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by MountDoom 252 days ago
HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away.

HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".
2 comments
latchkey 252 days ago
> Slashdot withered away

/. withered away because it was sold off multiple times and lost its mojo.

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MountDoom 252 days ago
People say that, but the sales didn't really change anything. The site still looks pretty much the way it did back in the day.

I think the main thing is just that Slashdot "belonged" to the BOFH / sysadmin subculture that's largely gone. In my younger years, that was the tech career to aspire to. Nowadays, kids want to work at OpenAI / Google / a billion-dollar future unicorn, so the SF Bay Area ethos is dominant.

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km144 251 days ago
You hit the nail on the head. There is no place on the internet more broadly susceptible to the same kinds of "founder brain" malaise that has afflicted so many in Silicon Valley--i.e. "I am good at software development so therefore I am confident I have a good understanding of (and opinion on) all sorts of intellectual topics".
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