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SoylentNews is people

posted by girlwhowaspluggedout on Friday February 28 2014, @05:00AM   Printer-friendly
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.

Barabbas writes:

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!

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @06:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @06:56AM (#8338)

    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?

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Popeidol on Friday February 28 2014, @07:47AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Friday February 28 2014, @07:47AM (#8360) Journal

    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

      by TheRaven (270) on Friday February 28 2014, @09:32AM (#8388) Journal
      I'm a bit surprised that they're paying for hosting. I can think of a few VM hosts that would be happy to donate some capacity in exchange for the publicity. If you ask your.org nicely, they'd be very likely to give you couple of FreeBSD VMs - they're very willing to support the open source community. If it's not commercial, then hosting in various universities is also a possibility. We have insane amounts of bandwidth on ja.net (I've had machines freeze downloading files because the disk cache fills up and the kernel can't service interrupts from the network and disk fast enough to allow it to do anything else until the download is finished), but a strict non-commercial condition of use. Sticking a VM that hosts the site in a university would be basically free, as long as you talk to the right person.
      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @04:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @04:51PM (#8590)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @09:18PM (#8788)

          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

          by TheRaven (270) on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:01PM (#9067) Journal

          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

    by crutchy (179) on Friday February 28 2014, @08:40AM (#8377) Homepage Journal

    As soon as this is turned into a business that generates cash flows we cannot trust it anymore

    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

    by Yow (1637) on Friday February 28 2014, @02:44PM (#8516)

    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.