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| Topics related to Slashdot |
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Slashdot subculture |
The Slashdot subculture is a mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, tasteless nonsense and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, amuse them, or challenge their thinking on the popular Slashdot technology website. Many of these are older phenomena which originated on common slang culture, which were migrated to Usenet, and then later to Slashdot.
Trolling is very common on Slashdot, and there are a number of repeating trolls that are seen on the site. Similar to trolling is flamebaiting, which is also highly prevalent. The most common flamebaits on Slashdot are references to the Microsoft vs. Linux controversy. See Slashdot trolling phenomena.
The General Slashdot user is very opinionated, and if you happen to post against their option, they will engage in any number of trolling attacks, including (but not limited to) the spelling Nazi, the grammar Nazi, Calling the poster a ?fag?, pointless responses, nitpicking the words used in the post, or stating some statistics but failing to give source for them.
A common recurring theme is the notion that most people do not read the article, and that many posts are uninformed because of this. Someone posting an incorrect reference to a linked article might be responded to by a comment urging the original poster to "RTFA," or Read The Fucking Article (adapted from RTFM). Sometimes it is lightheartedly suggested that nobody has actually read the article, and that people who have shouldn't be reading Slashdot.
Personal verbal assaults on the slashdot editors are extremely common. These are often expressed as trolls that accuse the Slashdot editors (for example Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda), open-source celebrities, etc. of being either homosexual, incompetent, or hopeless nerds. They are sometimes expressed as senryus. In the most extreme form, textual porn taken from random internet sites is rewritten to incorporate Slashdot editors. CmdrTaco's wife, Kathleen Malda, more commonly known by her maiden name of Fent, is a frequent target of these remarks.
A common "feature" on Slashdot is the prevalence of duplicate posts, an oft-made mistake by the Slashdot editors. Comments complaining about the duplication of current and past posts and even polls are common. Misspellings by the Slashdot editors are also very common. There are often posts making fun of this and indeed this is yet another recurring theme.
The non-scientific Slashdot poll is usually updated a few times a week and polls Slashdotters on an array of technical and non-technical questions. On occasions when the poll goes for an extended time without an update snide remarks are sometimes posted about the need for a new poll.
Jon Pater, known in Slashdot by the handle CowboyNeal, is the frequent target of jokes. In the past, nearly all Slashdot polls contained what is called a "CowboyNeal" option, where one of the poll options is either "CowboyNeal" or some variant. For example, if the poll was "What kind of vehicle do you drive?", the CowboyNeal option may be "CowboyNeal", or "CowboyNeal drives my limo" or even "I ride CowboyNeal's handlebars." This has spread outside of the poll and often jokes will be seen referencing CowboyNeal. Since the former poll editor stopped being in charge of approving polls the CowboyNeal option has been noticeably absent, instead being replaced with a more generic silly option, or even not having a replacement.
A common usage of this is in polls where a poll option accuses the person who framed the poll for giving an incomplete set of options. For example a poll on favorite genres of music might have an option saying "I'm deaf, you insensitive clod."
This particular running joke is also common among commenters, especially in the poll section. This type of post involves the poster of another comment being accused of being "an insensitive clod" for making an assumption about the troll's well-being; for example, in an article about which hand mouse-using people prefer, a troll will post a comment with the subject "I don't have any hands..." with the text "...you insensitive clod!". The distinction between troll and genuine grievance can become blurred, for example in the case of non-American slashdotters who believe Slashdot is too US-centric in its assumptions.
The most commonly accepted origin of this phrase appeared in the May 7, 2000 Simpsons episode "Last Tap Dance in Springfield". In the episode, the phrase is used when Professor Frink makes a pair of self-tap-dancing shoes for Lisa. After she dances, he points out that they were really in the "off" position, and that she had tap-danced by herself. Homer replies, "What are you talking about, Professor Frink? They're clearly in the 'on' position. See? 'On'." Professor Frink then says, "I was merely trying to spare the girl's feelings, you insensitive clod."
A much earlier example of the phrase came out of the first Calvin and Hobbes book, published in 1987.
The Moderation system is an integral part of Slashdot, and has spawned a few common cliches on its own.
