What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it.
I don't think /.'s comments have degraded over time, but I never thought they were particularly revelatory either. While they aren't very trollish, they tend to be pretty biased. That might not be surprising given the community's propensity toward Linux and OSS, but it hardly makes the comment quality high.
HN has a bias too, toward startups. But I think the comments here are more centered because opinions on startups don't really become religious, whereas any discussion on operating systems in general and OSS quickly turns into a flamewar.
Also, YMMV, but the one-liners get really old, especially since they've hardly changed. I remember the "in soviet russia" crap from over five years ago on /.
It thought /.'s quality was in a death spiral pre-digg, and as they tried to compete head-to-head, digg seemed like their death knell. Within a year I think they realized digg was different (crack-addict-speed-news) and if they just focused on what they were good at, they'd do fine.
Since then, I think their quality and focus have both improved. A lot of the idiots (who originate "in soviet russia" and "FP!" type stuff) have moved on to digg, 4chan, reddit, etc. There's fewer posts than a few years ago, but they're more worthwhile. While their SNR is worse, given their number of comments / item, they actually seem to be doing really well compared to other sites.
My account on /. is over a decade old now. I barely visit there, but that's actually amazing - I still visit there over a decade later. I never visit digg or the front page of reddit, and I'm visiting HN less and less.
Part of is it that I'm maturing and managing my time better, but part of it is I'm tired of the bustedness of these sites. I wish 3 things were fixed with these sites:
1. Discussions are maybe 1/2 of the value, but you can't participate really unless you're on and active all the time. I'd guess this is because people only go back to look at the topic again so long as it's on the front page, and the discussions are tied to the topics.
2. For me, most of the rest of the value are in links that aren't really news. They're more like a good old book in the library.. "oh look what I found. this is cool. [link to some page on http://c2.com/cgi/wiki and see one of my ancient edits still alive on there]. They are in fact cool, and it's great people are discovering cool stuff... but it's not news, and I've seen a lot of it already. There's got to be a better way of collecting and presenting this sort of thing.
3. Recommendation system / smart filtering darnit. The decent sites are too limited in topics largely because the only filter / recommender that's working on these sites is super crude: People just congregate on a site and stay around certain areas big portions of them are interested in. That's busted. Even on the best day ever on here, I probably didn't care about 50% of the stuff posted.. and I'd love to hear about and discuss things with other areas that aren't start-ups (HN), free software (/.), or programming (LtU, proggit)
Then of course, there's the Eternal September scaling issue...
/.'s ownership was part of one of the early, milestone Web 1.0 bubble buyouts and IPOs. HN wouldn't even be here today if it weren't for what Andover, VA Linux & all were doing 10-15 years ago.
one interesting thing is the inverse relationship between time and the usability and quality of the comment systems.
we start with /., which has--after lengthy iteration--a reasonable system of karma and crowd sourced filtering, plus a brilliant comment presentation system (open/close nodes, point threshholds with one-liners visible before google made that cool).
then we get digg, reddit, hn, each one providing less and less features. hn is the worst: you can't close discussion branches, there is no summarizing, the points are not capped. actually, these charges are against all the "accumulating-points" set. still, i noticed a real drop in features when i went from reddit to hn, predominantly in the lack of sub-domains or categorizations (/r/scifi, /r/python, etc).
anyway....very interesting from a social point of view.
That is fine with me. I'm here because you guys/gals, not the software. It is the community rather than the features of the sites that gets me to f5 every 15min. I don't want critical mass here.
There is something to this, cause I did Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit.... All have gone from my daily reading.
Slashdot (staying on topic) more because I don't find anything fresh there because of the story moderation, the comments are where the quality is, but I don't have that attention span and the news seems a day late.
There is something to this though - an inverse relationship between quality and popularity.
I disagree that hn's is the worst. Slashdot has a fancy system because the signal to noise ratio is so low there. Even reading at the maximum post "quality" level of 5 there is a lot of spam, off-topic banter, lame humor, etc. In comparison, I find the S/N here to be orders of magnitude higher. I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.
