Slashdot effect

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The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect. This has the same effect as a denial-of-service attack, albeit accidentally. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The term flash crowd is a more generic term. [1]

Contents

The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites, [2] and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms.

Terminology

The term "Slashdot effect" refers to the phenomenon of a website becoming virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. It was later extended to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site. [3]

The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Digg, Drudge Report , Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter, leading to terms such as being farked or drudged, being under the Reddit effect, or receiving a hug of death from the site in question. [4] [5] Another generic term, "flash crowd," [6] originates from Larry Niven's 1973 novella by that name, in which the invention of inexpensive teleportation allows crowds to materialize almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories.

Cause

Sites such as Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Fark consist of brief submitted stories and a self-moderated discussion on each story. The typical submission introduces a news item or website of interest by linking to it. In response, large masses of readers tend to simultaneously rush to view the referenced sites. The ensuing flood of page requests from readers can exceed the site's available bandwidth or the ability of its servers to respond, and render the site temporarily unreachable.

Google Doodles, which link to search results on the doodle topic, also result in high increases of traffic from the search results page. [7]

Extent

MRTG graph from a web server statistics generator showing a moderate Slashdot effect in action in 2005 SlashdotEffectGraph.svg
MRTG graph from a web server statistics generator showing a moderate Slashdot effect in action in 2005

Major news sites or corporate websites are typically engineered to serve large numbers of requests and therefore do not normally exhibit this effect. Websites that fall victim may be hosted on home servers, offer large images or movie files or have inefficiently generated dynamic content (e.g. many database hits for every web hit even if all web hits are requesting the same page). These websites often became unavailable within a few minutes of a story's appearance, even before any comments had been posted. Occasionally, paying Slashdot subscribers (who have access to stories before non-paying users) rendered a site unavailable even before the story was posted for the general readership.

Few definitive numbers exist regarding the precise magnitude of the Slashdot effect, but estimates put the peak of the mass influx of page requests at anywhere from several hundred to several thousand hits per minute. [8] [9] [10] The flood usually peaked when the article was at the top of the site's front page and gradually subsided as the story was superseded by newer items. Traffic usually remained at elevated levels until the article was pushed off the front page, which could take from 12 to 18 hours after its initial posting. However, some articles had significantly longer lifetimes due to the popularity, newsworthiness, or interest in the linked article.

By 2005, reporters were commenting that the Slashdot effect had been diminishing. [2] However, the effect has been seen involving Twitter when some popular users mention a website. [11]

When the targeted website has a community-based structure, the term can also refer to the secondary effect of having a large group of new users suddenly set up accounts and start to participate in the community. While in some cases this has been considered a good thing, in others it is viewed with disdain by the prior members, as quite often the sheer number of new people brings many of the unwanted aspects of Slashdot along with it, such as trolling, vandalism, and newbie-like behavior. This bears some similarity to the 1990s Usenet concept of Eternal September.

Assistance and prevention

Many solutions have been proposed for sites to deal with the Slashdot effect. [12]

There are several systems that automatically mirror any Slashdot-linked pages to ensure that the content remains available even if the original site becomes unresponsive. [13] Sites in the process of being Slashdotted may be able to mitigate the effect by temporarily redirecting requests for the targeted pages to one of these mirrors. Slashdot does not mirror the sites it links to on its own servers, nor does it endorse a third party solution. Mirroring of content may constitute a breach of copyright and, in many cases, cause ad revenue to be lost for the targeted site.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flash Crowd</span>

"Flash Crowd" is a 1973 English-language novella by science fiction author Larry Niven, one of a series about the social consequence of inventing an instant, practically free displacement booth.

Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Denial-of-service attack</span> Type of cyber-attack

In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kuro5hin</span> Technology-related discussion website (1999–2016)

Kuro5hin was a collaborative discussion website founded by Rusty Foster in 1999, having been inspired by Slashdot. Articles were created and submitted by users and submitted to a queue for evaluation. Site members could vote for or against publishing an article and once the article had reached a certain number of votes, it was published to the site or deleted from the queue. The site has been described as "a free-for-all of news and opinion written by readers". Around 2005, its membership numbered in the tens of thousands.

RTFM is an initialism and internet slang for the expression "read the fucking manual" – typically used to reply to a basic question where the answer is easily found in the documentation, user guide, owner's manual, man page, online help, internet forum, software documentation or FAQ.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Drudge Report</span> American news aggregation website

The Drudge Report is a U.S.-based news aggregation website founded by Matt Drudge, and run with the help of Charles Hurt and Daniel Halper. The site was generally regarded as a conservative publication, though its ownership and political leanings have been questioned following business model changes in mid-to-late 2019. The site consists mainly of links to news stories from other outlets about politics, entertainment, and current events; it also has links to many columnists.

Inline linking is the use of a linked object, often an image, on one site by a web page belonging to a second site. One site is said to have an inline link to the other site where the object is located.

Web traffic is the data sent and received by visitors to a website. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic, and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth.