Whenever someone thinks his/her post has unfairly received a negative moderation, that individual will sometimes reply to his own post (usually anonymously), saying 'Mods on crack' or some other variation thereof. Usually this is followed by a further clarification of why that particular moderation is thought to be unfair.
Sometimes, a person other than the original poster will complain in this manner. However, it is more common for these types of complaints to be directed against positive moderations than negative ones.
Nerd stereotypes are extremely common on Slashdot. The most common stereotypes are:
Complaints that the "typical Slashdot reader" would not understand a subject because of nerd stereotypes are common. The response may be "Why do people persist in using analogies so incomprehensible to the average Slashdotter?" when referring to one of the above points.
If someone questions an action or concept which appears ridiculous but is well-established on Slashdot, a wit may reply with "You must be new here!", indicating that only a newbie would not accept that ridiculous proposition as reasonable. It can also refer to the opposite - a practice that appears reasonable, but does not meet Slashdot standards. For example, it is common for people to post messages about an article without actually reading the article. This will sometimes receive a reply starting "Don't you people even read the article?" or similar. "You must be new here" is a common follow-up. The New Here user (id 701369) was created to provide standard "No, I'm New Here" responses to such posts.
Another Slashdot user stereotype is based on the pecking order created by the site's user ID system. Slashdot assigns a numeric ID, increasing over time, to users who create a username and password in order to post comments without being labeled an Anonymous Coward. Thus, users with a low (one- to four-digit) numeric ID, who began visiting Slashdot in its early days, sometimes view themselves as more elite than the masses of five- or six-digit ID-bearing newcomer rubes. Indeed, a comment may sometimes receive greater respect from readers because the poster carries a low numeric ID.
Karma whoring is a derogatory term for the posting of comments that do not add to the discussion but that are still likely to be modded up, doing so specifically to increase one's karma score. Like the term troll, karma whore can refer to the comment in question, the act of posting the comment, or the user responsible. While not malicious or deliberately disruptive, karma whoring is considered trolling because it distracts from more meaningful and informative comments.
The practice is a side effect of the karma system. Users earn karma when one of their comments is modded up. Users with a high karma score enjoy a higher status within the community and a default bonus to their comments' scores, resulting in higher comment visibility. Karma is designed to be a measure of the user's meaningful contributions to the discussion, since in theory it is meaningful comments that are modded up. In practice, some moderators will mod up comments simply because they agree with their opinion, and a user can sometimes collect karma points simply by stating an opinion that the majority of slashdotters agree with, without developing a full comment that would actually bring any new insight to the discussion. Many users consider this cheating, hence the derogatory term insisting that the user would do anything, even whore themselves out, for karma.
Other comments marked as karma whores are those in which a user pastes a verbatim copy of the featured article into a comment because the site that hosts the article is unavailable (usually due to the Slashdot effect). These comments are almost always modded up because they are genuinely helpful, but they are still derided as karma whores because any user could have created them, making it seem unfair that the karma boost should go to the particular user that did it first. This practice of pasting unavailable articles into comments has given rise to the article text alteration troll. To avoid being labeled as a karma whore, some users paste text of the article as an Anonymous Cowards (thus not earning karma).
Orwellian fears of totalitarianism are a recurring theme. Slashdotters are very concerned with privacy issues, and in fact, references to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four are often seen. These types of posts are most often found in the "Your Rights Online" section of Slashdot.
The Slashdot community has a love/hate relationship with certain technology corporations. Much of this is directly related to the (presumed) popularity of Linux within Slashdot. (But some claim that browser statistics show that a majority of Slashdot posters in fact don't run Linux but instead Microsoft operating systems.)
The phrase "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt", often shortened to FUD, is often used to ascribe a propaganda-like character to actions or statements by corporations. Most often, this is used when describing either Microsoft Corporation or The SCO Group. This has more recently been applied to the ADTI.
Microsoft is a long-standing target by Slashdotters for criticism. Common criticisms include that Microsoft's products are unstable, have poor security, or have Big Brother-like attributes.
