SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As you are all aware, we are in the middle of the dog days of summer. We get it, people are busy with work, family, and a plethora of other things. Some of our (volunteer) staff need a break too, so we are looking for a few good people, be they man, woman, child, animal, mineral or vegetable, to join our ranks and help spread the workload.
There are a number of ways to help out:
- Join us on our webchat IRC or, if you are new to IRC (I was only a year ago), check here for some tips on getting connected.
- Email mrcoolbp (or if you are sick of that guy any other staff member like janrinok will do; "nickname@soylentnews.org" works for any of us)
- Read the wiki page on "Getting Involved"
One thing that this site needs more than anything else to thrive is submissions.
We greatly appreciate all of our submitters. The submission queue is the lifeblood of SoylentNews, when it is empty, there is nothing to read, learn from, and argue about.
Takyon, Hugh Pickens, Phoenix666, and Arthur T. Knackerbracket come immediately to mind as people that we see submissions from a lot, and they present great submissions. However, consider that just one article a week from 25% of our registered users would give us more material than we can use, and yield a far greater variety of viewpoints, opinions, and stories. When you find something interesting, submit a story. Take a quick peek at our Submission Guidelines for some insight into best practices.
"But what do I submit?". Check out the RSSbot logs. Scroll down to 'today' and check out the links. This bot simply posts stories from various relevant sources in real-time by scraping RSS feeds (you can refresh the page and get more up-to-date stories).
A well crafted summary is preferred, but not an absolute necessity. Your summary doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be a copy/paste of the first paragraph or two from the article, but please, be sure to give us the link where you are getting the material.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the time spent working on SoylentNews and hanging around on IRC generally pretty relaxing. It is fun for me, and I appreciate that the community is an interesting place with people from many places, industries, and walks of life. It is a place where I come to learn, and read things I would otherwise never see.
Thanks to you all for helping build a great community, and we hope to see many new faces over the coming months.
--cmn32480
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:36PM
(This view won't be popular; I expect the majority of you won't share it. But I'll voice it anyway, in case I'm not alone...)
The fact is: I simply can't keep up with the stories we have!
I try to at least skim the summary for every story; in most cases, I also read some comments too. But, even devoting every lunchtime and a short while in the evenings, there are too many stories, and too many comments, to do them justice.
The solution isn't to read only the stories which interest me; in many cases, that's not clear until I've read the summary. (In fact, in a surprising number of cases, the title is a complete mystery anyway.) And sometimes the most interesting discussions start from the least promising stories.
The result is that I'm always playing catch-up, running a day or several behind.
Now, theoretically, stories on a site like this shouldn't have an expiry date; they're not often up-to-the-minute to start with, and discussion could easily continue for days or weeks. But in practice, it doesn't. I've noticed that unless I post a reply within a day or so of the story appearing, the chances of it being replied-to or moderated plummet. (I reply anyway, of course. But it's quite dispiriting. I wonder whether anyone will read this comment, for example.) And because I'm in the UK, and do most of my reading at lunchtime — which is early morning for most in the USA — I'm nearly a day behind to start with.
So from where I'm sitting, a lack of stories really doesn't look like a problem for this site. Quite the reverse!
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Wednesday August 12 2015, @05:22AM
Know this: I have read your comment and can sympathize with your viewpoint. Imagine trying to run this site and follow the discussions and news after a 60-70 hour work week, it's tough but rewarding because of people like you!
(Score:1^½, Radical)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:55AM
I have also read your comment - and I will reply.
I, like you, would like to see more discussion regarding some of the stories that we publish. It can be quite demoralising as an editor to see a story that took someone perhaps an hour to prepare, and editor some additional time to ready it for the front page, to then see it garner only a handful of comments.
However, many others disagree with your point of view, as you acknowledge in your own post. They would rather see this as a place where they can not only join in a discussion from time to time, but also as a 1-stop update on what is happening in the science and tech world. This is an entirely valid aspiration for them to have for the site. We have a long way to go before we can claim to be that, but with the gradual introduction of nexuses we should be able to post more stories but keep them in their own nexus so as not to swamp others who have no interest in that particular topic.
Your post has prompted me to give some thought to introducing a 'story-of-the-week', specifically selected to (hopefully) provoke a deeper discussion and debate about it contents. Unfortunately, such a thing might also become a magnet for trolls and other similar minded people who would rather disrupt a discussion than take part in an intelligent debate. I'll have a chat with the other eds and see what they think about the idea.