slashdot

Emergence

by Steven Johnson  · 329pp  · 88,954 words

of traditional geography. Until recent years, Holland had been best known for its annual tulip festival. But it is increasingly recognized as the birthplace of Slashdot.org—the closest thing to a genuinely self-organizing community that the Web has yet produced. Begun as a modest bulletin board by a lifetime

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Hollander named Rob Malda, Slashdot came into the world as the ultimate in knowable communities: just Malda and his friends, discussing programming news, Star Wars rumors, video games, and other

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geek-chic marginalia. “In the beginning, Slashdot was small,” Malda writes. “We got dozens of posts each day, and it was good. The signal was high, the noise was low.” Before long

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, though, Slashdot floated across the rising tsunami of Linux and the Open Source movement and found itself awash in thousands of daily visitors. In its early days

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, Slashdot had felt like the hill towns of ECHO and the Well, with strong leadership coming from Malda himself, who went by the handle Commander Taco.

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’t enough time for me to personally keep them in check and still handle my other responsibilities.” Malda’s first inclination was to create a Slashdot elite: twenty-five handpicked spam warriors who would sift through the material generated by the community, eliminating irrelevant or obnoxious posts. While the idea of

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tradition, Malda endowed his lieutenants with a crucial resource: they could rate other contributions, on a scale of -1 to 5. You could browse through Slashdot.org with a “quality filter” on, effectively telling the software, “Show me only items that have a rating higher than 3.” This gave his lieutenants

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function as well as a negative one. They could emphasize the good stuff and reward users who were productive members of the community. Soon, though, Slashdot grew too large for even the elites to manage, and Malda went back to the drawing board. It was the kind of thing that could

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less a real office, Malda needed far more than his twenty-five lieutenants to keep the Slashdot community from descending into complete anarchy. But without the resources to hire a hundred full-time moderators, Slashdot appeared to be stuck at the same impasse that Mumford had described thirty years before: stay small

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and preserve the quality of the original community; keep growing and sacrifice everything that had made the community interesting in the first place. Slashdot had reached its “climax stage.” What did the Commander do? Instead of expanding his pool of special authorized lieutenants, he made everyone a potential lieutenant

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community itself. His goals were relatively simple, as outlined in the Frequently Asked Questions document on the site: 1. Promote quality, discourage crap. 2. Make Slashdot as readable as possible for as many people as possible. 3. Do not require a huge amount of time from any single moderator. 4. Do

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not allow a single moderator a “reign of terror.” Together, these objectives define the parameters of Slashdot’s ideal state. The question for Malda was how to build a homeostatic system that would naturally push the site toward that state without any

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at should be immediately recognizable by now: a mix of negative and positive feedback, structured randomness, neighbor interactions, and decentralized control. From a certain angle, Slashdot today resembles an ant colony. From another, it looks like a virtual democracy. Malda himself likens it to jury duty. Here’s how it works

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: If you’ve spent more than a few sessions as a registered Slashdot user, the system may on occasion alert you that you have been given moderator status (not unlike a jury summons arriving in your mailbox). As

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community leaders could naturally rise to the surface. That elevation was specifically encoded in the software. Accumulating karma on Slashdot was not just a metaphor for winning the implicit trust of the Slashdot community; it was a quantifiable number. Karma had found a home in the database. Malda’s point system brings

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to mind the hit points of Dungeons & Dragons and other classics of the role-playing genre. (That the Slashdot crowd was already heavily versed in the role-playing idiom no doubt contributed a great deal to the rating system’s quick adoption.) But Malda

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inspired me,” Malda says now. “It was mostly trial and error. The real influence was my desire to please users with very different expectations for Slashdot. Some wanted it to be Usenet: anything goes and unruly. Others were busy people who only wanted to read three to four comments a day

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.” You can see the intelligence and flexibility of the system firsthand: visit the Slashdot site and choose to view all the posts for a given conversation. If the conversation is more than a few hours old, you’ll probably

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collectively done such an exceptional job at bringing that quality to light. In the digital world, at least, there is life after the climax stage. * * * Slashdot is only the beginning. In the past two years, user ratings have become the kudzu of the Web, draping themselves across pages everywhere you look

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a Web page without hyperlinks triggers today: yes, it’s technically possible to create a page without these features, but what’s the point? The Slashdot system might seem a little complex, a little esoteric for consumers who didn’t grow up playing D&D, but think of the millions of

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in the past few years, just to get e-mail or to surf the Web. Compared to that learning curve, figuring out the rules of Slashdot is a walk in the park. And rules they are. You can’t think of a system like the one Malda built at

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Slashdot as a purely representational entity, the way you think about a book or a movie. It is partly representational, of course: you read messages via the Slashdot platform, and so the components of the textual medium that Marshall McLuhan

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so brilliantly documented in The Gutenberg Galaxy are on display at Slashdot as well. Because you are reading words, your reception of the information behind those words differs from what it would have been had that information

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been conveyed via television. The medium is still the message on Slashdot—it’s just that there’s another level to the experience, a level that our critical vocabularies are only now finding words for. In a

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Slashdot-style system, there is a medium, a message, and an audience. So far, no different from television. The difference is that those elements exist alongside

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own path through them—these are all examples of interactivity, but they’re in a different category from the self-organizing systems of eBay or Slashdot. Links and home-page-building tools are cool, no question. But they are closer to a newspaper letters-to-the-editor page than

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Slashdot’s collective intelligence. First-generation interactivity may have given the consumer a voice, but systems like Slashdot force us to accept a more radical proposition: to understand how these new media experiences work, you

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to analyze the message, the medium, and the rules. Think of those thousand-post geek-Dionysian frenzies transformed into an informative, concise briefing via the Slashdot quality filters. What’s interesting here is not just the medium, but rather the rules that govern what gets selected and what doesn’t. It

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money) but what makes the game interesting—indeed, what makes it a game at all—lies in the instruction set that you follow while playing. Slashdot’s rules are what make the medium interesting—so interesting, in fact, that you can’t help thinking they need their own category, beyond message

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, dense urban core. The networks in CNN-era television have engendered runaway positive feedback loops such as the Gennifer Flowers story, while a system like Slashdot achieves homeostatic balance, at least when viewed at level 5. Different feedback systems produce different results—even when those systems share the same underlying medium

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well be connected to a rating mechanism, but that doesn’t mean all Web sites will behave the same way. There may be homeostasis at Slashdot’s level 5, but you can always choose to read the unfiltered, anarchic version at level -1. Is there a danger in moving to a

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the corner, and we’ll take a closer look at its implications in the conclusion. But for now, it’s worth pointing out that the Slashdot system is indifferent to your personal interests—other than your interest in a general level of quality. The “ideal state” that the

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Slashdot system homes in on is not defined by an individual’s perspective; it is defined by the overall group’s perspective. The collective decides what’

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more groupthink than Daily Me. Perhaps, then, the danger lies in too much groupthink. Malda designed his system to evaluate submissions based on the average Slashdot reader—although the karma points tend to select moderators who have a higher-than-average reputation within the community. It’s entirely possible that Malda

