Or they just cover the same interest areas? New Intel chips come out and both Slashdot and HN cover it, but not because someone is copy/pasting articles, it's just a story that both would cover.
Slashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your Rights Online type articles.
Yes, and I've started reading it again a couple of weeks ago when I found that my account still worked. The reason to open an account back then was that the number of comments grew so large that I could not hope to read/skim them all and had to store the filter settings.
The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me as I started moving to other boards like HN.
We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years.
An article or two or three would be one thing. But when I can flip between the two windows and see NINE of the same articles, there's something afoot. It's a big world out there. Lots of news to be had. Someone's being lazy.
Slashdot has been a major influence. Everyone (who was someone) read Slashdot. Sergey Brin, for example, was a great fan. To be mentioned on slashdot was a meant instant saturation for a website. Personally, I miss CmdrTaco's wry take on the new of the moment.
Wow, just realized something totally crazy.. Honestly, I ended up where I am today because of Slashdot. In 1999 I wanted to build a Slashdot site but had no idea what I was doing. So I sat down and just learned how all that stuff worked, ran phpSlash for a while, then Slashcode, then Drupal. All the while I kept learning to code and run servers because of my little site. All the while new doors opened, and I kept working and learning... and now 18 years later I'm doing what I do because of your site. I've had a great little career, so many thanks for helping me get here :-)
I will echo this. I absolutely knew I was a software engineer pre-Slashdot but it shaped what and where and how I do that. And I also have had a very good run so far. So thank you for that impact on my life.
I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.
However, I stopped going at some point because I felt I was in an "echo chamber". Actually that's how I started visiting Reddit and later Hacker News. I liked HackerNews because it had some contrasting values compared to slashdot, valuing "for profit" software efforts, and having more technically focused comments.
I vaguely remember you posting a link to Chips & Dips on a Linux-related EFNet channel more than 20 years ago. I gave it a look, and it was sort of interesting, but I didn't bookmark it and forgot about it. Then later you announced Slashdot and the new design must have made it stick in my head or something, because I read it multiple times a day for the next 10 or so years. Slashdot was an important source of news and hosted a valuable community during those early days.
My only regret is that I missed out on a two-digit user ID when you added registration, because I figured it probably wouldn't catch on (boy, was I wrong!) and I didn't comment much anyway.
Slashdot is where I first encountered both Google ('98 / early '99) and YC (the Summer Founders Program). So pretty valuable personally. Thanks for that :)
Ditto. It almost felt like Google got its nerd cred from being featured on Slashdot multiple times. BitCoin too (waaaay before it was "popular"), and probably Linux itself.
Recently, the new of the moment is pretty weird though. In retrospect, the things warranting criticism were easier targets, and there was a lot of low hanging fruit.
These days, a lot of what used to catch some well-deserved flak has been refined and corrected for. The things that deserve criticism lately are a little more obtuse, and it's hard not to sound like a whiny, petulant critic, when everything's not perfect. #firstworldproblems
On that note, i seem to recall some physicist's personal web page that got a massive attention on /., Reddit and some other site all in the same day, leading to quite the surprise from the server admin.
... as well as some of those that would eventually become someone. Like Mark Zuckerberg [0] who co-built an MP3 player that learns your taste [1] in 2003:
> "It looks like they're both college freshmen now. But last year, Adam D'Angelo went to Korea for the IOI contest. Apparently, the other one is a smart guy too. A friend at Exeter said Mark Zuckerberg was a bigshot in math there and had some interesting coding projects of his own. Go figure."
There's not going to be a next one, there's going to be 10.
20 years ago the web was a much smaller place, and a few billion people currently online weren't even aware that the place existed.
Now, the population has exploded and there will be lots of different sites, all good in different ways, to "nurture the next generation of nerds". In different languages, too.
> There's not going to be a next one, there's going to be 10.
I don't agree. People tent to congregate on online forums that achieved critical mass, and tend to flock where everyone already is. Plenty of slashdot alternatives, including slashdot clones, were already launched across the ages, and they never succeeded attracting the same level of content and same sort of community. Well, except HN which, at least to me, represents a far improvement.
I think there are 2 components to look at articles and comments.
I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I recall preferring /.'s articles from 15ish years ago (compared to what /. and HN have today). Maybe that is a reflection of the news at the time, my age, the communities' interests, or a combination of the above.
