I joined Hacker News relatively recently, 514 days ago (not sure when I joined Slashdot, but my ID has five digits). I remember finding it more adult than Slashdot and appreciated its maturity, figuring I would leave Slashdot. Most posts here that mention Slashdot talk about its immaturity, superficiality, or something like that.<p>After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down?<p>That said, I post more here, but I read both.
I find it bizarre that Slashdot still exists. It was essentially founded on the principles that:<p>- Technology can make society a better place<p>- Open source is the best way to make good technology<p>Yet when was the last time that the general public was genuinely excited about some open source project? Firefox? Wikipedia? It's been almost ten years.<p>And to the extent that most people are optimistic about technology in general today, it's a very cynical sort of optimism. I think these things are probably cyclical, but at least for right now how many people would actually want to live in a world where every morning the latest Eric S. Raymond essay was splashed across their homepage?<p>Slashdot was great in the late 90s, and pretty good in the early 2000s. But right now it just seems like an anachronistic holdout from a different time, a place where people still define their lives by the Columbine shooting and the year of Linux on the desktop is forever just around the corner.
Wow. I remember Slashdot. I was very active there before they had accounts. When they first introduced community moderation, I was one of the people chosen to be moderators. Then after the volume increased it lost all possibility for extended discussion, so I burned out on it. Years later they had a password compromise. So I changed my password, lost the new one, and of course it is tied to a no longer exising email address so I can't get my account back.<p>If anyone is curious, I was once <a href="http://slashdot.org/~Tilly" rel="nofollow">http://slashdot.org/~Tilly</a> there. My last comment there was a dozen years ago. (I've commented as AC a few times since, but not much.)
Slashdot has stayed much more consistently tech than HN. That's partly by design; HN is meant for stories "deeply insightful" and apparently "good hackers aren't just interested in tech." pg submitted a story about his favorite restaurant, that's just a community aspect here (something Slashdot really lacks, especially since it's more anonymous than HN). On the other hand, a lot of it is due to their story selection relying on approval by a handful of editors, versus the anyone can upvote on most social news sites. This really anchored their content in tech. Digg rose and fell as a tech news site as its userbase drifted into shallow entertainment news, taking the top ten stories with them. Same with the Reddit frontpage, though many subreddits are still good. Slashdot has outlasted both of them, and even one-ups HN a bit at avoiding unimportant but drama-filled stories (SV journalists writing about each other, tweet wars, allegations of plagiarism etc.). If anything, the selective greenlighting of stories (versus redlighting through moderation) helps avoid gossipy "news" that evokes strong emotions in readers but are of little to no importance.
I was an early Slashdot guy (# 1311), haven't posted in a year, but it was my top-3 tech news/opinion place for over 12 years. I still remember the (pointless) KDE vs. Gnome wars, the Microsoft Halloween memo, etc. I held the Toronto area Slashdot 10th anniversary party back in 2007 at a pub near U of T.<p>After Rob left last year, though, I felt the community shrunk a lot, and it doesn't quite have the character it used to have.<p>Hacker news does have a similar vibe to 1998-2002 Slashdot... instead of Microsoft vs. Linux being the dominant meme, it's Apple vs. Android. Though there are way more Apple supporters hanging here than MS supporters in the late 90's. Generally HN is more adult due to the moderation approach, but lots of posts degenerate into slug fests anyway.
Number 10566 speakin' here.<p>/. to me is like a bad marriage. I can't stand it in general, constantly I complain about it, but for some reason I can't leave it.
For everyone trying to figure out when they signed up: a poster named MyLongNickName linked to some research he did showing which UIDs correlate to which years.<p><a href="http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year" rel="nofollow">http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year</a>
I've only ever lurked on slashdot for many years. For me it's gotten too much political/legal and mega-corporation love/hate content.<p>HN is very new to me, but I like the content since it's mostly technical and without much if any religious argument over various platforms, languages, and technologies.<p>If I had to call out HN on something it's the somewhat naive "startup" vibe I get. There are many shades of success in business between cratering and being the next Facebook and they're the most likely place we all end up.
Happy 15th birthday from user #872. Back when Rob Malda started you, it was such a thrill to read the posts of far-flung techies whose interests went beyond what the real "tech news" press was covering. It's almost painful to go back now and read what has become of you. There are only so many racist trolls one can encounter before it ruins the whole experience.
The hook for me 15 years ago: seeing a Slashdot poll asking how many screws were actually screwed in on my computer case. I thought, "Wow... now these people are really on my wavelength."
Slashdot was one of the first weblog frameworks, written in Perl, and was very similar in the beginning to the vibe I get from Hacker News. It (slashcode) was also Open Source. These days I feel Hacker New has more of an edge and, like Slashdot used to be, is "right there" when it comes to technology.<p>Slashdot was one of the few sites that could handle the load when 911 went down and it was my main source of information that day. About a week later they posted a detailed report on how they handled the load - It was excellent.<p>Things have changed for them, they were bought out and the founders have moved on, but its still a decent site and I find it easier to use than HN.
I recall slashdot back in the early days, very shortly afterwards a small company called google was also formed. Even though I'm approaching 50 years myself it is stories like this that makes me feel old.
I only recently started visiting hacker news more often than slashdot. I love slashdot because of the interesting discussions. I think the comments on slashdot are still the best. But the problem that started to annoy me more and more is the articles themselves, which are often 3 days late, often too political, often plain advertising, and sometimes have a summary including something everyone knows like "WWW, which means World Wide Web", baffling the commentators.<p>And that's why I like hacker news now: more technical, less political.
I've been following Slashdot for a long long time now, probably 12 years or more. Was an avid, daily reader. Recently of course its been proggit and HN and newer sites. Nostalgia !
I hope they stay around for a long long time. One complaint is that the rate of new articles/stories is slow when compared to the newer sites.
There has been a place in my heart for Slashdot since maybe 2004 or 2005, when I started reading it.<p>Over time I completely stopped reading the comments, but the front page has been a decent indicator of medium to big tech news, plus lots of niche stuff that I likely would never have known about otherwise!
I'd have to say I migrated from slashdot to Kuro5hin (first place I made a name for myself), then on to Wikipedia where I <i>really</i> made a name for myself, then after being booted off Wikipedia I guess I found this place :-)<p>I seem to have bypassed Reddit completely. Don't know how that happened...
My biggest complaint about /. is through a combination of other sites it takes a half a day or more for stories I'm interested in to hit it, so by the time they are there I have already read them. The comments there add very little to the conversation imo.
I have found that I have outgrown the cranky, uncompromising userbase of that site. HN users (despite being extremely divisive at times), seem to be much more accepting of disruptive technological changes.