SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
January 1st is Public Domain Day. Throughout the year, works for which copyright has expired enter the public domain and become available for anyone to use in any way. In the US, copyright was originally only for 14 years with an option to renew for an additional 14. Now it is the life of the author plus 70 years. It is described in the US constitution under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 as having the purpose of promoting science and useful arts. However, with "life+70" that promotion is not able to happen, the stream of freely available ideas and resources has been forcibly dried up. So every New Year's Day, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes a list on what we would have had with sane copyright under the old rules:
Public Domain Day is January 1st of every year. If you live in Canada or New Zealand, January 1st 2018 would be the day when the works of René Magritte, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Jean Toomer, Edward Hopper, and Alice B. Toklas enter the public domain. So would the musical compositions of John Coltrane, Billy Strayhorn, Paul Whiteman, Otis Redding, and Woody Guthrie. Canadians can now add a wealth of books, poems, paintings, and musical works by these authors to online archives, without asking permission or violating the law. And in Europe, the works of Hugh Lofting (the Doctor DoLittle books), William Moulton Marston (creator of Wonder Woman!), and Emma Orczy (the Scarlet Pimpernel series) will emerge into the public domain, where anyone can use them in their own books or movies. (You can find a great celebration of some of these authors here.)
What is entering the public domain in the United States? Not a single published work. Once again, no published works are entering our public domain this year.
Source : Public Domain Day: January 1, 2018
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday January 02 2018, @10:22PM (2 children)
Something like 5 of every 6 submissions is accepted, probably a much higher rate compared to Slashdot. We've tried to keep politics to 1-2 a day maximum, and preferred articles that aren't complete flamebait. If you read some aristarchus submissions that linger in the submission list, it should become clear that posting them would drive users away. They'll look for a tech site with closer to zero politics. Even editing the commentary off of them usually leaves something that would only be suitable for "Soylent Enquirer".
Disallowing "garbage trolling" would necessitate the removal of anonymous commenting. Suddenly, the criticism you offered above could not be posted, or could be deleted based on mob consensus or something like that.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 03 2018, @08:07PM (1 child)
Normally I just ignore these posts...but I decided to actually go and take a look this time, since this one has been repeated so many times by so many posters.
So...either Aristarchus has significantly changed what he's submitting, retroactively a week before your post...or you consider Star Wars and psychology research to be "politics"? 'Cause I've read the three submissions he's got currently sitting in the queue, and only one of the three is really political IMO. And I'd be interested in all three honestly...as well as some of the others that have been lingering in the queue for up to two weeks now.
Isn't this supposed to be a community-driven site? And yet, the community gives feedback about what we'd like to read, and we get told, essentially, "STFU that's too political", despite the fact that when this site was created it was specifically stated that it was not solely a tech news site. Was there a meta article that I missed somewhere which redefined the site's intentions?
If you think I'm subscribing solely for tech news, you are seriously mistaken, and I'd urge you to reconsider that notion.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by takyon on Wednesday January 03 2018, @08:45PM
I see plenty of flamebait in the Star Wars sub [soylentnews.org]. But let's take a look at what hasn't made the cut lately:
Can the troll psychology sub run? Sure, why not. (Although it is based on material from March 2017.)
Do we need a "firehose" mechanism to allow Soylentils to vote on submissions? It might help determine what the feedback actually is. I think you'll find that some of these stories that were accepted by the editors were heavily criticized and inspired a lot of flamebait in the comment sections. Although I think that the users most likely to object left a long time ago when previous political stories were posted.
https://soylentnews.org/politics/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=23222&page=1&cid=613344#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I'm not all that interested in finding the perfect balance. I just want to submit stories that aren't trashy flamebait.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]