Slashdot was somewhere between a well curated tech subreddit and Hacker News.

It had its own in-jokes like: This is finally "the year of the Linux Desktop" and Jonathan "CowboyNeal" Pater, the site's moderator who often posted polls and commented.

In the late 2000s, most migrated their Slashdot reflex to Digg - and then eventually the YC-backed Reddit when there was a disastrous rollout of Digg v4 (in 2010)

Reddit then became less of a technology-focused site as it gained popularity, and HN became the defacto "tech news" aggregator with a well rounded comment section that resembled the early days of Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit.

What I really miss was the moderation system. There was a simple 1-5 score and a main trait (insightful, funny, flamebait, underrated, overrated...). To moderate you had to earn points which would you then spend, so careful consideration mattered. The result was that you could filter for 5+Insightful and get the core of the discussion, or 5+Funny and have a good time, etc.

Ignoring what Slashdot was like specifically: A lot more optimistic, a lot of hope and positive views of what the future would bring. The internet felt bigger, as if there was more to discover, even if it's larger now. More stupid, more fun. May it was just because I was younger.

It was also the year of the Linux on the desktop.

It was a lot like HN, but more curated and with a more complex (and arguably better) moderation system. More focused on Linux and open source than HN, but still a technology news site with comments.

To be honest I never liked the community much. But back then I still stubbornly clinging to smaller, more specialised communities (plus OSNews.com haha)

Very happy OSNews is still around, just wish it had more traffic :(