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 Hello friends, welcome to the Hacker History podcast. This is where we hear the stories of our history from the hackers themselves. My name is Josh Bressers, your hacker historian here to guide you through this tale of hacker history. Today we're sitting down with Rob Commander Takamoldo Rob. Tell us your hacker story.

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 Oh, man uh, I guess I'm responsible for Slashdot uh, which uh to to you uh youngins out there, was sort of uh one of these web applications that bridge the gap between the uh era of Usenet uh and the beginning of the eternal September uh and uh then, but before like the the modern social media era, uh so uh we started Slashdot in ninety seven uh. So like, back

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Uh uh like you have a J_ PEG. You have J_ PEG support in your browser? Uh that's bonkers Uh. that's that's high level technology.

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 And it's funny, you you joke, but that's actually not a joke. Those were like legitimate concerns.

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 No, I mean what right before we started talking about this uh like I had a whole fact entry explaining to people that cookies were not evil because I needed cookies in order to maintain uh session data and that was how you maintain session data and in nineteen ninety three four five there really wasn't much in the way of uh persistent sessions on the web. Those were still pretty rare. Like credit cards on the web like that's like uh I dunno Amazon starts in like ninety eight or something like uh yeah.

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 Yeah.

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 people don't understand what didn't exist there Like. this is bef like I dunno, is geocities even a thing then I? mean it was n it was weird. But uh Slashdot's thing was kinda taking uh uh the notions of mailing lists in Usenet, uh and then I sort of rolled those ideas together with uh a community driven content an, aggregation system I guess a, community driven aggregation system, - Yeah yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Yeah.

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 none of which really existed uh in in in any scaled form uh at the time and we grew very quickly.

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 Yeah I I I can't think of anything that predates the way Slashdot worked prior to that. I mean and 'cause I'm we're probably pretty close to the same age which is just old at this point and yeah. And yeah it was I mean Usenet and mailing lists were how people communicated. There was the web was it didn't exist.

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 There were there were I mean like there were sites like Hot Wired uh and like I think some of the newspapers were s just sort of getting online by at the time too, uh but the the difference I think is that uh if you worked for a mainstream news publication uh in this era you were like the the orphaned uh person from the mainstream newspaper like you weren't integrated into their c essentially into their newsroom.

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 Uh and then on the other end you have sort of what y a few years later would be called blogs, but at the time didn't have that name uh which would just be people writing whatever they felt like uh on their site And. kind of what Slashdot sprouted out of was so I had I had what you would've call uh what you didn't call a blog back then called chips and dips uh and what that was doing was sharing with folks uh my open-source patchacious

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 uh I was writing I was writing like I was hacking uh I was putting patches in on window managers. I was big into X_ eleven uh Gooeys at the time. Uh I was doing themes for for different things for different window managers Uh. I was making themes for enlightenment. I wrote uh a bunch of little g little dock like applications that n like in, I guess in modern terms, that you would embed into your taskbar I. was writing things to do that uh for like volume controls and C_D_

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 controls like these things didn't exist necessarily. There were there were there were competing versions of the but I wrote stuff like that uh that worked for uh for the feeble virtual window manager, then for window maker for enlightenment Uh. and in my blog I would have like there's the new version of this and then also like I watched this movie uh but it was all like it was the the movies the, tech the, su the the sci-fi basically everything that slash dot would have covered was basically blended into my blog at the

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 Mm.

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 uh and uh I was maintaining it as flat H_T_M_L_ uh that's that works to a point Uh. but my my uh college part-time job at the time uh was building websites for folks I. built uh I I worked for an ad agency and I built uh like a very mediocre web site for a realtor uh and uh uh a really really mediocre uh interface for uh uh a

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 Uh what do you call 'em, a school, but like a like a private school that uh I was I was like building building out little tools for them uh and one fall uh uh uh well during during the previous school year uh my buddy Nate and I did a homework assignment uh where so this is like when Java like if you wanted to write Java you, ran the Java browser because of the Java support in the web browsers was still so unstable that you couldn't

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 Right right,

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 Right.

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 Nice.

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 homework assignment uh uh I I don't I don't remember if he wrote the sprite he wrote the sprite library and I think I wrote the game library and then I built all the graphics 'cause I I have an artistic background uh and I built uh I built the the graphics for it and then a few months later some guy found it uh and he was like hey I have a web site I'm I have a client that m sells popcorn uh could you make a version of this game where instead of aliens uh it's popcorn kernels and when you shoot them

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 with I guess butter they, pop or something uh and so I made graphics for that uh and then uh the guy uh in exchange mailed me a DEC alpha Miltia uh which at the time was like a like a forty six S_X_ like a really fast three eighty six or a really slow four eighty six but it could run Linux uh and back then it ran the alpha the version of Linux and uh at the time the the ad agency that I

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 Whoa.

