I'm also rather disappointed to see the stereotype "we hate everything" characterisation of Slashdot from a couple of posters here. That's like saying HN is just full of college kids who think making a social web app with geolocation and a REST API is going to turn them into gazillionaires when they pivot to something useful (after all, the idea doesn't matter, it's the people who count) and then get acquired by Facebook for the GDP of a small country.
Obviously there really are quite a few young, delusional people on HN, but I don't think most of us spend time here because of those people. Obviously there really are quite a few very negative/selfish people on Slashdot, but I don't think most of us who spend time there do it because of those people, either.
Incidentally, as I write this, Slashdot's home page is full of topics that might have been (and in several cases have been) popular on HN as well: several articles on new technologies, several popular science articles, commentary on issues like piracy and privacy, and so on. There are some decent comments in the related discussions, too.
That all said, I don't go to Slashdot as much as I used to. Partly that's because they keep messing around with (and often breaking) the basic design and functionality of the site. Partly it's because a lot of the stories are old news by the time they get past the editors, and they've already hit the front pages of HN, relevant subreddits, etc. Partly it's because the discussions are too big for a simple chronological ordering to really work and the system for filtering by moderation score doesn't seem to help much. All of these things make the site more frustrating than it used to be, and I suspect if Slashdot is indeed on the way out there will be plenty of places to point fingers.
But please can we not descend to the level of "Oh, those people on {other site} are just {arbitrary negative stereotype}". Such generalisations can be levelled at any popular forum site on the Web, and they're about as useful in each case.
Your point about the system being subtly broken is spot-on. Sane people have moved on because of the subtle breakages. The site ends up full of older people who either a.) haven't realized the world is bigger and better things exist or b.) started using /. when it was new and somehow developed a perverse loyalty to "the first tech discussion site" and they refuse to move on. People stuck in their ways don't make the best conversational partners.
Obviously not everybody there is bad, but the baddies shift the tone of the discussion towards lunacy.
There are few companies out there more polarising in internet discussion these days.
I don't think they're trolls per se, but it's divided between worshipers,haters and those who don't see the point of worshiping or hating a multinational company motivated by profit.
http://consumerist.com/2011/05/mri-shows-apple-stimulates-fa...
No wonder the discussion degenerates into people who see the light vs. the people who don't.
For example, from Gruber's take on the iPhone 5 event:
>And what shows they were. When Schiller unveiled the iPhone 5, it rose from the stage floor on a smoothly-rising and rotating pedestal, pinpoint spotlights hitting the phone and only the phone. The rotation of the iPhone atop the pedestal was in perfect sync with the rotation of the iPhone projected on the big screen at the back of the stage. There’s no store where you buy such pedestals; Apple designed and engineered it specifically for this event. It was on stage for about a minute.
>Likewise, when Cook introduced the show-closing Foo Fighters, the screen rose and from behind the screen slid the band, on a raised dais that smoothly rolled to the front of the stage. Such stagecraft is one of the rewards Apple can reap from its $100 billion (and growing) war chest
For people on the opposite sides on the Apple fan spectrum, those two paragraphs elicit very different emotional responses. One HN comment said reading it make him/her feel physically sick while an Apple fan might get goosebumps.
Also curious is the fact that the Apple blogger network Gruber/Siegler etc. seem to be very bent on hating on and being snarky on all things not-Apple and rivals i.e Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook etc.
That doesn't make for good conversation.
The topics on Slashdot are about the same quality as they were last 5-7 years--not great, but still nice and "relevant to my interests." The wording of the article summaries is still pro-Linux anti-Microsoft (and now) anti-Apple inflammatory, and still hilariously poorly edited or vetted. However, that was always a charm of the site, in a way.
The difference is that some 5 years ago, in the face of an anti-Microsoft post, for example, people would chime and say "You know, actually I have developed a great project with ASP.NET and here's why it's good and worked well for me." Or people would post detailed responses, like we see on Hackernews.
Now, I've come to a point where I see so little of those good comments and so much of the inflammatory or ignorant or terribly-humored comments, that it's just not worth my time anymore. I can get the headlines from anywhere else and in the tech world, it's the discussion behind the headlines that's the valuable thing.
The value of /. is that occasionally the clueless masses will piss off someone with actual knowledge, enough to set people straight with a long, detailed post.
