Wikipedia

Slashdot

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Template:Slashdot Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website, updated many times daily with articles that are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on each story. Front page stories generally receive at least 70 such comments, with especially popular or controversial articles reaching totals of more than 1,000. The site resembles a blog in many ways, albeit with threaded comments. The summaries for the stories are generally submitted by Slashdot's own readers with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions for general posting. The site also sometimes features 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." Slashdot is often criticized for posting story summaries that are inaccurate and/or misspelled, and for intentionally posting articles that many find highly biased, and/or defamatory and often incite flamewars, while ignoring news or commentary on issues which outsiders may consider more serious or important (see Slashdot subculture). It is also infamous for the Slashdot effect, when thousands of Slashdot readers read an article and connect to the linked website, flooding it with unexpected traffic, and at times bringing the site down in a manner similar to a Denial of Service attack. The use of "slashdot" as a verb refers to this effect.

Officially, the name "Slashdot" was chosen to confuse those who tried to spell the URL of the site (h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org.)[1]

Administration

File:Slashdot main.png
Slashdot's main page

Created in September 1997 by Rob 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.

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 MacOS X.[2] Polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, are notoriously unreliable. Collecting user-agent information provided by the users' browser is generally more reliable than the polls; however, it 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.

Famous or well-known "Slashdotters" include actor Wil Wheaton (username "CleverNickName"), id Software technical director John Carmack (username "John Carmack"), ReiserFS creator Hans Reiser (username "hansreiser") 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.

Comments

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 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 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. (For example, 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 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.

Trolling

The Official Seal of the Anti-Slashdot Jihad
The 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 (see Slashdot trolling phenomena). 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[3], and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories[4].

In November 2005, it was alleged that a frequent submitter to Slashdot was exploiting the high PageRank of Slashdot in order to boost the PageRank of his/her own websites [5]. In its updates, Slashdot links the submitters screen name back to a URL provided by the submitter. This submitter is using a screen name containing a very famous band's name, thereby apparently using the high PageRank of Slashdot to boost the PageRank of his linked sites within searches for this term. Such a boost in PageRank could mean hundreds of dollars in increased advertising rates for one's website. Despite repeated comments regarding this apparent exploitation, Slashdot editors have not commented nor modified these posted sumbmissions, leading to additional allegations of kickbacks and overall journalistic malfeasance.

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 occasionally blocks innocent users[6]. The name "pink page of death" is a reference to the Microsoft Windows Blue Screen of Death, and prevents users from accessing the site.

Similar sites

English language:

  • Everything2: Meta-information database run by Slashdot founders.
  • Fark.com: A site with random interesting news stories.
  • Kuro5hin: An alternative discussion site founded and visited by Slashdot expatriates.
  • Plastic.com: A forum running on SlashCode covering news, media, politics, and other subjects.
  • Technocrat.net: A similar forum to Slashdot, intended to be more mature, managed by Bruce Perens. Technocrat.net
  • Digg: Technology news submitted by registered users of digg.com, usually spelled "digg.com" with a lower case letter 'd'.

Non-English:

References

  1. ^ Slashdot FAQ: What does the name "Slashdot" mean?
  2. ^ Slashdot Poll: My Main Computer Runs... (2002)
  3. ^ "THIS IS FUCKING EMBARRASSING", comment posted November 7, 2005 in response to the story "New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory?"
  4. ^ "Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot", comment posted December 27, 2004 in response to the story "DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us"
  5. ^ "Slashdot software broken, bans entire subnets", comment posted October 18, 2005 in response to the story "Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans"
 
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