I joined Hacker News relatively recently, 514 days ago (not sure when I joined Slashdot, but my ID has five digits). I remember finding it more adult than Slashdot and appreciated its maturity, figuring I would leave Slashdot. Most posts here that mention Slashdot talk about its immaturity, superficiality, or something like that.
After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down?
The Slashdot moderation system is still fantastic. One thing I noticed recently:
As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdot and less useful on Hacker News.
This is due to the overall UI and the moderation system. Slashdot had to implement functionality to deal with low S/N. Browsing on +5 lets you quickly get shallow overview of the interesting discussion in a short time even for stories with hundreds or thousands of comments. At the same time, you can easily burrow down on threads that seem interesting to you, e.g. see a +5's post (grand-) parent, its siblings and rebuttals. The moderation also makes it more feasible to find new ideas for a story you read in the past, and of course you can easily sort by date.
On Hacker News, when I visit a popular story, I usually read the first couple of screen pages, depending on my interest, that is the most highly ranked posts and their replies, which are sorted inline with them. I'm sure I miss a lot of content further down the page, not to mention on the other pages, which I never read.
And when I revisit a story that seemed interesting to me -- something I often did on Slashdot --, I am completely lost on HN. Finding posts that are both high-quality and new is way too much work. Sometimes I still do it, but I spend a lot of time seeing posts I had already read. Really, the only way I end up keeping up with previous discussion is when I keep track of replies to my own posts (which works better on HN than it does on Slashdot).
As HN's S/N is going down, finding good posts will continue to be an increasing problem. I know there are user scripts that both enable collapsing threads and hiding/marking read posts on Hacker News. I guess I should look into those. But for a truly effective solution, you'd need to know how the posts score. (I think Slashdot's system of capping comment score at 5 is also much superior to HN's solution of hiding the score.)
Before HN hid the comment scores it was possible to skim popular threads by looking for the well ranked comments, basically doing the +5 thing mentally. Now, popular stories becoming daunting with no clue if a particular long subthread has anything insightful.
I've noticed that top comments on HN are frequently meta (about the article's writing or author, not the article content) or flat-out disagree with it more often than on Slashdot. Readers here also tend to actually RTFA much more often before commenting.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. If you read the article and have nothing to add, then best say nothing. Better than saying something about an article you haven't read, that's for sure.
I recall pg initiating a discussion highlighting the declining quality (S/N) of comments at HN, and struggling to find a scalable approach of tackling it. Afaik slashdots approach has been published and works for them, so maybe that would be a good place to start looking?
I'm surprised your account hasn't been shadow banned. HN usually doesn't allow meta-HN conversations. I suppose it's on topic here, but watch what you say.
One thing I appreciate about Slashdot versus HN is more people with expertise in a broader range of science and engineering fields. HN is very good in certain areas of technology and business, but has relatively few civil engineers, physicists, climate scientists, chemical engineers, astronomers, etc., so the comments on those kinds of stories end up drifting more into speculation. On Slashdot, there are usually at least a few really good comments on the story from people with expertise in those areas.
I find the content and focus different between Slashdot and HN--probably driven by the underlying demographics.
Slashdot tends to focus on stories that low-level IT workers and geeks care about: you see alot of sysadmin stuff, political activism from a geek-liberal point of view, oddball stories, etc. Basically, the IT equivalent of cat pictures. I believe the demographics skew to high schoolers and bearded gnomes.
HN, on the other hand, has more entrepreneurial, business, and hardcore science and technology stuff. The content tends to be more high-level and more useful to those in the know. The demographics are Y Combinator types (mainly naive recent college grads) with a mix of Googlers, VCs, other high-powered industry players.
That said, I suspect some Slashdot users have migrated to HN, which would explain a lot of recent changes at HN.
I also have a five digit UID over there, but stopped going for the most part five or six years ago. The UI of reddit and then HN was so superior that it almost makes the quality argument moot.
Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.
You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't.
Note that GP said 'was'. I cannot tell how it is now, but there definitely was a point in time when Slashdot went for a dumb JS-enabled-dynamic-interactive fad and totally screwed the usability of their comments section. This is what made me stop participating.
Yes when they first put in the Javascript it was a pain, of course NoScript fixed that.
Reddit was, is, and looks like it always will be, a mess. Even when Slashdot first put in the Javascript in place you could at least still find things on the site.
They still have that, so not so much of a fad. It works but at the time it got in the way for me too and probably contributed to me jumping ship as well.
HN crowd on /. comment moderation with slimmer graphics and collapsible comment trees (like reddit) would probably be close to what I think of as ideal.
There's a difference when I can't find anything on Reddit because there is so much and their means provided for finding subreddits necessitates third-party efforts to ease the search, and Slashdot's random interface constituting a huge question mark. Many, many times I can go to the top /. story in my RSS feed, then go to the front page and not see it there at all.
Slashdot's moderation UI is pretty much the only thing besides comment-nesting that survived the redesign of X years ago, which ruined the site for me and took me from reading most of my tech commentary there down to a handful per month. Good for them and their UI designers, but I'm still bitter. It really is a terrible site to use.
Reddit's default UI went the same way, if not as far, but you can turn the vast majority of the previews and other debris off so that it looks very similar to HN (and very similar to how Reddit looked around a year in, which was UI perfection for me). I'll agree that if I'm not logged in, Reddit is a confusing jumble. Turning off previews goes a long way toward making it a solid block of paragraphs of text, which is most easy to read. For me. :)
Same here... 31494, and I completely stopped reading Slashdot right around the time I discovered reddit.