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 was uh building uh these really horrible websites for, they needed a mail server Uh. it says alright this'll work uh I'll get a static I_P_ uh and uh my little deck alpha Moltea will run S_M_T_P_ for you Uh. and then I'll have an actual Unix workstation or Unix machine uh at the time we were doing uh some of our hosting on an N_T_ server and and some of it on uh uh SparkStation uh that was

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 hosted by the local uh the local free net. And uh uh but this gave me a like a machine that I had root on uh with a static I_P_ uh, and so I learned Perl uh and I learned uh like the the r whatever tool suites, and was able to then like kind of up my game from using whatever horrible mediocre stuff ran on Windows_N_T_ at the time uh which was uh a really terrible database li library thing called I_D_C_ Internet database connect which,

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 interfaced uh Microsoft's whatever version of I_A_S_ was current at the time to like w must have been Microsoft S_Q_L_, mi but some S_Q_L_ server uh of that era. Uh but I got to actually like use Perl and like use Unix tools, which is what I'd been using uh in college. I was uh a computer science major at the time. Uh so it gave me access to what I would say were real tools.

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 Uh and so I spent my time uh kinda learning how that works uh, how I I got the machine up and running and then I ported my blog, which up until that point had been me editing text files uh to uh I wrote a really terrible Perl C_G_I_ app uh which I was like oh this is fine uh, but for those of you who are around in ninety seven you understand that uh a Perl C_G_I_ app in nineteen ninety seven recompiles itself every

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 Yep.

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 time uh that somebody does a page request. So this was not a particularly scalable solution, which at the time I'm like this is no big deal right, but inside of uh inside of uh a month or so I'm getting tens of thousands of page views a day. Uh and the whole internet back then.

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 Yeah yeah,

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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 Mm-hmm.

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 hundred baud. And then when social media sort of catches on uh you know, five, six, seven eight years later, those were people who were like, my family had a cable modem. Uh my ca my family had uh a fifty six K_ modem. Uh like they were generation they like they're whe they had a web they never knew an internet that didn't have a web browser with graphics Uh. and my my audience were the people who were like, well you can use

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 fancy for graphics That's. that's pretty good That's. pretty good You. can bust out the draw uh and and you can use the draw to make really sweet graphics. This can blink uh if you want. Uh I got sixteen colours and they can blink So. it looks really nice Um. so tha that was like the sort of the error of the mentality And. then so for like uh for the first couple of years it's just uh it's basically just me in a

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 uh against the traffic uh because we grow over the course of two years, three years we go from you know from a few thousand hits a day to a few hundred thousand hits a day uh and so th my system has to migrate from the DEC alpha multi uh to uh we p I ported the whole thing uh well then I added S_Q_L_ uh the original version of it hosts and everything was stored in a text file.

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 Nice.

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 Uh so like every single article was stored in text files delineated by like percent percent uh and line break. Uh but you know you could load that up into Perl with a split command and it's real easy to maintain so it was like oh whatever one line of code who cares. Uh so uh I I ran uh I g I got a my my buddy got a new machine so I got his old machine he and this was a uh Pentium two uh with uh two C_P_Us

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 Whoa.

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 uh fancy right, And then we used that as the database server and I think we used the other one for a while as uh just the web host. By that point I rewrote uh enough of the the C_G_I_ application to be mod Perl so it could be compiled. Uh and that went that that lasted that was scalable enough uh m but at that point we were connected via a T_ one to our I_S_P_ who had a T_ one and when we were saturating the entire

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 T_ one

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 basically the the town of Holland had like three T_ ones running in it and we were saturating one of them uh so basically the entire I_S_P_ was more or less shut down uh during peak hours of slash-re

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 peak hours of slash out they're like you gotta go Uh. so uh then we had to actually migrate uh everything over to uh an actual I_S_P_ uh and we had to do co-located boxes and uh that that then so then we're like two years old uh a year and a half old and at that point we're doing like you know we're doing like a hundred thousand or eighty thousand, hundred thousand page views a day and uh that sustained for like another year or so year or two

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 Yep yep,

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 we got acquired uh by a company called Andover dot net and from there uh we got to uh uh like getting some get some Real Iron like we got like uh like I think at that point maybe we had four or five or six web servers uh, something like that. And then a couple of back-end uh a couple of back-end database servers like redundancy and using round-robin D_N_S_ like this is this is like the sort of thing that uh you know even a couple of years

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 later even probably then maybe it wasn't the best idea but like in in two thousand you know we're just doing the best we can Uh. and it's it's always from the technology side it's always just trying to keep up like we're gonna be we're gonna get w a couple percent more traffic tomorrow, what do we do and uh so and it and that continued honestly for and until maybe two thousand six two thousand seven the traffic was just would just go go go go

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 Wow.

