It is my great pleasure to announce that SoylentNews has just celebrated four years of service to the community! The very first story on the site appeared on 2014-02-12 and actually went live to everyone 2014-02-17.
It all started when a story on Slashdot made reference to its "audience" which ticked off quite a number of people. Soon after came a boycott of Slashdot — aka the "Slashcott". While this was in effect, an intrepid few people somehow managed to take a years-old, out-of-date, unsupported, open-sourced version of slashcode and somehow managed to get it up to speed to run on much more recent versions of Apache, MySql, etc. Recurring crashes and outages were the norm. (See last year's anniversary story for many more details!) Further, on July 4th, 2014 our application to become a Public Benefit Corporation was approved — this set the stage for us to be able to accept funding from the community.
By the time you read this, we will have posted 20,980 stories to the site to which over 639,907 comments have been made!
We could not have done this without all of you. You (the community) submit the stories for the site. You write the comments... and moderate them, too. You made recommendations for improvements to the site. You are SoylentNews.
It has been my privilege and honor to work with a great group of folks who have done the behind-the-scenes skunk-work which has kept this site running. It does bear mentioning that this site is entirely staffed by volunteers. Nobody here has received even a penny's worth of income from the site. Like you, we have home and work responsibilities, but in our spare time we still strive to provide an environment that is conducive to discussions of predominantly tech-related matters.
Having said all that, I must add that income to the site has dropped recently. Having let my subscription lapse in the past, I know how easy that can be. Take a moment to check your subscription status. We have on the order of 100 people who have subscribed in the past, have visited the site in the past month, and whose subscription has expired. If your subscription is up-to-date, please consider either extending it or making a gift subscription (default is to UID 6 - "mcasadevall" aka NCommander). NB the dollar amounts presented are the minimum payments required for that duration -- we'll happily accept larger amounts. =)
If financial contributions are infeasible for you, we always appreciate story submissions. Submit a link, a few paragraphs from the story, and ideally a sentence or two about what you found interesting and send it to us. Any questions, please take a look at the Submission Guidelines.
Of course, the comments are where it's at. Thoughtful, well-reasoned, well-supported comments seem to do best here. Inflammatory histrionics garner attention, and usually down-mods, too. Speaking of which, if you have good Karma, and have been registered with the site for at least a month, you are invited to participate in moderation. Unlike other sites that up-mod or down-mod to infinity, we have something more like olympic-scoring here. A comment score can vary from -1 to a +5. This is how I look at scores: -1 (total waste of your time), 0 (meh), +1 (okay), +2 (good), +3 (quite good), +4 (very good), +5 (don't miss this one!).
Related Stories
Two of SoylentNews' staff submitted stories noting our three-year anniversary; one a site summary of where we are and a summary of what we've done, and the other a detailed presentation of the very early days and how SoylentNews got started.
Three Whole Years -- Thanks to You!
Three years ago, today, SoylentNews announced its presence to the world. Much has happened along the way of our providing a place for a community to grow and to engage in discussion.
It started as a fork of five-year-old, open-sourced code which had suffered under benign neglect. Perl, Apache, MySQL, and other products had continued on. So we had to deal with dependencies on unsupported and back-level versions of code. A great deal of effort went into bringing the site up-to-date with current versions of that base. See below for mechanicjay's illuminating first-hand account of how that all got started.
[Continues...]
Thank You!
On the occasion of the site's sixth anniversary, I thought it fitting to mention some of the many ways that fellow Soylentils contribute to our community. This also seems like a good opportunity to mention some of the site's history, relate some staffing changes, mention other contributions by the SoylentNews community, and to wrap things up with some site statistics.
Please accept our thanks:
These thanks go out to all of you: my fellow members of the SoylentNews community.
To the Anonymous Cowards who post comments to our site (be they inciteful or insightful). To our registered users who not only post comments, but are also the only members who can moderate comments. No matter how long you have been here; whether you have just arrived (Welcome!) or have been with us from the very start... Thank You!