With HN, I wish I could filter Valley specific news ("Zucktown, USA"[0] would be a recent example). HN aims for news for both Jobs and Woz types, where I think /. was really focused on just "News for Nerds, stuff that matters." That's all I really wanted.
So in terms of articles, I don't know what to believe. But I know that HN's community is more civil than /.'s, and this is one of the few sites on the web where I read the comment section.
Feels like the Slashdot guys chased the wrong end of blogging. Rather than seeing what Drupal/Wordpress saw (building the site is the real money) the Slashodt folks chased the advertising/traffic side to their site. It seems really obvious now, 20 years later, that they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now.
I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than making slashcode work for many other sites.
(really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old days and what its like looking back now)
Our shoestring budget probably prevented us from chasing that rabbit like it deserved. And Frankly there were far more seismic shifts that rocked us more.
>> they should've spent time on Slashcode and made that better for a larger audience and they could've maybe turned out to be something like Drupal or WordPress now.
I'd be curious as to how much of the original code is left, but there's "Forked from Slashcode, rehash is the codebase that powers SoylentNews.org, powered by mod_perl 2"
I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened..
Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.
I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub.
Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.
I read the Slashdot FAQ on the Friend/Foe system, but I still don't understand it. Is the idea just that it lets you filter a comment thread to emphasize comments written by people you're interested in (friends)? Does it hide the comments of foes?
The impression i have is that it gives fores a personal -1 on their comment score. So unless they get some +1s from others, or you have set /. to show everything, they will vanish below the breakpoint.
Note though that anyone can look up who has them flagged as foe on /..
The one thing that the friend/foe system missed IMHO was the ability to tag posters with comments like "suspected oil shill" or "actual Intel chip designer" or stuff like that. That's often more useful than some vague idea that a poster had some especially good or poor posting in the past.
The RES browser extension does this for Reddit (which I suspect you might already know, but others might not). It also sort of does automatic friend/foe for you, as it displays the net number of votes that you've given to each user next to their username, turning bright green for positive numbers and bright red for negative.
Funnily enough, every time I see the friend/foe dots/pills on a post my first thought is "that's an old-timer". I'm betting well over 75% of the current Slashdot readers don't even know it exists.
You just don't remember anything anymore. IIRC, it was implemented around 2001. It was little more than a curiosity though, you may have just bypassed the little colored "pills" on comments, but aside from being angry about having foes, or happy about getting a new friend, nothing was really done with the feature.
I think that friends' posts had an extra point of moderation calculated for your display, though that feature might not have been present in early incarnations.
I have wanted HN to have a friend/foe system since I first found the site. I'd also like it to have the ability to make notes, like 'farkies' from Fark.
On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on the list.
I'd like a combination of those two things. A simple friend/foe list with comments that show next to their name. I'd have no use for ignore functionality. Also, I usually use said note to write polite things that help me remember the user.
I think it encourages getting to know the other people and humanizes the pixels on the screen. Both sites have led to my meeting people in real life and making real life friendships. That's easier, for me at least, when I can more easily identify them as individuals and remember them.
Slashdot is where I first read your comments, then you didn't post for a while and I found HN and you post here too!
I didn't create an account on /. since AC was easy and I mostly lurk anyway but I always enjoyed the insights that everyone brought.
I remember either around the time of the revelation of the NSA phone closets there was a guy who used to do SIGINT and he posted a bunch on how to avoid surveillance. I think he had moved to the Philippines, sometimes what happened to him.
Just wanted to say hi and that you seem like an interesting guy!
I second this. At the very least. some way 'favourite' a HN user, and their name on their posts appears in a different colour. There are so many good commentators here, that keeping track of people is hard.
It's not currently compatible with Hacker News Enhancement Suite. Quickest solution I found was to change a line in findCurrentUser(), but just FYI. It would've been a deal-breaker for me.
Slashdot got a surprisingly large amount of stuff right, amazing considering it was one of the pioneering web-based discussion systems.
- You cannot both moderate and comment on the same article.
- Limited moderation points (too limited on Slashdot arguably, but better than infinite up/down votes).
- They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the same as up/down votes in the end, but make you classify postings.
- Set threshold to (say) 3 and quickly see only the +3 interesting comments on an article.
- Meta-moderation didn't work well, but was an interesting idea.