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 And so we would basically spend all of our time optimising as best we could uh to main to to keep the system stable uh and at some point we basically stopped being allowed to get new hardware uh, w at some time it was probably the dot com crash uh and then after that we couldn't really get new hardware. So uh for the next several years, we couldn't afford to hire people. We couldn't afford to buy new hardware more or less, so we basically just kind of tread water and

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 optimise as best we can by adding the minimum functionality we kind of can to survive, but by that point the moderation system was already sort of built-and-functioning uh and the uh the back-end editorial system was back-end and functioning and like everything everything that would have existed or that it existed through my tenure at Slashtop was more or less built, s uh we added little features here and there and we optimised and stuff but but the core of

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 what made slash dot slash dot was more or less built in two thousand one two thousand two. And then any time we tried to change anything after that uh the readers would get angry. So uh we kinda stopped we kinda stopped uh uh doing that.

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 I I lied.

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 A little one.

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 That that's a lie. It's total lie. But

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 So you started out with your blog chips and dips. And did that when when you turned that into a Perl application, did that just turn into slash dot or was slash dot like a purposeful new thing that was built?

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 room So. in my dorm in my in in in my dorm in my junior year uh we we we purposefully selected my my friends and I all got a floor on the same dorm because we knew that was gonna be the first dorm to have Internet on campus.

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 Yep yep,

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 Uh my machine uh officially was called MAL-DAR or MAL-DAR-R uh MAL-DAR-ROB and uh but the but the the host file was named slash dot because it was it was funny to have your home directory uh h you know slash dot slash dot like it was it was a it was a mouthful I was trying to be silly. Uh and so uh when I got uh when I when I got the DEC alpha MAL-TIA uh I decided well it had to have a domain name.

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 Ah.

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 uh, so I just used that domain I registered what uh had been my desktop's name uh, and then uh uh brought that uh that up. Uh and then the machine itself was live uh for maybe a month or so while I was developing the first version of the code. I started writing the code uh in like the summer of uh in the summer of ninety seven, uh and my roommate Dave wrote a chunk of the code and I wrote a chunk of the code and some of my

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 friends would contribute little bits here and there. Uh and the idea was that we all would get email addresses that a added a vanity domain name, which would be super fun. Uh and uh uh over time uh like Jeff uh Jeff paid half the domain registration fee when I registered as he most he paid he chipped it I. was like I'm g I'm I'm sitting on the couch like I'm gonna register a domain name tonight and alright cool uh I wanna dom I want an email address I'll give you I'll give you some money I'll give you half the money Back. then back then it was like a hundred bucks or something like that.

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 Yeah.

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 it was not cheap. Uh um so uh uh w I poured in the th I I'd built the system knowing that it was gonna have a static I_P_ knowing that it was gonna ultimately have a domain name. And knowing that I ultimately was going to port my blog, which was running in the computer science uh SPARK station cluster at Hope College at the time, uh but it was one of those things where it's like it was uh C_S_ dot hope dot

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 you slash tilde malda slash you know like like a really convoluted uh domain name. But from my end I was just thinking well all of these things that I'm learning how to do here registering, domain names uh, hosting hosting, them all, of those those components that, was the sort of stuff that I w I would need to know uh for my part time job at the ad agency building sharty websites. I was like well these are just the sorts of things that I would wanna learn uh and porting my blog

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 pages over to this was all just like it was like self-education I. was just teaching myself what I wanted to know in order to in order to do these things. There wasn't there wasn't like a plan or anything. It was just like the next logical step uh of what it was working on 'cause I was I w I wanted to learn how to build better web applications.

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 Sure. Sure.

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 did you ha w when did you realise like this is a thing that's catching on and it's getting real?

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 Yeah uh there's a there's a few moments that I that I generally like to cite uh one of the one of the things like even like a month or two in uh I remember hanging out uh in the living room uh we were renting a house at the time with uh uh th three or four of the guys that w we we formed a company called block stackers a year later, but most of the most of the guys that were in block stackers were liv were my roommates at the time uh it was a

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 house where we like drilled holes in the walls so we could run cat cat was it ever even cat five back then? Uh there were like ten megabit network cards back then and it was pretty pretty pretty pimp uh s uh oh for sure uh for sure Uh. w at the time we uh that house had an I_S_D_N_ line so I think we had a hundred and twenty eight K_ but it was a twenty four seven connection right, Oh. so good so good.

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 So

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 Yeah we we uh we uh had uh this home network uh worked up, we're all wired in and we're all kinda disconnecting to this thing and I'm the one that kinda runs I m I run slash dot it's, my baby. Everybody else kinda chips in here and there.

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 uh I was just doing a tail dash F_ on the log file uh on the access logs. And uh I just remember sitting there and and you know like, you would see like our college, because our friends my, friends would be on the site, you know we'd and we would see the the the local the m the Makatahwa area free, net was the network that we're gonna ha but then we would see like MIT.E_D_U_, and we'd see microsoft.com uh

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 and we were like seeing all these real companies uh i like their their domain names flying through uh the access log. And i th like that's when we were like oh uh like this isn't just us screwing around with our friends 'cause there's one thing when you like s post something and you get fifty sixty, seventy comments, but there's another thing to actually like look so so back then uh there was no user account system. Every post on Slashdot was anonymous.

