Slashdot Turns 5 692
As much as I avoid discussing Slashdot on Slashdot, I figured I'd just take
a moment to say that Slashdot is 5 years old now. I've written a
Journal Entry with a few more comments on the subject. And yes we know we jumped the shark about a week after we registered the domain name, but we just don't care! Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks. (As a side note, due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut, but I spent september 97 putting the site together... and when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)
WayBackMachine (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the oldest archived one [archive.org]
Happy Birthday Slashdot!
You forgot (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is it five years only? (Score:2, Informative)
all the fake Bruce Perens accounts
Re:jumped the shark? (Score:5, Informative)
TWW
/. doesn't delete posts (Score:5, Informative)
And deleting posts, while morally abhorrent, is the only way to keep ourselves from accidentally reading a 3 page long "taco snotting" FAQ.
Slashdot generally does not delete comments. Among over 4 million comments posted after the moderation system began, fewer than a half-dozen have been deleted, mostly for flagrant copyright infringement [slashdot.org]. Other than that, you can get 99.999% of everything posted, even the trash, by reading at -1.
Re:first page (Score:2, Informative)
The Wayback Machine [archive.org] has this [archive.org] from late 1997. Here's [archive.org] more from the past.
The cool thing is that the look of the site has been virtually unchanged since 1998; and that was at a time when <blink> tags where notorious. It's amazing how such a great design has held up so long. And that it's the design that most blogs copy off of. Kudos to the Slashdot team!
First usenet-posting mentioning /. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And Taco said "Let there be comments." (Score:2, Informative)
I dont know if the archive is completely accurate though... they mentioned data was lost...
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?threshold=0&op=st
Re:Is it five years only? (Score:2, Informative)
It was the bizzare way that his posts would always be the most rational of the entire thread - but be expressed in a proto-JeffK ALL CAPS rant. And all that stuff about breaking heads - classic.
Re:A Whole Week? (Score:2, Informative)
This is the best I can do with the wayback machine on slashdot.org circa December 1997..
http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http:
But it only shows one article and the formatting seems screwed up... has anybody else had any more luck with this?
Re:Why do no stories display the year? (Score:4, Informative)
Happy Birthday and thanks for a unique site... (Score:5, Informative)
"Unheard of in 1997?" you ask. Let me give you an example. In 1997 my daughter was a sophomore at the local community college. In a computer course she was given an assignment to write a report on an operating system that was not made by Microsoft.
Since I was her Dad... and I had used Linux since 1993, she wrote her report on Linux and I helped her. She did a great job but only received a B. The instructor wrote across her paper, "marked down because Linux is a nonexistent system". The instructor thought she had meant to write the report about Unix and got the name wrong!
So if we've been pushy here on our forum we have good reason. Even now the rest of the media pretty much doesn't understand the Linux movement. They don't understand the "support" issue (I suppose hiring competent people is too much to ask). They don't understand the technical issues (two MS programmers were once given credit for "inventing" symbolic links). And, they don't understand the social issues (we're a community, dammit!).
I am proud to be a Linux advocate and a
And thanks.
Re:How many other websites have been around this l (Score:3, Informative)
It's not quite as popular as
As Blue's tagline says: "Established 1995. Over an eighth of a billion visitors since 1997."
AnandTech [anandtech.com] and Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] are also up there.
Frankly, a lot of sites have been around since 1997. Find some non-university/corporate sites that have been around for 10 years with (relatively) high hit counts and it's more meaningful.
Re:Mod up parent (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, most of the early people moved on. Slashdot used to be a very different thing than it is today, with far fewer posts per thread, and with more of an emphasis on discussion than comments. The moderation system kinda did away with that by breaking the linearity of most comments and hiding some others, and the massive influx of new users made those types of discussions unfeasible anyway. When this all happened, many of us whined and complained, but a huge number of users simply left.