What happened to K5?

I was one of the "cool kids" who switched from Slashdot to K5 back when it started (back then we had 3 digit K5 id numbers, now we have Klout scores)

I stopped visiting it, but I am curious why it seems to have half died, but is still running. What's the story there?

I think people just lost interest, mixture of the community losing interest and the founder losing interest. The rise of blogs didn't help, I don't think: many of the people who in 1999-2004 would've written an article to submit to Kuro5hin would today prefer to post it on their own blog and just submit links to places like HN/Reddit. That has the advantage of letting you "own" your writing, to build a personal brand, perhaps monetize it, etc.; but it does result imo in a bit less of a community aspect.

It's funny because K5 diaries were one of the very early blog implementations.

K5 was interesting to me, and I actually was the one who negotiated an ad deal between Andover and Rusty to help him with money for the first couple years. K5 had very much the same feel as Everything2 which was the "other" site to Slashdot that the original krewe did. E2 still has a tight community with numerous marriages, people still talking. I think the problem with K5 is that become too self-referential, and ultimately people lost interest. That was the same thing with E2 -- while people for a time loved being part of the community at some point you have to start to do other things in life and the time commitment drops away.

Yeah, that was possibly the best site ever. Back when it went downhill all the people jumpt over to hulver.com but I left around that time. People talk about community, but that site was a _real_ community. Anyone remember the year we did a secret santa gift exchange?

Me too... they had some of the strangest and freaked-out submissions there. I don't know any substitute for it on today's internet.

Last time I went to the website I was surprised it was still online and I felt really sad when I realized the frontpage submissions were weeks old.

I feel old now, missing the 90s pre-bubble internet and I am sad I was just a few years too late to that party back then. sigh

The day it dawned on me that the way you pronounced k5 was "corrosion" my mind was blown.

Heh. Annnnd you just blew mine. I always thought it was "Kooroshin"

It helps to know that the founders name was Rusty. :)

IIRC, Rusty moved on to help with DailyKos, which later used Scoop (the K5 commenting/moderation system).

Wow. No wonder they got so popular, with a pedigree like that.

I once had something I wrote on the front page... that was crazy. Remember how you would submit a post for editing first, and let the grammar geeks fix every little thing first? And you didn't just post a link to a blog post, you wrote the whole thing right there, on the site, the longer the better. I just looked for a link, but apparently my stories are too old, and are gone, and my last diary post was 2004. Anyone know where you can go to find that kind of community nowadays?

I once sent a really awesome link of hot news to two friends - they never replied or said anything but one posted it on his facebook immediately as if he had found it and got all the likes and comments and the other posted it on slashdot only to actually make it to the frontpage and surely I didn't get any mention.

Yep, I felt really great that day.

metafilter is the closest thing i've seen to k5 in terms of the kind of writing the community encouraged