Retention of early Slashdot users

I'm one of those early users (uid == 18). I find the site too hard to navigate these days. I don't know where to click or how to filter it back to just the nerdy stuff. I guess I deserve my uid==18 since I feel like an old fogey saying that. :-)

I can only speak for myself but I stopped obsessively checking Slashdot (which had been a habit since 1998) around mid-late 2006 when Digg/Reddit had started getting momentum and interesting stuff was showing up sooner there since content wasn't curated.

Now I look at Slashdot maybe once a week, and I never read or participate in the comment threads -- because a given story on Slashdot likely showed up on HN three days prior and had a more interesting discussion then.

I stopped reading Slashdot as much because the curated nature of the site meant that stories showed up and were discussed on Digg and Reddit DAYS before they showed up on Slashdot. So Slashdot content felt old.

However, I find the discussion better on Slashdot due to their complex rating system, which is why I still visit Slashdot. Up and down votes are too simplistic and you get a lot of bad comments bubbling up or being buried for seemling no good reason. That's why I stopped reading Digg and Reddit. Interesting, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc... More sites need to adopt Slashdot's rating system.

I guess its just the way of the world. I've long used Slashdot but after a while the trolls start to take over and the conversation goes from informative to herpderp gradually. I've seen this happen to Digg, Fark, and k5.

Recently, it's also started happening on reddit. I would go there for the interesting articles but the frontpage is loaded with shitty fake AMAs, slanted political blogs, or stupid pictures. I could filter this stuff out, but then that would defeat the purpose of having community driven content.

Just remember, reddit didn't kill Digg and blogs didn't kill Slashdot. Digg was killed by the trolls in its membership. And Slashdot was killed by the latent racism/nationalism/sexism in some of its posts (if you ever read some of the comments concerning H1B, outsourcing, etc. it was fucking scary). I stopped visiting because the level of dialog dropped through the floor.

Also, this occasionally happens to HN, but I believe the community has been much better at keeping these shenanigans at bay. Unless the comments are well managed and moderated then they shouldn't have a problem keeping traffic up. But like anything in life, people move on and eventually it will happen here too.

Slashdot didn't originally have user registration, you just typed your nick in a field when posting a comment. They were already quite popular when they begin to require logins, and IIRC the <4 digit UIDs were consumed within a week or two. It would probably be a better metric to check UIDs under 20K or so.

All this talk of early slashdot reminded me that (for some reason) my account had unlimited moderation points back in the old days.

I'm a low-4-digit (or was, 1359) and left because the blogging system was just so bad. I think less that 1/4 of the screen you got for your own content.

That was the final straw, it had been an echo chamber for a while on the main board by that point, you know, every other comment seemed to be "Micro$oft is EVIL!!!!!", rather than the semi-intelligent debate I'm sure it used to have.

I'm a mid-stream adopter (uid == 626634) and I took Rob's departure to get around to removing /. from my bookmarks - something I'd been thinking about doing for some time. The main reasons for cutting the cord are that other sites (ie: HN) tend to list important/useful tech stories first and have a better signal-to-noise ratio in their comment threads.