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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

> Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was

In a lot of interesting varieties! Some even sort of artistic, and some precursors of later SomethingAwful/4chan/internet-meme types of things.

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot editor Rob Malda resigned from his editorship this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the HN community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to geek culture. Truly an internet icon.

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Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, covered in hot grits

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past. If we cannot scorn ourselves, we run the risk of taking ourselves to seriously.

Sometimes, while on HN, I miss the playfulness that made /. a true joy in the past.

I do as well, but I also keep reminding myself "This is Hacker News, not Slashdot." And so I down-vote people who post memes and the typical /. off-topic crap. I just always take comfort in knowing that, when I want that stuff, Slashdot is still around.

I get my meme fix on Reddit these days.

Interestingly enough, I rarely find much in the way of memes on Reddit. But I think it's because I almost never visit the front-page or any of the popular sub-reddits. I stick to a lot of very niche / specialized sub-reddits like /r/machine_learning and /r/semanticweb and /r/csbooks, etc. <shrug />

Trolling as an art form. I can still remember when "subscriptions" to /. first came out and the people who added a line to their signatures, bemoaning the little asterisk by the name of subscribers. I think I was probably the first (and probably only) person who anonymously bought gift subscriptions to several of the worst complaining offenders. Apparently some of the recipients tried to refuse the gift subscriptions, but /. didn't have a process for that, and I probably gave the admins a headache that they didn't anticipate. Ah, those were the days...

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