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All of the trend lines on this site are positive except one: story submissions. After an initial surge, they have been gradually declining despite users and page views climbing. Tonight the submission queue ran dry. Janrinok and I could go scrounging, as we sometimes do, but this needs to be addressed.
We have around four thousand registered users, and who knows how may AC's reading along. We can do better.
I challenge each of you to submit stories on a regular basis, at whatever frequency you find comfortable. Really, if even half of us submitted a story once a week, we would have more than we could ever use. Once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever you can handle, send it in.
Bookmark this link: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl - use it. Give us so many stories that we can select the cream of the crop and stun you with how amazing our community is. Make it happen.
I'm going to leave this story on top for a while, and see what is waiting for us when I get to work in the morning. Wow me, please.
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours. Its success is in your hands.
[UPDATE: We have received, in less than 12 hours, more submissions than we had the whole rest of the weekend. THANK YOU SO MUCH, and please, keep them coming. Even one story a month matters. Let the party re-commence. :) ]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SlySmiles on Monday March 24 2014, @04:58AM
Plenty of articles and no comments. Slow down the posting of news until there is more of a discussion.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Open4D on Monday March 24 2014, @06:00AM
Personally I don't ration myself to a certain number of comments per day. It's more about the interest that the stories have for me, and my perceived ability to contribute something useful.
Of course, people only have so much free time in the day, so the inverse relationship you are implying between story frequency and comments-per-story has at least an element of truth.
But I think a far bigger factor affecting comments-per-story is simply the number of users. (Even that's not a simple relationship, because on the old site the number of users was sufficiently high that I less often felt I had anything useful to say that hadn't already been said - but I don't think Soylent is near that point yet.)
Clearly there's a wide range of views [soylentnews.org] about story frequency. I don't necessarily object to slightly reducing it, but I still think that more submissions would be good, to make life easier for the editors.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sir Finkus on Monday March 24 2014, @06:25AM
Same here, I haven't seen many stories in the past few days I've felt qualified to comment on. That said, I think we have pretty decent engagement considering the size of the community. There's only around 4k registered users here last I checked.
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by black6host on Monday March 24 2014, @06:39AM
I believe it's a bit easier to comment, if you will, at the other site. The threads branch off so much that you can usually find something you can comment on. That is lacking here. The stories are good, but unless you know of the subject matter what can you say? I'd say get some submissions that were more general in nature that could be discussed from many different angles. Open up the ability to comment.
(Score: 3) by mrbluze on Monday March 24 2014, @08:23AM
We are planning improvements to the commenting system, rest assured. Overriding matters have delayed this somewhat, but we are onto it.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 1) by mmarujo on Tuesday March 25 2014, @09:47AM
Agree, but that does not make it better, in fact I believe it is only worse. In the Dark Days (the green site), every story had many more comment, but half of them were some MS/Apple/Google/Sony/etc. bashing, whether or not it had any relevance to the subject matter.
Now, the stories have less comments, but they are not endless repetitions to be filtered out.
(Score: 1) by black6host on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:56PM
I agree that many comments does not necessarily lead to a good experience. But many times comments would branch off the topic of the submission into interesting topics in their own right. And the comments to those could be good as well.
It's amazing how much I've learned how little I know by reading and/or commenting. :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tizan on Monday March 24 2014, @01:44PM
This is my place when i am bored at work to check what is happening.
So whether people comment or not is unrelated to catching my attention.
So as the user base increase so will comments...and it comes with its negatives
as large number of comments are useful..and also large number of them
will be useless and pointless.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday March 24 2014, @06:14AM
Mmmhhh... maybe it's just an effect of "karma points inflation"?
I mean, if I can't post and moderate and I choose to moderate for 10 points, suddenly I can't comment in at least about 3-4 articles. So:
I don't know, I have no visibility over the "karma economy", but I noticed lately I tend to let some of my "moderation rounds" just go to waste just to be able to post some comments.
