mathowie interviews CmdrTaco

December 1, 2011 2:54 AM

"I was a daily reader of Slashdot from about 1997 onwards, and it was a key inspiration for me starting MetaFilter." Matt Haughey interviewed Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, Slashdot founder.
posted by hat_eater to MetaFilter-Related at 2:54 AM (43 comments total)

Well I was a daily reader of MetaFilter from about 2003 onwards, and it was a key inspiration for me procrastinating a heap & getting fuck all done.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:05 AM on December 1, 2011 [24 favorites]

At least you didn't ruin the productivity of thousands!
posted by hat_eater at 3:11 AM on December 1, 2011 [4 favorites]

I do believe we can wrap this thread up now. Its so succinctly captures everything that really needs to be said *powders nose over again*
posted by infini at 4:03 AM on December 1, 2011

Slashdot and Metafilter have both changed my life. This interview should've been 10k words longer! Well done Matt.
posted by Blake at 4:32 AM on December 1, 2011

I did not know Slashdot had been sold. Don't sell us, Matt!
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:05 AM on December 1, 2011

Cool interview. Slashdot was my first internet community and I sort of moved directly from there to here around '02 (even though I couldn't comment until '04). My octothorpe username still works over there although I seldom bother to read anything unless someone sends me a link. ./ was really a big inspiration for pushing me to explore the Linux/Unix/BSD side of computing and since I currently get paid well to work on Linux and FreeBSD, I own CmdrTaco a debt of graditude.
posted by octothorpe at 5:24 AM on December 1, 2011

Excellent interview. I would love to hear Matt and Rob chat on a podcast for an extended period of time. I bet it would be fascinating.
posted by COD at 5:49 AM on December 1, 2011

But what I got out of my first PCs in the 80s was more than what my kid will get out of an iPad today.

One of my favorite parts of working on Cydia is when I meet young kids who know exactly what jailbreaking is and how to do it. (Like at Thanksgiving, telling acquaintances what I work on — the 12-year-old boy grinning in surprised recognition while the grown-ups carefully listened to an explanation of the concept.) There are lots of kids splashing around on their hand-me-down iPod touches jailbroken in one way or anoher: installing goofy homebrew software, crafting custom icon themes with terrifically ugly icons, installing OpenSSH and forgetting to change the default password but learning to SSH in and paste intriguing commands from the internet, editing plists to enable hidden features, figuring out how to restore the device when things inevitably go wrong, and generally making a lively mess of the device they get to totally play with. They cause some support burden for Cydia and App Store developers alike, but this is one way to learn to feel comfortable with poking around at the internals of things, to gain the confidence to break stuff because you know you can figure out how to fix it, to self-identify as a person good with technical stuff, to take an interest in AP Computer Science class later. This makes me happy. Each new generation of devices gets harder to jailbreak, but for now there's still some good stuff happening. (And the whole jailbreaking ecosystem even happens via old-school-style IRC channels, from support channels where famous-to-us people pop in for bug reports, to developers coordinating projects and sharing information, to the dev teams quietly collaborating on the jailbreaks themselves. And a bunch of the really talented and successful developers are teenagers! OK, this isn't supposed to be an ad, just a note about how there are some hopeful things happening with closed devices and how you should encourage your kids to jailbreak their devices and make messes with them, so I'll stop here.)
posted by dreamyshade at 6:47 AM on December 1, 2011 [25 favorites]

Thanks for making me feel so old, bastards.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 7:04 AM on December 1, 2011

I think I stopped reading /. regularly about the same time I discovered MetaFilter. This was not a coincidence.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:06 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

"By mid-1999 we had the roots of our moderation system in place, which existed for 2 reasons: To stop spam/trolling/garbage, and to promote quality content. But the latter was the byproduct of the former."

