I don't remember SlashDot's hey-day but in the times I've looked at it, the news that gets posted there seems more political while Hacker News seems more tech-related.
Based on that, Hacker News gives me what I'm looking for.
Slashdot was bought out by Dice.com, then it became more corporate. Signal to noise ratio was bad for advertisements and comments. Seems like chatbots got into the comment section trolling users to try a product.
Will HN be acquired by a company and turned into a faux marketing platform? I sure hope not. This would be best answered by ycombinator staff and investors. Perhaps they already have a vision and mission statement that addresses this on the site somewhere. Slashdot AFAIK was only a news discussion site. YCombinator is a seed funding org [1] and likely benefits from having this platform to launch its investments and potentially provide a crowd-sourced think tank. What is the average logevity of a seed funding org?<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ycombinator.com/about/</a>