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Slashdot
File:Slashdotlogo.png
Slashdot's main page layout
Type of site
News
OwnerSourceForge, Inc.
Created byRob "CmdrTaco" Malda
RevenueAdvertisement, optional subscription
URLhttp://slashdot.org
RegistrationOptional

Template:Slashdot Slashdot, often abbreviated as /.[1], is a science, science fiction, and technology-related news website owned by SourceForge, Inc.. It features user-submitted and editor-evaluated current affairs news with a "nerdy" slant. Each story on the site has an Internet forum-style comments section attached; Slashdot was one of the first popular websites to include a commentary section in such a prominent manner[citation needed].

The summaries for the stories are generally submitted by Slashdot's own readers with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions for general posting. While Slashdot's haphazard editorial style produced a unique voice in the pre-blog age, users frequently post criticisms of perceived arbitrary or biased editorial choices.[citation needed]

Though the site predates the modern concept of the weblog, Slashdot's architecture is commonly compared to that of modern blogs. Slashdot is notable in that its commenting system is much more robust than most blogs, with threading and user moderation having been introduced before these were commonplace in modern weblog packages[citation needed].

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-slashdot-dot-org").[2]

Administration

Created in September 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Slashdot is now owned by SourceForge, Inc.. 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[citation needed].

The software that runs Slashdot is called Slash, and is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The Slashdot headquarters are located in Dexter, Michigan.

Moderation

To prevent abusive comments, a moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) has a starting score which can be incremented or decremented by semi-randomly chosen moderators. When moderating, the moderator actually chooses a given descriptor (such as "insightful", "funny", "troll") and each descriptor has a positive or negative value associated with it. As such, posts not only are scored, but characterized ("20% insightful, 80% interesting"). Users can configure the value of each descriptor. The descriptors available are normal, offtopic, flamebait, troll, redundant, insightful, interesting, informative, funny, overrated, and underrated.

Moderation points added to a comment are also added to a user's karma score. Having high karma gives one bonus point to posts made by that author. (Being a registered poster adds one more, so that the highest normally achieved starting score is two).

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 or presenting a banal groupthink opinion or lame joke, are referred to as karma whores[citation needed]. 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 at a time is limited to a total of 5 points.

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.

A meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses.

Karma is implemented in the Slash Content management system and hence is generally used by all the sites that use this software.

Meta-moderation

Meta-moderation is a Slashdot mechanism whereby a reader can volunteer to review the correctness of moderation decisions. The reader is presented with ten moderation decisions made by other readers and is asked to say whether or not those moderation choices were fair, by reading the article which was moderated and considering the moderation given.

It is likely that the correctness of moderation decisions affects how often readers are given moderation points[citation needed]; so a reader who moderates but constantly has his moderation decisions marked incorrect under meta-moderation will only infrequently be given moderation points.

Slashdotting

Main article: Slashdot effect
Look up slashdot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Slashdot has about 5.5 million users per month,[3] and encourages its readers to read the articles linked to in the summary. This leads to a sudden upsurge in people visiting any website linked to, a phenomenon known as the "Slashdot effect". Sometimes the website's server is unable to cope with the level of traffic, and the site becomes unresponsive: the site is said to be "slashdotted".

The demand on the servers is reduced as the Slashdot story is moved down or off the front page from new stories being posted. Some webmasters have responded (either before or during a Slashdotting) by replacing dynamic content with static content on that page, to reduce the load and allow their servers to handle more requests. Rarely, a webmaster will take the entire page down or replace it with a blank page temporarily if the traffic is not wanted. Today, most major websites can handle the surge of traffic, but Slashdotting continues to occur on smaller or independent sites.

