Slashdot is really more like HN's predecessor. Mostly tech news focused. It faded in popularity after Digg became a thing and allowed all sorts of topics.
Slashdot was rocking in the late 90s when Digg didn't even exist. I started reading it when it was published by Rob Malda as his personal blog on his own server in his own dorm room.
Along with Usenet, webrings, blogs, the original BoingBoing and the Illiad strips at userfriendly.org (dead, search for archived pages on archive.org) it is among the places of yesterday's Internet that I miss the most.