Slashdot Trolling Phenomena

Slashdot Trolling Phenomena

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a technology-related news website owned by the US-based company Dice Holdings, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics. Each story has a comments section attached to it. Slashdot was founded in 1997 as a blog, Chips & Dips, by Hope College computer science student Rob Malda, also known as "Commander Taco" and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos".

Summaries of stories and links to news articles are submitted by Slashdot's own readers, and each story becomes the topic of a threaded discussion among users. Discussion is moderated by a user-based moderation system. Randomly selected moderators are assigned points (typically 5) which they can use to rate a comment. Moderation applies either −1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either normal, offtopic, insightful, redundant, interesting, or troll (among others). The site's comment and moderation system is administered by its own open source content management system, Slash, which is available under the GNU General Public License.

In 2012, Slashdot had around 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received over 5300 comments per day. The site has won more than 20 awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for Best Community Site and Best News Site. Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the "Slashdot effect".