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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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The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
-- Andy Warhol
(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
(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
(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]