Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds
meta.slashdot.org
meta.slashdot.org
After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down?
That said, I post more here, but I read both.
Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.
You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't.
I can't find anything on Reddit.
Reddit was, is, and looks like it always will be, a mess. Even when Slashdot first put in the Javascript in place you could at least still find things on the site.
They still have that, so not so much of a fad. It works but at the time it got in the way for me too and probably contributed to me jumping ship as well.
HN crowd on /. comment moderation with slimmer graphics and collapsible comment trees (like reddit) would probably be close to what I think of as ideal.
Slashdot's moderation UI is pretty much the only thing besides comment-nesting that survived the redesign of X years ago, which ruined the site for me and took me from reading most of my tech commentary there down to a handful per month. Good for them and their UI designers, but I'm still bitter. It really is a terrible site to use.
What did it for me was the much higher volume of stories on reddit. So much of the time, I just didn't care about the Slashdot front page. This is still true on reddit, but at least with more stories there's a better chance of a decent hit rate.
That said, even reddit is getting less interesting these days.
While I'd agree that some of the /. +5 comments can be worth reading, the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.
Because Slashdot actually provides the facilities to do so. If I could browse +5 HN comments then believe me I would.
> the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.
I could make the same argument about HN.
As others pointed out, even +5 /. browsing leaves you with a stilted half-conversation where you have to expand lower-rated comments to even understand the points being made in the replies. Even worse, often times you'll find some really great comments moderated into the ground there just because they aren't politically correct. Good debate and logical thinking aren't very appreciated there, just snarky comments and closely following the prevailing groupthink.
I could make the same argument about HN.
You could try. I don't think that it would be a particularly good argument. Slashdot's vicious trolling, moderation stalking, and general nastiness is something that I saw way too many times. Discovering HN last year was a huge breath of fresh air. I appreciate it and won't be taking it for granted any time soon.
Your take on /. is also overly negative. I've enjoyed it for many years. The reason I'm here more lately is that I've grown tired of much of the topics there, (such as software licensing) which I have little interest in.
My issue was that while the place was great for informative posts on fairly objective topics like tech or science, it was pure groupthink for anything social or political. I felt completely unwelcome and alien to the clearly dominant demographic of the place.
As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdot and less useful on Hacker News.
This is due to the overall UI and the moderation system. Slashdot had to implement functionality to deal with low S/N. Browsing on +5 lets you quickly get shallow overview of the interesting discussion in a short time even for stories with hundreds or thousands of comments. At the same time, you can easily burrow down on threads that seem interesting to you, e.g. see a +5's post (grand-) parent, its siblings and rebuttals. The moderation also makes it more feasible to find new ideas for a story you read in the past, and of course you can easily sort by date.
On Hacker News, when I visit a popular story, I usually read the first couple of screen pages, depending on my interest, that is the most highly ranked posts and their replies, which are sorted inline with them. I'm sure I miss a lot of content further down the page, not to mention on the other pages, which I never read.
And when I revisit a story that seemed interesting to me -- something I often did on Slashdot --, I am completely lost on HN. Finding posts that are both high-quality and new is way too much work. Sometimes I still do it, but I spend a lot of time seeing posts I had already read. Really, the only way I end up keeping up with previous discussion is when I keep track of replies to my own posts (which works better on HN than it does on Slashdot).
As HN's S/N is going down, finding good posts will continue to be an increasing problem. I know there are user scripts that both enable collapsing threads and hiding/marking read posts on Hacker News. I guess I should look into those. But for a truly effective solution, you'd need to know how the posts score. (I think Slashdot's system of capping comment score at 5 is also much superior to HN's solution of hiding the score.)
See http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml and http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
Did you intend the irony here?
Slashdot tends to focus on stories that low-level IT workers and geeks care about: you see alot of sysadmin stuff, political activism from a geek-liberal point of view, oddball stories, etc. Basically, the IT equivalent of cat pictures. I believe the demographics skew to high schoolers and bearded gnomes.
HN, on the other hand, has more entrepreneurial, business, and hardcore science and technology stuff. The content tends to be more high-level and more useful to those in the know. The demographics are Y Combinator types (mainly naive recent college grads) with a mix of Googlers, VCs, other high-powered industry players.
