Online Encyclopedia
Slashdot
| Topics related to Slashdot |
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Slashdot subculture |
Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as "/.") is a popular technology-oriented weblog, 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," but Slashdot is sometimes criticized for posting inaccurate 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. Getting "Slashdotted" typically produces two emotions: delight in the recognition; and terror that the flood of traffic will bring down your webserver.
The name "Slashdot" was invented to confuse people who try to say the url of the site orally (h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org) [1].
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The site
Created in September 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" 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 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. [2] One explanation for this result posits a number of Linux users browsing Slashdot from their workplaces, where Windows is dominant. Another is that some users of the site come there to wind up the more dogmatic parts of the Open Source using public or to make bogus arguments and generally sow confusion, rather than because they use or want to find out about it.
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"), 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 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 nonsense. 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.
The "pink page of death" is an infamous feature applied to IP addresses that have been used for extreme trolling. 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 Slashdot.
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." This practice is referred to as karma whoring.
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. Unfortunately Meta-Moderation does not affect Slashdot editors with unlimited mod points. This results in posts being modded down for 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 a article is posted*. This would show the level of disagreement the majority of the subscribers have with the high-handed and blatant bias that is consistently shown.
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 -- A German speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
- List of websites
- SlashCode
- Heise -- Heise.de has a similar subculture to slashdot
Compare against
- Kuro5hin -- An alternative discussion site founded and visited by Slashdot expatriates.
- Everything2 -- Meta-information database run by Slashdot founders.
- Plastic.com -- A political news forum running on SlashCode.
- Technocrat.net -- A more mature forum than Slashdot, managed by Bruce Perens.
External links
- Slashdot front page
- Slashdot Japan -- the Japanese version of Slashdot
- Slashcode -- homepage of Slashdot's backend software (Slash)
- AlterSlash -- a graphical slashdot digest
- Fristpost -- a trolling tool for Slashdot