Slashdot
Slashdot is a popular technology-oriented weblog. Created in September 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda it is now owned by the Open Source Development Network, part of VA Software. Most of Slashdot's content consists 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 provided by the Slashdot readers, with editors accepting or rejecting these contributions. Also sometimes featured are movie and book reviews, as well as "Ask Slashdot" queries from users requesting information from the readership.
The name "Slashdot" was chosen for the resulting unusual URL, "http://slashdot.org" (or "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org"). [1]
Slashdot 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).
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. It is commonly believed that this is a result of Linux users browsing Slashdot from their workplaces, where Windows is dominant.
As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is a bizarre and complex subculture involving discussion about the "first post", Naked and Petrified Natalie Portman, the trolltalk forum, goatse.cx, mock-homosexual erotica featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and other unusual juvenilia. Probably the most famous personalities to have come from Slashdot's 'old school' trolling community are OSM, Trollaxor, Jon Eriksson, Streetlawyer, Dumb Marketing Guy, 70%, 80md and The Lunchtime Troll. They are well-known for their creative writing. A newer breed of 'blue collar' trolls set up Geekizoid - a site devoted to exploring and fostering 'crapflooding', whilst at the more upmarket end of the scale Adequacy.org experimented with other trolling techniques.
Since trolling is prevalent, a moderation system is 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 software that runs Slashdot is called 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.
Slashdot users, sometimes called Slashdotters, number in excess of 690,000. Famous or well-known Slashdotters include actor Wil Wheaton (username "CleverNickName"), id Software programmer John Carmack, and open source evangelist Bruce Perens.
Nupedia and Wikipedia were slashdotted (see Slashdot effect) on Thursday July 26, 2001 and Wednesday January 22, 2003 (screenshot).
See also
- Meta-moderation system
- Slashdot trolling phenomena -- more detail on some Slashdot trolls
- Barrapunto -- A Spanish-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
- Gildot -- A Portuguese-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot