Slashdot effect suck balls these days.

[Vladimir]

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.

[tgmarks]

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.

[Tril]

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.

[Vladimir]

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.

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)

[eleuthria]

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.

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 is what 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 sucks 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.

[Vladimir]

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.

[tgmarks]

Ok, cool.  thanks for the explanation guys.

[Littleshop]

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.

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 is what 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 sucks 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.

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).

[Littleshop]

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.

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. 

[defxor]

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.

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".

[Vladimir]

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.

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 is what 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 sucks 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.

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).

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).

[Vladimir]

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.

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.

[JupeB]

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.

[Gabi]

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" 

[Stephen Gornick]

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" 

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).

[justusranvier]

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"  

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

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.

[xDan]

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...

[Herodes]

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 ?

[dissipate]

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.

[Matthew N. Wright]

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.

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)

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.