Slashdot
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
- Note: do not try to find slashfic on slashdot
"News For Nerds, stuff that matters" website located at slashdot.org.
A communal blog ran by a dozen or so seemingly incompetent authors. Intriguingly enough, there was a day when slashdot was regarded as a relevant, respected nerd site with plenty of interesting and useful items. Now it seems the editor's major role is to find news articles from other sites that will generate huge amounts of comments resulting in, of course, more page views to sell advertising. Present-day slashdot is simply another shitty site, not unlike livejournal, with the caliber of a group of fatties with Assburger Syndrome.
Slashdot is the largest home on the internets for trolls and whores (see trolltalk).
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[edit] Users on slashdot
99% of slashdot users have been self-diagnosed as suffering from Asperger's Syndrome. Most slashdot users consider themselves "smart," when in fact they are simply of average intelligence but have more free time and a fat egos. This can be seen in the forums, where spelling and usage errors are prevalent in condescending, arrogant rants, identified by containing the phrase "people are stupid" at some point in the post.
The majority of slashdot's userbase is composed of fat, white, goateed cubicle-shit. Statistically, a "slash-bot" is much more likely to spend his whole life being as unpopular as he was in high-school. The facts directly contradict the typical nerd comeuppance fantasy, where the awkward and unattractive grow up to rule the world, and their popular, seemingly "less intelligent" tormentors wind up pregnant, in prison or selling shoes at the mall. In reality, the bullies wind up in college on sports scholarships, and go on to study economics, law or at least sociology. Nerds tend to have poor job prospects: their skill sets frequently clash with market realities (for every Bill Gates there exist thousands of Best-Buy lifers), and their social lives dismally revolve around their junior-college anime club, wearing stupid costumes, and a monogamous relationship with a fat bitch. Nine out of ten slashdot users will contend with structural unemployment and degrading service-sector jobs for the rest of their lives. The other one will see the light and join the GNAA out of sheer frustration from the idiocy the Slashdot culture exhibits.
[edit] Articles on slashdot
Each new article provides a follow-up forum where Slashdot users can provide their own commentary. When slashdot was smaller and populated by the elite, the forums were self-moderated. As time went on, slashdot attracted a much younger and lower educated set of readers in addition to its original core. Because of the sheer volume of posts and the complete ease with which a troll could dominate a forum, slashdot started a moderation system to rate comments and associate those with slashdot users.
[edit] Examples of Idiocy
[edit] Moderation System
The Slashot moderation system was designed to raise good posts and denigrate poor ones. Its simplicity has been its downfall. It has been mostly successful at removing first post and crap floods, but rather than discourage trolling, it has elevated it to an art form. By relying on a point system (named, without irony, "karma") it provides a built-in scoring mechanism. A comments karma score can range from -1 to +5. Competing trolls can grade themselves as easily as a baseball game.
[edit] Problems with moderation system
Whores are more common on slashdot than trolls. The communal nature of granting and removing karma by the users is anti-authoritative and actively discourages people with real knowledge about a subject from discussing it. Instead, well-practiced whores tailor their comments to gain specific kinds of karma. Positive karma comes in the flavors of informative, insightful, interesting, funny and underrated. Funny whores regularly trot out old memes, meaningless buzzwords, or lame "Simpsons" jokes (none of which are funny in any way). Interesting and under-rated scores are a guarantee of off-topic crap. Insightful is the karma of choice when your comment is inflammatory personal opinion. It would seem that "informative" comments might make for good reading. However, when the people doing the scoring are as generally uneducated as the slashdot masses, anyone who writes anything that sounds intelligent gets the +5.
