SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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:
- 20 Months since SoylentNews went live (on February 14th, 2014.)
- 20 Current staffers who keep things running.
-
200150 Subscribers.[*] - 5,900 Registered users.
- 8,400 Stories posted.
- 10,000 Stories submitted.
- 250,000 Comments posted (almost -- who will get it?)
- 166,770,000 page hits on the site (yes, 1/6 of a Billion!)
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: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Thursday October 15 2015, @03:55AM
Love reading SN, love how quick it is to load and how clear the layout actually is. Great job on that. Best thing is the threading of comments for me. Now that we have that raw data, can you guys give us some more detailed stats? We've talked about this before but it would be pretty neat to see for example, per topic, the avg number of posts and/or modding points allocated, ration of AC to registered users postings, day of the week with biggest posts, the stories that have triggered the biggest conversation and so on. Heck, we could build a nice graph out of this :). I've said it before, having a dump of the anonymized DB would be pretty interesting to me if that's ever of interest to the staff. We could generate some weekly/monthly stats that may help us see how the site is doing and how much participation we get from the community.
But great stuff though guys, keep it going!