When I was younger I thought that Slashdot's moderation was brilliant, and every time that I tried to think up something better I invariably came back to that model. When I first stumbled across Reddit I thought to myself that it couldn't possibly work: too simple, too accessible, too easy to game. And yet over the years I kept reading Reddit and stopped reading Slashdot, and it dawned on me that Reddit's comment rating system miraculously was better than Slashdot's somehow, in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. Somehow their algorithm for knowing which comments out of thousands to place above the fold is basically perfect; even when I click on the "load more comments" links at the leaves of comment chains I nearly always find that the originally loaded comments were exactly where I wanted to stop reading. And of course Reddit still gets plenty of visibly-upvoted bullshit, but the difference is that on Reddit the top response to that comment will be a refutation that is just as upvoted, if not moreso. In contrast, on the rare occasion that I visit Slashdot these days, I wince at all the confidently-asserted yet blatantly wrong comments marked with "5, Informative", while the informed refutations languish invisibly below with a score of 1. Maybe Slashdot's moderation would work better on a more focused site, but in practice it just seems like the people selected for moderation just aren't often enough experts on the topic being discussed to distinguish the signal from the noise.
The "fall of Slashdot" had nothing to do with moderation and everything to do with the fact that articles are chosen centrally. That meant that Slashdot could never expand into other areas outside tech or dynamically follow its users' tastes.
I think it's similar to Netflix replacing stars with thumbs up/down. They realised they didn't need that data, they just needed more dimensions (ie for you to rate more of their library).
Slashdot didn't need to limit voting so severely. And it turns out replies to funny comments are usually funny and interesting comments are usually interesting.
They also never scaled it - +5 was the maximum from when an article might top out at 200 comments or 5000 comments.
> They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the same as up/down votes in the end, but make you classify postings.
I might be misremembering things, but I seem to recall that it was also possible to assign boost points to these in your user settings - i.e. so that Interesting posts would be treated as +2 rather than +1, for example.
I don't really understand the appeal of a friend/foe system. If I don't like a person, I typically try to avoid interacting with them unless/until I find a way to reevaluate them or myself so that I can find something positive, a way to like them. Pretty much the last thing I want is a computer to remind me that I don't like someone. In fact, I wish frequently that I could suppress my own internal feelings of dislike for people. When reading comments on sites like this I try not to read who posted them until I've evaluated the post on its own merit. The times I find myself pre-judging a post when I see who made it, I kick myself and struggle to evaluate its claims as objectively as I otherwise might.
I do understand that not everyone interacts with every site in the same way, and I personally do not approach every online community in the same way. So, I say, to each their own. The use of a friend/foe system seems to impose a bit of centralized structure, however, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the idea of enumerating to some website exactly whom I prefer as people, when I'm constantly trying to reevaluate and expand that in myself.
Slashdot is interesting in that it is one of the remaining bastions of (at least superficially) anonymous discussion. There are apparently several strata of users: some don't read anything by anonymous cowards, some don't read posts by their foes, and some only use the site anonymously. It makes me curious about how these different self-selected filter bubbles might give different perceptions of the discussion to different participants. Personally I have great difficulty engaging in public discussion without trying to read and understand as many diverse opinions as possible - I feel as though otherwise I'd be speaking out of ignorance.
EDIT: On occasion (at least speaking for myself) we don't like someone because they remind us of something about ourselves we try not to acknowledge or think about. Blocking their posts en masse can deprive us of an opportunity to explore this and grow.
The whole point of friend/foe system on Slashdot is that foes' comments are less visible, and friends' are more visible. It's basically a way to say "this person tends to say ridiculous things, and I don't care to read more of them" and "this person tends to say interesting things, I'd love to hear what they have to say on other subjects".
So if your approach is to "try to avoid interacting with them", it just automates that.
I used the friends/foes on /., but never thought much about it. Filtered out a number of vocal nutcases.
But wouldn't this sort of create your own cozy echo chamber, where all opinion is streamlined?
I think it would be interestring going the other way around, a bit like some sub Reddits don't show comment score for a day or two, to not cause self reinforcement in moderation.
Maybe even take it a bit further by anonymizing the commenter's name for a limitid time, could be interesting as the comment would then rely fully on content, not reputation or score feedback reinforcement.
