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by codinghorror 4933 days ago
Slashdot isn't emulated anywhere (can you name any other site that has a discussion system like Slashdot?), and is near death from my perspective.

I view Slashdot as one of the weird Galapagos animals: interesting, to be sure, but a giant evolutionary dead-end.
2 comments
saurik 4933 days ago
If you are going to be really specific, no: I can't even come up with another website that uses a discussion system like reddit's or HN's, as they both have subtle differences in all the things that apparently count, from how they hide/collapse subposts to how they handle moderation.

I mean, if all you are looking for is "infinitely-deep hierarchical discussion based around people posting links", then there are tons of clear-cut examples; the #1 difference between more "modern" sites (reddit, HN) and Slashdot is that the latter was slightly less "Web 2.0" in that you didn't vote on the articles: the articles were hand selected from the submission queue.

It is only cookie-cutter systems that are simple to install, like phpBB, Futaba, or OSQA (which as you are well aware, is not really much like StackOverflow except at first glance ;P), that you see replicated exactly all over the Internet. Otherwise, everything has their little quirks (if they didn't, they probably wouldn't exist in the first place ;P).

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lmm 4933 days ago
Slashdot is threaded, Reddit is threaded, HN is threaded. You're right that J. Random PHPBB forum isn't (and that taken together there are more of J. Random PHPBB forums around).

I wonder if it's simply the lack of any super-simple forum software in a popular language that supports threading - slashcode was famously unreadable perl, HN is a dead lisp dialect, I don't know what reddit uses.

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TeMPOraL 4932 days ago
> HN is a dead lisp dialect,

pg will be unhappy with calling Arc dead :P.

> I don't know what reddit uses.

Python (started as Common Lisp though).

Also LessWrong uses modified Reddit code to have threaded discussions under articles, and again, as saurik keeps saying, I can bet that 90% of discussion content wouldn't be there if comments were linear. Web discussion is non-linear by nature.

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