Slashdot

News website populated with stories submitted by wide ranging news scavengers - the slashdot readers themselves.

Commentaries on stories are collected from users. There're so many contributions a rating system is in use, based on points scored for good posts, as rated by slashdot moderators, who are given moderation points to award based on their slashdot karma.

However, there is a community of users that operate to increase eachothers' karma, though it is not a strictly conscious effort. Grabbing attention to your posts to score karma is done via the slashdot karma collection formula, employed by karma whores. The self-promoting factionalizing community is similar to those occuring on the old BBS software Pyroto Mountain.

1. Links. These are what I see at the top of most of today's discussions. Maybe some minor commentary, but mainly people just showing me that they know how to use a search engine. Get the fours and fives. Generally karma whores.
2. People reposting information they found on other sites. This is at least mildly useful, it brings something to the conversation. Quickly get moderated up to threes and fours.
3. And lastly, the few and the proud who actually writeup their own informed opinions on the matter. These are generally lucky to make it to three, and are a rarity.

I don't know what it is, maybe /. has gotten too big for its own good and is tripping over itself, but I don't see the same inspiring information, ideas, and articles I used to.

(ms. Reider, chief operations anti-Privacy MPAA, cross examinated by Mr.Garbus (attorney 2600.com))

The site struggles to maintain some sense of editorial integrity, though Rob has been known to say that the site is still just about stuff he thinks is cool. Slashdot also has a self-admitted bias towards the ideals of Open Source, and makes a point of plugging Linux. It's also interesting to note that news articles are almost always quotes from user news submissions, followed by an editorial remark. These editorial remarks sometimes contain spelling and grammar errors, which trolls love to point out. The unpolished presentation goes uncommented on by the majority of readers, and (perhaps intentionally) is rarely cleaned up after the post.

Slashdot has undergone some structural changes in the past several years, and is now owned by VA, a publicly traded company. Although there is an underlying corporate structure to the site, the Slashdot staff almost oppose it in some ways, and are vigilant in their quest to continue running the site in the spirit with which it was started. Indeed, Slashdot has a very mom and pop feel. The web servers run Linux, and are maintained by Slashdot in-house staff.

Rob Malda is at the head of Slashdot, and it is a credit to him that he personally takes responsibility for the site. As he is very quick to point out, he takes the brunt of user dissatisfaction, and the blame if their Cisco hardware fails them. He receives over 400 (personally addressed) emails daily pertaining to Slashdot. The Slashdot editors make a point to come accross as human beings and not corporate figureheads.

Due to the site's popularity, Slashdot has one of the strongest trolling communities this side of USENET. This problem has lead to tremendous perl-based efforts to implement user comment moderation that scales (run on sentence). Though flawed, the system works, and Rob has strongly defended the system in several notorious IRC flame wars. The IRC logs are worth reading, if only to demonstrate the kind of stress trolls put on this guy.

There is a ridiculous amount of documentation pertaining to every aspect of the Slashdot comment system.

The code that runs Slashdot is called the Slashcode, and it is freely available under the GPL. Slashcode is widely considered a hack job, though it's also a constant work in progress.

There is a Slashdot radio show, called "Geeks in Space", which is a hilarious and infrequent gathering of the Holland Michigan Gang (generally CmdrTaco, CowboyNeal, Hemos, and mixmaster Nate Oostendorp) where they discuss Slashdot-related stuff among other things.

Factoids!