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or creates user behavior profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.

This is a list of blogging terms. Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialized vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious.

An anonymous post, is an entry on a textboard, anonymous bulletin board system, or other discussion forums like Internet forum, without a screen name or more commonly by using a non-identifiable pseudonym. Some online forums such as Slashdot do not allow such posts, requiring users to be registered either under their real name or utilizing a pseudonym. Others like JuicyCampus, AutoAdmit, 2channel, and other Futaba-based imageboards thrive on anonymity. Users of 4chan, in particular, interact in an anonymous and ephemeral environment that facilitates rapid generation of new trends.

A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking service, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fark</span> Website launched in 1999

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. The site receives many story submissions per day and approximately 100 of them are publicly displayed on the site, spread out over the main page as well as topical tabs that are organized as entertainment, sports, geek, politics and business). Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he tries to run both far-left and far-right articles.

A memetracker is a tool for studying the migration of memes across a group of people. The term is typically used to describe websites that either:

  1. analyze blog posts to determine what web pages are being discussed or cited most often on the World Wide Web, or
  2. allow users to vote for links to web pages that they find of interest.
<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digg</span> Social media/news aggregator website

Digg is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mister Splashy Pants</span> Humpback whale who is popular online

Mister Splashy Pants, or Mr Splashypants, is a humpback whale in the South Pacific Ocean. It is being tracked with a satellite tag by Greenpeace as a part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition, which was working to raise awareness about whales threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency's hunting of 50 humpback whales annually. The whale's name was chosen in an online poll that garnered attention from several websites, including Boing Boing and Reddit, quickly becoming an internet meme. Mister Splashy Pants became the subject of a TED Talk by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, titled "How to make a splash in social media."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moviemistakes.com</span>

Moviemistakes.com is a website that notes mistakes and continuity errors found in film and television projects, with some books and games, and supplementary material covering trivia, quotes, DVD Easter eggs and movie trailers. It was created by Jon Sandys in September 1996. The site categorises mistakes into nine different areas: continuity, factual errors, mistakes that reveal the film-making process, visible crew or equipment, plot holes, audio problems, deliberate "mistakes", character mistakes, and "other".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AACS encryption key controversy</span> Controversy regarding copyright

A controversy surrounding the AACS cryptographic key arose in April 2007 when the Motion Picture Association of America and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC began issuing cease and desist letters to websites publishing a 128-bit (16-byte) number, represented in hexadecimal as 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, a cryptographic key for HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. The letters demanded the immediate removal of the key and any links to it, citing the anti-circumvention provisions of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

A user revolt is a social conflict in which users of a website collectively and openly protest a website host's or administrator's instructions for using the website. Sometimes it happens that the website hosts can control a website's use in certain ways, but the hosts also depend on the users to comply with voluntary social rules in order for the website to operate as the hosts would like. A user revolt occurs when the website users protest against the voluntary social rules of a website, and use the website in a way that is in conflict with the wishes of the website host or administrators.

References

  1. ↑ Ari, Ismail; Hong, Bo; Miller, Ethan L.; Brandt, Scott A.; Long, Darrell D. E. (October 2003). "Managing Flash Crowds on the Internet" (PDF). University of California Santa Cruz Storage Systems Research Center. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 May 2013. Retrieved 15 March 2010.
  2. 1 2 Kharif, Olga (March 2, 2005). "Less Impact from the "Slashdot Effect". Bloomberg Business Week. Archived from the original on May 15, 2005.
  3. ↑ Eric S. Raymond. "slashdot effect". The Jargon File, version 4.4.8. Retrieved 21 May 2012.
  4. ↑ Wilhelm, Alex (17 January 2012). "How Reddit turned one congressional candidate's campaign upside down". The Next Web. Retrieved 24 October 2012.
  5. ↑ "The Reddit effect". ABC News. August 31, 2012. Archived from the original on 1 November 2014. Retrieved 24 October 2012.
  6. ↑ Eric S. Raymond. "flash crowd". The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). Retrieved 25 May 2012.
  7. ↑ Williams, David E. "Google's unknown artist has huge following." CNN. July 19, 2006. Retrieved on July 19, 2006.
  8. ↑ Stephen Adler. "The Slashdot Effect: An Analysis of Three Internet Publications". Archived from the original on 2 December 2008. Retrieved 19 April 2003. (mirror)
  9. ↑ "Slashdotting graphs". Princeton University Department of Astrophysical Sciences. Archived from the original on 27 February 2009. Retrieved 13 January 2004.
  10. ↑ Aaron Benoy. "Ruins in ASCII" . Retrieved 27 September 2004.
  11. ↑ Paul Douglas, How Stephen Fry takes down entire websites with a single tweet, Tech Radar, March 3, 2010
  12. ↑ Jeremy Elson; Jon Howell (2008), Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage (PDF), Microsoft Research
  13. ↑ Daniel Terdiman (1 October 2004). "Solution for Slashdot Effect?". WIRED. Retrieved 2016-04-18.
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