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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, 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.

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  • (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!