Here's Malda finally acknowledging that all that trolling was actually good for Slashdot.
posted by daniel_charms at 7:19 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

I just met Rob in Ann Arbor this year and was surprised, for some stupid reason, how thoughtful and interesting he was to talk to about the whole Slashdot phenomenon and arc. Like he's very knowledgeable both about how his site worked but also how it existed within the context of what was available on the web at the time and then over time. I think Matt did a really great job at getting this sort of description and explanation out of him and I enjoyed reading this interview.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:43 AM on December 1, 2011

I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:03 AM on December 1, 2011 [6 favorites]

That is a terrific interview. I think he should change his name (to ditch the worst slashdotters) and start a new website which would be called something similar to Techfilter. And hire Matt as a consultant to show him how to gently deal with trolls and other miscreants. (Moderators, 5$ signup fee, timeouts, and bans).
posted by bukvich at 8:16 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks all, I liked it too. I basically had no direction to go so I just started by asking him a question I've always wanted to ask him, what he thought of me totally copying slashdot in the early days and thinking I could do it better.

What surprised me most was hearing he even has a resume and him saying it was time to look for a job. I figured a game-changer like Malda would have news organizations beating his door down to consult or collaborate with him on internet projects. I can't picture him ever needing a job again, and instead being in demand enough that he could pick and choose his future projects.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:58 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

One line, " I am CmdrTaco" is pretty much all he needs on his resume. Either they get it, or they don't. People that get it will happily pay him handsomely.
posted by COD at 10:00 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

I looked at today's Alexa rank metafilter, slashdot. They are almost the same (1574, 1596). There are far more people lurking here than I thought. Also I liked the comment in the interview that he doesn't use the word blogging or the word tweeting or whatever. It's just writing.
posted by bukvich at 10:55 AM on December 1, 2011 [2 favorites]

Also I liked the comment in the interview that he doesn't use the word blogging or the word tweeting or whatever. It's just writing.

For just the briefest of moments, I felt a surging desire to write at length in response to that, but then: it was gone. Which is probably for the best.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:40 PM on December 1, 2011

Great interview. I hope CmdrTaco gets to be doing something amazingly great in his next endeavor.

I loved Slashdot way back when (five-digit UID!), but I got real disillusioned with the moderation system when it promoted incorrect information. This happened a lot. Seemed to me the community had a tendency to moderate according to what they wished was true rather than what was actually true. It's a really neat system but subject to groupthink.
posted by zomg at 1:47 PM on December 1, 2011

What a bummer. This was a terrific interview, and I was just about to post it to the frontpage, thus completing the trifecta, but apparently it's all "oh this goes in Metatalk." This is my grumpy face. What do you mean it looks like my normal face?

I met Rob at least once, that I can recall -- in a restaurant somewhere (Boston?). He shared his fried alligator with me. I was surprised at how shy he was, which in retrospect I probably shouldn't have been. I also read /. regularly from about 1997 until maybe 2003 or 2004ish (uid 8501, newbs). And obviously it was a big inspiration. I think Rob's right, that it doesn't get enough credit in the wider world, but those who know all know that Slashdot was the grandfather of most of what we have now.
posted by rusty at 5:13 PM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

This makes me SO ABSURDLY EXCITED about Webstock 2012 (I have had my ticket for months, and plan on fanstalking Mathowie while he is here). This, and Merlin Mann interviewing Adam Lisagor. Webstock rules.
posted by szechuan at 5:32 PM on December 1, 2011

...the day that all my admin controls disappeared I basically logged out and it truthfully hurts to go back. I miss it tremendously, and really wish that they had granted my request to be allowed to continue to post as an occasional special contributor or something. I suspect I’ll always feel like a piece of my heart is missing.

I found this surprisingly poignant (as well as the line about Matt having the good sense to retain ownership). Why ever wouldn't they have granted him this request?
posted by nobody at 6:28 PM on December 1, 2011

Hey guys, several comments batched b/c i'm late to the party.

1. Matt runs a nice simple interview. Give me some rope and let me strangle myself. A podcast would be fun. We could do that sometime. Maybe in NZ?

