It’s hard to believe that Slashdot is turning 10 this month. Slashdot has been a fixture of the tech blogosphere since I started reading tech news online in 1998. I just barely missed getting a 4-digit Slashdot ID, and I wasted enough time reading Slashdot during college that I was one of the approximately 400 people selected to be a moderator during the site’s first experiment with mass comment moderation.
The site is now far larger and more influential in absolute terms, but I feel like it’s grown steadily less influential in relative terms, as the rest of the tech blogosphere has grown even faster. I also think it’s aged quite well, probably because Rob Malda has been at the helm since the beginning. (You’ve got to be a pretty devoted to a website to propose to your girlfriend on it.) Probably the biggest improvement to the site was when they stopped running Jon Katz’s clueless long-winded screeds. Since he left, Slashdot seems to have realized that political commentary isn’t really their strong suit and stuck to their core competence of tech news.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Slashdot was the first tech news blog, which makes this the 10-year anniversary of the tech blogosphere.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.