Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great. It would be the equivalent of HN forcing autoplay videos and animated banner ads on each page.
A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.
> Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great.
The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
> > Slashdot was awesome right up until the point that they forced the redesign on everybody and drove away all the users that made it great.
> The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
Agreed; I remember the day they started advertising the Apple marketing conventions and thought "who put Apple on my Linux site? This isn't 'news for nerds; stuff that matters'". The influx of microsoft apologists and apple shills soon after is what killed it for me, and I had been there for a long time (not since the beginning, but still user 32752; so close to a power of two!).
Still, I'm eternally grateful to Rob Malda. Great community, great moderation system, and a site that was unique. I'll wager we shall not look upon it's like again soon.
I recall that the redesign might have been very ugly but didn't increased the learning curve. Yet, the userbase stuck around and pushed for at least a way to get their old slashdot back. Complaining about slashdot's lack of unicode support was a in-joke.
But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial-level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.
The redesign changed the filtering and visibility settings and the way they worked. It was virtually impossible to read the way I did prior to the redesign.
Redesign was a contributing factor to what's been coming for a long time. The main problem was that the community had an extremely limited say in moderation of the content.
Puny 5 mod points once every few months is not a way to instill a sense of belonging. Imagine being able to upvote a post or a comment on HN only once a month, and passively watch random stuff of questionable quality float up the rest of the time. That ruined /. for me and I suspect I wasn't alone in that.
> Puny 5 mod points once every few months is not a way to instill a sense of belonging. Imagine being able to upvote a post or a comment on HN only once a month, and passively watch random stuff of questionable quality float up the rest of the time. That ruined /. for me and I suspect I wasn't alone in that.
To be fair, they pretty much invented user moderation, Slashdot was an early experiment with user curated discussions. That they never saw past the 5 mod points is understandable, it was a foundation the site was based on, and seeing past one's foundations can be hard.
They also had to likely balance against malicious users, who were a less small % of the user base than on other sites.
Hah, same. I still haven't signed up for an account, but I've been getting a fair bit of my news there since around 1998, before people bragged about UIDs. As a child, I learned a lot about how the grownup world worked, by lurking in their threads.
What really amazes me more than anything though, is how willing some of us are to trust Microsoft all of a sudden. They did damage to the software and web communities that will take us decades to recover from, but with another round of "embrace", we are right back in the old loop. Reminding people of their history is now considered rude; our own communities have been co-opted by the MS PR machine.
It's possible that with different moderation, notifications, blocking, and post mechanics this might have been less of a problem. But the site's design and architecture more or less perfectly amplified everything that could possibly go wrong with the concept.
It died in less than a year after going public. I'd anticipated it wouldn't go well, but that it failed that hard and fast surprised me.
Slashdot made a lot of mistakes (amongst the good parts) for the industry to learn from but it doesn't seem like this one was ever heeded, Digg made the same mistake and it's looking like Reddit is going to follow it (the moment the main site looks like the mobile one and the mobile app is they day I'll leave), many sites and products have been ruined by redesigns and over complicating things.
If they don't already, they will probably soon view the mobile app as "the main site" and then it's only a matter of time before the desktop site devolves as you fear.
Same here. I actively refuse to click on any url that goes to slashdot anymore.
I've only been back, by accident, a handful of times when a "short link" actually expanded out to slashdot, and every time, I closed the page as soon as I realized where the shortened url was really headed.
There were several changes over the years, but beta was when I left, but that was really just the straw. The politics was getting too much for me, it was always a factor (remember Katz and the buried commodore64 in Afghanistan)
Sadly nothing really recaptured the spirit of the first few years, and it can't. The internet isn't the Wild West any more, you're not using it over dial up from a box room staring down a CRT, times change, and you can never go home.
For me it was the politics as well. And not even the amount of it, but rather the toxicity of discussions. Not that things were polite in elder days... but they were not so actively hateful.
I still wonder sometimes if it's a shift in the Slashdot audience specifically - seeing how movements like neo-reaction have been springing up in the tech community in the past few years - or it just mirrors the increased polarization in American society (I know Slashdot has international audience - heck, I was a part of it for a long time - but it's definitely US-centric).
A lesson to reflect upon--monetizing is ok when it doesn't kill your userbase. My ID is under 5000 (cue the older ID replies) and I refuse to give them pageviews now.