Eternal June for HN begins…

Nah, floods of new users have come before. The lack of images, politics, and drama, combined with the "boring" design drives the undesirables away, leaving behind people who like talking about tech and other interests.

HN will always retain some of the new comers. I was first reddit user then HN.

HN instantly brought me "old" internet nostalgia. Geeks just talking about things in a mostly open minded way. Lack of memes, politics and "boring" design will be all positives for some.

Moderation is quality on HN too.

The tech+(with some business) focused nature of the feed keeps folks off too.

No memes here.

Politics is very much on HN. It's a part of the same filter bubble as the rest of big tech: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg

It's thinly veiled behind more passive aggressively written prose than reddit, but it's here. No images, I'll grant, but as someone mistaken for conservative by liberals and liberal by conservatives I can assure you it's very much political.

Began with covid :)

Now where do we go next...

So long as media posts aren't allowed and dang isn't overwhelmed I think we'll be alright. Politics will probably change a bit though, if there is a big migration, and it'll become a bit more impersonal.

I deleted Apollo and the official Reddit app (which I used to post posts) and I'm done. I had been a user for ~12 years and had 150K+ comment karma.

They fucked up and now I'll spend more time on here and /., is my guess. Unless there are other strong dork communities I should be looking into.

lobste.rs

I would like to participate there, but it is invite only, last I checked.

hop on the irc and say hello, you'll get an invite.

I don’t know how I’d ever get an invite to that.

What is /. ?

slashdot.org

Slashdot website, which was once a massive tech discussion site.

Slashdot.

Slashdot, if I had to guess

This hurts.

Yeah, I had a 4 digit user id. Getting old is weird.

Same. Although having a 4-digit ID even 20+ years ago was something of an oddity based on my interactions with local Slashdot meetups at the time.

Slashdot

I believe he means Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

As others have said, it's Slashdot - which got it's name from trying to spell out the web address over the phone. Silly and confusing...

h..t..t..p..colon..slash..slash..slashdot..dot..org

When you see "Hacker News Hug" on here (recently due to Cloudflare's issues) or Reddit's "Hug of Death", the original was "Slashdotted", when tech people hosted personal sites on their _own_ home DSL (even Dial-up via Dynamic DNS!) connections. These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.

If their webpage hit the front news of Slashdot, their upload bandwidth very quickly ran out due to the torrent of traffic!

My brother writes xkcd. In 2006 I was living at home while attending community college. At the time, his site was still hosted on the old HP desktop that used to sit in our family room and now sat in his old bedroom. One day I was playing in an unofficial Counter-Strike tournament when one of his comics (possibly "Pi Equals"[1]) got posted to either Slashdot or Boing Boing. My ping immediately went from probably ~25 ms to over 300, and then I timed out completely. I think it took us a couple hours to get our connection back, which I assume involved getting a new IP address.

Sadly, I didn't win the tournament.

[1] https://xkcd.com/10/

Please thank your brother! Some of his work has genuinely turned shit days into a positive ones over the years.

Aw I’m glad to hear that

The best posts are sometimes found in the comments

> My brother writes xkcd.

Username checks out.

This strip had a profound change on my life after I read it for the first time. To this day it still means a lot to me. Thank you for sharing your story and to your brother for sharing his art.

https://xkcd.com/154/

> These asynchronous connections had terrible upload speed by design.

As opposed to today, where connects have terrible uploads speed because ISPs don't want you to host servers.

I've heard of people getting gigabit down, but only 16 mbps up.

Not really. For example cable internet (and ADSL) goes thru cable (shocking knowledge, I know). Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth

Which essentially means you have X bandwidth to distribute between upstream and downstream. And it's far more profitable to sell X 40/10 Mbit connections vs selling a bunch of 25/25 Mbit ones, where most people there won't be using upload all that much.

> Cable have limited bandwidth, and as it is just a single cable, not RX/TX pair as it is for ethernet and it has limited bandwidth

DOCSIS 4.0 supports 10Gb/s down and 6Gb/s up using that same coaxial cable that's been in your house for decades.

Fiber doesn't do that. I think it's a cable issue tbh

Isn't Slashdot a reference to the current directory in Linux?

