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SoylentNews is people

posted by NCommander on Monday July 06 2015, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the long-time-coming dept.

I've long wanted SoylentNews to have much more in terms of content, and user participation. Many discussion sites such as reddit allow users to create their own independent communities-within-communities and as of the rehash upgrade, we've finally laid down most of the fundamental ground work for us to do the same. Right now, we have two nexuses, Meta, and Breaking News, and plans to add more. As one can see, by browsing these nexuses directly, you can see the intended communities-within-communities effect we want to generate. Right now, users can configure their home page to exclude or include nexuses they are directly interested in.

To clarify, rolling out community nexuses will not impact the main page; the intent of this upgrade is to allow more niche topics to have their own place of discussion and allow users to customize their home page as they see fit. For instance, if we have a nexus about Minecraft, you could elect to have those posts show up on the main page. To prevent us from falling into pitfalls experienced by other sites, I want to make sure we get the dialog going on this now and have a firm plan to hit the ground running. Our community defines this site and without that we are nothing, so we both want to make sure we do this right and provide opportunities to give back.

Overall, here's what I want to discuss

  • Avoiding Community Fragmentation
  • Community Governance
  • Monetization and Revenue Sharing
  • In Closing

Check past the fold for more information.

Avoiding Community Fragmentation

Every time the topic of expanding SoylentNews comes up, there's a fear that we may fragment what is already a very small community. While I understand where these concerns are coming from, I'm not sure that fear is justified. My thought here is that if you're reading SoylentNews for the articles and community, being able to stay on SN to read more niche topics would keep you here. For example, I'm a fairly avid Dwarf Fortress fan, but I can't discuss the game here; as such, I either post on /r/dwarffortress or on Bay12 about it. A Dwarf Fortress community on SoylentNews would allow me to discuss one of my favorite games here instead.

The intent is to keep the main page of SoylentNews as it is right now; a source of general news and information; the editors will remain in control of what is (or isn't) posting to SN front page. I don't want to move to a reddit (or firehose) style voting system for articles since I feel that would: lower the quality of content here, cause unpopular information to get buried, and wreck what IMHO has been a rather good system thus far. Individual nexuses may decide to use different criteria for their information, but said content would be limited to that nexus. Or in other words, this would be a purely additive change, not a revolutionary one.

Community Governance

Another thing we've promised since near the start is involving the community on major decisions and policies that this site would take. As such, it's been a relatively informal system with an article going up, feedback collected, and then acted on. I feel that if we're going to expand the site, a more formal framework of governance needs to be established — acting as a checks-and-balances system for the entire site. The fact of the matter is the original Slashcott, or reddit's current self-destruction process could have been averted had the community had a proper say in governance and other actions. For example, Wikimedia, the Ubuntu Project, Debian, and the Apache Foundation all have an elected set of users that act as community advocates.

Having community governance in effect is supposed to act as a circuit breaker — to prevent the staff from acting against the wishes of the community. We have a proven track record of being forefront in both listening to and acting on community concerns, but the entire system is dependent on the goodwill of the staff. People change as time goes on and it's possible that if we're here in ten years, none of the current staff and developers will still be here. Lest us forget that the green site was a haven for many of us until Dice took over. For SoylentNews to survive indefinitely, we need to have a system in place to make sure that the goodwill of the staff isn't the only thing keeping us from going into the abyss.

The problem is: where we do we define this line? Too much debate would cause everything on SN to grind to a halt; too little would prevent governance from being effective.

Furthermore, I'm concerned that a traditional-style community council would be ineffective. I struggle to remember any case where such a system really acted as true force of power in any organization I've been involved in. As such, I would like to think that we may want to mimic national conventions system from Article V of the US Constitution. Specifically, if X number of users (where X is a large percentage of the community), or nexus admins (acting as representatives of their community) across the site form and sign a petition, we could set up a convention to allow the community to overrule the staff and reform the site as necessary. Such a system would give the staff a relatively free hand in day-to-day operations, while acting as an effective circuit breaker to allow the collective force of the community to come to bear if it's ever necessary. This system can be directly incorporated into the bylaws, giving it legal power to enforce its demands, and not some wishy-washy system that can be ignored. I'd like to hear suggestions and feedback from the community on how best to proceed on establishing a system that allows the community to have significant power if it ever should need it.

Monetization and Revenue Sharing

I know this is going to be a touchy subject, so I want to clarify that nothing is set in stone. The simple fact of the matter though is that SoylentNews PBC requires money. As of right now, we can cover our server hosting costs with revenue coming in from subscriptions. This is a very good place to be, but I'd like to do better. I've made no secret that I'd love to get to the point that, long term, SN can do independent journalism, or at least have part or full time staff dedicated to improving the site. In the shorter term, I'd like to have the resources to form a parent not-for-profit to oversee the site, and the mission objectives as laid out by the manifesto, and even perhaps pursue 501(c)(3) status.

