Folks, it appears Kuro5hin is dead:
The site was founded by Rusty Foster in December 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot.[10] Kuro5hin's membership once numbered in the tens of thousands,[11] but its popularity declined significantly from its peak in the early 2000s.[13] On May 1st, 2016, the site was closed down permanently.
I didn't visit it. It seemed then like the bunker where the tinfoil hat brigade hung out. In the Slashdot days it served as the guardrail for conventional wisdom. But now that the tinfoil hat brigade has been entirely vindicated, and Kuro5hin is dead, it makes me a little sad. What are your favorite memories of Kuro5hin, and will we see its like again?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Tuesday May 03 2016, @09:12AM
Who/What is Kuro5hin, and why do I care.? A little background on what it was for all those other "tens of thousands" that have never heard of it.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday May 03 2016, @09:49AM
Nothing... get off my lawn and go back to sleep, kiddie.
Read yourself a bed story about Kuroshin [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Tuesday May 03 2016, @09:53AM
"Kiddie".?! I've been in IT for over 20 years, I am not a kiddie.! :)
Maybe I have never heard of it, because I don't go in for all this social bollocks (present site excluded)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:03AM
And in 20 years of IT, you didn't learn that doing as all the others do is not necessarily the wisest thing, mmm?
Case at point: you could start RTFA-ing from time to time for a change, S/N may be constrained by copyright laws from copy/pasting the entire FA for your convenience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:23AM
20 years of IT
[gentle chiding: ON]
Surely you know by now that you don't know everything...and how to look stuff up you may not know.
[gentle chiding: OFF]
...unless you're a windows guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:29AM
Even a Windows person should know how to follow a hyperlink.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:11PM
If the hyperlink is not posting on Twitter, then how should I follow him? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @01:59PM
Those first twenty years go by so fast, don't they Sonny? Come back and tell us what the second twenty were like, in a few years. Right now, get off the lawn. That's a good boy - DON'T FORGET TO WRITE - your mother, not me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @06:48PM
Those first twenty years go by so fast, don't they Sonny? Come back and tell us what the second twenty were like, in a few years. Right now, get off the lawn. That's a good boy - DON'T FORGET TO WRITE - your mother, not me.
PREACH ON BROTHA!
About halfway through the second twenty. It's an uncomfortable combination of confident and versatile mastery and crushing apathy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @07:06AM
And yet here you are, on a Slashdot wannabe site - facebook for nerds!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:29AM
Apparently you don't have to care:
founded ... in December 1999
peak in the early 2000s
Peaked a year after its founding, then started to decline.
Clearly it was a short-lived fad.
(Score: 5, Funny) by isostatic on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:59AM
You must be new here. I bet you never dreamed of Nattille Portman, naked and petrified either. When was the last time you poured hot grits down your pants?
(Score: 5, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 03 2016, @12:19PM
Is that the denied French sister of Natalie Portman?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:15PM
Why would anyone want to get off to a Jewess?
Natalie Portman is a Jewess!
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:46PM
Answered your own question, huh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @06:07PM
More like: "Why would anyone want to get off to a Jewess?"
Here, the reader agrees, thinking "Who would do such a thing?"
Then it hits: "Natalie Portman is a Jewess!"
The reader is now in shock at what he just learned. He just sits there staring at the words, unable to move. Then he wipes his face with his hand and remembers if and how many times he got off to the Jewess and vows never to do it again... unless he already knew the race of said actress and therefore does not watch any of her movies and does not get off to her.
There really are people who do not care about such things, but those are the brainwashed passive sheep. And there are others who look at the actors list and see if there are any undesirables in there and head the other way if there are Jews and their friends to be found. That is the way it is.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 03 2016, @12:09PM
It was big, so almost all you're gonna get is the blind men and the elephant parable, especially from the journalists who take a short simple narrative and copy paste everywhere into each article. It was bigger than what you can read about today. Bigger in the sense of width of experience not user numbers.
