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.
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...