Have you ever heard of Slashdot? Don’t feel bad. Most people in technology haven’t heard of Slashdot. After 20+ years as a professional I.T. closet cleaner for Fortune 500 companies and government agencies in Silicon Valley, I’ve decided to retire and invest my entire retirement funds—all three pennies—to buy a failed dot com website called Slashdot. This is how I plan to make Slashdot great again.
WTF Is Slashdot?
Slashdot was a popular website for reading and commenting on tech news in the late 1990s. It was, as you could say today, the Reddit of that era. Slashdot was so popular that the word “slashdotted” was coined for dial-up websites that went offline after being mentioned in a story. According to Wikipedia, which cannot be wrong, it was called the Slashdot Effect.
But that was 20 years ago.
After the dot com bust in 2001, Slashdot lingered on, changing ownership whenever ad revenue drops, and losing popularity to newcomer Reddit. I polled my coworkers at my government I.T. job if they have ever heard of Slashdot and Reddit. None of them heard of Slashdot, but they have heard of Reddit.
Buying Out Slashdot
Last month a bunch of script kiddies in Russia “slashdotted” Slashdot for an entire week after launching a DDOS attack with a Beowulf cluster of networked PlayStation 2 consoles. The same PlayStation 2 consoles that Saddam Hussein used for nuclear weapon design when he and his family weren’t playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
After Slashdot came back online, I approached the editors about buying them out and acquiring the Slashdot assets. After cashing out my retirement funds, I gave the three editors, BeauHD, msmash and EditorDavid, a penny each, thanked them for their valiant efforts to keep Slashdot up and running in the past year, and told them not to let the door hit their ass on the way.
Let me reassure you that I—and only I alone—can make Slashdot great again.
Upgrading Slashdot
Slashdot for years had ran their web servers off of a Beowulf cluster of five Banana Junior 6000 PCs from the 1980s. Needless to say, buying spare parts on eBay to maintain these old PCs is nearly impossible as the United States government is the largest user of Banana Junior PCs. I know because every I.T. closet I had cleaned out for the three-letter agency that I worked for in government I.T. was full of Banana Junior PCs that were no longer in use.
I’m confident that I can migrate Slashdot over to a new hardware platform.
The Salvation Army of Silicon Valley has generously donated five Apple Mac G3 computers, one in each color: lime, strawberry, blueberry, grape, and tangerine. The Mac G3 computers will be placed in a Beowulf cluster and operated by an expert team of server hamsters previously employed by Kia who are hard at work in training.
As for the Slashdot software, it was originally programmed in Perl. No one has programmed in Perl since the 1990s. The Slashdot software will be rewritten in Goat C, the newest, most popular variant of the C programming language. Unlike American programmers, H1B programmers from India are willing to bend over and spread cheeks for the privilege of putting Goat C on their resume.
New Features
When Slashdot got started 20+ years ago, all comments was anonymously posted. User accounts came later, allowing users to post comments under a real or fake name and attract dedicated bands of trolls.
With the horrendously broken moderator system, anonymous users were driving off named users from Slashdot and named users are posting anonymously to avoid being penalized for their opinions. The vast majority of anonymous comments on Slashdot are from Russian bots posting pornographic links to Russian schoolboys and promoting unqualified presidential candidates.
Therefore, I will abolish anonymous comments
The color scheme on the Slashdot website hasn’t changed in 20+ years. The color scheme will change from terminal green to vibrant pink to welcome women, minorities and social justice warriors.
Slashdot can no longer be the exclusive domain of white and nerdy techs, man-children living in their mother’s basement, and football jocks who think they are geeks for having a job with a PC. Slashdot desperately needs a newer audience to click on all the new banner ads from Amazon, Facebook and Google that I plan to add to the site.
After all, I need 12 quarter-cents to get my retirement funds of three pennies back and anything beyond that will allow me to retire to Las Vegas.
Finally, it’s been years since Slashdot had any kind of official t-shirt. For now the Goat C t-shirt will become the unofficial t-shirt of Slashdot. So bend over and spread those cheeks by clicking on the affiliate link so I can make some money.
Let’s make Slashdot great again! Happy April Fool’s Day and Easter Sunday!
Updated April 2, 2018: The Slashdot editors responded to my parody by removing my ability to comment under my “cdreimer” account on Slashdot. Oh, well. No good deed ever goes unpunished on Slashdot.