[kstrauser]

Among other things, almost all stories used to have at least a couple hundred comments. Today there are stories on the front page with less than 10.

The last nail in the coffin for me was their utter refusal to remove absolutely abhorrent comments. Not stuff like "I voted for someone different than you did", but bullshit like https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11756830&cid=561389... (CW: extreme antisemitism). I spent a lot of time on Slashdot over the years, and had a 4-digit UID that I'd bust on the inevitable "who's been here longer?" comment chains. But while they have the right to allow the comments section to fill with horrid stuff, I don't want anything to do with that.

[oliyoung]

> at least a couple hundred comments.

for context, that's when a "a couple hundred comments" was as big as "a couple of thousand/tens of thousands" of comments is now.

Slashdot was the centre of the (tech) internet for a long time.

[kstrauser]

Definitely. Given how much smaller the Internet was at the time, a lot of the people actually making the Internet -- Linux developers, webmasters, hardware designers, network protocol authors, etc. -- were packed into that one amazing forum and debating what to do next. It was amazing in its heyday.

[II2II]

> The last nail in the coffin for me was their utter refusal to remove absolutely abhorrent comments.

Slashdot was the first site that I frequented where I had to take a hard look at it and say, "I don't like what this place has become and I don't want to be a part of it." Sadly, it wasn't the last.

[eadmund]

That filth you linked to is scored 0, which I think means it is not visible by default. I think it is preferable to leave stuff like that available-but-hidden rather than to delete it altogether. Free speech is a virtue.

[kstrauser]

Hard disagree. That comment isn't contributing to dialog, even of the heated variety. It's hatred for the sake of hatred, and I don't think there's a place for it.

I'm happy to debate with earnest people I disagree with. That's interesting, and done well, we can both learn from it. There's no value in repulsiveness for the sake of repulsiveness. I don't expect a forum mod to be on top of every single comment ever made, but when things like what I linked are reported but stay up, the moderators are saying, yeah, we're fine with spending server resources to host that.

[erik_seaberg]

Slashdot has always had firm political leanings that include opposition to censorship. And stupid conspiracy theories always claim they’re being suppressed, which thrives when they can point to it actually happening.

[kstrauser]

To the contrary, there's a lot of evidence that deplatforming actually works. In this case, it's not about getting rid of uncivil users, but dropping blatant trash. There are any number of website willing to host that filth. Why give them an additional platform out of a misguided sense of ideological purity, saying that horridly racist trolling is just as valid as any other content?

[handoflixue]

You've kinda lost track of object reality there: "Only logged in users who are deliberately un-hiding this content" is hardly "as valid as any other content".

Slashdot's attitude is that things which are "removed" (voted to zero) ought to be auditable. This means everyone knows what the rules REALLY are (as opposed to what people SAY they are), and it also prevents the system from being abused (since you can trivially link to examples of that abuse)

I really don't think an auditable record of moderation decisions is that bad, and you have to understand that this is NOT "content that is presented to regular users." I don't remember my login anymore, so I can't even figure out how to see the comment you linked - I'm sure if I logged in and reset myself to view negative scores I COULD see it, since I've used the site before, but it is distinctly non-trivial to do so.

[thaumasiotes]

It looks like there's a slider at the head of the comments section controlling which comments are displayed with their text, which comments are "abbreviated", and which aren't visible at all. The line between abbreviated and hidden is defaulting to a position just less than 1, so a comment with a score of 0 has no representation on the page other than an indicator somewhere in the comment thread saying "[n] hidden comment(s)".

The comment will become visible (in abbreviated form) if you drag that slider over to just less than 0 (and load all the comments).

kstrauser is definitely choosing to see the comment.

[kstrauser]

I’m definitely not logged in. Do you have a content blocker that hides comments on websites?