In theory I have a slashdot account that's about a decade old, I have forgotten the password and no longer use the email address it's attached to. I haven't bothered going to extreme efforts trying to recover it (e.g. searching out old password lists I have written down somewhere) nor have I bothered creating a new account. Discussion on slashdot is just not worthwhile, at best it's like trying to have a conversation by yelling across a boisterous lunch room, at worst it's just spitting into the wind (which tends to be the average case). There are so many better alternatives out there now it's really not worth the time to visit anymore.
I think the reason that is so is that the HN system encourages certain behaviors which lead to better discussions whereas the slashdot system is more of a passive filter on a noisy feed, which is inherently a losing battle.
HN survives mostly by being small, self-selecting, and somewhat obscure. Slashdot, for all its flaws, is remarkable for being large, well-known, and of consistent quality. Most comparable sites would be well on their way into the gutter at a quarter of /.'s age.
I'm aware of only three viable means of maintaining stability in an online community: slavish adherence to the Peyton-Jones Law (viz. "avoid success at all costs"), iron fist moderators and a tangible cost to participate (cf. the Something Awful forums), or whatever secret sauce /. has.
HN almost certainly doesn't have the third, and the Powers That Be have better things to do than implement the second. I seem to recall pg describing the slow growth of HN membership in very positive terms, so I'm pretty sure there's a deliberate strategy here.
"... What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. ..."
I am surprised /. has survived. The place pretty much as it was back when it started in '97.
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This is my first post [0] for a couple of years. But there was a time when I lived here. I remember when /. was sold & CmdrTaco said all he wanted to do was run it I'm sure I for one didn't believe he'd still be at it now. The sig/noise is still bad if you trawl below the +2 level. But at +5 it's readable. I think the combination of moderation, ability to filter comments (text, best comments at top), culture and relationships have helped shape the site into something still readable. HackerNews exhibits all of the same sorts of growing pains /. had to go through.
Wow. For some reason it feels like such a "low" number. After so many years of browsing /. it feels like there has been so much stuff posted that the number should be so much higher.
I remember being Slashdotted in 1999. It was a brutal onslaught of traffic. Fortunately, more sites seem equipped to handle that sort of traffic today. (http://slashdot.org/story/99/12/04/158227, if you're curious.)
We'll see if this is later confirmed but, I think it pretty funny that (as of this writing) Slashdot appears to be, well, Shashdotted over this post. (Disclaimer: Obviously it won't be quite so funny if it turns out to be a malicious DoS attack or some quite unrelated glitch.)
/. was the first technology aggregation site I started visiting on the web.
I don't go back very much. I think the thing that did it for me was the site's redesign. It's much too clever by half. The signal-to-noise ratio dropped over the years as well.
Having said that, I thought the categorization system was awesome -- much better than up/down voting. And on good days I really enjoyed the mix of funny and interesting. It was a nice combination of amused peanut gallery and topic expertise. Sort of a joyful love of learning.
I'm always a bit surprised whenever I hear that /. is still running. I'm sure they're still a very successful site, but it's been like, forever. Aren't they bored?
What's amazing to me isn't that /. has carried on this long, but rather that the comment quality on here hasn't gone the way of most social new sites. It seems that in general as a social news site ages, matures, and grows, the comment quality follows an inverse pattern. Or more simply, as the number of users approaches infinity, the comment quality approaches 4chan. Digg used to be a decent site for discussion; now you'd be laughed at for even suggesting that the comments might be notable. Reddit is quickly getting there. Slashdot though seems to best this pattern. While I'm well aware that someone will reply to this with "In soviet russia 4chan approaches you!" or something similar in a successful attempt to disprove my point, but I think it still holds true in some respect. Kudos slashdot, keep it up. You keep trying to make UI (un)improvements and we'll still be here to comment without RTFA - and we'll both be thankful for it.
http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1475404&cid=304...