What about the following experiment: tweak the SN karma module to limit max karma awarded for posting comments at 5, decrease the chances for "karma awards by comments" and award more points for story submission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by linsane on Monday March 24 2014, @08:21AM
Concur - the moderation balance thing could do with a review. Also as there are so few trolls to down-mod, points are only required (at the moment) for constructive modding
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday March 24 2014, @12:30PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Informative) by weeds on Monday March 24 2014, @01:06PM
Also concur. I seem to be flush with mod points and then there is the conflict as to whether I should use my mod points or make comments. Also as a responsible member of the community, I try to post when I think my comment might add to the discussion. (keeps me out of plenty :)
As mentioned above, I don't know how the mod point algorithm works, but I do know that changes have been made to it for SoylentNews owing to size. I would suggest dishing mod points out not only based on the quality and number of comments, but the number of accepted submissions as well. Or maybe "bonus" mod points for submissions. And another thing... I know this has been discussed and may even be on the list, but there is no feedback for submissions. A rejected submission can be a powerful demotivator. "someone beat you to it and it's in the queue", "or, it will be out later" is a lot easier to take than "rejected". For general knowledge, story postings are not necessarily posted as soon as they come in, but may be scheduled out to keep a more constant flow of articles for everyone around the world (and the night owls.) Finally, we should publicize the IRC more. It's hard to build a community on the occasional story post. IRC (http://chat.sylnt.us/)provides for dialog (that's really social) and that's where I found out I was beaten to the punch on my post.
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 24 2014, @01:30PM
I'm surely not the SN dweller with the highest number of submissions, but I still have more than 10 approved on their own and 3 "merged" with others'.
Now, this is the context for the actual message of this commemt: my first submission on SN was rejected; luckily, I read the submission guidelines [soylentnews.org] shortly after and I'm yet to have another rejected (not that I expect that will never happen).
BTW: my direct experience seems to indicate there is a karma award for an accepted submission - can't say how much though, I topped my karma about 3 weeks ago and I'd need to troll to go back a little and be able to determine how much for a successful submission. Or... maybe... better ask the editors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by pjbgravely on Monday March 24 2014, @04:02PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bart9h on Monday March 24 2014, @02:20PM
I think comments and moderation should be excluded only from the same thread, not the same story.
Please explain why I'm wrong.
(Score: 1) by kbahey on Monday March 24 2014, @04:44PM
I fully agree.
Moderation points are given too frequently, and there are too many of them, and they expire too soon.
Change the mod points to 5 instead of 10, make them last one day or two days instead of the few hours now, and grant them to the same person every few days, not every day.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fluffeh on Monday March 24 2014, @08:16AM
I disagree with this. I much prefer to have a dozen articles to glance over, read and then comment on the ones that I am interested in - even if there aren't too many comments already. Don't get me wrong, I do like reading comments - but if it is a choice between many articles, few comments - and few articles bunch of comments, I will take the former.
Having said that, I generally submit an article as soon as I find one that is interesting. The weekend was however quite slow - but I still got three submissions published from Friday. Just had a rather busy weekend and there wasn't too much happening on the news sites I frequent.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mmcmonster on Monday March 24 2014, @09:58AM
Absolutely. Too many stories with only a handful of comments each.
With thousands of page views, I think the main problem is people are waiting for others to comment first. Either that or the topics are so esoteric that the population doesn't feel comfortable commenting at all.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday March 24 2014, @04:26PM
I agree. I think it's because ./ had enough people in each domain/area that you had to be pretty knowledgeable of the topic to comment. There was a lot of off-topic stuff really. Criticism of editing, speeling, and the grammars could be a quarter of the comments. It may just take a while for people to come out of their shells enough to comment on things they aren't experts on.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Monday March 24 2014, @11:33AM
Seconded. The level of submissions is only a problem if you assume we MUST have a certain number of stories every day. Instead, I'd go the exact opposite direction, and reject much of the junk that is getting to the front-page. The stories I submitted about a week ago were posted on Saturday & Sunday, and got almost no comments/discussion at all.
Secondly, I decided to stop submitting stories, due to technical issues with SN. Specifically, I was only seeing a fraction of the stories that were actually on the home-page, while logged-in, and nobody has said anything about how many other users may be affected by this bug (and not even know it). What's the point of submitting a bunch of stories, when a possibly-significant percentage of the user-base may not be able to even SEE THEM? Hence my .sig. See bug #78:
http://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/78 [github.com]
And finally, in my brief experience submitting, I see a notable trend from the editors to accept "tech news" but to reject hard-science type stories, which is discouraging, and the opposite direction of where I'd like to see SN going. I know /. is worse, these days, but in the early days, it was much more "hard" topics, and less rumor mill, product announcement, and political flamebait. If SN is just going to head that same direction, all over again, why bother?
