Section 23.6. Slashdot Grows Up

23.6. Slashdot Grows Up

If the Netscape story had introduced Slashdot to mainstream technical media, Columbine introduced Slashdot to the mass media. The site's audience grew, and diversified. The attention focused on the site grew as well. With Columbine, the media recognized that Slashdot could be, on occasion, not just a discussion point for news, but the news story itself.

Comments on Slashdot have become increasingly sophisticated. View Slashdot comments at moderation level 5 and you see a number of lengthy and thoughtful commentaries on each story. You also see certain usernames recur as authors of particularly insightful comments. That combination of an easy online vehicle for expressing opinion and building reputation through regular posting of well-considered opinions has made Slashdot a precursor for the blogging movement of today.

Story submissions have also become more sophisticated. In the first couple of years, Slashdot accepted many submissions that were simply a link to an interesting bit of technology news and a brief description of the news item. Accepted submissions now typically have a main story link, one or more background links to other related stories, as well as links to past Slashdot discussions on the same topic, all contained within a paragraph or more of explanation. This richer form of submission is a result of one of the network effects behind the site. The site is now large enough that any important story will be submitted multiple times, enabling the site staff to pick the most complete and well-formed submission for actual publication to the front page of the site. This puts the regular submitters in tacit competition with each other to create the best submission for key stories.

The continued success and popularity of the site owe as much to its anonymous contributors as to its regular, registered users. Slashdot could not have been the singular "town hall" that it was in the wake of Columbine without allowing and supporting anonymous posting. That aspect of the site has become ever more complicated to manage and maintain, however.

There are legal threats to anonymous status. While Slashdot has yet to be asked to turn over its logfiles, legislation from the DMCA to the Patriot Act has the potential to force Slashdot's hand on this issue. Furthermore, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have made it clear that they will use civil action wherever they think they have a chance of uncovering the identity of supposed copyright violators.

One change at Slashdot in response to this new legal climate has been to handle logfiles differently. Most sites keep logfiles of daily visitors to the site, and differentiate visitors by Internet Protocol (IP) number (the numerical address computers use to identify themselves to each other over the Internet). This IP number can potentially be used to backtrace where a particular visitor to a site came from. Slashdot now scrambles the IP numbers in its logfiles using a strong encryption scheme, and then discards the encrypting key. The result is a unique encrypted number associated with each unique IP number, but no way, even by the Slashdot staff, to derive the original IP number from the encrypted number stored in the logfiles.

As much of a problem as external challenges to anonymity is the mischievous behavior of a few anonymous posters. Given the high profile of Slashdot, there is prestige in the "troll" community associated with defacing or bringing down the site.

Many attacks on the site attempt some form of exploit on the comment system. These can include proxy flooding (repeated comment submissions dispersed via different sources using open proxies; similar to a "denial-of-service" attack); comment binging (attempting to overload the system with large comment submissions); and script attacks (using a script to generate a nonsense comment that can be submitted repeatedly at high speed).

Slashdot now has a maximum comment size, as well as a test for and block of open proxies. It has an internal definition of a well-formed comment, and roughly 500 separate regular expression tests, written in Perl, to which each comment submission is subjected. The attacks continue, but anonymous posting has never been disabled, and remains a bedrock principle of the site.

Sheer scaling issues have presented a different challenge. As of this writing, the site delivers 3.9 million page views per day to 400,000 unique visitors.^[4] While Slashdot's initial moderation system worked well for a while, moderation has had to become more sophisticated to both handle the larger volume of submissions and comments and take better advantage of the network effects inherent in an audience of this size. The most notable change has been the introduction of metamoderation. In metamoderation, select users are asked to moderate the moderators. The metamoderators review both comments and moderation decisions about those comments, and respond with a simple "agree, disagree, or no comment" response. Those selected for metamoderation typically have about 20 moderation decisions to review when metamoderation is turned on, and then might not metamoderate again for several weeks or months. The results give the staff and the Slashdot system a more fine-grained picture of which regular users of the site are effective at moderation, and which are consistently contrarian.

^[4] Unique visitors (known in the trade as "uniques") is not a firm number. The industry norm is to count the number of IP numbers on client machines of visitors. This approach can undercount when visitors are behind a certain kind of proxies that shows only one IP number for everyone behind the proxy, and can overcount because not every IP number is associated with an actual person at the other end. The Slashdot staff uses a different method. Looking at historical data, Slashdot has an idea of the ratio of registered to unregistered visitors, as well as the page views per visit typical of registered and unregistered users. From this data, the number of unique visitors can be extrapolated. By industry norms, the number of daily "uniques" on Slashdot would be roughly 750,000.

One of the lessons of Columbine was that the site not only had to be restructured to meet regular, steady growth in traffic, but also had to be capable of responding to surges in traffic associated with an extrordinary news event. While the sequence of events around Columbine never brought the site down, the staff realized they had, in many ways, been fortunate. They had not covered Columbine the day of the event. Katz's first story had been posted on a Friday, a low-traffic day. They had a weekend to recognize the effects of his story and anticipate the follow-up. Overall they had a whole week to work through the process. In many ways, Columbine was the exception; it is unusual for a news event to play out that gradually.