The karma system has several mechanisms beyond simple score-keeping that reinforce the trolling and whoring. Once a whore gets a few positive karma points their comments automatically get a bonus to their starting score. By simply logging in and having good karma a whores comments start out at +2, more than halfway to the maximum rating. A casual viewer with authoritative knowledge faces a Sisyphean task correcting the mistruths, urban legends and bullshit that fly around the slashdot forums. The sheer volume of noise is discouraging enough. The karma deficit is difficult to climb out of - most moderators read at a minimum of +2 guaranteeing a corrective post won't even get noticed.
Another contributor to the longevity of whores is the decision by the editors to actually discourage negative moderation. Users who repeatedly moderate comments negatively soon won't be moderating any more.
The Slashdot homepage features new articles slightly more than once an hour. With that short timeline, trolls and whores have a limited period to get their comments in and collect karma before the forum attention turns to a new article. The short critical mass period for an articles life is another block to authoritative and well-written commentary - most commenter don't even read the news articles before commenting. Slashdot actually sells an early access feature, which is nothing more than a link to Digg.com. A whore who can make comments before the general public has a magnificent edge in getting noticed by moderators.
The sad reality is that more interesting and informative discussion occurs on sites where the old and proven social mechanism for getting rid of trolls - ignoring them - is practiced.
The system itself is run on scripts referred to as slash.
[edit] Whacking it to /.
Slashdot is a great place to go to whack it. All technofetishists will be sure to get a raging boner from the porno pics of motherboards and the fantasy erotica about coming technologies. Slashdot also has full teledildonics support for users, so that every time you post something smug about Linux or Open Sores Software, you get a mind shattering orgasm. This is the reason why regular slashdot posters smell of old crusty jizz. As an added bonus, whenever you read the crap that passes for posting there, you feel like you have been thoroughly sodomized by an 800lb gorilla! BONUS!
[edit] Noteworthy slashdot personalities
- Hemos
- CmdrTaco
- Cowboy Neal
- Zonk
[edit] Slashdot trolling
Before it became irrelevant thanks to the rise of digg, reddit, and their ilk, Slashdot's position as the center of geek news also attracted some of the most creative trolling this side of Usenet. TOW even devoted an entire article to the subject, before the anti-lulz forces rose to delete it. An archived copy is here, for now. (For those who joined teh Interweb yesterday, please note that even TOW was actually lulzy at one point.
Slashdot's aspie geeks were easily trolled with Lunix bashing [1] and Windows propaganda, so a rare few trolls put extra effort into pushing the envelope on the medium. The infamous WIPO troll, for instance, posted and reposted incredibly elaborate faux-documentaries of the secret homosexual lives of prominent Slashdot and Linux personalities. For instance: The Linux Gay Conspiracy and Official Taco-Snotting FAQ. [2] Trollaxor took the same concept in the opposite tack, posting fictional narratives (slashdot slashfic) exposing what he called "faggot Linux Nazism". [3], both involving stock Linux geeks (the infamous Linux Party) and specific Slashdot personalities (CmdrTaco, Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, etc.)
The GNAA's early years centered around trolling Slashdot; getting a successful First post was long a condition of membership.
[edit] Tips
- 1. Always use the word "lunix" in place of "linux" in slashdot's discussion forums.
- 2. You can steal mod points by copying someone else's insightful comment and pasting it as a reply to an earlier one.
- 3. Mac users are a bunch of fucking queers.
- 4. When there's something you need to do that can't be done with Windows but can be done with Lunix, keep in mind that you can do an even better job with Mac OS X. Some argue that *BSD can do it better but no one makes software for BSD since no one gives a flying fuck.
- 5.
[edit] Compare against
- Macslash.org -- Like slashdot, but for Mac Fags
- 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 slash.
- Technocrat.net -- A similar forum to slashdot, intended to be more mature, managed by Bruce Perens.
- Digg -- Slashdot currently gets all its front page material here. There is an even lower level of discourse due to an immature and highly irritating user base, but it's still new, and a great source of links.
- Freebsd.org -- A piece of shit site with really loud fanboys.
- Sensible Erection -- Now with 50% more pr0n!
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
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