Article sections

As of May 1 2006, Slashdot articles are divided into the following sections:[4]

  • Apple • Articles related to products from Apple Inc, such as Mac OS X, iPod, as well as items that directly compete with those products.
  • Ask Slashdot • Articles that seek advice from the Slashdot readership about jobs, computer hardware, software glitches, philosophical problems, etc.
  • Backslash • This section contains editor's picks of best comments from a recent popular article, primarily intended for those who do not want to read hundreds of high-moderated comments from the original thread.
  • Books • This section is for original book reviews on (not necessarily) tech books.
  • Developers • News about the software, or anything that directly affects the practice of programming. (i.e. A new programming language? A useful technique? Licensing issues?)
  • Entertainment
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • Interviews • Slashdot occasionally has interviews with various people. Questions are posted as comments in an initial story and 10 highly rated questions are sent to the interviewee; the answers are posted in a follow up story.
  • Information Technology (IT) • Anything that people with "Information Technology" in their job description might be interested to know.
  • Linux • The Linux section is for news specific to GNU/Linux
  • News
  • Politics • This section is for news relevant to United States government politics. It was created primarily to cover the 2004 US Presidential Election, but now exists for occasional stories that are related to U.S. Politics.
  • Science • This is the place for science articles. Cool technology, space telescope observations, interesting medical research.
  • Technology
  • Your Rights Online (YRO) • News affecting your ability to live as a free, responsible person online. Such examples are Spam, invasions of privacy, and onerous licenses. Copyrights, patents, intellectual property, and other lawsuits often appear here although their relevance to online rights may be questionable.

The Apache and BSD sections are still posted to, although they no longer enjoy a place in the main site navigation. The Geeks in Space section was a web audio broadcast featuring several of the editors of Slashdot; there have been no recent updates to this section.

Criticism

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

  • The frequency of reposts (also known as "dupes"), where editors approve articles for the front page, often slightly re-worded, that have previously appeared on the site. Since the major responsibility of editors is to sift through article submissions, reposts leave the impression of incompetence. Some readers have called for mandatory procedures to search for Slashdot dupes before an article is published[5].
  • Some article summaries have typos, misleading titles, or errors. An example of this is an article titled "Spain Outlaws P2P File Sharing" where the article summary states that Spain is banning all P2P file sharing, a huge fuss ensues in the discussion, while the reality is that Spain only made it a civil offence to pirate movies, which is hardly "Outlawing P2P". [6]
  • There is no mechanism to delete Slashdot accounts. A user cannot remove or delete his Slashdot account. [1]

Culture

As Slashdot has existed for so many years, it has developed its own subculture, especially running jokes and gags, and the continued obsession with repeating certain quotes or phrases, as well as the use of obscure puns. These include:

  • Goatse (For years, a common tactic of Slashdot pranksters was to place comments with links which appeared to be article-relevant sites but were in fact links to the goatse.cx site, which featured nothing but a "gross-out" image)
  • Natalie Portman (Referencing her attractiveness, a meme that began on Slashdot around the time of the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)
  • "Hot Grits" Troll (Referring to a probably apocryphal story about Southern women pouring hot grits mixed with lye into the pants of unfaithful male lovers to maim them; usually combined with Natalie Portman references)
  • In Soviet Russia... (Referencing a hackneyed joke form popularized by the '80s comedian Yakov Smirnoff)
  • Al Gore References, (Joking references to Gore's semi-apocryphal claim to have "invented the internet", when the subject is the Internet. Headlines referring to Gore are also frequently tagged with "manbearpig", in reference to episode 145 of South Park.)
  • Chuck Norris (Referencing Norris's self-proclaimed refusal to use e-mail because he is a part of cowboy culture)
  • "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those" (Slashdot's early history coincided with the rise to prominence of the Linux-based parallel computing Beowulf system; speculation about powerful new computers arrayed in a Beowulf cluster quickly became an overused comment)
  • "You must be new here." (Invoked frequently after a poster complains of a common Slashdot issue such as duplicate stories or perceived bias by certain editors)
  • "But does it run Linux?" trolls and other Slashdot trolling phenomena
  • I, for one, welcome our new <some animal/object> overlords (Referencing the famous quote from newscaster turned would-be alien invasion collaborator Kent Brockman of The Simpsons)
  • I <cite silly personal offence>, you insensitive clod! (originates from a Calvin and Hobbes strip dated February 14, 1986)[7]
  • 1,2,...) <some action> n-1) ??? n) Profit!!! - number of steps (n) may vary. Usually 3 or 4
  • Defective by design (referring to DRM)
  • Series of tubes variations (Referencing Alaska Senator Ted Stevens's infamous explanation of the Internet as being a "series of tubes")
  • "<Some action>. Cancel or Allow?" (Referring to Windows Vista's User Account Control, which is reputed to frequently ask for permission to perform an action.)
  • "Stephen King is dead" variants (Referring to a popular early Slashdot troll which claimed to be posting breaking news that author Stephen King had died)
  • "Move along, nothing to see here."
  • Using "Young Sebastian" to refer to an innocent child.[8]
  • Car analogies.
  • "Netcraft confirms it: <some software> is dying" (Referencing a longtime Slashdot troll which made erroneous deductions, citing a Netcraft report, to conclude that BSD Unixes were "dying")
  • "THIS. IS. <some culture or other reference>" (Referring to 300 (Film))
  • The high system requirements for Microsoft Windows Vista.
  • Reference to Steve Ballmer throwing a chair.
  • I'M IN UR X, *verb* UR Y.
  • References to William Shatner's halting vocal style when a user is deemed to have either overused or incorrectly used commas.
  • Most of online polls seen on Slashdot include an option involving CowboyNeal.
  • "In Korea, only old people use <x>" (origin)