2. Jessamyn was nice when we met in A2. She took my $5 in cash and then told me I must have actually snagged my nickname like 8 years ago. I hope she gave it to MF and didn't just use it to buy booze and silly hats. You guys are lucky to have good folks like them here.

3. Webstock looks like it'll be fun. If any of you are there, please say hi. I'll be nervous unless I have a beer in my hand. I'll sit in a few talks, and then try to kidnap a hobbit.

4. Alexa is something approximately adjacent to meaningless. Not knowing MFs scale, I suspect that Slashdot is a bit larger, but who knows. For all I know Slashdot has tripled in size since I left. I'm pretty sure I was holding it back.

5. I am both shy and loud. It depends on moon phase and caffeine levels. I'd like to think I'm fairly well spoken on the subject of Slashdot and its place in internet history. But I'm also a bit rambly once I get wound up on a subject I am interested in.

6. Yes I am starting the job hunt. I suspect my reputation will get me through a few doors, but it won't get me a desk and chair. If you know any super awesome companies that you think might find my skills useful, please send them my way. I want my next chapter to be a meaningful challenge.

7. Trolling was always a mixed bag on Slashdot. Good and bad. Hysterically funny, and truly obnoxious. Truthfully the trolls generally didn't bother me... it was the botters that really got under my skin. I don't mind creative and witty trolling. I don't enjoy the same form letter posted thousands of times from a limitless network of anonymizing relay proxy servers! But in the end, we ended up with the best moderation system that still allows anonymity. Thats pretty great. I hope it lasts forever (but I'm doubtful).

and thanks to all of you who care. i appreciate it.
posted by CmdrTaco at 7:23 PM on December 1, 2011 [20 favorites]

I stopped reading Slashdot when they made they made the comment viewing system as difficult as humanly possible.
posted by Trurl at 7:29 PM on December 1, 2011

Suck and Slashdot defined the Web for me for a while there.

They kinda sorta still do.
posted by mediareport at 8:26 PM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

For the record, I am in favor of Jessamyn using MeFi's money to buy booze and silly hats.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:41 PM on December 1, 2011

What a bummer.

I did post it to the main page, but before I was done refuting the first "Meta." comment, I was ushered here. I get that it's a Tradition.

But this interview is FPP material not because we like Matt!
posted by hat_eater at 2:34 AM on December 2, 2011

Was CmdrTaco's post here some sort of register-delurk record? Caterina Fake now holds the baton.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:53 AM on December 2, 2011

hat_eater, I actually thought it would be fine as a front page post, but I've never seen a post about any of the people who work here stay on the front page. I think there would be problems with people saying, "sure, you delete my post about XYZ, but I see the post about the site owner stays up!"

Anyway, not your fault... you were fine, and it's an interesting article.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:07 AM on December 2, 2011

"sure, you delete my post about XYZ, but I see the post about the site owner stays up!"

Oh, I didn't look at it from that angle at all. Guess I'd be a lousy mod.
posted by hat_eater at 6:22 AM on December 2, 2011

Interesting interview! I was lucky enough to talk to both Rob and Jessamyn at the Ann Arbor event - and the discussion here continues much of that. I find the move to lock down access to both machine inner workings and the net very worrisome. Rob I thought your comment about how we're limiting future possibilities by cutting off access to things that the next generation will build on is insightful. Seems like this sort of shortsightedness in the name of near term gains is utterly pervasive lately. It makes me wonder: does all the focus on short term media - twitter, fb, whatever shape us culturally to the huge detriment of longer term bigger projects? And yes you kids had better get off my lawn while I'm at it.
posted by leslies at 6:47 AM on December 2, 2011

CmdrTaco: given the hindsight, is there anything you think you should or would have done differently at Slashdot regarding, for instance, the social aspects of the site? In my experience, the social tools (friend/foe system, journals etc) were what made the site attractive to quite a few people and I've often wondered what it would have been like if they had been given greater emphasis.
posted by daniel_charms at 6:48 AM on December 2, 2011

4. Alexa is something approximately adjacent to meaningless. Not knowing MFs scale, I suspect that Slashdot is a bit larger, but who knows.

