Slashdot's CmdrTaco steps down

Fourteen years later, Slashdot co-founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda has stepped down. In a stirring, moving note, he talks about the history of Slashdot and what he's going to get up to next.

Slashdot has been read by kernel engineers and billionaires. By sys-admins and CEOs. By high school kids and government bureaucrats. But what brings so many of them together is that we are nerds. It never ceases to amaze me the similarities that I find between us all when I climb out of my dungeon and go meet readers. From the inside of some of the most wonderful places on earth, to conference halls with useless wireless connections, to cube farms, you guys always reminded me of why I started this thing in the first place. We share something important and unquantifiable.
The internet has changed dramatically since I started here, and that's part of my reason for leaving. For me, the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site. While my corporate overlords and I haven't seen eye to eye on every decision in the last decade, I am certain that Jeff Drobick and the other executives at Geeknet will do their best. I am unquestionably confident in the abilities of the Slashdot editors and engineers- some of whom have been here just short of forever. They have proven themselves in the best and worst of conditions to be capable and dedicated.
As part of my resignation, after this story appears I will lose the ability to post. For me, this is the most bitter pill to swallow. Posting stories has always been my favorite part of the job. I created Slashdot to share these stories with my friends from IRC and school. It was never 'work'. Now I will have to go cold turkey. I'm walking away from the soapbox I built. I wish I could continue to post stories forever, but those closest to me know that if I maintained the ability to post, I'd never move on. I'll continue to read Slashdot and hopefully my occasional story submissions will make the cut. My old mantra: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters still holds true here today. Nobody does it better.

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot

(Image: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from redjar's photostream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Happy Mutants • slashdot • web theory

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championselector

damn… go in grace and peace and thank you for making me feel cool. respect.
GrymRpr

Slashdot has been losing traffic for a while now so the writing was kinda on the wall.
- http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith
  
  Slashdot has been losing traffic for a while now so the writing was kinda on the wall.
  
  The moderation system is losing out to bots which create a new account for every spam post. Some engineering will be required to work around that. I am a long time slashdot user but I find reddit more addictive now. Slashdot loses out by not being topical. People see a story break on another site while the /. editors wait for peak traffic time to post it.
lyd

I feel sad and old.
xunker

Soapbox time.

I think it’s really difficult for someone who has never created something to understand the gravity of a move like this. This is more than just changing jobs or taking some time out of the industry; for a project like that and an individual like that, this is epoch-making. It’s the sort of thing that creates a “Before” and “After” delineation

People would say it’s like sending your kids off to college. I don’t know, I don’t have kids, so I can’t say. What I can say is I’ve had the same experience of building something huge on the web and then later had to make the decision to leave it.

I always felt a connection to Rob & Co because it seemed like they were in the same situation I was, in that they basically “fell into” running something huge and meaningful. Yes, it wasn’t chance and they knew what they were trying to do (as did I), but the idea that other people with no experience or skill can have success that they don’t adequately understand gave me a lot of catharsis.

To create something, to build something, and then to let it go after it has _become_ your life is very painful.. though at the time very liberating.

You can’t spend years of your life and gallons of sweat then leave without at least a little regret. You’re not human if you don’t.
tacochuck

Is it just my imagination or did they basically invent blogging? I don’t remember a system where people were posting a paragraph or two on a topic with or without a link to a related web page and then there was threaded discussion on that item.

I understand there were BBS’s and usenet prior to slashdot, and probably web based forum software, but I don’t recall anything like the now typical blog post with threaded discussion prior to slashdot.

I also think the community moderated nature of slashdot is superior in theory to just about any other moderation system out there.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  They were certainly there at the beginning. What they were certainly pioneers of was the use of “karma” ranking of comments and commenters. That’s the only thing that makes some forums readable at all, despite the noise of spam and trolls.
  
  I assume a lot of PhD theses are examining the application of karma as a kind of synaptic weighting in data mining the social web. ”Like”, “+1″, and retweeting may be descendants of this system, but without the stickiness and feedback of association with the user-id and using the user-id’s karma as a factor in the rating I think they lose some of the value.
  
  Anyway, my eternal thanks to him for that bit of filtering empowerment.
  