For those who don't remember, when I discussed incorporation originally, we hit a major snag that SN follows such an unusual business model, combined with the fact that most not-for-profit corporations deal with things like parks or fire departments. While it is certainly possible to form a not-for-profit that covers SN, it would require a lawyer to determine the specifics, in addition with the usual costs of forming a business. With that in mind, SoylentNews PBC (our legal overlord), simply doesn't have the resources to do that. Forming the non-profit and making sure checks-and-balances are directly incorporated into the bye-laws would make sure the site would never be at risk of a buyout, regardless of who is leading the site, and a cornerstone in fulfilling our promise to the community.

Furthermore, there's the moral aspect to consider. It's a simple fact that without the community, we wouldn't be here, or as successful as we have been. As such, if we end up monetizing community nexuses, at least part of those funds should go to those who volunteer their time and effort here, both the staff and the overseers of a nexus.

I've got a couple of ideas that I'd like to bounce off the community to see what the general feelings are. This is broken into two parts: monetization ideas, and revenue sharing.

Monetization Ideas

Require Payment To Create A Nexus

This was the most obvious idea I had when I started drafting this novel. Pay a bit, and create your own community. I'm not really a huge fan of this idea, because it means that someone has to pay to create a place to discuss things, and my gut is telling me that this would go against our mission statements, even if on paper it seems completely reasonable to me. There is perhaps a middle ground that we could limit nexus creation to subscribers. Overall, I'm very much on the fence for this idea though.

Offer A Premium Tier

As a second option, we could allow nexuses to get additional functionality, such as the ability to fully re-theme their section of the site, have nexuses-within-nexuses, provide subscriber features to all users within a nexus, or provide general file and image hosting. I'm largely open to ideas on both what we could offer, and how much it could cost.

Other Ideas

Beyond these two, I've also considered the possibility of allowing community nexuses to run their own advertising, or selling hosted independent rehash instances for a turnkey website. I'm not sure either of these are good ideas (though hosted instances may be useful as a side business), which is why I didn't write about them in length. I'm of course always open to good ideas from the community on the subject

Revenue Sharing

I've said it before, and I will say it again, but this site is nothing without its community. If we're successful in increasing our revenue, then part of that money should be given back to that community, either in the form of free subscriptions or nexus upgrades, or as cold hard cash. Any of the editors here can tell you that building a community of any sort is a massive job and very time consuming. The admins of community nexuses will have to face the same challenges and time commitments that the editorial team current does. As of right now, subscriptions cover our hosting and legal costs, but not much more. If I could, I would give every person who has volunteered their time and effort a paycheck, but that's simply not feasible. What we can do, however, is set a small portion of incoming revenue aside for re-investment.

Once community nexuses are live, subscribers (or those re-upping a subscription) will be able to set a nexuses that gets part of those funds (the default will be the nexuses the user is currently browsing), and the option to "leave a tip" so to speak. Most of that money will go into the general fund to pay for the site or to build a legal war chest, but the tip will be set aside, and placed in a fund for that community. That fund can be used by admins of a given nexus to give their users free subscriptions, buy the premium tier, or other site related functions. We can also create the possibility of "cashing out" so to speak, though that will require discussions with our CPA and lawyer. I realize that this is unlikely to ever generate a significant amount of money, but it may allow for a local gathering with free beer or something. Specifics (and legalities) have to be hashed out, but I would love to hear the communities thoughts on this.

In Closing

Its been a wild 1.5 years, and this site has grown far beyond my initial expectations. While I can't say what the future holds, I want to make sure we have the ability to cement our future in a more permanent fashion, and not fall victim to the same pitfalls that destroyed (or are destroying) sites like Slashdot, digg, or reddit. Its possible this is all a bad idea, and I'm depending on everyone to get your feedback and to readjust things.

On one final note, a few users keep asking us about warrant canaries. I've never done one of these before, but I'm hoping that this will help assure those who are concerned that we've been warranted or something:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

SoylentNews PBC has never received any requests for law enforcement, or
has diverged any user information as required by a court of law or similar.

Headlines of July 5th as of writing:

The Climate One Year On: Exit Carbon Tax, Enter Brown Coal

Contact Temporarily Lost With New Horizons

NVIDIA Shows a Realistic HairWorks 1.1 Demo with 500K Fluttering Hairs

President/CEO
Michael "NCommander" Casadevall

Signed with:

pub   4096R/D2247639 2011-05-12 [expires: 2016-06-09]
      Key fingerprint = 37F0 1189 3BAE 3611 C45B  8E15 733E 1A42 D224 7639
uid                  Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@ubuntu.com>
uid                  Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@debian.org>
uid                  Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@kubuntu.org>
uid                  Michael Casadevall <mcasadevall@soylentnews.org>

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If anyone wishes to build a chain of trust to my GPG key to verify this message, I'm based in western New York, and available for key signing parties. ~ NCommander

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @05:49PM (#205759)

    There's a "post anonymously" box for logged users, so just have the option of "always post anonymously", that way people can have the benefits of always posting anon and never having to deal with karma or moderating but still have the benefits of having an account.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 06 2015, @06:51PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 06 2015, @06:51PM (#205785) Journal

    Logged in users can have the "No Karma Bonus" and "Post Anonymously" boxes checked by default by checking them under Comment Post Mode here [soylentnews.org].

    The problem is that some users are ideologically opposed to making an account.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]