Obviously Alexa is a blunt instrument but it's all a random websurfer has to go on beyond the intuitive impression of how often a slashdot page versus a metafilter page shows up on a google search result. If I was to use that criterion, metafilter is far more popular as for some reason the google algorithm seems to have a crush on ask.metafilter.

Maybe we could get a better idea if we knew what it costs to place an ad on slashdot versus what it costs to place an ad on metafilter. My guess is that those numbers are a lot closer than I would have guessed before I looked at those alexa numbers, so technically the alexa numbers are not meaningless to me.

Anybody know the comparative ad rate, metafilter v. slashdot?

This is not meant to puff up metafilter or deflate slashdot. Slashdot is a major story in the history of the internet, and metafilter is not (yet). To me this thread is as odd as a hypothetical possibility of the Newark Daily News becoming comparable to the New York Times.
posted by bukvich at 8:09 AM on December 2, 2011

Slashdot is a major story in the history of the internet, and metafilter is not (yet).

I think you're quite wrong about the latter. If anything, MeFi is the second Slashdot, in terms of reach and influence but lack of credit. But certainly a major story.
posted by rusty at 10:29 AM on December 2, 2011 [1 favorite]

One line, " I am CmdrTaco" is pretty much all he needs on his resume. Either they get it, or they don't. People that get it will happily pay him handsomely.

He has two resumes up, joke and slightly expanded. dropped in to post them since his resume is sitting at the top of the front page on HN.

I think I drifted away around the voices from the hellmouth era. I found metafilter through slashdot.

Kinda remarkable that Rob Malda, Matt Haughey and Rusty Foster are all in one thread.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:17 PM on December 2, 2011

I loved Slashdot way back when (five-digit UID!)

It scares me a little that I'm a "Member of the 3 Digit UID Club" there.

I can't put my finger on when exactly /. became a "nobody comes here, it's too crowded" environment -- where in spite of all the moderation and metamoderation and whatnot, the sheer scale of the userbase meant that if you arrived at a post 15 minutes after it appaered, the thread was jam-packed and unfollowable, and if you arrived in the first 15 minutes, your contribution might be modded up but it was more likely to be washed over in the swell of getting-in-first posting, and the threads upon threads that followed. Reading and commenting became asynchronous activities -- not too dissimilar from what's all too common now on large news websites that allow comments.

The problem of scale -- on a human, not tech resource level -- doesn't go away, but the ways to address it have multiplied: still, I can't help thinking that the linear "box and a button" approach, combined with good mods, has done better than the alternatives.

But Slashdot was utterly vital during a period that's starting to feel like the web's ancient history, and it's a pity that the record not just of how sites looked in the late 90s, but the patterns of usage and contribution that developed around them, lives on much more vividly in memory than it does on the web itself, even if those memories themselves blur over time.
posted by holgate at 6:02 PM on December 2, 2011

Man, and I was feeling pretty good about being in the low five digits.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:26 PM on December 2, 2011

I don't know, I'm quite comfortable with having a 500k UID.

holgate: it also lives on in studies written on the topic, although they were much rarer back in the early 2000's than they are today. There's a whole bunch of papers written about Slashdot alone.
posted by daniel_charms at 12:12 AM on December 3, 2011

I think you're quite wrong about the latter. If anything, MeFi is the second Slashdot, in terms of reach and influence but lack of credit. But certainly a major story.

Metafilter might be about the same size today as slashdot was back in the day, but the rest of the internet is so much larger. Even a site like reddit is a gnat compared to facebook. Basically everyone important in pop culture is on twitter now. I think, realistically digg and now reddit were the 'second' and 'third' slashdots.

The irony is I stopped going to slashdot years ago, but whenever I see a link pointing there the comments are actually really good now.
posted by delmoi at 2:45 AM on December 3, 2011

I discovered Slashdot when I was 15 or so. Read it every day straight through high school, but forgot about it during college and grad school. But I blocked Metafilter on my work computer because I was wasting too much time here, which means I've found myself occasionally reading the Slashdot comments.