Speaking of which, thanks go to our staff who bludgeoned and duct-taped an ancient unmaintained open-sourced version of the code underpinning slashdot into some sort of basic functionality, and who have since made it the site you are enjoying today. Thanks, too, to our behind-the-scenes staff members, who keep the underlying services we depend on, running 24/7. Other staff members are more visible, like the editorial team who spend several hours every single day processing the stories that get posted to the site.
And let's not forget the members of the community who purchase subscriptions and thereby fund the operations of this site. We do have real world expenses: paying for our servers, domain registrations, and paying a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to do our taxes.
Read on past the fold for all the rest!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @01:19PM
SoylentNews has reached that tender age when we shoot the kid in the head and feast on its bones.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 19 2018, @01:34PM (4 children)
In the list of brags, assuming this is the correct URL:
https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues [github.com]
Then that's years of service, 13K+ commits, resulting in only two outstanding bugs, both wishlist, which is professionally impressive, if accurate.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @11:23PM (3 children)
Oh it's not accurate. It was last time I updated it but that was back in November or December. I only go through and sort the issues before I start on a new coding push, which will probably be in a week or two.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:16AM (2 children)
NCommander missing from the 'party'? No speech?
Anyone knows of him? Is he alright?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:22AM (1 child)
He's fine, just doesn't have a whole lot of time for coding and such lately so he's been sticking mostly to the Spiritual Leader and Bookkeeper roles.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday February 20 2018, @05:41AM
Thanks.
Wasn't worried about his coding, but more or less about his presence in the comments section.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 19 2018, @01:46PM (6 children)
Happy birthday, S/N, many happy returns, where else I can waste my time more fruitfully?
Thanks to the editorial board and site maintainers, in the first place.
And to TMB second, for his active coding and admining wizardry. And for the occasional chuckle caused by his posts - don't tell him the socialists are after his code mainly, pecuniary interests secondary, he won't believe you (understandable, dabbling even occasionally into PERL has to have consequences on mental well-being)
Hat tip for NCommander if someone has seen him. Hope he's still around, not totally lost in a Dwarf Fortress, rotting in a pile of small stout corpses.
Nice bunch you soylenters, see you around for another 100 years... maybe we'll get to outlive the green site some day - that's not the point anymore, but what soylenter in her/his full mind expects the comments to stick or even have a point?
Of course, this wouldn't be one of my serious posts without ending with a (large smile) (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by fishybell on Monday February 19 2018, @04:35PM (5 children)
I see you must be new here
(Score: 3, Touché) by hemocyanin on Monday February 19 2018, @04:55PM (4 children)
Compare UIDs to figure out who is new between you two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @07:11PM (3 children)
Heh, look at ^this sucker buying into the bullshit of UID seniority. Hate to break it to you but AC was there even before UID 100 :P
(Score: 5, Informative) by aristarchus on Monday February 19 2018, @08:50PM (2 children)
In the beginning, was the AC, and the AC was peaceful, and darkness prevailed.
Then the Founder said, "Yo, codemonkey, let there be SoylentNews!" And there was light.
The AC felt much consternation, but he fit in after a while. At least he was not Eth, most of the time.
Happy birthday, Soylentils!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)
You know that EF only posts AC if it ("it" b/c probably identifies as attack helo) has something useful to say right?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Sulla on Tuesday February 20 2018, @04:34AM
Wow rude. If you had any common sense and decency you would know that "it" is misgendering for an attack helicopter. AAFSS or AAH you INSENSITIVE CLOD
My browser says misgendering is spelled incorrectly but msgendering or miss gendering will probably also get me in trouble in Canada
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday February 19 2018, @01:55PM (7 children)
Bug: Went to the subscription page (clicked on my little star); saw the "send email when expired" and send email when low" settings, changed them both from None to EMail, clicked save, and they came back as None again.
Also, this. [soylentnews.org]
And yeah, happy birthday. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Monday February 19 2018, @04:32PM (1 child)
I just did likewise (didn't know the options were there), and it saved for me. Try again maybe?
