I was with Slashdot for 8 years. There are a lot of memories I could share, but the thing I appreciated most about my time there was just how much Rob (and the core team of engineers and editors) really cared about the site and its users. It's rare to see such conviction from tech companies or leaders of large, user-centric websites.
I'm not sure Slashdot's users ever really understood how much time and energy Rob expended defending the site from user-hostile changes tossed without concern from the upper echelons of the org chart.
Thanks Rob.
Thanks Rob for the trip down memory lane. I have two to share:
I started using Slashdot in â97. 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 âfamousâ 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 âthis server must be able to handle getting Slashdotted.â
So we bought the biggest Dell server we could find, put it in Level 3 in San Francisco (back when they still hosted things â that datacenter is now Dropboxâs 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 couldnât believe one site could send that much traffic.
If it werenât for you none of that would have happened, so thanks Rob!
I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdotâs friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. Itâs called Hacker Smacker and itâs on GitHub.
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 whatâs good. Much like how Slashdotâs friend foe system highlighted the good stuff in threads.
I remember the early days of slashdot fondly, although I didn't actually make an account until a few years later. It was such an interesting mix of serious discussion, in-jokes, and amusing trolls (even the infamous goatsx troll that I fell for more than once.)
I still think that the moderation and meta-moderation was one of the most interesting experiments in a self-governing commenting system, even though it was clear that it was mostly a failure in the long run. My conclusion is that a site needs hands-on human moderation to maintain quality.
Slashdot is also a perfect example of the general life-cycle of cool social site. Humble beginnings -> lots of interesting people -> own little subculture -> lots of interesting content with some impenetrable in-jokes -> existing userbase ages out as they get jobs or have kids -> less interesting content, more in-jokes -> owners sell -> dry husk of a site remains.
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!
Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years.
Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)
User #5825 here. Here are a few of my favorites:
The whole anti-Microsoft movement on /. Thy were the evil empire and Google was saintly. Itâs funny how times change.
The weather station we sent you in hopes of doing a promotion for our weather equipment site, weathertools.com.
OOG THE CAVEMAN. He was DevOpsBorat at least a decade before Twitter.
The launch of Mac OS X and the launch of the first titanium PowerBook.
That CPU startup that Linus was a part of. Most disappointing build-up ever. LOL
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:
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.
Thanks cmdrtaco!
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Congrats Rob.
I recall the incredible hype on Slashdot surrounding the release of Phantom Menace. Lucasfilm released few details and Slashdot seized on every little thing leading up to the release.
I worked at the New York Times then (just a web programmer) and lucked into an advance screening two weeks before the film's release. I came right back to the office and wrote a review (in plain text!) and submitted it to Slashdot but it never got posted.
Rob, if I spoiled the film for ya, sorry about that! It seemed in the last two weeks before Phantom Menace was finally released you were a lot less enthusiastic, and I wondered if my early review put a damper on it.
I grepped my ISP account and found the original file:
I had a four-digit Slashdot UID (just over 4000, I think). I have lots of great memories of technical discussions. As a young man who had managed to install Linux on his computer but still knew little about programming or the mighty Unix tradition, it was amazing to be able to participate there in discussions with so many big names in *nix or Free Software.
But some of my fondest memories come from trolling there with another account. Trolling Slashdot often wasn't like how trolling works on other news sites, where some user tries to make some controversial point or racist remark related to the submitted story in order to spark arguments and take the conversation off course.
Instead, troll posts on Slashdot were usually completely unrelated to the submitted story. They consisted of themes that were sometimes coarse and tasteless, but which fascinatingly evolved over time as each troll adapted the copy/paste to new circumstances or his own personal whims. The million variations on "BSD is dying" is a good example, but my personal favourite was "X touched my junk". And while I was never so cruel to link to Last Measure, I was grimly impressed by the work that had gone into it, completely with having an autoplay audio file "I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!!!!" which must have cost a least one or two cubicle dwellers their jobs.
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)
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.
My favourite part of Slashdot was the trolling.
Some classic trolls there like "egg troll", "The Turd Report", etc. with their quite absurd yet entertaining posts.
Then there was the rather ruder trolling, like not knowing if the link you were about to follow was yet another Goatse Man. Or the more helpful trolls, such as ones taking music requests to spam as the first post.
There was even a 'hidden SID' forum, trolltalk, which was rather amusing (and somewhat disturbing) until it was overrun by some Markov chain bot.
And spinoff trolling sites like http://adequacy.org - satire to rile uptight nerds and amuse the rest.
I think the bizarre trolling subculture, amidst the righteous frothing of Linux fanaticism, was what really made Slashdot.
Anyway, good times.
Fond memories, as many others have pointed out. I still check it out every few days. I find the stories there almost as interesting as the ones that make it to HN and a lot more interesting and educational than those making it to the top of reddit.
Shot in the dark and off topic, but for years I've been trying to find a comment posted on /. during the Columbia disaster. A poster mentioned how he was part of some high school science program and got to visit the Columbia before her maiden voyage. When it was lost, he was driving across remote Texas on the way back from a client visit when he saw the debris across the sky. It was quite a sad and moving story, and I'd love to re-read it.
