I remember working at early-stage Amazon in 1998, and I would check Slashdot something like 4-5x per day. I remember that period before and after Slashdot was acquired by Andover.net fondly, especially CmdrTaco, Hemos, and CowboyNeal.

I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!