The history of Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda [audio] | Hacker News Reader

The history of Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda [audio]

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135 pointscolinprince170 comments

Used to play D&D with that crew. I wonder if I can still make Rob mad by mentioning Spike Stones? (My druid threw some down at entirely the wrong time and lost us the battle)

Slashdot at the time of the Netscape open source announcement was a fantastic place, it felt like the future was going to be great in 1998. I still miss the metamoderation and I'd like to see it implemented in more places.

One of my favorite documentaries covers this moment inside Netscape.

Code Rush https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

Thanks for the reference, I've never seen it but it's quite good. I haven't seen anything quite like it, at least for the time-and-place.

It makes me see the downside of wfh..

I have been curious of one could add /. 's meta-moderation and/or reason-for-vote scheme to HN, without losing the things that make HN unusually good.

Slashdot’s own code was open-sourced for other websites to build on top of. When HN was founded, it could have even used Slashdot’s own system of moderation directly. However, HN is part of Y Combinator, and the latter undoubtedly wants to protect its brand. Discussion on such corporate-owned websites naturally always entails more severe moderation than on hobbyist communities or ones run by a small business.

I'd prefer a vote or post scheme, maybe at the thread level. I like that at least you can't downvote people who respond to you.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Slashdot saved my life.

In the late 90s I had developed some very unhealthy habits, and while lurking on Slashdot all day wasn't the best use of my lifetime, it was certainly the best I was able to do and one of the few activities I enjoyed. Visiting my people.

Yes, it was just another dopamine hit, but at least you could read about open web standards and peak oil and how we will all have portable computers in our pocket, and did you hear about the WAP protocol? It will be huge.

I learned so much just tapping into the knowledge and opinions of other people. It was much better than FIDO and Usenet, and I was hooked.

Bill Gates got it wrong. It was not about the information superhighway, it was about the information high. Sugar and news run this world.

I'm still somewhat excessively consuming information. Now mostly on HN.

But I believe Slashdot was what kept me from spiralling out of control, when I didn't know why I would even want to have control.

Thanks, CmdrTaco and Hemos. For everything.

Yer welcome, I think?

Life is good.

Years later, I moved to the US and decided to make Michigan my new home.

I didn't know much about the area, so I checked Wikipedia, found the entry for Hope College, clicked on alumni and was surprised to see your name. I had no idea Slashdot started in Holland, MI, even though I visited your site every day for over 10 years.

I guess I should have mined bitcoins instead. But in Soviet Russia, bitcoins mine you.

Thanks for everything. You shaped my youth :)

Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!

My people indeed.

Wulf… :’(

I forget what exactly caused me to stop visiting Slashdot. Probably the redesign was when I started finding other sites to visit. Same with Fark. Another big crappy redesign that drove users away. Then Reddit. When will sites learn?

Slashdot->Digg->Reddit->HN for me. Almost exclusively on HN these days. For me the transition from one to another was graduated where I visited multiple sites daily. As the "new" grew and covered more of what I liked to read about I stopped using the "old". Quality of comments and discussion is the secret sauce for me. Redesigns never really bothered me.

Slashdot holds a special place for me though. It just happens to be the first place I commented and joined in discussion with a large group of strangers.

This was exactly my same progression.

"Same" would be a low-effort comment; I think this was the path a lot of us have taken.

Today's Reddit is a mire of ephemeral pop commentary, censorship, and automated flagging. It's like the leadership cares about engagement, not discussion, and they're willing to let people talk into the ether to drive the numbers up. The audience quality bar has substantially dropped in all but the most niche topical subreddits as well.

Twitter and the spinoffs are all too high drama for me to engage in regularly. Everyone is playing morality sports or trying to game for traction.

I miss being able to hold a no-stakes, high quality discussion amongst peers. I feel like we need anonymous P2P social networking. I don't like other parties being the arbiters of information flows, and I also don't like bad agents seeking to tear down those that go against their personal brand of ideology.

I still visit /., I just avoid the comments because its 4chan-y in there. My first /. account was created in 1997.

What I like about /. interface is that there is a summary under each article, and there are only ~10 articles on the main page, and I find the topics more focused on what I'm interested in.

HN is just a flood of random stuff and I'm usually only interested in ~10% of what's on the front page, compared to 80% of /. front page. HN needs channels.