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’s rules have created a tyranny of the majority at Slashdot, at least when viewed at level 5. Posts that resonate with the “average” Slashdotter are more likely to rise to the top, while posts that

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posts based purely on quality, not on whether they agree with the posts, but the line is invariably a slippery one.) From this angle, then, Slashdot bears a surprising resemblance to the old top-down universe of pre-cable network television. Both systems have a heavy center that pulls content toward

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center as well.) The network decision to pursue the center rather than the peripheries was invariably made at the executive level, of course—unlike at Slashdot, where the centrism comes from below. But if you’re worried about suppressing diversity, it doesn’t really matter whether it comes from above or

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get amplified, while minority viewpoints get silenced. This critique showcases why we need a third term beyond medium and message. While it’s true that Slashdot’s filtering software creates a heavy center, that tendency is not inherent to the Web medium, or even the subset of online communities. You could

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the thoughtful minorities—the ones who attract both admirers and detractors—would have a place at the table. There’s no reason why centrist Slashdot and diverse Slashdot can’t coexist. If you can adjust the quality filters on the fly, you could just as easily adjust the diversity filters. You could

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design the system to track the ratings of both popular and controversial moderators; users would then be able to view Slashdot through the lens of the “average” user on one day, and through the lens of a more diverse audience the next. The medium and the

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or our sidewalks, but once again we look to self-organization for the tools, this time built out of the instruction sets of software: Alexa, Slashdot, Epinions, Everything2, Freenet. Our brains first helped us navigate larger groups of fellow humans by allowing us to peer into the minds of other individuals

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years, not only will every television set come with a digital hard drive—all those devices will also be connected via the Web to elaborate, Slashdot-style filtered communities. Every program broadcast on any channel will be rated by hundreds of thousands of users, and the TiVo device will look for

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, as consumers discovered that the smart ads weren’t all that smart after all. Just as you can adjust the quality threshold for posts on Slashdot, you could do the same with personalized advertising: sign me up for the most highly rated services and ignore the rest. Who knows? In a

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. Those critics wildly underestimated the extent to which software can create self-regulating systems, systems that separate the scoundrels from the honest dealers, the way Slashdot’s quality filters separated quality from crap. Every seller on eBay has a public history of past deals; scam one buyer with a fake or

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more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas. Imagine a corporate system structured like the Slashdot quality filters: in a traditional company, the CEO composes the posts himself; in a Slashdot-style company, he’s merely tweaking the algorithm that promotes or demotes posts based on their quality. The

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products of photosynthesis from the leaves to the roots, and so on.” Wiener, 150. “The signal was”: Posted on the Slashdot site: www.slashdot.org. “As in the legal analogy”: Technically, Slashdot moderators don’t give each post a grade on the scale. Posts start out life at 0 or 1 (depending on

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at Automatic Media involved helping with the design and implementation of self-organizing software: mainly in our Plastic.com site, which was built on the Slashdot code. It’s not often that a writer gets to build something as he or she is writing about it, and it’s equally unusual

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of genetics, 57–59, 182–86 models for, 9, 16–17, 23, 59–63 of self-organization, 59–63, 76, 163–69 60 Minutes, 144 Slashdot, 152–62, 205, 212, 223, 260n Slate, 118, 128 sleep cycles, 140 slime mold (Dictyostelium discoideum), 11–17, 18, 20–21, 23, 43, 52, 63

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

by Andrew Lih  · 5 Jul 2010  · 398pp  · 86,023 words

_WIKI ORIGINS 43 Ward’s Start 45 HyperCard’s Inspirations 51 A Web Browser 53 Viola 54 HyperCard Revisited 55 Chapter 4_WIKI INTRODUCED 61 Slashdotting 67 Contributing the Meaning of Everything 70 The GFDL 72 v _Contents UseMod Grows 73 Give Me More Space 75 Server Load 77 Chapter 5

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live Wikipedia!” announced Sanger. He also set a goal: “I predict 1,000 [articles] by February 15.” In fact, they hit it three days early. Slashdotting If there was ever a salon for the technical elite and a grand senate of the computing community, it was

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Slashdot.org. Started originally as a user-contributed news 68_The_Wikipedia_Revolution site, Slashdot boldly proclaims as its pedigree: “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” It lists significant technology stories in a

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blog format to foster discussion, but it started even before blogging became part of the Internet lexicon. What makes Slashdot more than just a blog is its unique community formula. A handful of the site operators serve as editors, sifting through user submissions to post

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important technology stories from other outlets. But the story is simply a starting point. The real interesting content comes from the community discussion that ensues. Slashdot has become so popular that discussions are overrun by hundreds and thousands of comments, some pure gold, but many more pure crap. How do you

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sift the good from the bad when there are thousands of comments each day? Slashdot pioneered a way for self-policing the community with an innovative solution. In an era before the interactive and participatory Web 2.0 movement

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, Slashdot experimented with using something called meta-moderation. The system employed moderation techniques by tapping readers from time to time, not unlike the random marketing surveys

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, writers of those comments got more or fewer “karma” points, which became a tangible metric as an indication of social capital within the community. The Slashdot model worked very well, to the point where after a decade of operation, it still retains a large, high-quality community, able to keep the

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such a typical action, one of the most common exclamations by regulars is “RTFA”—long-standing Internet jargon for “Read the friggin article!” Conversations in Slashdot are laced with inside jokes, ranging from bad 1980s Yakov Smirnoff laments about Soviet Russia, to cherished Simpsons quotes like “I for one welcome our

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insect overlords,” when talking about the risks of technology. Slashdot gained an intense following in the technology crowd because of its high caliber of contributors. It was a lively community that grew in size, but

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maintained quality as well. Slashdot became the tech elite’s peanut gallery and salon. If you won the hearts of Slashdot readers, you captured the in-crowd and gained extremely influential technology street cred. While

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Slashdot’s editing system was very different from Wikipedia’s free-form system, it did provide an important seed. It was a tight

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with rating one another’s work. They worked together to sift the good from the bad and to filter out disruptive behavior. The usefulness of Slashdot was entirely in the hands of the individuals who volunteered to do meta-moderation. It was like a community garden. People were stakeholders and invested

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their time and energy in preserving something special in their corner of the Internet. When Slashdot editors reported on the launch of Wikipedia in January and February of 2001, it resonated. Their readers were introduced to a site that aspired to

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. The first wave of editors from that tech community had such a great influence that Wikipedia has often been dubbed the “Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built.”21 As Wikipedia chugged along, it was to benefit greatly from the Slashdot veterans. To this day, pretty much any story about Wikipedia is treated favorably on

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Slashdot, with many of the users speaking knowledgeably about the project because they are themselves editors at Wikipedia. 70_The_Wikipedia_Revolution Contributing the Meaning

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the only well-known “free” license without the copyright being held by one single entity. No doubt, a big reason Wikipedia had traction with the Slashdot community in those early days was its use of Stallman’s GFDL, showing that it had the right pedigree and philosophical roots in the hacker

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community. UseMod Grows As Slashdot provided an influx of volunteers, Wikipedia was evolving quickly. Clifford Adams created a more elegant way of pointing to pages by using free links in