I feel like no, trying it out (though on my Mac using zsh and not a 25 year old Linux box) the slash being first makes it reference the root directory.

yes, the correct syntax would be: ./ not /.

It could be but the version I remembered was trying to tell someone the website over the phone.

Perhaps someone on HN has a more reliable source than my brain?

How do you create the name for a website by trying to tell someone how to get to it over the phone? Doesn't the DNS entry have to exist first?

"Hey check out this website I discovered - it's called Slashdot" "It's called what!?" "Slashdot" "How do you spell that?" "http://slashdot.org" "Hang on, what? How many slashes and dots?"

So the conversation of what might happen occurred before the site was created?

See the FAQ for an official answer - https://slashdot.org/faq

I probably got the telephone part mixed up but was right about being confusing to read aloud.

Can’t get a better source that /. itself!

I have a 6 digit /. id and somehow never knew this. Thanks!

Dot is the current directory.

With ~, ~/. could mean your home directory if your shell recognises ~ as $HOME.

Don’t think /. aka slashdot has any intrinsic meaning in Linux.

I didn’t give you permission to make me feel this old this early in the week.

Slashdot, I assume

Slash dot

slashdot.org

Slashdot

slashdot.org

Slashdot

Slashdot

https://slashdot.org

I've started looking at that and arstechnica for my tech news replacements.

Slash dot, an older tech site news that was popular pre digg/reddit

slashdot. it was (i think) the first news aggregator everyone used, then digg, then reddit.

slashdot

Slashdot

Slashdot.

Literally "slash dot".

https://www.slashdot.org/

Slashdot

Slashdot, one of the oldest big tech/nerdy news and comment web forums (like HN) on the net. In many ways it pioneered voting and moderation systems we see today. https://slashdot.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

slashdot.org

Slashdot

There's also tildes.net (like early Reddit set up as non profit, invite only, but not hard to get an invite) and also open source distributed https://join-lemmy.org/

When you say "not hard to get an invite" what do you mean?

There's an e-mail on the website to request an invite (it's in contacts). This is what I did and got invite next day.

They also regularly open the invite threads here: https://old.reddit.com/r/tildes/

Also people who have been there for a while (not me) can invite their friends.

16 year club here.. same. I came to reddit from the digg DVD exodus. Time to drop this habit.

I'm boycotting reddit this week, and I will never use their app, but I just don't know where else to go for communities related to niche non-tech interests, and state & local stuff. I guess Facebook groups, but FB is practically unusable these days.

Just a few weeks ago I went through the exercise of closing my FB account because I was getting all of my local NYC discussion from subreddits, instead. Poor timing I guess.

If reddit bungles this whole thing, the loss of /r/asknyc will be truly tragic. Such a great way to crowdsource local recommendations without the extra veneer of tourist feedback on top.

I'm in a much smaller city than NYC and /r/<mycity> is a very reliable place to find out what is going on around town, chat about the best place to go for <cuisine>, etc.

It will be very sad. It's been a pleasant era for Reddit-fu.

What's wrong with FB groups? It's almost as good at surfacing good stuff as Reddit for my niche interests and it has a lot of buy/sell/trade activity that never makes it to eBay or Reddit.

Did the same, but I took a step further and deleted my account. I had been using the site for over a decade, I knew that if I didn't cut off the path behind me I'd be tempted to linger.

I'll miss my local and hobby subreddits. I hope I find something to replace them.

It seems pleasant at first, then you realize that 90% of comments on every post are cynical negativity and I'm not entirely sure if spending much time around here is a good thing because it'm starting to absorb it.

* * *

Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative?

Is there any social media that isn't largely cynical and negative?

I also notice how my mindset changes when I don't visit, which really just makes me think I should stop engaging in 90% of online discourse and discussion.

Feels like reddit is at least has a larger percentage of memes and shitposting so there's less overall negativity, but there's also less substance.

> Is there any tech-oriented forum that isn't largely cynical and negative

Maybe no? I only know of two (not including subreddits): HN and Slashdot. And of the two, Slashdot is far, far, more negative, with the weird addition of American style republican political views. Which, as a European reader, makes it feel like a very right wing place.

Are there any other forums I'm not aware of?

Idk once you experience enough world, it is quite hard not be cynical. I guess I fit right in.