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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

This is why I post on slashdot. They've passed the test of time (but not UIs, fuck beta). Looks like their first posts in '97 start here: https://slashdot.org/?page=8582 dunno what their december 31st, 1969 posts are after that (errors? intentional de-ranking?)

Newspapers have a bad history of "experimenting" with enabling online comments and then deciding the experiment failed and delete them all. You're a newspaper, you're not supposed to delete history when you don't like it!!!

And then they complain when people use social media as their newspaper.

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It's very depressing that all the comment sections from the late 2000s to mid 2010s are nowhere to be found. Also a lot of live journal type sites. Comment sections seem omitted from Internet Archive snapshots, but I find them in many ways more worthy of archival than the published articles that make the cut.

That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis

> That type of data would be so interesting for things like historical sentiment analysis

Except that internet commenters are very weird, and like the least representative sample ever. Not quite as weird as Wikipedia editors, but still really weird.

They aren't representative of the general public. This can still make it very interesting though. Do trends show up earlier among commentators? If so, has the time it takes for the trends to flow to the mainstream changed over time. Has the likelihood at which online commentator trends flow to the mainstream changed? It's the influence more pronounced for specific subjects?

Comments from people actually close to areas mentioned in articles, detract from the effectiveness of /THE MESSAGE/ and had to be removed.

It is very depressing, but on the other hand you'd have millions of comments written in another era (pre-culture wars, when the Internet was more, let's say, "tolerant") that can be now traced back to the authors to cancel them. With infinite memory you need protection, otherwise it's un-erasable damnation.

The last time I looked at Slashdot comments (2021, give or take) they were low-effort trolls, racist/sexist, or just gibberish. Has moderation improved there or is it still a cesspool?

I scraped a sample of their posts ten years ago and ran a regression on user activity by ID. They have zero significant growth in user base other than mobile users posting more as AC. There was a small core of older active 5-6 digit UIDs doing the bulk of the posting and that was shrinking toward zero around now. Slashdot will die in the near future even if Netcraft can't confirm.

As one of those 6-digit UID posters, /. has been dead for quite some time. Discussions barely breach 50 comments or so now days, for the most part. The firehose sucks. The 'editors' constantly post dupes and the left hand seems to have no clue what the right hand is doing.

> December 31st, 1969 posts

Unixtime is the number of seconds since 1/1/1970. Subtract a few hours for timezone post processing and you get 12/31/1969 as a date. Indicated time zero or null or missing value trying to get formatted as a date.

Pedantically, Unix time measures the number of non-leap seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970.

This is Dec 31 1969 at 7:00 PM in Eastern Standard Time.

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