Section 23.1. The Origins of Slashdot

23.1. The Origins of Slashdot

Like many web endeavors that evolved into dot-coms, Slashdot started as a hobby and a learning exercise. Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Nate Oostendorp, and Kurt DeMaagdthe future "Blockstackers"had been friends growing up in Holland, Michigan, and later at Hope College. At first, "online community" meant bulletin board systems (BBSs): email, discussion, and file sharing services available locally by dialing up and connecting directly to a BBS machine. College provided access to the Internet and the earliest web sites via one of the college's Unix or VAX machines.

Rob Malda's first home page at college (http://cs.hope.edu/~malda), dubbed "Chips and Dips," would be labeled by mainstream media today as a weblog, or blog. Superficially, Chips and Dips did resemble current blogs minus many of the interactive elements we take for granted in today's Internet. It was a personal page for Rob. It offered his opinions on everything from web design to science fiction book reviews. Yet to call it an early blog really misses the point.

Blogs are fundamentally inward facing. They share events from the blogger's life, together with opinions of the blogger on those events and the world at large. Chips and Dips had none of that intimate and voyeuristic sense of a diary. Instead, it had more in common with the early versions of Yahoo!: a hand-built directory of useful links, with guidance and commentary, aimed at like-minded people. Chips and Dips was, from the beginning, about that sense of community; it was outward facing.

Indeed, right from the start Chips and Dips offered more than just Rob's links and opinions. Friends submitted suggested entries for the directory listings, or reviews of movies that others had yet to see. The site was just flat HTML, no CGI or other dynamic elements. As a consequence, the only way to submit to the site or contribute to discussion was to email Rob, and then wait for Rob to post on the site. This created an implicit and autocratic moderation mechanism. If Rob did not have the time or interest to post something, it didn't get posted. As it was Rob's site, his decision, or even whim, was final.

In the fall semester of 1997, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, and the other Blockstackers entered their junior year of college. Most had two years of computer science under their belts, and lots of hands-on experience from hobbies pursued and an assortment of student jobs. They also had a sense of the larger world of which Hope College was a part.

Netscape had completed its successful IPO. Graphical web browsers, and the Web itself, were becoming pervasive parts of popular culture. Microsoft had released Windows 95 and announced that the Internet was the future of the company. Linux was headed toward the 2.0 release of the kernel. Apache was, as it is today, running most public web sites. The dot-com boom was in full swing.

Registering a domain name had gone from an esoteric to a more commonplace activity, albeit an expensive one by student standards. While Rob had done a lot of computer programming, he was fundamentally a designer, and indeed one with a strong sense of the ironic. He approached problems visually, and in his spare time was as likely to be doodling cartoons as writing code.

The choice of the name "Slashdot" for a domain was a clever play on the line between the visual and the verbal. In the early web days, the idea of a URL and what it was still seemed alien to the mass media. Every ad for a web site began with the announcer carefully spelling out, "H-T-T-P colon slash slash..." Visually, "/" is simple and distinctive. In those days, verbally spelling out "H-T-T-P colon slash slash....dot org" was ridiculous. It appealed to Rob's sense of humor.

Moving from Chips and Dips to Slashdot brought several immediate changes, not all of them forseen.