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 Popeidol on Friday February 28 2014, @05:33AM
Given how much whatsapp went for, it's clear we should hang on until we're at least offered a few billion. Then we just deal out the money in a way inversely proportional to your UID number.
So the first few thousand people will be able to retire on the spot, but the poor guy who signed up account #2003539 will get a voucher for a free cheeseburger.
(Disclaimer: I stand to benefit substantially from this scheme)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @05:52AM
With a 3-digit UID, that works for me.
(Score: 1) by TK on Friday February 28 2014, @07:51PM
You bring up an interesting point. Anonymous Coward has been here since day one (UID=0?). That flaming, troll-baiting racist is going to get a disproportionate chunk of the selling price!
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @09:21PM
But AC makes the best posts, which no one else is brave enough to make.
(Score: 2, Funny) by toygeek on Friday February 28 2014, @07:28AM
Works for me!
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com
(Score: 5, Funny) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 28 2014, @07:56AM
Makes me almost as happy as you. ;)
For an actual payout estimate, note that the payoff is a truncated harmonic series.
IOW, the individual payoffs are k/1, k/2, k/3, k/4, etc., while the total payoff is k/1+k/2+k/3+...
Fortunately, the sums of the truncated harmonic series are known as the harmonic numbers, H_n=1/1+1/2+1/3+...+1/n (H_n can be approximated as ln(n))
Therefore, we can determine k, for dividing a given payout amongst n users, by dividing the total payout by H_n.
Considering ten thousand users, H_1000 ~= 7.485 [wolframalpha.com].
For a million users, H_1,000,000 ~= 14.39 [wolframalpha.com].
(/. currently has UIDs up to 3555467, though there's only 2264017 [soylentnews.org] UIDs, which suggests an interesting rate of captcha and/or email verification failure...)
Wolfram Alpha won't calculate H_3,555,467 or higher for free, but you can see each additional digit of UIDs increases the number by about 2, so you can extrapolate as you like...
Now, let's suppose, for convenience sake, that a roughly /.-sized soylentnews (H_n=15) sells for about as much as whatsapp, but a bit goes to taxes, lawyers, etc., so only 15 billion is to be paid out to members. Paid out uniformly, that's $5000 or so each -- not shabby. But in the actual, UID-inverse-proportional scheme, k=(15G$)/H_n=1G$, so uid 1 would get k/1=1G$ -- but, wait, there is no UID 1 (is AC UID 1? Or is that UID 0? Anyway, let's suppose it's AC, and use the first billion for a lottery of some sort, so AC can get his share...)
NCommander (the first actual user) gets a well-earned k/2=500M$. (And mcasadevall gets k/6=133M$ -- what would life be without a good double-dip!)
You and I, farther down the list, get a modest k/35=28.6M$ and k/37=27M$, respectively. (Though my alt Barbara Feldon gets k/99 = 10.1M$, because if it's good enough for NCommander, it's good enough for me!)
Some schmuck joining today would get k/3476=288k$ -- I'm not sure that's retire-on-the-spot money (remember taxes), but it could be, depending what part of the country/world one's in.
And that newish guy gets k/2003539, or not quite five dollars. Hey, that's two or three free cheeseburgers!
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Friday February 28 2014, @02:21PM
I love math. Can I get my $21M now as an interest free loan? Honestly y'all wouldn't have to pay me when the community sells out. Just trying to buy a farm and am stuck in the numbers game right now. I'll take an advance of $500K and that can be deducted on payout...please?
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by Kromagv0 on Friday February 28 2014, @05:16PM
New investment opportunity. 4 digit user accounts to soylentnews.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 1) by cmn32480 on Friday February 28 2014, @04:58PM
Anonymous Coward is gonna make a MINT!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson