Your creation led to younger me becoming a much better person. I learned when I was being a know it all vs Insightful or Funny. Probably the single greatest learning environment ever created. Yeah, probably would have gotten more work done without it existing, but I wouldn’t have social skills or know as much correct facts about everything. Thank you.
Years later, I moved to the US and decided to make Michigan my new home.
I didn't know much about the area, so I checked Wikipedia, found the entry for Hope College, clicked on alumni and was surprised to see your name. I had no idea Slashdot started in Holland, MI, even though I visited your site every day for over 10 years.
I guess I should have mined bitcoins instead. But in Soviet Russia, bitcoins mine you.
Ha! Awesome. Thanks Cmdr. Yeah that was 25ish years ago, as I said in a different post I was living abroad for a year that spanned 1997 into 1998. I was off by a few months apparently.
Thanks for old slashdot, was one of my favorite sites and got me into linux and cool open technology back then. btw the thing you are looking for in the article (10 best stories from hackernews) has already been built (not by me), check out: https://brutalist.report/topic/tech?limit=10
Hi as well! One day we should do a get together of the people that made the top 100 web sites work prior to 1998 or so. I'm sure there would be lots of interesting stories.
Hehe, yes, definitely. The ratio of interesting content:junk would be nice to visualize. In the early days of the web I hardly ever ran into a website that wasn't interesting. /. (why not ./ by the way?) was a nice way to discover new stuff when that ratio first started to decrease.
the new llm craze should make moderation and metamoderation even easier. i think we will see a resurgence of some slashdot inventions, albeit more automated.
collect votes from power users. extrapolate how they would have voted on stories they havent seen. feed people stories based on similar voting patterns, to test if you predicted their votes correctly. maybe a synthesis of two random voters accurately predicts a power voter.
id like to see something akin to a reverse subreddit. instead of having posts, i add 50 people to a list and turn them into a voting block. then i follow multiple voting blocks. i can follow other peoples voting blocks. my feed tells me which voting block elected to show me a story. let teams of people build voting blocks together, collaboratively. different voting blocks can have different purposes, like populism or expertise. being able to stumble into well made, premade blocks solves discovery and initialization problems, without having to bootstrap a feed from a low number of my own votes.
there are so many building blocks of good ideas, of which metamoderation is still one of the best, that it leaves me both exited for a future where somebody picks up the baton, and disheartened that somebody hasnt yet. is it time for a slashslashdotdot?
I would guess it's more likely that the Slashdot moderation system is too hard to implement. It also requires a lot of finetuning (like how to determine how many moderation points to dole out to users based on their karma and activity). The Hacker News developers seem to prefer to keep things simple, so they might reject Slashdot-style moderation for being too complicated, but that doesn't mean they don't like it in principle.
The source is that the HN mods know about Slashdot, and people have been asking for those features here for 15 years, and they haven't been implemented.
Im going to join the mini-appreciate session here and add that there’s still lines from Geeks in Space that give me a smile and chuckle when they pop into my mind well on 20 years later.
Also, I was right about THAT iPod! 2 years later they got the product right and when people reference this quote, THAT is the product they have in their minds eye.
