Slashdot (frequently abbreviated as /.) is a popular 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 the story. Each story generally receives at least 50, and sometimes over 1000, such
comments. In many ways it resembles a blog. 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 widely criticized for regularly posting inaccurate,
highly biased, and/or inflammatory story summaries that incite heated posting,
while ignoring serious news or commentary (see Slashdot
subculture). It is also famous 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 downing the site.
The official reason for the name "Slashdot" is that it 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] (http://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml#sm150).
The site
Created in September 1997 by Rob Malda,
Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org) 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] (http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=848&aid=-1) 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." Collecting User-Agent information provided by the users' browser is generally more reliable than the
polls; however, it shows a far greater percentage of Microsoft customers than Linux users. 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 (http://slashdot.org/~CleverNickName)"), id
Software programmer John Carmack (username "John Carmack (http://slashdot.org/~John%20Carmack)"), GNOME
co-founder and Mono's chief architect Miguel de Icaza (username: "miguel (http://slashdot.org/~miguel/)") and open
source evangelist Bruce Perens (username "Bruce Perens (http://slashdot.org/~Bruce%20Perens)"). 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 (http://www.ipa.net/~cmcpher/), for example, started the well-known hot grits and
naked and petrified memes while OSM (http://www.clusterlizard.org/) and
Trollaxor (http://trollaxor.com) 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 (http://www.anti-slash.org) 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] (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134092&cid=11192313).
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 the post's 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.
Compare against
External links
- Slashdot front page (http://slashdot.org/)
- Slashdot Japan (http://slashdot.jp/) — the Japanese version of Slashdot
- Slashcode (http://slashcode.com) — homepage of Slashdot's backend software (Slash)
- AlterSlash (http://www.alterslash.org) — a graphical Slashdot digest
- Zack Bagga (http://www.zackbagga.com) — a digest based on the Slashdot RSS feed
- mirrordot (http://mirrordot.org) — A tool that provides mirrors of all Slashdot stories to avoid
the Slashdot effect
- Slashdot Hall of
Fame (http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml) List of most popular (either posts or
views) stories
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