Leaked Documents Reveal Facebook's Global War on Data Privacy Laws (opens in new tab)

"So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."

I don't know what/when this happened to Slashdot, I remember that most of my life I have been avoiding the comments sections of almost every website, and then I met HN :) and life changed. This is perhaps the best self-curated forum and I believe that the main reason is that we all "got better things to do with our time", and we are coming here to exchange opinions and views with similarly productive people. Maybe this is it, most of us are productive and respectful of our AND other people's time and attention.

Slashdot was more like a cross between something like lobste.rs (in its focus on 'nerds') and reddit (in its wide range of discussion subjects) than it resembled HN. It was a far more easygoing and 'fun' place in what was in many ways a more 'fun' time compared to the often overdone seriousness of this place and time. It was at /. that many of the vices and virtues of the tech-related internet forum world came into being, from the shit-posting natalie-portman-with-hot-grits-down-wherever-they-went trolls to sometimes surprisingly insightful comments on current issues. There were no self-important VC-chasing startup tycoons, at least not in the earlier years. While there was quite a bit of group-think - e.g. the well-known operating system from Redmond, WA was not popular and anything related to it or the company behind it was generally ridiculed - those who spoke outside of the group were not shunned as they are here and now, just teased and made fun of.

Slashdot was fun and I too learned some amazingly arcane stuff on certain topics. HN does have humor sometimes, one of my favorite threads is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12781157 looks towards the bottom. I guess we all need to be serious these days lest someone doesn't see the funny. Slashdot was pretty amazing for a community policing itself as opposed to making moderators do a lot of the heavy hauling, but you really need people to stick around and do the work.

Yeah that ascii art with three swastikas really added to the discourse. That and the second comment “your mom is Facebook” made me think the Algonquin round table had come back to life.