That said, I suspect some Slashdot users have migrated to HN, which would explain a lot of recent changes at HN.
However, i can't get myself around their interface, i don't understand it/don't like it, i feel like their lacking a designer or something... in comparison with HN.
So, I spend less time on it, and didn't create an account or anything, eventhough i'd like to...their UI just doesn't feel right.
- Reddit has best conversation because the red envelope tells you of replies.
- Hacker News has the best audience.
If these were combined into one site it would be hella cool, but unless HN evolves the tech I can tell you what site I won't expect to be around many years from now. Blacklisting unsavory contributors and deleting posts is only going to work to maintain standards for so long.
Alas, I think it's past it's prime by a few years now and it is sad to see it's decline. But time does its thing. With the advent of Hacker News (and yes reddit too!), and arguablly a new generation of developers who used to read /. in high school and college have grown up a bit, and a much more relevant "News for Nerds" website has evolved. Not to mention the high-caliber of people and personalities who actively participate in the HN forums. But I wonder if HN would exist today if not for slashdot?
So hat's off to you Rob Malda aka CmdrTaco (Important note: In Soviet Russia, the hat takes off you!). You did a fine thing and planted a seed 15 years ago that not only informed, inspired, and shaped a generation of nerds but also the internet as a whole.
Happy 15th Anniversary /.!
EDIT: grammar and stuff
- Technology can make society a better place
- Open source is the best way to make good technology
Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years.
And to the extent that most people are optimistic about technology in general today, it's a very cynical sort of optimism. I think these things are probably cyclical, but at least for right now how many people would actually want to live in a world where every morning the latest Eric S. Raymond essay was splashed across their homepage?
Slashdot was great in the late 90s, and pretty good in the early 2000s. But right now it just seems like an anachronistic holdout from a different time, a place where people still define their lives by the Columbine shooting and the year of Linux on the desktop is forever just around the corner.
As for belief that technology can make society a better place, that was never universual on /. (or the YRO section wouldn't exist) and I for one absolutely still believe it.
In many ways hn is a much more grown up version of /. we recognize that communism isn't a workable philosophy, that money can be pretty sweet and there is nothing wrong with making them so long that you provide real value for it.
Oh, and that AB tests are like printing money, once you have users.
But in the end, and even considering that my /. user id is much more than a few digits, I am pretty happy that it exist. The teenage me would not have been so into tech if it hadn't been for /.
So a happy birthday from me.
How does replacing the Windows PC with an iPad(70% of tablets sold are iPads) lead to a better future? If anything, it makes it a lot worse, locked down single hardware vendor, 30% cut of app price, 30% cut of in-app purchases etc.
This reflects the problem with many on Slashdot and even HN to some extent, the unhealthy fixation on beating MS (see Ubuntu bug #1) rather than promoting better and open software. MS is always seen dying by the next quarter from the 15 years that Slashdot has been in existence.
The amount of misinformation,knee jerk FUD, slanted coverage and story selection just gets annoying and repulsive after a while. For a small example see the summary and comments on this story from 2009 about Windows 7.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-dr...
The lesser said about the DRM FUD spread about Windows Vista, the better. And I see much of the same on HN too, articles not negative about Windows 8 are flagged off the front page quickly even if they ever reach it and all we ever seem to see are the negative ones.
This kind of insularity causes broadminded folks to leave the site(s) and makes the problem worse with the echo chamber.
The future is the web. And no single company can ever have a monopoly that is strong enough to stand against the combined work of humanity.
You are too narrowly focused on the app store. As Apple fucks things up more and more (see e.g maps, which Jobs would never have allowed) and with the new Nexus 7 coming out the future of computability is only going to go one way -- HTML5 will become more and more powerful, Javascript interpretators is going to become better, faster and leaner, and Android Tablets are going to be better and better.
But even if we assume Apple is always going to reign supreme for all eternity (and honestly, has any company ever done that?), they allow you to install any 'app' of the internet. It is available on the little icon next to the browser bar and you can develop these apps on a windows PC, if you want. No license, no control, more freedom than you ever had with MS and much easier to get started too.
