No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

August 25, 2011 6:38 AM

After 14 years, Rob Malda is walking away from Slashdot.
posted by schmod (141 comments total)

2 posts, and neither has told me why this matters...
posted by Theta States at 6:42 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

write if you find work with the swinging door.
posted by clavdivs at 6:44 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Both of these posts are pretty thin.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 6:46 AM on August 25, 2011

Slashdot was one of my early internet addictions, but it pretty quickly got replaced by digg, when it was still tech-y, and then reddit. I haven't visited there in years, at this point.

They were the site that invented community moderation, yeah? With the karma system?
posted by empath at 6:47 AM on August 25, 2011

Asking why the founder of Slashdot (finally) moving on matters would be like asking why the founder of Apple stepping down matters. Slashdot was on a down trajectory, true, but Rob Malda created what was for a long time the biggest traffic juggernaut on the Internet. It's since been eclipsed by Digg and Reddit and their ilk (even MetaFilter is close to Slashdot's traffic nowadays), but Slashdot is a pretty big piece of Internet history.

On the other hand, he still worked there? They have employees? Sheesh. Have they done anything in the last five years?
posted by Plutor at 6:49 AM on August 25, 2011 [18 favorites]

/.
posted by pyramid termite at 6:51 AM on August 25, 2011 [57 favorites]

I mentioned Slashdot in my honours thesis.

God, I hope nobody ever reads it.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 6:51 AM on August 25, 2011

This /. FPP was in one minute before the other /. FPP, but is getting far fewer comments.

Have no idea what that means.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:59 AM on August 25, 2011

When I stumbled on Metafilter early in the 00s, I remember thinking, "Oh it's like Slashdot for non-tech stuff".
posted by octothorpe at 6:59 AM on August 25, 2011 [19 favorites]

Lame. I saw this on Slashdot earlier today. Can't we do better than just repost things from Slashdot?

I come to MetaFilter to see things that AREN'T on Slashdot.
posted by foggy out there now at 6:59 AM on August 25, 2011 [20 favorites]

Aaaaaand, the winner is... schmod! WOOT!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:00 AM on August 25, 2011

Plutor: "even MetaFilter is close to Slashdot's traffic nowadays"

Indeed. Domestically, Metafilter actually even does a bit better than /. (which is ironic, considering that /. is oft accused of having a distinct US-centric bias, but actually has a smaller share of Americans compared to MeFi).

Of course, a lot of that traffic comes from AskMe Google Gravy, and I'm not quite sure if slashdot have any similar original content that ranks highly on multiple Google queries.

Also, can I shed a tear for K5? It was great while it lasted. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long.
posted by schmod at 7:00 AM on August 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

I have a sub 1000 Slashdot user number. It was my first site I visited every morning. When a story I submitted made it to the front page I high fived everyone in my university computer lab. To be that young again!
posted by PenDevil at 7:01 AM on August 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

I'm linking my own comment for posterity.
posted by empath at 7:01 AM on August 25, 2011 [4 favorites]

Have no idea what that means.

It means you just broke my brain's ability to process punctuation.
posted by griphus at 7:02 AM on August 25, 2011

Also, can I shed a tear for K5? It was great while it lasted. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long.

Rusty posts here all the time (at least I think it's the same rusty)
posted by empath at 7:02 AM on August 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

This post was deleted for the following reason: NATALIE PORTMAN NAKED AND PETRIFIED WITH HOT GRITS DOWN THE PAGE A BIT -- cortex

posted by schmod at 7:02 AM on August 25, 2011 [15 favorites]

This /. FPP was in one minute before the other /. FPP, but is getting far fewer comments.

Have no idea what that means.

Everyone was fooling around waiting for the red box of deem.
posted by TedW at 7:03 AM on August 25, 2011

I've seen the red box! A lo, it was red, and box like, and told of deletion!
posted by Ghidorah at 7:03 AM on August 25, 2011

Cdr Taco's shining achievement.
posted by empath at 7:03 AM on August 25, 2011 [11 favorites]

Obviously, CmdrTaco was Steve Jobs' self-hating sock-puppet account.
posted by designbot at 7:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [5 favorites]

I just heard some sad news on the Nerdist podcast - Slashdot founder Rob Malda was found retired on his homepage this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone stuck in 2001 will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his editorial work, there's no denying his contributions to e-culture. Truly an Internet icon.
posted by cortex at 7:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [19 favorites]

I should read thread titles.
posted by empath at 7:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

<0)
  ( \
8=x=D
posted by Threeway Handshake at 7:07 AM on August 25, 2011 [11 favorites]

Rupert Murdoch is reportedly pleased with his latest acquisition.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:08 AM on August 25, 2011

I guess this thread title is better than that of my deleted thread.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 7:09 AM on August 25, 2011

I'm not going to believe this news until netcraft confirms it.
posted by seanyboy at 7:09 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is this substatiated yet? Does Netcraft confirm it?
posted by bonehead at 7:09 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Doh!
posted by bonehead at 7:09 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

schmod : Also, can I shed a tear for K5? It was great while it lasted. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long.

But but but... It still exists! Sorta...

Of course, I haven't logged in there for so long I don't remember my password. But it hasn't gone dark yet. :)


cortex : I'm sure everyone stuck in 2001 will miss him

Hey now! Sure, /. has gone downhill over the years, but just about every geek I know still drops in there on a near-daily basis.

That said... 2001? Pffft. I wish - In 2001, the Slashdot interface worked, unlike their current crappy Ajaxified Web 2.0 pile of suck. ;)
posted by pla at 7:10 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

MeFi has become everything that Slashdot was for me at one time. Given the traffic numbers, I am not alone in that.

Also, can I shed a tear for K5? It was great while it lasted. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long.

K5 coulda been somebody, it coulda been a contenda. Alas.
posted by tommasz at 7:11 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

Where will I go to find that ObscureLib has released version 0.1.15?
posted by DWRoelands at 7:12 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Have they done anything in the last five years?

