A return – and the Slashdot effect
So it’s been quiet here, pretty much by force. Heeman and I both had massive amounts of studies to attend to, and Ian made sure that we didn’t *think* about writing on Web Coherence.
However, it’s time to get back in gear. (At least for a week, then I go to Greece (; ) I have a long overdue piece that I am to write about today.
Some time ago I was talking with Ian about coherent effects on the web, and I brought up the Slashdot effect. To my amazement, he had not heard of it – as any good geek would think, I thought that it was universal among tech types. So I’m writing about it here – not to illuminate the many of you who undoubtedly know about the Slashdot effect, but to further explain what ‘coherent’ behavior is.
The Slashdot effect is, in short, redirecting a massive crowd of internet users to a specific site, spiking traffic and loading the destination server, especially in these days of dynamic pages. It is so named as the notorious geek site Slashdot was the first to consistently reproduce this effect, often bringing down web pages or servers completely. More info here.
Intro done, so why am I saying this? To explain coherent behavior yet again.
This is a perfect example of direct behavior having coherent effects. It is intentionally funneling the massive hordes of the internet to a specific site, not through malicious hijacking, but through common interest and community. The effects it generates (traffic spikes, down servers, instant sales and reputation) are in a large part both emergent and unplanned.
The Slashdot effect was happening shortly after the site was launched in 97. It’s “community” was solely tech-savvy geeks, nerds, and programmers, yet they could knock down small-to-medium size servers with nary a problem. Nowadays, the Internet-savvy population is much greater in volume, needing a much smaller interest profile to generate critical mass. Most internet users are not aware of Slashdot, digg, the blogosphere or anything like it, but they are quite capable of joining (or creating!) a coherent effect. These effects are not studied, not planned for, and are capable of astounding divergences.
Why aren’t we watching this again?
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