Creeva’s World 2.0

Con­tin­u­ing slowly through my sites I use series I’ll go with one of the sites I’ve used the longest — Slash­dot.

What is Slash­dot (from wikipedia):

Slash­dot, often abbre­vi­ated as /.^[1], is a sci­ence, sci­ence fic­tion, and technology-related news web­site owned by Source­Forge, Inc.. It fea­tures user-submitted and editor-evaluated cur­rent affairs news with a “nerdy” slant. Each story on the site has an Inter­net forum–style com­ments sec­tion attached; Slash­dot was one of the first pop­u­lar web­sites to include a com­men­tary sec­tion in such a promi­nent man­ner.

The sum­maries for the sto­ries are gen­er­ally sub­mit­ted by Slashdot’s own read­ers with edi­tors accept­ing or reject­ing these con­tri­bu­tions for gen­eral post­ing. While Slashdot’s hap­haz­ard edi­to­r­ial style pro­duced a unique voice in the pre-blog age, users fre­quently post crit­i­cisms of per­ceived arbi­trary or biased edi­to­r­ial choices.

Though the site pre­dates the mod­ern con­cept of the weblog, Slashdot’s archi­tec­ture is com­monly com­pared to that of mod­ern blogs. Slash­dot is notable in that its com­ment­ing sys­tem is much more robust than most blogs, with thread­ing and user mod­er­a­tion hav­ing been intro­duced before these were com­mon­place in mod­ern weblog pack­ages.

Offi­cially, the name “Slash­dot” was cho­sen to con­fuse those who tried to pro­nounce the URL of the site (“h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash–slash­dot–dot-org”)

I can say that I have been using it for roughly 9–10 years (depend­ing on how early on I dis­cov­ered it. For many years it was my pri­mary geek news loca­tion. How­ever in the last cou­ple years that has started to waiver. I get my news now from sites like the pre­vi­ously men­tioned Digg and other sites along the way. Slash­dot moves too slow (which is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing) but gets bor­ing when you are look­ing for quick news bites.

My last posi­tion (when I worked in the office) we had enough geeks there that we were actu­ally banned for a cou­ple days from slash­dot by slash­dot — because they thought we were launch­ing a DoS attack on them. Just shows get a large large group of geeks together and they all think a like.

With the rise of digg is slash­dot irrel­e­vant? The legions of fans don’t seem to think so — going so far that dig­gers make fun of slash­dot­ters and vice versa. If you are actu­ally involved in the com­mu­nity the two are quite dif­fer­ent. Slash­dot­ters are pas­sion­ate but Digg brings out more of a party care free atom­sphere. I really don’t go to slash­dot for the news any­more — I go for two things.

The first thing that I absolutely use as a ref­er­ence point is the Ask Slash­dot Sec­tion — this sec­tion allows you to post a ques­tion to the com­mu­nity and the com­mu­nity picks it apart or tells you unique answers that can be mostly quite helpful.

Which goes straight into the other rea­son I use slash­dot — the com­ment­ing sys­tem. The fact that’s digg’s com­ment­ing sys­tem is bro­ken (but they are fix­ing it soon) plus the atti­tudes dif­fer­ence makes slashdot’s com­ment sec­tion much more insight­ful and inter­est­ing then almost every other news board (to me at least).

The grand­fa­ther of the geek news sites will always have sto­ries to tell and mem­o­ries to live on. Let’s all hope it lives for a long long time.