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: 2, Interesting) by hash14 on Friday February 28 2014, @06:40AM
You guys are doing a fantastic job, and this is something former slashdot users have sorely needed for a long time, though I hope that we keep this a community site. Now that the site is starting to get a lot of traffic, I think subscriptions with various simple benefits are starting to become feasible options. My only question is why the traffic is on the same order of magnitude as that of slashdot while the comment counts are still rather small by comparison. But it's about quality, not quantity right? I guess slashdot had more shills and trolls than we originally thought ;-)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mrcoolbp on Friday February 28 2014, @07:02AM
S/N = signal to noise = )
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Friday February 28 2014, @10:50AM
Very good, that should be an alternative site motto. I wonder if someone could work it up into a clever logo or graphic of some kind, to go on t-shirts and things.
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Sunday March 02 2014, @03:09AM
Suggestion added to the master list of site suggestions.
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 28 2014, @11:02AM
I dunno, the comment counts don't feel that much smaller than they what they got on /. once the Slashcott started. Considering the smaller initial user base here that's not bad. I was reflecting on these sorts of questions over the weekend and it seemed even the lower modded comments here are higher quality than much that would float to the top on /., so it seems the user base at SN, while smaller so far, is more robust. Also, the weakness of Slashdot's moderation system was that posting earlier strongly boosted chances of higher mods, so more well-thought out posts that took longer to compose so frequently lost out to funny or knee-jerk group-think responses. We don't yet know if SN's mod system will shake out differently at high volumes, but so far it's been refreshing to see high-quality posts from top to bottom. So I find I am content. I don't care if SN never achieves the traffic Slashdot had. My purpose is met. I come here to learn from other members of the community who know far more about other areas of tech or science than I do, and to test the mettle of my own ideas in areas I think I know more about by placing them before a peer group whose opinion I respect. And I do love the nerdy, witty humor that wends its way through that discourse, too.
Congrats to SN on a successful launch. May its success sustain it, its mistakes inform it, and its circle of friends grow and grow.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Friday February 28 2014, @01:22PM
Hear, hear!
(Score: 1) by strattitarius on Friday February 28 2014, @09:05PM
I could not agree more. This site is already a success. I am ready to become a paying member!
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday February 28 2014, @01:04PM
My only question is why the traffic is on the same order of magnitude as that of slashdot while the comment counts are still rather small by comparison.
Because the would-be clowns trying to be funny and clogging up comments with worthless tripe thankfully stayed at slashdot. Personally, I'd rather not have thirty good comments buried in 200 trash comments. I've been promoting "S/N" to be the shorthand for soylent news for a while now for that very reason. Too much noise over there, not enough signal.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org