I read Slashdot for many years. Slashdot introduced me to the open source movement and shaped my conception of civil liberties greatly. I remember what the place was like on 9/11: when CNN's servers couldn't keep up, I kept going to Slashdot (and then IRC, something I didn't know much about). Slashdot was a great source of news about geek culture. I liked that it was that it was curated by editors, because as a teenager I had no idea where to find out about the sorts of things they talked about.

However, what led me to leave Slashdot wasn't any sort of Eternal September like effect. Yes, there were many troll comments there, but there's also lots of options to adjust moderation types to suit one's particular interests. Rather, what I found was that the editors themselves seemed to stop caring. Article summaries would be blatantly incorrect or have distorting editorializing in them. If the whole point of the Slashdot style of reporting was to present a small number of quality stories each day, how could I trust the site when what the editors presented was inaccurate?

When I came to HN I was surprised to discover that articles simply have a title and URL. Sometimes there's editorializing in the titles, but in general its pretty good. But I can understand what Malda is saying when he expresses his frustration in wading through the front pages of HN. I don't know if the solution is to implement topics of some sort or not, but the user volume on this site is picking up enough that I think some sort of organization beyond a single ranking algorithm is required. It might also lead some interesting stories that never make it onto the front page to reach an audience. This problem of course isn't unique to HN... whether its Slashdot or Twitter or Facebook, getting the signal to noise ratio to an appropriate level is a really hard problem.

That being said, in my short time here I have learned a tremendous amount -- albeit much of which lies in my bookmarks!