If there was ever a salon for the technical elite and a grand senate of the computing community, it was Slashdot.org. Started originally as a user-contributed news site, Slashdot boldly proclaims as its pedigree: "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." It lists significant technology stories in a blog format to foster discussion, but it started even before blogging became part of the Internet lexicon.
What makes Slashdot more than just a blog is its unique community formula. A handful of the site operators serve as editors, sifting through user submissions to post on their front page taken from important technology stories from other outlets. But the story is simply a starting point. The real interesting content comes from the community discussion that ensues. Slashdot has become so popular that discussions are overrun by hundreds and thousands of comments, some pure gold, but many more pure crap. How do you sift the good from the bad when there are thousands of comments each day?
Slashdot pioneered a way for self-policing the community with an innovative solution. In an era before the interactive and participatory Web 2.0 movement, Slashdot experimented with using something called meta-moderation. The system employed moderation techniques by tapping readers from time to time, not unlike the random marketing surveys found on many Web sites. These selected readers were asked to help rate the merit of individual comments. They were given five "moderation points" to dole out to comments they thought merited attention. As moderators, they could rate comments a number of ways, including positive "insightful" or "interesting" ratings, or negative ratings, such as "flame-bait," to flag disruptive comments that should be ignored.
Comments with more positive ratings bubbled to the top. This way, readers could browse the comments at levels ranging from -1 (reading everything) to 5 (where only the top rated comments would be shown).
As comments were rated up and down the scales, writers of those comments got more or fewer "karma" points, which became a tangible metric as an indication of social capital within the community. The Slashdot model worked very well, to the point where after a decade of operation, it still retains a large, high-quality community, able to keep the "signal" high and the "noise" low.
But the next step was more interesting. To guard against bogus "mod points" and gaming the system, other users were also tapped to "watch the watchers" by performing "meta-moderation." That is, users were asked to rate the ratings. Users were selected to view certain ratings at random without knowing who was involved in giving out the moderation points in the first place. In effect, it was an audit of the ratings being dished out.
The result was a community that could scale up to handle dozens of stories a day, deal with thousands of comments, yet maintain an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio because of legions of community members who participated in this so-called meta-moderation.
In fact, the discussion areas have likely usurped the stories as the centerpiece of the site. Articles have become a sort of MacGuffin—not particularly important in themselves, but they serve to drive an interesting conversation. In fact, diving directly into the conversation without bothering to read the original story is such a typical action, one of the most common exclamations by regulars is "RTFA"—long-standing Internet jargon for "Read the friggin article!" Conversations in Slashdot are laced with inside jokes, ranging from bad 1980s Yakov Smirnoff laments about Soviet Russia, to cherished Simpsons quotes like "I for one welcome our insect overlords," when talking about the risks of technology.
Slashdot gained an intense following in the technology crowd because of its high caliber of contributors. It was a lively community that grew in size, but maintained quality as well. Slashdot became the tech elite’s peanut gallery and salon. If you won the hearts of Slashdot readers, you captured the in-crowd and gained extremely influential technology street cred.
While Slashdot’s editing system was very different from Wikipedia’s free-form system, it did provide an important seed. It was a tight community of readers and editors familiar with rating one another’s work. They worked together to sift the good from the bad and to filter out disruptive behavior. The usefulness of Slash-dot was entirely in the hands of the individuals who volunteered to do meta-moderation. It was like a community garden. People were stakeholders and invested their time and energy in preserving something special in their corner of the Internet.
When Slashdot editors reported on the launch of Wikipedia in January and February of 2001, it resonated. Their readers were introduced to a site that aspired to take the contribution of the masses, be it writing, editing, correcting, or sifting out junk. It was a perfect fit.
The first wave of editors from that tech community had such a great influence that Wikipedia has often been dubbed the "Encyclopedia That Slashdot Built."21 As Wikipedia chugged along, it was to benefit greatly from the Slashdot veterans. To this day, pretty much any story about Wikipedia is treated favorably on Slashdot, with many of the users speaking knowledgeably about the project because they are themselves editors at Wikipedia.
