Slashdot hits the 100,000 posts milestone
meta.slashdot.org
meta.slashdot.org
What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it.
HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a flamewar.
Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.
Since then, I think their quality and focus have both improved. A lot of the idiots (who originate "in soviet russia" and "FP!" type stuff) have moved on to digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. There's fewer posts than a few years ago, but they're more worthwhile. While their SNR is worse, given their number of comments / item, they actually seem to be doing really well compared to other sites.
My account on /. is over a decade old now. I barely visit there, but that's actually amazing - I still visit there over a decade later. I never visit digg or the front page of reddit, and I'm visiting HN less and less.
Part of is it that I'm maturing and managing my time better, but part of it is I'm tired of the bustedness of these sites. I wish 3 things were fixed with these sites:
1. Discussions are maybe 1/2 of the value, but you can't participate really unless you're on and active all the time. I'd guess this is because people only go back to look at the topic again so long as it's on the front page, and the discussions are tied to the topics.
2. For me, most of the rest of the value are in links that aren't really news. They're more like a good old book in the library.. "oh look what I found. this is cool. [link to some page on http://c2.com/cgi/wiki and see one of my ancient edits still alive on there]. They are in fact cool, and it's great people are discovering cool stuff... but it's not news, and I've seen a lot of it already. There's got to be a better way of collecting and presenting this sort of thing.
3. Recommendation system / smart filtering darnit. The decent sites are too limited in topics largely because the only filter / recommender that's working on these sites is super crude: People just congregate on a site and stay around certain areas big portions of them are interested in. That's busted. Even on the best day ever on here, I probably didn't care about 50% of the stuff posted.. and I'd love to hear about and discuss things with other areas that aren't start-ups (HN), free software (/.), or programming (LtU, proggit)
Then of course, there's the Eternal September scaling issue...
HN is to Startups what /. is/(was) to Linux.
one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems.
we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool).
then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc).
anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.
That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here.
There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading.
Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late.
There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.
In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not worth the time to visit anymore.
HN survives mostly by being small, self-selecting, and somewhat obscure. Slashdot, for all its flaws, is remarkable for being large, well-known, and of consistent quality. Most comparable sites would be well on their way into the gutter at a quarter of /.'s age.
I'm aware of only three viable means of maintaining stability in an online community: slavish adherence to the Peyton-Jones Law (viz. "avoid success at all costs"), iron fist moderators and a tangible cost to participate (cf. the Something Awful forums), or whatever secret sauce /. has.
HN almost certainly doesn't have the third, and the Powers That Be have better things to do than implement the second. I seem to recall pg describing the slow growth of HN membership in very positive terms, so I'm pretty sure there's a deliberate strategy here.
I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97.
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Slashdot is probably talking about front-page stories and not submissions, but, if we consider the editorial process, 100,000 is definitely high.
P.S. One of my most exciting geek-memories as a younger man was having one of my submissions hit the front-page of Slashdot.
And more relevant, too. Turns out I do not care at all about the latest SCO vs. Linux lawsuit.
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I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over the years as well.
Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.