Slashdot was one of the main inspirations for Advogato. One clue in support of this is that the codebase was called "mod_virgule". The trust metrics were designed to be a more sophisticated moderation system than what Slashdot did, but in retrospect I'm not sure it actually worked that much better; Advogato never reached a mass audience and to the extent it had higher quality posts it was probably due to a smaller and more focused community.

I still have my slashdot account (number 3148), but rarely use it. I can well imagine the "complicated feelings" that Rob has, and wanted to add my voice to the many saying that Slashdot was an important Internet space.