(Score: 3, Informative) by fyngyrz on Monday February 19 2018, @08:46PM
Tried: restarting browser; logging out and logging back in; force-reload of page.
Same behavior.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday February 19 2018, @05:05PM
Few days ago I noticed something odd was going on. I had my 10 mod points but the modding drop-down wasn't appearing on any comments, on a brand new story page. It was behaving like it was an old, archived story.
You might want to do what I did, the old tried-and-true "log out and log back in" i.e. the network-based version of "turn it off and then on again". Worked like a charm. I assume in between upgrading things and moving servers around recently something tripped over itself. That's usually all that's behind that kind of interface glitch.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday February 19 2018, @08:59PM
Looked at the HTML, and within the <form>, after the options, was this:
<input type="submit" name="op" value="Save"><input type="hidden" name="userfield" value="">
...perhaps that empty, hidden userfield is causing it?
Here, I entered from this thread, by opening the subscription page in another tab with a right-click on my subscription star. Looks like the value for that field - probably "fyngyrz" or "6567" - isn't making it across.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @11:43PM
Yeah, that's on the to-do list. The nagger banner I mean. For now I'll just try manually settting you to email.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @11:45PM (1 child)
Okay, you're set to email. Not sure why it wouldn't work for you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:57PM
Thank you.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by isostatic on Monday February 19 2018, @02:14PM (12 children)
Fuck Beta
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday February 19 2018, @02:16PM (4 children)
Also, buck feta!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @02:21PM
Big Buck Nigger rapes the twitching corpse of the four-year-old white girl.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 19 2018, @02:42PM (2 children)
It doesn't seem like four years. But, yeah, buck feta. It really did look like a pile of steaming dog shit.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @03:26PM (1 child)
I really, really try not to think about the passage of time too much anymore. SoylentNews is usually a good distraction technique. Not today but for this I'll make a worthy exception!
Sure did and just look how much of the rest of the web has turned the same way. It will be so sweet when reading long texts and space efficent layouts with tight margins become trendy again. We all know it isn't just about mobiles and tablets. So many other website makeovers have provoked similar reactions from their users, partly because they're also buggy as hell and harder to use as well.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @11:48PM
Fear not, I'm sure we can manage to be just as buggy as they are eventually. There's just only so much time and martyb keeps killing them almost as fast as we write them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:09PM (6 children)
But you know there are still idiots out there that would insist that everything look like dumbed-down mobile dreck. They would likely call this site "vintage", as they do to anything else that is actually useful or makes sense.
Congratulations on ignoring such idiots. Soylentnews looks like a proper web site, works like a proper web site, and feels like a proper web site.
No lame animations, no super-heavy scripting, no over 9000 font point size, no retarded in-browser popover windows, no separating content in to small "pages" for a specific sized grease-finger swipeable toy mobile screen, and so on.
(Score: 4, Funny) by SomeGuy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:15PM
Oh, and "Don't forget to tweet this post on Twitter(TM) and like it on Facebook(TM)! They pay us each time we say that!".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @04:34PM (3 children)
Don't forget no narrow, fixed width pages on vastly wide and short screens; no cavernous hundred pixel voids of whitespace in margins; no "hamburger menus", "breadcrumb trails" or whirrly progress wheels chasing their tails; no endless piles of cross domain requests just to get the text to show up and buttons to work; no giant, irrelevant stock photos of average Joes and their families grinning like they've just injected something...
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by VanessaE on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:24PM (2 children)
And for the love of all that is good and sane, none of that weird extra-fast-smooth scrolling, either.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:11PM (1 child)
You guys are giving me such great ideas for 4/1.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:25PM
Just use the CSS to make the page slowly spin like a barbershop poll.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Monday February 19 2018, @10:40PM
I wonder if that's legitimately part of the winning formula to, well, keeping out the unwashed masses.
HackerNews is 'vintage' in the same way.
That said, even reddit has its moments. Find the right subreddits, and they're not overrun with morons.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday February 19 2018, @03:01PM (4 children)
Thanks for all the work.