Apple's already dragging its feet on things like HTML5. Jobs' memo about deprecating Flash for HTML5 was 2.5 years ago, and we still see major issues with HTML5 that are easy in Flash.
Not to mention using patents to put the kibosh on very important things like touch events.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/12/is-apple-using-patents-to-h...
Android?
Like other's said, Android. Along similar lines - and sometimes called "open source" - there's Khan Academy.
Makerbot (! http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57520633-1/pulling-back-... and RaspberryPi are open[ish] projects but perhaps still too geek to be public interest.
Maybe "Course Builder" is public enough, or perhaps too restricted to educational space: http://www.itproportal.com/2012/09/13/open-source-education-....
Perhaps someone could answer "yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some [closed source] software project?" to give us an idea about what is meant.
Do the "general public" get excited about software as opposed to full products.
If anyone is curious, I was once http://slashdot.org/~Tilly there. My last comment there was a dozen years ago. (I've commented as AC a few times since, but not much.)
If there was a point, I'd not have left in the first place, or else I'd have created another account.
After Rob left last year, though, I felt the community shrunk a lot, and it doesn't quite have the character it used to have.
Hacker news does have a similar vibe to 1998-2002 Slashdot... instead of Microsoft vs. Linux being the dominant meme, it's Apple vs. Android. Though there are way more Apple supporters hanging here than MS supporters in the late 90's. Generally HN is more adult due to the moderation approach, but lots of posts degenerate into slug fests anyway.
Of course, at the time there was not really a well-developed online technology press and there was minimal blogging, so that degree of centralization can probably never be recreated. Still, Hacker Hews has a bit of this--certainly for anything relevant to startups or Silicon Valley. To some extent reddit does too vis-a-vis their IAmA threads.
http://slashdot.org/~John+Carmack/firehose
Paul Graham used to be a regular user as well.
#2774 here, I remember this well and it had a great effect. Every comment I was ask myself to think real hard, "is that worth posting". As for /. this is what I wrote about 6/7 years ago, sound familiar?
/. gone to seed
Since 1996 I`ve been making crappy comments and observations on slashdot. And I must say while I still like to frequently check the stories. I find them less interesting. The comments are less informative. Innovation less than inspiring. Its not just the dilution of smart readers that is a problem. ~ http://slashdot.org/journal/123931/-gone-2-seed-37
/. to me is like a bad marriage. I can't stand it in general, constantly I complain about it, but for some reason I can't leave it.
What's interesting about the numbers he presents is that there's a definite increase in growth rate (~2x) around 2008-2009.
HN is very new to me, but I like the content since it's mostly technical and without much if any religious argument over various platforms, languages, and technologies.
If I had to call out HN on something it's the somewhat naive "startup" vibe I get. There are many shades of success in business between cratering and being the next Facebook and they're the most likely place we all end up.
Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent.
Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.
The real testament is to consider how visually similar slashdot is from iteration 1.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.or...
How fascinating is it for something to work as well as it has, for so long.
A pun on the Borg motto "resistance is futile" with regard to Microsofts dominance in pc space at the time.
As it happened, that morning, she had just had a meeting with the boss about turning up late too frequently, and was thrown into a momentary paranoid panic, before she figured out that I was the culprit!
Heh. Those were the days.
What other everyday profession is so interesting to pick up as a teenager and so amenable to learning professional-level skills without ever leaving your house?
Sure, you could start studying medicine or the law at an early age, but no one will let you practice those things without a degree. You can't get experience operating on a cadaver when you're 12 like you can putting together some arduino circuits or a Node.js web site.
I always found it amusing how much emphasis recruiters placed on where I went to school in my first couple of jobs after college when so little of what I felt I brought to the job I actually learned at the University level.
I get a weird feeling when I think that it's less than twice the age of 4chan, which still feels new and exciting (possibly because I was there in its first year and have watched it grow).
And that's why I like hacker news now: more technical, less political.
Over time I completely stopped reading the comments, but the front page has been a decent indicator of medium to big tech news, plus lots of niche stuff that I likely would never have known about otherwise!
I seem to have bypassed Reddit completely. Don't know how that happened...