SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.
There are a number of ways to help out:
- Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
- Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
- Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"
One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.
We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.
Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.
"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).
A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.
Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.
--cmn32480
(Score: 2) by mendax on Monday August 10 2015, @05:57PM
Yes, which goes to prove one of my points: I know what people like here. There have been occasions where I've posted a dupe. Mea culpa for not being more careful. But I've posted what I thought were some very interesting things and I know would be interesting to others here that have gotten rejected for mysterious reasons. One which particularly galled me was a submission of a NY Times op-ed describing how dignity is becoming recognized as a constitutional principle [nytimes.com]. The submission has since dropped into the bit bucket as it was made over a year ago. However, it is highly relevant to the civil libertarian and human rights crowd here, a significant number of readers, and has direct applications to technology and how it is used today, particularly the snooping the government has been doing. Privacy and dignity go hand in hand. But it was rejected and I have no idea why.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday August 10 2015, @07:44PM
Speculating - because I do not know the story - there are several reasons why such a submission might not make it, and not all of them are to do with the quality of the submission itself.
We aim to provide a balance and spread between topics and submitters. When we can, we do not put successive posts by the same submitter together - something that has become extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible to do, over the last few months as the number of submitters has fallen sharply. We also like to cover as many topics in a day as possible.
But, more likely, is that if we had covered a libertarian issue on a given day, and a story on a similar topic but with no strong link to science or technology came along, we would in the early days reject the later story. We had 30-40 per day to choose from and we were trying to provide the variety and quality that the site deserves. Today, that is far less likely to happen. The quality of submissions in some cases has fallen, meaning each story takes more work before it is ready for the front page, and we receive fewer submissions, meaning that we cannot afford to reject stories quite so easily. Again, this means that more editorial effort is required to provide the 15-20 stories a day that we aim for (to cover the majority of our community in the US and Europe). In fact, the informal target has always been about 1 story per hour around the clock. An editor from Aus/NZ would also be a great help to the team.
A higher proportion of submissions nowadays are political (which we will always try to avoid - there are plenty of other outlets for that sort of news) or are not factual reports but contain someone's personal slant or views, information that should be in the comments not in the story submission. Unless we can clean those stories up they will be rejected. If we publish fewer stories we lose community members, they are not going to come here for a handful of stories each day when other sites are covering more in both quantity and sometimes quality. We try to select stories that will provoke thought and, hopefully, discussion. Topics that would have had an active discussion 12 months ago now provoke only a handful of comments. What has changed? Is it the community who are becoming less interested in science and technology but more interested in social issues or injustice, is it the editors who are simply not producing the quality of output to catch the community's collective imagination, or is it that some of those who were here in the early days have now gone elsewhere to find their news and that we now have a very different community? As they say, answers on a postcard to janrinok@....., or post your views here.