perfessor multigeek's Journal: It feels like 2002

There's a nice space travel thred in yesterday's top stories. Actual facts and analysis in the comments, good signal to noise ratio. I've been through the first and third pages so far and plan to go back in a few weeks and save an offline copy of the whole thing.

Makes me miss the /. of a few years ago to see so many scientists and engineers with relevant expertise dominating the discussion. Gives me fantasies of someday helping to create a discussion site (say, in five more years) purpose-built to encourage that sort of thing, maybe even with an architecture that explicitly encompasses meatspace interactions like conferences and more digg-like fuzzy ground between "first page" and "journal entries".

Of course the tagging experiment (I'm taking the time to tag - are you?) and such are admirable moves in that direction. Maybe my pessimism about /.'s future is misplaced and we're just seeing the awkward adolescence of an interaction space nowhere near its mature effectiveness.

That would be really nice.

-Rustin

P.S. Check out the "Vital Stats" JE with something like fifty /.ers laying out our personal profiles and beliefs. Man, that was a blast from the past.

Ah yes, 2002.

[The Cydonian]

Would you believe it, I was introduced to /. in 2001-02 by a friend who convinced me that this was the place where all 'brainy' people congregate. Since I had aspirations to be a 'brainy' type back then, I was hooked immediately, debating vigorously and posting with 'refined' arguments and all that shit.

Then, one fine morning, after my daily cuppa, and ready to take on the world, I had chanced upon a certain website somehow unfortunately associated with Christmas Island. Things were never the same after th