I was a heavy USENET user for several years before finding Slashdot. With /. I found myself rarely going to the source link and almost never reading the editorial commentary. I'd go straight to the comments and start reading what people had to say. All these decades later and what I love about sites like HN and Reddit is immediately wading in and embracing the zeitgeist. I *loved* Twitter for a long time for the same reason.
But you're right. There are others I knew who were the exact opposite. And those people today have very different internet habits than I do.
And often any comment I made was in relation to the ongoing discussion and not necessarily the article itself.
I still do that here and elsewhere too.
In my golden era of message boards the worst you had to deal with were trolls or bad actors but today you simply don’t know who is an LLM bot
What’s the point in reading or replying to machines. It’s like a sand trap just wasting your time in the worst possible way
IMO, people who liked the user generated aspect of slashdot also liked the higher velocity of digg, reddit, and even HN better as those came along. People who liked the editorial curation angle that distinguished slashdot from these newer takes came to prefer more curation and professional editorial commentary, leaving slashdot in an odd in-between space.