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 Okay.

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 Uh yes, that's right. Right.

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 the the account that you posted as when you were an honest but but prior to that anybody who posted with leaving that form blank uh became anonymous coward uh B. because of that like I didn't really have a sense of how big the the user pa base actually was because this could be one guy posting thirty times or this could be thirty guys posting one time I. didn't really know I and I was pretty busy at sa I was still in college right, I'm still like trying to get through my senior

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 year and graduate. Uh so like I didn't c really understand until I started looking at these log files, oh no, we're getting not only are we getting you know thousands of people coming to this to thi a day, these are people who are coming from the businesses that you're talking about, like you're you're complaining about Microsoft's monopoly, you're com you're complaining about a lawsuit, uh you're you're celebrating the open source release of a

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 Yep.

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 version of a piece of software and, those people are all here reading right along with you Uh. they and in many cases they were posting uh right along with us on the website. Uh the other one that uh the other one in the early days we one of the first things that we engineered was the polling system so you could uh we could have polls because even in even in nineteen ninety seven uh polling is like the you know user polls are just the coolest way uh to gain user interaction uh but

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 uh we we posted uh one night uh one of my roommates was Kurt we, called him Kurt the Pope and uh we posted how many shots should Kurt drink uh and it was like two four eight sixteen or something like that and sixteen got like a thousand votes in like a minute and they're just like oh.

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 yeah yeah. A as one might expect uh it was it was it was very wild Now. the site didn't the site still was kind of a local thing, a smaller scale thing, until uh early in January of ninety eight uh at which point uh I wrote uh a little editorial uh this is this is i in the era where uh internet explorer has been announced by Microsoft and

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 yep.

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 their operating system monopoly uh will uh was was being I don't think it was being litigated at the time but, like it like it was clear that Microsoft was going to be able to use their position as the dominant operating system vendor to squash uh in this case Netscape uh the the only other viable uh contender for a dominant bu web browser Uh. and uh I wrote a little essay basically just saying the only way to fix this

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 for Netscape to just release the source code uh to their web browser. Uh and I got an email from somebody uh like that day and they're like yeah we're talking about that I, uh which was pretty neat. Uh and then like a week later they announced it And. uh I I to be one hundred percent clear I, did nothing uh to convince anybody anywhere of this but, because I had written a very public uh

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 uh I was cited uh by other publications as being uh the the originator of this idea and to to some extent which one hundred percent not true but my traffic like doubled and tripled over the following couple of weeks. Uh and at that point uh that that's kind of when we sort of started saturating the the community's T_ one uh and we started having to r I had to rewrite uh the system

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 to get rid of uh C_G_I_ um with as with Mod Pearl and Dave. Like that's that's kind of the moment where traffic became so big that it it went beyond the bounds of my little tech alpha MALTIA. Uh and uh maybe six months after that I think we started having to co-locate it uh somewhere else 'cause we had our traffic had grown so fast.

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 And and the slash dot effect tell, me about the slash dot effect 'cause obviously that's just a normal term now but, like you invented the slash dot effect essentially.

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 Uh yeah although uh the only people that remember it now are the people who were who are old.

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 Well that's fair I. use it all the time but,

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 as well you should uh hail to the originator. The Slashdot effect was just m so in nineteen ninety seven uh most websites they're, like we get a hundred hits a day, you know we, get t two hundred hits a day and they're not optimised to handle you, know, a lot of traffic Well. Slashdot in but you know uh by early nineteen ninety eight can shove ten thousand hits

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 at a web server in, you know, an hour. Uh and if you've got if you if you've got ten thousand hits on your little vanity project over the last year to then suddenly get ten thousand hits in one hour, your site will break. Uh like if you're if you're C_N_N_ uh or wired or you know one of these companies that uh that has a professional staff uh then you're probably okay probably, uh but

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 if you're uh if you're ju and what we would be linking would be like people like us I just released a new version of this code. I just wrote a little article about this thing, I I discovered this like we're we're linking to uh to stuff that doesn't have necessarily the most uh technical support If. there's there's sites you know no different than Slashdot had been you, know uh in the first in the first few months uh but now you are suddenly getting

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 squashed uh by thousands of users and who would often get very grumpy uh and they would post in the comments, and they would be very sad. Uh and uh you know, that was that was just kinda how it went. Uh and uh v for years that was just a problem! People would ask me if I could uh build a caching a, web cache for that. And I was like I didn't wanna deal with the copyright issues with that I. I s that was a big problem back then. Uh and also they're just like well just wait a half hour. Like

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 fine Like. what's your rush? uh but of course that's not that's not uh what folks wanna hear. Uh but and over the course of the following few years, c you know, the web just in general gets faster. And fewer fewer people are hosting uh things you know on their old forty six you know that kind of thing. And andbut I mean even today you still see this, but now we we've got decades of uh of experience for dealing with this, but that's why I

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 like when a new app releases they'll have a gated release strategy right, will send out invites, they're throttling their traffic uh you know which it which man it would be would have been cool if you could have done that back then. Uh but no you did not do that back then that, was not how these things worked. Uh it was chaos it, was the wild wild west.

