Among other things, almost all stories used to have at least a couple hundred comments. Today there are stories on the front page with less than 10.

The last nail in the coffin for me was their utter refusal to remove absolutely abhorrent comments. Not stuff like "I voted for someone different than you did", but bullshit like https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11756830&cid=561389... (CW: extreme antisemitism). I spent a lot of time on Slashdot over the years, and had a 4-digit UID that I'd bust on the inevitable "who's been here longer?" comment chains. But while they have the right to allow the comments section to fill with horrid stuff, I don't want anything to do with that.

In its heyday, Slashdot was often (but not always) really timely with tech news, and was reasonably well-curated. The comments were generally numerous, and had a lot of genuine insight since the site tended to be frequented by actual IT/development professionals. Even the political discussion was fairly sincere. It also had an early user-driven moderation system, which while flawed, was enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. It anticipated Web 2.0 in a lot of ways.

I used to click on big posts, set the filter for Score: 3 or higher, and read through EVERYTHING. It'd take hours sometimes, and I'd learn a ton about all kinds of stuff. These were discussions, not just comments, and I think people took more pride in the quality of their contribution.

Like everything from back then, Slashdot got whittled down. It went through multiple acquisitions, and eventually became disconnected from all the original people behind it. Subsequent owners seemed to have no vision or connection with the community. There were some attempted changes that never seemed to go anywhere, but I think the most important thing about the acquisitions is just how bland the site became.

And of course, even if Slashdot had all those same people, everything else changed too... the industry, the people, the culture, the Internet, the whole world.

HN is the closest thing I know today to /. -- I'd say imagine an HN where editors curated the content, and with a lot more whimsy in its culture, and a lot more optimism. I don't expect to find any of that today on Slashdot, and when I do click through to the comments I find them to be very one-dimensional and tired.

The comment count is sad; the reposting of links from HN instead of breaking new stuff is sad; the lack of the unique editorial voice of the Slashdot OG crew is sad.

There is literally no reason to visit Slashdot anymore other than inertia. You will not find anything new or interesting. There will be no insightful commentary beneath an article. There will never be a new meme that originates from the comment section.

It's somewhat similar to finding out that DeLorean was making his living by selling DeLorean-branded watches or whatever.

Sustained shortage of ASCII Penis Birds over the past decade.