As part of what has become a series of interviews with founders of social news promotion sites, I spoke with Slashdot's (publisher, editor-in-chief, lead programmer, etc.) Rob Malda. Widely regarded as an online institution for tech and science news, Slashdot's vibrant community submits press content directly to editors who select the most newsworthy items for listing on the main page. This is opposed to models like Shoutwire, Digg, and Reddit, which generate homepage content via readers' votes on recent news submissions from an index they supply. Many thanks go out to Rob for sharing his viewpoints with me.

How has Slashdot evolved in the past eight years?

Slashdot is almost always about dealing with growth- this means hardware and software, and this means dealing with more comments, more submissions, and more abuses. The biggest change in 8 years is that when it started it was me with a little help from friends. Now it is staffed by many.

What are some promising scientific trends that see regular profiling on Slashdot?

Right now we're talking a lot about x86 Macs, DRM and HD content, and the rise in worms and security issues.

Can you list some formatting/topic recommendations for story submissions? About how many stories get selected/rejected each day?

A few hundred stories are rejected. A few dozen are accepted. For formatting, the most obvious thing people forget is proper hyper linking. Linking the word 'article' or even worse 'here' just makes my skin crawl. But honestly we're looking for the substance of the URL, not the formatting of the text. I can reformat text if the linked URL is worth it.

To continue reading this interview, click below.

What are some notable examples of the "Slashdot Effect"?

Just read the site, you'll see it ;)

Around the internet, people frequently comment about a "war" between Slashdot and Digg for some kind of supremacy. Do you consider Digg a competitor? What competitors does Slashdot have?

I guess they are a competitor but we're really fundamentally different. They are the latest site for us to "War" with. There have been a number of them before. I think there's room for many sites with different styles, methods, subject matters, readership. Far to often a "War" exists only because fans of things like to argue. We do our things, other sites do theirs.



What is the general feeling at Slashdot about Web 2.0 applications?

I wish I had more time to incorporate more of the fancy stuff into Slashdot itself.

How has the emergence of social news promotion effected Slashdot?

It's nice to see the rest of the world catch up.



Will Slashdot ever introduce a form of social news promotion on its site?

Oh I guess we mean different things by Social Promotion then, since i think readers submitting their stories to us *is* social news promotion. (FTR, I meant readers voting on what stories will become featured)



If the Slashdot staff had a large infusion of venture capital, what are some dream initiatives?

Rewriting the moderation system, an AJAX forum system, new database servers, fixing the search system.

What are some new features people can look forward to in the future?



We have a few under-the-hood changes coming that most readers won't notice, but the next few things coming is tagging for articles, and an improved index layout that makes it easier to find all the content.

How do you see social news promotion evolving over the next year? Over the next five?

I imagine it will expand into other genres of news. Most of these fancy news things start in the tech sector, but i'd like to see them hit the mainstream press. I just hope that the system designers are able to harness the wisdom of the masses without simply creating stampedes. This is a problem i've been trying to solve on Slashdot for many years. It is very non-trivial. The guys who get it right are going to be huge.