Hmm...six years ago they switched to HTML 4.01 and CSS and earlier this year they did another redesign. Right about five years ago they introduced D2, the new discussion system, which has been tweaked substantially since then, particularly with the site redesign this year. Two years ago they added achievements (it was announced on April 1 but it's a real thing, albeit not something people care much about).

My Slashdot UID is in the very low 5 digits. I think I signed up in 1999, back in the days of dial-up and youthful Linux zealotry. Ahh, the heady days when Slashdot was flush with VC money and Linux was poised to take over the world. Anyone remember the Beanie awards, when Slashdot gave away $100,000?

I still check the site regularly, but most of my commenting consists of trying to add at least a little bit of factual accuracy to discussions about patents. I rarely read the comments anymore. I feel like the self-moderation system has mostly failed.

On a side-note, Malda also had a hand in Geeks in Space, one of the earliest podcasts.
posted by jedicus at 7:12 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Where will I go to find that ObscureLib has released version 0.1.15?

Freshmeat.net is still around.
posted by jedicus at 7:15 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

/. was the first time that I used octothorpe as a username. Every once in a while I think about doing a Brand New Day thing and moving to a new online identity since I don't really like my username but I hate to give 13 years of history.
posted by octothorpe at 7:19 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

He's being replaced by a beowulf cluster.
posted by eyeballkid at 7:19 AM on August 25, 2011 [12 favorites]

In Soviet Russia, website quits YOU!
posted by Threeway Handshake at 7:20 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

The dot-com boom is officially over for me now. As are my old Unix hacker days (although, truth be told, not staring at either /. or emacs for four years so far should have covered it)
posted by the cydonian at 7:20 AM on August 25, 2011

Here's my /. story: it was early 2001 and I had - incredibly - managed to get myself invited to speak at TED. I was just one of the kids there being only 18, and so I spent some of my time hanging out with the other 'kids' such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (whom I can guarantee you now would not know my name).

Anyway, during one of the parties at the conference venue where all the adults were schmoozing and we were all making fun of Sergey's dating profile, I look over to the left and I see Larry not doing any schmoozing at all but just scanning Slashdot. I thought (unnecessarily) "Wow - that dude is a real geek!". And I'm pretty sure I saw him surfing that site quite a few times. I bet he doesn't read it any more now though. It's too bad.
posted by adrianhon at 7:22 AM on August 25, 2011 [5 favorites]

Octothorpe, I always wondered if it was the same you.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 7:23 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I've got a sub-5,000 account on Slashdot, and joined Plastic shortly after it started up. Then I started reading Mefi and, although I didn't set up an account until a couple years ago, I've been participating here more frequently than the other two combined.

If /. ended up not really being the forum-of-choice for me personally, that had a lot more to do with what the community was interested in conflicting with what I was interested in; Mefi happens to mostly be a better fit in that regard. Slashdot was, for years, a place where tech news broke, and its relative decline on the web community landscape has as much to do with the vast increase in online population in the past dozen years as it does with the changes in technology and user expectations.

Rob Malda is a bright guy and, although it's easy to complain about the flaws in implementation, he navigated Slashdot during its rocket to popularity with insight and a lot of hard work. I've had the pleasure of meeting him once, and he's easy to like. Good luck with him in whatever he does next. Hope that ends up being interesting too.
posted by ardgedee at 7:25 AM on August 25, 2011 [6 favorites]

Sure, /. has gone downhill over the years, but just about every geek I know still drops in there on a near-daily basis.

I kid because I love. Slashdot stopped doing it for me a while ago, but I was an avid reader back in my college linux zealot days. I have no idea what my ID is anymore; at the time, I felt late to the party, but it's probably at least mildly impressive at this point.

I remember going to a Linux con in NYC in 2000 with a gaggle of LUG nerds from WPI—we drove and trained and bussed to the expo center, I made myself a t-shirt on the way with permanent marker, "STEAL THIS DISTRO" I think—and in among all the no-budget indie booths and awkwardly slick corporate pavilions was this beanbag mecca with Taco et al lounging around like internet demigods, chatting with people and maybe doing some sort of Internet Show in the process. That has forever remained my image of the Slashdot crew.

Also a bunch of us goaded one of the LUG dudes into having an awkward fanboy conversation with ESR.
posted by cortex at 7:26 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

No wireless. Less space than Ars Technica. Lame.
posted by fungible at 7:28 AM on August 25, 2011 [5 favorites]

cd ..
posted by Salvor Hardin at 7:32 AM on August 25, 2011

I miss adequacy.org.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 7:32 AM on August 25, 2011 [12 favorites]

cortex : and in among all the no-budget indie booths and awkwardly slick corporate pavilions was this beanbag mecca with Taco et al lounging around like internet demigods, chatting with people and maybe doing some sort of Internet Show in the process. That has forever remained my image of the Slashdot crew.

Heh, awesome - Almost identical impression, though from LinuxWorld 2001 instead of 2000. Suits and booth-bunnies everywhere trying to find a way to cash in on something free, and then you have this group of half a dozen guys chilling on bean-bag chairs in one of the primo spots at the whole con. Surreal.
posted by pla at 7:37 AM on August 25, 2011

It seems like lately all of the /. stories have already appeared on metafilter two days earlier.
posted by Stagger Lee at 7:41 AM on August 25, 2011

It's funny, I just took a look at my /. activity, and it looks like I more-or-less stopped commenting (not that I was ever a heavy commenter) about when I got a MeFi account. Coincidence? No. I can't even remember the last time I read ./.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:45 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

linux and the internet are going to save the world.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:50 AM on August 25, 2011

Heh, one of the things you can configure on Slashdot are 'Slashboxes,' little pre-fab sets of links and news feeds that go along the right-hand side of the page. I guess they never retire them, though, and the list of possible Slashboxes is a little trip down memory lane all by itself.

Some gems: Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, BeBits, caoine.org, Excite, icculus.org, Linux M68k, Metacrawler, Slashdot RC5 Team Stats, ticalc.org.

