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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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Do not use if foil seal is broken.
(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.
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(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday May 03 2016, @04:55PM
P.S. Yes, I was 'gidds' on Kuro5hin too.
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