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the needs of Wikipedia specifically, it provided a good platform for growth. Magnus Manske was not the only one who did the coding. With the Slashdot effect came more and more programmers to the cause. One that stayed and became employed full-time specifically for Wikipedia was Brion Vibber. In a

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what would become Wikipedia in January 2001, it was always thought that it would be a proving ground for articles to feed into Nupedia. As Slashdot and other tech communities noticed Wikipedia, the academic Nupedians who were the first Wikipedians suddenly found many computer programming types joining the ranks. By itself

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writers, editors, and academics, leaving things in a half-baked state was a clear departure from their comfort zone. But given the masses of wiki, Slashdot, Usenet, and open source software veterans, eventualism remained the prevailing attitude, at least in the early days. However, as Wikipedia’s articles matured and became

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having his authority or expertise challenged at every turn by users for whom he had no respect. In Sanger’s extensive memoir written for the Slashdot tech Web site—with exhaustively detailed writing being his hallmark—he reflected on this part of the Wikipedia history as the point where things could

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and deferring politely to experts. (Those who were there will, I hope, remember that I tried very hard.) Sanger is convinced here, and in his Slashdot memoir, that he could have changed one aspect of policy to “deferring politely to experts.” But it’s hard to say if that would have

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could not be bought or shut down by anyone. It was with some fanfare that Microsoft announced on its Encarta blog and picked up on Slashdot: Encarta is not just a pell-mell conglomeration of information and random bits of trivia (some would argue that that would pretty much describe the

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to “filter it very lightly.” This minimal level of supervision apparently left the wiki unprepared for the effect of being featured on Slashdot, as happened Saturday. The effect of Slashdot items that link to wiki pages is fairly familiar on Wikipedia. A flurry of new edits is a certainty, quite a bit

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be reverted frequently and often protected from editing. Similarly, the wikitorials project was hit with several vandalism attacks within a few hours of appearing on Slashdot, and the wikitorials were taken down on Sunday. The statement left behind read: “Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because

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existing dominant encyclopedias were behind paid firewalls, making the environment ripe for a new, free player. Combine the goal of “free content” with veterans of Slashdot, Linux, open source software, and an academic culture, and one can see the fertile ground that nurtured Wikipedia. However, throughout this book, we’ve seen

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for being a primarily amateur-operated project and for not having any specialist roles for professional experts such as academics. In his memoir written for Slashdot, Sanger reflected on the guidelines he would have changed in Wikipedia if he started today: In knowledge-creation projects, and perhaps many other kinds of

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. 8. http://www.stallman.org/archives/2007-may-aug.html. 9. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A MemoirSlashdot, April 18, 2005, http://features.slashdot.org/article .pl ?sid=05/04/18/164213& tid=95 . 10. http://web.archive.org/web/20010410035607/www.nupedia.com/steering.shtml. 11. http://www

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.nupedia.com/write.shtml. 12. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A MemoirSlashdot, April 18, 2005, http://features.slashdot.org/article .pl ?sid=05/04/18/164213& tid=95 . 13. “Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?” The New Yorker, July 31, 2006, http

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/ 2001-January/000676.html (retrieved on May 1, 2008). 21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mark_Richards/Archive_2#The_ .22Encyclo pedia_that_Slashdot_Built.22_Awards. 22. Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 23. Ibid, p. 108. 24. Ibid, p. 57. 25

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-wikipedia-doesnt-have-advertising -hint-follow-the-money. AFTERWORD 98. http://www.theglobeandmail .com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080526.wrwikipedia26/ BNStory/Technology/home . 99. http://features.slashdot.org/article .pl ?sid=05/04/19/1746205& tid=95 . 100. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-briefs31-2008may31, 0 ,6581366.story

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, 26, 212 “Croydon facelift” article, 118 editing: Cunctator, The, 171–72, 175 of Nupedia articles, 37–41, 43, 63, 64 Cunningham, Karen, 55–56 at Slashdot, 68–69 Cunningham, Ward, 45–50, 55–56, editing of Wikipedia articles, 3–4, 6, 38, 75, 98 64–66, 69, 73, 88, 114–15

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, 173, 175 Sinitic languages, 159 Tower of Babel, 133–34 see also China tragedy of the commons, 223 Skrenta, Rich, 23, 30 Trench, Chenevix, 70 Slashdot, 67–69, 73, 76, 88, 205, trolls, 170–76, 179, 186, 187, 189–90 207, 216 Truel, Bob, 23, 30 Sanger’s memoir for, 174

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–73, 98, 104, 109, 176–77 211–12 schools and, 177–78 locking of, 95 servers for, 77–79, 191 maps in, 107, 109–11 Slashdot and, 69, 73, 76, 88 neutral point of view in, 6–7, 82, 89, 111, sock puppets and, 128, 178–79 112–13, 117, 140

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DMOZ The Nupedia Idea Nupedia�s Rules The Nupedians Chapter Three Ward�s Start HyperCard�s Inspirations A Web Browser Viola HyperCard Revisited Chapter Four Slashdotting Contributing the Meaning of Everything The GFDL UseMod Grows Give Me More Space Server Load Chapter Five Usenet�s Legacy Lessons from Usenet Growth How

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DMOZ The Nupedia Idea Nupedia’s Rules The Nupedians Chapter 3 Ward’s Start HyperCard’s Inspirations A Web Browser Viola HyperCard Revisited Chapter 4 Slashdotting Contributing the Meaning of Everything The GFDL UseMod Grows Give Me More Space Server Load Chapter 5 Usenet’s Legacy Lessons from Usenet Growth How

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

by Yochai Benkler  · 14 May 2006  · 678pp  · 216,204 words

elaborate platform for peer production of relevance and accreditation, at multiple layers, is used by Slashdot. Billed as "News for Nerds," Slashdot has become a leading technology newsletter on the Web, coproduced by hundreds of thousands of users. Slashdot primarily consists [pg 77] of users commenting on initial submissions that cover a variety

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on a distributed, peer-production model. 156 First, it is important to understand that the function of posting a story from another site onto Slashdot, the first "utterance" in a chain of comments on Slashdot, is itself an act of relevance production. The person submitting the story is telling the community of

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Slashdot users, "here is a story that `News for Nerds' readers should be interested in." This initial submission of a link is itself very coarsely filtered

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. OSTG is a subsidiary of VA Software, a software services company. The FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) response to, "how do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?" is revealing: "We don't. You do. If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this

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. This is why it's important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main." In other words, Slashdot very self-consciously is organized as a means of facilitating peer production of accreditation; it is at the comments stage that the story undergoes its

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most important form of accreditation--peer review ex-post. 157 Filtering and accreditation of comments on Slashdot offer the most interesting case study of peer production of these functions. Users submit comments that are displayed together with the initial submission of a

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substitute for television's "talking heads." It is in the means of accrediting and evaluating these comments that Slashdot's system provides a comprehensive example of peer production of relevance and accreditation. Slashdot implements an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users. Moderators are chosen according to several criteria

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posts, and will ban a user for twenty-four hours if he or she has been moderated down several times within a short time frame. Slashdot then provides users with a "threshold" filter that allows each user to block lower-quality comments. The scheme uses the numerical rating of the comment