  Also, I think he taught the world to have scaling contingency capacity for sudden massive spikes in server load. ;-)
- http://twitter.com/mkelley mike k
  
  Blogging was around way before /, or before it was called a weblog.
herrnichte

It sure seems that there is a typical pattern to these sorts of endeavors:
1. the cool rebel ascendancy
2. a perceptible leveling off
3. acquiring expanded investment
4. the investors gaining influence
(4.5 profit?)
5. then a steady downward decline

well, hopefully Mr Malda is out there already working on a new #1…
Geof Glass

I’ve been reading Slashdot since at least 1998. I dearly hope it survives Rob’s departure. I have found it almost unique as a site with effective moderation that scales. Discourse is effectively anonymous, yet it’s a place where I have found that a well-made argument and sound evidence often succeed even when it doesn’t adhere to the reigning wisdom or ideology. (I think the history of global warming opinion on the site – where skeptics once dominated – backs this up.)

The moderation system is one of a kind, and it goes way beyond +1 votes. Malda and co. found that users would try to treat the system as a game by achieving high scores, first posts, etc. So they systematically went about eliminating anything that could be gamed. (Leaving me somewhat disturbed by the current fad of “gamification.”) That’s why karma is an adjective (not a number) and why scores top out at +5. The limits on moderation (small numbers of mod points randomly granted, a rule against modding and commenting in the same discussion) discourage the typical news site practice of littering the place with +1/-1 mods. The norm for moderation is to prefer promotion to demotion, and to moderate for quality, not personal agreement. Then there’s meta moderation, though only the admins know how well that works. I’ve seen the system misused, but in general the moderation is so good that I, consistent with the frequent admonition to RTFA, seldom actually do so – preferring to read top comments instead. If there is one thing I would wish from mainstream news sites with their polarizing voting systems amounting to little more than popularity contests, it is that they learn from the success of Slashdot.

The community has its problems. They tend to be incredibly sexist (not surprising given that they are something like 94% male) and susceptible to a number of ideological myths. But the ability to respond effectively and be recognized for it is very satisfying. I believe I have sensed a political shift over the years that makes me hopeful for the future and reinforces my belief that it’s a place where good arguments matter.
spool32

Damn… end of an era, in many ways. Meta-moderation! blind goatse.cx links! Getting slashdotted…

ahh well. Things move on, but the moderation system and the forums they built were fantastic long before most people realized. Blog comment sections like this are still (still!!) a distant second. A pale shadow.

We’ve sorta settled for a crappy system, and I’m honestly not even sure why.
traalfaz

I kinda gave up on Slashdot a few months ago when it got to the point where everything on it was something I’d already read somewhere else a day earlier.
Still, whatever Rob lands on next, I’ll go there and give them a try, whether he starts something new or jumps in as an editor or contributor somewhere. His contributions were always more than cut-and-paste.
- Gilgongo
  
  You’re doing in wrong: /. isn’t about currency, it’s about discussion. For me, slashcode means that I’m instantly reading some pretty informative commentary.
Geof Glass

As for Slashdot being late with stories, I don’t really care. It’s the comments I value. If I read a story first somewhere else, I’ll still go to Slashdot to see what people have to say.
- Jason Boudreau
  
  I agree completely! I’ll always try to find the same story on either Slashdot or Boing Boing, since the comments on both are generally informative and insightful (see what I did there? Har.). I’ve tried to quit in the past, but the user comments and the rating system just keep dragging me back.
- Andrew Conlon
  
  Every time I see an interesting tech story somewhere else (like Boing Boing), I quickly run off and see if its hit /. yet. I heard about the Steve Jobs thing on the radio, and quickly thought “oooohh… Slashdot is going to be VERY entertaining today”.
  
  That said, Slashdot has some problems. There are fewer tech type people (not that I’m one), and everything is getting far too political. I never minded the “crazy libertarian” contingent, but now the “tea party” contingent has decided that it is their god-given duty to find a way to bash Barack Obama or “socialism” on ever topic, no matter how apolitical it is.
gorkon

Hemos is at Google now. Maybe they can pick up Rob.
p0zitr0n

Oh, I always imagined Cmdr Taco looked like Charlie Stross.
dwdyer

Even though I don’t visit /. that often these days, I’m still proud of my four digit user ID there and my “Excellent ” karma.
Damian Barajas

Steve jobs is out, Cmdr Taco is out, Bill gates is out. That just leaves:
Moot, craig, Drew and the boingboing gang.