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 Right.

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 solid gold 'cause they were snarky and hilarious and ridiculous and it was brilliant like there was always a my favourite still is the hot grits in the pants guy that showed up on every single story like it was amazing I, loved it.

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 Oh my God. Oh my God.

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00:29:57,560 --> 00:30:01,240
 That's true.

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 who who got integrated into that meme but, the the the comments for Slashdot were very much a uh uh you know a uh a hint at what was to come for the internet, the very fast evolving uh memes in the forums before that term even existed Uh. the how how these stories would evolve how, how the you know there, was the there was the Ook the caveman, and there was the penis bird, and there was uh you can bleep that

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 editing if, you want. Uh I I yeah yeah yeah. Uh but like all of these little memes sort of cropped up. The the thing is that because uh Slashdot grew out of my blog uh and it I I didn't say but it's worth noting also, I was pretty active in I_R_C_ channels uh at the time so, the audience of Slashdot for the first three to six months was pretty much entirely people from I_R_C_ channels

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 uh people from mailing l from Linux mailing lists uh Linux R_C_ channels. So the people in the forums were actually like the people doing the stuff. It's not the people it's not the fanboys, it's not the people watching and hanging on, it's the people doing. And nothing nothing draws a crowd uh uh faster than watching people do the thing. Uh and I think that's uh a lot of what you see today in social media.

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 Yeah. That's true.

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 Uh often from a place of from an uninformed place. Like they come from a place of being a fanboy not, from a place of being an actual creator. Uh and that's a that's a different thing and and when that happens uh the meta-commentary the m the discussion of the tools of the platform of the culture outweighs uh overpowers the the the conversation about the actual thing. Uh and at that time slash

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 Yeah.

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 was was so much about uh the joy of this new technology of the internet about, the joy of computers of, the of of the fun of science fiction, of of ga of gadgetry uh but coming from people who are actually creating it and actually talking about it and actually like they were a part of it uh like you would see people oh, I'll fix that in the next version, you know things, like that uh and you see that sort of thing on Twitter now but,

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 that's not like been a s necessarily what you see oh that's not what that's known for. Uh but that that is what slash dot was uh in those early years So. it was just this charming mix of the people who were actually doing the things that you cared about. But also just witty funny people um a whole lotta introvert nerds uh uh people like me uh you know m my peeps uh not necessarily the most socially

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 a group of group of people, you know, in a in a m piece of meat space but, you know, i you if you can hide us behind a keyboard, uh you know w, we'll, we'll have some fun. Uh and along with that of course comes a whole host of complications, but you know, i in nineteen ninety seven, nineteen ninety eight, that's kind of what the internet looked like. The internet was the the in order to be on-line in nineteen ninety eight uh that implied uh a

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 is amount of privilege uh it implied uh like uh if you were on Slashdot in nineteen ninety seven it probably meant that you were at least middle class and your your dad brought home a two eighty six or a Commodore sixty four uh in the in the mid eighties uh like the that was uh that was a lot of what the so these were the these were the people who hid in their basements uh you know and I I I can't speak for everybody but, I

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 hid in my basement because I'm not so good at talking to people uh and uh you know and I_R_C_ and USENet and mailing lists had given me an outlet uh. But those systems, by their nature uh, required a pretty substantial level of technical expertise. You needed an I_S_P_ you, needed a connection to the internet, you needed the technical chops to install at the very least like WINSOC, but there's still at tha even in this era a ar a lot of a lot of

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 just people who were Unix people uh and they're they're the of course the greatest humans uh who have ever lived uh but you know they're they're they're they might be flawed in other ways.

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 Yeah.

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 Yeah.

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 So like the forums were were just uh were very the people who were there had so much in common. Uh I they were people who were they had they understood probably UNIX uh they they uh i like even a year or two later Windows was uh was uh much more common. But uh because uh the initial audience was uh people who were

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 my chips and dip stuff, they were people who were like, well I'll compile the new kernel today. Uh and that that population it w it wasn't until you know six, months, a year later where that population had been diluted uh by the normies uh and the normies in ninety eight ninety nine are different than the normies in two thousand two two thousand three 'cause those folks are like we have D_S_L_ And. and look slash dot the, comments were never particularly kind to Windows. Like w it was we were not a bunch

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 Mm-hmm. of Windows fanboys using slash dot. Like it was it I have no doubt that part of the popularity and just kind of growing up of open source was due to the kind of just the the audience of slash dot 'cause there was such a pro open source slant there. Y if if you were a slash dot reader you couldn't avoid it.