Additionally, the ID of the Slashdot user is sometimes regarded as a sign of how 1337 the user is, although this is not taken very literally. Having a user ID that is a prime number or other significant mathematical number is also valued. Some people have successfully sold their Slashdot ID (usually because it was a low 4 digit or smaller), although the website's policy on this isn't exactly clear. Slashdot assigns user ID numbers in the order that the user registered, i.e., lower user ID numbers correspond to older accounts.

Audience

While Slashdot's core audience is 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 Microsoft Windows as their 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.[9] Polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, may be unreliable (all slahdot polls include the disclaimer "If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane"). The ongoing assumption that Slashdot is Linux-oriented comes both from historical reasons and from its famous Bill Gates "Borg" icon. Despite this reputation, a significant number of Slashdot stories are related to Windows video games or applications, or Microsoft security bulletins.[citation needed]

Famous or well-known active "Slashdotters" include:

Several engineers from NASA involved in the Mars rover exploration projects have also participated in Slashdot's forums.[citation needed]

Appearances in books

Slashdot has been named, either directly or indirectly, in a number of works:

Slashdot has been used or mentioned in a number of fictional works, including:

Slashdot Japan

Slashdot Japan is owned by VA Linux Systems Japan, led by Oliver M. Bolzer. It started beta test in 2001-5-9, and began operation in 2001-5-28. However, the first Slashdot Japan news article was published in 2001-4-5.[10]

The site carries some of the original Slashdot articles, and localized Japanese news.