What did it for me was the much higher volume of stories on reddit. So much of the time, I just didn't care about the Slashdot front page. This is still true on reddit, but at least with more stories there's a better chance of a decent hit rate.
That said, even reddit is getting less interesting these days.
I stopped trying to participate on Slashdot in 2000, but never stopped reading the site entirely.
My issue was that while the place was great for informative posts on fairly objective topics like tech or science, it was pure groupthink for anything social or political. I felt completely unwelcome and alien to the clearly dominant demographic of the place.
The biggest difference between Slashdot and Hacker News is that I find Slashdot to be much more accepting of humor. There is plenty of good discussion there, but there are also plenty of quality one liners and inside jokes, both of which seem to be lacking on hacker news. It's like two newspapers, but one has a comics section. That said, I think /. is an older crowd, and I got there late to the party, Hacker News is more my generation I suppose.
I find Slashdot to be completely lacking in humor. It used to be different back before they cracked down on the trolls, but these days it's about as bland and humorless as you can get.
I stopped reading /. long ago due to the embellished story descriptions tacked onto the submissions. They are very judgemental, trollish, and became too trite for me to read any longer. As others here have mentioned, /. has some serious groupthink, and it is visible via the predictable submission summaries.
My subconscious did. I didn't mean to imply that HN lacks group think --- I just don't want to see it in the submission summary, and HN's structure prevents that to some degree.
The story descriptions, and multiple links, are the best part about slashdot. Instead of twenty submissions completely filling the front page with the latest "what it means to program" and its 19 blog replies, there's one story. With one comment thread, instead of twenty threads all starting off with the same "not this again" comment.
I don't remember when I first started reading slashdot, if I had to wager, I'd say 1999 or so. For many years it was my goto website. The first one I perused in the morning, and the last one in the evening. Hell, it was open all day long!
Alas, I think it's past it's prime by a few years now and it is sad to see it's decline. But time does its thing. With the advent of Hacker News (and yes reddit too!), and arguablly a new generation of developers who used to read /. in high school and college have grown up a bit, and a much more relevant "News for Nerds" website has evolved. Not to mention the high-caliber of people and personalities who actively participate in the HN forums. But I wonder if HN would exist today if not for slashdot?
So hat's off to you Rob Malda aka CmdrTaco (Important note: In Soviet Russia, the hat takes off you!). You did a fine thing and planted a seed 15 years ago that not only informed, inspired, and shaped a generation of nerds but also the internet as a whole.
Almost the same here, I like Slashdot as much as HN for the content they bring to me and yes, the maturity (something very important on the web).
However, i can't get myself around their interface, i don't understand it/don't like it, i feel like their lacking a designer or something... in comparison with HN.
So, I spend less time on it, and didn't create an account or anything, eventhough i'd like to...their UI just doesn't feel right.
- Slashdot has the best moderation to show you the best posts.
- Reddit has best conversation because the red envelope tells you of replies.
- Hacker News has the best audience.
If these were combined into one site it would be hella cool, but unless HN evolves the tech I can tell you what site I won't expect to be around many years from now. Blacklisting unsavory contributors and deleting posts is only going to work to maintain standards for so long.
How can you compare reading Slashdot at +5 to reading the mostly unfiltered comments here? I think it's also telling that you only feel the desire to participate in discussion (post) here.
While I'd agree that some of the /. +5 comments can be worth reading, the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.
> How can you compare reading Slashdot at +5 to reading the mostly unfiltered comments here?
Because Slashdot actually provides the facilities to do so. If I could browse +5 HN comments then believe me I would.
> the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.
Because Slashdot actually provides the facilities to do so. If I could browse +5 HN comments then believe me I would.
As others pointed out, even +5 /. browsing leaves you with a stilted half-conversation where you have to expand lower-rated comments to even understand the points being made in the replies. Even worse, often times you'll find some really great comments moderated into the ground there just because they aren't politically correct. Good debate and logical thinking aren't very appreciated there, just snarky comments and closely following the prevailing groupthink.
I could make the same argument about HN.
You could try. I don't think that it would be a particularly good argument. Slashdot's vicious trolling, moderation stalking, and general nastiness is something that I saw way too many times. Discovering HN last year was a huge breath of fresh air. I appreciate it and won't be taking it for granted any time soon.
You've apparently never run into the malicious pack of down-voters here. Say something they disagree with (even when they are wrong), use humor, or say thank you, and you will.
Your take on /. is also overly negative. I've enjoyed it for many years. The reason I'm here more lately is that I've grown tired of much of the topics there, (such as software licensing) which I have little interest in.
On Slashdot, you get stories of general interest without "What's this doing on HN?" or "I wonder if a startup could disrupt <whatever>?" bullshit comments cropping up. People can post humor for the sake of humor without getting stick-up-the-ass shitheels posting high-and-mighty "we are not amused" replies and downvoting. Slashdot feels fun and maybe a bit incendiary. Hacker News has great content and a lot of great posters, but it also has this atmosphere of constantly trying to make yourself look as smart and perfect as possible, taking yourself way too seriously, and most importantly selling yourself/your startup at any opportunity.
My account there is five digits as well (I probably didn't sign up straight away). The ironic thing is that I was probably about 15 years old myself when I started visiting Slashdot.
After not reading it for a while, I went back to check it out. Upon further review, I don't find Slashdot inferior to Hacker News. Obviously they're different so you can't compare them directly. Still, I find Slashdot, at least reading at +5, which is where I read it, funnier, no less insightful, and less self-important than Hacker News. I don't see evidence supporting the denigration, which I now consider unsupported snobbery. Do the posts below +5 bring Slashdot down?
That said, I post more here, but I read both.