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(where only the posts that have been upgraded by several moderators will show up). 158 Relevance, as distinct from accreditation, is also tied into the Slashdot scheme because off-topic posts should receive an "off topic" rating by the moderators and sink below the threshold level (assuming the user has the

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or 1. In addition to the mechanized means of selecting moderators and minimizing their power to skew the accreditation system, Slashdot implements a system of peer-review accreditation for the moderators themselves. Slashdot accomplishes this "metamoderation" by making any user that has an account from the first 90 percent of accounts created

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their own work relative to the power of the critics. Users, moderators, and metamoderators are all volunteers. 161 The primary point to take from the Slashdot example is that the same dynamic that we saw used for peer production of initial utterances, or content, can be implemented to produce relevance and

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terms of the time and effort that an individual must invest in producing them. The five minutes [pg 101] required for moderating a comment on Slashdot, or for metamoderating a moderator, is more fine-grained than the hours necessary to participate in writing a bug fix in an open-source project

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necessary thousands of smallgrained contributions. With orders of magnitude fewer contributors, each must be much more highly motivated and available than is necessary in Wikipedia, Slashdot, and similar successful projects. 202 It is not necessary, however, that each and every chunk or module be fine grained. Free software projects in particular

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engine or directory. Peer-production processes, to the contrary, do generally require some substantive cooperation among users. A single rating of an individual comment on Slashdot does not by itself moderate the comment up or down, neither does an individual marking of a crater. Spotting a bug in free software, proposing

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fallback, however, appears only after substantial play has been given to self-policing by participants, and to informal and quasi-formal communitybased dispute resolution mechanisms. Slashdot, by contrast, provides a strong model of a sophisticated technical system intended to assure that no one can "defect" from the cooperative enterprise of commenting

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also incorporate mechanisms for smoothing out incorrect self-assessments--as peer review does in traditional academic research or in the major sites like Wikipedia or Slashdot, or as redundancy and statistical averaging do in the case of NASA clickworkers. The prevalence of misperceptions that individual contributors have about their own ability

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Spanish irrigation regions or the shores of Maine's lobster fishing grounds, or even to the ubiquitous phenomenon of the household. As SETI@home and Slashdot suggest, it is not necessarily limited to stable communities of individuals who interact often and know each other, or who expect to continue to interact

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or platforms for the users whose outputs it then uses in its own products. The Open Source Development Group (OSDG), for example, provides platforms for Slashdot and SourceForge. In these cases, the notion that there are discrete "suppliers" and "consumers," and that each of these is clearly demarcated from the other

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interesting experiments in peer production described in chapter 3 are focused on filtration. From the discussions of Wikipedia to the moderation and metamoderation scheme of Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up the Open Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, the means of filtering data

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setting up a Web site or a blog, and through to the possibility of maintaining interactive conversations with large numbers of people through sites like Slashdot, the cost of being a speaker in a regional, national, or even international political conversation is several orders of magnitude lower than the cost of

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static Web pages, to, more recently, blogs and various social-software-mediated platforms for large-scale conversations of the type described in chapter 3--like Slashdot. Static Web pages are the individual's basic "broadcast" medium. They allow any individual or organization to present basic texts, sounds, and images pertaining to

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the various larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems available on the Web, of the type described in chapter 3. Two basic characteristics make sites like Slashdot or Wikipedia different from blogs. First, they are intended for, and used by, very large groups, rather than intended to facilitate a conversation weighted toward

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are already highly connected because of the time they were introduced (like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), because of their internal attractiveness to large communities (like Slashdot), or because of their salience to the immediate interests of users (like BoycottSBG), will have persistent visibility even in the face of large infusions of

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node to itself become a cluster of users and posters who, collectively, gain salience as a node. Slashdot is "a node" in the network as a whole, one that is highly linked and visible. Slashdot itself, however, is a highly distributed system for peer production of observations and opinions about matters that

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decisions, beginning with the speaker's closest information affinity group. Consistent with what we have been seeing in more structured peer-production projects like Wikipedia, Slashdot, or free software, communities of interest use clustering and mutual pointing to peer produce the basic filtering mechanism necessary for the public sphere to be

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and discourse fragmentation concerns without reintroducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production, both long-term and organized, as in the case of Slashdot, and ad hoc and dynamically formed, as in the case of blogging or [pg 272] the Sinclair or Diebold cases, is providing some of the

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capability. They can do this, if not through their own widely read blog, then through a cycle of mailing lists, collective Web-based media like Slashdot, comments on blogs, or even merely through e-mails to friends who, in turn, have meaningful visibility in a smallish-scale cluster of sites or

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's adoption of open source, Second Life's adoption of user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology Group's development of a platform for Slashdot. We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some

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, 154, 155, 204, 297, 314-322, 317, 337, 338, 355, 358, 359, 397, 423, 429 Amazon, 152-153 Google, 153 Open Directory Project (ODP), 154 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 as distributed system, 317-318 as public good, 34 capacity for, by mass media, 358 concentration of mass-media power, 297

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-322, 317, 336-337, 355, 358, 397, 423, 425, 426, 429, 429, 462-466, 467 Amazon, 152-153 Google, 153 Open Directory Project (ODP), 154 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 as distributed system, 317-318 as public good, 34 by authoritarian countries, 426 capacity for by mass media, 358 concentration of

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research, 568 commons-based strategies, 550-554 liberal theories of, 542-549 K KDKA Pittsburgh, 345, 346-347 KaZaa, 741-742 Kant, Immanuel, 274 Karma (Slashdot), 157 Keillor, Garrison, 441 Kick, Russ, 203, 464 Know-How model, 95 Knowledge, defined, 562 Koren, Niva Elkin, 40 Kottke, Jason, 455 Kraut, Robert, 638

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network environment, 397-402 Medicines, commons-based research on, 609-623 Medium of exchange, 214-219 Medium-grained goods, 221 Meetup.com site, 653 Metamoderation (Slashdot), 159-160 Methodological individualism, 48 Mickey model, 90-93 Microsoft Corporation, 759, 794 browser wars, 759-761 sidewalk.com, 794 Milgram, Stanley, 454 Misfortune, justice

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, 273, 421, 430, 459, 629-667, 631, 642, 649, 654, 659, 664, 818 Internet and human coexistence, 664-666 Internet as platform for, 654-658 Slashdot mechanisms for, 157-160 enforced norms with software, 659-663 fragmentation of communication, 421, 430-431, 459-460, 818-819 fragments of communication, 41 loose

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, 208, 273, 421, 430, 459, 629-667, 631, 649, 654, 659, 664, 818 Internet and human coexistence, 664-666 Internet as platform for, 654-658 Slashdot mechanisms for, 157-160 enforced norms with software, 659-663 fragmentation of communication, 41, 421, 430-431, 459-460, 818-819 loose affiliations, 27-28

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, 314-322, 317, 336-337, 355, 358, 397, 423, 425, 426, 429, 462-466, 467 Amazon, 152-153 Google, 153 Open Directory Project (ODP), 154 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 as distributed system, 317-318 as public good, 34 by authoritarian countries, 426 capacity for, by mass media, 358 concentration of

