Slashdot.org
is a culmination of a news board/forum, because of this, the
conversation moves very fast and is "fresh" every day/couple
of hours. The literacy requirements for community vary by topic
and general interest. However, you do need to have an enthusiasm
for geek culture. If you are someone who is a technology hater
slashdot.org will quickly bore you and one may ask why it exists.
I would define geek culture as "a culture where technology
is first and everything else last".
A
good way to characterize what one needs to know in order to
participate is that if there is a section heading
on the main page, you should at least know what it stands for.
For example, the Apache section is referring to Apache server
side software which was created for linux as a solution for serving
web pages. This section is where server side news is released
and discussed.
There
are however general sections as well, which require less geek
knowledge and more general current event knowledge such as
the politic section. In this section people discuss digital
rights, humans rights and many other "current issues."
One
of the interesting things about slashdot is that it is often
where literacy of a subject is created. Because of the rapid
posting of new technologies and discussions of them, slashdot
is often referred to as a source of news for geek's.
One
term that I have found interesting is "slashdotted." Slashdotted
is a term used when someone/company has been posted on the
main page. Most commonly when you say someone was slashdotted
it means that their server went down due to the inability to
handle the bandwidth/processing requirements brought upon the
website by thousands of users trying to access the website
all at once.