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 yeah for sure. It was uh I I you know I I I I think I said this a minute ago but, I I often say that the the core of Slashdot was the joy of technology and the fear of people taking it away. Uh and I with with those people on that site you were writing the code because it was joyful for you to write the code but, also because you were afraid that Microsoft was gonna take it away. Uh you were afraid that big corporations were g were

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 gonna do I mean and that's what happened, you know, it but w but it didn't happen uh through the the the the taking of source code. It took it it happened by uh the cloud sort of eating away the idea of running local code. And uh it got taken away by uh Ola Gargi's uh usurping A_P_I_s, embracing and extending A_P_I_s, and adding feature sets that ultimately

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 round out the open versions uh of these things. Uh and but that that took uh that took twenty years uh to to truly set in um and bring us to the dystopian hellscape in which we inhabit today. But uh uh uh but but back then these were folks who were we were passionate we were into it we, were all about it and these were folks who lived and breathed technology. We were computer science majors we, were

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 engineers we, were I_T_ guys uh at the corporation uh and all of that leaked out into the discussions. Uh and those those that's why those first two three years of Slash-Out were just so unique and special uh because over time uh as as the internet grows and becomes more accessible m uh anybody's able to get onto the internet and that that trend sort of continues until we get to the introduction of the iPhone uh at which

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 Yep.

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 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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 Yeah.

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Right.

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 Uh and that was a that was a you know uh uh the the Slash-Out audience was very much that earlier group of folks uh and that that shaped that population and to a certain extent doomed it uh in the long term. But you know it, was a group.

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 have quite that level of candor about the fact that like you had an audience and it kind of just aged out of existence which, is wild.

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 it was it was a it was hard because uh we would get people who would be like well you should add this feature and you should add that feature and you should cover stories about this subject matter and I was always in a really bad position with that because if I start posting more stories about I don't know ab about Windows development tools well then I've alienated my core audience uh but also I'm not interested in that. That's not what like I'm not

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 qualified to speak about that and I think that that's a lot of what you see uh today is a lot of people will be speaking about things that they're not truthfully qualified to talk about. Uh and I'd I would fight that on slash dot editorially Uh. I tried to uh I tried to make slash dot be a mirror of its audience as best I could, but also to be truthful to the things that I understood and did the truthful truthful to the things that

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 I cared about. Uh which you know, I'm a I'm a Gen X-er shaped by that era uh so like uh things like uh m uh advertising on-line and uh the all all of the sort of the modern things like self-promotion was one of those things that always screwed me, because I was a Gen X-ig right, Uh? I was the I was I was I was I was raised by grunge music uh where where those millionaires uh they were flannel, so somehow they were

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 different than the millionaires that wore leather pants Uh. they still play the guitars but whatever they're different. Yeah because they don't self-promote man. Uh and I was kind of raised by that generation and the generation that came after that had no qualms whatsoever. You get out there you self-promote like, and I couldn't do that. Uh and I think that that was I mean even the name slash dot comes from a place of being difficult to say.

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 Right. That's right.

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 dot dot org. It was it was intentionally meant to be something you could not really say. And then I'm the one who's ultimately screwed by that because I get uh I you know in the in the you know ninety nine two thousand two thousand one range where I have to go on radio shows or podcasts or whatever. No pod there's no podcasting back then. We had done that but uh we had the oldest running podcast uh uh we had the the Geeks in Space podcast like ninety nine.

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 remember that.

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 Uh and so Geeks In Space is still going man Uh. oh yeah So. so here's myself promotion. You guys uh everybody who listens uh to Josh here should go find Geeks In Space the podcast We. still record uh uh with some regularity uh it's me and two of the other editors ho from back in the day from Slashdot Uh. and we talk about nerdy stuff.

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 uh but uh I dunno it was it was it was a different audience uh and one that I consciously chose to remain faithful to. Uh and ma I mean I think from a business perspective, you probably could make a pretty good case that that was the wrong choice, uh but uh I was true to my vision, I was true to what I wanted Slashdot to be, and I mean I left I left uh

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 Um

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 Yeah, yeah.

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 me throughout the last five years. 'Cause when your traffic is growing everybody's like great, that's fine. Uh do whatever you want Rob, uh but then uh when you start seeing sites like uh like dig or Reddit uh come onto the scene uh and dig is c like if Slashdot was formed out of people who had uh Commodore sixty fours and two eighty sixes in the eighties, dig was like formed by people who hung around in a chat room and watched uh tech T_V_

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 together. But it was formed out of like fandom for a T_V_ show. Uh and that is a that implies so many different things. Everybody's a decade younger, everybody has a decade of different expectation. Uh they're not necessarily engineers, and doers, and programmers, they're more of a fan group. And they're intr and and I d I don't say that derogatory at all, this is just a completely different population, but there are an order of magnitude

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 Yeah Yeah.