The notion of âA Blogâ was years away, so I wrote my own code.
I was on slashdot from the very early days until way too recently. In 2011, I joined a startup company of young guys and one of them saw that I had a slashdot page up. He said, "Slashdot is for old people. Let us show you Hacker News".
I worked at The Image Group a few years after Rob left, and one of the designers there confirmed the story.
> "I took a rejected template from a project at work"
The version I heard was he pitched this as the actual website for The Image Group, except it had different colors and the boxes where on the left instead of the right. Crazy to think if ownership had accepted it.
Side note: I built sets with Rob in high school: crazy and all around nice guy. Very high energy back then. I'll never forget his rant/love letter for Pascal I heard one day during a break.
I enjoyed Slashdot every single day as a passive reader but not as an user. I never received feedback from the founders when I pointed them to incorrect facts in their news and the never corrected the posts there. I specially rember an important security issue discovered by the company where I worked (Core Security Technologies) that was mistakenly reported as if was found by CERT. You can say that this is very common but at that time Slashdot was the top influential place in the community and security wise.
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 :)
User #333 here. Back in the day, someone offered me oral sex for the low user number. What a perfect metaphor for the dot-com era: offering to wildly overpay for a social media asset that would eventually turn out to be useless.
Perl Monks was my favorite thing that came from the Slashdot guys. I never got Perl, but did a few projects with it over the years and I was always amazed at how cool the community on that site was.
www.perlmonks.org
Hey cmdrtaco. This isn't entirely related, but I just wanted to say thanks for the chili recipe from your blog. I've been using it for years and it's great.
(I also miss the Slashdot that was).
I remember registering wwwslashdot.org in my young days of being a typo-domain advertiser (had to eat in college, I've repented) and CmdrTaco posted a message indicating that they "Must have made it because someone registered our typo domain."
My mailserver crashed about an hour later from the flood. Lesson learned :)
In case the site is down, here's a mirror http://www.invitinghome.com/Mirrors/img/mirror-1534.jpg
slashdot was one of the few news sites that stayed up during 9/11. I think there was even a follow-up technical article about how they kept it up that day.
I once scraped a subset of all Slashdot posts for the month of October. There were some interesting trends. The bulk of posting is by old UIDs in the 100k to 300k range and those are dropping off rapidly, suggesting that it will die around 2022. Some of that is attributable to the rise of mobile and more frequent anon posts but that doesn't balance out the decline from logged in posts.
There is also evidence of UID inflation by only issuing odd or even numbers during certain periods.
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.
#1794
Getting something on the front page of Slashdot was one of my proudest moments.
What I miss about Slashdot more than anything was the editors and writers using the comments section to fact check the stories.
Ye ghods, do I miss that.
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 am where I am today because of Slashdot. All those early articles about Google running Linux...
I started reading slashdot around 2000-2001, being about 14 years old at the time. I would venture to say that slashdot and its community has been as educational (or even more) as school, and played a large part in my deciding to work in IT.
Since I never signed up for an account there (I was a kid and knew I had nothing to bring to the table), I never experienced the friend/foe system or participated in moderation. Still, the site has had an amazing impact on my life and given me an insight into topics I never would have learned about otherwise. Nowadays it feels HN has taken over, but I still feel a need to express my gratitude for both the site and the community.
Five digit slashdot here and star post name, but I have most switched to Hacker news. HN updates immediately, raises highest voted topics to top. I notice both cover the same articles. The slashdot ads are a lttle annoying.
Wow.. time flys when you are getting old! To protect the mostly innocent, my uid is just over 64K, so definitely one of the early adopters. /. was definitely the premier place for nerdy/tech news prior to the dot.bomb and it definitely had an outsized influence in the tech world.
Many have spoken of having their websites slashdotted though it was not uncommon to get email months and years later about a story submission. Somehow early netizens believed the submitter must be an authority and would be more than happy to answer their questions lol.
I had a 5 figure uid, but I read it for a long time before I registered. First started before the '97 Green redesign.
I found a comment parser attack on '98 or so which let me post a "Powered by WindowsNT" on a FreeBSD thread. The ten minutes it survived was a highlight. I actually used an image from the Microsoft site because there wasn't anywhere else you could host images back then.
One things I haven't seen mentioned is the hidden sids (remember sid=wahiscool?)
Fact: Slashdot is dying
It is official. Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when CmdrTaco confirmed that he is resigning from Slashdot, now that Slashdot market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all geek news outlets. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive geek news reading test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Slashdot YRO is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core contributors. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot contributors only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader CmdrTaco states that there are 7000 users of Slashdot. How many users of Ask Slashdot stories are there? Let's see. The number of Ask Slashdot stories versus Slashdot posts is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ask Slashdot stories users. Slashdot book reviews (or, 'Slashvertisements') are about half of the volume of Ask Slashdot stories. Therefore there are about 700 Slashvertisments. A recent article put Slashdot Security posts at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of Slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of OSNews, abysmal sales and so on, OSNews went out of business and was taken over by Digg, another troubled geek news site. Now Digg is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geek news dilettante dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(source from Thursday August 25, 2011 @12:39PM: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2397584&cid=37209054 also notice I got a n00b to respond to me... oh, such simpler times ;) )
I really enjoyed the early slashdot but lost interest when politics ran rampant in nearly every part of the site. the vitriol associated with it and more (stuff you could not see) just reduced the value the site had in my eyes. I honestly cannot remember the last time I have visited the site.
tech sites need to keep their purity to stay accessible, politics, direct story posting or the constant indirect type, need to stomped out with a vengeance
User 8xxx here... Slashdot was great while it provided the best daily overview of IT stories. I wonder what changed - I can vaguely recall switching to heise.de and later HN.
