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Comment by virgil_disgr4ce | Hacker News Reader

Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)

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yeah, it's around, but a ghost of its former glory.

I still check t regularly alongside HN. Need a counterpoint to HN submission coverage and crowd-editorial zeitgeist.

Yup, me too. What’s funny is that your slashdot account can make friends (or enemies!) with other accounts, and there’s a limit of 200. Sometimes I spot comments of friends I made like 20 years ago.

Same.. however I've been using Alterslash as a story summary for years.

https://alterslash.org/

Maybe lobste.rs?

Mostly HN reposts and extremely limited ability to post there if you don't have Bay Area social circles.

It's sad to see its decline. I started reading right around 2000 and even noticed that it started to decline even as early as 2008, after and around some of its redesigns. I know I quit regularly stopping around there probably around that time too.

Yup, around 2008 is when I noticed that many of the Slashdot front page submissions were discussed on this new site called Hacker News 1-2 days prior, minus the trolling and the comedy threads. It was a pretty easy switch at that point.

>Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era.

Please don't out me as a ghost parent

Slashdot was the shiznitt back in the day of ye olde web. Great submissions and great personality amongst the admins and commenters. On occasions when I’ve brought that attitude here I’ve been slapped down by dang…

It certainly had an impression on me in my younger days -- moving over to Firefox and later messing around with Knoppix and becoming an open source geek probably stemmed in large part from seeing all the "Install Linux, problem solved" memes.

Yeah Knoppix jeez… what a mind bending revolution that was.

> Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era.

I definitely missed out :(

What was it like?

It was a lot like HN, but more curated and with a more complex (and arguably better) moderation system. More focused on Linux and open source than HN, but still a technology news site with comments.

To be honest I never liked the community much. But back then I still stubbornly clinging to smaller, more specialised communities (plus OSNews.com haha)

Very happy OSNews is still around, just wish it had more traffic :(

Slashdot was somewhere between a well curated tech subreddit and Hacker News.

It had its own in-jokes like: This is finally "the year of the Linux Desktop" and Jonathan "CowboyNeal" Pater, the site's moderator who often posted polls and commented.

In the late 2000s, most migrated their Slashdot reflex to Digg - and then eventually the YC-backed Reddit when there was a disastrous rollout of Digg v4 (in 2010)

Reddit then became less of a technology-focused site as it gained popularity, and HN became the defacto "tech news" aggregator with a well rounded comment section that resembled the early days of Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

What I really miss was the moderation system. There was a simple 1-5 score and a main trait (insightful, funny, flamebait, underrated, overrated...). To moderate you had to earn points which would you then spend, so careful consideration mattered. The result was that you could filter for 5+Insightful and get the core of the discussion, or 5+Funny and have a good time, etc.

Ignoring what Slashdot was like specifically: A lot more optimistic, a lot of hope and positive views of what the future would bring. The internet felt bigger, as if there was more to discover, even if it's larger now. More stupid, more fun. May it was just because I was younger.

It was also the year of the Linux on the desktop.

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