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...
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...