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.
The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
But then the astroturfing problem blew up and in no time killed slashdot. The community tolerated trolls, even the infamous GNAA, but slashdot's industrial-level astroturfing campaigns in what I believe to be collulsion with site maintainers was something that was massively abhorrent.
> The redesign wasn't what killed it. The constant astroturfing and (what I assumed to be) collusion between astroturfers and site maintainers killed it real dead.
Agreed; I remember the day they started advertising the Apple marketing conventions and thought "who put Apple on my Linux site? This isn't 'news for nerds; stuff that matters'". The influx of microsoft apologists and apple shills soon after is what killed it for me, and I had been there for a long time (not since the beginning, but still user 32752; so close to a power of two!).
Still, I'm eternally grateful to Rob Malda. Great community, great moderation system, and a site that was unique. I'll wager we shall not look upon it's like again soon.
Puny 5 mod points once every few months is not a way to instill a sense of belonging. Imagine being able to upvote a post or a comment on HN only once a month, and passively watch random stuff of questionable quality float up the rest of the time. That ruined /. for me and I suspect I wasn't alone in that.
To be fair, they pretty much invented user moderation, Slashdot was an early experiment with user curated discussions. That they never saw past the 5 mod points is understandable, it was a foundation the site was based on, and seeing past one's foundations can be hard.
They also had to likely balance against malicious users, who were a less small % of the user base than on other sites.
It was only when I realized that having an account still allowed me to post as an AC that I finally made one.
I wish AC was still a thing for popular websites like reddit, HN, etc. Just start off the comment at -1 or something...
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What really amazes me more than anything though, is how willing some of us are to trust Microsoft all of a sudden. They did damage to the software and web communities that will take us decades to recover from, but with another round of "embrace", we are right back in the old loop. Reminding people of their history is now considered rude; our own communities have been co-opted by the MS PR machine.
It's possible that with different moderation, notifications, blocking, and post mechanics this might have been less of a problem. But the site's design and architecture more or less perfectly amplified everything that could possibly go wrong with the concept.
It died in less than a year after going public. I'd anticipated it wouldn't go well, but that it failed that hard and fast surprised me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...
I've only been back, by accident, a handful of times when a "short link" actually expanded out to slashdot, and every time, I closed the page as soon as I realized where the shortened url was really headed.
Sadly nothing really recaptured the spirit of the first few years, and it can't. The internet isn't the Wild West any more, you're not using it over dial up from a box room staring down a CRT, times change, and you can never go home.
I still wonder sometimes if it's a shift in the Slashdot audience specifically - seeing how movements like neo-reaction have been springing up in the tech community in the past few years - or it just mirrors the increased polarization in American society (I know Slashdot has international audience - heck, I was a part of it for a long time - but it's definitely US-centric).