Jeff Bates, also known as hemos, is the co-founder of Slashdot[1] along with Rob Malda ("CmdrTaco").

Bates graduated from Holland Christian High School in 1994[2] and received a Bachelor's degree in History and Biology from Hope College[3] in 1998.

In February 2008 he became Geeknet's Vice President of Platform and managed the core engineering and product teams for Slashdot, freshmeat, and SourceForge.

In 2012, Slashdot had about 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received more than 5300 comments per day.

Occasionally, a story will hyperlink to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites, a phenomenon known as the Slashdot effect.