Slashdot Launches

1997

Date: 5 October 1997 · Place: Holland, Michigan, then Hope College dorm room · Figures: Rob Malda (CmdrTaco), founder · Jeff Bates (Hemos), co-founder · Kurt Gray, early developer · Tags: News Aggregator, Comment Moderation, Geek Culture 01. News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters Rob Malda registers slashdot.org on 5 October 1997 from his dorm room at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. The site is a hand-written Perl CGI aggregating Linux news, Star Wars rumors, and Carmack .plan updates. Jeff Bates joins within weeks as Hemos. The tagline, 'News for nerds, stuff that matters', is unironic. Threaded comments arrive in 1998 with the M1/M2 metamoderation system, the first serious attempt at distributed community moderation on the open web. Karma points, score thresholds, and the +5 Insightful tag enter the lexicon. 02. Imagine A Beowulf Cluster Of These Slashdot generates two enduring memes by 1998. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these is the canonical comment on any new piece of hardware. Frist psot is the corrupted spelling of the race for the first comment. In Soviet Russia, car drives you spreads from Slashdot via Yakov Smirnoff revivals. The Slashdot Effect, the traffic spike that crashes any small site linked from the front page, is the first widely-recognized DDoS-by-popularity. The phrase enters technical English permanently. "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these." — Anonymous Coward, Slashdot comment, repeated thousands of times from 1998 onward Sources • Rob Malda, 'Slashdot: 10 Years' retrospective (slashdot.org, 5 October 2007) • Andrew Leonard, 'Free Software Project' (Salon, 1999) • Wendy Grossman, 'net.wars' (NYU Press, 1997)