Jump to content

Slashdot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 4.250.141.242 (talk) at 01:32, 15 January 2005 (→See also). 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 trolls. 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, sometimes bringing them 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 consists 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 assemption 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 800,000 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. It is called the pink page of death because the page is pink and it prohibits entry to Slashdot. Entry is only permitted again if the owner of the IP address explains themselves to Malda.

Karma (LAMENESS)

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. X-Forwarded-For: 10.0.0.21

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.

Slashdot lies, opinions, and half-truths

  • If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
  • There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. A recent Slashdot poll showed that the majority of Slashotters are unemployed or are students ("academics"), which explains a lot. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
  • Artists "deserve their money" only in cases in which the RIAA is the bad guy. When it's a P2P article, suddenly ripping artists off and not paying for their music via piracy is magically different from some record companies not paying royalties. This mindset is supposed to make sense.
  • At the 2004 WinHEC, Allchin demonstrated an alpha version of Longhorn that played six high-resolution videos at the same time while playing Quake III in the background. An equivalent XP machine couldn't play more than four videos. Meanwhile, I can't even get xmms to play without skipping, and windows to drag without visual tearing! That's because KDE and GNOME are hacks to emulate a desktop on top of the crufty XFree86 architecture that people won't let die (the majority Linux users absolutely fear change...there are rational ones, but they are outnumbered by zealots).
  • OSTG-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
  • Speaking of OSTG--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSTG, it's okay.
  • Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
  • Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
  • The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
  • Linux rules the desktop, when in reality [google.com]: Windows = 91%; Mac = 4%; Linux = 1%
  • Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off as though he was a stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
  • The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
  • If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
  • Slashdot is all about spinning truth for its agenda and posting outright falsehoods. In this article [slashdot.org], for instance, Roblimo claims that Baystar spokesman Bob McGraith "admitted" that their "only viable asset is the potential proceeds of lawsuits against Linux users and vendors." And yet, in the very next sentence, his real words are given: "We're looking for the best return we can, and we think the focus should be on IP licensing (and enforcement)." Ignoring the outright lie RobLimo posted about what was said, Bob McGraith describes what every standard IP company does--run their business on the licensing of their valuable IP. If that isn't enough, Slashdot's own VA Linux stated in their recent 10Q filing [yahoo.com] the exact same thing: "We rely on a combination of copyright, trademark and trade-secret laws, employee and third-party nondisclosure agreements, and other arrangements to protect our proprietary rights." But hypocrisy and double-standards don't matter to an agenda-driven group like Slashdot. It's all about "whatever it takes" to discredit those on your geek blacklist.
  • SCO and other companies are evil scum, manipulating stock prices and going to the extreme to be greedy. Meanwhile, the SEC investigated VA Linux's IPO [com.com] for "questionable IPO practices." VA Linux owns Slashdot.
  • Slashdot breathlessly reported that AMD beat Intel in CPU sales [slashdot.org] by 2% for one week (what a victory). Meanwhile, it was omitted from the article that AMD only beat Intel in RETAIL desktop sales. Dell hasn't been selling AMDs [forbes.com], and Dell, among others, does not count as retail. According to the article Intel still outsold AMD in the PC market with a 61% share. Of course this is helped by their 81% share in notebook sales a market that AMD has been unable to succeed. This is crucial because according to the article this market is the fastest growing segment of the PC market. The anti-Intel spin is amazing. But not unpredictable, because Windows and Intel go hand in hand, and therefore "Wintel" is evil. Even though laptop sales account for over 50% of PC sales, and AMD has ignored that market...
  • Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity [linuxsecurity.com] posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
  • OSS advocates complain about the lack of innovation coming from Microsoft. Often, these posts are written from KDE using an integrated filesystem/HTML browser, a taskbar, a start menu, and more. Apparently, nobody wants to admit that the only reason those are implemented is because much-criticized Windows 98 did it first. Clone, clone, clone. This is the life of an open source wannabe. One of these days, they'll actually come up with an original idea that ordinary people can use to create interest in their offerings. Until then, it's going to be, "Yeah, we'll be able to do that soon, too." Slashdotters--ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place. This is not the way to gain integrity.
  • This opinion poll [opinion.com.au] shows that 56% of respondents hadn't even heard of Linux.
  • Linux is "ready for the desktop." This is the yearly uttering since 1998. Never mind that there is STILL no binary installation/uninstallation API for desktops, you can't come home with a printer and a CD and stick it in to get an Autoplay menu that lets you set up the driver. Somehow, Linux is just magically supposed to be ready--that is, if someone else sets it up for you and you never change or add your hardware or software and doing nothing else but check e-mail and browse the web. Conveniently, this includes grandmas, so people can post their grandma-using-Linux stories as "proof." As a recent article on Slashdot pointed out, Linux can't even run a generic soundcard that 10-year-old Windows 95 has no problem with.
  • Hypocrisy is accusing Windows XP of being "riddled with spyware" without actually citing a single example, and if you run Windows Media Player, the very first thing it gives you is the privacy page allowing you to disable automatic grabbing of song titles. Meanwhile, almost every single standard Linux media player automatically grabs titles from places like freedb.com without asking you first. One OS grabs song titles and it's spyware, the other grabs song titles and nobody mentions a single thing. Hypocrisy.
  • Slashdot professes to be some sort of golden defender of consumer copyright law. Few people remember that in an IRC chat, Hemos said that what DailySlash is doing was "illegal" and that they should stop.
  • Corporate-owned, subscription fees, banner ads, reposts, and complete falsehoods. Remember when Slashdot was a great tech news site for nerds? Before the point of the site was to have an anti-RIAA, anti-"M$" agenda? When it was just about posting cool technology stories regardless, before VA Linux took it over?

Slashdot is dead.

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
  • SlashCode
  • Heise -- Heise.de has a similar subculture to slashdot

Compare against


Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slashdot&oldid=9373670"