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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

This is a slight tangent, but I have not been on slashdot since the early aughts. I'm surprised that it fell into obscurity since technical forums like HN and reddit CS subreddits are thriving. Or maybe it still vibrant and I'm making assumptions?

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I still check it out a few times a week, and the discussions have just fallen off a cliff, and that was the biggest draw to me as well. The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political - and I see the draw there, those posts are the only ones that can attract over 100 comments these days, when back in its heyday pretty much everything had around 200 comments on the front page.

And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger. On more than one occasion I have suspected bots have stolen accounts. Looking at post history on some particularly unhinged posts after the previous election, there was a pattern of people posting regularly in the 00s about only technical things and then going quiet for 5+ years and then only making comments about politics. It was fishy enough I sent some examples to the mods but never heard anything back.

It's a real shame, slashdot used to be a juggernaut, and it's just a shadow of its former self.

> it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.

I've noticed that on teamblind as well (started to use it only recently). I didn't realize there was such hate towards foreigners in the US, especially, in the tech world which I assumed was more educated/progressive. Don't know if it's fueled by Trump or the other way around, but it's pretty scary.

Something like 80% of blind posters are Indians on h1b. Absolutely no judgements here, just saying (source: polls asking some variation of Are you Indian? appear all the time there)

> The articles are far less technical these days as well and tend to lean more political

I dunno, it must've been 15 years since I set my signature there to "remember, Slashdot is a tabloid", after I realized how the posts skewed towards... "engagement".

(signatures seem to have been lost in some redesign since)

> And it's a weird snakepit of conservative anger.

I disagree. It's still 90% center left. But if you have a low tolerance for seeing conservative responses then sure maybe it feels more conservative. Those views rarely get modded up though.

Slashdot refused to moderate comments in an effective manner. Comment section was always full of bad memes that became stale:

* Lot of rickrolling. but replace Rick Astley by Goatse, Tubgirl, or LemonParty.

* Frist post

* BSD is dying

* GNAA

* Nathalie Portman

* Robotic Overlord

* In Soviet Russia

* Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these memes

* etc.

Then it becames fixated on SCO and basically became Darl McBride News, for years...

However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system. You did not simply upvote or downvote, but needed to add a qualifier to it: +1 Informative, +1 Insightful, +1 Interesting, +1 Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Offtopic, -1 Flamebeat. I never seen such a system elsewhere.

jesus this takes me back

slides a bowl of grits down the front of his pants

... something something Natalie Portman...

I used to be a meta moderator there. But you're right, you need to have a strong "hand" or the communities like that fall apart.

Their original owners also sold the site.

You forgot Cowboy Neal, you insensitive clod!

slashdot stopped allowing easy new user sign ups a while back. Now its the same folks over and over, very predictable. A number of those old memes have died out, mostly. They really limited ascii art which helped too. There do seem to be a lot of trolls/psyops in the comments.

> However, what was interresting was their qualified upvote system

In the abstract, this seemed like a brilliant idea, and I don't understand why nobody else tries it, and I still don't see a good argument against it.

But in their specific implementation, if you deem that "funny" can redeem a post in and of itself (and you allow an open community to judge humour), well, you get what you measure. (And nowadays, "troll" is basically understood to mean the same thing as "flamebait", because nobody trolls the old-fashioned way — it's increasingly hard to distinguish yourself from people who are actually that clueless, and too many clueless people around to make it worthwhile to fake more.)

Sensiblee*ection used a similar voting system. They probably borrowed it from Slashdot, but added more qualifiers.

I've never been on slashdot before. And what stands out to me is it's really hard to follow the UI. It's better than the classic forum layout but it's still just not easy to read, I just can't see myself using it. Though I have similar opinions on new reddit and it is pretty popular so I think I don't represent the possible new user.

What seems more relevant is that I didn't know about it at all which seems common with many older internet sites dying a slow dead of no new users as younger audiences are literally unable to discover the site.

It was better before their "redesign" in the mid-2000s, around the same time as the Digg redesign.

Skimfeed, my entry point into HN, still indexes /. threads, so I still check it out from time to time. Definitely not what it was in the cmdrtaco days, but it has gems in there sometimes still.

IMO Slashdot always had some very narrow focus points and the community pretty predictable.

Not a lot of variety in content or community compared to the digs or reddits of the world.

personally hoping for a cultural shift back to smaller decentralized communities

I like the idea, although smaller communities I find now a days to be far less formal and respectful than the slashdot heydays. The ride or die fans of a given thing or community sometimes are strange folks. People greatly upset by differing opinions and so on.

I believe it, as old ossified communities go. I remember a few old vbulletin spots that went through an exodus and often the ones who stick around are trolls, spammers, or odd ducks and people addicted to snark.

Yeah, that was my take too. I used to be on it regularly 15-20 years ago, great nitty-gritty tech plus usually good-natured snarky techy humor; but haven't even visited in over a dozen years.

/. was done after the Slashdot Beta mess. Never recovered.

just checked, my last comment was in 2014... damn

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