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 24 2014, @12:06PM
"I see a notable trend from the editors to accept "tech news" but to reject hard-science type stories"
I'll second that. An intentional aversion to primary sources.
Want some stories? Autopost anything that hits astrobites or Aaronson's quantum blog. Could troll arxiv.org all day and post interesting papers.
Generally speaking, we're not stupid here. We don't need a simple clearly written paper to be misinterpreted by a BBC journalist trying to rewrite it for the general 3rd grade public. Yes astrobites is a re-interpretation but its not a journalist reinterpretation. You want to talk about Rosetta, well just talk about the Rosetta probe, don't need a BBC journalist's permission to do so. There's many other examples of "requiring" a journalist's "permission" to discuss the news.
Soooooo how bout that
http://astrobites.org/2014/03/24/examining-martian -water-with-hydrogen-isotopes/ [astrobites.org]
Basically hydrogen isotope ratio on Mars varies because the light isotopes blow out of the atmosphere. There's a pretty interesting section on error analysis, where UV light and other sources of water screw up the ratio. But there "should be" a heck of a lot more water on Mars than there seems to be, which is interesting. So either there's a lot of water we haven't found, or somethings making it disappear that we haven't figured out.
I'd have to think a bit about how this applies to any terraforming ideas. Or even just colonization. Or did they just screw up on the analysis? One thing I didn't like about KSR's scifi trilogy was the portrayal of a terraformed Mars having an ocean and being green. Its looking a lot more like a terraformed mars would look a lot like saudi arabia or perhaps a cold desert.
(Score: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:06PM
I'd love to see submissions of papers, if the submitter takes the time to write a decent summary. It should at least cover the abstract, clarify any terms not well-known to non-specialists and point out any interesting bits that aren't in the abstract.
That would be a great service, maybe even a story category that some non-genereal-community members might choose look at exclusively with an RSS feed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 25 2014, @04:27PM
astrobites, but not for astronomy.
If anyone knows of something like astrobites for CS that would be very interesting.
In my infinite spare time I've occasionally considered shamelessly copying the astrobites "business model" for other scientific fields.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @01:12PM
We seriously have not had the opportunity to be be very choosy about subject matter, sources, and the like. (There are more than a couple stories this week I'd have rejected if the submission bin had more than six stories at the time.) Trends like you are describing are coming not from the editors, but from submissions. While I welcome critique, submission and commenting are the most powerful thing members can do to steer the tone of this site.
I believe the bug you mention was worked on (fixed?) over the weekend.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday March 24 2014, @03:19PM
I can only reiterate the points I've already made...
There's nothing forcing you to post X stories per day. Comment-count on stories indicates there's FAR too many on the weekends...
Half my submissions were rejected. Not that I'm not offended, but that doesn't exactly scream a desperate deficits of stories to me. The pattern seems to indicate an aversion to sciency stories, and it seems I'm not the only submitter that has seen this.
Well then, it seems like members are telling you that you're posting too many stories, and as this story and your reply indicate, some editors here are unwilling to listen and accept that.
I thought as much, as I saw a notable (but not complete) improvement since the maintenance. But it does defeat the purpose of bug tracking systems if nobody is bothering to update them...
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Monday March 24 2014, @03:44PM
"Well then, it seems like members are telling you that you're posting too many stories, and as this story and your reply indicate, some editors here are unwilling to listen and accept that."
As far as that goes, what we're getting is a lot of conflicting messages owing to different priorities and tastes, as you can see here when we had a community discussion specifically on this matter. [soylentnews.org] Our current posture emerged directly from that discussion. Some members want a more restrained pace, others want us to push things out as quickly as we're able. I don't think there's a single right answer that's best all the time.
(Score: 2) by cwix on Monday March 24 2014, @05:05PM
I disagree. I think the comment count issue more lies in the fact that many of us do not feel qualified to give useful and insightful commentary on subjects we do not understand. I have found a good many of interesting articles, but I just don't feel like I can comment on something that far out of my field of expertise without making myself look like an ass.