Simon Willison’s Weblog

The slashdot effect

5th February 2003

Dave Winer asks why Joel Spolsky gets much more traffic when slashdotted than UserLand’s hosted sites tend to. Joel explains (it’s all down to network effects) and mpt kicks in a few ideas as well.

Posted 5th February 2003 at 11:43 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May - 12th September 2026
Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem - 8th September 2026
The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting - 4th September 2026

This is The slashdot effect by Simon Willison, posted on 5th February 2003.

dave-winer 24 joel-spolsky 9 slashdot 14

Next: More YAML

Previous: Zeldman and definition lists

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/02/05/slashdotEffect