Who can stop google now?

I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.
http://twitter.com/badtux99 Bad Tux

I have a three-digit Slashdot user ID and “Excellent” karma under my real name, so there :).

Actually, I used Slashdot prior to the user ID system and resisted obtaining a user ID for a week or two. I felt that the trend towards online news / commenting sites requiring user ID/password pairs was a mistake, that it was going to ghettoize the online community into a collection of individual communities each of which had its own culture and user community, and that it was going to make it difficult moving forward to have the sort of creative cross-pollination that kept online communities fresh and interesting. To a certain extent I was right — HaloScan for Blogger came along without the ID/password pairs as did WordPress, and created a large ecosphere of blogs that people moved between whereas the Slashdot model was to try to capture the users and keep them on the site (so as to get more ad impressions). Combined with Google Reader, it’s no wonder that Slashdot’s traffic is off… their fundamental business model has gone the way of buggy whips because the days of capturing an audience is over, decentralization has won.

That said, the users who do remain at Slashdot are a bunch of very bright people and on my rare visits there, I generally learn something from them. That appears to be the fate of the notion of “online communities” today — they have to concentrate on a narrow area that can attract a specialist audience, or else they just fade away. Whether “Geek” is a narrow enough area is a good question that I don’t have an answer to.
social_maladroit

Damn, he looks so young in that picture! And for $DEITY’s sake, will someone please let him see the inside of the data center Slashdot’s servers are in?

Slashdot’s definitely made me a happy mutant for some time now, because of their interesting mix of stories and the intelligent discussion that usually ensues (which their moderation/meta-moderation system greatly enhances). It’s always been interesting to see how their posters’ politics trend libertarian (what is it about software nerds and libertarianism?) and to witness the depth of technical expertise on display.
jeremy slawson

been reading and posting on slashdot for ten years or more. Its the only place to go to get opinions in discussion threads. News sites like the BBC and NYT could desperately do with slashcode. We deserve an arab spring too and slashdot leades the way. Its time we had our say instead of being told what to think by the advertising and marketing industry that our politicians use to control us.
Ryan Matheuszik

This is truly a sad day for Slashdot. I have been reading the site for years, and it is one of the few places on the internet with a lively, yet on-topic and respectful, discussion pertinent to the issues at hand.

Let’s hope that it remains as free from corporate interest as possible, and continues it’s reporting of real geek news, rather than just flashy gadget announcements.
http://profiles.google.com/d.o.teller David Rajchenbach-Teller

@google-c4066b0f98cf48ecb092208e55e584e4:disqus
Unfortunately, Slashdot has started a long time ago to be a massive PR target. My company has tried three times to be featured on Slashdot (and, ironically, succeeded today, just before the servers went down), just to get the buzz running.

@CmdrTaco:disqus
Thank you. Thank you for all these years of service to the geek community. And I’d like you to leave knowing which story I remember most vividly. Here’s a hint: it happened on February 14th, 2002. Wow, 9 years ago already. Well, so long, and thanks for the fish.
penguinchris

Recently I’ve not been reading Slashdot as much, though I do look at it every day. The problem is the discussions are usually so interesting that it takes a lot of time to read. I’ve been using that time to instead read BoingBoing and do other things. You can never really go away from it, though… I actually feel that as a reader and commenter for years and years that in a weird way slashdot is kind of part of who I am.

Other than BB, slashdot is the only internet discussion area that I bother to read with any regularity – the combination of an intelligent, interesting crowd and the generally excellent moderation system (though fraught with problems, in the end it works) is simply incredible and nothing else comes close. I don’t think with CmdrTaco’s leaving too much will change – it’s all about the users, not the people in charge, and it’s become more and more corporate controlled over the past few years anyway with little ill effect.
joshhaglund

I found boingboing via slashdot (user since ’96 or some early year, was one of the many who didn’t bother getting an account until accounts were over 5 digits) — it was (is) one of the sidebar options.
Ryan Lenethen

Not exactly what I pictured he looked like. My mental image what someplace like the comic book guy in Simpsons…
Ito Kagehisa

Rob’s a good guy. And yes, he does look that young, and being on the short side hasn’t helped him much with that!

@google-6cddc4fd8ebf329f8c05f5e837678e10:disqus – you’re thinking of Cowboy Neal, not Cmdr Taco!