Slashdot

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Editor's Note: Help Wanted for the History, Impact, and Highlights Sections

About

Slashdot, sometimes referred to as "/.", was one of the first websites where the users themselves could post content ^[1]. This model, now referred to as "social news" inspired the creation of similar sites like fark, and digg, the latter of which inspired reddit.

History

Slashdot was launched by Rob Malda & Jeff Bates in October 5, 1997 ^[2]. The original purpose of the site was to share thought-provoking stories, though they were usually tech related. As the site gained enormous traffic the next year, new servers were added to sustain it, along with users now able to post stories directly on the site ^[3].

Impact

Slashdot had introduced many of the interactive site features we take for granted today, including tags, moderators, karma, and the aforementioned user-submitted posts. Consequently, Slashdot had a different approach with implementing these features than more modern sites like reddit, due to their absence on other sites at the time ^[4].

Features

Moderation

Interviews

Karma

On Slashdot, karma's lower and upper limit are -1 and 5 by default, respectively.

Comments

Highlights

Slashdot Effect

Click here for more details.

The Slashdot Effect is a phenomenon that occurs after a Slashdot post is cited. The source itself normally wouldn't get a lot of traffic, but once it's cited, it experiences a massive spike in traffic as a result of being readily accessible to Slashdot users ^[4]. This would cause the receiving site to slow down, or even experience an outage. Since 2005, this happened far less frequently, due in part to the source link going to a mirror of the original site (aka Mirrordot), bandwidth costs in general decreasing, and the site's decreasing traffic.

Traffic

In 2017, Slashdot's global site rank has floated somewhere between 5000 and 6000, according to Alexa ^[5], and it saw 300k to 450k people according to Quantcast ^[6].