The SCO Group is often targeted for criticism as a result of its claim that "Linux is, in material part, an unauthorized derivative of UNIX" (SCO letter to its Linux customers, 12 May 2003). SCO has asserted broad rights to the intellectual property of Unix, and thus also claims rights over Linux. SCO is attempting to enforce and defend its rights through a series of lawsuits, including ongoing litigation with IBM. SCO brought on the wrath of Slashdotters for, among other things, attempting to charge a fee of $699 for "authorized" copies of Linux. As a result, replies to Linux articles will often contain the semi-serious joke that the poster owes SCO some amount of money. (See SCO v. IBM)
The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute (ADTI) has recently become the target of jokes since its president Ken Brown published a report entitled samizdat that said that Linus Torvalds was not the creator of Linux, but rather that Linux is a derivitive of Minix. To anyone with any knowledge of computer history, this claim is ludicrous. The ADTI in the past has done work for the tobacco industry claiming that cigarettes are safe.
Slashdot is based in the United States, so as a result the articles have a US-centric view. Many American Slashdot users are nationalistic and generally demeaning of Western European countries such as France, about which they make generally fairly uninformed comments, especially on topics such as alleged lack of civil rights, freedom of speech or economic freedom.
This has sometimes been explained by the belief that a majority of Slashdot contributors are male adolescents, however, since Slashdot is anonymous, there has been no confirmation of this. Another theory holds that the bulk of such posts are merely trolls.
Often, a poster will refer to his or her "tinfoil hat", referring to someone who is overly concerned with privacy issues, or is a conspiracy theorist. For instance, in response to an article about putting GPS transponders in cell phones, a poster might say "Excuse me while I put on my tinfoil hat, but I don't want the government to track my every move!"
"Tinfoil hat" can also be used in an ironic sense, for example, "What if they started putting GPS transponders in Tinfoil hats?".
The sycophant type of troll is based on a quote from the newscaster character Kent Brockman of The Simpsons. In one episode of the show (episode number 96, Deep Space Homer), Brockman watches a video broadcast from a space capsule, within which a number of ants have accidentally been released. The ants appear huge because they float directly in front of the broadcast camera and close to the lens. He mistakenly assumes that alien insects are invading Earth and attempts to ingratiate himself to them by broadcasting propaganda: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."
Subsequent to this Simpsons episode, variants of the phrase came into common use in 2002-2003, generally used to suggest that whatever party referred to as the new overlords is engaging in Orwellian behavior.
In these posts, trolls usually begin their comments with the subject "IN SOVIET RUSSIA" (all capitals) and typically proceed to reverse the order of words in that story's headline, usually changing the verb slightly to maintain subject/verb agreement and changing the object of the sentence to the second-person "YOU!". Thus, '[subject][verb][object]' usually becomes 'IN SOVIET RUSSIA, [object][verb] YOU!'
The nature of the joke, when done correctly, is such that the noun contains a different and Communist meaning in the latter part of the joke than in the former. The original "in Soviet Russia" joke, by comedian Yakov Smirnoff goes "In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, The Party can always find you!" The implication is that the latter use of the noun "party" implies the Communist Party, and refers to pervasiveness of the Communist party in Soviet Russia. Whether the members of Slashdot's audience who make these jokes have direct familiarity with Smirnoff's comedy act (which includes much observational humor about the Soviet Union which doesn't fit the word-reversal pattern) is doubtful, since this particular faction of the Slashdot community likely recalls the cold war as only a childhood memory. A likely vector for the introduction of the Soviet Russia joke is a Family Guy episode in which the family tries out an in-car voice navigation system, which has Yakov Smirnoff as one of the preprogrammed voices, uttering the one-liner "in Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
One announcing that a Russian minister had turned the tables on spammers by flooding their email inspired a number of Soviet Russia jokes, mainly because the article was about an incident that took place in Russia that involved an ironic reversal, the very meaning of the Soviet Russia joke.
Many variants of this troll have been created, for instance: "IN NAZI GERMANY/You get SHOT for [doing something]!", among others.
As Slashdot is a gathering ground for those interested in things technical, it is inevitable that a highly advanced sense of technical humor has arisen. Often, this humor is a reference to a past event in geek history, and are often inane and obscure.
Whenever a story mentioning a new gadget is posted on Slashdot, it will often be proposed that the power of a Beowulf cluster of the new gadgets would be incredible. Such comments are generally prefaced with "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!" This type of troll actually began as a parody of sincere posts frequently made in stories about new computers back when the concept of Beowulf clusters first entered the technological mainstream.
