Normally I might not identify with this level of nostalgia, but in this case I find it hard to restrain myself.
Slashdot was a critical piece of Internet history. In my mind it was last big thing that came out of the Internet from the era when it was exclusively for geeks. It continued in the footsteps of what we had done previously with email, usenet, ftp/archie, and irc, and became one of the biggest websites for us old timers.
After Slashdot the next big thing was probably Napster, and at that point the chasm was crossed to traditional mainstream youth demographics. Never again would the biggest thing on the Internet also be the geekiest.
Just want to say thanks for all of the great work over the years. Slashdot was never my home - I never signed up, always contributed as AC - but I've been a loyal reader for almost a dozen years.
It's not what it once was, but it's still the best at what it does.
Truly. Slashdot was on of the great influences on my young self (I was 13 when I signed up in 1998) and I checked it daily for over a decade. I'd probably not be the nerd I am today if it had never existed!
I'm 25 and I can honestly say that for all of us on Hacker News, Slashdot has been a part of all our lives, a huge one. I've checked Slashdot at least once every second day since 2000 (I'll admit more frequently in the past), and I couldn't have imagined the past decade without it.
It may not keep up with some of the better subreddits, Metafilter or Hacker News in many respects and I can feel its userbase aging when I read the comments... but...
It stands like a rock, and may it always.
I remember my being in high school, checking Slashdot on the school computers and telling other students about Wikipedia, their reaction being "anyone can just edit it?", in about 2001. Memories of the phosphorus on white school CRT with Windows NT 4.0 burning news of technology as it came along.
I will continue checking Slashdot for my fix of news just about every day, and may you find my IP in your access.log for years to come. A true verdant thou hast burnt in mine eyes and may it shine on brightly within them forever.
I wonder how many long time ACs there are. I think I started reading /. In mid 1998 but for some reason never got around to creating an account. I checked it almost every day up until I found HN.
That was an enjoyable read, and Id like to Point out that it is also a chapter in many of our lives. Maybe not as directly or deeply, but for me my discovery of slashdot coincided with my move back to the valley in 97 specifically to get into silicon valley IT.
I've grown a lot, slashdot was a part of that growth and while I don't visit it that often any longer, it's still a part of my professional and personal DNA.
Nostalgia is a good thing, after all; memories are the only things you have to think back on. ;)
/. user #5825 here. I have great memories of the old days.
Let's start a list of funny and cool things that we learned about for the first time on Slashdot. Here's mine:
1. Google - I still remember the first postings about their search engine and how awesome it was compared to everything else when I first tried it out back in the mid 90's.
2. RootServers, a startup that sold colo'd linux boxes and would give you root--a big deal back in the mid 90's. I saw their ad on /. and was surprised that they were based in my hometown. They later morphed into Rackspace, which has been my employer for the last five years!
3. Mac OS X. I remember the early posts about Rhapsody, which encouraged me to go buy a Mac at the just-opened second-ever Apple Store in DC. Been a Mac user ever since.
Slashdot user #527 here. I feel as similarly as an outsider can to Taco's feelings. Slashdot did a lot to shape what I think of as a real community, both on and offline. It was based around news but there were also fun things like all the Natalie Portman's grits stuff that not only didn't detract, it added to the feeling. HN is a great discussion place but there's very little "frivolous" stuff that really makes a friendly community. It'll never really be replaced.
I first got good at network programming by writing /. crapflooders in the late 90's and early 00's, and my profanity skills honed in the trolltalk salt mines still take my mother's breath away to this day.
I think my most successful 'troll' was a response to an Opera update post. My response was serious, as well as a 'troll'. It wasn't the most appropriate.
Slightly OT, but I'm very glad that working at WaPo Labs feels like those early days of Slashdot. I very much believe in news organisations and I want them to have a future- hearing about this kind of innovation is fantastic. Someday I hope to able to get into a similar news labs environment myself.
Before HN, before Digg, before any kind of social networking or all encompassing tech news sites, there was Slashdot. I still remember when one of the first questions to ask a fellow programmer was, "You on Slashdot? What's your number?"
Sadly, I think you may be right. We can do better though, because it still sucks. Something merging the innovations in thread sorting from HN and cherry picking from large amounts of comments from /. would be nice.
In 1998 I moved to VA for a job as an Account Manager with a web consulting firm. Their business model changed almost immediately and I had to learn how to sell Sun hardware if I wanted to stay employed. Reading Slashdot was an important part of my education into Unix, system administration, and system administrators. That lead to an interest in open source and ultimately to me installing Red Hat at home. Today I am much more comfortable in the FOSS world than I am in the Windows world, and it all started with me reading Slashdot. I finally removed Slashdot from my feed reader last year, when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I clicked through to read a story.
However, I am still waiting for the box of swag I was supposed to get to pass out at the 10th anniversary party that I organized.
I also arranged a 10th anniversary party and I had no swag to give out. Two weeks later, a box of 15 or so anniversary shirts showed up. I tracked a few attendees down, but most of the shirts remain in a box that follows me around as I move.
Which is to say, I'd be happy to provide a shirt. I've been wondering what to do with them. I've been thinking about setting up an auction and giving the proceeds to the EFF...
Semi-long time /. reader here -- six digit UID but just barely. If I had known it would have conferred bragging rights I would have signed up a week or two earlier.
Slashdot was absolutely the best community from the late 90s up through maybe 2005 or '06. I learned so much from both the news articles and the subsequent discussion. Still have never found a better comments section than what Slashdot had then, though I keep searching.