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giants", 81-83 Shrink-wrap licenses, 778-781 Sidewalk.com, 794 Simon, Herbert, 441 Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG), 360, 396-402 Skype utility, 176, 741 Slashdot, 155-161, 204-205 Small-worlds effect, 454-457 Social action, 55-56 Social capital, 189, 638-639, 640-653, 643, 649 networked society, 649

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, 273, 421, 430, 459, 629-667, 631, 642, 649, 654, 659, 664, 818 Internet and human coexistence, 664-666 Internet as platform for, 654-658 Slashdot mechanisms for, 157-160 enforced norms with software, 659-663 fragmentation of communication, 41, 421, 430-431, 459-460, 818-819 loose affiliations, 27-28

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-717, 704, 709, 715 broadband regulation, 704-708 municipal broadband initiatives, 715-717 open wireless networks, 709-714 Trespass to chattels, 791-795 Troll filters (Slashdot), 157 Trusted systems, computers as, 721-722 Tubes (Web topology), 448-450 U UCC (Uniform Commercial Code), 780 UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act), 778

Peer-to-Peer

by Andy Oram  · 26 Feb 2001  · 673pp  · 164,804 words

street maps and the status of airline flights. Some of those databases are by-products of automated processes. Finally, Usenet newsgroups and threaded discussions like Slashdot are examples of volunteer databases, where interested individuals provide the data because they feel passionate enough about doing so. Amazon.com’s well-known reviews

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and buzz around the Web have centered on sites that use it as a conversational medium. These conversations take place within a particular web site (Slashdot, eBay, Amazon.com) or an application (Napster, AIM/ICQ, Netshow). And repeating the history of the pre-Web Internet, the new conversations sprout up in

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Web. The most exciting of these exhibit characteristics of a peer medium and empower individuals to become producers as well as consumers. Examples include eBay, Slashdot, IMDB, and MP3.com. Although the applications provide a new medium for conversations between P-P peers, the mechanisms for doing so are application-specific

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have many advantages over centralized ones. The Web as it is today has many problems that can be traced to its client/server model. The Slashdot effect, whereby popular data becomes less accessible because of the load of the requests on a central server, is an obvious example. Centralized client/server

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immediately to any further requests for that particular document. This means that commonly requested documents are cached on more nodes, and thus there is no Slashdot effect whereby one node becomes overloaded. The reply contains an address of one of the nodes that it came through, so that nodes can learn

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early stage, however, Freenet is solving many of the problems seen in centralized networks. Popular data, far from being less available as requests increase (the Slashdot effect), becomes more available as nodes cache it. This is, of course, the correct reaction of a network storage system to popular data. Freenet also

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request will quickly hit a server with the data is increased. Active caching and mirroring offer more protection than ordinary caching and mirroring against the "Slashdot effect” and flooding attacks. On the other hand, systems using these techniques then need to consider how an adversary could take advantage of them. For

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extend trust to new parties. Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot The news site Slashdot.org is a very popular news service that attracts a particular kind of " Slashdot reader”—lots of them. Each and every Slashdot reader is capable of posting comments on Slashdot news stories, and sometimes it seems like each and every

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interaction can help a user figure out which of the many comments are worth reading. To help readers wade through the resulting mass of comments, Slashdot has a moderation system for postings. Certain users of the system are picked to become moderators. Moderators can assign scores to postings and posters. These

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view of the posts depending on a user’s preferences. For example, a user can request to see no posts rated lower than 2. The Slashdot moderation system is one existing example of a partially automated reputation system. Ratings are entered by hand, using trusted human moderators, but then these ratings

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are collected, aggregated, and displayed in an automatic fashion. Although moderation on Slashdot serves the needs of many of its readers, there are many complaints that a posting was rated too high or too low. It is probably

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http://www.sourceforge.net (host to Freenet) is considering using a similar reputation system. The stakes at Advogato are higher than they are at Slashdot. If the Slashdot moderation system fails, a user sees stupid posts or misses something important. If the Advogato trust metric incorrectly certifies a potential volunteer as competent

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on the trust metric to find and contact free software volunteers. In practice, Advogato’s trust metric is used mostly for the same application as Slashdot’s: screening out stupid posts. The method of determining trust at Advogato also contains features that distinguish it from a simple rating system like

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Slashdot moderation. In particular, the Advogato trust metric resists a scenario in which many people join the system with the express purpose of boosting each others’

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actions of a rogue trader, are exceptions rather than the rule. Which reputation-based systems have worked online, and how well have they worked? The Slashdot and Advogato moderation systems seem to work. While it is difficult to quantify what “working” means, there have been no spectacular failures so far. On

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involve incentives that lead more people to respond; another approach is to simply collect so much data that the issue is no longer relevant. (The Slashdot moderation system, for instance, depends on the participation of huge numbers of independent moderators.) But systematic errors or biases in the ratings will generally defeat

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note a simple fact: peer-to-peer won’t save you from dealing with resource allocation problems. Two examples of resource allocation problems are the Slashdot effect and distributed denial of service attacks. From these examples, it’s tempting to think that somehow being peer-to-peer will save a system

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slider–Moderating security levels: An accountability slider active caching adversaries and, Active caching and mirroring maintaining data availability with, Active caching and mirroring protection against Slashdot effect, Active caching and mirroring active mirroring Akamai Technologies, Active caching and mirroring maintaining data availability with, Active caching and mirroring protection against

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Slashdot effect, Active caching and mirroring active-server document-anonymity, Anonymity for anonymous storage ActiveState, A success story: From free software to open source Adams, Rick,

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pseudospoofing: Advogato how trust is determined, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato resisting pseudospoofing, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato trust metric vs. Slashdot moderation system, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato Aiken, Alexander, Reputation metrics AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) attacking by shilling, Attacks and adversaries protocol-centric

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accountability, Peer-to-peer models and their impacts on accountability MLE (Maximum Likelihood Estimation), Reputation metrics–Reputation metrics moderation system for postings on Slashdot, Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot Moechel, Erich, Acknowledgments Moinvaziri, Nathan, Open source to the rescue, Placing nodes on the network Mojo Nation accountability problem, solving, Purposes of

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proof of transaction validates, Aspects of a scoring system protecting against timing attacks, Privacy and information leaks pruning bad, Scoring algorithms of Slashdot postings, Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot submitting fake or misleading, Attacks and adversaries submitting to mutually agreeable scorers, Multiple trusted parties weighting, using credibility of raters, Scoring algorithms

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flow, Collecting ratings open source development, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato–A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato partially-automated (Slashdot), Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot personalizing reputation searches, Personalizing reputation searches problems with, System successes and failures pseudospoofing, bad loophole in, Problems with pseudospoofing and possible defenses purpose

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, Reputation metrics–Reputation metrics treating reputations as probabilities, Scoring algorithms vs. privacy of transaction data, Privacy and information leaks scoring postings/posters on Slashdot, Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot scoring systems, Scoring systems–True decentralization adversarial approach to, Scoring algorithms aspects of, Aspects of a scoring system attacks against, Attacks and

