SoylentNews

martyb writes:

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.
• 200 150 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.

Original Submission