It depends on how you use it. If you only friend people who agree with you, then yes, you'll get an echo chamber. If you friend people who say interesting things instead, you won't.
I wonder where sites like slashdot and digg will continue to fit in to the news landscape over time? If I'm looking for tech news straight from the horses mouth, I often end up at arstechnica, anandtech, or verge. If I'm interested in the zeitgiest I might look to HN or reddit. Is there a middle ground to this that's viable?
I love(d) /. article summaries, even if the quality of editing was a running joke. Also the fact that it was simple sequential list and not constantly changing and living front page was a nice aspect. On HN you might miss a good story either because of bad title or because not checking the front page often enough. On the other hand aggressively refreshing HN and optimistically clicking more links leads to massive overload. Personally I think the middle road of /. hits a very good balance.
I lost access to my first account because I lost access to the email address. This was quite a while back and it was a moniker less able to be tied to me. So, I eventually stopped posting as AC and signed up with my 'real' moniker.
Same username as here.
Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them in real life. Mostly, they're good people.
Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by.
What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily offended. Still, I find it worth the effort.
The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - which is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly.
I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID. (I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good.
When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software.
The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could even exist - even though virtualization wasn't really new.
So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever really good.
And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad, and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And that's okay.
Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading at -1, just so you get the full experience.
ID > 20611, No wireless, Less space than a Nomad... Lame
I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.
For me, Slashdot was the first big internet community. I wasn't materially involved in news groups before that.
It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still log in with my old username.
And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)
Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share:
I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.
My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous” and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.”
So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck.
I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site could send that much traffic.
If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!
> I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.
I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.
Level 3 still has some facilities there; I don't think they ever used the space that Dropbox was in. (And since vacated; it's occupied by Stripe and Lyft now)
Hah, my daughter was in Voorhees freshman year (hmm, it might have been Van Vleck (sp?) the first year but there was a year she was in Voorhees). And all this time she had no idea she was living and studying in a place of historical interest :-)
The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people).
Ahh the memories, especially that time I got an Ask Slashdot accepted. That was a BIG DEAL for some reason.
Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right away!
Slashdot user #578 here. :) Besides pre-web stuff like Usenet and BBS boards /. was the first place I really felt like part of a community. I still remember fondly the times that stuff I submitted made it to the front page (like the story announcing the title of Star Wars Episode 1), like I was now "famous" with a bunch of people I really wanted to impress. Like most of us, I drifted away a long time ago but I'm always happy to see people in new communities who were around back then. Happy Birthday /. and thanks for all the grits!
Yeah, I recall reading stuff there 'back in the day' and it was pretty cool. I tried to find my old account, but couldn't :-/ I did find a few stories I sent in in 1998.
Wow, good memory, assuming your username, boasting of your new high speed acoustic coupler modem, is any indication of when you registered your account :-)
User #527 here. I sold my username (iota) on eBay for $150, back when your slashdot user number still meant something. I've always wondered what the buyer was up to, it was funny at the time to think of "selling" something that didn't exist. I guess it's commonplace now
came here looking for a story like this. i had a 2-digit id that i coincidentally sold for exactly $150 on ebay also. college beer money. don't regret it at all.
cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few days.
I had (and I guess still have) user id #10, which for a few years conveyed a minor amount of Internet cred. I should have sold out in 2005 and retired to a country with an extremely low cost of living.
I remember /. before user reg even existed. There was some buildup to it finally being released, I recall. I signed on within an hour of it going live and though it was all pointless. Guess that's why I wound up with a 4-digit uid instead of a 2-digit one :)
Whether they know it or not Slashdot inspired a lot of Michigan startup founders. They proved that you didn't have to be in Silicon Valley to found a notable company.
I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months
and then finding out that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored.
Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor at Michigan State University:
Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was created.
I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional developer I am today.
One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the 10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.
You seem to write almost exclusively CPU and tech articles. Good for you. I wish your co-workers would stick to technology and lay off pushing politics.
[edit] Wow, the moderators couldn't even tell I was complimenting the guy.
I know right? I don't feel like my opinion was really that controversial.
Ars Technica has been a bittersweet story for years in all of the communities / circles that I hang out at. Some of their articles are great journalism. Others make you pine for "the good old days".