This is a nerd site so how about if you'd accept cryptocurrency as donations?
Also, for the last couple of days I'm having DNS issues connecting (just) to this site, sometimes I have to retry up to 10 times:
This site can’t be reached
The webpage at https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=18/02/19/0210223&from=rss [soylentnews.org] might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
ERR_NAME_RESOLUTION_FAILED
Even posting this didn't work the first time.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @03:20PM
Silly fake nerd poser, cryptocurrency is too mainstream for nerds.
Butt your welcome to give a blowjob to MichaelDavidCrawford our resident cryptoking.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @03:34PM
"how about if you'd accept cryptocurrency as donations"
Or cryptojew corpses along with their organs as donations. The organs can be sold in the black market for money.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @11:56PM
I had the same problem a while back myself. Something was screwy with Linode regarding DNSSEC. I don't really have time to look into it at the moment but I'll see if I can wrangle NCommander, paulej72, mechanicjay, or audioguy into giving it a poke n prod.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:02AM
Missed that bit. It's been discussed more than once. The reason we don't accept it directly is because it makes the accounting go from very simple to not so much. Here shortly we're not even going to be able to accept BitCoin at all because Stripe is dropping it due to entirely unreasonable transaction fees.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @03:18PM (3 children)
Happy Birthday to you!
And Fuck Beta too!
50yl3n7n3w5 !5 7|-|3 |_337357!
Beta made me wanna spew!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Monday February 19 2018, @07:42PM (2 children)
In one of the early updates, the dbms was upgraded to support unicode. You may want to give that a try, like this:
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:06AM (1 child)
Yeah, one of these days I plan on getting the db able to store full four octet characters. Right now we encode the four octet characters to numeric html entities. I'm not in a huge rush though because that would add about a third to our database size since it's not exactly common for us to be doing much arguing in four octet unicode.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday February 20 2018, @06:41PM
For what it's worth, it probably better to store it as html entities.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @03:30PM
Congrats on 4 years!
Put the green site in /etc/hosts back then and haven't been back there since.
Fuck Beta! From one of your audience :)
(Score: 3, Touché) by requerdanos on Monday February 19 2018, @04:04PM (1 child)
After careful and thoughtful consideration, in addition to a subscription, I have decided to donate this comment as well. Comments are where it's at, as well-reasoned thought would indicate in a daily reading of the site, and of course as supported by the quote from TFS above.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Monday February 19 2018, @05:40PM
I donate comments up 10 times per day or more!
Careful and thoughtful consideration may not enter in every single one of them, however.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday February 19 2018, @04:20PM (2 children)
I'd like to just add that the subscriptions go towards paying for servers, hookers and blow (of course, without the hookers and blow)...
...someone is paying for this.
Think about it.
Subscribing with money helps SOMEONE(s) with paying for this shit. It would also be nice to help pay some of the volunteers (full disclosure: i am NOT one of the volunteers doing the HARD GRUNT WORK or anything so would see none of this money myself).
Someone is paying for expenses, so helping defray these costs would be nice! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 19 2018, @06:14PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:11AM
Just Blow nowadays, Hooker died a while back. cmn32480 is a wacky guy when it comes to naming his cats.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Appalbarry on Monday February 19 2018, @04:39PM (4 children)
On solid food, walking, toilet trained and approaching preschool.
And finally sleeps through the night.
I dread the teen years though...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday February 19 2018, @04:48PM (3 children)
Yeah, the editors will sleep til noon, party all night and sex, sex, sex.
And bondage (tie up and gag Aristarchus!) [uh oh... opened the damn can....]
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @09:31PM (2 children)
+1 just for mentioning bondage which hardly gets a mention on this site where just about everything else does ;)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 19 2018, @11:31PM (1 child)
Drupal Fires Contributor for Practicing BDSM [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:57AM
Makes sense. Using Drupal is practicing BDSM. Mostly the M part.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by callmeemo on Monday February 19 2018, @05:07PM (1 child)
Came with the beta wave, but as much a lurker as I am I waited till a little over a year ago to actually register. And here's my yearly comment!