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 of those people, then there are the people who were, and for Slashdot, tha I would say um Slashdot was made for people who were on the Internet in nineteen ninety seven and you don't get to make more of those Uh. uh but the the the populations that that came on later, those populations were able to expand. They were general interests. Slashdot would have been great had it uh uh had it been financially successful with the niche audience that uh

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 it served uh but that's that's hard to do especially once uh once uh you've got that uh that big ol' V_C_ money and uh investor expectations and all and all that. Like that's a that's a different thing, right That's. right That. changes the game.

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 Yeah.

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 Yep.

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 Right Like. you've pigeon-holed yourself right there, right Like?

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 Exactly. But I d I did so on purpose. I didn't Yeah. And and like if you've listened to Geeks in Space now, we're still talking about basically the same stuff.

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 and he would he would so editors on Slashdot we, call we called our shifts daddy-pants uh you wear daddy pants and you do it for like five hours a day uh where, you just basically read hundreds of story submissions uh and and then whittle them down and post the ones that uh you wanna share with the community. Both of those guys were were daddy pants editors Rob, did daddy pants for like he he was there after I left after I quit, he stayed for like three or four more years before they downsized you, know, I don't know anybody that works there anymore.

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 Wow wild,

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 Wild and and that's true 'cause you I forgot about that even it, wasn't like Reddit or something where people would upvote on whatever like garbage got submitted, it was curated content where people would submit stories and it you weren't guaranteed your story would make it.

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 Yeah.

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 Mm-hmm.

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 Sure sure,

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 people for whom getting a Slashdot story was like their achievement that year. Uh and I like I s I get to like that's one of the things that that even to this day like if uh you know if if somebody famous re-tweets me uh uh and suddenly a bunch of people bump into me oh yeah, I remember Slashdot, that was really cool, you know, twenty five years ago uh they'll uh uh the the the I'll still get people who will who'll raise their hand and say that was like a cool thing

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 to them back in the day. But for me uh I always thought that what I was doing was a service. Uh I thought that by reading hundreds of stories and by picking ten uh I was doing a a favour to my audience. I was saving them time and effort Uh. what I did not comprehend in that i in that at that time is that I was getting an endorphin rush from uh

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 this avalanche, we called it we called it uh the fire hose. Uh because it's just this never yielding stream of stories and ninety percent of them were garbage. Uh and and that's why when Dig and Reddit came along, I was just like yeah, sure, that's great but, ninety percent of what is on the internet is absolute garbage. Uh and it turns out that people don't actually care Uh. and they just like I had be

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 doing they enjoyed the endorphin rush of sifting through that garbage to find those needles in that case. Like I thought that I was I thought that I was doing a service to my community by saying, look there are gonna be th r t so uh AMD just released a new thread ripper to yesterday or today right, And uh uh so there are now going to be twenty-five YouTube videos about it and there are going to be five hundred blog entries about it, and with Slashdot I would pick the

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 one. You know I I I would pick and and there you go. I did the work for you uh like I I saved you that time ever, but it turns out that's not what people want. They enjoy uh getting multi lots of information from from lots of sources and they're willing uh to step through it. Now in two thousand twenty three, those tools are pretty optimised for users You. can scroll through Reddit real fast, you can scroll through Twitter real fast. Uh in nineteen ninety seven, uh that would mean uh

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 loading up hundreds of web browsers in an era when tabs didn't even exist in the web browser yet. Uh so this is a this was a a different a different value prop uh to folks back then. So I always thought that I was doing a service, but it turns out that I was denying a population uh their fun uh of weaving through mediocrity. Uh it I

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 Yes.

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 Uh the uh the the sub-stack sort of things, right That? those are they are in a lot of ways a descendent of the curatorial part of Slash Diagn Num. sort of has a couple of legacies One. is the curatorial component uh, but the other uh would be our moderation system. Uh And the fact that we actually our system uh tens of thousands of people would post and then users would take turns moderating uh to a degree that was far more

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 successful uh than Reddit or Digg or or or Twitter uh is today generally. Uh I think that our system worked better uh than anything else has since. Uh and that's probably the piece that I'm most proud of but you don't need that when a news with a newsletter right, 'cause a newsletter is kind of one person speaking to a thousand, the Slashdot system was was thousands of people funneling through a s a small group and

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 Yeah.

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 uh those thousands of people kind of piling on uh to have that conversation afterwards. So we had like these multiple values uh to people uh uh I dunno I. d I was proud of it. I liked it a lot.

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 You should be proud of it. It was epic man. Like it was it was a phenomenal time. Alright so we're we're drawing to the end here and the question I always like to ask people when we we kinda come to the close is for for someone kind of new to the industry and and by industry in your context I guess it would be maybe someone looking to to get their voice heard today right, where it's blogs or videos or or whatever. Like what's your what's your bit of advice for someone coming up in that space?

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 Mm-hmm.

