SoylentNews

You will all now be aware that there are changes afoot to the management and structure of SoylentNews. Many of you are pleased to see that some action is being taken, and in many ways I also support that concept. But it is obvious to me that many of you don't understand the possible implications of what is currently happening. I would like to discuss this further. First, it is necessary to have some background.

The Board

The Board of SoylentNews was created very early on in the site's life and originally comprised of 3 people. NCommander, Matt Angel, and mrcoolbp (aka Ben Prentice). Ben stepped down many years ago from his post as Board Secretary, which was a role that covered many different things. So for at least 6 years, the Board has comprised of only 2 people. Matt Angel does not, as far as I know, have a nickname on this site. He is the Board Treasurer; a job he has done quietly and efficiently in the background. NCommander you should all know well by now.

You may think that the Board is there to look after your interests, but nowhere in the founding documents or bye-laws does it say any such thing. One of its primary duties is to look after the interests of the shareholders. They do not have to consult the community, or inform them of any decisions that they make, nor are they accountable to any other external authority or individual. They do not have to provide you with written records. They should provide direction to the site but not be involved in any aspect of how that is achieved or managed. There are 2 shareholders - NCommander and Matt Angel. You can read into that anything you wish. I am not telling you what to think, I am simply telling you something that many of us only learned relatively recently.

The Board can, however, wind up the site without any consultation or prior warning. That is entirely within their powers and legal rights.

The Hardware

Since the site began it has been hosted on Linode (now part of Akamai) hardware. It is not the cheapest around but you get what you pay for. The hardware has been managed by the sysops team, the names of whom you will also know and you have seen them commenting on the site recently. There were multiple people who had need of access to the hardware starting at the top with NCommander. Ideally, the sysops team would all have individual specialities and areas of responsibility, but that is simply not possible for a small team such as we have had for several years. Therefore they all contribute where they can to address whatever issues they must attend to.

There are some advantages to this arrangement. There are checks and balances that what is being implemented is sensible and will not adversely affect other areas of the system. If it does, they can each be aware of the problem areas and they can be addressed logically and systematically to bring the work to a conclusion. This requires communication, trust and access to the hardware.

The Data

The data I am referring to is the database which, in addition to your individual personal and account data, contains every story, journal, moderation, comment etc. The most valuable asset that this site has is its community. Without it there is simply no site. And the most important asset from the community's point of view is the data that has been accumulated. It is so valuable that we have alway pledged to protect it to the fullest extent possible. We have successfully done this for over 9 years.

The Third Person

Kolie approached, or was approached by, the Board to be contracted to provide new hardware to host a containerised site. He is for the moment a contractor. He has been generous in providing the hardware that has been gathered so far for free. Nobody other than the Board or kolie himself knows what exactly is in that contract. They are not obliged to reveal it to us, and this is perfectly normal and legal. I am not suggesting that anything otherwise.

Kolie is the CTO of several companies, the one that he has discussed most of all is Ennwise (ennwise.com) but there is also an Ennwise consulting company too, and probably others. The hardware that he is currently using is located in Ennwise company facilities (Freemont, CA, FMT2 facility. Linux OS on a iSCSI array.) but it is being moved later on this month. I do not know where to. He describes the company as "Ennwise is more accurately a consulting, custom software, and MSP/ISP" and "[...] ennwise mostly does vCIO work for businesses in the 1-10B range". He describes himself as "I'm in vc, tech, construction verticals so it's basically a product of lessons learned in focusing on your product and not managing servers." He therefore has an abundance of relevant experience and seems to have made a successful career out of it.

Some Missing Pieces

This site has always been entirely open in its dealings with the community. Many of us know each other at an almost personal level. We do not usually hide what we have done or are planning to do - in fact we often consult with the community beforehand to get a majority approval. There are some things that must be kept private - handling you personal data is one of them. I make no apologies for having withheld personal data belonging to one person from others who do not need to know it. Some time back I was given a copy of our policy document from 2014 after somebody managed to recover it before it was lost for ever. It was published in the site Wiki and was there for everyone to read. I am proud to say that I do not know of any contraventions to the policy decisions stated in it. The privacy passage in particular has never be contravened.

