Photo: Roy Ritchie

SLASHDOTTER-IN-CHIEF: In June 1999, at the very height of the dot-com boom, Slashdot, brainchild of Rob Malda, was acquired by Andover.Net.

Slashdot serves its geeky audience so well because Malda himself is among them. “I've always characterized it as ‘me,' ” he says. “It's people who like to write code and love technology.”

Like his readers, Malda was a self-educated brainiac from the start. Growing up in the bit-size town of Holland, Mich., he started coding on his Radio Shack TRS-80 in fourth grade and never looked back. He spent so much time writing computer games and surfing primitive bulletin-board networks on his 1200-baud modem that his mother once grounded him by locking his keyboard in the trunk of her car. But Malda fought back with ingenuity, as he once described on his blog: “Since this was the days of DOS, I just added a keyboard error-code check to my autoexec.bat file, which launched a BBS so I could simply get at my data from a friend's house. Sorry, Mom.”

While studying computer science at nearby Hope College, Malda stumbled on a like-minded group: the community that had formed around Linux, the open-source operating system. The appeal of Linux was intense. “You could pop off the lid and study it,” Malda says. In July 1997, years before anyone knew a blog from a podcast, Malda started posting his technology takes on a site he cheekily called Chips and Dips. Two months later, he renamed it Slashdot because the original URL “was difficult to pronounce.” He chose his handle, CmdrTaco, from a joke about bad restaurant names in a book by humor columnist Dave Barry.

It didn't take long for Slashdot to unfurl its geek flag. In December 1997, Malda anticipated the marketplace victory of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 browser and suggested that Netscape's only way to compete would be to cough up its source code. Six days later, Netscape obliged. Although Malda doesn't think he was the singular catalyst, his prescient call earned techie respect—and influential readers.

“That was an era when the plumbers of the Internet had the power,” Malda recalls. “If you knew a lot about Linux, you could be a major corporation's entire Internet department. I wasn't conscious [of anything] except that I was a plumber, too. So I was making the site I wanted to read, and it turned out I was one of tens of thousands of others.”

By the fall of 1998, Slashdot had about 300 000 daily readers and enough ads for Malda to quit his day job as a PC technician, pay himself a US $40 000 annual salary and run the site full-time, with the help of buddy Jeff Bates. They set up shop in what Malda calls a “crappy college house.” But the water-rotted ceiling was the least of their troubles. The plumbers piping into Slashdot proved to be just as unkempt.

Although communities had been coming together on the Internet in the form of bulletin-board services and newsgroups for years, the Web's rapid growth was, by this time, testing the limits of online crowd control. New breeds of disrupters began taking to the Slashdot forums: trolls who were looking for a fight, ­plagiarizers, spammers, copyright-violating cut-and-pasters, and grammar fanatics who savaged every entry with overzealous critiques. After Malda proposed marriage to his girlfriend in a Slashdot forum on Valentine's Day in 2002, one of the comments made was, “Good luck to you, but bah humbug on valentines day.”

“The ultimate goal is sharing ideas and information,” Malda says, “and if you're nitpicking about grammar, you're wasting everyone's time.” To survive, Slashdot had to achieve the unimaginable: tame the geeks without turning them away. “If you put up a billboard in front of all of New York, someone will climb the pole and spray-paint it,” Malda says. “You can't stop them. You have to gain leverage against them. It's a never-ending arms race.”

In June 1999, at the very height of the dot-com boom, Slashdot was acquired by Andover.Net, the Linux hub, which was itself bought the next year by VA Linux, the computer systems service. Andover.Net went for more than $1 billion, but Malda, who prefers not to divulge his specific earnings, insists his take in stocks was not retirement money and, essentially, “nowhere near anything impressive.” He remained onboard as Slashdot's chief; he still had plenty he wanted to accomplish.

It's midmorning at Slashdot as Malda bounds into his office. There's a doll of Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail on his desk and a lamp filled with marbles. Anime posters cover the wall. When his cellphone rings with the presumably ironic ringtone of Britney Spears's “Baby One More Time,” Malda taps the mute button. He has work to do.

Every day, Slashdot receives anywhere from 200 to 500 story submissions from readers, but it runs only 20 to 30 of them. To submit a piece, visitors are urged to use the Submissions Bin, an online form, instead of e-mail. Malda instructs users to include concise subject headers and not to submit duplicate stories, but the growing pool of candidates gets harder and harder to wade through. Malda and his team judiciously fish out only the best.