The Web’s Roundabout Way to the Truth
When Rob Malda likes something, his choicest term of praise is that single word: “sweet.” He begins it with the ever-so-slightest sibilance--just a touch of the kind of “sch-” sound at the beginning of schwing!--getting louder as he says it, a crescendo of energy that ends with the small explosion of exclamation.
He says it several times each hour. Because Malda--Internet publisher, techie idol, millionaire at 23--is pleased by much of what he sees. Who wouldn’t think that life is sweet?
Malda, his best friend Jeff Bates, also 23, and a passel of buddies run Slashdot.org, a 4-year-old site on the Web that has become required reading for the geekerati. Part online newsletter, part fanzine, part town hall meeting, Slashdot represents a startling experiment in journalism. Its motto says it all: “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.”
For the most part, the move to online journalism has only made news faster, dumber and more prone to stunts and mistakes. (Matt Drudge? A reporter for Salon licking Gary Bauer’s doorknob? Puh-lease.) At Slashdot, though, something genuinely new is being born.
The influential site breaks news--and makes news. When Jane’s Intelligence Review wanted experts to vet an article on cyberterrorism last fall, the respected journal published a draft on Slashdot. The comments from readers were so trenchant that Jane’s spiked its article and whipped up a new one based on Slashdot contributors’ answers. The site gained national media attention after last year’s shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School, when it became a gathering place for self-described geeks to talk about the everyday cruelties of American high school life.
Last month, Slashdot featured a story that rocked Austin, Texas-based Netpliance. The company sells a $99 computer with no hard drive, designed specifically for surfing the Internet; Netpliance takes a loss on every machine and hopes to profit by selling users its Internet service. Slashdot featured a story about a hacker’s tweak that allowed users to add a hard drive to the machine--making it a fully functioning computer for about $100 more. The gadget flew off the shelves, the hacker’s Web site logged more than 200,000 hits, and Netpliance took a serious stock market hit.
The boys mix up an addictive blend of high tech and low culture. They might print a riff on robots you can build with Legos, or mourn the passing of Shel Silverstein, the grade-schoolers’ poet laureate. But they devote their most obsessive attention to Linux, the computer operating system that was first written by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and continually improved by armies of volunteers around the globe.
Little wonder that, with Wall Street’s interest in Linux running high, Slashdot (fans type the name simply: /.) has been sold not once but twice in recent months. Last year Andover.net, a Massachusetts-based publisher, plunked down several million dollars to acquire Slashdot as a complement to its own site for open-source information, the unfortunately named “freshmeat.” In February, California-based VA Linux bought Andover in a deal originally valued at a stratospheric $975 million. VA Linux chief executive Larry Augustin says Malda and Bates’s creation was part of the reason he wanted to snap up Andover: “Slashdot is the town hall of open source.”
Getting news from online sources is often something of a gamble--it’s sometimes hard to tell real from fake, knowing from naive. Slashdot was designed to confront the problem head-on, and does a surprisingly good job. Articles on Slashdot are often little more than simple links to a report or announcement from some other news or corporate site on the Web, accompanied by a brief commentary from Bates, Malda or any of the hundreds of regular Slashdot contributors.
Then the real fun begins: Dozens or even hundreds of contributors chime in, adding commentary and more information, often arguing in a rich braid of digital conversation. Regular users register and post by name or online nickname, but newcomers can post anonymously. The system puckishly gives those users the nickname “anonymous coward.”
To help sort the gold from the dross, the site also assigns “karmic value” to regular users, a measure of how often their comments are commented on. That lets Slashdot readers filter for the best and leave the rest.
Put it all together and you get a textured discussion that helps readers sort truth from fiction, fact from paranoid fantasy. Slashdotters play truth-squad with one another.
This kind of news-by-discussion has emerged before online. But never before with the robust yeastiness of Slashdot.
Clever types have called what Slashdot puts out “open-source journalism.” Just as Linux has been forged in an open process with thousands of participants hammering away, news on Slashdot is always an open process.
The boys don’t buy that notion.
“We’re editors,” Bates says simply.
They see some 500 submissions each day, and post only the news that feels Slashdottish. They have honed skills for the online medium, noticing that if they begin a topic with a post that’s heated and angry, the subsequent comments will generate more heat than light. So they edit submissions to keep the tone civil. “We want an exchange of ideas--not an exchange of name-calling,” Malda says.
Slashdot’s greatest strength might lie not in what is so new about it, but in what is old-fashioned about it, says Jon Katz, a novelist and former media critic for Rolling Stone who is a paid columnist for the site. “Slashdot is a throwback to some of the most successful ideas in media,” he says. Katz attributes the success of Slashdot to the interests of the core group--and sees their idiosyncratic style as part of a tradition of iconoclastic editors going back to Time’s Henry Luce and the Washington Post’s Benjamin C. Bradlee. “In a way,” he says, “it reflects the interests of two guys.” Slashdot is rediscovering what mainstream journalism has lost, Katz says.
Linus Torvalds says he is “a fairly occasional reader” and calls the site “kind of fun.”
(To the Slashdotters, this is something like the pope saying he finds your little catechism Web page sort of cool.) “It may not be quite as reliable as going to CNN.com,” Torvalds says, “but it’s often much more interesting.”
Can Slashdot’s wild ride last?
Clay Shirkey., a professor of New Media at Hunter College in New York, says he isn’t so sure. Shirkey says: “They are listened to because they aren’t the Establishment--but past a certain size of audience, they become the Establishment.”
