By Nathan Cochrane
Fairfax I.T.
February 19, 1999
Slashdot embodies a growing trend in online news - sites that generate little of their own content yet are rapidly gathering devout readerships, including journalists, who want to stay abreast of developments. So much is happening so fast that reader attention spans are shortening and filter services that rely increasingly on user-generated tidbits updated in real time are becoming more important. Slashdot covers an eclectic and often arcane range of subjects from console computer games to supercomputing, intellectual property disputes and operating systems to Star Wars - just because its owner likes the movie. The site name is a tongue-twister play on the Web naming convention; try saying ``http://slashdot.org" and you'll wind up sounding like you have a speech impediment.
Slashdot fits somewhere between a discussion forum and a vertical portal. It acts as a filter, pointing surfers to a select dozen or so interesting stories on the Web each day.
Slashdot and its ilk such as Linux Weekly News, LinuxToday and Freshmeat are part of a growing trend towards portals geared to tight communities of interests. In an online sense, commercial portals such as Netscape's Netcenter are modelled after the traditional electronic broadcast mediums of television and radio, pushing advertising messages to users scattergun-style. But the community portals are developing around narrow vertical niches.
SLASHDOT'S 22-year-old creator, Rob Malda, aka ``Commander Taco'', said he stumbled on the idea two years ago while a computer science student - to share with the Web what he found cool or worthy, what he refers to as ``stuff that matters''. And with about 70,000 readers a day visiting the site, and growing rapidly, it appears there are plenty who share his terms of reference.
The term ``slashdot effect'' comes from what happens when an average 30,000 or so Slashdotters suddenly descend on an unsuspecting Web server referenced from Malda's site.
Malda lives in Holland, Michigan, USA, on the edge of the Great Lakes in that country's north east. Home is ``Geek House 2.0'' - apparently there was a version 1.0 - an old building inhabited by a group of proud self-proclaimed geeks.
Slashdot dominates his waking life.
``I don't have a life. I've only left my house three times in the last week,'' Malda said.
The irony is that the same people who cause the regular brownouts on other sites - the Slashdot readers - are themselves the sorts of people who must maintain sites being mostly system administrators, Web developers and programmers. But increasingly, as Slashdot is mentioned more in the mainstream IT press and sysadmins are required to explain why the corporate Web server burped, senior management is starting to take note.
``(The response is) pretty positive. I get more than my share of hate mail when I screw up, regularly, and fan mail when I do good, (which is) less regularly,'' Malda confessed.
``Journalists are intrigued because it's a different model for news distribution. Decentralised. IT professionals have mixed feelings; your sysadmin reads Slashdot, but his boss might not like it. We tend to be on the extreme end of things, but that's where it's most interesting.''
As with so many other things related to the Net, no one knows where the term ``slashdot effect'' originated, but it achieved ``official'' status when Wired magazine recently mentioned it in its Jargon Watch column.
So noticeable is the effect that it led New York-based research physicist and systems analyst Stephen Adler to document his own experience after a paper he presented was referenced. He said he ``freaked out'' when he received 10 times the weekly number of visitors he normally saw at his site within an hour of it being posted to Slashdot.
``I kept thinking to myself, all those people wanted to read my article?'' Adler said.
The same thing happened twice more, which led him to write a summary based on Web server logs. The article on the effect was not meant seriously, he said, but it has still engendered a great degree of interest, downloaded more than 16,000 times.
And he offered a sage word of warning for mainstream media with Web presences.
Adler said: ``Traditional publishers are in for a rude awakening when they find that people will enjoy an active forum in publishing, which Slashdot offers, rather than the static form we have now through the traditional print media. Once people get used to it, they will demand it.''
BUT Malda mostly dismissed what had been said about his site's ability to demolish a server or gobble its outbound bandwidth as ``hype'', but admitted an element of truth.
``We have a noticable effect on unprepared servers, but we probably knock a server down most every day,'' Malda said.
So convinced is Malda of the correctness of his approach, that he has published the source code for Slashdot on his Web site. Now anyone with a working knowledge of programming and Internet technologies can start their own version of Slashdot, even competing with the original online IT resource if they wish.
A man known in Internet circles as the father of digital distribution, Dan Rasmussen, was not surprised by Slashdot's impact. He said there was no end in sight to the need for more bandwidth and better managed Web hosting. The founder of the world's first and biggest Web hosting service, Frontier GlobalCenter, hosts big names such as Yahoo!, The Starr Report, Netscape and Excite. The company recently expanded its operations to Australia, with a point of presence in Melbourne and another planned for Sydney.
``We will consider the amount of bandwidth people use today laughable in 10 years,'' Rasmussen said. ``As the technology evolves, the bandwidth requirements will skyrocket. In fact today's high-speed OC-48 technology will be used for smaller pipes.
``But I don't think backbones will catch up with demand; I don't see it.''
More broadly, the effect is causing hardened news veterans to reconsider what is news, where they get it from, and how to package it. Journalists from InfoWorld to Time, and the New York Times now check the site daily for tip-offs to trends and hot stories. Just as many probably check to see if their stories got a mention. Malda personally posts about a dozen of these from 300 submissions a day. And a single story linked from Slashdot can generate 100,000 visits or more in just a few days. Malda said supporting the site was a full-time obsession, but, despite the obvious traffic he could direct, he had yet to find a business model that might attract a buyer.
``Frankly, the site is expensive to run and I don't care about figuring out how to pay for it,'' Malda said. ``If other people can figure that part out and leave me to run the site as I see fit, I'd consider it.
``We did it right, and at the right time and we managed to get enough momentum to become big enough to survive. It's a chicken-and-egg situation - you don't get big without having content, and in my case, since the content mostly comes from the readers, you don't get content unless you get big.
``As for two years from now... who knows where it'll be. I think we'll ideally be doing a lot of the same stuff, but maybe with spell checking.''
When South Australia's Geoffrey Bennett, had news about his refund for an unwanted copy of Windows 95 broadcast on Slashdot last month, his site recorded more than 25,000 visitors in a single day, he said. At the time, Bennett told I.T., the response was ``amazing'', generating more than 120 e-mails of support in a day.
Such is the power of a single site to direct news, that refund movement has snowballed. Buoyed by the ongoing US Government investigations into alleged Microsoft monopolistic practices, it has resulted in about a half-dozen coordinated efforts in the US to get refunds from Microsoft and hardware vendors.
Copyright 1999