I don't remember what Caoine (MeFi's own emmastory) had to do with Slashdot, but she did the design for Penny Arcade a couple of versions back (~9 years ago). Incredibly, distributed.net is still around and still cranking away on RC5-72. The Slashdot team is still around, too. Linux m68k was last updated about 9 years ago, as best I can tell.
posted by jedicus at 7:50 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I lurked on /. for a long time before registering for an account (with a 5 digit UID!). Today I dug it up logged on and read some of my old comments. Wow. I'm glad I used a pseudonym.

Good thing I used one here too... Oh. I'm going to regret this in 10 years.
posted by samhyland at 7:52 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh man, whenever one of the Old Guard moves on (and yes, I ALMOST remember "back when" they were the Young Turks), I check to see if memepool is still up, and I'm surprised every time. That man will be stuck in that elevator forever and ever, amen.
posted by muddgirl at 7:55 AM on August 25, 2011 [13 favorites]

I weaned on slashdot. It has little utility for me these days, but it really changed my whole notion of what the web was good for, introduced me to groups like EFF, and at one time had some of the best comments on the whole internet. For a time, I read every single comment and story obsessively.

Slashdot is/was a great thing, and it helped form a lot of the Internet as we know it today. Good job cmdrtaco.
posted by fake at 7:57 AM on August 25, 2011 [4 favorites]

I like to look back at old slashdot posts of mine. It's like the journal I was supposed keep, but never did. Being able to anonymously look at my attitude and personality from 10 years ago is a little strange, but grounding in a way.

Trying to learn all of the in jokes turned me on to a lot of cool books and television, too.

Thanks Rob.

/.
posted by notion at 7:57 AM on August 25, 2011

Another 3 digit UID account here. Moderation woes and getting more useful news from other places and RSS feeds really lessened my visiting frequency to /. over the years. Probably accelerated when they sold themselves to what become VA Linux. (Ouch, that's been over 10 years ago, hasn't it?)

Still a little sad to see him give it up and move on.
posted by Kip at 7:58 AM on August 25, 2011

I have a sub-5k user number over there, and I read the site for months before getting around to actually making an account there; had I done one right away, I think it might have been sub-1K. Used to read the site religiously... in many ways, it was the epicenter of the dotcom boom. (I'm not sure if anything really qualifies, but if such a thing existed, Slashdot was either it, or within spitting distance.)

I used to read it religiously, but I got very pissed off at them when they explicitly refused to spellcheck or fix submissions. This just infuriated me. The way I saw it, they were refusing to adapt to their audience. We weren't all teens and early 20s anymore, we were aging, and it was time to pick up their game and deliver a quality product for the literate, educated nerds that we had all become. But they absolutely insisted on staying stuck in teenager mode, forever.

So that really weakened my desire to read the place, and when they rolled out some huge change to the interface without asking anyone's opinion, testing it in any way that I could see, or giving users any option to fall back to the old way, well, that was it for me.

Very simply, they refused to grow up. I still check in every once in awhile, but the submissions are boring, and the commentary is ignorant and misleading. Once upon a time, they had some of the best minds in tech hanging out there, but nowadays they're just crap.

And don't get me started on the NEW new interface. The first remake was bad, but what they're running now is a fucking disaster.
posted by Malor at 7:59 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Man, what timing. The Influential-tech-person-steps-away-from-his-signature-creation Well is going to be pretty dry this week.

Not saying /. is (or really ever was) the Apple of tech weblogs, or anything, just that between last night and today there's a whole lot of leavin' goin' on.
posted by gauche at 8:01 AM on August 25, 2011

Somebody keep an eye on mathowie for me, please. (These things come in threes too, right?)

as if we'd let him walk away

wow, that sounded creepy when I meant it with love
posted by MCMikeNamara at 8:04 AM on August 25, 2011 [7 favorites]

Seeing as how the good quotes are already used up, let me just go for the cheap snark that most of us left /. a long time ago! ZING!

I really need to get a Rodney Dangerfield tie and jacket for this line of work.

Also, yes, K5 really had something go for it. Let's make this thread about K5 and then we can have rusty come in from his yacht and tell us where we got it wrong. (Rusty, I <3 you!, this is in lovingly good fun)
posted by cavalier at 8:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

And don't get me started on the NEW new interface. The first remake was bad, but what they're running now is a fucking disaster.

Yeah, this really can't be stressed enough. I'm of the same era -- pretty low uid, read it since damn near the beginning, but over time they lost me. I don't even know my password anymore, and I'm fairly sure the email associated with my username is no longer valid.

The Slashdot of 1998 was reasonably modern (for the time), usable, and interesting. The Slashdot of today is, as best as I can tell it, an attempt by someone who doesn't actually ever use the site to make it conform to some poorly defined "web 2.0" ideal that has never existed. It is full to the brim with AJAX bells and whistles, all of which seem to serve no purpose other than to ensure that nobody is going to want to actually use it. It truly is disastrous.

But, still, it is an end of an era, and it's kind of sad to see him go.
posted by tocts at 8:13 AM on August 25, 2011

I concur with making this about K5. I got really into that place for a while, but ultimately it was a shooting star... so many great, well-written articles, but it faded fast. What a strange, tricky community it was, too. It had the oddest trolling culture I've come across. The only one that actually tempted me to join it; it was almost gentlemanly, in a way, almost respectable, almost genuinely funny. In the end, I suspect they were the downfall of the site, though.

When I joined Metafilter, I was really tickled the first time I saw rusty post and realized he was the K5 rusty. It made me feel a little more at home.
posted by gilrain at 8:16 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Rob helped a few of us pull off a "Several websites shut down by unknown entity (*nudge wink* MSFT)" April Fool's day prank back in 1999. Upon reflection, I should have filed a patent for "a process by which a website owner pulls a lame and somewhat obvious prank on April the First".* I also beheld his beanbag courtyard at some trade show or other.

* Actually it went over pretty well, at least for mine and another's site. The third site owner ended up apologizing to his readers for toying with their emotions.
posted by mikepop at 8:17 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Rob helped a few of us pull off a "Several websites shut down by unknown entity (*nudge wink* MSFT)" April Fool's day prank back in 1999.