As a contractor kolie is perfectly entitled to keep the details of his contract private. He does no have to share it with anyone. But to be a valid contract I believe that there must be a payment of some kind - either monetary or in kind. Otherwise it is not a contract but an obligation or promise. If it is monetary then it might have been paid for by your subscriptions. Although that places no obligation on the Board I would have hoped that, being the community that we are, somebody would have at least mentioned it. They do not have to seek your approval for a payment but it would seem to be a reasonable action to be made aware of it. This is purely a personal view. If it is not monetary, then what is it? What reward will kolie receive for the expensive hardware that is being procured to run the site? I have acknowledged that so far it appears to be costing us nothing but that does not guarantee it will always be that way in the future. I will return to this point later.

kolie has told us that there are 'milestones' built within the contract that trigger the next stage of activity, and presumably a partial payment. Again this is simply a guess because I am not party to exactly what the contract says. None of us are.

The Potential Problem

At the moment the entire future of this site rests in the hands of the Board, and in particular NCommander. I understand exactly where he is coming from in wanting to see his work move forward into the future. But during the last month or so that future has been uncertain with statements from 'I am closing the site down' to 'the site will continue and I am planning for the next 5 to 10 years'. And with each change we do not have to be consulted, your views do not matter, and it is causing a lot of damage to our community. I have been criticised for even raising some issues that I think have been obvious from the start but are unappreciated or simply not understood by many. I ask blunt questions and time is very short I expect to receive more criticism for this journal entry. The place were we are supposed to be able to raise topics that interest us personally.

I have no crystal ball. I cannot say what will happen in the future. I know that the first 'milestone' occurs towards the end of this month. That is only a few weeks away. And most people are sat back just waiting for it to happen. Let me tell you what could happen:

1. At the end of the month the new hardware is stood up and the site switches over to it. We don't know where that hardware will be, how secure an environment it will be in, what is the expected up-time, and how much it will cost to run it.

2. The 'milestone' reward might be that kolie will receive a seat on the Board for it. He has said that he gets a seat at some point but it is not clear when that might be. He is immediately elevated from contractor to Board Management. You do not have to approve that action or even be told about it taking place.

3. One person, now a Board member, has total control over the hardware. But unlike in the past where the access has been shared between the sysops team, which resulted in checks and balances, there is no indication that such access will be granted. We have been told by NCommander that there will be NO shell access to the new hardware. If the cost of access to the hardware for the community increases - perhaps a form of compulsory subscription fee - then there is little more you can do except to pay up or leave.

4. Your data, which we have protected for over 9 years, has also moved completely under the same person's control. We cannot copy it, you cannot change it, you have simply lost the right to control your data. In the EU this is already illegal, and it doesn't matter where the data is held. If it contains the data of EU people there are already existing laws in place. Once that data is gone, this site can never be recreated.

I repeat, I haven't got a crystal ball and cannot say what will happen. But I can say that once it has happened you have already lost everything. How that data is used will be for the Board to decide, not you. If they want to monetize it they can do so providing that they do not break US law in doing so. If they want the site to be covered in advertising they may do so. If they want to invite other 'investors' to join the Board they can do so. Unless community members are on the board then it is all over.

I have no reason to doubt koli's sincerity today, but I also never imagined that NCommander would just shut the site down as he intended to do. If koli's interests are rather more monetary than community spirited, then he may view things differently in the years ahead. Today he is working hard to create a site, and giving generously of his time and money, but it might not be the site you imagined it would be.

This is what some of you are enthusiastically cheering for. This is what I am trying to prevent. If it looks like it will happen then I cannot guarantee the safety of your data or influence what the site will become. This might be the most important time ever for you to say what you want to happen - even if they are not listening.

