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In the dying hours of 3rd Dec (UTC) into the early hours of 4th Dec something significant occurred in the vicinity of the SoylentNews PBC boardroom. One witness is reported to have said "it was as though a light zephyr appeared unexpectedly, brushed by a pile of watermelons before shooting up into the sky as a vivid light", this has not been confirmed as an accurate portrayal of events and quite honestly we're not sure they weren't just making it up.
Moving to a more formal note. The timeline above is correct. In what seemed like a few brief moments of discussion and accord, NCommander stepped out of the position of CEO and yours truly (juggs) stepped in as interim CEO.
To quickly dispel any doubts or concerns, this was not some hostile power play within the board, more an amicable and pragmatic changing of the guard. It was notably lacking in any form of drama whatsoever.
Firstly, I'd like to thank NCommander for bringing us to where we are today - a thriving, growing community with a stable foundation from which to grow and many tomes of vision for what the road ahead may lead us on to build. I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping he sticks around and makes a reprise - I have a strong feeling he will.
As much as I'd like to mark my entrance with some grand vision - in the very short term I'll have to mostly concentrate on some very mundane but very necessary corporation affairs.
Longer term, I have a few nascent ideas in the back of my mind that need kicking into shape - but given the whole transition was out of the blue, I'm more at the sort the desk out and find the nearest coffee dispensary stage than the grand visionary stage. I do however fully intend to revisit NCommander's SN vision statements and go from there as an immediate starting point at the very least.
Feel free to use the Comments for questions, concerns or suggestions, I'll be sure to reply.
juggs
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Saturday December 06 2014, @08:21PM
With many repeated stories between SN and Slashdot, will you aim to differentiate this site? They seem to be beating us to publication much of the time.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday December 06 2014, @09:00PM
Articles only initiate the discussion. Members of SN are somewhat more mature, and as there aren't too many of them, a simple article about a new mouse does not generate 100,000 comments. Who has time to read through a large discussion on /. ? How many of those comments are "+1, Informative" ?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 06 2014, @10:37PM
Speaking as a user, quality of discussion on this site vs the other is reason enough for me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07 2014, @03:52AM
When I see a good story at Slashdot I hope it comes here so it can get a better discussion.
When I see a bad/clickbait/dicevertisement I am happy that it stays over there or it is at least written less clickbait-y.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by juggs on Sunday December 07 2014, @04:08AM
That is a very good question.
I think to answer it, I need to tackle it from two directions. Those being site content and the site functionality.
The content is very much the product of the community at this point. Of course we could technically control what stories appear via the editorial process if we so wished, in reality the subject areas for submitted stories seem to self-regulate in a way. I'm not sure we'd want to attempt to steer this part of things, to do so would defeat the point of being a community site I think.
We need to consider at this point some of what was stated on our Certificate of Incorporation [soylentnews.org]
There are early efforts afoot within the editorial team to engage third parties with a view to generating original content (as opposed to regurgitation of already existent news). Original content (third party or community based) is an interesting potential avenue to explore and has several possible branches to it - be that short form news stories that no-one else is covering, longer form deep analysis articles on a particular subject or area, or even some completely off the wall creative writing.
Clearly some of these forms and topics of original content would not fit too comfortably within the current SN site structure as it is. So I shall neatly segue into...
At the moment all stories are released to the main page and only the main page. This is fine while volumes and community size is small - we can skip over the stories that don't interest us. That doesn't scale as we grow and subject areas become more diverse.
We have the functionality ready to go (in code terms) to split stories out into various nexus. The release of this is dependent on acquiring a wildcard certificate, which has been in process for far too long (in my opinion as a hereto spectator), this is high on my list to kill off as a job that should be done already.
With nexus in place we can begin to split content up, be that based on subject matter or long form vs short form, it opens a door of opportunity.
As an aside, I think SoylentNews already differentiated itself from Slashdot as we went through the early altslashdot > SoylentNews transition. We may superficially "look" the same, but a book should not be judged by its cover.
(Score: 2) by elf on Monday December 08 2014, @03:00PM
On the content front I think you need to define what this site is and what this site isn't, if you try and make it an everything for everybody site then it isn't going to be as successful as you think it will be (In my opinion)
I haven't subscribed yet (no fancy star!) for the prime reason that I really don't know what I am subscribing to. Yes, articles are posted. Yes, there is commentary for those articles. But the subject of the articles is so wide its hard to pin down the types of articles I am going to get. What I would like is a definition of your target audience to see if I fit in to it in the long term. As was mentioned above the name of the site puts me off too, I come here for tech news but name is anything but related to tech.
But I am not leaving here and time soon (I lurk more than post nowadays), I don't think the CEO change over is that much of a problem. This is a community run site and the change of leadership is expected but as long as the community is strong then things should just continue. I hope NCommander continues to be more active again in the future and I hope Juggs is able to take the site to the next stage in its evolution.
The nexus thing should help a lot here if you can filter out the types of articles you aren't interesting in.