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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I do have an id in the 7x,xxx range. Not sure if I can work much out from that.
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.
The funny one was someone on soylent posting AC and then would sign each one with their name. Never got that one...
Seemed like a sad end to a site that was pioneering in community moderation.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
One big factor: once he learns where something is, it doesn't move.
You could see the manipulation from a mile away.