Perhaps the way it presented the stories worked better for a few major pieces per day and everyone tries to read "all" interesting stories every day now, so pages with just headlines and broader coverage took over?
I miss the quieter "online life" of the late 90's...
I remember, about 20 years ago, having an argument with someone on Slashdot. Then realizing, about 10 messages in, that I actually knew the person I was arguing with. Being able to connect with friends online, being able to make friends through dialogue online... the site was easily the best online community at the time.
Bonus: Even 20 years ago it had better design than Hacker News! (= (Couldn't resist.)
Slashdot was truly a part of my youth, it was the site I went to when I was a teenager, in between taking breaks from coding. It made me feel like there were others out there like me and was a great source of inspiration growing up in a less than stellar childhood in Ohio.
It makes me nostalgic for the web of yesteryear, when it was mostly about just a bunch of nerds sharing their passion for technology.
Thanks, CmdrTaco.
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.
Is there a way to figure out when you joined? Not seeing a "member since" date. My id # is 7xxxxx (6 digits). I was reading it regularly for quite a few years, maybe 4-5 years IIRC, before finally deciding to sign up. No idea why I waited so long, I guess I was more into the articles than the commenting side of things. Dumb of me!
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 #4245 here, with comments dating to April of 1999, 2 friends and 1 fan, no foes or freaks. I also had the pleasure of meeting Cmdr Taco at an early LinuxWorld (1998?) in California. I admit it fed a lot of my biases at the time, but also provided a lot of useful information.
Has someone yet curated a list of All Slashdot Polls Concerning or Mentioning Cowboy Neal?
Sharing the audio version of the article for those who'd like to listen to the article: http://bingewith.com/#id694
I can trace almost everything that helped me professionally and even many of my tech opinions to something I read on Slashdot. Really the site that influenced me the most.
Can't wait to read the same post 10 years from now.
I was always proud of having a slashdot userid < 262000 :) Definitely spent too much time on slashdot in the university computer lab.
Great. Yet another non-closable pop-up window.
We were one of their first advertisers! If I recall, we traded them some RAM and maybe a server case as part of the deal.
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.
Does anyone else remember kerneltrap?
What's the story behind Anonymous Coward, the most popular slashdot user?!
I learned about 9/11 from the slashdot front page. Wow, 16 years ago.
I learned about Slashdot from a screenshot demoing the Enlightenment VM.
so much nostalgia. big big thank you to rob and the rest of the team.
First post!!!
+5 funny
I wish that people would stop blogging on Medium, especially about Free software topics. I click the link and get an obnoxiously animated popup shoved in my face that tells me that I've read my two articles for the month and that I should log in for the full experience. Why should people be asked to sign in to follow a blog when there is RSS/Atom? Learning how to use Hugo, Metalsmith, Hexo, Pelican, or Jekyll is not difficult.
I hope this doesn't come off as dickish but it's not intended as such:
I was really expecting more... well... history. As soon as I get interested "he's gotta upgrade for the onslaught of users! How will he handle it?", the article stops.
p.s. Just realized Mr. Taco submitted it himself. So let me add, "Hope your having a great day, and thanks for contributing to the internet and hacker culture." ... But I still want to hear more about your history. ;) I've thought about starting my own IT-centric social site so I'm dying for info.
Ahh, memories. (I'm slashdot user #9784.)
I remember when our tiny company (with a 2 Mbit/s uplink, iirc) was slashdotted:
https://ask.slashdot.org/story/00/05/27/2227209/thoughts-on-...
I was running (our homebrew) web server with debug output in an xterm (with timing details for every request served) throughout this ordeal, just to be sure it didn't screw up. (We didn't really have a thorough testing regime, ahem.)
How convenient he left out the parts about how people used to trade pirated software and kiddie porn regularly in the comment section in the early days. They made a lot of money off of that, I can see how he'd want to forget about that unfortunate truth.
Sure the internet was a much different place in the 90s, but still, it was practically encouraged by the admins.
I remember Chips&Dips and got confused one day when I couldn't find it. Started searching and found it again under Slashdot and have been a fan and loyal visitor ever since. Thanks a lot for this awesome write-up of Internet History :-)
No mention of Natalie Portman or Hot Grits in the Post. Colour me disappointed.
Coincidentally, 90% of what's on /. is also on HN. I'm not sure who's copying whom, but it seems like someone is wheezing someone else's feed.
I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :))
I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.)
But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them.
I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software.
In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.