Bitcoin Forum

2 articles featuring Bitcoin on front page of slashdot.org . As Matthew told me privately "slahsdotters will be furious about this".

However, one of those articles features a link to an old article about MintChip on bitcoinmagazine website. I must note that I am very disappointed by "slashdot effect" I can observe. Direct link to http://bitcoinmagazine.net from front page of slashdot.org and we could easily handle 1000 and even 10000 times stronger slashdot effect.

It seems, that bunch of Bitcoin haters are getting rather irrelevant these days.

I originally heard about bitcoin from slashdot, so it doesn't piss off everyone.  When you say slashdot effect are you talking about the number of hits to your website from slashdot?  thanks.

I suspect slashdot users are sick of hearing about bitcoin so they ignore those stories.  They had plenty of earlier articles, and if the users aren't following bitcoin by now, they don't care.

I heard about bitcoin from slashdot (around Nov 2010 and Feb 2011), but since then, slashdot decreased in quality and I stopped reading it every day.

In old days, various websites regularly went down once mentioned on front page of slashdot.org due rather significant and sudden increase of visitors/hits. This was called "slashdot effect" i.e. many links on slashdot being dead because the websites referred could not handle the load. (probably because poorly configured apache on weak servers when handling explosive load).

perhaps better explanation is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect (I did not read it)

To be fair, generally the Slashdot Effect only took down shared hosting plans.  If you're on any decent VPS server (or almost any dedicated server) you can easily handle the traffic from Slashdot articles.  Everytime I can recall people saying a story had been taken down by Slashdot (or digg, or reddit), it was generally responding with some kind of hostgator/bluehost/godaddy error page once it came back online.

eleuthria, fair point. However, by "old days" we perhaps refer to slightly different old days. I, for example, distinctly remember some websites updating their dedicated servers to cope with slashdot effect.

Ok, cool.  thanks for the explanation guys.

Actually the slashdot effect mostly hurt internally hosted websites where the connection may have been a few T1's.  It is usually lack of  bandwidth that causes the problems not server load (unless you are running windows server).

From the last article about the bitcoinica lawsuit, the tone of the comments was actually much better.  There were still plenty of haters, but the bitcoin supporters were less then 1 in 10.  Now for every call of 'its a ponzi' there is some reason discussion about the brilliance of bitcoin and the lack of financial censorship. 

I am sure that many of the haters have all bitcoin articles blocked as well. 

Ah the old days. My /. uid is ~100000 - I was late to the party. For many years getting Slashdotted meant your connection would go down - and they themselves had a pretty big pipe. When 9/11 happened and a lot of big websites went down due to traffic (CNN.com IIRC) Slashdot was the only site that was continuously updated.

It's quite fun reading comments on Bitcoin on Slashdot. Most of them reek with hurt geek superiority, i.e, "Since I didn't get it from the beginning I will now hate it".

Actually, unlike me, you probably refer not to websites in late 90's on some typical dedi with Intel Pentium III with humongous 256 Mb of RAM and preforked apache with 10-20 threads going swapping and DB's going crazy on higher loads without enough RAM. (my memory is fuzzy on exact details).

Of course, it was written in perl and pretty well optimised on all levels. Unlike typical monstrous contraptions, often on IIS that most corporations run.

I remember, I was at work at NOC for some ISP when 9/11 happened. Internet basically went down for a few minutes because of huge traffic spike which got coupled with loss of some significant routers. It took about an hour for the internet to recover.

I used to read Slashdot every day in high school; now I'm lucky to visit it twice a year. That, coupled with better server resources and more bandwidth probably killed the Slashdot effect.

Maybe "slashdot effect" was a name invented by slashdot to make them self-important, alà "we are so big and important that when we make an article, sites linked there go down due to so many visites"  :D

Nope.  Even bitcoin.org was essentially DDoS'd multiple times due to those Slashdot stories.  (though sometimes there were real DDoS attacks at the same time).

It was a name invented by Slashdot and it was a real effect. That effect was far more common about 10 years ago than it is now. Back in the early 2000s a mention on the Slashdot front page would regularly bring down unprepared web servers. Note the date on this article: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/10/65165p (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/10/65165p)

At one time there was a Firefox plugin that would automatically add Google Cache, Coral Cache and Mirrordot links to each URL published on Slashdot so that people could still read the original article after the server publishing it had crashed.

Are there any estimates for number of hits that are received as a result? (as in, pageloads per second)

Just curious whether my server would be prepared...

