It's a really dumb thing, but being able to type: http://slashdot.org/~blhack and see how my comments were doing karma wise was really important to me. For a young, budding geek, the karma was valuable feedback on how well I was contributing.
A tiny change to http://slashdot.org/~blhack/comments was just...annoying. Typing that first URL was something that I did probably 15 times a day; having it change was annoying. Like if for some ridiculous reason, gnu decided to change "ls" to "ks" or something. Tiny, but still annoying.
Then they kept screwing with the comments system. Reading the comments at "3" was part of my daily routine.
Yeah, I can change it back in preferences, but it feels like every time I try to get back into /., I have to spend 20 minutes hunting around for a way to get it back to usable.
To me, when slashdot started changing things, it felt like there is a bar that I've been going to for a decade, but the owner recently decided to change the interior design.
My bar is gone. The same people still go there, but the building has changed. It's not the same thing anymore.
Eventually, it seemed like a lot of the people left too.
I, too, read /. in the late 90s and up to around 2005, when I became more interested in other things, and other sites began making the changes that /. (and presumably CmdrTaco) were resistant to.
I also remember trying to read the source and muttering over the innumerable lines of cryptic Perl.