Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs (apparently I'm one)?
"The first" might be overselling it. For example, Kevin and Kell started in 1995. This TvTropes listing [1] has some more, but oddly enough UF isn't on there so perhaps others are missing also.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebcomicsLongRun...
UF is on the discontinued list under "13 years"
As someone who got dial-up in the mid-90s, I remember regularly reading so many of the comics on these lists and it makes me feel old... Some of them are still in my bookmarks...
I miss Ye Olde Internets.
The last nail in the coffin for me was their utter refusal to remove absolutely abhorrent comments. Not stuff like "I voted for someone different than you did", but bullshit like https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11756830&cid=561389... (CW: extreme antisemitism). I spent a lot of time on Slashdot over the years, and had a 4-digit UID that I'd bust on the inevitable "who's been here longer?" comment chains. But while they have the right to allow the comments section to fill with horrid stuff, I don't want anything to do with that.
for context, that's when a "a couple hundred comments" was as big as "a couple of thousand/tens of thousands" of comments is now.
Slashdot was the centre of the (tech) internet for a long time.
Slashdot was the first site that I frequented where I had to take a hard look at it and say, "I don't like what this place has become and I don't want to be a part of it." Sadly, it wasn't the last.
I'm happy to debate with earnest people I disagree with. That's interesting, and done well, we can both learn from it. There's no value in repulsiveness for the sake of repulsiveness. I don't expect a forum mod to be on top of every single comment ever made, but when things like what I linked are reported but stay up, the moderators are saying, yeah, we're fine with spending server resources to host that.
Slashdot's attitude is that things which are "removed" (voted to zero) ought to be auditable. This means everyone knows what the rules REALLY are (as opposed to what people SAY they are), and it also prevents the system from being abused (since you can trivially link to examples of that abuse)
I really don't think an auditable record of moderation decisions is that bad, and you have to understand that this is NOT "content that is presented to regular users." I don't remember my login anymore, so I can't even figure out how to see the comment you linked - I'm sure if I logged in and reset myself to view negative scores I COULD see it, since I've used the site before, but it is distinctly non-trivial to do so.
The comment will become visible (in abbreviated form) if you drag that slider over to just less than 0 (and load all the comments).
kstrauser is definitely choosing to see the comment.
And apparently you've done this out of a belief that such comments shouldn't be discoverable, even by those observing a record of moderation decisions.
Are you similarly upset by HN's "showdead" option? Will you be sharing some truly objectionable comments from here on a large social media account?
But it's not visible in the comment thread where it was made. How would you see it if you weren't specifically trying to?
I used to click on big posts, set the filter for Score: 3 or higher, and read through EVERYTHING. It'd take hours sometimes, and I'd learn a ton about all kinds of stuff. These were discussions, not just comments, and I think people took more pride in the quality of their contribution.
Like everything from back then, Slashdot got whittled down. It went through multiple acquisitions, and eventually became disconnected from all the original people behind it. Subsequent owners seemed to have no vision or connection with the community. There were some attempted changes that never seemed to go anywhere, but I think the most important thing about the acquisitions is just how bland the site became.
And of course, even if Slashdot had all those same people, everything else changed too... the industry, the people, the culture, the Internet, the whole world.
HN is the closest thing I know today to /. -- I'd say imagine an HN where editors curated the content, and with a lot more whimsy in its culture, and a lot more optimism. I don't expect to find any of that today on Slashdot, and when I do click through to the comments I find them to be very one-dimensional and tired.
There is literally no reason to visit Slashdot anymore other than inertia. You will not find anything new or interesting. There will be no insightful commentary beneath an article. There will never be a new meme that originates from the comment section.
It's somewhat similar to finding out that DeLorean was making his living by selling DeLorean-branded watches or whatever.
(Does anyone remember Geek Code? Does anyone else still have their Geek Code .sig file?)