Thank you, Soylent, and keep up the good work. Trawling the web for interesting, relevant news blows, so I'm glad to have found myself here -- and the comments here are interesting to boot!
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday February 19 2018, @08:04PM
I can't even call myself a lurker but I'll throw in my congratulations as well; happy 4th SoylentNews!. I can only encourage everybody who uses this site to make a birthday donation if they can.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @05:19PM (1 child)
Maybe today is the day gewg logs in!
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday February 19 2018, @05:46PM
That would be a sign of the Apocalypse.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Monday February 19 2018, @05:58PM
Congratulations Soylentnews!
(Score: 1) by Maddog on Monday February 19 2018, @06:27PM
Congrats on keeping it going... I'm always impressed by those who volunteer significant time to the cause. Kudos!
I lurk a lot, comment only a little (work tends to keep me busy).
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Monday February 19 2018, @07:23PM
I haven't even been taught the "secret handshake" I was promised [soylentnews.org], but it's ok.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by aiwarrior on Monday February 19 2018, @07:34PM (2 children)
This weekend I will renew.
Just one request, can we make the Disagree a mod-up? Truth without adversary is just a dogma.
I often disagree with many of the people in this forum but they influence me, immensely, in very subtle ways
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday February 19 2018, @07:49PM (1 child)
Disagree doesn't add or subtract which is unique and a pretty good compromise. You can use Underrated if the comment has already been moderated (Underrated raises the score but does not add to karma).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:16AM
Yeah, Interesting is the one I go for if I don't necessarily agree but it was well worth my time to read.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by black6host on Monday February 19 2018, @09:23PM
Yeah, that'd be me. Just rectified that situation. Living on a fixed income though it's hard to subscribe to all the sites I enjoy. I guess it's SN's time again :)
Glad you all are here. All of you.
(Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Monday February 19 2018, @09:53PM (1 child)
That's odd, I don't recall that name. I just recall Fuck Beta.
I finally know some Perl now which I didn't when SN got started, but the likes of NCommander have long since repaired and upgraded the backend code by now. Too late now perhaps, but knowing Perl, never too late for that, and it's indispensible. And we have Unicode!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:21AM
Oh we still have plenty of perl to write. Yall bastiches keep finding new and interesting bugs and wanting things like a site that's readable on a phone as well. And before you go thinking "I only know a little perl, I'm not a guru." I want you to consider that any code I don't have to write is time I can spend fishing, so all contributions are appreciated. Except FatPhil's.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 19 2018, @11:01PM
Or should that be "when"? 5th anniversary parties, anyone? Do LAN parties maybe?
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 19 2018, @11:24PM
Happy four years, you're doing a great job. And maybe, probably, you'll have eight TREMENDOUS years. Or even more. Best wishes and may you stay in power as long as it takes. So many people are saying that to me! Especially today, on the best President's Day EVER!
Thanks to those who serve my agenda and the American people. To whoever let my stories, tweets & journals go out over the airwaves. To my many LOYAL followers. And to whoever funded my subscription. You're saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don't. Maybe it was. It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.
And no thanks to the OBSTRUCTIONISTS! The VERY UNFAIR down-modders, the Spam modders, the administrators who VERY UNFAIRLY leave Spam mods in place, the story rejecters and the journal hiders. Folks, let's have a moment of silence to honor the victims. Everyone who was modded to oblivion, who got very NEGATIVE Karma and could only tweet once a day. XivLacuna, fakefuck39, maybe there are more, the obstructionists moved very strongly against them. I SALUTE them. I thank them for their service. Everyone who tweeted a VERY SPECIAL thought, got Spam modded and could never tweet again. Nobody ever asks, why is there Spam modding? It's to silence people who think a little differently, the Steve Jobs of the world, the folks who make this world so interesting & beautiful. Let's honor everyone who submitted a story, but it was REJECTED by TERRIBLE EDITORS. And our great journal writers who have been BLOCKED. Because they tried to build up their businesses. Or maybe, probably, because they're WHITE AND PROUD. Aryanx277, Jondraper88 and so many more. So many more. We salute you!
