A shocking resignation

Rohan Pearce

Rohan Pearce is the editor of Techworld Australia.

It's the resignation that has sent shockwaves through geekdom. A tragic loss of someone who was a real pioneer in his field — I mean sure, he's still kicking but he's stepped down from the role that's made him famous.

Yes, it's sad but true: CmdrTaco — aka Rob Malda — has resigned from Slashdot, the site he founded.

Slashdot.org — "News for nerds, stuff that matters" — launched in 1997 and has long been a favourite among techies. I created my first account back in 2004, but even before that I was a regular reader. In fact, for many years it was the first site I would visit when I opened my browser, in order to get my tech fix. I still remember the excitement of getting a story on the front page (I think it was an IT security related article by the Sydney Morning Herald).

So many memories: CmdrTaco proposing to his girlfriend using the site, the endless trolling (the 'glory' years of the GNAA), obscene ASCII art in comments, and a lot of great tech news.

For many websites, the "Slashdot effect" — the barrage of traffic that could bring a Web server down after a link to a site hit the front page — could be a real issue. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.

These days, Slashdot isn't as popular as some of the (relatively) young upstarts like reddit. But it's still a great read, and one of my first ports of call when I log on to my PC in the morning (and one of my last before I log out in the evening)*.

As always, feel free to drop me a line at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au if you need to share your nostalgic ramblings about the good old days on the internet. You can also find me as @rohan_p on Twitter.

-- Rohan

PS that Apple guy also resigned this week.

* When I was younger, I wanted a job that would involve reading Slashdot. Yes, sometimes dreams do come true; in retrospect maybe I should have dreamed about world peace or something.