Public user accounts on slashdot were created in 1998 :)

Ha! Awesome. Thanks Cmdr. Yeah that was 25ish years ago, as I said in a different post I was living abroad for a year that spanned 1997 into 1998. I was off by a few months apparently.

How can you tell when your account was created? I know I was reading it pre 9/11 but can't find an "account created on" page.

If you go to Achievements in your profile, there is one for years read, which shows a date that I assume is the account creation date.

Correction: Doing the math, it looks like the date on which the achievement was earned, so subtract off the years read from the date to get account creation date.

In the early culture your slashdot id # of digits was bragging rights, at the time I was proud of my 6 digit, but the culture there is very toxic now and all it means is I was older or an earlier "lucky 10000". Status seeking is a childish endeavour, but in my defense I was a child.

You must be new here...

Doesn't work for mine. I just have "Days Read" (no "Years Read"). My "Days Read" is a small number and dated 2009, but I was posting comments in 2007. All of my achievements are from 2009.

My 10 years read is in 2003, which would mean I started reading in 1993, but Slashdot says they only started in 1997.

I do have an id in the 7x,xxx range. Not sure if I can work much out from that.

There's this thing called "human memory", heard of it? :) Kidding. It is easy for me because I was living in Porto for a year and I chose my username to be the street my apartment was on.

I pretty much stopped visiting /. when CmdrTaco left. A colleague at the time turned me on to HN and I've been here ever since.

PS: I just signed into /. for the first time in years. My account is still active and my karma is positive! It's been 26 years since I created that account! It's probably my oldest account on the internet.

For me it was the copious anonymous posters who ruined the comment sections with garbage.

I was a AC for a long time. I made a comment someone didnt like and they followed me thru all the discussions to keep the conversation going. So I just posted AC and moved on with my life.

The funny one was someone on soylent posting AC and then would sign each one with their name. Never got that one...

The in jokes became racist and nobody seemed to care.

Seemed like a sad end to a site that was pioneering in community moderation.

The tone went from rough-and-tumble, big tent libertarianism to hate filled right wing politics. From weird and funny to stupid and rude. I didn't want to be contaminated by that thinking or have my name associated with it, so I moved to Reddit where eventually the same thing happened.

There's some kind of Godwin's Law corollary here that revolves around whether your board removes "I'm just asking questions" posts or not.

I don't see Reddit as one place like Slashdot was one place. I'm sure it still has horrific subs, but the ones I'm on are little islands of well-moderated chit-chat, local jokes and retro-computing.

That's what the comments settings were for!

At one point I realized that Slashdot was reporting on stories that showed up on HN days earlier. It was a quick transition for me, despite daily usage of Slashdot since '99 or so.

> Same with Fark.

"You'll get over it."

Yeah, I never did.

I use m.fark when I browse it, even on desktop. The desktop site remains awful. Both are worse than the pre-redesign site.

Honestly, for me Hacker News fills the roll that Slashdot did for 20 years. I was reading them both daily for a while, then realized that I could save time by just following HN.

Twitter. Twitter caused me to stop visiting Slashdot. I visited /. because I found things out on /. before I read the same thing elsewhere. That stopped happening at some point - I'd see something on Twitter and then see it on /. a day or two or a week later.

Gradually I stopped visiting Slashdot at all. And then I read that Rob left, and I was like "yeah... makes sense."

Note: Worked for Sourceforge from mid-2005 to mid-2007 on other properties. Met Rob once or twice... wasn't particularly friendly, but this was while Slashdot was still in its heyday and I'm sure he was burned out on making small talk with other folks. Jeff Bates (hemos) was a decent guy, reported up through him for a while IIRC.

I started going there in 2003 and stopped around 2013. For me it was the shift toward an ever more ornery comment section. Public discussion in general seemed to get a lot worse around the time Obama was elected, and /. was one of the last sites to fall

The network effects are way stronger these days so they're able to withstand user-hostile actions like ad-friendly redesigns. Since the social networks are much bigger now and network effects are n^2 they're becoming unstoppable. I think we're stuck in this local optimum for a while. I kind of hope AI bots ruin it for everybody and we forced to come up with something new.

I stopped when reddit came along because the reddit engine was simply more pleasant to use. even when I browsed slashdot regularly I almost never commented because something about the ux was off-putting.

