If you’ve got a passing interest in science, technology or even politics, you might be
familiar with Slashdot
The news aggregation site that prides itself on being for nerds.
But how does it compare to sites like hacker news?
What is the Slashdot Effect?
And how does the website influence the uptake of mainstream media around the world?
Here’s How It Happened
Slashdot is surprisingly old for a social internet platform, with roots dating back
to 1997, when founder Rob Malda launched a website called Chips and Dips, which he used
as a blog to post articles that interested him in the worlds of tech and software
Rob became known by his internet handle CmdrTaco, running his site while studying at college
and working as ad programer, all off of just a single server
With help from friend Jeff Bates, or ‘Hemos’ as he was called online, the pair registered
their website in October of 1997 as Slashdot.org;
The name was part of a running joke, since its full URL was https://slashdot.org,
An obnoxiously long mouthful that was made to be intentionally hard to pronounce.
Slashdot quickly became a hub for technophiles and its own slogan was “News for Nerds.
Stuff that matters”,
The following year, the website started accepting reader submissions via web forms, and needed
to recruit more servers and moderators to keep it under control.
Much like online forums that we see today on Reddit or Facebook, Slashdot was a very
early venture into the world of social media; users could comment and rate posts based on
their content, which usually comprised of a summary of the news story accompanied by
a few sources from well known news outlets.
It wasn’t long before Slashdot had outgrown its creators, and by 1999 it had over 400
moderators on rotation.
ThAT year the site was sold to Andover.net, a content provider for Linux users and continued
to grow at a faster rate, reaching its 10,000th article in February 2000.
President George W Bush’s re-election campaign saw Slashdot position itself as a political
news channel too, with stories about the 2005 London bombings and Saddam Hussein’s capture
quickly rising to the website’s top 10 most active articles.
Slashdot later introduced features like Karma points, a long term way of users collecting
feedback about the quality of their posts, and tags with their own unique syntax, to
help readers filter through and find relevant articles more easily
The website’s primary means of income is through banner ads, ensuring that content
remains free at the point of use to all readers; but they also offer a paid subscription, charging
$5 for the removal of ads from 1000 pages at a time.
Slashdot went through several more acquisitions down the years before merging together with
open source software provider SourceForge, now operating under the parent company of
Slashdot Media
Malda stepped down from his role as editor-in-chief at Slashdot 10 years ago, stating that after
14 years as the leader, it was time for someone else to take control.
His next positions have included the Washington Post, and favourably compared his own site
to Hacker News, judged by many to be a successor to Slashdot.
But Malda himself has questioned the lifespan of news aggregate websites, claiming that
after they reach a point of critical mass, the interests of the readership become much
broader than the founder’s intentions.
In any case, Slashdot is still proving successful among its users.
It might be difficult to gauge the number of monthly readers or how many subscriptions
they sell,
But if 600,000 Youtube subscribers and a quarter of a million Twitter followers are anything
to go by, the brand is still going strong.
In fact its become such a prominent part of internet culture that the phrase ‘the Slashdot
Effect’ has been seen across mainstream media, referring to when a smaller site receives
an explosion in traffic due to exposure on a megablog like Slashdot, Reddit or Digg,
Basically the same as an accidental denial of service attack
Comment below if you’ve tried Slashdot and if aggregate sites should be the future of
news consumption.
And that’s how it happened.
Thanks for watching.