As someone firmly ensconced in the six-digit UID I'd like to say: CmdTaco I hold you personally responsible for all that lost time, and I intend to collect if I ever meet you in person. My weapon of choice will be beer, though perhaps milk is now more appropriate as ages have advanced.
Anyway, adding my thanks for a great site. I learned a bunch.
#79509 here and was AC posting quite a bit before ever signing up. I've actually got a few accounts there and my oldest was hardly used for posting even back then.
Surprisingly I still remember my password on /. though I hadn't used that password in many years.
Lucky thing I remember it too since the email account (gfm@my-dejanews.com) registered to the /. account is long since dead.
Loved Slashdot from the very beginning (read Chips n' Dips on occasion before Slashdot). My second ID was 100612, and my first was four digits. I'd been posting anonymously before that.
When reddit came along, I was splitting my time about equally for six months or so. And then, I realized a few months after that that I hadn't logged into Slashdot in months, and hadn't really noticed. I came back to Slashdot a couple of times to answer questions about something I was involved in (like Y Combinator), and found that it still led to a huge spike to my company/Open Source project website...slashdot is, or was, a firehose of very focused traffic that may never be replicated (at least, not for really nerdy folks). reddit never sent that kind of traffic our way, and neither has HN, or any other single source.
Anyway, it must be hard to let go of something awesome. But, it's also hard to watch something awesome die while you try to save it. Slashdot may not be "dying" per se (any more than any of us are dying, at a slow but steady clip), but I'm pretty sure it's in a steady decline that will never be turned around, and that's tough to watch.
This is a great example of solid writing that transcends the specific knowledge of any community. The nouns are all familiar, but the story would resonate even if they weren't. It's just about being human, and doing human stuff.
Slashdot had an incredible influence on my perception of computers, the internet, privacy, and participation. Though I don't remember the subject, I remember printing out my first successful submission and posting it on the wall.
Slashdot introduced me to ArsDigita, which introduced me to web programming and linux, leading me out of the depths of a corporate visual basic dead-end job. I'm very grateful for the impact this had on my life. Thanks, Rob.
I'm splitting my time between here and Slashdot nowadays. Karma is certainly a lot more difficult to get here but I think that's a function of the quite different communities.
I'm curious though, do you know if Dice has any plans for reviving Slashcode or creating a new version of it? It looks like it hasn't been touched in about two years.
In any case, thanks for everything, and I'm sorry that the site seemed to grow away from you. I think most people here agree that it was better when you were part of it.
Ah, the fond memories of hitting Slashdot at least 5x per day back when I worked for early Amazon (1998?). I remember all the memes from back then. Like many people attest, it was hugely useful to make connections to other FOSS and Linux users.
But the biggest thing I remember was 9/11 and the updates from /. users who lived in NYC, Brooklyn, and Queens right after the disaster happened...at the point when the only other coverage was CNN.
You know what? I think over the years cmdrtaco has become quite a writer as well.
I started reading Slashdot when the first days of the "slashdot effect" for flattening websites was being mentioned. Late 90's?
It was always a go-to site for me, and for events like 9/11 it was a better news source, simply because the team was agile enough to swap to static pages to handle the load, unlike CNN etc.
This was a great read, user #11637 here. I had a project many years ago called half-empty that made it onto the /. front page, which slashdotted my college apartment and got my cable Internet service cancelled within a few hours. This was my first taste of the crack-cocaine called "tail -f access.log". It was awesome. Thanks again Rob.
Slashdot will always be near and dear to my heart. Slashdot was a big catalyst in my early tech education, even if I had to wait for long threads to load over my Courier Robotics modem. I can't remember if my user number was 8811 or 8872 but I do remember how cool it was to meet cmdrtaco at an early Linuxworld in nyc.
Long-time top submitter here (still top 4, although I think I stopped in 2005 http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml), many good memories, the sense of community helped shape my interests in many ways, influencing my career, so just want to thank for your great work.
Still remember the moment six months into it's history when I found out that Slashdot was a Michigan company. You never heard about any cool Internet companies originating from Michigan in those days. I remember being dumbstruck and then proud, damned proud.
myself, i had a modest user number, a few mentions for my work, posted some book reviews, hosted timothy at my condo a couple of times, even got slashdotted a couple of times (including once to distribute star wars prequel trailers via a grad school server i ran, which should give you an idea of how old i am now). "focused traffic" is hardly an apt description, and we still call it "the slashdot effect."
good times.
thank you. what was always clear is that it was first and foremost a labor of love and interest, and that's a rare thing among the net's high profile sites. that has had a profound impact on the site's long term quality.
#1221 here... I remember when Slashdot ware THE place to get the tech news and discuss them. I do not think it is anymore, but still have some fond memories from these times. Thanks for that.
It really filled the gap on the web in Perl, Linux & FOSS, information and was the go-to place in startups I've worked in. Now for a few questions,
Q. /. for me was the start of 'social software' through commenting & friends (fondly remembering 'friends of foes' & freaks) - what lessons learned in moderating & story post moderation do you think HN could improve with?
Q. Is there any way to get a dump of old posts. I've got 'em back to '96 & wouldn't mind getting a copy.
Slashdot was a critical piece of Internet history. In my mind it was last big thing that came out of the Internet from the era when it was exclusively for geeks. It continued in the footsteps of what we had done previously with email, usenet, ftp/archie, and irc, and became one of the biggest websites for us old timers.
After Slashdot the next big thing was probably Napster, and at that point the chasm was crossed to traditional mainstream youth demographics. Never again would the biggest thing on the Internet also be the geekiest.
Godspeed cmdrtaco.