Redesign hit right when reddit started to blow up. That's what killed /. For me. I didn't want to learn a new system and old reddit was STUPID easy to slot into and start using.

Reddit seemingly learned. It is why old.reddit.com is still around.

It doesn’t matter if old.reddit.com is still there. Only a tiny percentage of people know about it and use it. Everyone else is posting from the new website or app, and largely from phones, which absolutely has had an impact on the culture there.

For example, subreddits used to have FAQs and wikis in the sidebar. The redesign hid all that, so on many subs people are asking the same questions over and over again. Mods who lock such posts and refer posters to a FAQ, often get lambasted by the community, who can’t see any FAQ. This may have been an intentional part of the redesign, since repetitive posting registers as greater “engagement” for Reddit’s metrics.

I dont think Reddit would want to make their own internal metrics worse, they arent getting paid for that. They needed to go mainstream though, and the best working tactic out there was (still kinda is) simplification and infinite scroll. Reddit did both.

For now. The .compact view was removed recently.

They're intentionally killing it slowly through malicious neglect. It's already unable to deal with some things in user profiles and the image galleries which force you into the new awful.

https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/nwv50z/old_reddit_use...

2.5 years.

Selection bias at work here. Most sites that have been around along time have redesigned at some point, and you always get some vocal users complaining about it.

Eh, I have to say it's probably not just selection bias directly.

Most of the time you have to ask the question, who is the redesign for, and what is it attempting to accomplish.

Especially in the case of sites where you have mostly a base of technical users and the site is looking for more generalist users to join to "increase engagement for profitability reasons" then don't be surprised when all the technical users are pissed.

Once they sold to Conde Nast, it went downhill quick.

And everyone dunks on Craigslist for not modernizing it’s design….

It's the only major(?) site my elderly dad can consistently use without assistance.

One big factor: once he learns where something is, it doesn't move.

For me it was when they evolved into daily "Windows vs Linux" articles that they would pump for content.

You could see the manipulation from a mile away.

For me it was Digg (pre redesign) then Reddit and hn

New tagline for /. - Enshittification pioneers since 1997

I miss the troll culture that Slashdot had, people put a lot of work into crafting elaborate jokes. Many Slashdot regulars intentionally browsed at -1 so that, on slow news days, they could read some of the inventive troll posts: Netcraft is Dying, Penisbird Enterprises, Batman Touched my Junk, etc. HN does have good discussion, but the culture here is not welcoming of jokes, and when those jokes get modded down, dead, or flagged, the controls for people to view them regardless are less convenient than Slashdot’s were.

Counterpoint - strong prank and joke culture can quickly turn to a closed subculture that is offputting to otherwise superb contributors. I really enjoy HN due to the generally lukewarm and civilized discussion the rules promote. I love jokes and filthy humour, but gladly seek them elsewhere.

Absolutely nothing wrong with closed subcultures. The need to draw as large an audience as possible in order to satisfy investors, is part of why discussion on sites like Reddit is so flawed.

Totally agree. I was not pitching for large audience, the dryness creates a specific exclusivity in itself. HN subculture is focused on conrete subjects with world class subject experts occasionally pitching in.

Tons of things wrong with closed subcultures. Do we only want to hear from TechBros about the latest fad, currently how awesome LLMs are, with no dissenting opinion to provide any sort of debate? I, for one, welcome our large audience, because this place has more posts than Slashdot, has wireless, and isn't lame(most of the time).

This would be bad if these closed subcultures were the only cultures to exist.

But that would be a self-contradiction, by the virtue of being closed, there are people who are not part of them, so they cannot be the only culture.

Elitism is a disease we should not cater to in any circumstance.

I've never figured out what people mean by the tech elite. Internally I only see regular rich people and folks who find blinking lights fascinating. Using interest in a subject as a barrier to entry seems like a fairly straightforward noise filter.

Don't worry, most aren't.

I miss the old school trolls where entertainment was as much a goal as annoyance.

Elaborate castles in the clouds of unbelievable yarns, like an episode of Would I Lie To You?

Yeah. unfortunately the word trolling sometime over the past 15 years started to merge with what was customarily referred to as griefing or flame bait or flaming itself. The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target (but amusingly obvious to everyone else) was completely lost in the mainstreaming of the word.

