Slashdot The Site Trolling And Moderation Karma See Also

The site's slogan is, "News for nerds, stuff that matters," but Slashdot is sometimes criticized for posting inaccurate, highly biased, and/or inflammatory story summaries that incite heated posting, as opposed to serious news or commentary (see Slashdot subculture). It is also famous for the related Slashdot effect, which often floods unsuspecting websites with traffic, sometimes bringing them down.

The name "Slashdot" was invented to confuse people who try to say the url of the site orally (h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org) [1].

1 The site

Slashdot's core audience consists of Linux enthusiasts and various other enthusiasts of the open source software movement. Curiously, a poll on Slashdot suggests that approximately half of all Slashdot visitors actually use a Microsoft WindowsImage use policy. Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually has come to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, t with only a third using some form of Linux. [2] One explanation for this result posits a number of Linux users browsing Slashdot from their workplaces, where Windows is dominant.

Slashdot users, frequently called Slashdotters or Penguinheads, number in excess of 800,000 registered users. Famous or well-known Slashdotters include actor Wil WheatonRichard William (Wil) Wheaton III (born July 29, 1972) is a former child actor, now a writer and father. He is best known for his portrayals of Wesley Crusher on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and Gordie LaChance in the film Stand By (username "CleverNickName"), id Softwareid Software is a computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. The company was founded by four members of the computer company SoftDisk: John Carmack, a programmer, John Romero and Tom Hall, game designers, and Adrian Carmack, an a programmer John Carmackgame programmer. Through his work, he has made significant contributions to the field of 3D computer graphics and his games have sold in the millions. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific p (username "John Carmack"), GNOMEGNOME is a computer desktop environment for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. It is the official desktop of the GNU Project. Origin The GNOME G NU N etwork O bject M odel E nvironment) project was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico and MonoMono as a single word can refer to: single-channel audio, a shortened form of monaural abbreviation for Infectious mononucleosis, an illness an open source implementation of the Microsoft. NET architecture, see Mono (Ximian) a fish, Monodactylus sebae Mon's chief architect Miguel de IcazaMiguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a free software programmer from Mexico, best known for starting the GNOME project. Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He started writing free softwa (username: "miguel") and open source evangelist Bruce Perens (username "Bruce Perens"). Also noteworthy is the participation of several engineers from NASA involved in the Mars rover exploration projects.

2 Trolling and moderation

As one of the largest forums on the Internet, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon (see Slashdot trolling phenomena). It is an offbeat and complex subculture involving sometimes repetitive and sometimes obscene comments featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and other unusual juvenilia.

There are many famous personalities from Slashdot's older trolling community. Craig McPherson, for example, started the well-known hot grits and naked and petrified memes while OSM and Trollaxor specialized in bizarre creative fiction regarding various Slashdot and Free/Open Source Software personalities. SpiralX, Streetlawyer/John Saul Montoya (jsm), Signal 11, Dumb Marketing Guy (dmg), Seventy Percent, 80md and others typified the classic sense of trolling both under their well-known monikers and a bevy of pseudonyms (or "sock puppets").

Other less-sophisticated forms of Slashdot trolling -- often referred to as crapflooding -- includes posting of one-liners, ASCII art, and other materials. Several of these trolls set up Geekizoid, a site devoted to exploring and fostering crapflooding memes. Members of the aforementioned classic trolling group created Adequacy.org and continued their formula there until its closing. Another site where trolls gather is Anti-Slash where trolls come to wage jihad on Slashdot.

The Slashdot editors are sometimes accused of posting (and even preferring) stories that are, themselves, thinly-disguised trolls, which encourage large numbers of postings in response.

The "pink page of death" is an infamous feature applied to IP addresses that have been used to access Slashdot many times in a short period. It often appears on proxies used for crapflooding. It is called the pink page of death because the page is pink and it prohibits entry to Slashdot. Entry is only permitted again if the owner of the IP address explains themselves to Malda.

2.1 Karma

Since trolling is prevalent, a moderation system was implemented, whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by randomly chosen moderators, changing its score likewise. Slashdot editors, including CmdrTaco himself, can moderate limitlessly, while those users who are randomly given moderation privileges can only moderate a limited amount. Moderation points added to a comment are also added to a user's karma score. Having high karma gives added bonuses to users, such as the ability to autopost at higher starting values. Conversely, users with low karma have penalties imposed on them. People that post comments designed to get more karma, for example mirroring a linked article, are sometimes referred to as karma whores.

A given comment can have any integer score from −1 to +5, and Slashdot users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person browsing the comments at a threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of −1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to −1. Subsequently, a meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses. However, Meta-Moderation does not affect Slashdot editors with unlimited mod points. This results in posts being modded down for allegedly political reasons. Many have called for the release of the Meta-Moderation scores of those with unlimited mod points on *mods performed in the first 5 minutes after a article is posted*.

3 See also

Barrapunto -- A Spanish-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
PuntBarra -- A Catalan-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
Gildot -- A Portuguese-speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
Linuxfr -- A French speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
Symlink.ch -- A German speaking site in the spirit of Slashdot
List of websites
SlashCode
Heise -- Heise.de has a similar subculture to slashdot

4 Compare against

Kuro5hin -- An alternative discussion site founded and visited by Slashdot expatriates.
Everything2 -- Meta-information database run by Slashdot founders.
Plastic.com -- A political news forum running on SlashCode.
Technocrat.net -- A similar forum to Slashdot, intended to be more mature, managed by Bruce Perens.

5 External links

Slashdot front page
Slashdot Japan -- the Japanese version of Slashdot
Slashcode -- homepage of Slashdot's backend software (Slash)
- A list of sites running Slash
AlterSlash -- a graphical slashdot digest
Fristpost -- a trolling tool for Slashdot
mirrordot -- A tool that provides mirrors of all Slashdot stories to avoid the Slashdot effect

Slashdot Weblogs

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