I kissed comment culture goodbye

Slashdot had a decent comment system where moderation points were assigned at random and a comment could be marked as insightful, troll, etc. This helped sustain discourse and resisted some of the usual “hive mind” pile ons that are common on reddit and here.

I think we are all pretty aware of how the up and down arrows are supposed to be used versus how they get used.

For content that doesn’t trigger an emotional response: the arrows are used appropriately, highlighting comments and silencing less useful discussion. HN is incredibly useful for discussion on non-controversial, almost mundane, topics.

However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage. Where up and down arrows are clearly used as “like” and “dislike” buttons regardless of the facts or merit presented in each comment. Instead commenting becomes an exercise in PR. The first clue is the comment count. HN has some very predictable patterns in comment counts.

Platform operators may not be willing to change this as “hive mind” and “liked” content helps visitation, even if it doesn’t help discourse. The consequence of inaction however is that topic experts are pushed out by mobbing, because invariably not everything is sunshine and roses.

Why did Slashdot die?

In short, death by acquisition by dice.com

Dont forget metamoderation, which altered the distribution of points, and the ability to filter per comment moderation type. Truly ahead of time.

It slid into irrelevance as the early internet exploded around it and it became an angryish nerd oasis. Reddit easily outscoped it, and HN had the attraction of VC money sloshing behind the scenes.

Slashdot, the site, still lives as a fossil from 10-15 years ago. It must be popular enough to pay its bills.

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

— Mark Twain

Terrible mobile-first or "web 2.0" redesign.

That's probably the real reason, but I think their redesign didn't help either.

The /. redesign wasn't as brutal as that which Digg had, but it was certainly something that stopped me visiting so often.

I just looked and saw to my surprise I still have an account there, the last few comments were made in 2014, 2012, 2011. So maybe I did return later after all.

Don't forget Digg, it was quite big in its time.

> However it all comes undone for any topic that carries emotional baggage.

It all comes undone if people abandon the entity because of enshittification.

I left because the people there became worse and worse. There is a side of tech culture I find utterly repugnant, and it gradually became most of the site.

I have no idea if others had the same reason. I hear more about its user interface, but that change didn't bother me.

This might sound crazy, but what if we're hitting some sort of hardware limitation, like too many people are sharing a single phone line, and Slashdot is innovative, but is like near best case solution when we're still sharing the same phone line? It's hard to explain what I'm trying to say.

Like when your mom picks up the phone and it kicks you off the dial-up internet. Except these days, it's like 4 pancakes of getting kicked off since Cloudflare entered in the scene, 5 pancakes if you're in the EU, and sure, let's throw in Anubis the catgirl just to be extra safe with the computers.

Beta

The resistance was the straw, but by then it was already descending from an interesting site frequented by people like Bruce Perens, John Carmack, Wil Wheaton etc, to just more of the same. Taco leaving was another point, I forget if that was before or after the redesign.

There’s was a significant amount of Randian right wing group think too, which tended to spiral away

Ultimately though it was tacos blog, and that type of site doesn’t scale and retain the quality.

"Angryish nerd oasis" sounds like the same thing that happened to Reddit, so perhaps Slashdot wasn't actually uniquely good. Perhaps it will also happen to HN and lobsters.

What do you consider as "emotional baggage"? Is it possible that content which triggers negative emotional reactions in people is useless content merely designed to trigger negative emotional reactions in people?

> HN had the attraction of VC money sloshing behind the scenes.

Not to forget Paul Graham’s tales of founder hero myths. Who wouldn't want to call themselves a “hacker”?

It's already happening to HN and Lobsters is going through some internal fighting now. Compare conversations 10 years ago here to now and you can see how much angrier the site has become.

I left Slashdot for HN...but I didn't leave Slashdot because of HN. I was frustrated with Slashdot and was actively seeking alternatives. About 2 days after I discovered HN existed, I was done forever with Slashdot.

Among other frustrations (including some really vile comments), I felt like the world was bursting with interesting tech news, and Slashdot was just not keeping up. The publish rate was too slow (maybe 10-13 stories a day), and the %age of stories I found interesting had dropped considerably from a few years previous.

I wasn't a fan of the redesign, but it was content that drove me to seek alternatives.