Slashdot is run primarily by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, Jeff "Hemos" Bates (who posts stories, sells advertising, and handles the book reviews) and Robin "Roblimo" Miller (who came on board to help handle some of the more managerial sides of the site, as well as posting stories). Bandwidth comes from Exodus.Net.
Slashdot is a premier source for "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Nupedia and Wikipedia were Slashdotted (see Slashdot effect) on Thursday July 26 2001, @03:10AM.
The core audience for Slashdot are Linux users. The Slashdot crowd is extremely hip to free software, free content, etc. They should love Wikipedia a lot, and indeed several Wikipedia contributors started contributing as a result of Slashdot's mention of Wikipedia.
As anonymous posting is allowed on Slashdot, trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is a bizarre and complex subculture involving attempts at the "first post", Naked and Petrified Natalie Portman, hot grits, the trollsid, goatse.cx, Beowulf clusters, mock-gay erotica featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and topics (e.g. Star Trek, Linux, BSD), and other unusual juvenalia. Geekizoid, at www.geekizoid.com, was a site devoted to that culture, but disappeared as of fall 2001.
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