Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take on the new of the moment.
... as well as some of those that would eventually become someone. Like Mark Zuckerberg [0] who co-built an MP3 player that learns your taste [1] in 2003:
> "It looks like they're both college freshmen now. But last year, Adam D'Angelo went to Korea for the IOI contest. Apparently, the other one is a smart guy too. A friend at Exeter said Mark Zuckerberg was a bigshot in math there and had some interesting coding projects of his own. Go figure."
Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so many thanks for helping me get here :-)
I will echo this. I absolutely knew I was a software engineer pre-Slashdot but it shaped what and where and how I do that. And I also have had a very good run so far. So thank you for that impact on my life.
I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.
However, I stopped going at some point because I felt I was in an "echo chamber". Actually that's how I started visiting Reddit and later Hacker News. I liked HackerNews because it had some contrasting values compared to slashdot, valuing "for profit" software efforts, and having more technically focused comments.
Slashdot is where I first encountered both Google ('98 / early '99) and YC (the Summer Founders Program). So pretty valuable personally. Thanks for that :)
Ditto. It almost felt like Google got its nerd cred from being featured on Slashdot multiple times. BitCoin too (waaaay before it was "popular"), and probably Linux itself.
I vaguely remember you posting a link to Chips & Dips on a Linux-related EFNet channel more than 20 years ago. I gave it a look, and it was sort of interesting, but I didn't bookmark it and forgot about it. Then later you announced Slashdot and the new design must have made it stick in my head or something, because I read it multiple times a day for the next 10 or so years. Slashdot was an important source of news and hosted a valuable community during those early days.
My only regret is that I missed out on a two-digit user ID when you added registration, because I figured it probably wouldn't catch on (boy, was I wrong!) and I didn't comment much anyway.
There's not going to be a next one, there's going to be 10.
20 years ago the web was a much smaller place, and a few billion people currently online weren't even aware that the place existed.
Now, the population has exploded and there will be lots of different sites, all good in different ways, to "nurture the next generation of nerds". In different languages, too.
> There's not going to be a next one, there's going to be 10.
I don't agree. People tent to congregate on online forums that achieved critical mass, and tend to flock where everyone already is. Plenty of slashdot alternatives, including slashdot clones, were already launched across the ages, and they never succeeded attracting the same level of content and same sort of community. Well, except HN which, at least to me, represents a far improvement.
I think there are 2 components to look at articles and comments.
I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I recall preferring /.'s articles from 15ish years ago (compared to what /. and HN have today). Maybe that is a reflection of the news at the time, my age, the communities' interests, or a combination of the above.
With HN, I wish I could filter Valley specific news ("Zucktown, USA"[0] would be a recent example). HN aims for news for both Jobs and Woz types, where I think /. was really focused on just "News for Nerds, stuff that matters." That's all I really wanted.
So in terms of articles, I don't know what to believe. But I know that HN's community is more civil than /.'s, and this is one of the few sites on the web where I read the comment section.
On that note, i seem to recall some physicist's personal web page that got a massive attention on /., Reddit and some other site all in the same day, leading to quite the surprise from the server admin.
Recently, the new of the moment is pretty weird though. In retrospect, the things warranting criticism were easier targets, and there was a lot of low hanging fruit.
These days, a lot of what used to catch some well-deserved flak has been refined and corrected for. The things that deserve criticism lately are a little more obtuse, and it's hard not to sound like a whiny, petulant critic, when everything's not perfect. #firstworldproblems