(Score: 2) by tekk on Monday February 19 2018, @11:39PM (1 child)
4 years since Beta? That doesn't sound right. I thought SN was launched in response to that, did it exist before?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:25AM
From here [fuckbeta.com]:
We're just getting old and time's going by faster.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Monday February 19 2018, @11:58PM (11 children)
Ok, maybe someone can help me out here. SN went live in Feb 2014. My first subscription ended in Aug 2015 and I'm not sure I signed up right away after making an account. Close though, so let's say I did. So in the course of 7 months (inclusive of Feb and Aug) UIDs went up to the 3000's as evidenced by mine. Four years later that number seems to only have doubled.
I can understand why, there was an exodus due to many missteps on the part of Dice. However, I'd like to know if my numbers are close or I missed something. Any staff members here who could help me out? Not important, just the submission got me thinking. Thanks!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @12:28AM (6 children)
I think most of our accounts were created in the first year, though we average one or two new ones a day last I heard from martyb. He likes digging up those kind of stats, so I'll leave it to him if I'm in need of correction.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:21AM (5 children)
Thanks for the input. Just curious, and you'd probably know this better than most... Is SN at a place where a significant number of new users could be added without increasing costs significantly? Or if so, could the ratio of subscribers to non-subscribers be lower, and still functional, due to economies of scale?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @01:24AM
"Or if not", rather. Damn, I'm glad we can't edit and sorry we can't at the same time, lol.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:52AM (3 children)
Yup. We could double in size and nobody would notice until we started seeing 5 digit uids in the comments. The underlying architecture and code are extremely durable and scalable. I imagine we could have a million or more daily users and only have to add another web frontend or three.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @04:21AM
I actually expected no less than this.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:37AM (1 child)
Funny, this is just a guess... but I think you just *might* see 5 digit UIDs if you double in size.
Of course, its not like I could use my UID to calculate that... the maths to do that must be really difficult.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 20 2018, @11:27AM
Yeah, that was kind of the point. Current max uid is 6876 belonging to bussdriver, so doubling it would put us in double digits and get noticed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @02:43AM (3 children)
As TheMightyBuzzard mentioned [soylentnews.org], I do keep tabs on these kinds of things. And, as you surmised, there was a huge, initial exodus that swelled our ranks. TFA notes the site went live on 2014-02-17. By the end of March, 2014 we just surpassed 4000 accounts. We had a few surges along the way, but we've run at a steady rate of about a new account per day. Here is the breakdown for the 392 accounts created over the past year:
So, the first line says that, in the year 2017, in the 2nd month, we added 21 new accounts.
As of the time I am writing this, we have 6878 accounts.
Hope that satisfies your curiosity!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday February 21 2018, @03:14AM (2 children)
Yes, indeed it does! Thank you very much. I thought I'd joined way early on (first 2 months) but data is king! :)
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday February 21 2018, @03:03PM (1 child)
To follow up on your question... I suspect you'd like to know when your account was actually created: 2014-03-13 13:39:19 UTC. HTH!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Wednesday February 21 2018, @04:20PM
Thank you very much! So, almost 4000 UID's taken in a month. I'm glad the growth did not continue at that rate, it gave me time to get to know a lot of the people here by posts if nothing else. Thanks again!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @02:27AM
Four-digit UID on that other site, AC here.
I used to read the green site religiously, but the Beta debacle was the last straw. Their corporate overlords badly misjudged their "audience." Trying to make it into just another jobs board, worsening UI to the point it was unusable, and cheerfully trying to ram it down everyone's throat. I participated in the boycott and have not been back more than a handful of times. Have a look at a cached version--it was even more awful than I remembered.
So good for Soylent News for sticking to their principles AND squashing bugs to make an accessible site. Thanks, volunteers.