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The draw of /. used to be its comments. Nowhere else could you get such informative discussions. often with the people involved in the story. The rating-of-comments concept has been copied by many other sites, but few of them have a user reputation system and fewer get it right. This is why I pretty much copied /. for my own site.

And this is different from much of the socially viral Web how?

I agree that Slashdot's lost its way and cachet, but substance is hardly prominent across much of the Internet today.

Agreed; nowadays anywhere you go, there's some snarky dude saying 'hardly'.

According to their (IIRC) tag line, it is/was "news for nerds, stuff that matters." Basically, HN for the late 90s, but with better features.