Now it's used mainly as something like "being a dick online" or even without the online part, as if English (and every other language) didn't have enough slang for this behavior already.

I submit that what has happened to the word trolling should be exhibit A in the counter argument against the claim that language evolves over time, or at least challenge the idea that evolves is analogous to "improves" or "becomes better suited to its purpose."

The concept of 'troll' moved from "like a fisherman" to "like under a bridge".

> The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target

Yeah.. noo. Who told you this? This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin.

Even the gnaa and the penis bird and all that sort of thing, although typically labeled -1, troll by slashdot's moderation system (because that's the best fitting option in the list - the obvious absurdity ruling out using "flamebait" instead), were really not getting at the original (and semantically unique) sense of the term [0] as it existed during the Usenet days when it first appeared.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html

"The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

I think for me the turning point as an inveterate troll was learning about seriously sociopathic nihilistic groups like Queer [n-word] for Satan who would no-kidding bully and doxx vulnerable people. My attempting to get a rise out of the clueless was nothing compared to that kind of monstrousness.

I think I may have given a late estimate for the turning point of the word troll, because even by the time slashdot came around and usenet had already gone into steep decline, the usage has started to shift away from "trolling-as-in-fishing-technique" craftwork and toward "trolling-as-in-attention-seeking-monster's-petty-sadism."

The former requires ever greater refinement to improve upon, while the latter requires merely ever increasing tolerance for banal cruelty, leading to the situation you described.

There are no distinct boundaries between griefing, trolling and flamebaiting. I'd argue the groups with intentionally offensive names are griefers by default. Is intentionally triggering a negative reaction in someone for lulz using an off-topic comment and claiming "it's just a joke, bro" trolling, flamebaiting or griefing? Depends who you ask, but I'm glad none of the overt versions of the three are welcome on HN.

>> The crucial quality that a troll is best executed with as much subtlety as possible so as not to be detected by the intended target

> Yeah.. noo. Who told you this? This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin.

It's literally the classic definition of an internet troll. The whole point was to subtly push other people's buttons to get them to do something interesting.

See this semi-famous example: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyours.... It can and did trigger a lot of geeks' impulse to pedantically correct others, be opinionated (e.g. AOL hate), and defend their hobbies against what they perceived as cultural hostility.

> It's literally the classic definition of an internet troll.

Yeah, nah. Maybe for boomers? Are you "silent generation"?

gr8 b8 m8 :)

> Yeah, nah. Maybe for boomers? Are you "silent generation"?

Nice troll.

"uhm, akshally... that is flamebait. HAND" -B1FF

Nicely done, I completely fell for it.

You got me.

I still remember the wikipedia article on "slashdot trolling phenomena" (yes, it was its own page, not a subsection of the slashdot page!) describing the gnaa as an "organised coalition of slashdot trolls". for some reason, at the time I thought that was the funniest phrase I'd ever seen on wikipedia.

For reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20061013102144/http://en.wikiped...

Wikipedia used to be much more fun.

That makes me think of Reddit where many submissions that ask the audience a question need to have the comment sort order changed to "controversial" to read something interesting.

Ah yes, who can forget the quality curious engaging debate, such as first post!1, hot grits and the GNAA. What wonderful life they brought the place. To your point though, the tools available with reason- based pointing, and meta moderation, were far superior than later forums have.

Communities of people who spend their time together in quality intellectual discussion, like researchers, might still head for the pub, organize barbecues, or go fishing where they just want to blow off steam and make jokes, and among their own people where they can base those jokes on nerdy shared lore. There’s room for both serious things and frivolous things in life.

I feel like I remember good old days before the troll culture arrived. I had a 3-digit id, and remember users like Meeept (no offense, whoever you were) being the beginning of the decline. Maybe it's just rose-colored glasses on my part, though.

frost pist

I remember on 9/11 that Slashdot was one of the few sites that stayed up available to deliver commentary and speculation. That was impressive for the time.

I was never prouder of my team.

By 9/11 "being slashdotted" was a well-known phenomenon (that is, websites going down because they drew so much traffic from Slashdot’s large readership at the time). That meant that the site’s own servers had likely been hardened in various ways to deal with heavy traffic.

