Jeff Bates (technologist)

Jeff Bates, also known as hemos, is the co-founder of Slashdot along with Rob Malda ("CmdrTaco"). Bates graduated from Holland Christian High School in 1994 and received a Bachelor's degree in History from Hope College in 1998.

Malda and Bates created Slashdot in 1997, while undergraduates at Hope College. In 1999 they sold the site to Andover.net, which was acquired by VA Linux Systems in 2000 (which became SourceForge, Inc. in 2007, then Geeknet, Inc. in 2009).

Bates served as Director of Media Operations for Geeknet from May 2001 through July 2004, when he became Vice President of Editorial Operations and Executive Editor of Slashdot. In February 2008 he became Geeknet's Vice President of Platform and headed the core engineering and product teams for Slashdot, freshmeat, and SourceForge.

In August 2011, Bates joined Google. He continues to work at Google as Chief of Staff for the CIO.

Bates founded Slashdot in July 1997 under the original name "chips and dips", later in September 1997 the site became what it is known as today. Slashdot is a technology-related news website, it features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics. In 2012, Slashdot had around 3.7 million unique visitors per month and received over 5300 comments per day. The site has won more than 20 awards, including People's Voice Awards in 2000 for Best Community Site and Best News Site. Occasionally, a story will link to a server causing a large surge of traffic, which can overwhelm some smaller or independent sites. This phenomenon is known as the "Slashdot effect".