My memory was the front page articles were pretty much a previous generation of -chan posts, in that most were a waste of time but roughly a single digit percentage were pretty fascinating. It was a weird mix of real essays and 1000 monkeys pounding on typewriters and great steaming piles of impenetrable meme salad that make Ulysses look straightforward and unsymbolic.
For most of the time I knew of the site it was dying, which is funny. Like the local PBS TV station which has the same advertising shtick that we're right about to close, yeah right about tomorrow, for the past couple decades. Getting an account was convoluted and changed over time but I have the feeling it was always pay, and new accounts were outright closed for "a long time" maybe a decade.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:43PM
Mirrors my experience as well. The site was filled with garbage. It was so bad that the signal was below the noise floor and not even worth looking for.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gidds on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:49PM
I think you saw only the tail end. It wasn't always like that. (In particular, I don't recall paying for an account.)
IIRC, at its height (early to mid 2000s) it was roughly on a level with Slashdot; less technology-focused, more eclectic, with a readership a little smaller but a higher signal-to-noise, a wider range of viewpoints, and a greater tendency to sustained intelligent discussion.
Its decline was very gradual, but slowly the interesting people, stories, and discussions seeped away, leaving mainly crackpots.
I won't mourn it today, because I've already done so. For a few years at least, it was a good place to be.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:55PM
P.S. Yes, I was 'gidds' on Kuro5hin too.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @09:21AM
Of course it's a conspiracy! The American people conspired to elect a black man president, and then reelected him! That's how conspiracy happens!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:26AM
And a fine job he did of dressing up business-as-usual in a civil rights costume.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @03:57PM
Opening up Cuba. Blocking Iranian nukes. Obamacare. Dismantled the Minerals Management Service (one of the oil industry's crony agencies). Blocked tax inversions for off-shoring tax havens (which immediately killed the $160B pfizer 'merger'). Created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite wallstreet fighting it tooth and nail. Halted deportation of "DREAMers" as well as parents of legal residents. Ended federal funding for abstinence-only sex ed and ended the reagan-era "global gag rule" blocking funding of foreign family planning groups that offer or even talk about abortion. Reversed the growth of federal prison population for the first time in 30+ years. Etc, etc, etc.
The only reason you think its just "business-as-usual" is because you don't have any idea of the actual changes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @06:25PM
You left one off the list: Destroyed America.
Get a brain moran.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday May 03 2016, @07:04PM
You left one off the list: Destroyed America.
Get a brain moran.
Ha ha ha ha ha! America is still there, moron.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:45PM
pretty sure you are a victim of Poe's Law.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:05AM
Any archived pages to look at?
(Score: 3, Informative) by number6 on Tuesday May 03 2016, @10:44AM
(https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9052853&cid=52026359)
I have some of k5 archived
by Anonymous Coward - 2 May 2016, 2:51AM - (#52026359)
I wrote a k5 screen scraper, and have 95% of k5 diaries, unfortunately I don't have any stories.
Date range for my archive is: 2001-1-4 to 2015-7-22
For a total of 161,942 diaries [semantic-db.org]
Here is a summary of what I have in my archive [kr5ddit.com].
Here are some tables showing which kurons had the highest number of posts over the lifetime of k5 [kr5ddit.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @11:01AM
The rise and fall of diaries over time:
$ sed -ne 's/.*, \([12][90][901][0-9]\) at.*/\1/p' full-k5-diary-index.txt | sort | uniq -c
2520 2000
15655 2001
35476 2002
31645 2003
13824 2004
11407 2005
11694 2006
9255 2007
7269 2008
5403 2009
4143 2010
3237 2011
3248 2012
2756 2013
2515 2014
1693 2015
That bit probably died because of farcebook and twatter taking over.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday May 03 2016, @06:09PM
If the users could find farcebook and twatter a suitable replacement. Then maybe there weren't too much of out of the box thinkers there after all..
Btw, Anyone have some example (good) posts from the site?