If I recall - CmdrTaco talked in considerable detail (at the time, on SlashDot) about the rather extreme technical changes that he and his crew performed, on the fly, on 9/11, to keep their site up.

I remember that as well. All the major new sites were unusable because they were so slow and crashy.

Slashdot had pictures and everything. What a wild time.

No video. Less running time than many podcasts. Lame.

Almost as lame as the original iPods that couldn't play video, but coined the original term "pod" cast?

A podcast is audio.

Not sure if you missed it but it's a reference to CmdrTaco's initial take on the original iPod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Hah amazing! I still don't get why he would have expected video when we were still struggling for bandwidth at the time, too soon!

What he actually expected was wireless, if you check the link.

Oh god, third comment on that post:

"Ok , will it connect to a computer running and x86 family processor ?"

No sarcasm. Less snark than an average Slashdot comment. Cowboy Neal.

whoooosh

Still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. We did get Duke Nukem Forever eventually, so I'm optimistic. Next year for sure...

It would be more in reach if we would just accept that Android is that desktop for billions of people worldwide.

23rd year of the linux desktop for me.

I really prefer text based interviews rather than audio based interviews.

I can parse, text more quickly than audio and I see no transcript here which is a letdown.

Is it just me?

https://pastebin.com/pq2xXEnB

Not just you. I would have read this interview if text. I won’t have to be opportunity to listen to it.

For sure, though it'd be cool to have it link to relevant audio. Even better will be when AI is commonly used to summarize youtube videos, podcasts, etc. The tech is there now but not widely deployed.

Not just you!

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. Slashdot was the first webpage I ever went to daily. I used the web a lot before that but it was the first page that felt like I wanted to check in every day.

> but it was the first page that felt like I wanted to check in every day.

Daily? That's amateur numbers! Their cron job regenerated the front page every 10 minutes, so you might miss something if you didn't reload it every 10 minutes!

My user number on /. is "404" ( https://slashdot.org/~dmd ).

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. I wonder if my account on /. still exists?

I just checked mine out of curiosity as well. My last comment was in 2012, when I called someone an idiot for making Slashdot unreadable. So I guess I was part of the problem.

I was curious as well so I did a password reset since I was pretty sure I used an older username. Looks like my account was created early enough to have last left comments in 2000 but there are some signs of activity as late as 2010, when I got an achievement related to reading things a few days in a row.

Checked mine. (Your comment about bad passwords reminded me what I would have used. And it was.) It's a five-digit account.

One comment from 2009 (self-referential, talking about when I last posted),

two in 2008 (about John Carmack, and old computers),

one in 2007 (about HP calculators / RPN),

nothing in 2006,

and then lots of posts (relatively speaking) in the first half of 2005 and earlier. That's right when reddit launched (mid 2005)!

I check about once a year and my account (created in 1999 I think) was still up. I've temporarily lost the muscle memory to enter the password though. I should check again when it comes back.

I did the same, but I have a bad feeling I used my altavista email...

So waaaay back when I had an account on ./ before they dropped their user database without a backup. Never contacted them to recover it as I didn't use ./ much at that point.

Have another 5 digit ID, but no idea if that one even still works.

I just checked mine, still works, still has the same crappy password.

The profile options also still provides for an AIM name, complete with "but don't make this AIM link public" option! :D

I've been an acquaintance of Rob since the VA/Andover acquisition, and he's seriously one of the most affable people I've ever met in the industry. Him and Hemos were a great pair of folks to rub elbows with. I still have a business card of mine that he vandalized after he stole a pen off my desk for its sheer comedic perfection.

Guys like him make this kind of work worth it.

I’m gonna dox u if you don’t draw me pictures. Actually, I still have a Keith moon sketch you did in my photo library for some reason..

Pete Townsend > Roger Daltry.

Fight me.

Like many I used to visit /. regularly. I looked at my history and my last comment was in 2013.

I think I stopped when they revamped their comment system. I really liked how customizable it was where you could put a penalty on "funny" posts if you wanted and a +1 on off topic or something but they removed that customization and it made it harder for me to enjoy the comments.

No matter how much hot porridge went into my pants...

Natalie Portman never stopped in for a visit

My only /. regret

c'est dommage Natalie, the loss was yours I am sure

you probably used the wrong sort of porridge. it has to be grits specifically!

