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How often should SoylentNews plan to post stories?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Popeidol on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:56AM
I've posted about these before, but putting all our thoughts in a central location makes sense:
I'm a fan of the story queue. It reduces the load on the editors, and gives me a reason to check the site during quieter times. The timing between the stories is a matter of fine tuning: The higher the traffic/comment rate, the more stories can be reasonably posted.
Prioritising stories based on urgency is also a good idea. When a story is submitted or hits the queue, it's marked with a time-priority. So a story about Russia cutting the Ukraine off from the internet is breaking news and would get maximum priority, while somebody reminiscing about how drum memory made certain coding styles easier would be the lowest. On a busy week it might continually be bumped to the back of the queue and come out at 5am Sunday morning.
We should also take the chance to re-think how the editing process works as a whole. One of the strong points of slashcode has always been the moderation (and meta-moderation) system. I see no reason the same principles couldn't be applied to story editing. A few vague ideas about it's structure:
At best that system would have a tonne of testing and modification before it could go live, at worst it's a socialist dream that will never work. If it does, it could be beneficial to the site while cutting down the number of required 'staff' substantially.
This site was built on the community and slashcode. Why not use the strengths of both of them?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:59AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:57PM
However, that's a little unfair to Laminator_X, who after all is putting some real effort in, even if it's misdirected presently. At the moment, we're just sitting here eating and or throwing peanuts.
If I had to express my nebulous opinion on this matter in 5 words, it would be: "I value quality over quantity".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by boltronics on Thursday March 06 2014, @10:00AM
Indeed. Maybe Laminator_X didn't reach our high standards on that particular day, but we can still recognise his efforts to contribute something positive, and be respectful of that. While I'm sure everyone appreciates the constructive critism, we shouldn't simultaneously attack the people who are at least trying. The last thing we need are more people giving it in.
So to all the SN contributors, well done on making it this far. We do appreciate it!
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 1) by nightsky30 on Thursday March 06 2014, @12:43PM
I second this. Great Job!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Nait on Tuesday March 11 2014, @09:02AM
I agree with "quality over quantity". I would be fine with half of the stories that we get if it would mean higher quality of stories and discussion.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by nobbis on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:27PM
Agreed, voting submissions down before they appear on the front page would save it from receiving only angry comments.
I don't mind if any submissions I make are changed, as long as they end up factual and with a neutral stance (as the submission should have been), I really just want that story to appear in some form.
With prioritisation some submissions may be put back, and then end up out of date and then rejected, but I don't have a problem with that either, as long as we have good quality stories coming through.
I would ask that the queue of submissions is rationalised, stories that are accepted but not published are not visible, which makes it difficult when checking for dupes.
It's easy to look up when your mind's in the gutter
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gorath99 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @02:08PM
Agreed. An additional advantage of shifting some of the control to the community is that the flow of stories will better reflect the time zones at which the community reads the site. That could be a big benefit to international readers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dotdotdot on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:44PM
I suggested something similar to this for submissions last week [soylentnews.org]. We the Soylent people should be able to contribute to the editing and approval process somehow.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SleazyRidr on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:45PM
I'm very wary of rushing stories to the front page. I see this site as more of a review site where we can take the time to make sure stories are factual first and then sit and discuss the implications. The market for "urgent" news which may or may not be factual is already fairly saturated: it's easy to get to-the-minute news, but the kind of in-depth discussion you get here is harder to find.
I like your suggestions about editors, seeing something like that come to fruition would be good.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:50PM
I went with the "It's not that simple" option. Popeidol's explanation is close enough to what I was going to explain that I'll simply endorse it rather than rephrase it.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:17AM
Agreed. Here is a slightly improved version of my comment at the "SoylentNews Status for Feb 27" story [soylentnews.org]:
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I agree that breaking news should be given some special treatment. I assume you mean the submitter would flag his/her submission as such, so that the editors may more easily choose to consider it immediately - possibly even drafting in help ("dude I'm busy for the next two hours, could you take a look at this breaking news submission?")
With regards to holding back stories, I agree there is some merit to spreading things out. But this shouldn't be an absolute rule, and for breaking news it's worth breaking the rule.
A word of caution though. We shouldn't go too far in all this. The editors shouldn't be panicked into a race to publish first. If an editor is available to apply all the editorial standards and publish a breaking news submission to the front page fairly quickly, then great. If not, it doesn't matter that much. It's the discussion by the community that really matters, and timeliness is not the biggest factor affecting the quality of the discussion.
And I hope it doesn't sound like we are loading onerous responsibilities on the editors. Everything I've said here is what I'd consider an aspiration, never a grounds for criticism. I'm grateful for all the editors' hard work. Thanks people!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Popeidol on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:17AM
I wasn't sure whether it should be the submitter or the editor who tags the priority. While the submitter doing it makes it more likely to hit the queue quickly, it also could lead to abuse with people 'accidentally' mistagging articles as urgent to get it looked at faster than everybody who used the tag correctly.
You're right about the rest as well: The option to push breaking news is nice, but it should never become a focus. That's not what we're about.
(Score: 2) by jt on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:50AM
IMHO the submitter should never tag the priority, as it will either be a) abused, or b) ignored. In a previous workplace our bug tracking system had 2 priority fields. One was visible to the users, who always tagged everything as top priority and highest urgency. The other was visible to the tech team who estimated the real priority from the user-suggested priority and a broader knowledge of the organisation. It would have been a career-limiting move to allow the users to know this.
Let the editors make these decisions and maintain an independent viewpoint.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:00PM
In the system I'm proposing, the urgency level would simply be the submitter's opinion, which the editor would be made aware of - possibly at the same time as being made aware of the Karma of the submitter. It would still be down to the editor to chose if & when to post any particular story.
My take on some priority levels:
I suppose I'm assuming that every now & then, an editor thinks "right, time to post a story", and has a look at all the submissions. When they do so, they might sort by urgency - as long as they don't defer to it too much (because we certainly need level 6 submissions quite often).
Furthermore, some editors might chose to receive an alert (email, for example) whenever a user above a certain Karma level submits what they claim is a level 1 or 2 story.
Most "Ask Soylent" type submissions should be Urgency Level 6.
I've submitted two stories so far, and I would have declared them as levels 3 and 5 respectively.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:19PM
Sounds useful.
I think such a system could also include/replace my idea [soylentnews.org], where the purpose is to remove the outer level of 'recursive quoting'.
So this