Was that this one?
posted by jedicus at 8:22 AM on August 25, 2011

Oh man. I have a barely five digit ID there, but like many others I don't use /. much at all anymore. It's still in my RSS reader, but only to occasionally glance at a headline. (And you can almost always tell a Slashdot headline by the self-serious tone combined with predictable subject matter.)

The first thing I did on my 18th birthday was buy some RedHat and VA Linux stock. At (as we all later found out) what was pretty much the apex of the bubble. *sigh* By the time I cashed those out I think it barely covered the transaction fees.

I'm going to pour out some hot grits for an Internet pioneer, for better or worse.
posted by kmz at 8:28 AM on August 25, 2011

That was the one. Several people cried foul because we started the build-up a bit early.

The amusing (to me) part is that I sent an email around saying "hey want to do a coordinated April 1 thing where we all say we've been forced to shut down or something" where by "or something" I meant "something much better" but instead everyone took that idea and ran with it.
posted by mikepop at 8:30 AM on August 25, 2011

"The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."

-- Proust*








* First
posted by titus-g at 8:30 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

Another ex-Slashdot user; my password doesn't seem to work and I no longer have the email address I registered with.

When I first saw a link to this story, I assumed it was meta-humor about Jobs' retirement. That's pretty telling about Slashdot's culture. Slashdot was very emblematic of a certain period in the Internet's development, and I miss those days, they seem like the Wild West compared to today. (Which is ironic, because in Slashdot's heyday I was already pining for the Internet of the early to mid 90s.)

It's gotta be a bummer to be remembered primarily for being incredibly and vocally wrong about one of the most successful consumer products of alltime.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:30 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

last ps0t!
posted by Anything at 8:38 AM on August 25, 2011

Oh cool, we're breaking out the /, e-peens. Put me down as a four-digit UID (sub-5000), and it's only that high because I grumpily resisted signing up for user accounts for a while after they instituted them. I never commented much. I just logged in for the first time in ages to find my UID, and see I have 88 comments total to my name, most of them in late 99, early 2000, but I read it regularly for quite a while before (and after) that.

Come to think of it, it's much like my usage pattern here. Low 4-digit UID, but no one knows who I am because I don't say much even though I've been around for over a decade.

MeFi, though, has stayed relevant to my life, whereas Slashdolt hasn't been in my regular rotation for years.
posted by jammer at 8:47 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hell, I have a six-digit /. ID, and I feel old right now.
posted by Celsius1414 at 8:48 AM on August 25, 2011

I can't wait until Fark closes down so I can brag about my sub-2000 UID!
posted by WinnipegDragon at 8:51 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Wow... slashdot. I haven't really been reading it regularly for awhile, but man... back in the day, that site really spoke to me. Then... linux kinda won. They weren't so much the underdogs anymore.

Good stuff, though. He had a fantastic run of things... took that site and the movement that came with it further than anyone would have possibly expected.
posted by ph00dz at 8:53 AM on August 25, 2011

hot grits?
posted by Ad hominem at 9:07 AM on August 25, 2011

I find that /. was always read by a certain number of folks, who always seemed quite interested in the latest tech news, learning the latest new trends, and finding out that trinity dies at the end of the matrix.
posted by k5.user at 9:09 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

FUCKING SPOILER ALERT JESUS
posted by griphus at 9:12 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also, can I shed a tear for K5? It was great while it lasted. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long.

I came here via k5. I remember, I got fed up with k5 because of all the trolling. I think someone had photoshopped a porn pic of rusty's wife and he was like, 'OK, I'm not playing any more.' The whole thing seemed insane to me. Why didn't he just delete it and move on?

I got to k5 via Slashdot. so indirectly, I suppose I owe Rob Malda my Metafilter.

And what about memepool? Does that still have the never changing front page?

(checks)

Yeah, still unchanged since April 2008.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:16 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

FUCKING SPOILER ALERT JESUS

That's it, I'm off to Etsy to find someone to make me that action figure.
posted by Theta States at 9:17 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

My slashdot login is Trurl. User number 3494. The relatively recent addition of a very active user by that name here at mefi causes me to double-take every post.
posted by rlk at 9:17 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

I just went back to /. to see if I could log in - fortunately I was able to dredge up my password from where it was deeply buried in my memory. And - oh wow - I'm user # 4995! Member of the 4 Digit UID Club, baby!

(and now I'll probably not go back to /. for another few years)
posted by jazon at 9:30 AM on August 25, 2011

Here's a blast for the past for you: My photos from LinuxWorld 2000, which had a Slashdot booth which I apparently hung out at all day, for no good reason.
posted by smackfu at 9:31 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

(Oh, and apparently my Slashdot account is so old I am just plain "Smack" over there.)
posted by smackfu at 9:32 AM on August 25, 2011

I still read Slashdot - what the hell do you people who left use for a sci/tech news aggregator?
posted by Ryvar at 9:32 AM on August 25, 2011

earlier this year they did another redesign. Right about five years ago they introduced D2, the new discussion system

Arggghhhh. Slashdot redesigns. Probably the biggest reason I don't visit regularly anymore.

The changes (and in particular the new discussion system) always felt like something I had to fight off by periodically delving into the preferences and trying to keep it at bay. I've never really liked the design of the site, even when I was a twitchy-refresh-multiple-times-per-hour participant, and when I first joined up I was using computers that had a hard time with their layout, so I'd *long* been a user of the simplified HTML version of the site, which I thought was great, but seems to have been slowly eliminated over time.

And while I know there's a lot of noise on the site, there's always been deeply worthwhile content there occasionally. Take this comment on Marxism. That's certainly right up with the best of commentary here on Metafilter, let alone most places on the web.

But with a few of the most recent redesigns and tweaks, it seems the plain HTML view is now completely unavailable to me, and I've found it increasingly difficult to just *use* the site.

It's true that Metafilter long ago filled the general interest niche for me, and Twitter + StackExchange is pretty much doing the job for tech news and discussion, but I would probably actually still be regularly visiting Slashdot, searching for the diamonds in the rough, if I hadn't been chased out by their changes.
posted by weston at 9:34 AM on August 25, 2011

1) holy shit i forgot about k5
2) DON'T LEAVE MATHOWIE!
3) Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz at G+, I think Jobs and Taco leaving is a sign for you boys to step down.
4) Rusty is the rusty from K5? Damn.

