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By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
There is no doubting the influence of Slashdot among the technically savvy and the culturally geeky - the deep blue-green site can - and does - make or break products, or whole companies in the technology and IT industries, by deciding who or what to publish. It is, as the site proclaims, "News for nerds," and perhaps, depending on your definition of the term, one of the first "blogs" on the Internet, having been started in September 1997.
--Credit: Derrick Story/O'Reilly Network
According to Slashdot's FAQ, the site serves 80 million pages each month. No small feat.
And the only reason I've written out an introduction which restates what most people already know - and avoided using the cliché that Slashdot is "a household name" - is the fact that my father once congratulated me for one of my stories being linked to by "Glashsnot."
Still, almost everyone knows about Slashdot.
One of Slashdot's relatively recent major changes has been the addition of a new "social news" feature called "The Firehose," and we were lucky enough to interview, via e-mail, Slashdot creator and editor Rob Malda (also known as "CmdrTaco") about this new feature.
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The Slashdot Firehose is named after a scene in the 1980's "Weird Al Yankovic" movie, UHF, where a small child, having found a marble in the oatmeal at Stanley Spudowski's Playhouse, wins the right to "drink from the firehose" and when he is told to "open wide," he is promptly launched from his seat by the pressure. Having to pore over and evaluate the overwhelming number of submissions, Malda said, prompted a similar feeling in the Slashdot editors.
The Firehose serves two purposes - first, it gives Slashdot readers a look at all the submitted stories - allowing a glimpse behind the editorial curtain, and perhaps giving readers a chance to find a story that would interest them personally, but for whatever reason, was not chosen for publication on Slashdot's pages. The second is that there is a voting mechanism in place, with plus or minuses, that let people determine how relevant a story is, with a color code, determined by how many votes that article received.
If it seems similar to efforts from Reddit and Digg, it is, but Slashdot's Firehose is not designed to follow the same model as those two other social news sites. Both Reddit and Digg surrender editorial control to the whims of the audience and the automated algorithms that determine placement based solely on voting and time. Slashdot's Firehose, Malda says, doesn't have such a strong determination over Slashdot's content, though it does affect it to a limited extent.
"I use The Firehose as a tool," Malda wrote, "but the ultimate story selection decision remains in the hands of the editors."
"[If there are] three stories submitted about the exact same bit of news, the hose often can show me which of these is 'best' so I can read it first. [Or, it's a] slow August afternoon and it's time to post something. I can look back at stories from the last 24 hours and re-read things that readers like but I passed over the first time.
"The trick is to strike a balance between the community and our own sensibilities. A thousand reader votes won't make me post a picture of Paris Hilton, and if I see an important story with zero votes, I may post that too. But in general, reader feedback can really aid you in spotting good stuff."
"We have tons of [editorial] concerns [about The Firehose]. I think the major social news websites suffer from huge scalability problems... separating a 'mob' from a 'crowd' is a tough problem. I can choose to ignore a story that I think is dumb no matter how many people vote it up. The social news sites follow a pattern: A small dedicated crowd joins a new system and the thing works great because they share similar views. But as it becomes hot and popular new people join... people who are less dedicated and have (surprise!) different views. So success can be cancerous as you dilute the core audience that you appealed to."
"So the trick is to find balance. There are many parts to that, and nobody has solved it yet, including, obviously us. But it's fun and interesting, and at the end of the day, for me anyway, the real goal is creating a page interesting to both the active core audience, as well as the more passive and casual observers (who vastly outnumber the core)."
Social news sites are a more recent development; sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit came onto the mainstream in late 2004 to 2005 but quickly became popular. A few people compared it to the younger, but more popular, Digg, with social networking news site, "Mashable," calling it a "Digg Clone," and Wired Blogs saying that Malda "set his sites on Digg, Reddit." Malda does not deny that there's a similarity in general ideas but pointed out that it wasn't just "a reaction."
"There are many similarities between us and [Digg and Reddit]," Malda wrote. "Things like having a page of paragraphs that link readers to highlighted stories submitted by the audience itself. Just to pick a few examples. ;) "
"It's easy to simplify this as a simple response to a number of successful websites, but that's just not the case. We knew we needed to get reader participation into the process to deal with more content faster. Other sites have good ideas for doing this. So do we. But our goal is to maintain a content focus on Slashdot, not to create popularity contests for URLs."
We asked Malda if he believed that social news sites "change the discourse. Malda said that he believed that social news sites just solved old problems in a new way.
"I tend to look at the social networking news sites as serving two functions," Malda wrote. "The first is those homepages - a collection of links for you to look at. I don't know that social news 'changes the discourse' really because most people are simply looking at that page and looking for 10-15 stories to read. How those are selected doesn't impact the vast majority of users. To most people, that is the start and end of the discourse process. The methodology never really enters into it. In these cases, 'Scale' or 'Coolness' matter a lot, but I don't know that those things are new."
"The other function is discussions. Those have followed a progression from mailing lists (group communication) to message boards (public) to web message boards (VERY public) to moderated (with many different methods to achieve that). Today there are a number of AJAX message boards, but I'm not seeing any standouts, and I'm fairly certain that simply making it 'AJAX' doesn't 'Change the discourse.'"
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More information:
Slashdot FAQ:
- Introducing the Slashdot Firehose
Previous Coverage:
- Reddit's Tea Party
- The Slashdot/Digg Effect, Visually