I wish they'd bring back Computer Gaming World. That was the gold standard of computer journalism. You can actually find PDF's of every issue ever released online and if you compare them to today, they used to be so methodical and objective. They didn't read like advertisements and there was no forced-in message about the political climate. You didn't read about Battle Chess and get shamed for liking that the Queen looked pretty.
Sadly these "deep dives" feels more and more shallow these days. More and more they are about "look and feel" or pixel counting rather than the meat and potatoes.
Frankly these days Ars Technica could just as well be relabeled Apple Technica. The site scuttled their coverage of FOSS and similar under prominent sections, while the Apple stuff keep leaking out from their "infinite loop" section.
These days if it is not Apple related, it gets binned under their generic "gadgets" section.
And this from the site that got me interested in Linux in the first place back when it was black and orange, and housed a multipage introduction to Linux internals.
Yeah it was slashdot that sent me to the embryonic Ars to find out all about Pentium2 (or was it 3?) architectures, BeOS, and this new-fangled unstable unixy MacOS in beta etc.
cmdrtaco, thanks for all the grits, inventing the blog and the watering hole that helped facilitate the discourse and creation of the open source movement.
Actually this is a great comment. I wonder how many ideas grew out of Slashdot? What was its influence on the world? The "watering hole of the open source movement." +1 Insightful
Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software development, perl, etc.
Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think about.
Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community.
I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.
Ah, slashdot. Things were good in the beginning. Then they sold out to Dice. And Dice took it in a bad direction. So bad that a bunch of us abandoned it for the comp.misc Usenet group.
And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> > 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
wow, crazy, how time flies. i stumbled onto slashdot in late '97 as a side effect of wanting to put together a computer for a project. i still think it had the best moderation system, however complicated it was. it gave you lots of control on how you wanted to view comments.
365 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadSlashdot has a lot less "Everybody should switch to strongly typed functional programming language X" articles than HN, while HN definitely has fewer Your Rights Online type articles.
The current HTML/JS seems lighter than I remember, which was a problem for me as I started moving to other boards like HN.
We'll see. For now I've meta-moderated again after all those years.
[edit] BTW, relevant discussion in /.: https://meta.slashdot.org/story/17/10/03/2356229/20-years-of...
I did a book review on there, way back when, and I meet Rob and Hemos at the Atlanta Linux Showcase (I guess it was 1997 or 1998) as I took part in the "Loki Hack" (they might have brought food, I don't fully remember.) I don't know how to fully describe it but I was a fresh out of school engineer at IBM, generally introverted and shy, and I somehow felt like I needed "permission" to take part in opensource and the community. Not permission from work, that was actually very very easy, but more like "where do you start" and I didn't want to look like a fool. Someone else was running a project and I had some ideas and had no idea if my ideas meshed with their mission. It's just easy to stand on the sideline and talk about stuff, but you sort of have to take a risk and put yourself out there to take part, and maybe I needed "permission" to do that. The slashhdot guys were particularly down to earth, and laid back and totally welcoming, Hemos even told me that they could probably send me more books to review if I was up to it, just made me feel totally welcome for my fairly trivial contribution. I think it's really easy to turn away newbs with a bad experience and these guys didn't do that. A big website and a business are some neat things to be a part of and to have created, but to be really early members of a new community and to do that well and welcome people and grow it and nurture it is a major accomplishment.
However, I stopped going at some point because I felt I was in an "echo chamber". Actually that's how I started visiting Reddit and later Hacker News. I liked HackerNews because it had some contrasting values compared to slashdot, valuing "for profit" software efforts, and having more technically focused comments.
My only regret is that I missed out on a two-digit user ID when you added registration, because I figured it probably wouldn't catch on (boy, was I wrong!) and I didn't comment much anyway.
Thanks Rob, and best of luck!
I miss the enthusiasm of that community.
These days, a lot of what used to catch some well-deserved flak has been refined and corrected for. The things that deserve criticism lately are a little more obtuse, and it's hard not to sound like a whiny, petulant critic, when everything's not perfect. #firstworldproblems
For quite a while, that was even referred to as being 'slashdotted'...
... as well as some of those that would eventually become someone. Like Mark Zuckerberg [0] who co-built an MP3 player that learns your taste [1] in 2003:
> "It looks like they're both college freshmen now. But last year, Adam D'Angelo went to Korea for the IOI contest. Apparently, the other one is a smart guy too. A friend at Exeter said Mark Zuckerberg was a bigshot in math there and had some interesting coding projects of his own. Go figure."
