Submitted by ackbar on April 11th, 2005Facts
From February 2 to April 4, 2005, user ThinSkin (#851769) has had nine submissions accepted by the Slashdot editors, and published on the front page of Slashdot.
Each of these nine stories contain at least one link to extremetech.com, which curiously enough is also ThinSkin's user homepage. Six of the stories are direct lead-ins to an ExtremeTech article.
Four of the nine stories were published by timothy.
As of the time of this writing, ThinSkin has not posted any comments or made any entries in his Slashdot Journal.
Commentary
Given that the ThinSkin account is apparently used for nothing more than submitting stories, it is probable that it is solely used by ExtremeTech staff to get links to their articles posted to the front page of Slashdot. The published submissions don't link to just one ExtremeTech staffer's work, so we can assume that either the account is shared, or that one person is submitting these on behalf of the whole site.
This, in itself, is nothing new, and is a smart tactic for ExtremeTech to increase its traffic. However, ThinSkin is account #815769- it was probably created mid-January 2005 (based on our analysis of UIDs and their time of creation). Since then, nine submissions have made the front page. This rate of successful submission rivals that of Roland Piquepaille, which leads one to wonder if there is some behind-the-curtain negotiation between ExtremeTech and Slashdot.
The two main arguments against there being at least some sort of favoritism going on are (1) ExtremeTech might make a Slashdot story submission for each article they publish, and (2) ExtremeTech's submissions are well-written. This may, after all, be an innocent mistake made by the Slashdot editors, but here's why we think there's more to it than that.
Concerning (1)- this may very well be true, and the Slashdot editors may only be accepting a handful of the submissions. Past experience with Slashdot's posting habits is the main reason why we do not believe that to be the only factor here. Also, it seems unlikely that ExtremeTech would do this for every last article they write— they may only submit a story to Slashdot for the more unique articles.
Concerning (2)- Slashdot is not known for picking the best submission regarding a particular news item. Many times a sloppy submission is accepted, and in the discussion threads for this story, other users ask why their superior (and sometimes earlier submitted) submission was not accepted. So, while ExtremeTech's submissions may be one of the best regarding a particular news item, this hasn't shown to be a strong predictor for getting a submission accepted in the past. If something is the current buzz in the tech community, it is going to get submitted to Slashdot by a lot of users. Why does ThinSkin so frequently make it to the top of this heap? To the front page (as opposed to only being seen on a subsection page), nonetheless? A cursory glance of the account makes it clear as crystal that the account exists only to get links to ExtremeTech on Slashdot's front page.
What happened to the "by the community, for the community" ethos of Slashdot? With the constant barrage of slashvertisements submitted by an employee of the company whose product/website being featured, Slashdot is becoming nothing more than an advertisement aggregator for tech sites. Surely the editors must notice when a story submission comes from the people who will directly benefit from this story being shown on Slashdot's front page. To continually publish such articles shows, at best, a lack of journalistic integrity, and at worst indicates kickback schemes.
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