As a popular story gets more and more comments, it gets more useful on Slashdot and less useful on Hacker News.

This is due to the overall UI and the moderation system. Slashdot had to implement functionality to deal with low S/N. Browsing on +5 lets you quickly get shallow overview of the interesting discussion in a short time even for stories with hundreds or thousands of comments. At the same time, you can easily burrow down on threads that seem interesting to you, e.g. see a +5's post (grand-) parent, its siblings and rebuttals. The moderation also makes it more feasible to find new ideas for a story you read in the past, and of course you can easily sort by date.

On Hacker News, when I visit a popular story, I usually read the first couple of screen pages, depending on my interest, that is the most highly ranked posts and their replies, which are sorted inline with them. I'm sure I miss a lot of content further down the page, not to mention on the other pages, which I never read.

And when I revisit a story that seemed interesting to me -- something I often did on Slashdot --, I am completely lost on HN. Finding posts that are both high-quality and new is way too much work. Sometimes I still do it, but I spend a lot of time seeing posts I had already read. Really, the only way I end up keeping up with previous discussion is when I keep track of replies to my own posts (which works better on HN than it does on Slashdot).

As HN's S/N is going down, finding good posts will continue to be an increasing problem. I know there are user scripts that both enable collapsing threads and hiding/marking read posts on Hacker News. I guess I should look into those. But for a truly effective solution, you'd need to know how the posts score. (I think Slashdot's system of capping comment score at 5 is also much superior to HN's solution of hiding the score.)

See http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml and http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

Slashdot tends to focus on stories that low-level IT workers and geeks care about: you see alot of sysadmin stuff, political activism from a geek-liberal point of view, oddball stories, etc. Basically, the IT equivalent of cat pictures. I believe the demographics skew to high schoolers and bearded gnomes.

HN, on the other hand, has more entrepreneurial, business, and hardcore science and technology stuff. The content tends to be more high-level and more useful to those in the know. The demographics are Y Combinator types (mainly naive recent college grads) with a mix of Googlers, VCs, other high-powered industry players.

That said, I suspect some Slashdot users have migrated to HN, which would explain a lot of recent changes at HN.

Also, reading at +5 meant, at the time, that I mostly got highly-rated replies to questions or points I didn't see, which meant I then had to do a lot of clicking just to understand what was being said. Combine that with the constant clicking to get more comments or get rid of "helpful" bars that hang out in the middle of the screen, and I gave up, and would have even if I'd had no where else to go.

You can't be serious. Reddit is horrible to get around and horrible to read. It looks like a mass of disorganized text. Slashdot is far easier to understand how the flow of comments go and what is a new story and what isn't.

I can't find anything on Reddit.

Reddit was, is, and looks like it always will be, a mess. Even when Slashdot first put in the Javascript in place you could at least still find things on the site.

They still have that, so not so much of a fad. It works but at the time it got in the way for me too and probably contributed to me jumping ship as well.

HN crowd on /. comment moderation with slimmer graphics and collapsible comment trees (like reddit) would probably be close to what I think of as ideal.

Slashdot's moderation UI is pretty much the only thing besides comment-nesting that survived the redesign of X years ago, which ruined the site for me and took me from reading most of my tech commentary there down to a handful per month. Good for them and their UI designers, but I'm still bitter. It really is a terrible site to use.

What did it for me was the much higher volume of stories on reddit. So much of the time, I just didn't care about the Slashdot front page. This is still true on reddit, but at least with more stories there's a better chance of a decent hit rate.

That said, even reddit is getting less interesting these days.

My issue was that while the place was great for informative posts on fairly objective topics like tech or science, it was pure groupthink for anything social or political. I felt completely unwelcome and alien to the clearly dominant demographic of the place.

Did you intend the irony here?

Alas, I think it's past it's prime by a few years now and it is sad to see it's decline. But time does its thing. With the advent of Hacker News (and yes reddit too!), and arguablly a new generation of developers who used to read /. in high school and college have grown up a bit, and a much more relevant "News for Nerds" website has evolved. Not to mention the high-caliber of people and personalities who actively participate in the HN forums. But I wonder if HN would exist today if not for slashdot?

So hat's off to you Rob Malda aka CmdrTaco (Important note: In Soviet Russia, the hat takes off you!). You did a fine thing and planted a seed 15 years ago that not only informed, inspired, and shaped a generation of nerds but also the internet as a whole.

Happy 15th Anniversary /.!

EDIT: grammar and stuff

However, i can't get myself around their interface, i don't understand it/don't like it, i feel like their lacking a designer or something... in comparison with HN.

So, I spend less time on it, and didn't create an account or anything, eventhough i'd like to...their UI just doesn't feel right.

- Reddit has best conversation because the red envelope tells you of replies.

- Hacker News has the best audience.

If these were combined into one site it would be hella cool, but unless HN evolves the tech I can tell you what site I won't expect to be around many years from now. Blacklisting unsavory contributors and deleting posts is only going to work to maintain standards for so long.

While I'd agree that some of the /. +5 comments can be worth reading, the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.

Because Slashdot actually provides the facilities to do so. If I could browse +5 HN comments then believe me I would.

> the populism, trolling, and general lack of real-world experience of other posters made participating in the discussions pointless and even counter-productive.

I could make the same argument about HN.

As others pointed out, even +5 /. browsing leaves you with a stilted half-conversation where you have to expand lower-rated comments to even understand the points being made in the replies. Even worse, often times you'll find some really great comments moderated into the ground there just because they aren't politically correct. Good debate and logical thinking aren't very appreciated there, just snarky comments and closely following the prevailing groupthink.

I could make the same argument about HN.

You could try. I don't think that it would be a particularly good argument. Slashdot's vicious trolling, moderation stalking, and general nastiness is something that I saw way too many times. Discovering HN last year was a huge breath of fresh air. I appreciate it and won't be taking it for granted any time soon.

Your take on /. is also overly negative. I've enjoyed it for many years. The reason I'm here more lately is that I've grown tired of much of the topics there, (such as software licensing) which I have little interest in.