The medium used for Slashdot.org is a news/comments setting. It is based off open source code, incorporating Debian, Red Hat, Perl, Apache, mod perl, MySQL. The end product is now called slashcode, which is under the GNU public licence.

Usually describing hardware which a virtual community uses doesn't’t necessarily mean much for the end user, however, because of Slashdot.orgs popularity, the hardware requirements put upon it are extreme. Slashdot uses 5 load balanced Web Servers for serving pages, 3 Load balanced Web Servers for images and a SQL and NFS server. These are run in a data center located in Waltham, Mass, which interestingly enough is within 30 minutes from where the admins live. This is interesting, because it still shows that though this is a virtual site, the need for close physical locations is still desired. *

Slashdot.org has three different participants, the viewer, the account holder and the subscriber. The viewer is someone who just visit's slashdot.org, reads articles and comments, however does have have a user account. An account holder is someone who has filled out a web form and obtained a user name and password, this user can view all the material as well as post comments. The subscriber is an account holder who pays a subscription for premium services such as not having to view the normal advertisements when visiting slashdot.org and also they get to have it be noted that they are a subscriber when they post comments. The later may sound small, but it lets you begin to see at least the beginnings of a very intricate social system.