[0] https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61425&cid=5774512
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/04/21/110236/machine-lear...
if the guy knew...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/07/26/1217248/inside-echel...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/05/25/1312239/the-eu-repor...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/04/10/1626236/aclu-takes-o...
https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/02/12/051200/australia-sp...
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/99/07/16/1025259/britain-tapp...
Yeah, they had good concentration of people "who were someone". HN had similar thing going on too; I wonder what's the next one is going to be...
20 years ago the web was a much smaller place, and a few billion people currently online weren't even aware that the place existed.
Now, the population has exploded and there will be lots of different sites, all good in different ways, to "nurture the next generation of nerds". In different languages, too.
Growth, evolution -- all good.
I don't agree. People tent to congregate on online forums that achieved critical mass, and tend to flock where everyone already is. Plenty of slashdot alternatives, including slashdot clones, were already launched across the ages, and they never succeeded attracting the same level of content and same sort of community. Well, except HN which, at least to me, represents a far improvement.
I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I recall preferring /.'s articles from 15ish years ago (compared to what /. and HN have today). Maybe that is a reflection of the news at the time, my age, the communities' interests, or a combination of the above.
With HN, I wish I could filter Valley specific news ("Zucktown, USA"[0] would be a recent example). HN aims for news for both Jobs and Woz types, where I think /. was really focused on just "News for Nerds, stuff that matters." That's all I really wanted.
So in terms of articles, I don't know what to believe. But I know that HN's community is more civil than /.'s, and this is one of the few sites on the web where I read the comment section.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398430
I totally love slashdot still, tried like hell to run Slashcode many years ago, but it always feel like they were focused on Slashdot.org rather than making slashcode work for many other sites.
(really not meant as a criticisms at all, just thinking about the good old days and what its like looking back now)
I'd be curious as to how much of the original code is left, but there's "Forked from Slashcode, rehash is the codebase that powers SoylentNews.org, powered by mod_perl 2"
https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash
I wonder if a Perl-based CMS would have became as popular...Part of the appeal of Wordpress is any goober that 'knows a little PHP' can hack on it.
Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.
https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker
Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’s friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.
Note though that anyone can look up who has them flagged as foe on /..
Also based on the 2nd degree information, friends of friends and such.
I would use it behind the scenes to look for bad accounts too. Someone with lots of foes would be a candidate for some silent moderation.
It's not compatible currently with Hacker Smacker, but fixing that takes one line of tweaking.
On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on the list.
I'd like a combination of those two things. A simple friend/foe list with comments that show next to their name. I'd have no use for ignore functionality. Also, I usually use said note to write polite things that help me remember the user.
I think it encourages getting to know the other people and humanizes the pixels on the screen. Both sites have led to my meeting people in real life and making real life friendships. That's easier, for me at least, when I can more easily identify them as individuals and remember them.
I didn't create an account on /. since AC was easy and I mostly lurk anyway but I always enjoyed the insights that everyone brought.
I remember either around the time of the revelation of the NSA phone closets there was a guy who used to do SIGINT and he posted a bunch on how to avoid surveillance. I think he had moved to the Philippines, sometimes what happened to him.
Just wanted to say hi and that you seem like an interesting guy!
https://imgur.com/a/wRtfp
NB: the icons beside your name are for "model", "traffic", "acquired" and "phd"
Hey - it's a little hard to see the splits like foe of a friend (I'm red/green color blind), what's an easy way to tweak the colors?
EDIT: I unpacked it and tweaked the CSS. Wooo!
It's not currently compatible with Hacker News Enhancement Suite. Quickest solution I found was to change a line in findCurrentUser(), but just FYI. It would've been a deal-breaker for me.
Looking forward to playing around with this :).
- open the folder for the extension (name of folder can be found in the extensions screen in Chrome)
- edit client.js
- go to line 25 or the function 'findCurrentUser'
- replace with this.me = $('.pagetop .nav-links #my-more-link').text()
- You cannot both moderate and comment on the same article.
- Limited moderation points (too limited on Slashdot arguably, but better than infinite up/down votes).
- They didn't have up/down, but a system of "Interesting", "Informative", "Off-Topic" and a few others. These are the same as up/down votes in the end, but make you classify postings.