I always remember the "Kathleen Fent Read This Story" post [0]

[0] https://slashdot.org/story/02/02/14/143254/kathleen-fent-rea...

Frist Post.

... Or not

Man everything he said about his audience: it's me. I'm his audience.

I remember when blizzard forced a character rename.

And then he sold out and it sucked.

oh man, goosebumps just reading the handler

Netcraft confirms it: I, for one, welcome our Hacker News overlord, CmdrTaco who sometimes dwelves in these part of the interweb. He's got a beowulf cluster of hot grits that Nathalie Portman would approve of. ;)

Thanks?

You missed the Cowboy Neal option

Sounds like it’s time for another lively thread about whether FireFly is the best sci-fi show ever. Things get awkward when Wil Wheaton joins the conversation and proceeds to know more about FireFly than anyone else.

You had me until 'whether'

+5, Funny

or my other favourite character... the illusive Roland Piquepaille and his "articles" that pioneered blogspam based on the way ./ers would react to him.

> Roland Piquepaille

Wow! I haven't heard that name in nearly 20 years, but the instant I saw it I had a negative reaction. I didn't even know why at first until I read the rest of your sentence.

Scary to think that it's been that long.

I forget, is this the persona responsible for that "voices from the hellmouth" series? the one that, retrospectively, coincides with my /. usage starting to slope negative.

omg, voices from the hellmouth was sooo cringe. Who was that? typetypetype

oook, JonKatz, and it lives on

(tl;dr for my post here, there was a segment of the slashdot population who really identified with the Columbine shooters, the trench-coat mafia, i guess in terms of being picked on at school by the popular kids or something? it was sort of like "of course Columbine, what did you expect from those of us living at the hell-mouth you've created for us" If I have any of that wrong it's because I couldn't stand reading any of it in the first place)

https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from...

https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1117204/Voices-from...

https://features.slashdot.org/story/00/10/23/1521250/voices-...

https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/bw-voices-from-the-hell...

> tl;dr for my post here, there was a segment of the slashdot population who really identified with the Columbine shooters

I mean the reason YC (and by extension, HN) became a thing was largely because of pg posting on Slashdot about similar themes.

I hadn't realized that Roland passed away almost 15 years ago...

1. See a slashdot poll

2. Point out the missing Cowboy Neal option

3. ???

4. Profit!

He must be new here

My username has been consistent between ./ and HN.

me2

you did way better than you know who:

"While trying to be First Post on a Beowulf cluster article, my site got Slashdotted just as I poured hot grits down my pants. 'You must be new here,' commented CowboyNeal, who, in Soviet Russia, welcomes our new overlords. Now I'm just waiting for step '???' before I hit Profit! Surely that's worth +5, Funny?"

You insensitive clod!

Give me a sec - just trying to hide a link to a, er, goat-related website in a comment and pretending it's related to the story.

Also writing a comment about what a worthless human Jon Katz is because he can't compile Linux from source.

No wifi. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Also, BSD is dying.

Is this the news for nerds or hackers?

Is it the stuff that stirs or matters?

from the don't-forget-your-yearly-physical dept.

FR1ST PR0ST

The above comment is owned by The Poster.

I wonder if APK could drop in and tell us about blocking ads using the mysterious magic of the hosts file.

Or if The Glorious MEEPT!! could show up and smack us with some scathing satirical commentary on Linux fans.

My UID is lower than yours

Whatever, n00b. (3352)

Wow! This took me back.

Remember when people believed that some kids in a garage could do something big and special? Now they think only FAANG and VCs can do it. Now kids drive for Uber and post for Instagram / TikTok / etc.

It's a big big loss, a critical loss. It's hard to imagine how it won't impact innovation.

I'm not sure why you put VCs into that group since it makes it easier for a bunch of kids to make a business. I mean kids who don't have rich parents to cover all their costs.

edit: Another big difference is that kids now would be focused on crypto and, now, AI which are the hot growing trends just like the internet used to be.

I'm thinking of VCs as gatekeepers. In some senses, VCs are no different than FAANG, who could acquire and fund the kids.

In since it was Chips 'n Dips. Still got my 3-number slashdot ID. Were definitely some crazy great days, refreshing slashdot back in the day ..

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