The Slashdot Effect

The computer geek forum slashdot.org could give you an idea of the future
of online journalism

by Florian Cramer


The history of Slashdot could be told as a typical success story of the
Internet boom: How a student hobby website became the voice of a whole net
culture and earned its owners solid money on the stock market within two and
a half years. But unlike other popular internet service, Slashdot offers
neither e-commerce, nor the usual search engines, chats or games. Instead,
the web site is made for computer experts and system programmers who use
free operating systems like GNU/Linux and support their open source
philosophy. By adapting itself smoothly to the needs of its technically
savvy readership, Slashdot developed into a unique hybrid of a news ticker,
a link site, discussion forums and a database, giving online publishing
a wholly new format.

The concept of Slashdot hasn't fundamentally changed since the computer
science student and free software programmer Rob Malda launched the site in
his dormitory room at Hope College in September 1997. Slashdot readers
E-Mail the editors about the newest online news concerning Open Source,
computer technology and net politics. The editors filter out what they find
interesting and put it as a brief message onto the Slashdot homepage.  All
Slashdot news acknowledge their original source and informant with their
Internet addresses. As Slashdot's number of daily page views had increased
to 50.000 by 1998 and exploded to 800.000 in 1999, the notorious "Slashdot
effect" resulted: Whenever Slashdot points to a news source in the web -
like a news release of a computer company or some Internet-related court
decision -, a few thousand readers, attempting to read the document, bring
down its web server. "We've been slashdotted" is the typical message on the
day after.

In 1998, Malda replaced Slashdot's hand-witten HTML code with a database
system. Thus it was not only possible to store all news but, even more
important, create discussion forums for readers. Slashdot soon became an
insider spot. Prominent Open Source developers, who had fled such overcrowed
newsgroups as comp.os.linux, met for discussions in Slashdot forums. Of
course it didn't take long until Slashdot was hit by the newsgroup syndrome
as well. When the average number of responses to Slashdot news story had
increased to two hundred, their quality had proportionally decreased. Malda
saw the problem and tried to solve it in hacker fashion, that is, with
technical means instead of censorship. He programmed a system for Slashdot
which permits moderators to score postings and leaves every reader the
freedoom to decide whether or not his readings should be filtered by score
thresholds.

Although moderation has been introduced, Slashdot's discussion still reveal
that even software freedom fighters tend to indulge in religious warfare and
self-righteousness while many users misunderstand open source as a consumer
conucorpia. The people behind Slashdot are not quite innocent of such
attitudes. True to the image of their site, they celebrate a 'geek' and
'nerd' lifestyle of introverted male adolescents with a weakness for fast
food and Science Fiction flicks and let Slashdot columnist Jon Katz
embellish this attitude with homebrew sociology. Nevertheless, there can be
no doubt about the importance of Slashdot as a marketplace for
computer-related news, an importance which could not even be lessened by the
fact that the site is no longer economically independent, but has been
bought by the major Linux player VA Linux in February. The international
computer press still likes to copy their news from Slashdot. The Slashdot
format has proved so successful that newer open source like
www.technocrat.net, www.advogato.com and www.kuro5hin.org adapted it
straight away. Since Rob Malda's program code is open source, he's unlikely
to mind the clones.

Slashdot and Company have gained their popularity not only at the expense of
classical newsgroups which are less and less known to newcomers to the net.
In the U.S., these websites have factually replaced the computer quality
press. Since "Byte" ceased to appear, there are no important print
periodicals for above-average computer users. Slashdot has thus become an
avant-garde of online journalismus, although traditional journalist skills -
including correct spelling - are not exactly its virtues. Rob Malda even
sees Slashdot as "a superset of journalism" which is "somewhere between two
guys talking in a pub, a thousand guys talking in a forum, and a newspaper"
without actually being any of these. 

One could argue that other online media have tried to accomplish the same.
Frequently, they failed because of graphics and script overkill and bizarre
user interfaces. A particularly telling example is the flight simulator
interface of the first online edition of German illustrated paper "Stern".
The secret of Slashdot's success is not to be conceived as an
offshot of a traditional medium, but developed from the ground up in the
internet for internet people. Despite the various shortcomings of its
content, Slashdot is - half a decade after the invention of online
journalism - a living example of web publishing which has emancipated itself
from print, tv and radio.