I think #3 is my only original contribution, but #2 I came to say but was beaten to the punch. And that is symbioid's summary of the thread. Carry on.
posted by symbioid at 9:35 AM on August 25, 2011

You guys haven't moved to advogoto yet? so much better than slashdot.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:36 AM on August 25, 2011

This site and Slashdot are the only two places on the net where I use this username. So there.

It's interesting that he's leaving. It seems like he'd actually been writing more stuff for the site recently.
posted by zsazsa at 9:37 AM on August 25, 2011

Obligatory.
posted by Smart Dalek at 9:43 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Well, thanks, I barely made it in the 5-digit club, now I feel like a loser. Bastards.

After years away, I could still remember my login. At least I still have Excellent karma.
posted by Bovine Love at 9:46 AM on August 25, 2011

Let's make this thread about K5

I cannot afford the number of accounts for that here.
posted by mrgoat at 9:52 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Like Fark, /. is one of those places where I have a 5-digit account number but rarely visit any more.

I stopped commenting on Slashdot when I realized that the community moderating system was working very well to promote incorrect information. Kind of fascinating, and it made me question the whole "million eyeballs" paradigm.
posted by zomg at 9:53 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Suck.com's Slashdot parody from 1999.
posted by zsazsa at 9:58 AM on August 25, 2011 [5 favorites]

I posted on that site quite a bit back in the day. For a long time it actually seemed like CmdrTaco actually hated most of the users. And most of the posters seemed to dislike the way things were run Then later he just kind of disengaged from the comments entirely.

Ahh, the heady days when Slashdot was flush with VC money and Linux was poised to take over the world.

Heh, I was on there before Slashdot got bought by Andover Media and was actually kind of struggling to get ads and stuff. I know I was reading the site in 1999, and probably '98 as well.
posted by delmoi at 10:00 AM on August 25, 2011

I remember, I got fed up with k5 because of all the trolling.

and the complaints about trolling - and most of all, the feeling that the collective IQ of the place was dropping like a stone

then there was the article moderation system, which i felt relied too much on negative votes, which had the effect of certain subjects and posters being discarded with no real reference as to value

isn't it interesting that we manage to have more compelling content on a day to day basis with minimal moderation and no negative votes, just a flat out veto from the mods when things get too bad?

the last straw for me was a troll - a rather racist katrina choose your own adventure game - i didn't want to be part of a website that voted this shit up and said so
posted by pyramid termite at 10:07 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

It's gotta be a bummer to be remembered primarily for being incredibly and vocally wrong about one of the most successful consumer products of alltime.

I think if that is what people remember the dude's contribution for, they were not paying a whole lot of attention.

(Hell, I don't even think he was all that wrong, in a certain way. Transformational and culture-defining technological artifact and all that, but I still don't use an iPod, for predictable Linux nerd reasons...)

I too have a pretty low uid, though I never did comment much and can't for the life of me remember my password, which is probably a sign that I haven't logged in for about five years. I checked the front page about 15 times a day from 1997-2003 or so, though. Shaped my view of things in ways I probably don't even fully understand.

/.
posted by brennen at 10:09 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Getting slashdotted was every webadmin's simultaneous nightmare and dream. In 2003, a reasonably-well known financial firm I worked for was mentioned way downthread on /.; our servers hit their highest load for the next day. Later on, our web admin had moved to another company which got its own Slashdot post. He spent 24 hours manually load-balancing servers on the verge of giving up under the load. It was a huge deal.
posted by scruss at 10:22 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

and the complaints about trolling - and most of all, the feeling that the collective IQ of the place was dropping like a stone

It seemed like the place was being overrun by rightwingers, and organized troll gangs as well. Except this was in like 2002. I'm pretty sure I was pretty much done about a year after I signed up for metafilter. I had a three digit UID on that site. I'd signed up when it first started, left since there was no content and came back and started using the site later.

Reddit seems to be going the same way, into a spiral of idiocy
posted by delmoi at 10:23 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

When I stumbled on Metafilter early in the 00s, I remember thinking, "Oh it's like Slashdot for non-tech stuff".

Hah. Yes. Back before anyone had invented the term "blog", you might say of a new web site that it was "like Slashdot, but about $foo". It wasn't the first of the proto-blogs, but it was by far the biggest.

My slashdot userid is 1745. I doubt I actually go to slashdot itself more than once a year, but I still read it daily through Alterslash.
posted by Mars Saxman at 10:23 AM on August 25, 2011

Getting slashdotted was every webadmin's simultaneous nightmare and dream. In 2003, a reasonably-well known financial firm I worked for was mentioned way downthread on /.; our servers hit their highest load for the next day. Later on, our web admin had moved to another company which got its own Slashdot post. He spent 24 hours manually load-balancing servers on the verge of giving up under the load. It was a huge deal.

I don't know how much cultural currency it has for the populous at large, but the term and concept "Slashdotting" will be the main contribution I remember the site for.

(That and Beowulf clusters of Natalie Portmans covered in hot grits.)
posted by kmz at 10:27 AM on August 25, 2011

Oh man alterslash, when that came out the admins were actually saying they were going to take legal action against it. Kind of hilarious given that the site had been a huge proponent of open culture but as soon as something they were working on got 'remixed' they flipped. And when called on it they posted this completely bogus bit of legal mubo jumbo

Read the IRC log. When someone posts a comment, they are granting permission for it to appear on here. If it's taken from here, and mposted some place, we're liable. That's bad. That's how it works - the commenter would take it up with them, but the way the legal system works, we bear responsbility.

I want to try and find a solution.

It's absolutely amazing that anyone who even read Slashdot could have such a warped view of copyright.

That was brought up in an IRC interview which is now a dead link.
posted by delmoi at 10:34 AM on August 25, 2011

For a long time it actually seemed like CmdrTaco actually hated most of the users.

