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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly.

I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.

I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.

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On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.

Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.

I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.

I'm kind of thinking that it was more about the new owners than about the site redesign.

I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.

The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).

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