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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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24 August 2004 - 10:48 am
Occasionally I fall back into old habits. Today, after a healthy four or five months since I last did so, I followed a link to slashdot.
Slashdot rose to fame and fortune in the late 90s because their target audience was internet users. Because of the unique demographics of the world wide web before it gained true acceptance, slashdot had articles uniquely targeted to the geeks of the world. And those geeks happened to be the only ones using the internet. (Or so it seemed.) Things have changed on the internet in the six years or so since I started reading slashdot, but slashdot hasn't changed at all.
Visiting the site -- or more accurately reading the comments -- is a bit like stepping back in a time-warp. You can still read the same comments today that were made almost a decade ago. Let me offer you an example. Here is a slashdot article that touches on Java from 1999 ('99 is the last year I could find on slashdot that had comments). Here is a more recent Java-related article from slashdot.
If you had the stomach to churn through them, you'll see that they are still arguing about the same things. Java is either too slow or to dumb for some to use, but perfect for others. (I'll address the Java debate in a future post. I had intended this post to be a response to some of the anti-Java sentiments, but got side-tracked by how mind-numbing reading slashdot can be.) I didn't have the heart to link to two articles that deal with Microsoft or Linux, but rest assured that the slashdot folks have not swayed in their appreciation for the latter and their hatred of the former.
In short, slashdot was started in September '97, and no doubt peaked not long after that. Slashdot lacks a search capability that lets me do useful searches for historical purposes, but I assume that by the end of '97 they'd covered all of their main topics: open source, Linux, Microsoft, gaming, and illegal file-sharing. (As it turns out, all of those categories are currently represented on the slashdot front page as I write this article.) So really, everything written there in the past six years has mostly been a retread of past comments.
(I'll leave as an exercise to the reader to examine how slashdot front page posts lag behind other news conglomeration sites. Anecdotally, it appears that slashdot is frequently a day or so behind other sites.)
As a final point, you do have to give some credit to Rob Malda and Jeff Bates for turning a site with no newsworthy posts or insightful comments into a profitable business. Bravo, boys!
Posted by on 24 August 2004 at 10:48 AM
Comments
I, for one, welcome our new Slashdot overlords.
Posted by Chris Hill Festival on 24 August 2004 - 6:28 PM