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Slashdot is a popular technology-related news discussion and community website. The site's slogan is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." The website is updated frequently with articles that act as summaries of news and information from other websites, including links, and readers are able to comment on the articles. The articles that appear on the front page generally receive at least 70 comments. The more controversial articles have reached a total exceeding 1000 comments (Wikipedia, 2005).
Slashdot is a form of online news production and distribution that is enabled by the collaborative news network on which it is based (Chan, 2002). Slashdot exhibits many of the characteristics commonly associated with open publishing and online news production sites. Slashdot runs independently from established news organisations as a form of online journalism and, like many similar sites, relies upon a large, anonymous and physically dispersed group of users that produce the majority of the site's content (Chan, 2002). Slashdot varies to some other open publishing sites, such as Indymedia, in terms of its editorial process. Many open publishing sites operate with minimal or no editorial staff. The articles and responses published on Slashdot are predominantly submitted by the users and are initially subjected to an elaborate communal editing and moderation process by the editorial staff (Bruns, 2003, p.6).
Slashdot first began in September 1997 as the personal blog of Rob Malda who, at the time, was studying art and computer science at Hope College in Holland, Michigan (Chan, 2002). The name Slashdot was intentionally chosen to create confusion and difficulty in pronunciation of the URL; h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org (Slashdot, 2005). Malda used his personal site to publish news and personal musings on technology related issues and, more specifically, Linux programming (Chan, 2002). Readers began to email links and articles to Malda and discussion forums were promptly added to the site. It was the ability of the users to openly contribute and give feedback that developed the site into a popular news discussion and community website (Chan, 2002). The software used to run the Slashdot forums is called Slashcode and is released under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Public License (Wikipedia, 2005). Slashdot is owned by the Open Source Technology Group which is a part of VA Software, but the site is primarily run by Rob Malda, Jeff Bates and Robin Miller (Wikipedia, 2005).
Slashdot has experienced numerous achievements, problems and controversies since 1997. September 14, 1998, Slashdot was hacked for the first time and again on September 28, 2000 (Wikipedia, 2005). February 1, 1999, was when the Slashdot effect was first mentioned. The Slashdot effect is said to occur when a website crashes due to too many people hitting it after it has been mentioned in an interesting article on the Slashdot site (Raymond, 2004). 1999 was also the year Slashdot introduced its moderation system in response to inappropriate postings. August 18, 2004, marked the sites ten millionth user posting (Wikipedia, 2005).
Slashdot’s forum moderation system is complex. The editors of Slashdot ‘watch the gates’ at the input stage where they read the news stories submitted by their users and then, while keeping in mind what their users want to see, they publish the most interesting stories on the homepage (Bruns, 2005, p.38). Other stories are placed in topical sections of the site. Bruns (2005, p.39) defines this editorial process, neither as gatekeeping nor gatewatching, but as supervised gatewatching; gatewatching by users at the input stage that is supervised by an editorial team at the output stage.
Chan (2002) revealed, at the time of her study, that 85% of Slashdot visitors work or study in technology related fields and an estimated 95% are male. This group was comprised of 22% students, and 63% were either researches, engineers, programmers or IT professionals (Chan, 2002).
Slashdot’s primary audience consists of Linux and open source software enthusiasts as well as many users of the Microsoft Windows operating system (Wikipedia, 2005).
Slashdot is frequently presented with numerous problems. A common problem is trolling (Wikipedia, 2005). In relation to the Internet a troll is a person who posts provocative messages in online discussion forums in an attempt to disrupt the conversation and agitate users (Campbell, 2004). Similar to trolling are verbal assaults and flamebaiting, which are both prevalent within the Slashdot forums (Wikipedia, 2005). Flamebaiting is the raising of an issue that is likely to result in a flame; a hostile comment. The most common flamebaits on Slashdot are references to the Microsoft versus Linux debate (Wikipedia, 2005). Slashdot introduced moderation to help combat such problems but it has caused further problems.
The moderation system works by giving each post a score. Moderation points that are given to a comment are added up to create a karma score for each user, and this has resulted in what is called karma whoring (Wikipedia, 2005). Karma whoring is where users post comments that do not contribute to the discussion but nevertheless result in the user’s karma score being ‘modded up’. The motivation behind karma whoring is that karma gives the user a higher status within the Slashdot community and consequently higher comment visibility (Wikipedia, 2005). This practice is considered just as bad as trolling.
Open Publishing
Open Publishing - Aggressive and Disruptive Behaviour: Flaming, Trolling and Hate-Speech
Open Publishing - Indymedia
Open Publishing - Participatory Journalism
Bruns, A. (2003) “From Blogs to Open News: Notes Towards a Taxonomy of P2P Publications,�? paper presented to the ANZCA03 Designing Communications for Diversity Conference, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 9-11 Jul.
Bruns, A. (2005) Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0820474320.
Campbell, T. (2004) “Internet Trolls,�? retrieved October 15, 2005, from http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm
Chan, A. (2002) Collaborative News Networks: Distributed Editing, Collective Action, and the Construction of Online News on Slashdot.org, retrieved October 15, 2005, from http://web.mit.edu/anita1/www/thesis/Index.html
Raymond, E. (2004) “Slashdot Effect,�? retrieved October 15, 2005, from http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/slashdot-effect.html
Slashdot (2005) “Slashdot’s Frequently Asked Questions,�? retrieved October 15, 2005, from http://slashdot.org/faq/slashmeta.shtml#sm150
Wikipedia (2005) “Slashdot,�? retrieved October 15, 2005, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
Michelle Manners 11:21, 16 Oct 2005 (EST)