I think he was sick of the trolls and karma collectors (evidence: the CmdrTaco / Signal_11 'discussion' on IRC, archived at kuro5hin of all places). The easy sign-up system and anonymous posting meant that it was virtually impossible to ban anybody, and the constant game of moderation system whack-a-mole probably got to him.
posted by jedicus at 10:40 AM on August 25, 2011

I think he was sick of the trolls and karma collectors (evidence: the CmdrTaco / Signal_11 'discussion' on IRC, archived at kuro5hin of all places). The easy sign-up system and anonymous posting meant that it was virtually impossible to ban anybody, and the constant game of moderation system whack-a-mole probably got to him.

Right, but rather then try to do anything about it he just seemed to get bitter and hate everyone who was really invested in the site.
posted by delmoi at 10:49 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

My (mostly) positive memories of slashdot:

1. On September 11 2001 the CNN server was toasted. There was no google news yet. Slashdot stayed up all day and that was what I followed.

2. I was on slashdot before I was on metafilter. I arrived here following a link there.

3. The most amazing thread I ever read on the internet was the one on hellmouth on slashdot after the Denver Columbine high school murders.

4. The most hilarious thing I ever saw on the internet was Eric Raymond bragging about how rich he was after the VA linux IPO when the stock was selling for about 50X the price it fell to before he could legally disgorge any of it.

5. Shortly after I got a metafilter account I stopped looking at slashdot daily. Before Kerry ran for president I stopped looking at slashdot ever. I cannot recall my password so I can't log in there any more. My userid was 90000 something I guess.

I enjoyed the hell out my time at slashdot for the most part.
posted by bukvich at 11:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

I had a 4 digit /. UID, and lost it. I didn't bother to make an account again until the low 6 digits - but Slashdot was a great place in those days and I didn't have much to contribute. I read it every day, though. As well as Ars, Ace's Hardware and Toms (before they sold out) Anandtech (before he... got lame) As well as Fark and Metafilter (and Monkeyfilter!)

One of the things that Slashdot, K5, and Advogato did for me though, was to help me develop a cogent understanding of the flaws in a free market system through the perils of moderation. Those sites, and the growing pains they went through in trying to manage their communities through various systems of trust were instrumental to me developing my own understanding of human behaviors.

I doubt CmdrTaco will read this, but Hot Grits! and thanks for your work.

I also used to really enjoy Geeks in Space. I might have some still in a folder somewhere
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 11:05 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

He and rusty are going for a trip on rusty's yacht, where Taco will the fine art of monocle polishing.
posted by double block and bleed at 11:10 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

will learn
posted by double block and bleed at 11:11 AM on August 25, 2011

I started reading slashdot in the pre-account days (1997? 98?) and only created an account to hide JonKatz's articles (I think there were more than a few of us who did that). That gave me a low-5-digits UID.

I did cringe at almost everything JonKatz posted, but the comments for Voices From the Hellmouth were an interesting read. /.ers were discussing their lives as nerds and outcasts in the days after the Columbine massacre. They did several "Voices From the Hellmouth Revisited" posts after that.

Some memories:

Anyone remember the day someone figured out how a hack to post images in comments? It was like 4chan.

"Natalie Portman, Naked and Petrified" - I'm old enough to remember that "petrified" in this context meant scared, not turned to stone. But sometime after 2000 that's what it meant: a stone Natalie Portman. How does that make sense?

Then there was that article on tagging and "folksonomies". It might have been this one. Looking back it makes a lot of sense, but the /. nerds rejected the concept and mocked it thoroughly. I remember the same thing happening with an IBM article about cross-site scripting. /.ers denied that that class of attack existed. Same thing with web 2.0. They were well behind the curve on a lot of interesting things.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 11:15 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

They were well behind the curve on a lot of interesting things.

That's because most of them were self-important nerds, rather than merely nerds.
posted by aramaic at 11:19 AM on August 25, 2011

Looking back it makes a lot of sense, but the /. nerds rejected the concept and mocked it thoroughly... They were well behind the curve on a lot of interesting things.

Nerds are just like the normal people they claim to be so different from; they get old and ossify. I know a different group of nerds on the web who loudly reject Twitter, Facebook, etc.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:20 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

I had a three digit UID on that site.

Luxury! We used to dream of having a three digit UID! We had a negative six digit UID and when we logged in Cmdrtaco would kill us and dance about on our graves!

(apologies to the Python fellows)
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:21 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

1105. Missed it by *that* much.
posted by CaseyB at 11:23 AM on August 25, 2011

For all the memories, no one mentions all the hidden sids ? (I think they were sids or usernames that let you fake-out the slashcode to have your own private hangout.. ) k5 was full of "mod this troll up" links, and that's where I stumbled on the hidden sids. Trollaxor, maybe rings a bell.
posted by k5.user at 11:24 AM on August 25, 2011

...and only created an account to hide JonKatz's articles (I think there were more than a few of us who did that).

Thanks Pruitt-Igoe for reminding me why I created my account when I did.
posted by samhyland at 11:25 AM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Looks like one of my friends still posts regularly! I'll have to ask him what brings him back there.

I can't tell if he's still updating his journal, though - there's no year on the submission date. Come to think of it, most of slashdot had that problem for the longest time. Frustrating.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 11:29 AM on August 25, 2011

After years away, I could still remember my login. At least I still have Excellent karma.

I've just logged in and noticed my Karma was terrible. Which confused me, because I couldn't remember spamming the place, or trolling.

I checked my comment history.

Apparently, one Valentine's day, Malda proposed to his then girlfriend.

I left a comment that said something like 'You cad! How can you propose to another woman when you're already married to me? And me pregnant with our sixth!'

I didn't do it on a troll account. I did it on my usual account. Within half a second, you could check my comment history and see I was a man amd not a spurned taco groupie.

But they put me into permanent bad karma, because I'd had the termerity to make the mildest and most of jokes. Clearly, geek romance = serious business!

It seemed like a hypocritical misuse of moderator power, and from then on in, their Rebel Without a Cause posture began to look pretty hollow to me.

I do wonder if the relationship survived though?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 11:52 AM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

I do wonder if the relationship survived though?

