I suspect slashdot users are sick of hearing about bitcoin so they ignore those stories.  They had plenty of earlier articles, and if the users aren't following bitcoin by now, they don't care.

I heard about bitcoin from slashdot (around Nov 2010 and Feb 2011), but since then, slashdot decreased in quality and I stopped reading it every day.

To be fair, generally the Slashdot Effect only took down shared hosting plans.  If you're on any decent VPS server (or almost any dedicated server) you can easily handle the traffic from Slashdot articles.  Everytime I can recall people saying a story had been taken down by Slashdot (or digg, or reddit), it was generally responding with some kind of hostgator/bluehost/godaddy error page once it came back online.

Ok, cool.  thanks for the explanation guys.

From the last article about the bitcoinica lawsuit, the tone of the comments was actually much better.  There were still plenty of haters, but the bitcoin supporters were less then 1 in 10.  Now for every call of 'its a ponzi' there is some reason discussion about the brilliance of bitcoin and the lack of financial censorship. 

I am sure that many of the haters have all bitcoin articles blocked as well. 

Actually, unlike me, you probably refer not to websites in late 90's on some typical dedi with Intel Pentium III with humongous 256 Mb of RAM and preforked apache with 10-20 threads going swapping and DB's going crazy on higher loads without enough RAM. (my memory is fuzzy on exact details).

I used to read Slashdot every day in high school; now I'm lucky to visit it twice a year. That, coupled with better server resources and more bandwidth probably killed the Slashdot effect.

Nope.  Even bitcoin.org was essentially DDoS'd multiple times due to those Slashdot stories.  (though sometimes there were real DDoS attacks at the same time).

Are there any estimates for number of hits that are received as a result? (as in, pageloads per second)

Just curious whether my server would be prepared...

I told a senior Linux system administrator at my work about Bitcoin (thinking he would be really interested in it), but he was actually really turned off by it. I think in order to for someone to be interested in Bitcoin and not be repelled by it, they have to have some kind of economic understanding of the potential, and they have to be a bit more open minded than most. It is not just a technical understanding that is necessary, that's for sure. If you don't have the economic understanding of Bitcoin's potential, it will just seem like another scheme.