IEEE Spectrum November, 2007 - 26

tion process to jury duty. On any given day, 30 000 readers may 20 percent of our population on Internet Explorer," he says. "It's
be eligible to be moderators, but only a few thousand are chosen. exactly flipped from the Internet as a whole."
Although some moderators have been around since the early years
While Slashdot gets refined, however, it has become harder
of the site, newbies can join the ranks in as little as a few weeks. for Malda to ignore the impact of competitors, particularly Digg,
Each moderator reads a comment and assigns it a numeric which positions itself as a populist answer to the top-down model.
value on a scale of 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Readers elect to view only "Digg is like your newspaper, but rather than a handful of edithose comments that receive a minimum numeric value of their tors determining what's on the front page, the masses do," Digg
choosing; the average threshold selected is close to the default founder Kevin Rose recently said. "Our algorithms make sure a
value, 2. Moderators also assign descriptive tags from a drop- diverse pool of unique Diggers likes a story before promoting it to
down menu. If a comment is made simply to start a fight, it gets the front page." The algorithms also weight the recommendations
marked "Flamebait." Comments that don't move the conversation of some Diggers more than others.
forward are branded "Redundant." Other labels include "Funny,"
Malda, however, questions the integrity of that system. People
"Informative," and "Off-topic."
on Digg "have the feeling that they are the ones determining what
The moderators' assessments carry weight. Each grade affects goes on the main page, and administrators on the site are all too
a member's so-called Karma level-a scale that
happy to let that delusion persist," he says. "[But]
ranges from Terrible to Excellent, reflecting the
stories randomly disappear. Obviously there are
person's standing within the community. The
higher powers at work."
better your Karma, the greater your chances of
Although Malda says the comparison between
being chosen as a moderator. But to ensure that
the two sites is apples and oranges, Slashdot
everyone gets as fair a shake as possible, Slashdot
is experimenting with its Digg-like project,
also uses something called "metamoderation,"
Firehose, to open up the editorial process. The
a means by which visitors can rate the skill
idea came from a mounting problem: how to
of the moderators. "It's a way of watching the
deal with the increasing flood of submissions,
watchers," Malda says.
as many as 500 a day. Firehose lets readers see
and rate submitted stories just as the Slashdot
slashdot's biggest challenges have tended
crew does, before the stories hit the main site.
to follow major news events, such as the 1999
Readers can expand or contract the list of stories
Columbine shootings or the levee failures durand filter those that have already been ranked
ing Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Because the
according to popularity.
Columbine tragedy touched on popular Slashdot
"The interface for maintaining the site behind
themes of gaming and media, the site's coverage generated huge the scenes was old and dated," Malda says. "It was designed for
discussion threads. Although a typical story ordinarily garners me when I was the only one doing it in '98. Right now, three or
about 300 comments, Slashdot's Columbine pieces engendered four people are looking at stories on any given day. Why not make
more than 1000 each-numbers that may sound tame by today's it work for thousands?"
standards but that felt overwhelming in 1999. "Our system was
So far, the response to the Firehose test has been "surprisingly
not made to deal with that amount of comments," Malda says. positive," Malda says. "I don't know exactly how this will change
"We had to rewrite it so it would handle thousands."
us," he adds. "I want to use the Firehose but still maintain the
By 2001, Slashdot's 10 servers, located in San Francisco, quality and consistency that makes Slashdot great. Currently I use
were able to sail through the biggest story they'd ever faced: the Hose as a trusted bit of advice on each selection. Sometimes
9/11. Other online news sources were getting crushed under the I disagree, but in general it's a very useful tool."
weight of traffic that day. Even CNN was crashing now and then.
Malda makes no bones, however, about the value of the topBut Slashdot, with its new system in place, stepped up to the down model that has made Slashdot a must-click. "The stories
plate. "We knew how to sort through information and run the on Slashdot are ones I chose," he says. "They're not chosen by
site effectively," Bates says. And as word spread, nontechnical democracy or random voting. I'm not pretending to say it's
readers began visiting the site that day-and the following days- your opinion."
in droves. To handle the tripling of traffic, Malda switched off
Slashdot's latest features are staying in beta for the time being.
nonessential features such as the logging of server activity.
No matter how progressive the site's readers may be, they're averse
But keeping everything in line is a work in progress. In 2004, to change, Malda says. "Slashdot people are ornery. When you
Malda and his colleagues took Slashdot through its first major change things, they get cranky."
n
redesign. The site, which was originally written in HTML, had
to be rebuilt, which proved to be a formidable challenge. They About the Author
opened up the process to users, calling for their suggestions as to dAVid KuShNer is a frequent contributor to IEEE Spectrum.
what they thought the site should be. More than 100 readers sent his latest book is Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids
in opinions, and Malda incorporated the best ideas.
(random house, 2005).
Currently, the system employs asynchronous JavaScript and
XML, a more structured superset of HTML that is increasingly to probe Further
the lingua franca of interactive online applications, in addition the ongoing digg versus Slashdot brush war has been
to Perl. And Slashdot is currently beta-testing two tools to help widely explored. back in 2005 Wired speculated in a headimprove the flow. One is Discussion 2, a system that allows a line that "digg Just Might bury Slashdot" (http://www.wired.
reader to expand and contract a comment thread without having com/science/discoveries/news/2005/11/69568), which
to reload the page. This feature doesn't work well with Internet of course inspired a long Slashdot thread ("the rise of
Explorer, a situation about which Malda is not exactly apologetic. digg.com," http://slashdot.org/articles/05/11/17/1439224.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers use Firefox. "We only have shtml?tid=95&tid=124).

columbine
tragedy

slashdot
themes

ieee Spectrum | November 2007 | NA

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http://www.wired http://www.slashdot.org/articles/05/11/17/1439224 http://www.spectrum.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum November, 2007