SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the soylent-news-is-(even-more)-people dept.
It's amazing what a small group of dedicated people can achieve in such a short amount of time. I'd like to thank you on behalf of the entire Soylent Staff, for helping us build a new community - a community of the users, by the users, and for the users.
It's been a week (only a week!) since first rollout, and extrapolating from our usage we're serving 5 million pageviews per month. That's huge. For comparison, Slashdot serves an estimated 15 million pageviews per month.
The pageview rate is also climbing - we passed the 2 million mark somewhere around our 9th day online. We'll soon need a higher service tier.
The site's estimated value grew from $43 (Tue) to $639 (Fri) to $2000 (Tue - today). Woot!
It's been a wild ride! Read more about it below.
The sys team is building the infrastructure to support a mainstream site. We purchased 3 more linodes (full year, for a 10% savings), which are being provisioned for development, test, and production. The dev team is preparing a turn-key slashcode package that developers can run locally, and we have already started to see bug fixes appear in the live site, with more to come.
The style team has a long list of planned improvements, and the content groups have been feeding us a steady supply of delicious article summaries, spirited debate (IRC, forums), plans and roadmaps (Wiki, status posts), with contributions from many other groups. We have our own customer relations person!
I promised that the project would be community driven, and we are largely that. Each overlord has agreed to run their department by community consensus, only making executive decisions when there is no general agreement, or if there is a global overriding concern. This is working well. For the majority of cases consensus is clear and feels "clearly the right decision". For a split consensus, both choices seem equally good so it doesn't matter which one we choose.
The overlords have authority to make decisions in their area, which means people can get involved with areas that interest them without wading through everything. If you would like to participate, come join us!
Global issues will be decided by community vote. Notable votes coming up will be 1) Choosing a permanent name, 2) Choosing a business model, and 3) Choosing revenue streams. I have researched these and have notes and observations to set before the community as a starting point for discussion.
That's my next step: setting down the notes for discussion, some background information (such as projected expenses), and orchestrating the voting process. Once the business/financial models have been chosen we can start building a proper business.
It looks like we've got ourselves a winner!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Open4D on Friday February 28 2014, @10:45AM
I agree that breaking news should be given some special treatment. I assume you mean the submitter would flag his/her submission as such, so that the editors may more easily choose to consider it immediately - possibly even drafting in help ("dude I'm busy for the next two hours, could you take a look at this breaking news submission?")
With regards to holding back stories, I agree there is some merit to spreading things out. But this shouldn't be an absolute rule, and for breaking news it's worth breaking the rule.
A word of caution though. We shouldn't go too far in all this. The editors shouldn't be panicked into a race to publish first. If an editor is available to apply all the editorial standards and publish a breaking news submission to the front page fairly quickly, then great. If not, it doesn't matter that much. It's the discussion by the community that really matters, and timeliness is not the biggest factor affecting the quality of the discussion.
And I hope it doesn't sound like we am loading onerous responsibilities on the the editors. Everything I've said here is what I'd consider an aspiration, never a grounds for criticism. I'm grateful for all the editors' hard work. Thanks people!