Slashdot

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Slashdot (often abbreviated to /.) is a popular technology-related website/Forum 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 comments. 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 typographically incorrect, factually inaccurate, biased, or defamatory (stories 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 pronounce the URL of the site (h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org). <ref>Slashdot FAQ: What does the name "Slashdot" mean?</ref>

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Administration

Image:Slashdot main.png

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.

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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 Mac OS X. But what is probably significant is the number of cross-users, that is people who use more than one if not all the mentioned systems. <ref>Slashdot Poll: My Main Computer Runs... (2002)</ref> Polls on Slashdot, like most on the Internet, are notoriously unreliable. Collecting user-agent information provided by the users' browser, which is generally more reliable than the polls, 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. Additionally, OS results may be skewed by the fact that many Slashdot readers access the site from work, and only use Linux on their home computers.

Famous or well-known "Slashdotters" include actor Wil Wheaton (username "CleverNickName"), id Software technical director John Carmack (username "John Carmack"), Bittorrent creator Bram Cohen (username "bramcohen"), Freenet creator Ian Clarke (username "sanity"), ReiserFS creator Hans Reiser (username "hansreiser"), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (username "jwales") 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.

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Comments

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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 semi-randomly 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 Rob Malda ("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.

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Trolling

Image:Slashdot jihad seal.jpg Template:Main As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. 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 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, <ref>"This is fucking embarrassing", comment posted November 7, 2005 in response to the story "New Discovery Disproves Quantum Theory?"</ref> and of accepting kickbacks to post certain stories <ref>"Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot", comment posted December 27, 2004 in response to the story "DURL, a Search Tool for del.icio.us"</ref> <ref>"**Beatles", comment posted January 9, 2006 in response to the story "Mysterious MilkyWay Warp Finally Explained?"</ref>. Attempts to rectify these criticisms have been made <ref>On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection</ref>.

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 it occasionally blocks innocent users. <ref>"Slashdot software broken, bans entire subnets", comment posted October 18, 2005 in response to the story "Designer on Slashdot Overhaul Plans"</ref> The name "pink page of death" is a reference to the Microsoft Windows Blue Screen of Death, and prevents users from accessing the site.

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Criticism

Critics claim that the quality of materials found on Slashdot has progressively declined. Common complaints include:

  • The frequency of reposts (also known as "dupes"), where editors approve articles for the front page, often slightly reworded, that have previously appeared on the site. Since the major responsibility of editors is to sift through article submissions, reposts leave the impression of incompetence. Some readers have called for mandatory procedures to search for Slashdot dupes before an article is published<ref>On the matter of Slashdot story selection - At that day, complaints about Slashdot story selection process were appearing on all published stories, which prompted a response from Slashdot editors</ref>.
  • Article summaries with typos, misleading titles, or errors.
  • The collective bias of contributors, editors, and users (moderators and comment authors). Common biases include excessive criticism or praise of certain companies (such as Microsoft and Google, respectively), favoritism towards open source software, stereotyping (e.g. PHB), and leanings toward certain political positions (e.g. less regulation of the Internet). These biases prevent Slashdot from claiming neutrality, discourage balanced discussions, and can turn away potential readers and contributors.
  • The presence of articles that many consider to be thinly veiled advertisements. These articles usually receive a large number of trolling comments, including insults towards the editors, and are often referred to pejoratively as "Slashvertisements."
  • The posting of articles which report trivial research, long established facts, popular gossip, or blatant pseudoscience. Experts on the topic often criticize such stories with lengthy, insightful tirades.
  • Articles, titles, and summaries which appear to be designed to incite inflammatory remarks (see Flamebait).
  • A non-transparent submission process, where submissions may be posted by any editor, at any time, with any number of substantial changes to the summary text. In some cases, some submitters have claimed that their work has been published under the name of another contributor.
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Similar sites

English language:

  • Ars Technica: Technology and science news, typically with fewer stories but longer analysis and relevancy.
  • Digg: Technology news where news is submitted and voted on by registered users.
  • Everything2: Database run by Slashdot founders.
  • Kuro5hin: An alternative discussion site founded and visited by Slashdot expatriates.
  • MetaFilter: A community Weblog focusing on links to interesting sites; some overlap with Slashdot topics
  • reddit: Technology and science news, with karma and user-submission similar to Slashdot.
  • The Register: More enterprise oriented than Slashdot. Based in the UK.
  • Shunya: Slashdot like site for Indian Technology News

Non-English:

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References

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External links

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