I overstayed at Slashdot. I kept visiting it probably due to a long habit of it being the first news site I'd check while code was compiling. Just ingrained in muscle memory.
Then, one day, I realized most discussions had turned vile. Cynical rants that would find fault with absolutely anything, and I would feel dirtier reading it.
It's really a shame, a bit like seeing an old friend that ended up with wrong choices in life.
> Cynical rants that would find fault with absolutely anything.
I think that is just comments on the internet in general, everywhere has them, I had to work hard at stopping it bothering me, you can't bath in negativity and not get wet.
I was really into slashdot for like a year, and then quickly saw the tides turn in favor of trolls for some reason and left.. I mean, it went from being a place I check multiple times per day to now I never go to slashdot unless someone explicitly gives me a link. I think they lost their community somewhere in the multiple buy outs. Their bias supporting Sourceforge during the adware bundling debacle I think was when there was a mass exodus, and now it's pretty much just trolls left.
I was into Slashdot back in the 1990s. I lost interest about 15 years ago. When the Sourceforge thing happened I was mildly surprised to see that Slashdot still existed.
Back in the mid-2000's when Slashdot was "working" -- It was this: A bunch of yahoos would post enough inane comments, that an expert who actually worked there would get annoyed enough to write a long, insightful post full of actual facts.
In the late 90s, everyone who was technical and cared about Linux/open source/etc monitored slashdot. EVERYONE.
A lot of the experts who got annoyed, probably had been following it from then. But as time went by, being said expert got tiring. Eventually the trolls drove them away.
Yep. "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." It used to have some useful software news. Then it turned Randian and political, and it was just too tiring to wade through the BS. It apparently still exists, but I see no reason to look at it.
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Yeah, I gave up on Slashdot comments when the comments on the "Microsoft is joining the Eclipse Foundation" news item turned into a "Microsoft is killing Eclipse" conspiracy.
Completely different from HN, where every "Google is improving security/adding a new API/product" post turns into a "Google is an NSA front/will kill any product/API that you use" flamedown.
One thing I like about Slashdot is that the comments there often represent a much wider set of opinions and a greater diversity of thought than are found here or at reddit.
That does often mean that more of the comments might be seen as negative, some might be offensive to some people, and some might contain misinformation. But it works the other way, too, where some of the best commentary I've seen anywhere has been there, often from people posting as Anonymous Coward.
