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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday February 19 2018, @01:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the cake-for-everyone! dept.

It is my great pleasure to announce that SoylentNews has just celebrated four years of service to the community! The very first story on the site appeared on 2014-02-12 and actually went live to everyone 2014-02-17.

It all started when a story on Slashdot made reference to its "audience" which ticked off quite a number of people. Soon after came a boycott of Slashdot — aka the "Slashcott". While this was in effect, an intrepid few people somehow managed to take a years-old, out-of-date, unsupported, open-sourced version of slashcode and somehow managed to get it up to speed to run on much more recent versions of Apache, MySql, etc. Recurring crashes and outages were the norm. (See last year's anniversary story for many more details!) Further, on July 4th, 2014 our application to become a Public Benefit Corporation was approved — this set the stage for us to be able to accept funding from the community.

By the time you read this, we will have posted 20,980 stories to the site to which over 639,907 comments have been made!

We could not have done this without all of you. You (the community) submit the stories for the site. You write the comments... and moderate them, too. You made recommendations for improvements to the site. You are SoylentNews.

It has been my privilege and honor to work with a great group of folks who have done the behind-the-scenes skunk-work which has kept this site running. It does bear mentioning that this site is entirely staffed by volunteers. Nobody here has received even a penny's worth of income from the site. Like you, we have home and work responsibilities, but in our spare time we still strive to provide an environment that is conducive to discussions of predominantly tech-related matters.

Having said all that, I must add that income to the site has dropped recently. Having let my subscription lapse in the past, I know how easy that can be. Take a moment to check your subscription status. We have on the order of 100 people who have subscribed in the past, have visited the site in the past month, and whose subscription has expired. If your subscription is up-to-date, please consider either extending it or making a gift subscription (default is to UID 6 - "mcasadevall" aka NCommander). NB the dollar amounts presented are the minimum payments required for that duration -- we'll happily accept larger amounts. =)

If financial contributions are infeasible for you, we always appreciate story submissions. Submit a link, a few paragraphs from the story, and ideally a sentence or two about what you found interesting and send it to us. Any questions, please take a look at the Submission Guidelines.

Of course, the comments are where it's at. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-supported comments seem to do best here. Inflammatory histrionics garner attention, and usually down-mods, too. Speaking of which, if you have good Karma, and have been registered with the site for at least a month, you are invited to participate in moderation. Unlike other sites that up-mod or down-mod to infinity, we have something more like olympic-scoring here. A comment score can vary from -1 to a +5. This is how I look at scores: -1 (total waste of your time), 0 (meh), +1 (okay), +2 (good), +3 (quite good), +4 (very good), +5 (don't miss this one!).


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Monday February 19 2018, @02:14PM (12 children)

    by isostatic (365) on Monday February 19 2018, @02:14PM (#640088) Journal

    Fuck Beta

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=2, Informative=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday February 19 2018, @02:16PM (4 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday February 19 2018, @02:16PM (#640089)

    Also, buck feta!

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @02:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @02:21PM (#640093)

      Big Buck Nigger rapes the twitching corpse of the four-year-old white girl.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 19 2018, @02:42PM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @02:42PM (#640099) Journal

      It doesn't seem like four years. But, yeah, buck feta. It really did look like a pile of steaming dog shit.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)

        by acid andy (1683) on Monday February 19 2018, @03:26PM (#640115) Homepage Journal

        It doesn't seem like four years.

        I really, really try not to think about the passage of time too much anymore. SoylentNews is usually a good distraction technique. Not today but for this I'll make a worthy exception!

        But, yeah, buck feta. It really did look like a pile of steaming dog shit.

        Sure did and just look how much of the rest of the web has turned the same way. It will be so sweet when reading long texts and space efficent layouts with tight margins become trendy again. We all know it isn't just about mobiles and tablets. So many other website makeovers have provoked similar reactions from their users, partly because they're also buggy as hell and harder to use as well.

        --
        If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:09PM (6 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Monday February 19 2018, @04:09PM (#640127)

    But you know there are still idiots out there that would insist that everything look like dumbed-down mobile dreck. They would likely call this site "vintage", as they do to anything else that is actually useful or makes sense.

    Congratulations on ignoring such idiots. Soylentnews looks like a proper web site, works like a proper web site, and feels like a proper web site.

    No lame animations, no super-heavy scripting, no over 9000 font point size, no retarded in-browser popover windows, no separating content in to small "pages" for a specific sized grease-finger swipeable toy mobile screen, and so on.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by SomeGuy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:15PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Monday February 19 2018, @04:15PM (#640128)

      Oh, and "Don't forget to tweet this post on Twitter(TM) and like it on Facebook(TM)! They pay us each time we say that!".

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:34PM (3 children)

      by acid andy (1683) on Monday February 19 2018, @04:34PM (#640135) Homepage Journal

      Don't forget no narrow, fixed width pages on vastly wide and short screens; no cavernous hundred pixel voids of whitespace in margins; no "hamburger menus", "breadcrumb trails" or whirrly progress wheels chasing their tails; no endless piles of cross domain requests just to get the text to show up and buttons to work; no giant, irrelevant stock photos of average Joes and their families grinning like they've just injected something...

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Monday February 19 2018, @10:40PM

      by Wootery (2341) on Monday February 19 2018, @10:40PM (#640313)

      I wonder if that's legitimately part of the winning formula to, well, keeping out the unwashed masses.

      HackerNews is 'vintage' in the same way.

      That said, even reddit has its moments. Find the right subreddits, and they're not overrun with morons.