Slashdot facts for kids
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Type of site
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News/social news |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Slashdot Media |
| Created by | Co-Founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and Jeff Bates |
| Revenue | Advertisement, optional subscription |
| Alexa rank |  5,474 (October 2018[update]) |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | October 5, 1997 |
| Current status | Online |
Slashdot (also called /. for short) is a website where people share and discuss news. It started by calling itself "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." This meant it focused on news about science, technology, and important topics. Users of the site suggest news stories, and then other users and editors check them out. Every story has a comments section where people can talk about it online.
The website was started in 1997 by two college students, Rob Malda (known as "CmdrTaco") and Jeff Bates (known as "Hemos"). They later sold the website to a company called DHI Group, Inc. in 2012. In 2016, another company, BIZX, bought Slashdot Media, which included Slashdot.org. BIZX then changed its name to Slashdot Media in 2019.
Contents
How Slashdot Works
Slashdot works because its users are very involved. Users send in short summaries of news stories and links to the full articles. Each story then becomes a place for users to have a discussion. These discussions are organized so that comments are linked to each other, making it easy to follow a conversation.
User Moderation System
The comments on Slashdot are looked after by a special system where users help moderate. Some users are chosen randomly to be moderators. They get points they can use to rate comments. When they rate a comment, they can add or take away one point from its current score. They do this based on if the comment is "normal," "offtopic," "insightful," "redundant," "interesting," or even if it's a "troll" (meaning someone trying to cause trouble).
Website Technology
The system that handles comments and moderation on Slashdot is built using its own open source software. This software is called Slash. "Open source" means that its code is available for anyone to see and use, and it's shared under a special license called the GNU General Public License.
Impact and Awards
Slashdot has been a very popular website. In 2012, about 3.7 million different people visited the site each month. Users also posted over 5300 comments every day. The site has won more than 20 awards. These include two People's Voice Awards in 2000 for "Best Community Site" and "Best News Site."
At its most popular, a news story posted on Slashdot with a link to another website could send so many visitors to that site that it would crash. This event was so common it got its own name: the "Slashdot effect." It showed how powerful Slashdot was in sending traffic to other websites.
Images for kids
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Co-founder Jeff Bates
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Rob Malda, Co-founder of Slashdot
See also
In Spanish: Slashdot para niños
