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Slashdot (often abbreviated as /.) is a popular technology-related news website and Internet forum updated many times daily with user-submitted and editor-evaluated summaries of news and events with a nerdy slant, and a page for comments on each story. The site slogan is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

The site has been called a blog for its model, though it predates the term, and includes a much more robust commenting system than most blogs, with threading and user moderation. The summaries for the stories are generally submitted by Slashdot's own readers with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions for general posting.

Officially, the name "Slashdot" was chosen to confuse those who tried to pronounce the URL of the site (h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org). [Slashdot FAQ: What does the name "Slashdot" mean?] The name also refers, idiosyncratically, to the root directory on a UNIX or Unix-like computer system (the usual way to denote this directory would simply be a slash, but "/." also works); this appears to have been a happy accident.

Contents

Administration

Slashdot's main page layout
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Slashdot's main page layout

Created in September 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Slashdot is now owned by the Open Source Technology Group, part of VA Software. The site is run primarily by Malda, Jeff "Hemos" Bates (who handles articles and book reviews and sells advertising) and Robin "Roblimo" Miller who helps handle some of the more managerial tasks of the site, as well as posting stories. (See Slashdot history).

The software that runs Slashdot is called Slash or slashcode and is released under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License. Many other websites use various customized versions of this software for their own web forums.

The Slashdot Headquarters are located in Dexter, Michigan.

Audience

While Slashdot's core audiences are often said to consist of Linux enthusiasts and various other enthusiasts of the open source software movement, there is a significant Windows audience as well. A poll on Slashdot suggests that approximately half of all Slashdot visitors use a Microsoft Windows operating system, a third use some form of Linux, and above ten percent use Mac OS X. But what is probably significant is the number of cross-users, that is people who use more than one if not all the mentioned systems. [Slashdot Poll: My Main Computer Runs...] (2002) Polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, may be unreliable. Collecting user-agent information provided by the users' browser, which is generally more reliable than the polls, shows a far smaller percentage of Microsoft customers and a far greater number of Linux and Mac desktop users than the internet at large. However, many Slashdot stories are related to Microsoft Windows video games or applications, or Microsoft security bulletins. The ongoing assumption that Slashdot is Linux-oriented comes both from historical reasons and from its famous Gates "Borg" icon. Additionally, OS results may be skewed by the fact that many Slashdot readers access the site from work, and only use Linux on their home computers.

Famous or well-known "Slashdotters" include actor Wil Wheaton (username "[CleverNickName]"), id Software technical director John Carmack (username "[John Carmack]"), Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen (username "[bramcohen]"), Freenet creator Ian Clarke (username "[sanity]"), ReiserFS creator Hans Reiser (username "[hansreiser]"), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (username "[jwales]") and open source evangelist Bruce Perens (username "[Bruce Perens]"). Also noteworthy is the participation of several engineers from NASA involved in the Mars rover exploration projects.

Slashdotting

Sites that receive a mention on Slashdot are said to be "Slashdotted" as they can expect a flood of attention that may overwhelm their servers.

Article sections

As of May 1, 2006, Slashdot articles are divided into the following sections [Slashdot FAQ: What are the Slashdot Sections for?]:

The following sections are no longer active or available on the main page:

Moderation

To prevent abusive comments, a moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by semi-randomly chosen moderators, changing the post's score likewise. Moderation points added to a comment are also added to a user's karma score. Having high karma gives added bonuses to users, such as the ability to autopost at higher starting values. Conversely, users with low karma have penalties imposed on them. People that post comments designed to get more karma, for example mirroring a linked article, are sometimes referred to as karma whores. Those who can moderate are selected by their karma score and number of meta moderations (and maybe other criteria). Slashdot editors, including Rob Malda ("CmdrTaco"), can moderate limitlessly. Moderator access for non-editors is time limited (to a few days) and the number of 'mod points' one gets is limited (to a max of 5 points at the time of this writing).

A given comment can have any integer score from −1 to +5, and Slashdot users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. A person browsing the comments at a threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of −1 or 0 but will see all others. Moderators have demonstrated their ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to −1. Subsequently, a meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses.

Trolling

Official seal of the Anti-Slashdot Jihad
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Official seal of the Anti-Slashdot Jihad

As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is an offbeat and complex subculture involving sometimes repetitive and sometimes obscene comments featuring a mixture of Slashdot celebrities and other unusual juvenilia.

There are many famous personalities from Slashdot's older trolling community. Craig McPherson, for example, started the well-known hot grits and naked and petrified memes while OSM and Trollaxor specialized in bizarre creative fiction regarding various Slashdot and Free/Open Source Software personalities. SpiralX, Streetlawyer/John Saul Montoya (jsm), Signal 11, Dumb Marketing Guy (dmg), Seventy Percent, 80md and others typified the classic sense of trolling both under their well-known monikers and a bevy of pseudonyms (or "sock puppets"). While all of the aforementioned may be well-known to Slashdotters, the earliest repeat offender was "MEEPT". Prior to MEEPT's stream of consciousness posts, Slashdot did not require posters to log-in in order to attribute a post to a name. MEEPT was one of the last straws that brought about username/password logins and eventually moderation.

Other less-sophisticated forms of Slashdot trolling—often referred to as crapflooding—include posting of one-liners, ASCII art, and other materials. Several of these trolls set up Geekizoid, a site devoted to exploring and fostering crapflooding memes. Members of the aforementioned classic trolling group created Adequacy.org and continued their formula there until its closing. Another site where trolls gather is [Anti-Slash] where trolls come to wage jihad on Slashdot.

The Slashdot editors are sometimes accused of posting (and even preferring) stories that are, themselves, thinly-disguised trolls, which encourage large numbers of postings in response, of lending unjustified credence to pseudo-science, ["This is fucking embarrassing"], comment posted November 7, 2005 in response to the story ["New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory?"] and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories ["Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot"], comment posted December 27, 2004 in response to the story ["DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us"] ["**Beatles"], comment posted January 9, 2006 in response to the story ["Mysterious MilkyWay Warp Finally Explained?"]. Attempts to rectify these criticisms have been made [On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection].

The "pink page of death" is an infamous feature applied to IP addresses that have been used to access Slashdot many times in a short period. It often appears on proxies used for crapflooding, although it occasionally blocks innocent users. ["Slashdot software broken, bans entire subnets"], comment posted October 18, 2005 in response to the story ["Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans"] The name "pink page of death" alludes to the Microsoft Windows Blue Screen of Death, and prevents users from accessing the site.

Criticism

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Critics claim that the quality of materials found on Slashdot has progressively declined. Common complaints include:

Decline

As of July 2006, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that Slashdot's audience is shrinking not only in relation to other sites, but in absolute terms as well. One graph (originally posted as a comment to a Slashdot story) shows that comment volume has plunged since mid-2005,[link] confirming the instincts of many who have commented on Slashdot's slower pace. Google Trends shows an alarming decline in queries including the word "slashdot," suggestive of a concomitant drop in traffic.[link]

Similar sites

Slashdot's main page layout, from 1997 until the 2006 redesign contest
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Slashdot's main page layout, from 1997 until the 2006 redesign contest

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References

External links

 

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