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in Gnutella growth, in a Freenet network, Simulating growth–Simulating growth Sipser, Michael, Open source software Slashdot effect, Freenet protecting against, Active caching and mirroring resource allocation and, Conclusion Slashdot moderation system, Who will moderate the moderators: Slashdot vs. Advogato trust metric, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato small-world effect, It

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web

by Cole Stryker  · 14 Jun 2011  · 226pp  · 71,540 words

logo was a cartoonish parody of the goatse shock image, and their motto was “Gaping Holes Exposed.” Nerd News: Slashdot & Metafilter Slashdot founder Rob Malda, aka “Commander Taco,” says that he created Slashdot because he missed the high-minded technical community he enjoyed in the BBS era that discussed the sort of “news

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for nerds, stuff that matters” that interested him. In 1997, Slashdot offered something new: user-submitted stories. Each story became its own discussion thread. The site became so popular that when a story was linked by

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site’s host would often buckle under the weight of all the traffic. This phenomenon became known as the Slashdot Effect. This phenomenon is not unique to Slashdot, but Slashdot was one of the first to be routinely recognized as a server killer. Other sites can be farked, for example, or undergo the

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Digg Effect, demonstrating the power that content aggregators wield. Malda says that Slashdot developed its own unique memetic culture almost instantly. He remembers lots of gross-out memes popping up in addition to stuff from the Star Wars

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prequels, which were hugely popular during Slashdot’s early years. I asked him if there was a specific moment when he realized that memes were a thing. He replied, “Long before I

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heard the word, that’s for sure.” Many of Slashdot’s memes deal with ultra geeky science and computing puns. Malda claims that since he started Slashdot, the corporations have taken over, our rights are on the decline, and our privacy is gone. Back

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, but free. He recognizes the value in anonymity, and feels that there’s something special about 4chan’s community. I love that they interact anonymously. Slashdot was similarly completely anonymous for the first year of our existence, and still today we allow anyone to post without any identifying information whatsoever. I

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pseudonym is useful because it gives you continuity if not accountability. You might not know that “CmdrTaco” is actually a dude named Rob, but on Slashdot at least, you know that each time you see a post with that name attached, you know it’s the same guy. I felt for

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Slashdot that it was important to provide that for people that wanted it. I don’t think that creates a sense of “personal responsibility” in any

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which might be important if you want to be taken seriously. Interestingly, anonymous posters on Slashdot are jokingly labeled “Anonymous Coward.” Matt Haughey was a big fan of Slashdot, but he wasn’t crazy about the interface. Slashdot had editors that picked from submitted stories. Matt was looking for something more democratic, so

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and a permanent record and we all have these embarrassing beginnings where we openly failed again and again before we started to figure things out. Slashdot and Metafilter were the first big content aggregators, and their elegant feature sets have had a massive impact on the way all media now behaves

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on the web. Long before Digg and Reddit came along, Slashdot and MetaFilter provided users with a way to define what their news would look like. This democratization of the media has influenced not only the

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popular and increasingly approachable, even for tech noobs. It enabled unpaid, amateur writers and commentators to compete with mainstream news sites, and aggregators like Fark, Slashdot, and Metafilter gave them equal standing in terms of traffic. It wasn’t who you were, it was what you were saying. Curtis doesn’t

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come. It’s marked by a weak grasp of Anonymous’s structure, histrionic sound bites from supposed victims, and ham-fisted usage of 4chan lingo. Slashdot founder Rob Malda posted the video, commenting, “Cringe as you watch this video explain terms like ‘LULZ’ and show inspirational poster parodies as evidence of

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making fun of the report, which conflated comparatively harmless Anonymous trolling with actual domestic terrorism. One anonymous Slashdot commenter nailed the sea change: Seriously, /b/ is so mainstream now, it beggars belief. Here is a Slashdot article that mentions it in passing without so much as stopping to explain the term . . . It

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Guy showed up! Tron Guy, aka Jay Maynard, was a flabby programmer whose spandex costume inspired by Disney’s Tron went viral in 2004 via Slashdot and Fark, reaching a peak with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Tron Guy can be seen as a representative for people who display their unassuming

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. http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/dan-macsai/popwise/cheezburger-networks-ceo-i-can-has-media-empire. Malda, Rob. “AC = Domestic Terrorists?” Slashdot. Last modified July 28, 2007. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/07/28/1145204/AC--Domestic-Terrorists. Malda, Rob. Interview with the author. May 9, 2011. Margulies, Lynne, and Joe

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

by Howard Rheingold  · 24 Dec 2011

and powerful ways an old and essential human trait. Note the rise of Web sites like eBay (auctions), Epinions (consumer advice), Amazon (books, CDs, electronics), Slashdot (publishing and conversation) built around the contributions of millions of customers, enhanced by reputation systems that police the quality of the content and transactions exchanged

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they may trustingly mail a check. Ratings of experts on Epinions make visible the experience of others in trusting each expert’s advice. Moderators on Slashdot award “karma points” that make highly knowledgeable, amusing, or useful posts in an online conversation more visible than those considered less insightful. Wireless devices will

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rate reviewers and to rate other raters through “webs of trust.” The most trusted reviewers are read by more people and therefore make more money. Slashdot and other self-organized online forums enable participants to rate the postings of other participants in discussions, causing the best writing to rise in prominence

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culture: “News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters,” proclaimed the front page. Official editors would select relevant stories every day, post links and commentary, and the Slashdot community around the world added commentary in the form of sequential posts. Malda, who goes by the online handle “Commander Taco,” called it

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“Slashdot,” after a commonly used Linux command. Malda later wrote: “We got dozens of posts each day, and it was good. The signal was high, the

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was right for a virtual watering hole to appear as a hangout for the programmers around the world who shared the open source zeitgeist. The Slashdot population grew, and soon there were too many posts to police and too much noise to ignore. Malda chose twenty-five people to help. They

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deleted spam and awarded points to posts that seemed valuable. Then the Slashdot population grew unmanageable even for twenty-five volunteers. By 1999, if a link to a Web site was posted as a top-level story on

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Slashdot, that Web site would get so many hits that host servers often crashed, a phenomenon that came to be known Netwide as “being Slash-dotted.”

