Jump to content

Slashdot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ElTyrant (talk | contribs) at 01:51, 5 March 2005 (Revert due to vandalism). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
File:Slashdot.org.Logo.png

Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as /.) is a popular website, primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. Each story generally receives 50 to over 1000 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", Slashdot is criticized for posting inaccurate, highly biased, 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, which often floods unsuspecting websites with traffic, at times resulting in the sites going down. Template:Slashdot

The name "Slashdot" was invented to confuse people who try to spell the url of the site (h t t p colon slash slash slashdot dot org) [1].

The site

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).

Slashdot's core audience is often said to consist of Linux enthusiasts and various other enthusiasts of the open source software movement. However, 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] It should be noted that polls on Slashdot, like most on the internet, are notoriously unreliable: the disclaimer reads on the bottom of the poll "This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.". The User-Agents way to identify visitors may be more reliable and shows a far greater part of Microsoft customers. Moreover, lots of the 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.

Slashdot users, frequently called Slashdotters, number in excess of 850,000 registered users. Famous or well-known Slashdotters include actor Wil Wheaton (username "CleverNickName"), id Software programmer John Carmack (username "John Carmack"), GNOME and Mono's chief architect Miguel de Icaza (username: "miguel") 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.

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.

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), 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").

Other less-sophisticated forms of Slashdot trolling -- often referred to as crapflooding -- includes 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, and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories [3].

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. The name "pink page of death" is a reference to the Microsoft Windows Blue screen of death, and prevents users from accessing the site. Entry is only permitted again if the owner of the IP address explains themselves to Malda.

Karma

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. Slashdot editors, including CmdrTaco himself, can moderate limitlessly, while those users who are randomly given moderation privileges can only moderate a limited amount. 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.

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. However, Meta-Moderation does not affect Slashdot editors with unlimited mod points. This results in posts being modded down for allegedly political reasons. Many have called for the release of the Meta-Moderation scores of those with unlimited mod points on mods performed in the first 5 minutes after an article is posted.

See also

  • Barrapunto — A Spanish-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • PuntBarra — A Catalan-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • Gildot — A Portuguese-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • Linuxfr — A French-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • Symlink.ch — A German-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • newz.dk — A Danish-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
  • SlashCode

Compare against

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slashdot&oldid=10930443"