I don't care whether you think this journal is the right thing to do or not, or whether you think it is sour grapes or just stirring the pot - as long as you are no longer running blindly into the unknown then it will have served its purpose.

This is my community too.

Got my first successful heart attack one month before my birthday - many happy returns.
_{^{maybe I still have a chance to see the bug stopping my modpoints cleared before I die, but I won't hold my breath, I'm still short of it}} :large-grin:

But I digress. Or just decided I might as well waste the rest of my life browsing the Internet. Or something.
In any case, if you reck'n you have 20 mins to waste watching YTes: "Social Constructs (or, 'What is A Woman, Really?')"

Kolie and I have started dividing up the work to finish dealing with the worst of the critical infrastructure problems. At this point, I have Apache, Perl, and mod_perl building in Docker, with a good chunk of rehash's dependencies now installing. It's going to be a fair bit of work since at this point, a lot of the mystery meat aspects of the backend need to be detangled and at least reproducibly reinstalled, but at least there's some actual hope at seeing this site actually get its infrastructure updated.

I expect I'll have more to write about next week in that regard.

I intended to have a main page post following last Saturday's post about SN's averted shutdown, but after three attempts of trying to write it and it basically kept coming out as a copy and paste of the last posts I've written, I'm going to put that aside for the moment. Instead of simply repeating the same thing over and over, I'm just going to write a quick summary of what's been done

I've spun up a new development Linode account, and kolie put together the skeleton of an ansible playbook. I'm going to start hammering on it more tomorrow. The intent is to create a full staging environment for every aspect of the site. The playbook will also let us easily be able to do development locally as it will perfectly match what we're doing in production. That way things like configuration updates or even rehash code updates can be tested, deployed, and easily rolled back.

The first target is to rebuild the nginx terminator, as well as to use Traefik to help handle routing and termination. I re-installed the SSL terminator last November so its exact configuration is known and easy to recreate. Each component of the stack is going to get documented both via a playbook a wiki page on GitHub. After this, we'll start migrating services one by one until we can fully decommission the current VMs.

This also has the advantage that we will have something resembling change management, disaster recovery, and not deal with some strange part of the stack breaking when a configuration is updated which is always a good thing. It also means doing a large overhaul to rehash at least moves into the realm of "theorically possible", up from "impossible".

I'll try to keep people apprised of how things are progressing here every few days. I have no idea how long any of this will take, and even after the infrastructure rebuild is done, there's still a lot more that has to follow.

So the discussions on backchannels have continued, and I have written a 7k word document essentially bullet pointing everything that needs to be done. It covers both the technical and business side of SoylentNews. This document is being reviewed right now, and I'll likely post a revised version of it in the near future if conversations continue to go well.

This is that this document is my personal plan on how SN might be revamped. It wasn't written with consultation of the staff.

It includes a full list of remaining technical issues, action items to redraft and revise the business plan to solve the single revenue stream issue, establishment of true site governance, and finally, a high level look at what replacing rehash will look like.

This plan also includes a specific items to determine how I can be legally disentangled from the infrastructure, as well as the requirements in allowing legal responsibility for SN, which includes ongoing maintenance and more, to not be a burden simply left at one persons feet.

This is largely codification what I've been saying and trying to repair for the last few months.

There's also the very open question on if there are enough people in the community who are interested in working in this. The impression I had on IRC was there wasn't. The backchannels discussions which happened because I was approached as a human, have convinced me an alternative might exist.

If there's significant community involvement to essentially renovate and relaunch the site (and I mean this is people actually doing it under a specific plan that we can agree to), then the largest problem in keeping SN online can be solved.

I'll write more on this in a post I hope to have out on Monday, but I'm not going to sit here and leave you all in silence and let rumors build up over the weekend.

An update: There has been serious conversations in back channels relating to ongoing SN operations from outside parties who are not current SN staff. It is possible the shutdown will be averted, but at this point, it will require signing a contract with the PBC to, at minimum, handle ongoing IT and support for the servers for a period of time, and to finish migration to deployment automation services.