Timeline

  • July 1997 - shortlived forerunner to Slashdot, called "Chips & Dips"
  • September 1997 - Slashdot is created.
  • December 31, 1997 - First archived Slashdot post.[11]
  • February 2, 1998 - Slashdot begins accepting advertisers.
  • May 13, 1998 - Slashdot introduces the "Ask Slashdot" section.[12]
  • September 14, 1998 - Slashdot is hacked.[13]
  • February 1, 1999 - The Slashdot effect is first mentioned.[14]
  • June 29, 1999 - Slashdot is acquired by Andover.net.[15]
  • September 7, 1999 - Meta-moderation is introduced to Slashdot.[16]
  • September 10, 1999 - Slashdot announces the addition of the "Your Rights Online" section.
  • October 15, 1999 - Slashdot announces the addition of two new sections: Apache and BSD.
  • February 3, 2000 - Andover.net, Slashdot's parent company, merges with Linux company VA Linux.
  • February 24, 2000 - Slashdot's 10,000th article is posted.[17]
  • May 2000 - Slashdot is the victim of a week-long Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.[18]
  • September 28, 2000 - Slashdot is hacked again.[19]
  • March 9, 2001 - An anonymous poster posts the full text of Scientology's OT III ("Operating Thetan Level Three") document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology then demanded that the Slashdot editors remove the post under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A week later, in a long article,[20] the Slashdot editors explained their decision to remove the page while providing links and information on how to get the document from other sources.
  • August 18, 2001 - Slashcode 2.2 is released, which allows for comment notification, journals, and UNIX-style user pages.[21]
  • January 2, 2002 - Slashdot introduces the "zoo" system, allowing the marking of users as "friend" and "foe".[22]
  • January 16 - January 30, 2002 - An off-topic post purported to be detailing the results of an investigation into Slashdot trolling phenomena becomes itself the subject of a "moderation war" and ends up being moderated a record 851 times (as well as getting 268 direct replies). The editors are accused of indiscriminately modding down all the posts in the thread collectively as well as permanently banning anyone who moderated the post up from moderating or meta-moderating again.[23][24]
  • March 1, 2002 - Slashdot begins a subscription service, where subscribers are given special perks in exchange for a small fee.
  • March 6, 2003 - Slashdot subscribers are given the ability to see articles 10-20 minutes before they are released to the general public.[25]
  • August 18, 2004 - Slashdot has its ten millionth user posting.[26]
  • September 7, 2004 - Slashdot "goes political" and creates a new politics subsection, two months before the U.S. 2004 presidential election.[27][28]
  • April 8, 2005 - Slashdot introduces "day passes", allowing all users to enjoy the benefits of subscribers for the duration of one day if they watch a commercial.
  • September 22, 2005 - Slashdot begins using HTML 4.01 and CSS on its pages, replacing the aging HTML 3.2-based system which had been in place for many years.
  • April 1, 2006 - OMG!!! Ponies!!! pink theme is used for the day, some users report eye strain. The theme can be applied to the current Slashdot layout using the Slashdotter Firefox extension.[29]
  • June 4, 2006 - A new design is implemented following a contest.[30]
  • September 2, 2006 - richardcpeterson registers as Slashdot's one millionth member.[31]
  • November 9, 2006 - Slashdot reaches 16,777,215 (or 224 − 1) comments,[32][33] temporarily breaking the database.[34]
  • October 2, 2007 - Slashdot marks its 10 years online

References

  1. ^ Favicon of Slashdot.org
  2. ^ Slashdot FAQ: What does the name "Slashdot" mean?
  3. ^ Naughton, John (2006-08-13). "Websites that changed the world". The Observer. Retrieved 2007-05-05. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ "Slashdot FAQ: What are the Slashdot Sections for?". Slashdot.org.
  5. ^ On the matter of Slashdot story selection - At that day, complaints about Slashdot story selection process were appearing on all published stories, which prompted a response from Slashdot editors
  6. ^ http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/29/0217250
  7. ^ http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Insensitive_clod
  8. ^ Slashdot: UK Schools Bans WiFi Due To Health Concerns
  9. ^ Slashdot Poll: My Main Computer Runs... (2002)
  10. ^ Wind River Systems BSDi
  11. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/01/01/012000&tid=95
  12. ^ http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/05/13/094300&mode=thread&tid=124
  13. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/09/14/1949212&mode=thread&tid=124
  14. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/02/15/1249237&mode=thread&tid=124
  15. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/06/29/137212&mode=thread&tid=124
  16. ^ http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/07/155233&mode=thread&tid=124
  17. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/24/0954216&mode=thread&tid=124
  18. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/17/1318233&mode=thread&tid=124
  19. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/29/1245218&mode=thread&tid=124
  20. ^ http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/16/1256226.shtml?tid=153
  21. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/18/0433206&mode=thread&tid=124
  22. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/03/1812245&mode=thread&tid=124
  23. ^ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660
  24. ^ http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display&uid=442574&id=4236
  25. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/06/1548245&mode=thread&tid=124
  26. ^ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118344&cid=10000000
  27. ^ http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/07/1513235
  28. ^ http://politics.slashdot.org/
  29. ^ http://efinke.com/slashdotter/
  30. ^ http://slashdot.org/articles/06/05/30/1531251.shtml
  31. ^ http://slashdot.org/~richardcpeterson
  32. ^ http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=205709&cid=16777215
  33. ^ http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=205549&cid=16777215
  34. ^ http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204
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