Apple's Xgrid clustering solution was announced on Slashdot just as this phenomenon was dying, sparking fears that this might mutate into a new flood of posts declaring, "Imagine an Xgrid of these things!"
"NO CARRIER" is a response printed by a modem if it loses its connection. It is usually used to truncate a sentence, implying that some disaster has befallen the author or their computer. This joke goes back to the early days of USENET. This is used most often in the context of a user accidentally severing his connection, or in the context of the authorities silencing someone during an online exchange.
The full sequence, for full effect, is
a memorial to one of the first really intrusive software patents.
"Buffering" is a response to any topic related to streaming media, particularly RealPlayer. The post features a sentence or paragraph broken by "...BUFFERING..." strings, imitating a streaming media program on a poor connection.
^H represents the key combination control-h, which on Linux/UNIX systems types a backspace. When a user has a misconfigured console the backspace key will sometimes actually print ^H instead of deleting a character. This can lead to embarrassing admissions when a word a user means to delete is left in a message followed by a series of ^H's. Jokes are often made on Slashdot in reference to this bug^H^H^Hfeature. These jokes provide a funny way for users to reveal their true thoughts and to make subtle comments.
A more concise alternative sometimes seen is ^W, which is the shortcut to delete the previous word in the Berkeley Unix terminal line discipline. One ^W can replace a whole string of ^H's. This shortcut has also made it into vi and its imitator text editors. For really embarassing blunders, ^U (kill line) can outdo a whole line of ^W.
Older teletypes did not have a backspace and used # for erase, and @ for kill line.
Slashdotters often use the heavy hardware requirements of Doom 3 to make fun of supercomputers. For example, in an article about a new supercomputer, someone may joke by saying "But does it run Doom3?"
In August of 2004, Doom 3 was released. The system requirements weren't that bad.
Duke Nukem Forever is a game with a release date that has changed for years. Slashdotters often compare a timeline to DNF's timeline. For example, in an article about a product that appears to be vaporware, someone will post a "But will it come out before DNF?" Often, DNF is referred to as "Duke Nukem Whenever", referring to the many changes in release dates. Also, a prediction given by either a poster or someone quoted in a news story as to the availability of a new technology/app will be given the rhetorical question: "Can they also tell us when Duke Nukem Forever will be released?"
This troll is based upon a business plan featured in an episode of the animated television show South Park, in which a community of Underpants Gnomes have a three step business plan, consisting of:
None of the gnomes know what the second step is, and all of them assume that someone else within the organization does. This pokes fun at the general lack of a sensible business plan by dot-com era companies, who often came up with an interesting idea, but no clear way of turning that into profit. For Slashdot stories where an individual or organization is alleged to have performed some questionable action, a false business plan based on this template is often proposed in jest, with this action as the first step.
The Chewbacca Defense is occasionally mentioned or quoted in discussion of legal affairs, usually cases involving Microsoft, SCO, or the RIAA; the implication of such a reference being that their legal arguments make no sense. This is also based on a South Park episode.
There are certain topics to which posters will post an "obligatory" post in reference to a certain element of pop culture.
When referring to someone's boss on Slashdot, it is common to refer to him or her as one's Pointy-Haired Boss, or PHB. This is a reference to the Dilbert comic strip, in which co-workers refer to their boss who does, indeed, have pointy hair.
Posters often make references to this line (from the movie Star Wars and referring to the Death Star) whenever a story involves a moon or space station.
"The Password is: 1...2...3...4...5" followed by "That?s the combination to my luggage!" comes from the movie Spaceballs where the security code for the planet Druidia was this simple string. The line is used anytime a security issue involves passwords.
Frequently, Slashdot articles involve news that, to a technical audience, seems unrealistic and plain odd. Examples are the claims of Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution questioning the origins of the Linux kernel, the all-out lawsuit of SCO against IBM and anything else which doesn't make sense. It is believed that by postfixing the phrase "in Japan!" anything will make sense and seem real, yet still very distant and alien. This is in reference to the odd items and cultural phenomena that can be found in Japan and are considered normal, such as USB heated blankets, Hello Kitty vibrators and Domo-kun. For example, the article might state that Duke Nukem Forever will be released next summer. In that case, there will be some comments such as "Duke Nukem Forever will be released tomorrow ... in Japan!" This meme is believed to have started in discussion.
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