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SoylentNews
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 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.