Do you still read Slashdot? | Hacker News Reader

Do you still read Slashdot?

11 pointskashif34 comments

I started reading Slashdot when it was Chips and Dips...but I had completely discontinued Slashdot for about two years and reddit took its place. Now that reddit has declined from a "have to read nearly every link on the page" to "maybe two or three articles per day" habit, I find myself going back to slashdot at least once every couple of days.

I read news.YC more often than either now...but the volume here is still low enough to where it's not a problem. I drop in more than I need to (I'll come back not really expecting anything new) kind of as a nervous tick while I'm waiting on software to build or virtual machine images to copy (I manage our apt/yum software repositories, and do all of the QC testing, so I twiddle my thumbs more than I'd like).

Lately, there's a lot more of that, as may be seen in my ridiculous increase in comment volume this week...I'm kind of embarrassed looking over it now...because I'm in the midst of rolling out a new version of our installer--so lots of testing and packaging. I need to find something more productive to turn into a nervous tick. Blogging, or smoking crack or something.

Nope. I haven't for several years now.

"... Do you still read Slashdot? ..."

Started reading in '96, uid of 2774 and I used to read it as much as I read hacknews.yc but stopped after ads started appearing and the sig/noise became unbearable ~ http://slashdot.org/~goon

I've made several unsuccessful attempts over the years to go more than a few days without reading slashdot :)

I still read it almost every day, at least to check what the stories are. For a while, about eight months ago, I found myself going to it less, in favor of the main reddit page. Now that www.reddit.com has... evolved, I start a lot of my free-range browsing time from programming.reddit.com and slashdot (as well as news.yc, suddenly).

The firehose is intriguing. Good to see Malda et al. continuing to experiment with novel approaches (and it IS novel - it's not a straight digg/reddit clone, as some opine). Will be interesting to see how that plays out.

My slashdot visits have become rather infrequent over the last couple of years.To be honest neither reddit nor news.yc still get the kind of quality comments/analysis that a lot of the slashdotter comments >= 3 provide. programming.reddit.com is better. Add to that humour - there used to be a couple of sites that collected humorous comments from slashdot. You can't build a community overnight - it takes years; something that most people don't want to hear. I know for a fact that a lot of older hackers hang out on slashdot - that could account for the more insightful comments and great sense of humour. The trick is to experiment with the filters.

Every day, man. Beats the hell out of reddit and digg. Sure, there's a lot of pointless articles there, but at least I don't have to see tracksuitceo articles every day there, either.

Slashdot is useful in that it aggregates content differently than do reddit/digg. As such, you find stories there selected by the editors that the rabid mob at reddit would otherwise ignore. Also, because the comments are moderated and scored, I find them to be fairly useful when viewed at a high enough filtering threshold.

I read it daily, but it's true it's value has been declining with time. If you read many feeds, you'll keep getting duplicated news with a one day delay in Slashdot. Of course, comment reading is a no-no except you are really, really interested, in which case I only read top score comments from the first page.

Not as much as I used to. programming.reddit and news.yc have replaced it almost entirely. Whenever I check Slashdot nowadays I feel the stories are too political and trollish. Is it just me or has the comments quality on Slashdot actually declined significantly in the last year or so?

About the only time I read it anymore is when something else links to a post there.

The editors are Slashdot's twist on tech news, but the editors are almost uniformly awful. The stories they break are consistently days behind Digg/Reddit, and of no better quality.

I check occasionally but often I find nothing worth clicking on. The range of stories seems narrower now than it was a few years ago. It seems like they reacted to the arrival of digg and reddit by deciding to focus on their core competency, new OS releases.

It's still my homepage out of loyalty but I rarely actually read it. How messed up is that?

Yes. The commentary on /. tends to have an infinitely higher quality than found elsewhere (particularly digg.) Digg and Reddit are great for breaking news, but when I'm looking for an interesting (quality) discussion /. can rarely be beat.

Daily from around 1997 until 2004 or so, since then maybe a few times a year.

I also used to read it a couple times a day. Now I scan it maybe once in a while.

They don't break any stories to me anymore, it is always a delayed link to something I already read in reddit / digg yc.

> "They don't break any stories to me anymore"

Care to explain why breaking news stories are relevant at all? I don't see their point.

I used to read it multiple times a day. Now I read it every few days. News.YC has replaced /. (and Digg too) as my source for interesting articles and relevant commentary.

Haven't read slashdot in years. neither do I read digg. prog.reddit sometimes. YC News everyday.

The million $ question is when do I move away from YC News, and when?

Once a day. Given up on reddit and digg. Now its news.YC and Slashdot. I really need to work out a better way to get "local" news - I feel really out of touch at times.

I get all my news through my RSS reader. If it doesn't have RSS (or Atom) it doesn't exist :-)

So I look at the headlines and reads at least one article a day

Absolutely. I still find a lot of interesting things there, and the comments are really great. I especially like the comment tags (informative, funny, etc.).

I get the daily email. Occasionally there are a couple of things that I've missed from the day before, but I agree. It's not as "breaking" as it used to be.

Never did. Whenever I looked at it, it just felt like a bunch of Microsoft-haters resentful of the fact that they still lived in their mom's house.

Yes, but only in the following way: sorted by highest score, -2 funny modifier, and with a plugin to allow thread collapsing.

I stopped for a while when reddit was at its peak, but now I'm back to slashdot every once in a while.

Once in 1 or 2 days to check if there is anything interesting. No regrets if I'm not able to visit!

I scan the stories using a once-a-day RSS update but I never bother with the comments.

A coupla times a week. Back around 1999, I was there multiple times a day.

Yes, but I mostly just scan the links, I click a link less than once a day.

Once a day for the headlines and insightful or interesting comments.

somewhat regularly, with comments having score 5 only.

No. Security + Copyright Law = BORING

no.

gave up on reddit, too, which now consists mostly of iran conspiracy theories.

I do.

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