Slashdot
Slashdot is a popular technology-oriented weblog primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to them, and provisions for readers to comment on the story; each story generally receives between 50 and 700 such comments. The summaries for the stories are generally submitted by Slashdot's own readers with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions for general posting. Also sometimes featured are movie or book reviews, interviews, and "Ask Slashdot" queries from users requesting information from the readership. The site's slogan is, "News for nerds, stuff that matters," but Slashdot is sometimes criticized for posting inaccurate and/or inflammatory story summaries that incite heated posting, as opposed to serious news or commentary (see Slashdot subculture). It is also famous for the related Slashdot effect.
The site
Created in September 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Slashdot is now owned by the Open Source Development Network, 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). The name "Slashdot" was chosen for the resulting unusual URL, "http://slashdot.org" (or when read aloud, "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org"). [1]
Slashdot's core audience consists of Linux enthusiasts and various other enthusiasts of the Open Source software movement. Curiously, a poll on Slashdot suggests that approximately half of all Slashdot visitors actually use a Microsoft Windows operating system with only a third using some form of Linux. [2] One explanation for this result posits a number of Linux users browsing Slashdot from their workplaces, where Windows is dominant.
Slashdot users, sometimes called Slashdotters, number in excess of 700,000. Famous or well-known Slashdotters include actor Wil Wheaton (username "CleverNickName"), id Software programmer John Carmack, and open source evangelist Bruce Perens.
The software that runs Slashdot is called Slash 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.
Nupedia and Wikipedia were slashdotted on Thursday, July 26, 2001. Wikipedia was again slashdotted on Wednesday, January 22, 2003 (screenshot), Sunday, December 28, 2003, and Monday, February 2, 2004.
Trolling and moderation
As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon (see Slashdot trolling phenomena). It is an offbeat and complex subculture involving sometimes repetitive and sometimes obscene comments featuring an admixture 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), 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.
Other less-sophisticated forms of Slashdot trolling -- often referred to as crapflooding -- includes posting of one-liners, ASCII art, and other nonsense. Several of these trolls set up Geekizoid, a site devoted to exploring and fostering crapflooding memes. Members of the forementioned classic trolling group created the site Adequacy and continued their formula there until its closing.
Since trolling is prevalent, a moderation system was implemented, whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by randomly chosen moderators, changing its score likewise. A given comment can have any integer score between -1 and 5 inclusive, and Slashdot users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person with a score threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of -1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the 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.
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.
Related articles
- Slashdot effect
- Slashdot subculture
- Slashdot trolling phenomena -- more detail on some recurrent Slashdot trolls
- Barrapunto -- A Spanish-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
- Gildot -- A Portuguese-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
- List of Wikipedia articles based upon websites