It is my impression that every time bitcoin is mentioned on Slashdot, it receives a lot of negative comments.

This surprises me a little, as when there's political issues presented, there are usually a lot of insightful and interesting comments, and a lot of them is kind of libertarian.

So not sure about the hostile attitude towards bitcoin from the slashdot community.

Anyone got a theory about it ?

I told a senior Linux system administrator at my work about Bitcoin (thinking he would be really interested in it), but he was actually really turned off by it. I think in order to for someone to be interested in Bitcoin and not be repelled by it, they have to have some kind of economic understanding of the potential, and they have to be a bit more open minded than most. It is not just a technical understanding that is necessary, that's for sure. If you don't have the economic understanding of Bitcoin's potential, it will just seem like another scheme.

I remember on ZDTV (back when it existed) on the Screen Savers with Leo Laporte, he would frequently tell callers that they would add an address to the show notes and email a copy to them because if they mentioned it on the air, the site would probably go down. Hehe. Good old days.

I see a lot of people dismiss things immediately when they are told about it, and don't even bother to check it up. Personally I'm always open minded and tries to learn about new things when I hear about it.

Not bitcoin related, but in life I have done some experiences, and I often have some tips for people that I know are good tips, but very often, people do not even listen, but just continue on in their miserable ways. Some people even prefer to use their ineffective methods of solving things, when they are presented with more efficient ways of doing something. So I realized, it's not for me to try to convince or try to better the lifes of others, I tell people about something once. And if they don't react to it, I won't push it on them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4FSLOMErbA

I've seen lots of this in real life where people freeze up at opportunities. They need things dictated to them. They need habits. Everyone would be using Bitcoin in 10 years if we kept at this rate of adoption, so I guess we should just start building for the future and using it now.

Actually I would not take any money in such circumstances either. Lots of scams are based on somehow giving a person money and then emotionally assaulting him based on the fact that money were accepted. One of the rules of survival in prison, some army units etc... (dpending on country obviously) is to not owe anything to anyone. I'd say refusing gifts from strangers is a perfectly viable survival stratagem.

See one of the latest Burn Notice episodes (season6, ep 3-4 ish) for confirmation if you do not believe me.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes ->  "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"

Troyan horse attacks are possible and are are happening not only in Information Security context but in context of street level survival as well. What you see in that video is people intuitively defending themselves from a potential trojan horse attack.

If only bitcoiners were as streets smart as those random people in that video, Pirate ponzi would be done and dusted long ago...

My /. uid is just below 4000, tho 100k is pretty good too. 

Anyway, getting slashdotted is a good thing.  It means people are actually reading your site.

Hasn't Slashdot been largely irrelevant for almost a decade?

(my uid is < 500)

My UID is a palindrome: 25252

I'd be interested to see the site traffic on slashdot over the last 10 years. Its a pretty niche crowd that I cant imagine has grown much compared to the 'lighter' to read tech blogs like engadget or gizmodo these days.

As others have said slashdot is going downhill. I barely visit any longer. A funny coincidence is that I used to frequent something awful back in the day as well (like 5 years ago), but have long abandoned that place. Both these communities seem to be overrun by pseudointellectual trolls these days. Maybe it isn't a coincidence.

Instead of a sweaty scary guy, they should've used a glam babe with cleavage, I think more people would have accepted the cash then. On the other hand, giving out money on the street is 'unnatural', while giving out flyers is normal..

I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for over ten years. The site itself hasn't changed much in that time, bar some minor redesigns. The traffic and posting levels, the types of stories that are posted, etc, are all pretty similar.

It's not that the Slashdot effect got smaller, it's that technology got better.

As to why some people dislike the idea of Bitcoin, a lot of it depends on how you initially introduce it to people. I've not encountered anyone who's turned off by it, but I don't ever introduce it as a kind of investment or way to make money. I don't try and sell Bitcoins to them or get them involved. I just describe it as a bunch of people experimenting with a new financial system that doesn't need banks. Then typically they are quite receptive to the idea. They won't sign up tomorrow, but maybe in a few years.

That's awesome, using Burn Notice as a reference.

TIL that Slashdot is still relevant to some people.

Haven't visited that place regularly since discovering Reddit a few years back.

So true, and not only for Bitcoin. Most people don't like being "forced" into new ideas. Make them curious and they will investigate it on their own. Any critically thinking person will be sceptical if you tell them that you know something fantastic, something amazing that will revolutionize the world.