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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday October 06 2017, @11:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the upon-the-shoulders-of-others dept.

There is a story up on medium.com by Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco) reflecting on Slashdot's start twenty years ago, on October 5th, 1997. For those who may be new here, the code driving this site you are reading is based on an old version of slashcode. If it weren't for Rob's efforts starting way back then, there would be no SoylentNews today.

Within a few days of DNS registration, Slashdot.org was live. I quickly added polls to answer urgent questions like "How many shots should Kurt drink". While he suffered the results of these polls, I would tail -f on the access_log and the residents of the so-called Geek House would boggle as names like 'mit.edu' and 'microsoft.com' streamed forward faster than we could read.

Rapid change followed: traffic soon created real expenses requiring hardware, colocation, and advertising. The code was in constant flux: adding user accounts, moderation, the submissions bin. And of course performance improvements to deal with the unyielding traffic growth. All the while I posted story after story, and our readers matched us with more comments than we thought possible.

My friends began contributing more and more. From code, to old hardware, to posting stories and coordinating advertising, we formed Blockstackers with a purpose. Slashdot went from from something with a stupid name that I was building into something we were building... with the help of thousands of nerds around the world that we would never meet in person.

I first visited Slashdot in its very early days. I saw the creation of UIDs and nicknames... and the database crash which lost all of the accounts so people had to sign up again. (Those with very low UIDs were very much not pleased!)

The code that drive the site you are reading is based on a version of Slashdot's code which they released as open source. Sadly, that version had not been maintained for years, so it had dependencies on out-of-date packages like Apache, and basically fell all over the floor — many long days were spent to get the code into shape. Our updated version of the code, rehash, is available on github.

I suspect I'm not the only one who came to SoylentNews who has many years' experience on Slashdot. Feel free to use this as an opportunity to share your remembrances of the early days there — and of SoylentNews, as well — which will be 44 months old on October 14th.

[Update: As mentioned in the story, these sites do not run or fund themselves. At the time of this writing, we have received approximately $537 towards our goal of $3000.00 for the half-year period ending 2017-12-31. We accept credit card payments and even Bitcoin. If you would like to contribute something to SoylentNews, please take a moment to go to our Subscribe page. The dollar amount is the minimum amount for the stated duration, but you are free to set it to whatever larger value you like. If you don't want the subscription for yourself, some folks make a gift subscription to NCommander who has UID 2. Oh, and in case you were not aware, none of the staff collect any kind of income for their work — we are all volunteers and give freely of our time and energy. --martyb]


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday October 06 2017, @01:37PM (9 children)

    by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Friday October 06 2017, @01:37PM (#577993) Journal

    I can't figure out if I should mod this up or down. Nor can I think of a bad car analogy.

    Something something series of tubes for carrying CowboyNeal.

    --
    Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:44PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @01:44PM (#577998)

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday October 06 2017, @04:46PM (6 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday October 06 2017, @04:46PM (#578112) Journal

      In Soviet Russia, Beowulf clusters imagine YOU … naked and petrified ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 06 2017, @05:13PM (5 children)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 06 2017, @05:13PM (#578135) Journal

        I'm only half-naked, you insensitive clod!

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2, Funny) by DECbot on Friday October 06 2017, @05:19PM (4 children)

          by DECbot (832) on Friday October 06 2017, @05:19PM (#578141) Journal

          Memes upon memes!

          It's memes all the way down!

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 06 2017, @05:24PM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 06 2017, @05:24PM (#578147) Journal

            All Your Memes Are Belong to Us.

            I still remember near the end of the great run of that meme seeing it carved in a restroom in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Funny how all that stuff can become part of your lingua franca.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday October 06 2017, @05:38PM

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday October 06 2017, @05:38PM (#578162) Journal

            We need more Gwyneth Paltrow memes:

            https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/06/26/0326206 [soylentnews.org]
            https://soylentnews.org/~takyon/journal/2451 [soylentnews.org]

            --
            [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday October 09 2017, @06:10PM (1 child)

            by bart9h (767) on Monday October 09 2017, @06:10PM (#579346)

            Memes upon memes!
            It's memes all the way down!

            I heard you like memes.
            So I made a meme of a meme, so you can meme while you meme!

            • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday October 09 2017, @09:01PM

              by DECbot (832) on Monday October 09 2017, @09:01PM (#579420) Journal

              That sounds like a silicon valley business proposal!

              1. Someone makes a meme
              2. Someone memes the meme
              3. Tech startup aggregates and syndicates the memes of the memes
              4. ???
              5. Profit!!!

              Let's write a charter and troll post on HackerNews for VC cash! No one will beat our burn rate!

              --
              cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Friday October 06 2017, @06:48PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Friday October 06 2017, @06:48PM (#578223) Journal

    At least it's not a GNAA post.