Judging by his farewell post I'd say so. He mentions the proposal as the high point of his career at Slashdot and says he's "gonna spend some time with [his] boys and [his] wife." That strongly suggests to me that he's still married to the woman he proposed to.
posted by jedicus at 12:00 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Slashdot is the reason I became a Linux / FOSS nerd. I accidentally ended up with a job selling Sun servers in 1998. I was reading Slashdot in an effort to learn what the hell all my SysAdmin customers were talking about. I ended up totally buying into the Open Source ideal because of what I learned reading Slashdot.

I took it out of my feed reader last year. I'm sure CmdrTaco already has several interesting opportunities to consider. I would think just about any open source related company would be interested in getting him on board in some capacity.
posted by COD at 12:13 PM on August 25, 2011

"Natalie Portman, Naked and Petrified" - I'm old enough to remember that "petrified" in this context meant scared, not turned to stone. But sometime after 2000 that's what it meant: a stone Natalie Portman. How does that make sense?

Not scared, stoned. Geddit?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:16 PM on August 25, 2011

I remember a Linux conference in 1999, back when such things didn't usually feature wifi. The conference crew took pity on the hundreds of nerds suffering slashdot withdrawal - they printed out the slashdot front page every few hours and pinned it on a notice board.

I think the last straw for slashdot was Taco discovering OS X. He suddenly lost all the Linux/Free Software passion that had kept him involved, but it was making so much money that he couldn't walk away. The site has been in a holding pattern ever since - too lucrative to shut down, too neglected to ever get any better.
posted by vanar sena at 12:40 PM on August 25, 2011

Another sign of time passing, I guess. I did manage to log in on the first try though!

Booyah!
posted by halonine at 1:21 PM on August 25, 2011

Everything dies.
Everything dies more quickly on the Internet.

I remember so many great places and so many great thinkers, so many fascinating community places, all of who's works are now , essentially , gone forever. SEO optimizations and the limits of that which even Google can store have placed all such works beyond reach. Ten years from now, everything you have every written or enjoyed on Metafilter will be essentially gone. With all respects to the founders (of which I do have much respect) it's likely Metafilter doesn't exist in 2025. Probable that it doesn't exist even in 2020 - in my estimation, of course, based on what I have seen over the decades

Why is that I wonder? I can go to any library (so far) and pick up a Heinlein or a Wells pretty easily? But where did all those great discussions on The Well go? Can't easily bring them up in Google. Compuserve had some fascinating places with fascinating celebrities talking about fascinating things. All effectively gone. Why is that?

I propose it has something to do with "Too Much Content" but more importantly it has to do with the commercialization of Internet access. A library does not care whether the it puts out a century old classic like "War of The Worlds" or a recent Stross novel. They all get equal billing. Not so on Google. People pay big money for Placement and Wells isn't much on SEO optimization I hear. The death of the Internet as we now know it was foretold in 1998 when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to an entity that didn't exist yet: a company called Google Inc. . That year is when the Internet, as we know it now, began to die. Skip forward to 2025 and what passes for the Internet then , we might call "Television" today.

Everything changes. Everything dies.
New things come to take their place. Enjoy them while they last because time is always shorter than you would like.
posted by Poet_Lariat at 1:44 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

>Reddit seems to be going the same way, into a spiral of idiocy

True dat. It seems the destiny of sites like these--hopefully, Mefi is an exception--to spiral into juvenile blandness before fading into obscurity. With Slashdot, the picture is somewhat more complicated. As many of the sub-5000s will recall, it brimmed with excitement in its early days, as literate techheads found a forum of expression outside of The Well and obscure usenet groups. Suddenly, you could opine, rant or vent on a Mosaic-friendly, World Wide Web site with thousands of readers and lurkers.

Things soon took a turn for the worse, as the juvenile element (perhaps the same that is encroaching on Reddit) became obsessed with the noise end of the spectrum. For a few months, first posts and penis birds drowned out the discourse. Then, Commander Taco and his crew came up with the karma system, and for a few years--say, from 1998 through 2002--Slashdot was home to the most stimulating postings on the internet, bar none. Coincidentally, this coincided with the most thrilling period of growth in Linux, and even if you weren't interested in debates on SuSe versus Redhat, or Enlightenment versus KDE, the air seemed electric.

It was Slashdot's golden age. I miss it.
posted by Gordion Knott at 1:46 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Say, whatever happened to the Slashdot PT Cruiser?
posted by entropicamericana at 1:52 PM on August 25, 2011 [3 favorites]

The Slashdot Cruiser exists! I assumed they never gave it away due to the ridicule.
posted by zsazsa at 2:20 PM on August 25, 2011

Poet_Lariat:
Perhaps you'd enjoy:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/
posted by wuwei at 2:48 PM on August 25, 2011

Much as I do love the wayback machine, they (understandably) have huge holes and gaps in even what little of the web they have archived.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 3:05 PM on August 25, 2011

Much as I do love the wayback machine, they (understandably) have huge holes and gaps in even what little of the web they have archived.

Thankfully.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:21 PM on August 25, 2011

I also read /. pre user accounts. My 10K account was only created once accounts allowed one to block the ads. Haven't read it in years except when it gets linked here. Mostly because the moderation system creates pretty well the polar opposite of the comment system here. IE: context free comments free floating from the comments before and after them.

And ya, Tales from the Hellmouth were one of the things that I'll always remember /. for; it truly was a crowning moment of awesome. I must have forwarded the URL hundreds of times over the next couple of years.

PeterMcDermott writes "But they put me into permanent bad karma, because I'd had the termerity to make the mildest and most of jokes. Clearly, geek romance = serious business!"