Back around 2000 that was pretty novel.
"Given a large enough crowd, someone is bound to know what in the hell they're talking about."
I set that up in 2002 or so and still visit weekly for fun.
A lot of us get that impression, here. Some of us were underneath founders exactly like that and have good reason to be suspect.
Scroll down to the middle of the page past the typical trash comments and you can find some useful info, often from old hands who have had a some first hand knowledge of the subject.
Of course that is also the downside. Every troll, malcontent, joker and astroturfer has had a good 6 hours to harden their position.
freshmeat/freecode is really great. Lots of great software there (I liked the old name better)
Browsing the freecode frontpage is far more satisfying than the HN page because it's all about real code that does something and very little hype and BS.
This latest redesign takes Sourceforge from Slashdot-flavored ugly into domain-squatter horrendous.
Besides github is doing its best to compete on the "largest number of useless buttons/toolbars on the webpage" front with sf. I also found that finding something based on keywords works better on sf than on guthub.
Consider how excruciating it is to try and view source code on SourceForge compared with GitHub. On the latter you are literally shown a listing of files with the README already open for any given repository.
Sourceforge has this absolutely useless "Download" link where you have to grab an archive, extract it, dump it into your text editor, and only then will you find out it's not what you want.
It is not an understatement to suggest that Sourceforge is by people with no idea about open source.
This is probably largely related to the behavior of their users, though: Github's interface is not a lot more informative than Sourceforge's if no one writes a useful readme, and there have frequently been well-written projects hosted on Sourceforge that have lots of good information on how it works, or how to use it. However, I rarely seem to hear about new projects at Sourceforge, and frequently do see stuff at Github that has well-written introductory documentation accompanying the sources.
I frequently want to read about projects that solve interesting problems, but might not have the interest in installing or using it. Moreover, many people seem to now be using Github as a "Host my interesting document easily" host, which reinforces the "I go to Github to read code / read about code" perception. I'm sure a large part of it is confirmation bias, since most of the interesting code-related things I read about here are hosted at Github. ;)
I don't think it's that hard to see that this is still preferable for many projects.
http://gcmakefile.cvs.sourceforge.net/gcmakefile/
Seriously? That's the best they can do?
They have different ways to present code with different design targets and different problems. I prefer GitHub for reading code online without having to check-out, I prefer SF when already working with a project where I have the code locally and using the online interface to hunt for changes.
This comment is quite simply out of line. SourceForge played a crucial role in the promotion and distribution of Open Source software well over a decade ago. It was the first successful repository that freed projects from the uncertainty of university or personal web hosting, it provided collaborative development tools and multi-developer project management years ahead of Github's very existence, and continues to distribute some of the biggest names in Open Source.
Learn your history! (Man, I feel old saying that)
Freshmeat was never a spectacular platform, but it was the de-facto open-source distribution center at the time. It played an important role in that environment, but was more of a distribution channel than a collaboration tool.
Today SourceForge is the GeoCities of source hosting. It has almost no redeeming features.
It's not my intention to try to one up others with my four-digit UID. All I'm saying is, I was there, I was heavily involved in Open Source at the time, and SourceForge was critical.
Edit to add: Geocities was pretty important to the development of the web, too. Part of me prefers the days when everyone made their own eye-gouging web site instead of relying on Facebook. There was a much more eclectic selection of content available back then.
Really? On Geocities and the web in the 90s?
Just because you stopped looking for new content and 'web rings' fell out of style, doesn't mean it all went away and the only thing on the Internet is now Facebook. There are nearly 200M active websites on the Internet, with 55M of those alone being Wordpress sites (which I'd suggest is in competition with Tumblr, et. al to inherit the 'geocities' throne). In 2000, there weren't even 50M individual websites.
I think you might be viewing history through some rose-colored glasses, open source or otherwise.
I do agree that SF.net (and /.) played a central role in Open Source, and was fantastic at the time. It's a well worn turd now, compared to it's younger, more nimble competition.
It does have the benefit that it only (afaik) hosts OSS though - as was mentioned the other day, there are thousands of projects where the code is available on github, but there's no license allowing any form of derivative or other use.
Nowadays, it is kind of hard to find good sites specialized in that which are free.
Oh, and back then there we did not need to install adblock plus to make navigating the web a bearable experience.