Past that, a more serious discussion on how to migrate off rehash would have be worked out, although this doesn't need to be set in stone to stop dissolution.

I don't know if this will actually come through, and I don't want to build hope if there isn't any, but I would prefer an option that allows SN to continue.

but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

... Remember, every single user can submit stories, moderate, and contribute to discussions all at the same time, and that's what makes us unique....

That is just as true today as it was then.

That was the, ummm, statistic of the year at the time and continues to be.

... I stumbled on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SUjqIvVZHY

Speculative, but plausible. In short: lately, Putin lost the plot and got off the rails. On top of an autocratic and Russian imperialist mindset, he managed to get rid of all opposition, therefore he can't be sure if today he has the same power as yesterday.

I'm reading the comments, and here's my initial thoughts, I'll mull more as feedback comes i.:

Folks want AC posting to stay.

I'm personally not a fan, but frankly, I am willing to concede this point. It may become "Logged in users can post as AC" if you have high karma, or leave it as it is that ACs can post on journals, but not on the main page, but that's a more in-depth discussion. I may actually wait until after the site renovations are complete before addressing this; that means the backend has been updated to use less brittle infrastructure.

For now, the current status quo will continue, but I will continue to get feedback on what the final for of this will take. I may also just leave it for whomever replaces me, as I do wish to find someone to replace me.

Karma changes

I don't think I saw much objection to this. I wrote some comments explaining how karma works, but the short version is its a range from -25 to 50, with +3 points given when you submit a story, and then affected by moderation values. By and large, people don't downvote very often, especially on logged in accounts. This was a constant problem which is why we ended up going with 10 moderator points per day vs. the original lottery system. Shrinking the range might be enough to basically cause AC posts to automatically get tagged as -1 if there's just a stream of garbage coming out of the domain. That might be enough of a middle ground here.

Comment Deletion/Edit

My intent here was that for things like COVID misinformation and the like, it should be flat out deleted ala a subreddit. I wasn't clear about this in the original post however. I'll talk with the editors more about that on the side. As for an edit button, I'm not object to it, but it would be a time limited thing, and keep the original post and show a banner "This post was edited"

  - N

NCommander is publishing a Meta story today: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/11/20/0342250 It will be published on the front page with all of the restrictions that apply to such stories and discussions.

In it NCommander explains how he sees the future of the site developing with regards to software, hardware and administration. Some of those views are different now from the views that many of us held in 2014. The requirement for some of our servers is no longer justified, and there are better technologies available for achieving what we are trying to do thus also reducing our running costs. The administration of the site is placing an increasing burden on the relatively few administrators that remain in the support team. Society has also changed. Some discussion has been replaced by intimidation and threats. It is much more polarised than it was in 2014. In many ways this is the same as for numerous other web sites. However, the abuse and toxic atmosphere created by a small number of Anonymous Cowards is unacceptable and must be reversed if the site is to survive. The responsibility for some of the problems that we are experiencing, and the resulting actions that we have had to take, is placed entirely at their feet.

A few months ago the majority of the community opted - albeit very reluctantly - to remove AC posts from the front pages of the site. This action has successfully removed the vast majority of the abuse from our discussions. We are seeing a slow increase in the number of comments week-on-week and the signal-to-noise ratio is now much higher. It is only right that we also reconsider the implications of that change.

This journal entry is to enable anyone who wishes to remain anonymous to express their views. I promise that I will read it and will ensure that genuine views are considered when the community decides which path it wishes to follow. I cannot make any assurances that other members of the site's administration will read it - although I expect that at least some will. If you have an account then I strongly encourage you to leave your views under NCommander's Meta story and not here.

I further my promise that I will try to represent your views as honestly and fairly as I can.

If you abuse this journal then you are simply giving more support to the alternative options that might be considered than you are to the status quo. I encourage you to expresses sensible, logical and considered views but should you decide that abuse is what you prefer then this journal entry can simply be removed. You are being given an opportunity - do not throw it away.