I wish I'd kept the URL in my fortune file but all I've got is the moderation summary for a comment that eventually got deleted over and over:
/. Moderation Totals: Offtopic=258, Flamebait=4, Troll=26, Redundant=3, Insightful=68, Interesting=151, Informative=32, Funny=8, Overrated=11, Underrated=45, Total=606.
At the time it pretty well summed up everything that was wrong with moderation via voting.
posted by Mitheral at 4:15 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

The GigaOM writeup compares /. and MetaFilter favorably.
posted by dhartung at 4:42 PM on August 25, 2011

I used to read Slashdot, and then I discovered MeFi and realized I wasn't a techie.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 4:58 PM on August 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

Huh. I have a five-digit user number at /., and remembered my password on the first try. This might be a lot more impressive if I had made more than two comments.
posted by Songdog at 5:11 PM on August 25, 2011

I've got a sub-5,000 account on Slashdot, and joined Plastic shortly after it started up.

Ugh. Fucking Plastic. It was up last time I checked, and now it isn't. That brings me joy... started to hate those people.
posted by gjc at 6:25 PM on August 25, 2011

I never heard about the slashdot PT cruiser. Googling around for it I found this post on mathowie's blog.

Maybe someday someone will catch the MetaFilter Yugo on the freeway when it's out of the shop (custom license plate: JRUN ERR)

The PT Cruiser was certainly a polarizing car. I think it was one of the ugliest mainstream cars out there.
posted by delmoi at 8:22 PM on August 25, 2011

library does not care whether the it puts out a century old classic like "War of The Worlds" or a recent Stross novel.

Charlie Stross provided me with loads of advice and encouragement re. free Unixes on the Mac, back in demon.ip.support.mac. This was in the days before MkLinux existed, when your choices were the then-defunct AIX, an expensive commercial port of BSD unix that ran on the desktop called MachTen and the barely functional Macintosh port of FreeBSD.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:26 PM on August 25, 2011

I have to say though, I do kind of miss the GNAA.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 8:31 PM on August 25, 2011

Small voice now: Matt. Jess. Cortex. Don't ever leave me.
posted by SPrintF at 9:07 PM on August 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

I admit I still read it every day (even have a 4 digit uid), just like I have been doing for 14 years, but I don't really read the comments much anymore since the last update took a steaming dump all over the classic mode. I guess I only really read the headlines because it's still in my RSS reader and I've been at it for so long. I can't tell you when the last time I signed in was.

Which is why I'm glad Metafilter is here -- it's the Slashdot that could have been, but never managed to achieve. And it's much, much better.
posted by narwhal bacon at 11:18 PM on August 25, 2011

For a few months, first posts and penis birds drowned out the discourse

If at some point in 1999 you were annoyed by a massive flood of out-of-context Scott McNealy or Larry Ellison quotes paired with penisbirds, I apologize. I wrote a script that posted random quotes from a database to new articles and sometimes as replies to other comments, and it took them about a week to ban my IP address.

It was funny at the time.
posted by cmonkey at 12:51 AM on August 26, 2011

One of the few things that Slashdot actually got right was the zoo.pl system: the ability to mark people as your friend or a foe, and a rudimentary blogging system (journals). This was really what kept me going back there for a long time after discovering I didn't really care about tech stuff. The zoo was a completely different ecosystem, a different culture than the front page; there were quite a few non-techie people there, some of whom rarely or never read the main site. What they got wrong was that after creating this great system, they pretty much ignored it, rather than trying to promote (it wasn't even easy to find; I had been reading /. for a few years before I discovered it) and develop it: the reasoning was, I think, that since they were, after all, a news site, it wasn't something they should be spending their resources on. The reason why I think this was a mistake is because it could change the dynamics of the site quite a bit. As it was, nobody was really that invested in the "main" site; it didn't belong to the readers or posters, it was "theirs", the editors', so that when Digg appeared, offering the users more control, everyone of course jumped ship. It turned out they didn't really care about the news after all.

I apologize.

I would like to apologize as well if you were offended by any of my trolls*. I only did it because the /. front page seemed such a cold and unfriendly place, and I would never do this on Mefi.

* My favourite was a post where I compared RMS and ESR (IIRC) to Lenin and Stalin. It dominated the whole discussion and my karma went from Excellent to barely Neutral in the matter of a few hours, resulting in a month-long ban.
posted by daniel_charms at 3:27 AM on August 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

Ah, wow. I worked for a side project at OSDN (as it was briefly known) called NewsForge for a bit. One of my favorite memories was being at a trade show and hanging out with the cool kids at the Slashdot booth after roaming the exhibit floor all day looking for things to write about. Hilarious and informative, and met some really scary people that were regular commenters, too. That was an interesting time for Open Source, but mostly for me I guess. Seems like a lifetime ago.
posted by dantsea at 11:48 PM on August 26, 2011

I believe my username on /. is the same as here. Let's see if I remember my password ...

Holy crap. It worked!

I think that's the first time I've logged on there since ... well, since I left the SF Bay Area in 2005.

Nope. I see a lone comment from 2009 and a user number in the 500K level. Hmm. I must have created that account more recently. Well, that's odd. I know I had an account from back in the day, but for the life of me I can't remember what my username would have been if not this one. I had fun in the dotcom days (for a while anyway), but it was all a bit too much fun, and memories are hazy ... I never posted much there under any username, as it was full of programmers who knew their shit much more than I ever did.

I used to subscribe to the Newsforge/OSDN emails, but eventually it got to the point where I'd just end up deleting weeks full of unread newsletters. Had to unsub and recently quit my IT job. It was difficult facing the truth- that I was more of a person who used computers than would ever accomplish much in the tech industry, or be happy doing it for a living. But my life is so much better for this realization, and now a computer is a tool and not an end in and of itself. So, I can sympathize with CmdrTaco, since we all have to move on from those days when anyone who could hack their way through browser (Netscape!) and platform incompatibilities in HTML 3/4 and had a pirated copy of Photoshop 4 was given a large salary (ahem), although he'll always be a god among dotcom and Linux nerds. Myself? I'm much happier to read about it now as an outsider. Good for you, CmdrTaco, and thanks for the giant nerd kingdom you built. It was fun to be part of it back when it was buzzing and oh so important, even as a spectator.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:10 PM on August 27, 2011

Apologies in advance ...

Metafilter: a massive flood of out-of-context Scott McNealy or Larry Ellison quotes paired with penisbirds
posted by krinklyfig at 7:28 PM on August 27, 2011