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The original twenty-five moderators chose four hundred more. The Slashdot karma system emerged to filter out noise, point out good postings, and protect against abuse of power from moderators. When a registered user logs in

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often enough and reads postings over a sustained period, Slashdot’s “Slashcode” software automatically puts that user in a pool of candidates for jury-like service. Randomly selected “moderators” from the pool of regulars are

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+1. Moderators use their allotment of points to raise or lower the settings of selected posts and hence affect the karma of the selected posters. Slashdot readers can use a menu to set their “quality filter” reading level. Some readers can choose to read every one of hundreds of posts in

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filter to show only those with the highest rating of five, sometimes reducing a thread of hundreds of posts to a handful. By 2001, the Slashdot community of registered users exceeded 300,000. At that scale, there was no way to organize except self-organize. Malda and friends tinkered with the

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reputation system in response to community use and abuse, adhering to four design goals: Promote quality, discourage crap. Make Slashdot as readable as possible for as many people as possible. Do not require a huge amount of time from any single moderator. Do not allow

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a single moderator a “reign of terror.”23 The Slashdot system evolved several refinements. Moderators cannot post in the same conversations they moderate, and metamoderators are randomly chosen to assign points to the moderators’ choices

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://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/comcomp.html> (29 March 2002). 9. See: eBay, <http://www.ebay.com> Epinions, <http://www.epinions.com>; Slashdot, <http://www.slashdot.org> and Plastic, <http://www.plastic.com>. 10. J. Carey, “Space, Time and Communications: A Tribute to Harold Innis,” in Communication as Culture (New

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.html > (24 February 2002). 21. Henry Jenkins, “Digital Renaissance,” Technology Review, March 2002, <http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/jenkins0302.asp > (24 February 2002). 22. Slashdot FAQ, <http://slashdot.org/faq/ > (9 February 2002). 23. Ibid. 24. eBay, <http://pages.ebay.com/community/aboutebay/overview/index.html > (5 February 2002). 25. Peter Kollock

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, Alex Levy, Steven Lewis, Michael Liberty, threats to Library of Congress Licensing See also Regulation Licklider, J. C. R. Ling, Rich Linturi, Risto Linux and Slashdot and wireless networks Literate technology Livny, Miron Location awarenessii basic description of and Botfighters and i-motion services and smart objects Locke, John Lotus Corporation

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Shipley, Peter Shoch, John F. Shockwave Rider, The (Brunner) Shoshone Indians See also Native Americans Showa Women's University Sigmund, Karl Signaling Skolnick, Cliff Slashcode Slashdot Web site Slavery Smarr, Larry Smart: dust rooms tags SmartMobs Web site Smith, Marc A. Smith-Kline SMS (Short Message Service) and Botfighters and free

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site Amazon Web site Askme.com Web site Blink.com Web site eBay Web site Epinions Web site ExpertCentral Web site Platic Web site, xix Slashdot Web site SmartMobs Web site Upoc Web sitei Yahoo! Web site See also World Wide Web Webster, Anthony Weilenmann, Alexandra Weiser, Mark Weizenbaum, Joseph "Well

Engineering Security

by Peter Gutmann

December 2008, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470897. [225] “Re:Don’t do this at home”, ‘starfishsystems’, 23 December 2008, http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1071061&cid=26214357. [226] “Nobody is perfect”, ‘Schmoilito’, 1 January 2009, http://schmoil.blogspot.com/2009/01/nobody-is-perfect.html

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)”, IETF Draft, Jeff Hodges, Collin Jackson and Adam Barth, 4 January 2011. [572] “Re:’People’ don’t understand computers”, ‘forkazoo’, 27 July 2009, http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1315749&cid=28832955. [573] “Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study of SSL Warning Effectiveness”, Joshua Sunshine, Serge Egelman, Hazim Almuhimedi, Neha Atri

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endless problems of voting computers — also known, somewhat erroneously, as voting machines — which are covered in “Geeks vs. Humans” on page 149. Although the typical Slashdot-reading geek is intimately familiar with an endless succession of data breach horror stories, to the average user they simply don’t exist [392], and

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2011, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/15/protecting-youfrom-malware.aspx. [259] “Norton must die!”, ‘GFree’, 10 November 2006, http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=205872&cid=16791238. [260] “Why can't I disable the Cancel button in a wizard?”, Raymond Chen, 24 February 2006, http

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, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/11/21/495507.aspx. [562] “Tricking Vista’s UAC To Hide Malware”, ‘kdawson’, 26 February 2007, http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/26/0253206. [563] “User Account Control”, Ben Fathi, 8 October 2008, http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10

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the door (or, in this case, the skylight). Designing for evil requires asking yourself the question “what if some of my users are evil?” [1]. Slashdot’s reputation-based posting mechanism, which filters out spammers and other nuisance posters, is a good example of designing for evil (on the other hand

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-based rating system either indirectly using cliques and stolen credit cards to inflate their feedback ratings or directly by buying highly-rated accounts from phishers). Slashdot also uses a few other tricks like randomisation, allocating the ability to rate other people’s posts on a random basis, which makes it much

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May 2008, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/designing-for-evil.html/. http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt, author unknown, undated, possibly originating at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98024&cid=8373855, 24 February 2004. “DMTP: Controlling Spam Through Message Delivery Differentiation”, Zhenhai Duan, Yingfei Dong and Kartik Gopalan, Proceedings

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”, ‘fail0verflow’, 30 December 2010, http://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/20208556741492736. “Re:Epic Fail? WTF?”, Hector Martin, a.k.a. ‘marcan’, 30 December 2010, http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1928970&cid=34705884. “Beware SIM Card Swop Scam”, Clayton Barnes, The Saturday Star, 1 January 2008, p.1. “Police net seven

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, Vol.12, No.47 (10 October 1991), http://www.catless.com/Risks/12.47.html. [166] “Re:CACert”, ‘Anonymous Coward’, 18 July 2008, http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=618797&cid=24246935. [167] “CAcert root cert inclusion into browser”, Mozilla forum discussion, 6 August 2003, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show

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about links that are executable, pop up new windows, execute Javascript, and so on [78]. Figure 144: Slashdot displaying the true destination of a link A variation of this technique is used by the Slashdot web site to prevent link spoofing, in which a link that appears to lead to a particular

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.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WhatIsOpenIDGoodFor.aspx. 644 Passwords [182] “Re:a site that uses nothing but OpenID”, ‘Blakey Rat’, 7 January 2009, http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1083819&cid=26364017. [183] “What Makes Users Refuse Web Single Sign-On? An Empirical Investigation of OpenID”, San-Tsai Sun, Eric

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December 2009, http://www.millersmiles.co.uk/report/13302. [209] “3DS is also broken from a human factors POV”, ‘gilgongo’, 28 January 2010, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30943342. [210] “Not only insecure, WORTHLESS”, ‘macbuzz01’, 28 January 2010, [211] [212] [213] [214] http://news

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.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30944372. “Re:Lol”, ‘tatsuyame’, 28 January 2010, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30939322. “Re:Lol”, ‘Kamokazi’, 28 January 2010

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, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30939456. “Re:Lol”, ‘Lord Byron II’, 28

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January 2010, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30940032. “Re:Lol”, ‘JesterOne’, 28 January

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2010, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1528586&no_d2=1&cid=30940856. [215] “The ‘Verified by Visa’ fiasco

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper  · 18 May 2015  · 387pp  · 112,868 words

the fledgling Bitcoin community. HEADPHONES ON AND an oversize can of MadCroc energy drink by his side, Martti sat at his dorm room desk, giddy. Slashdot, a go-to news site for computer geeks the world over, was going to post an article about Martti’s pet project. Bitcoin, largely ignored

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on the forum saw a perfect opportunity to get the word out. Martti agreed with a handful of other users that Slashdot would be the best place to do this. “Slashdot with its millions of tech-savvy readers would be awesome, perhaps the best imaginable!” Martti wrote on the forum. “I just

