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 are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI - 12th December 2025
GPT-5.2 - 11th December 2025
Useful patterns for building HTML tools - 10th December 2025

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