Slashdot

» go to slashdot.org now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

Slashdot is a tech news aggregator with a comment system. submissions come from readers. editors pick which ones get posted. comments get a karma score that affects their visibility. it has been online since september 1997, which makes it older than google.

the format was: a short summary at the top, a link to an external article, and a comment thread underneath. the comment thread was the actual product. people came to slashdot for the comments. the editors were aware of this and posted articles that were good comment-bait, even if the articles themselves were not always great.

~ the early 2000s peak ~

i started reading slashdot around 2001 when i was at university. it was where every cs student in turkey who knew about it checked the news first thing in the morning. there was a real time difference: when i woke up at 8am istanbul time, the front page had four to five new stories from the previous us evening. by lunch there would be ten more.

from about 1999 to 2005, slashdot was the place where every tech worker checked the news in the morning, regardless of country. major stories breaking on slashdot would routinely overload the linked sites' servers. there was a verb for this: "to be slashdotted." getting slashdotted meant your tiny self-hosted blog got 50,000 hits in an hour and the server died.

the comment system was sophisticated for its time. moderation was done by users with karma. each comment had a score from -1 to 5. you could filter out everything below 3 to read only the good comments. you could read at -1 to find the trolling. the moderation was fair often enough to be useful. people complained about it but they kept reading.

~ how it survived without growing ~

digg launched in 2004 and ate slashdot's casual audience. reddit launched in 2005 and ate the rest of it. by 2010 slashdot's traffic was a fraction of its peak. by 2015 it looked like the site was about to be shut down. several owners came and went. there were redesigns, some of them ugly. some users left. some stayed.

the ones who stayed are still there. you can go to slashdot.org today and see stories posted within the last few hours. the comment threads are smaller than they were in 2003 but they exist. the people commenting are mostly older now, often the same people who were commenting in 2003. it is a small dedicated community that refuses to migrate to anywhere else.

~ why it still posts ~

slashdot is now owned by BIZX, who bought it from dice in 2016. the operation is small. there are a few editors. there is some ad revenue. it does not need much to keep going because the costs are low and the audience is loyal.

the deeper answer is that slashdot is what hacker news and reddit's tech subs are not. it is older. it has institutional memory. the regulars remember the dot-com bust. they remember when google was small. they argued about microsoft when microsoft was the empire of evil and not a benign cloud company. that long memory is the value the site still provides. nobody else has it because nobody else has been around continuously since 1997.

slashdot does not need to grow. it needs to keep going. it has been doing that for nearly thirty years. that is the achievement.

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