SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the soylent-news-is-(even-more)-people dept.
It's amazing what a small group of dedicated people can achieve in such a short amount of time. I'd like to thank you on behalf of the entire Soylent Staff, for helping us build a new community - a community of the users, by the users, and for the users.
It's been a week (only a week!) since first rollout, and extrapolating from our usage we're serving 5 million pageviews per month. That's huge. For comparison, Slashdot serves an estimated 15 million pageviews per month.
The pageview rate is also climbing - we passed the 2 million mark somewhere around our 9th day online. We'll soon need a higher service tier.
The site's estimated value grew from $43 (Tue) to $639 (Fri) to $2000 (Tue - today). Woot!
It's been a wild ride! Read more about it below.
The sys team is building the infrastructure to support a mainstream site. We purchased 3 more linodes (full year, for a 10% savings), which are being provisioned for development, test, and production. The dev team is preparing a turn-key slashcode package that developers can run locally, and we have already started to see bug fixes appear in the live site, with more to come.
The style team has a long list of planned improvements, and the content groups have been feeding us a steady supply of delicious article summaries, spirited debate (IRC, forums), plans and roadmaps (Wiki, status posts), with contributions from many other groups. We have our own customer relations person!
I promised that the project would be community driven, and we are largely that. Each overlord has agreed to run their department by community consensus, only making executive decisions when there is no general agreement, or if there is a global overriding concern. This is working well. For the majority of cases consensus is clear and feels "clearly the right decision". For a split consensus, both choices seem equally good so it doesn't matter which one we choose.
The overlords have authority to make decisions in their area, which means people can get involved with areas that interest them without wading through everything. If you would like to participate, come join us!
Global issues will be decided by community vote. Notable votes coming up will be 1) Choosing a permanent name, 2) Choosing a business model, and 3) Choosing revenue streams. I have researched these and have notes and observations to set before the community as a starting point for discussion.
That's my next step: setting down the notes for discussion, some background information (such as projected expenses), and orchestrating the voting process. Once the business/financial models have been chosen we can start building a proper business.
It looks like we've got ourselves a winner!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @05:05AM
>>The site's estimated value grew from $43 (Tue) to $639 (Fri) to $2000 (Tue - today). Woot!
Only a week old, and already looking to sell out. I guess it's fitting seeing as everything else around here is a copy of Slashdot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @05:09AM
This is not really a fair assessment.
Any time you build a system you look for metrics of success.
When comparing a reboot (like SoylentNews) with the original (Slashdot) there are lots of ways it could be done, and assessed monetary value is a reasonable way of doing so, especially when asking oneself about sustainability.
Unless, of course, you're stepping up to support this whole thing financially out of the goodness of your heart. Oh, you're not? Sorry, rude of me to assume.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Friday February 28 2014, @03:26PM
I can't believe how much I was missing this:
Woooosh!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Robotron on Friday February 28 2014, @05:20AM
I'll bite.
Barrabas has and continues to fund the website. This place was introduced as a business; if you've a problem with that, you can go elsewhere. The fact an initial investment is seeing a return which is highlighted publicly to everyone is a sign of genuine enthusiasm rather than slavish devotion to cash. By comparison neither Malda or anyone at the old place talked money openly, preferring to cash in privately before revealing all in community tributes about how rewarding things were in a non-financial sense.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @05:49AM
+1, Insightful.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by mrcoolbp on Friday February 28 2014, @06:51AM
Mod parent up please.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @06:56AM
In the early IRC days of altslashdot, many called for a non-profit. As soon as this is turned into a business that generates cash flows we cannot trust it anymore. No matter what is promised, why should we trust it?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Popeidol on Friday February 28 2014, @07:47AM
Here's a comment from Barrabas a few weeks ago: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=261&cid=560 6 [soylentnews.org]
The key information:
We haven't chosen a business/financial model as yet, but my best guess is that we'll be non-profit with either a board of directors or using the co-op model (everyone owns the business).
This doesn't *completely* eliminate selling out, but the risk is spread among several individuals.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday February 28 2014, @09:32AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @04:51PM
This is interesting and I'd mod you up if I had modpoints. But do you know who to talk to? I never heard a university would sponsor this although my universities had insane amounts of bandwidth and servers. Would they really affiliate themselves with a project like this? Is there some example?
*THIS* would be trustworthy!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @09:18PM
Perhaps an organisation dedicated to free speech. The one thing I already fear is that debate on certain topics is going to be stifled. The spooks won't take long to take over, just watch.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:01PM
When Slashdot was popular in the late '90s to early 2000s, it had huge hosting requirements. Back then, a typical low-volume host could sit happily on a 1Mb/s link with a 100MHz CPU and would be completely overwhelmed if a significant fraction of /. readers clicked on a link to it. Now, the Slashdot effect is a tiny blip. A cheap VM will give you a 10Mbit or 100Mbit connection with a few GHz of CPU power. The requirements for hosting a site like this are in the noise for any moderate-sized hosting provider.
If you want to host it in a university, then you might talk to various computer societies. The SRCF at Cambridge or SUCS at Swansea are the two I know of, and either of those probably has enough spare capacity. To be honest, I could probably host the site on the machine under my desk without anyone noticing.
I'd be more inclined to talk to VM hosts though. Your.org is happy to hand out free VMs to FreeBSD developers, and if you talk to them nicely (and let them put 'We host Soylent News' on their web site if they want to), then they'd probably be willing.
When I talk to people who have hosting problems, they're usually people who are saturating a 10GigE link and want to add more capacity, so the idea of something as low-volume as a site that serves almost exclusively text (and trivially cacheable images) seems a bit silly.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by crutchy on Friday February 28 2014, @08:40AM
so where's the money going to come from to keep the site afloat?
magic internet money?
hmm maybe soylent should accept bitcoin donations from parent to fund site and facilitate a non-profit model
(Score: 1) by Yow on Friday February 28 2014, @02:44PM
Trust is tricky. I'm going trust all of this right now because my vast trust wisdom has noted this site's discussion of growth presents as transparent: with discussion of funding/business model from the start. It is what it is.
(Score: 4, Funny) by iNaya on Friday February 28 2014, @07:20AM
In Beta, values estimate you!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mtrycz on Friday February 28 2014, @08:25AM
Since I participated (loosely) in this and having chatted with some of the finest folks here, I know that is not the case, I think we should have an "exit strategy" of sorts?
What if unknown future conditions bring trouble?
I think that maybe t would be a good idea to release the cond *and* the assets, so the community can start over (this time not from scratch), thus cleanly future-proofing the whole thing.
Is that a good idea?
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2, Funny) by DECbot on Friday February 28 2014, @06:39PM
I believe the exit strategy is something like this:
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Friday February 28 2014, @01:56PM
Slow down there slim, you missed the rest of the story
"This website is estimated worth of 3,187$ and have a daily income of around $ 00.00."
Now seems to me that if they don't make any money on a daily basis, the worth value is not really real either so I'd not get you undies in a wad just yet. Besides, TANSTAAFL. At some point these guys need to pay for the system and perhaps get a little compensation for the effort to provide you with a quality site. This whole thing started because people felt powerless in the face of big money? You think our new overlords would make the same mistake?
Yeah, so do I, but then that is how the circle goes.
Revolution, growth, security, establishment, gentrification, brittleness, instability, revolution.
I'm just glad to be around for both the revolution and growth.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 09 2014, @04:54PM
bkeuFF http://www.qs3pe5zgdxc9iovktapt2dbyppkmkqfz.com/ [qs3pe5zgdx...kmkqfz.com]