- Set threshold to (say) 3 and quickly see only the +3 interesting comments on an article.
- Meta-moderation didn't work well, but was an interesting idea.
Why would anybody want to?
Slashdot didn't need to limit voting so severely. And it turns out replies to funny comments are usually funny and interesting comments are usually interesting.
They also never scaled it - +5 was the maximum from when an article might top out at 200 comments or 5000 comments.
I might be misremembering things, but I seem to recall that it was also possible to assign boost points to these in your user settings - i.e. so that Interesting posts would be treated as +2 rather than +1, for example.
I do understand that not everyone interacts with every site in the same way, and I personally do not approach every online community in the same way. So, I say, to each their own. The use of a friend/foe system seems to impose a bit of centralized structure, however, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the idea of enumerating to some website exactly whom I prefer as people, when I'm constantly trying to reevaluate and expand that in myself.
Slashdot is interesting in that it is one of the remaining bastions of (at least superficially) anonymous discussion. There are apparently several strata of users: some don't read anything by anonymous cowards, some don't read posts by their foes, and some only use the site anonymously. It makes me curious about how these different self-selected filter bubbles might give different perceptions of the discussion to different participants. Personally I have great difficulty engaging in public discussion without trying to read and understand as many diverse opinions as possible - I feel as though otherwise I'd be speaking out of ignorance.
EDIT: On occasion (at least speaking for myself) we don't like someone because they remind us of something about ourselves we try not to acknowledge or think about. Blocking their posts en masse can deprive us of an opportunity to explore this and grow.
So if your approach is to "try to avoid interacting with them", it just automates that.
But wouldn't this sort of create your own cozy echo chamber, where all opinion is streamlined?
I think it would be interestring going the other way around, a bit like some sub Reddits don't show comment score for a day or two, to not cause self reinforcement in moderation.
Maybe even take it a bit further by anonymizing the commenter's name for a limitid time, could be interesting as the comment would then rely fully on content, not reputation or score feedback reinforcement.
Well, I didn't really mean that I don't read or listen to what they have to say. I just choose not to engage with it.
I do have my own system on following/starring PoI in HN, using no extension at all, so I can instantly know who's comment is more useful
no banning though, since valuable nuggets on knowledge can come from anyone
whomever you want to take interest to, will pops up in 'Visited Link' color, the rest just normal URL
obviously works best in less-hyperlink sites like HN, wikipedia quite tolerable
YMMV :D
Same username as here.
Anyhow, I seldom post there, as of late at least, but I've met a bunch of them in real life. Mostly, they're good people.
Lately, I've found the HN conversation to be more stimulating. I should try to visit Slashdot later and see who dropped by.
What I like best about sites like Slashdot is the vast amount of intelligence there. You will need to wade through some troll posts, but it is worth it to find the gems. Reading at -1 is not for the faint of heart nor for the easily offended. Still, I find it worth the effort.
The new owners have done away with the hidden trolltalk board. They have disallowed the n-word, so people found a workaround using the few Unicode characters they do allow. Still, no sign of the promised UTF-8 support - which is funny because Soylent News got that figured out pretty quickly.
I do like to point out that Slashdot was never good. No, no it wasn't. I read it before they allowed comments and, as mentioned, even had a five digit UID. (I lost it and now have a six digit UID.) Slashdot was never good.
When people on Slashdot like to talk about how it was so much better in the past, about how the level of comments was so much better, I like to link them to the announcement of VMWare releasing their first VM software.
The comments are mostly people insisting that it can't work, won't work, and that VMs are a bad idea - because they are quite happy dual booting Win95 and Linux. The comments range from mockery to disbelief that such a product could even exist - even though virtualization wasn't really new.
So, no... Slashdot was never really great. I'm not even sure it was ever really good.
And that was part of its charm - and still is. From GNAA to Yoda-in-your-ass guy, Slashdot is just Slashdot. The racism is rampant, the puns are still bad, and mobile is still broken, but not as bad as beta. Slashdot is like your drunk college buddy that you really hope doesn't show up at your wedding. And that's okay.
Yeah, I'm going to have to visit later. If you do visit, I'd suggest reading at -1, just so you get the full experience.
I always found it funny how the ranking of user by the order they joined encourages people to join. I guess its the same as not being a "green" user here.
It's a little weird to think I wasn't 20 when I started using /. I was also a little surprised to see there's still a website at the URL. And I can still log in with my old username.