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hope the server can stand getting ‘slashdotted.’” A small crew went back and forth about the right language to submit to the Slashdot editors. Satoshi got his hackles up when someone suggested Bitcoin be sold as “outside the reach of any

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to scale up the site’s capacity with the company that rented him space. But this, and the derogatory comments that showed up under the Slashdot item, did not dampen his enthusiasm. This was what he’d been waiting for for months. CHAPTER 5 July 12, 2010 When he awoke late

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, the morning after the Slashdot posting, Martti Malmi saw that the attention was not a hit-and-run phenomenon. People weren’t just taking a look at the site and

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the Bitcoin software. The number of downloads would jump from around three thousand in June to over twenty thousand in July. The day after the Slashdot piece appeared, Gavin Andresen’s Bitcoin faucet gave away 5,000 Bitcoins and was running empty. As he begged for donations, he marveled at the

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strength of the network: Over the last two days of Bitcoin being “slashdotted” I haven’t heard of ANY problems with Bitcoin transactions getting lost, or of the network crashing due to the load, or any problem at

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to get rid of, but later came to accept as one of the side effects of Jed’s brilliant mind. When Jed came across the Slashdot post about Bitcoin he was immediately intrigued. It seemed to fulfill many of the ideals behind Napster and eDonkey—taking power from authorities and giving

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use that,” MiSoon replied. “That’s kind of weird and easy to remember. Why not if you already have it registered?” Seven days after the Slashdot post, Jed casually advertised his new site on the Bitcoin forum: Hi Everyone, I just put up a new Bitcoin exchange. Please let me know

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Bitcoin. Until this point, there had been occasional transactions, but mostly between aficionados making them out of a desire to help the network. After the Slashdot story, the difficulty of mining new Bitcoins ramped up quickly with the surge in the number of people racing to win coins. Satoshi had determined

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of new Bitcoins would become more difficult, ensuring that it would always be roughly ten minutes between releases of new coins. The week after the Slashdot story, the difficulty of mining new Bitcoins jumped 300 percent. Gavin Andresen, who had initially started mining Bitcoins to help the network, now found it

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. In Martti’s case, after a year of working on Bitcoin free, he needed a regular source of income. In September, two months after the Slashdot story, he took a full-time job with a firm that analyzed social-media data. On top of having a full schedule, Martti also saw

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Cutting Edge,” Info World, May 24, 2010, http://www.infoworld.com/article/2627013/open-source-software/open-source-innovation-on-the-cutting-edge.html. 47“Slashdot with its millions of tech-savvy readers”: Martti Malmi to BTCF, June 22, 2010. 48“How’s this for a disruptive technology?”: “Bitcoin Releases Version

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0.3,” Slashdot, July 11, 2010, http://news-beta.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/bitcoin-releases-version-03. CHAPTER 5 49The number of downloads would jump from around three thousand

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, 82–84 hacker penetration, 169, 225–226 seizure by FBI, 245–253 Silk Road 2.0, 269–270 Sirius-M (screen name). See Malmi, Martti Slashdot, 47–51, 53, 58 Snoop Dogg (rapper), 297 Snowden, Edward, 271 The Social Network (movie), 145 Songhurst, Charlie, 184, 292 Spain, 330 Spitzer, Elliot, 186

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates

by John Logie  · 29 Dec 2006  · 173pp  · 14,313 words

music files are circulating. As the RIAA ramped up its criticism of Napster, the war metaphor became increasingly common. In a February 2000 exchange on Slashdot, we see correspondents debating whether a particular Cold War era model ought to be applied to their circumstances. A correspondent going by “Rader” begins the

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were sometimes criticized in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the carelessness with which Rader draws this analogy prompted an incredulous response from another Slashdot correspondent: ZIKZAK: Holy shit! Are you really claiming that the battle over MP3 pirating could be equivalent in importance to the Vietnam War? Fuck, I

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greedy recording industry’s practices to the death of thousands and thousands of young men is absolutely the lowest thing I’ve ever seen on slashdot. Congratulations. You have scraped absolute bottom. Zikzak’s outburst prompted what appeared to be an embarrassed silence from Rader, and other participants, in what had

…

prison is highly questionable. Most Americans have neither the interest nor the technical skill needed to circumvent copyright protection systems. But within the context of Slashdot’s dis- Pa r l orPr e s s 114 wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Peers, Pirates

…

. Porter, James E. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 34–47. Rader. “Re: Look, this is silly.” Slashdot. 26 Feb. 2000. slashdot.org. 20 Aug. 2006 <http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10781&cid=401120>. Recording Industry Association of America. “725 Additional Illegal File Sharers Cited In New Wave

…

. ZDNet. 15 Aug. 2005 <http://news.zdnet.com/2100–9595_22–502047. html?legacy=zdnn>. Wah. “Re: Look, this is silly.” Slashdot. 26 Feb. 2000. slashdot.org. 20 Aug. 2006 <http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10781&cid=401279>. “When David Steals Goliath’s Music.” New York Times. 28 Mar. 2005. Nytimes.com

…

. “Ethos.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996. 410–14. Zikzak. “Re: Look, this is silly.” Slashdot. 26 Feb. 2000. slashdot.org. 20 Apr. 2005 <http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10781&cid=401213>. Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p

…

, James E., 20, 130 Presley, Elvis, 42 public domain, 8, 100–3, 126, 147 public policy, 7, 43, 61, 108 R.E.M., 10 Rader (Slashdot pseudonym), 112–13, 117 Rakoff, Jed, 81 record industry, 11, 39, 116–18 record labels, 3, 4, 11, 35, 90, 112 reel-to-reel tape

…

, Marie, 120 Segaller, Stephen, 26–28 Selfe, Cindy, 130 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 105 SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), 147–48 Sharman BV, 136 Slashdot, 112–14 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1999, 101, 129, 141 Sony, 57, 108, 122, 133, 137-39 Sony v. Universal Studios, 57

…

, 106 videotape, 57–58, 73, 134 Vietnam, 106, 112–14 vinyl, 59, 65, 117 w00w00 (Internet Relay Chat channel frequented by hackers), 32–33 Wah (Slashdot pseudonym), 113 Wainwright, Loudon III, 86–88 Warner Music Group, 93, 108, 119, 122 WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), 28–29, 39 West, Susan, 130

…

Organization), 47 Wired, 78, 154 Woodmansee, Martha, 20, 130 World Wide Web, 4, 128 Written Communication, 145 Yale University Press, 149 Yoos, George, 7 Zikzak (Slashdot pseudonym), 113, 115 

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

by Cory Doctorow  · 15 Sep 2008  · 189pp  · 57,632 words

early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within

…

minutes; this is commonly referred to as "the Slashdot Effect."], has a baroque system for "community moderation" of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random,

…

are given five "moderator points" that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and

…

messages are consistently highly rated. It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin

…

human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s ability to read, review, rank and categorize them. Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward for good behavior. But as

…

well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with discussion, griping and gaming on the moderation system itself. The core task of

…

Slashdot has become editorship, not the putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of

…

, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a "slashdork." As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as radical as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human

…

RSS readers don't distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you click-through the most. There was a time when I could

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