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SoylentNews is people

posted by mattie_p on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the man-behind-the-curtain dept.

mattie_p paraphrases Barrabas, who uttered these words (mostly):

To everyone who contributed to the initial roll out, thank you! It was an amazing effort, and we couldn't have done it without you.

I've set down some notes, with an overview of where I see the project heading in the next few weeks. As always, we can stop and discuss if the community feels we should be moving in a different direction.

We have had a wildly successful launch, and can now proceed at a slightly more leisurely pace, at least for the team that handles code development. I have always intended to do development the right way; with a strong foundation of tools and with leaders to oversee and coordinate the effort between individuals and other groups. As a result, this upcoming week I've told our system administrator team to take a break. They can certainly do minor bug fixes at a leisurely pace if they feel bored, but I want a team that is relaxed and refreshed.

Speaking of a team, we actually have at least five of them. There is a systems team, which are primarily concerned with systems and server issues. There is a development team, consisting of people who contribute code to the site. There is a content team, consisting of our editors, artists, and administrators of our wiki, forum, and IRC channels. A fourth group is style, representing those who help determine how the site is presented. Finally, we have our business team, which includes marketing, legal, finances, and other such issues.

This has been an exciting time. I understand there has been some concern about decisions made during first roll out. I promised that we would operate by community consensus, and I will abide by that. Look for opportunities to contribute to the future direction of SoylentNews over the upcoming days and weeks.

(To read the full story in his words, simply go to Barrabas's Journal Entry. (internal hyperlink))

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by evilviper on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:53AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:53AM (#2219) Homepage Journal

    From their total score they are ranked and put in a band, of say top 5%, top 20% etc.

    I don't want to see the "top 20%" of comments. And that wouldn't make ANY sense for the vast majority of comments that never see a mod point either way... What percentile is your un-modded comment falling into? Or mine?

    I typically set my threshold at +3, so I can see nearly all comments that got ANY positive mods, without downmods later, and skip over all the tripe that wasn't interesting to anyone but the poster, but didn't happen to be bad enough to get downmods.

    IMHO, the /. mod system is fine, just make sure meta-moderation is heavily promoted... All this site needs now is STORIES, STORIES, STORIES, to get people coming in, and users frequently reading, and talking.

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1) by jcd on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:57AM

    by jcd (883) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:57AM (#2221)

    Yes. And we need things posted to the main page more frequently than once every two hours.

    --
    "What good's an honest soldier if he can be ordered to behave like a terrorist?"
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Popeidol on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:08AM

      by Popeidol (35) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:08AM (#2226) Journal

      That's something that should probably scale with the userbase. If you just dump twice as many articles to the main page, each article will get substantially fewer comments and we won't get any real discussion going. The site has just launched, so both the active users and the frequency of posts will probably ramp up at the same rate.

      • (Score: 1) by stderr on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:39PM

        by stderr (11) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:39PM (#2715) Journal

        If you just dump twice as many articles to the main page, each article will get substantially fewer comments and we won't get any real discussion going.

        Why? Just because you have posted a comment on one article, doesn't mean you can't comment on another article too.

        Let's face it, some of the articles won't interest everyone. But with more articles, there's a greater chance of an article that will interest you, which makes it more likely that you will comment on that article and that's what we want, right?

        Few people spend time writing comments on articles that doesn't interest them, If you're already not commenting on a not-so-interesting article, an extra (interesting or uninteresting) article can't make you comment any less on the uninteresting article. (Unless we get a huge amount of uninteresting articles and start complaining on all the articles, but then we got bigger problems.)

        More comments also means more active mod points in the system. And with more articles, that means more articles where you can actually spend your mod points. Some of us have had problems using our mod points simply because we had already posted comments on almost all the articles.

        --
        alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" # ... and get off my lawn!
        • (Score: 1) by Popeidol on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:09AM

          by Popeidol (35) on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:09AM (#3028) Journal

          At the end you mentioned that more articles would allow you to use mod points, presumably because you'd be commenting on a smaller percentage of posts. You're not the only one who thinks that, so it's reasonable to assume that more posts would lead to less comments per post at the moment.

          I agree that a few more posts a day would be great (especially for those awake while america sleeps), I'd just rather we ramp up slowly to find the sweet spot.

          • (Score: 1) by stderr on Friday February 21 2014, @09:48AM

            by stderr (11) on Friday February 21 2014, @09:48AM (#4192) Journal

            At the end you mentioned that more articles would allow you to use mod points, presumably because you'd be commenting on a smaller percentage of posts. You're not the only one who thinks that, so it's reasonable to assume that more posts would lead to less comments per post at the moment.

            I don't think it's reasonable to assume that at all.

            If I want to write X comments on article A when article B doesn't exist, I'll most likely still want to write the same X comments on article A when article B in fact does exist.

            The percentage of articles I'm commenting on could go up, down or stay the same when B enters the mix, but the absolute number of comments on A doesn't change.

            --
            alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" # ... and get off my lawn!
  • (Score: 1) by siliconwafer on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:33PM

    by siliconwafer (709) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:33PM (#2426)

    The "without limit" would make it similar to reddit's upvote/downvote in that regard, no? Not saying that's good or bad, just trying to understand your concept.