(Score: 2) by number6 on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:01PM
We Are Morons a quick look at the Win2k source || kuro5hin.org (2004) -- Google cache of webpage [googleusercontent.com]
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:17PM
I suspected Microsoft code to be shit. Now I don't have to doubt anymore.. ;-)
"IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!!!!!!! /../ DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS"
"The specific idiot in this case is Office95, which likes
// to free a random pointer when you start Word95 from a desktop
// shortcut."
Hilarious. ;-)
Good thing that piece stinking code don't touch any important systems here ;)
More tip on good Kuro5hin posts is appreciated.
Btw, I have seen some Unix driver source author complain about brain dead hardware design. Like throwing a DMA transfer destination with an non-deterministic offset of 0-64 kB. *gosh* I think it as Re..ek :p
(Score: 2) by number6 on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:29PM
(for each result, click on the 'Cached' links) ?intitle:|| kuro5hin.org? - Google Search [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 03 2016, @11:45AM
#4, our very own beloved MDC! :)
I went to k5 every once in a while to look around: i came, i saw, i saw a lot of bitching about MDC and not a whole lot else.
Maybe i missed something, but couldn't see enough there to look closer at what i may have been missing. SoylentNews is much better, IMHO
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Informative) by butthurt on Tuesday May 03 2016, @11:05AM
The source for this story is Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's source is a Slashdot story [slashdot.org] that says:
It may be that themusicgod1 saw that the domain is parked and concluded from that fact that it'll never come back. I'm not aware that themusicgod1 has any information beyond having seen the parking page. It's possible this is a temporary outage for reasons such as: the owner didn't pay the hosting bill, the site is being moved to a new hosting service, the site was hacked, there was a hardware failure, there was a DDoS attack, or a software update went wrong.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:30PM
There's a bit more information from the owner at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11612648 [ycombinator.com]:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:00PM
What happened was basically that Internap shut down the data center we were in and had to move the servers, and I conspicuously failed to Deal With Things around that.
In response to losing Kuro5hin, Internap's share price dropped over 12% today. [yahoo.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rich on Tuesday May 03 2016, @11:44AM
Netcraft has confirmed it:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.kuro5hin.org [netcraft.com]
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday May 03 2016, @12:47PM
But how will we know when netcraft reaches its demise?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:14PM
Netcraft cannot die, as how would it confirm it?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @04:28AM
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even netcraft may die.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:01PM
ping and traceroute will confirm THAT.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @12:36PM
Walk the halls, and notice how small everything seemed to be?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @12:47PM
Oh c'mon, we thought those lockers were too damn small even back then.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:35PM
No, I was distracted by the fact that I kept getting older while the high school girls stayed the same age!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 03 2016, @01:03PM
What are your favorite memories of Kuro5hin, and will we see its like again?
When will we see a spinoff of Slashdot that experiences an all too brief rise of popularity followed by a long, slow death as users fade away? Makes you wonder doesn't it?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:53PM
When will we see a spinoff of Slashdot that experiences an all too brief rise of popularity followed by a long, slow death as users fade away? Makes you wonder doesn't it?
Aye I've been wondering about the long term viability here too. How do new users find SN given that Slashdot has (temporarily?) returned to barely passable. Is SN destined for Slashdot's sloppy seconds only? That may not be bad as it'd be great if the quality of users remains high and growth is not always good. However it'd be interesting to see the rates at which people engage the site to see if it has been increasing or decreasing.
I fear that SN may have to perform some form of marketing outreach so people know it exists. Though I don't know how to do that at all. It'd go something like this:
Soylent news! Now with more clue! Impress your friends, type things, get modded troll. Limitless libertarian ire awaits. You can't afford not to join today!
Yeah I'm not very good at this.
(Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:19PM
Aye I've been wondering about the long term viability here too. How do new users find SN given that Slashdot has (temporarily?) returned to barely passable. Is SN destined for Slashdot's sloppy seconds only? That may not be bad as it'd be great if the quality of users remains high and growth is not always good. However it'd be interesting to see the rates at which people engage the site to see if it has been increasing or decreasing.
Honestly, while I like it when we get new members, I'd be perfectly fine with SN staying the same size and keeping the same community it has now. I've rarely seen an online community improve by adding more members (after a certain point of course).
