As someone who pays an inordinate amount of time pondering things, I noticed some recent milestones for SoylentNews and thought these might be of interest to the rest of the community. In round numbers we have:
What started as a protest activity (The Slashcott) burgeoned into action in the form of taking a several-years-old, non-maintained code base and, through the alchemy of dedication and sleep deprivation, came to be known as SoylentNews. There were numerous site crashes and outages, but things gradually stabilized. We were incorporated (completed on July 4th, aptly enough). Other niceties started to make their way onto the site: moderation changes, User Interface (UI) enhancements, Unicode support, apache and mod-perl upgrades, and countless other behind-the-scenes tweaks and tunings to get things to where they are now.
Besides the main site, I would be remiss if I did not mention that we also have our own Wiki and an active Internet Relay Chat (IRC) community.
Most importantly, it is our community that drives us! Thank you for all the story submissions, for all the comments on those stories, and for your feedback on site improvement ideas.
[*] The original value of 200 for the number of subscribers was an estimate; the correct number was 150. Updated this story for posterity.
To those who have started or extended their subscription please accept our genuine and sincere thanks — we could NOT do it without you! -Ed.
(Score: 1) by Bobs on Wednesday October 14 2015, @05:11PM
Has there been any discussion as to whether SN is a success? I'm somewhat alarmed at the low # of registered users, just 6k in more than 18 months seems a little low.
Good question. I occasionally pop onto the green site and it seems to me that the volume of comments is trending lower and I suspect the audience is smaller now.
I also suspect most of them have not heard of Soylent. Anybody have ideas about how to get more people aware of / participating in this site?
(Score: 5, Funny) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday October 14 2015, @05:46PM
Anybody have ideas about how to get more people aware of / participating in this site?
More "Fsck BETA" troll posts on ./ ?
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday October 15 2015, @12:20AM
Hey, that may actually work! After all, it's safe to assume that a lot of us heard of that whole "altslashdot" thing that some awesome folks were making because of those posts.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 4, Funny) by WillR on Wednesday October 14 2015, @08:50PM