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SoylentNews is people

posted by mattie_p on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-your-own-adventure dept.

So, what is SoylentNews? This is your chance to tell us!

I am announcing the first ever SoylentNews online video contest. The rules are pretty simple.

  1. Upload an original video (no more than about 60 seconds, please) to the site of your choice (but please tell us where it is up loaded and ensure it tracks views) that answers the question, "What is Soylent News?" Your video should ideally contain the phrase, "Soylent News is ..." but this is not strictly required. Let us know what site you upload to.
  2. Tag your video SoylentNews.
  3. Watch as the hits roll in.
  4. ????
  5. Profit!

Too easy, right? We will count the views on 31 March 2014, at 11:59 UTC. The winner is the individual video that has the most views.

You do not actually have to appear in the video! Make a cartoon, do CGI, do a voiceover of a movie, whatever. Be creative and explore your artistic vision! (Yes, you have one. It may be underutilized at times but it is there).

We have not yet determined the prize for the winner, but it will be jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring (it's a key-chain I found on the sidewalk somewhere). No, it'll be something good. At a minimum we'll feature your video on the site here and interview you for the "making of" your entry. But probably more (it's a keychain).

On behalf of the entire staff and volunteers, we continue to be amazed at the response we've gotten from the community so far. We will continue to provide ways that you can interact with us and help define us. I hope you enjoy this contest. If you have any other suggestions for how we can better meet your needs, feel free to let us know in IRC, the Forums, or the Wiki. Thanks for reading!

~Mattie_p

p.s. keychain!

p.p.s updated based on feedback

 
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  • (Score: 2) by kebes on Wednesday February 26 2014, @12:52AM

    by kebes (1505) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @12:52AM (#7037)
    As I said in another comment [soylentnews.org], you guys are overall doing a great job. So please take these comments constructively:

    I believe the video contest is potentially fun, but likely to not pan out. (I'm happy to be proven wrong.) My opinion is that SN should be targeting the nerdiest and most technically-minded segments; those are the people who will contribute to the awesome discussions that we want (and that so far we've been generating). I believe one of the characteristics of nerds of this type (whether young or old), is that they process information quickly, and they abhor roadblocks to their attempts to process that information. (Everyone hates slow-loading pages and pop-up ads, but we seem to especially hate them...) Text is much faster to read/understand, as well as generate. So, in this sense a video contest might turn off some users.

    In fact, since we're trying to curate a community of people who fanatically enjoy fast-paced text-based discussions, it would seem that text-based 'events' could work. For instance, getting interesting people to do a Q&A story, but also arrange for the person to 'show up in the comments' during a prescribed time period to actually interact with the community. (Similar to a reddit AMA, I suppose.) The 'guests' for these things don't have to be super-stars in the tech community: I would love to be able to pick the brain (no-holds-barred, no question too stupid) of experts in datacenter design, databases, photography, etc. Picking a specific time-of-day for when some stories are released might also help focus the community and increase the comment-count on those stories.

    Relatedly, one of the things I'm a bit worried with SN is that the discussions are not always reaching 'critical mass'. On Slashdot, the readership was large enough such that discussions would get 'fully formed' within a couple hours. Commenting after that was often pointless, as moderators and other users would rarely go back and look at old stories. SN has a smaller community (for now!), so it takes longer for a discussion to really 'build up'... but within a short time stories are pushed off the page and so those older discussions die. People don't seem to be going back to re-read and participate in the older posts (I'm guilty of this, too). I'm not sure what the solution is. Fewer posts-per-day would solve this problem but create another (not enough variety/content). Perhaps we could have mechanisms wherein an older post that was still getting actively commented-on gets re-promoted to the front page? Or perhaps reorganize the sidebar to more clearly and cleanly show the "still active" discussions from the last few days?

    These ideas are vague and ill-formed. I'm just throwing them out there in the hopes of generating discussion...
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kebes on Wednesday February 26 2014, @01:11AM

    by kebes (1505) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @01:11AM (#7040)
    Another suggestion for boosting the amount of commenting: Have a "Good Question" moderation option. When a post comes along and someone is an expert in that subject, they may (paradoxically), not feel any inclination to comment. Maybe the content of the article is well-known to them, so they skip past; or they're unsure how detailed to be in their commenting (since they know the subject so well), ... But one way to engage these people would be for the rest of the community to post questions in the thread, thereby encouraging the experts to explain nuances of the topic in more detail.

    And, a way to encourage these questions would be to explicitly up-moderate them, giving people karma for posing good/interesting questions. Alternatively, we could just update the moderation guidelines to say "Look out for good questions!" ... but does anyone read the guidelines?
  • (Score: 1) by Daniel Dvorkin on Wednesday February 26 2014, @01:49AM

    by Daniel Dvorkin (1099) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @01:49AM (#7045) Journal

    Perhaps we could have mechanisms wherein an older post that was still getting actively commented-on gets re-promoted to the front page? Or perhaps reorganize the sidebar to more clearly and cleanly show the "still active" discussions from the last few days?

    Either of these might be a good idea, particularly if they could be controlled by a user setting: say the sidebar by default, with "bumping" recently-commented-on old stories as an option. A lot of people seem to dislike old stories being brought to the fore, but you know, it works for Usenet ...

    --
    Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
  • (Score: 1) by Maow on Wednesday February 26 2014, @03:55AM

    by Maow (8) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @03:55AM (#7101) Homepage

    You've given me a couple of my own (so far) ill-formed thoughts.

    "Video of your science experiment" could be cool use of video.

    Also, on /. I always made a point of mostly only reading somewhat older stories due to the conversation being more complete by that time.

    My mod points probably weren't as effective as if I dove in to new stories, but I got more out of it. And helped promote the stragglers' comments.

  • (Score: 2) by Popeidol on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:12AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:12AM (#7106) Journal

    A quick patch for the 'critical mass' problem could be a Recent Comments page. At the moment if I want to see any fresh content in a discussion I have to open up a bunch of articles and sort by newest first. A list of recent comments would make that easier, and help people find interesting things going on in older articles (and as a bonus, it's a quick way to find comments that could use moderating).

    It wouldn't scale well as the site increases, but might help keep conversations going at the moment.