My slashdot visits have become rather infrequent over the last couple of years.To be honest neither reddit nor news.yc still get the kind of quality comments/analysis that a lot of the slashdotter comments >= 3 provide. programming.reddit.com is better. Add to that humour - there used to be a couple of sites that collected humorous comments from slashdot. You can't build a community overnight - it takes years; something that most people don't want to hear. I know for a fact that a lot of older hackers hang out on slashdot - that could account for the more insightful comments and great sense of humour. The trick is to experiment with the filters.