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Mr. Hirschorn applauded Slashdot's "very smart balancing act," which he characterized as "appealing in a very intimate, direct way with its core audience and figuring out a way to branch out into other topics, like intellectual property, that would appeal to a broader audience."

He suggested, however, that any comparison between large business efforts like his Inside site and Slashdot were misleading. Slashdot's creators don't really "measure themselves as a business. They can meaure themselves as a cause," he said. "The fact that it's turned out to be a modest business is a happy surprise."

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Does Slashdot, in fact, make money? Its owners say, yes, sort of. The site is owned by Open Source Development Network Inc., a subsidiary of the VA Software Corporation. Open Source runs a number of technology-related Web sites and an online store, ThinkGeek.

Richard French, senior vice president and general manager for Open Source, declined to break out the income of any one component of the company, except to say, "Slashdot works from a cost point of view and from a revenue perspective."

In fact, he acknowledged, "If you took any one of them on their own, probably none of them would be profitable," he said of Open Source's various Web sites.

But because many of the sites use the same hardy, low-maintenance software developed by Mr. Malda and his team, and because the Internet resources are pooled, the company says it is able to squeeze out a profit from the cluster, and makes further profits from sites that it sets up for businesses.

The sites have a combined audience of some six million people, Mr. French said, and a sizable number of those visitors go to ThinkGeek. The store offers a range of goods that techies love, including T-shirts with the logos of Slashdot and other affiliated sites, like Freshmeat and SourceForge, as well as shirts and caps that bear representations of the chemical structure of caffeine; caffeine-spiked candies; and even caffeine-saturated soap.

"Apparently, our readers need caffeinated soap," Mr. Malda said.

The arrangement works, Mr. French said, because the corporate owners do not interfere in the editorial decisions of the Slashdotters. "I don't go down and say, `Rob I want you to write about this,' " he said. "Rob understands his community."

Mr. Malda added: "I still think of it as my personal soapbox. If I decide next Thursday that `It's all about Windows!' I don't know if Slashdot would follow that — but I would keep posting it and posting it until they fire me."

Mr. Malda and Mr. Bates met in high school in Holland, Mich., and went on to attend the local Hope College, where Mr. Malda created the site. He was soon joined in the effort by Mr. Bates, the way that kids in the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies put on a show with friends. They were stunned by the site's popularity, and even more stunned when it actually made money.

They once had visions of dot-com wealth of their own, and had immense paper profits when their site was bought in 1999 by the Open Source Development Network, then known as Andover.net. Open Source was then sold the next year to VA Linux (which later changed its name to VA Software). The 2000 transaction was, for a heady moment, valued at $975 million. That's when the company's stock was worth nearly $250 a share. These days, VA Software's stock trades for around 75 cents a share.

Mr. Bates said his stock did not make him rich, but he was able to sell some shares.

"Not as many as I would have liked," he said, "but that's the nature of lockup" — the clauses that restrict a corporate insider's ability to sell newly acquired stock. "At the end of the day, I was able to buy a house, and hey, I'm not going to complain about that."

Fans of the site are ready, even impatient, for more.

One of the messages posted to the discussion of passing the five-year mark last month was a simple three words: "O.K., now what?"