Rob Malda and the Slashdot crowd deserve kudos for blazing a trail and for sticking to their guns. they seem to have weathered Digg and the like just fine and will most likely outlast them all. I still stop by Slashdot regularly, but haven't visited reddit for almost a year now.

Slashdot seems to have found at least a local minima in balancing editorial selection and audience participation. Firehose, a nod to Digg, is an interesting spin on democratized story selection.