Slashdot

Slashdot is a science and technology blog/news site, with the motto "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". Founded in 1997 by Rob Malda, it is one of the earliest examples of a blog. The site remains one of the most well-known and most-visited technology sites on the Internet. The URL was chosen because of the difficulty of pronouncing it, as it is spelled out "H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org". It is currently owned by the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG). Slashdot is generally targeted at people with a high degree of computer literacy, especially computer professionals.

Organization

Stories are posted on Slashdot by editors, who are paid employees. They gather the stories from user submissions, which other users can comment on in the "Firehose". Approximately 20 stories are posted to the front page of slashdot daily. The stories are commented on by users, with a typical story getting between 75 and 200 comments. Each story is assigned to a category, with the categories ranging from science to politics to IT. Additionally, each story has "tags", which are user-assigned.

Moderation

One of the most prominent features of Slashdot is its moderation. Every comment has a score, which ranges from -1 to 5 and starts at 1. Randomly selected users are given 5 mod points to give to comments. Each mod point can either increase the score of a comment by one, or decrease it by one.

Site Infrastructure

Slashdot runs on Slash, an open source Perl script built for the site. It runs using the Apache web server and a MySQL database on Linux servers.