The amazing thing is how little the site has changed. Despite the total change in story approval, moderation, and threading (not to mention ownership), there's a core group of commenters who've been dominating almost all the threads for nearly a decade now.

It kind of makes me sad to see all these guys who started ot on Slashdot in their mid-20s, and are now in their early 40s. They're still rehashing the same arguments, copying and pasting the same memes, being nostalgic for the same old computers (which were old even when I was born), still apparently mostly sysadmins. The Web isn't new and shiny anymore, no one remembers Columbine, the KDE vs. GNOME battle ended long ago in a truce, BSD is not dying, and the iPod with less space than a Nomad has come and gone. Looking at it reminds me of looking at old Usenet arghives, only there are constantly new comments and threads -- but always with the same people arguing the same points over and over again.
posted by miyabo at 5:17 AM on December 3, 2011

holgate: "I can't put my finger on when exactly /. became a "nobody comes here, it's too crowded" environment"

Yeah, it's hard to identify precisely when it was, but an element of benign neglect crept into the site some years ago, as if CmdrTaco lost the passion that had been keeping him engaged with the site and its community. For me, a small but telling sign was the "what we're playing" box in the games subsection. That thing didn't get updated for years - old games, being apparently played by people who didn't even appear to be involved with the site any more. Thankfully, that particular box seems to have been quietly dropped during the site redesign.

I've got no informed opinion on the role slashdot played on the internet as a whole, but it definitely was the community hub for the most energetic part of the open source dev movement in the late 90s and early 2000s. Most of those folks (like me) are 10+ years older and don't have quite the same involvement with that community, and that's reflected both in the kind of stories that get picked for the front page and the kinds of comments that get posted on stories related to software in general and free/OSS software in particular. People who are still involved have moved onto other sites, or their own blogs and planets.

I know metafilter has been through this generational shift in userbase a number of times, but I think the continued hands-on involvement of Matt and a bunch of older users has kept the site from falling into the same kind of malaise. It also helps that MeFi has broader scope in content.
posted by vanar sena at 7:23 AM on December 3, 2011

I've got no informed opinion on the role slashdot played on the internet as a whole, but it definitely was the community hub for the most energetic part of the open source dev movement in the late 90s and early 2000s.

For sure. The obvious point of comparison is the diffuse, high-traffic world of gadget/hardware blogs -- even if the majority of their posts are variations in commentary on the same press release or product launch or whatever. Of course, the advantage for the GizGadget brigade in focusing on the latest shiny thing is a nice advertising pitch to people wanting to sell the latest shiny thing.

I think that shift might be part of what CmdrTaco alludes to when he talks about the apparent lockdown of the tech world, but I also think he's selling Slashdot's contribution short: the Maker/hardware hacker culture was shaped on the foundations that /. prepared. It's a transmutation of that creative tech space, not a transformation.
posted by holgate at 9:59 AM on December 3, 2011

Wow great interview Matt - and it gets me thinking that there are a lot of stories and personalities of the 90s internet that have not been properly memorialized (not in the sense of memorial = death, just in the sense of fixing participants' memories of the past).

I was never hugely into Slashdot though I was already active in online community well before it came along, I pretty much jumped from old-school online community (picospan-inspired things like the Well and in my case Cafe Utne) directly to blogs and Metafilter as community blog. At the same time though even as just a reader, /. was incredibly important and those of us who worked in the early internet - particularly on the content and community side - had to pay attention and everyone did for a whole slew of different reasons.

I wonder what the master list of other interviews would look like, setting the founding of Suck as the starting date and the launch of Flickr as the end date (though even that may be too late), and specifying the focus to be not tech but editorial/text/other. Steadman, Haughey, Malda, Butterfield, Fake, Steven Johnson... lots more...
posted by mikel at 4:52 PM on December 4, 2011