The website was founded in 1997 by Hope College students Rob Malda, also known as "CmdrTaco", and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos".

Moderation applies either −1 or +1 to the current rating, based on whether the comment is perceived as either "normal", "offtopic", "insightful", "redundant", "interesting", or "troll" (among others).

Slashdot was preceded by Rob Malda's personal website "Chips & Dips", which launched in October 1997,[13] featured a single "rant" each day about something that interested its author – typically something to do with Linux or open source software.

[24] Many of the most popular stories are political, with "Strike on Iraq" (March 19, 2003) the second-most-active article and "Barack Obama Wins US Presidency" (November 5, 2008) the third-most-active.

[25] Some controversy erupted on March 9, 2001, after an anonymous user posted the full text of Scientology's "Operating Thetan Level Three" (OT III) document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article.

A week later, in a long article, Slashdot editors explained their decision to remove the page while providing links and information on how to get the document from other sources.

[26] Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001 (although the first article was published April 5, 2001) and is an official offshoot of the US-based Web site.

As of January 2010[update] the site was owned by OSDN-Japan, Inc., and carried some of the US-based Slashdot articles as well as localized stories.

[29] On Valentine's Day 2002, founder Rob Malda proposed to longtime girlfriend Kathleen Fent using the front page of Slashdot.

[34] Slashdot altered its threaded discussion forum display software to explicitly show domains for links in articles, as "users made a sport out of tricking unsuspecting readers into visiting [Goatse.cx].

[39] On November 9 that same year, Malda wrote that Slashdot attained 16,777,215 (or 224 − 1) comments, which broke the database for three hours until the administrators fixed the problem.

[41] On January 25, 2011, the site launched its third major redesign in its 13.5-year history, which gutted the HTML and CSS, and updated the graphics.

He did not mention any plans for the future, other than spending more time with his family, catching up on some reading, and possibly writing a book.

[47] Two months later, in May 2012, Slashdot launched SlashBI, SlashCloud, and SlashDataCenter, three websites dedicated to original journalistic content.

Despite the debate, articles published on SlashCloud and SlashBI attracted attention from io9,[49] NPR,[50] Nieman Lab,[51] Vanity Fair, and other publications.

[52][53][54] While initially an opt-in beta, the site automatically began migrating selected users to the new design in February 2014; the rollout led to a negative response from many longtime users, upset by the added visual complexity, and the removal of features, such as comment viewing, that distinguished Slashdot from other news sites.

[57] He shared editorial responsibilities with several other editors including Timothy Lord, Patrick "Scuttlemonkey" McGarry, Jeff "Soulskill" Boehm, Rob "Samzenpus" Rozeboom, and Keith Dawson.

His online nickname (handle), CowboyNeal, is inspired by a Grateful Dead tribute to Neal Cassady in their song, "That's It for the Other One".

After Andover.net bought Slashdot in June 1999,[63] Several programmers were hired to structure the code and render it scalable, as its users had increased from a few hundred to tens of thousands.

This work was done by Brian Aker, Patrick Galbraith, Chris Nandor and others, resulting in version 2 of the software, released in 2001.

Slashdot's editors are primarily responsible for selecting and editing the primary stories that are posted daily by submitters.

Moderators may choose to attach a particular descriptor to the comments as well, such as "normal", "offtopic", "flamebait", "troll", "redundant", "insightful", "interesting", "informative", "funny", "overrated", or "underrated", with each corresponding to a −1 or +1 rating.

A popular meme (based on an unscientific Slashdot user poll[74]) is, "In Soviet Russia, noun verb you!

Other popular memes usually pertain to computing or technology, such as "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these",[76] "But does it run Linux?

Slashdotters typically like to mock then United States Senator Ted Stevens' 2006 description of the Internet as a "series of tubes"[81][82] or former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's chair-throwing incident from 2005.

[86] References to the game are commonly brought up in other articles about software packages that are not yet in production even though the announced delivery date has long passed (see vaporware).

[90] In 2002, approximately 50% of Slashdot's traffic consisted of people who simply check out the headlines and click through, while others participate in discussion boards and take part in the community.

This was known as the "Slashdot effect",[88][91] a term first coined on February 15, 1999, that refers to an article about a "new generation of niche Web portals driving unprecedented amounts of traffic to sites of interest".

Some of these celebrities include: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak,[97] writer and actor Wil Wheaton,[98] and id Software technical director John Carmack.