Founders and CEOs on Reddit

Rob Malda

Founder of Slashdot

Company Slashdot ↗

u/CmdrTaco ↗AMA only

How we know it's theirs

His 2012 r/IAmA AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 19 comments from u/CmdrTaco, all from 2012, most often in r/IAmA.

Best moment

u/CmdrTaco posted in r/IAmA

IAM Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Founder of Slashdot, AMA.

Proof In 1997 I started Slashdot.org. For several years, we pioneered news aggregation and on-line communities while exploring our niche of the 'net under the slogan, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Our work was later expanded upon at countless other more successful sites…

u/CmdrTaco replied

First Post.

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “IAM Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Founder of Slashdot, AMA.”

Rob, of all the recurring memes that have existed on /. over the years, which do/did you find most irritating? And why?

u/CmdrTaco replied

'First Post' was actually really irritating to me, because there would be a dozen or more of them on many articles. This made the REAL discussion a significant hunk of scroll away to read. A number of users wrote bots…

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'First Post' was actually really irritating to me, because there would be a dozen or more of them on many articles. This made the REAL discussion a significant hunk of scroll away to read.

A number of users wrote bots designed to get the First Post, which created a lot of unnecessary load on our servers in an era when we were pretty starved for resources.

We solved that for a few years by writing a script that posted an automatic 'First Post' to stories before readers actually saw it. And then a few minutes later, we would remove the robot created post.

This worked for awhile, but then readers started noticing comments were disappearing, and the system was explicitly designed to never delete a comment... but by then the 'First Post' game had died down, and the moderation system became highly effective at sending them down to Score:-1 almost immediately.