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:47PM
While I get your point, I do think any site that is not growing will inevitably die. The trick, though, is to attract the right kind of new people to the site. We need people who can add insightful comments to the discussion, make interesting submissions to the queue, etc. We definitely don't need certain folks like the APK-guy spamming the comments. Just my $0.02.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Tuesday May 03 2016, @08:41PM
I'd be perfectly fine with SN staying the same size and keeping the same community it has now. I've rarely seen an online community improve by adding more members
And from an AC in an adjacent thread
While I get your point, I do think any site that is not growing will inevitably die. The trick, though, is to attract the right kind of new people to the site. We need people who can add insightful comments to the discussion, make interesting submissions to the queue, etc.
I believe you are both correct and all 3 of us want to see the same thing: maintain a constant quality of our experiences, which are defined by the community, at the expense of possible growth. One of my quirks is I always assume everything I see is being done wrong and I've learned to temper that and perform analysis. I was a Kuro5hin reader and contributor and rather enjoyed it but something went wrong. What it was I don't know but I think SN is at risk of it happening here too. Growth for growth's sake is something that would be done as a business decision to increase advertising revenue. Fortunately that economic incentive does not exist in SN. However stagnation is not good either. Contributors won't be here forever (at the very least they are going to die at some point) and enough stagnation will lead to atrophy; these are serious issues to consider as far as I can tell.
My verdict in regards to SN doing it wrong is as follows: there does exist a workflow and community standards that could produce a high quality user base and survive growth while maintaining high quality experiences. However it is not a technological problem by any means: it becomes a multidisciplinary problem. The primary domain is psychology: experts would be needed to identify why communities fall apart under growth and devise policies and cultural norms to combat them. The technology side is almost unnecessary except it is the means to deliver and enforce the design of the community system.
Final conclusion: SN is doing the best job they can considering the primary means of solving a problem is through technology. It doesn't seem reasonable for SN to be able to solve the psychological issues unless a working group of volunteers could be formed. But they would have to be qualified experienced psychologists, I don't think college graduates would be able to do it. If this can be tackled successfully it would produce some pretty good results.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GlennC on Tuesday May 03 2016, @02:34PM
I was one of the earlier members of Kuro5hin. As I recall, it started as a reaction to the perception that Slashdot was becoming too commercial. I wrote a couple of stories for the site, and contributed comments when I thought I could add to the conversation.
From the beginning, Rusty tried to say that it wasn't really "his" site, that it was "ours," and that we could make it what we wanted. While I thought that was a noble idea, I pointed out to him that I had no financial or commercial interest in the site, and neither did most people. Therefore, while we could have a voice, Rusty and his admins should provide a more structured editorial point of view.
As the site went on, I found the stories were less about "Technology and Culture From the Trenches," and more about various random musings. After a while, I lost interest and moved on to other aspects of my life.
I all but forgot about K5's existence, save for the occasional /. story, at which time I would check back in (surprisingly, my login still worked after several years absence) and find that very little had changed. If anything, the musings seemed even more random and vapid, so I did not return.
I advise the owners and admins of Soylent to look at the history of K5 and take the lessons learned to heart. As much as you may want to make it "our site," never forget that you need this to work more than we do.
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @03:34PM
I think the editors should be careful about posting political stories in which either TFA or TFS is clearly biased, unless there is a decent rebuttal or opposing view (perhaps offered by the editor) in the summary.
Other than that, I'm not in the "It better be News for Nerds" camp.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 03 2016, @03:50PM
Is to just completely rape and lampoon any subject brought up with factual information. The bias part doesn't matter as long as the citations are true and unbiased, even if the story isn't. Just look at politics. If you can get stories from RT, BBC, (Insert some US rag here), Al Jazeera, and whoever else, you will eventually end up with a bunch of biases that will eventually balance out. The trick is covering the stories from multiple angles and not using a single story as your sole citation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DarkMorph on Tuesday May 03 2016, @03:57PM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @02:13AM