And, for the record, my autoincrement user id was 6533. During the height of their popularity having a 4 digit id give me a bit of geek cred :)
I started using Slashdot in ‘97. I remember back then you had a cron to update the front page and we figured out you only run it every 10 minutes, so I built small shell script on my Linux desktop that would pop up a notification reminding me to reload slashdot every 10 minutes.
My second memory was when I was working for Sendmail. Because we were “famous” and appeared on Slashdot for every Sendmail release, one of my first jobs was helping the senior admins set up a new web server for Sendmail.org. I was told by the creators of Sendmail “this server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.”
So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things — that datacenter is now Dropbox’s HQ), and then I asked the creator of Bind if he could secondary my DNS on a.root-servers.net. When he actually replied and said yes I felt huge pressure to get that entry right and was a bit starstruck.
I was also awestruck as I was doing tail -f on the logs and we hit Slashdot for the first time after setting up the server. I couldn’t believe one site could send that much traffic.
If it weren’t for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!
I did something similar but then at some point I ended up blocking slashdot.org in my hosts file because it was killing my ability to focus or get work done. I need a beowulf cluster of attention at work.
I used to have one of those! Sadly, Natalie Portman filled it with hot grits.
The great thing this shares with a lot of stories about that time is that Rob didn't say "What can I build that will make me a million bucks?" instead he was just providing a service that was interesting and useful to him and people who shared his interests (which turned out to be a lot of people).
Congrats Rob.
Addendum: Thinking back, Slashdot is where I came of age in tech. Also, I browsed casually without registering for at least a couple years before finally getting a userid in the low 600K area. I regret not registering right away!
I just checked and was shocked I remembered my password there.
cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few days.
I well remember after reading Slashdot for a few months and then finding out that they were in West Michigan and being absolutely floored.
Fun fact one of Rob's friends who helped found the company is now a professor at Michigan State University:
https://msu.edu/~kdemaagd/bio.html
Throughout the years, I'd turn to /. to keep up to date on latest shakings and goings ons. I first heard about MythTV there back in the heady days before the home media landscape was bought up and "civilized". I got to see a constant reminders of the failings for the RIAA and so....many....patent troll cases. I remember the crap packt publishing reviews too - basically getting someone to pimp their book. Tons of discussions on cell phones and where the technology was going before Apple did put out the 3g phone and created the walled gardens we have today...then reading about the jailbreaking and what not that was created.
I owe a lot to /. for helping shape me into the slightly jaded but functional developer I am today.
One of my fondest memories was the time we did an Oktoberfest party on the 10th anniversary of /. We were the only party in the state I think.
I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post date in the upper right corner.
Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)
[edit] Wow, the moderators couldn't even tell I was complimenting the guy.
And not as much the politics, as the feeling that the site has become more "partisan" in the tech world.
Ars Technica has been a bittersweet story for years in all of the communities / circles that I hang out at. Some of their articles are great journalism. Others make you pine for "the good old days".
I wish they'd bring back Computer Gaming World. That was the gold standard of computer journalism. You can actually find PDF's of every issue ever released online and if you compare them to today, they used to be so methodical and objective. They didn't read like advertisements and there was no forced-in message about the political climate. You didn't read about Battle Chess and get shamed for liking that the Queen looked pretty.
Frankly these days Ars Technica could just as well be relabeled Apple Technica. The site scuttled their coverage of FOSS and similar under prominent sections, while the Apple stuff keep leaking out from their "infinite loop" section.
These days if it is not Apple related, it gets binned under their generic "gadgets" section.
And this from the site that got me interested in Linux in the first place back when it was black and orange, and housed a multipage introduction to Linux internals.
slashdot, ars, anandtech were foundational websites to me growing up - amazing that this was 17+ years ago
#1794
Slashdot shaped the minds, ideas and opinions of many people, and definitely changed the world. It helped get people into the internet, software development, perl, etc.
Would HackerNews exist without slashdot paving the way? Interesting to think about.
I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.
And in my case, I have simply not returned, and don't plan to return, even though they 'claim' to be past the Dice era now. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
It was only when I realized that having an account still allowed me to post as an AC that I finally made one.
I wish AC was still a thing for popular websites like reddit, HN, etc. Just start off the comment at -1 or something...
️
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...