The Sputnik launch isn't the only big anniversary this month; Slashdot is celebrating, too.
The influential "news for nerds" site famous for swamping unsuspecting websites with boatloads of traffic turns 10 in October, and parties are popping up all around the country.
It all started in 1997, in a time before there was Gmail. Slashdot founder and editor Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, wanted a non-college-affiliated e-mail address, so he simply registered his own domain name. And while he was at it, he decided to add a little humor and make the url as unpronounceable as possible: "H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, slashdot, dot, org."
What Malda didn't expect was that Slashdot would become one of the most popular geek news sites on the web, overloading so many websites' servers that the phrase "Slashdot effect" would be coined.
Wired News spoke with Malda by phone Wednesday as he got ready for the Slashdot 10th anniversary celebrations at his home base in Michigan. (Want to join the fun? Find a Slashdot party in your neck of the woods.)
Wired News: Did you ever think Slashdot would make it to 10 years?
Rob Malda: No. When I registered the domain name it was supposed to be a joke, and I wanted an e-mail address that wasn't my college's e-mail. The website was built out of my blog -- though they didn't call them blogs back then -- because I wanted to have a web server I could Perl and hack around on. There was no premeditation, and it was three or four months before I realized Slashdot meant anything.
WN: So when did you know that Slashdot was turning into something?
Malda: There was a log file that would slowly scroll across your screen. It used to be that I'd look at the log every few days and see we had X number of hits. But one night we were just hanging out in our living room and watching the log scroll by and it was just hit, hit, hit. And they were coming from MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and Microsoft and Red Hat and big companies and big institutions of higher learning. Before that, my only real comprehension of the size of Slashdot was that I was getting a lot of e-mail, hundreds of e-mails, but that never mentally translated into, "OMG! People in Germany are reading this thing!"
WN: So you had hundreds of articles in your inbox and people all over the world following Slashdot. Why did you decide to keep Slashdot a user-submitted, editor-evaluated site instead of crowdsourcing the job of posting articles?
Malda: When you're building a system like this you're balancing the wisdom of the crowds versus the tyranny of the mob. Sometimes a crowd is really smart, but some things don't work so well by committee. Crowds work when you have a tightly knit group of people with similar interests, but when you have a loosely knit community you get "Man Gets Hit in Crotch With Football" and Everybody Loves Raymond, where it's just good enough to not suck. At the end of the day I want to be able to say, "These are good stories."
WN: And the users can tell you whether they think the stories are good in the comments. When you started this, what made you think comments were going to be as important as they've become?
Malda: I never thought of not having comments. I started with BBSes in the 1980s and was using Usenet. I don't understand why you would build a site without comments. That's what the internet is for: people communicating. I think we got lucky that the people reading Slashdot were techies who also grew up with BBSes and Usenet and they also wouldn't have imagined not having user comments.
WN: What do you think has helped Slashdot reach its 10th anniversary?
Malda: Over the years the site has developed something of a personality. There are certain subject matters that we're going to discuss and there are certain subjects we're not going to discuss. We're going to cover what's happening with Linux, who's building new technology and what companies are taking your right away to play with that technology. There aren't a lot of websites that are focuses. Everybody tries to be everything and no one does one thing that they're really good at.
WN: So it's all about having your niche?
Malda: That'd be the much more concise way to say it.
WN: Looking back at the last decade, what are your top Slashdot moments?
Malda: I have to mention that I proposed to my wife on Slashdot. That was pretty cool. And then there have been a number of stories where we went out of our normal bubble and stuck our noses in something else. Those somethings were (the) Columbine (school shootings) and Sept. 11.
Sept. 11 was interesting because a lot of the mainstream websites that were online were getting so overburdened with traffic that they were getting shut down. My team worked really, really, really hard to keep the site up and there was a lot of traffic on the site that day. We'll never know the numbers, because we had to turn off the clock to save processor cycles. But we managed to stay up and that was a real shining day because of what we had to get done. It was a pretty shitty day, but I was very proud of everybody at Slashdot that day.
And then there was Columbine. Columbine was weird because the mainstream media really took on a specific view of what happened and the Slashdot audience took a very different view of that event. The discussions on Slashdot were very heartfelt and meaningful. Instead of reading the mainstream media stories about videogames causing kids to be evil, you were reading stories about what happens to kids being beaten up for four years. When the bully jocks kick a helpless kid, it's not surprising that every now and then someone's going to snap.
So there's a happy and two less-happy moments in Slashdot history.
WN: And what's next for Slashdot?
Malda: People always ask me that, and if in 10 years from now Slashdot is the same as it was 10 years ago, I'll think we're doing something right. If we continue to maintain the level of article selection and user discussion then I'm a happy camper.
