Natalie Portman and oatmeal are dead, Netcraft confirms it. Slashdot fails as a news site because it's slower than everyone else, the best comments are redundant because everyone reading slashdot is also reading reddit and hackernews and LtU and ..., and because Slashdot is the last to post the interesting comments have already been made. Even its memes are stale. CmdrTaco himself gave up on it after the OMG Ponies! april fools thing. The moderation system is clever, but the community just kind of froze somewhere between 1999 and 2006. It's sort of comforting, because geek culture has gotten a lot less fun in the mean time if it's still even a thing outside of marketing, and Slashdot is a sort of unliving Pompeii that's a lot like the good old days except with more dust and ambulatory corpses, but it's not "stuff that matters" anymore.