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 the thing that paid the most dividends for me was authenticity. Uh mm slash dot grew out of everything that I loved I. loved programming, I loved the internet, I loved talking about new C_P_U_s, I loved talking about uh uh the new the there would be rumours about Star Wars there, would be you know what's what's happening in Star Trek. Uh did you hear they mayb are gonna make a movie about a

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 comic book uh uh like wouldn't that be a cool idea like, already I read I read these X_M_N_s uh in the in the eighties uh, you know, maybe they'll do the Claremont run. Uh like this was the there was never uh th like the technology of Slashdot grew out of my passions and my hobbies Uh. it grew out of uh my homework uh in some ways my, part-time

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 jobs uh it grew out of whatever I was doing I, never, ever, ever had to fake uh a bit of it Uh. for, years and years and years It. wasn't until years later uh where I started realizing that what I was doing was more performative uh and and less uh less uh coming from what I wanted to be doing in that moment And. I think that people can smell uh insincerity. Uh and I think that uh whether the medium

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 uh is is visual or textual uh as long as you're coming from a place of sincerity uh then it just comes down to are you good enough or not And. the bad news for most people uh is that you're probably not good enough uh because uh uh the the skill set now uh is extraordinary like I do not have uh a a voice for radio. I do not have the visual

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 Risma to be a YouTube presenter I. don't have those skill sets, uh What. I had was the ability to programme and write kind of mediocre text Uh. uh it that was the tools that were necessary for me to get over the fact that I'm socially awkward and don't present well on a camera Nowadays. uh the people who are the most successful uh they are uh capable of performing uh in

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 a hundred byte tweets uh but also they are capable of reading a teleprompter uh write it writing a script then reading off of their teleprompter in a convincing way uh that somehow sustains uh their ability uh to to be convincing to be authentic. That skill set is crazy. You see a million awkward YouTubes uh and

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 if the if the content is th uh niche that you're interested in, you will watch the awkward YouTuber uh but at the at the at the large scale uh you gotta be the whole package uh and that's that's rare uh and that special. But the cool thing about the internet is that you can still click five or six times down you, can find that guy who's got five thousand followers on his uh YouTube channel and he's talking about your initi uh niche address of subject matter, right, and it's like, oh yeah, I

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 want to talk about people who are really obsessed with cycle accuracy, emulation of the im Mattel/intellivator Uh. you know, like th i i if you're passionate about that, that dude, there's a hundred of those dudes. Uh and that's good. That's fun Um. And so what it comes back to is if you are speaking from a place of authenticity, the success like at the scale of Slashdot might elude you, uh but you won't be bored Uh. you'll be passionate You. will have fun, and if you got it

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 day job that pays you bills uh then that as a hobby you you what you get from that is to connect to people who are passionate about the things that you're you're that you uh really truly care about. And so much of what you see on uh on uh on the net these days is clearly people who are just there for the paycheck. And they're talking about something they don't really care about, but they know it's gonna get clicks uh or they're or they know it's gonna get their

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 paycheck and I don't fault them for that, but I can't imagine that they are getting the same personal satisfaction as I managed to get uh you know for the first you know seven, eight, nine years of Slashdot where it was a joy every day to wake up and know that I was gonna get to read two hundred items about stuff that I cared about and then pick uh half a dozen of 'em and then get to talk to people about them.

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 awesome yeah, That's true.

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 And I I wish I wish for everybody to have that kind of joy uh in the in their day to day uh but that is not something that that you get to fake. That is not something that you can that's not something that that comes from anything except the heart uh and the places that are easy are real saturated now. Uh 'cause like um if uh if your passion is Super Mario Bros. well the good news for you is there's quite literally fifty thousand

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 YouTube videos right now about Super Mario Brothers. So that's a that's a crowded space. So I guess my other advice would be to what look for what's next. Uh because it's gonna be far easier for you to break out on whatever comes after TikTok. Uh uh whatever platform comes next if you can be first to market uh with that authenticity uh with that passion on the new platform uh you'll be successful. And Slashdot was Mm Slashdot broke out because of the authenticity but also because it

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 was the web. Uh and the web was at the time the new break out platform uh so much of what we did was re redoing, reinventing Usenet, reinventing I_R_C_ uh but with our own with with the capabilities that were made available to you by the web. Like the idea of posting comments on a page in nineteen ninety seven was still pretty rare. You know like a guest book was was maybe the

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 Yeah.

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 equivalent. But a guest book was like uh was a direct message to the creator and not an interactive community. And there were interactive communities out there but, they were few and far between, they were wild west. Uh and you'd you know see three comments uh you know and it yeah that's no fun.

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 Oh good I, hope this all recorded.

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 We're gonna find out.

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 Thank you for sharing your time with Hacker History. We all have stories to share and Hacker History is always looking for stories about hackers. If you or someone you know wants to share your story, please let us know at hackerhistory.com Until next time, keep hacking.

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 [MUSIC]

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 Thank you.