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SoylentNews
Greetings, Soylentils. First of all, I want to thank you, the community, for the outpouring of support during these past few weeks. The participation has been amazing, and I'd like to personally thank each and every one of you for your help in a successful launch so far. Unfortunately, I can't thank every one of you individually. As of this writing, there are over 3500 registered users!
Now, we promised to be transparent, and we intend to deliver. Our first (and right now, only) all-hands staff meeting is at 1800 UTC on 2 March, and will be held on our IRC channels.
The staff will be holding the meeting on #Staff at irc.soylentnews.org. Only staff will be able to log into and speak on that channel. However, our IRC folks will be re-broadcasting this on the public channel, #Soylent. If you aren't familiar with IRC, please review Landon's recent post (we have a web client available as well). Many of our staff members will be monitoring both channels, and we will try to have the opportunity for questions. Conducting this meeting will be one of many learning experiences for us, so feel free to pipe up and say your piece.
Items on the agenda include a vision statement from our founder, an overview of staff organization from me(draft available here), general status update from each group, as well as proposals for future development. You may notice some missing names in the org chart. Please contact us at suggestions @ soylentnews dot. org if you are interested in volunteering or working here.
As always, thanks for being a part of this great community!
~mattie_p, general manager
(Score: 4, Interesting) by cloying on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:07AM
Yes, it does seem odd. There is an uncomfortable mix of old and safe, with new and slack. Why use something like irc, and then use Google docs? set up a forum and then ask us to submit trite videos to YouTube? I just did a twatter search for 'soylent news' and there exists a pointless stream of headlines. Lovely
Have we escaped beta to enter another socially networked fiasco?
I would love to see this site work, but one of its reasons for it needing to exist was, our at least I thought it was, to avoid the use of ludicrous technologies and dependencies the rest of the internet works are happily falling in bed with. I certainly don't ever want to be part of this huge social experiment of popularity wars and privacy stupidity.
I can't make 'witnessing' the "staff meeting" due to living in a far off time zone. Perhaps the issues above would be something I would like to see discussed and decided upon in my absence, and before the site commits too much to operating in this way.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:41PM
At least, up to now, the site itself does not depend in any way on third-party sites. Which I consider a big advantage. Especially today where most sites include stuff, especially JavaScript, from a dozen other sites.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cloying on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:55PM
Yes, but dependencies are being created. Twitter, google docs, youtube... In my view we should never need or even suggest these for any part of the site content or management.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jt on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:09PM
Personally, I don't want SN to be dependent on other third-party services. What the proprietary world giveth, the proprietary world taketh away etc. However, maybe this will be useful when getting things kicked off, provided there is a clear plan on how these dependencies will be dropped in the near future.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:42PM
Which is EXACTLY why every else falls in line too -- it's just too "convenient" to take use of these freely available "cloud" solutions, just waiting to make life easier, even for high order tech geeks.
"Oh we'll just use it while we kick things off."
Sure. Except it will ALWAYS be more convenient in the Google / Apple / MS gardens.
This is why no one really uses open source chat networks (yeah sure IRC/XMPP), why no one uses self-hosted Docs equivalents, why no one seriously relies on OpenStreetMap when GMaps or MS Maps or Garmin et al. are available, why no one uses self-hosted videos or photos or social networking. (All for varying definitions of "no one", of course.)
Laporte used Skype temporarily when setting up his million dollar TWiT network, including the open source show "FLOSS Weekly". 5 years later he's still using Skype, with no real end in sight. He's talking about moving to a different Microsoft communications server next... seriously.
I am not surprised Soylent would stoop to using Docs for sharing or Youtube for video... but I am disappointed. It's still hard to avoid the free candy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:26PM
Twitter is an advertising channel, not a dependency. I don't think you lose out anything by not using twitter (I can't be sure, of course, because I don't use it, but AFAIU it only broadcasts the story titles.
Also YouTube is not essential to the site (although it excludes everyone not willing to get a Google account from competing in that competition, but then, I also see that competition more of an advertising campaign, and while I don't really like that competition, the fact that it's done on YouTube is my least concern here.
Use of Google Docs for documents central to the development is already a different level. Is there a reason why that could not have been done on the (already existing!) SoylentNews wiki?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @02:41PM
this. I agree, what seemed to be starting off quite well has turned into a complete and utter mess.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday March 02 2014, @06:26PM
Pointless? Except for Twitter users who have an interest in SN, and prefer to subscribe that way [twitter.com] rather than using RSS [soylentnews.org]?
And it seems like a sensible & cheap marketing strategy too. If a geek 're-tweets' one of these stories to his/her followers, SN may get some new users as a result - with no proselytizing needed.
(Score: 1) by cloying on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:40PM
Retweet Marketing new users like subscribe follow
All of that can fuck right off.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Monday March 03 2014, @06:46AM
The old site provided RSS. It was just one of several RSS subscriptions I had, which was nice because it didn't require that I gave it any special attention - and yet I still probably saw the stories sooner than I would have otherwise. I almost never visited the front page; I always just went direct to the stories that interested me.
Get off my lawn?
(Score: 1) by cloying on Monday March 03 2014, @09:08AM
Get off my lawn?
I probably laid that lawn when you were a kid...