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SoylentNews
SoyentNews is staffed by volunteers who give of their time and knowledge to provide a forum where people can discuss stories submitted by the community. We have no outside funding source.
Per our advance announcement on Saturday, May 20th, we completed our site update... one day ahead of schedule! And, even more amazingly, the community came together and we had over four dozen people subscribe since then! THANK YOU! Read on for more details.
The Site Upgrade: I am happy to report things went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, I didn't even notice the upgrade was being rolled out! I was on the site at the time, following along on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and didn't even realize the updates they were discussing were not on some support server... these updates were on the main site! (Given that I have a long background in QA/test, that's high praise indeed!) Many thanks to The Mighty Buzzard, NCommander, a surprise visit in IRC by "NC|FromTheFuture", and the rest of the SN staff waiting at the ready to help out should things go sideways.
IRC Server Updates: As mentioned in the earlier article, we are continuing apace with moving to Gentoo for our base OS across all our servers. Before we update the OS, all of the facilities and services underlying SoylentNews need be ported over. To that end, Deucalion has been working diligently to port our IRC servers to run on Gentoo and to do so in a 'multi-server' arrangement. (Behind the scenes, SoylentNews staff primarily coordinate our efforts using IRC. Should something go wrong, we do have fall-backs in place, but they are much less efficient.) We will keep you informed as to our progress.
Folding@home: Our progress has been slower and competition has been greater as we reach the higher ranks. We are currently still on track to be one of the Top 300 F@H Teams in the World by May 28th, 2017 — barely fifteen months since we started! To put this in perspective, there are over 226,270 teams behind us. Please consider helping us in the fight against many debilitating diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. (Original Announcement.)
Site Suggestions: The prior story brought a wealth of comments. Several suggestions for the site look to be both helpful and reasonably feasible to implement.
One proposed change is to provide a means for a user to set an explicit time (or a reference comment) for which comments newer than that would be flagged as *new*.
Several people shared how they had failed to notice their subscription had expired. One suggestion recommended dimming the "Site News" box which shows the site funding status, based on your current subscription status. Dim the box (user preference) when your subscription is up-to-date; display full-intensity when your subscription has expired (or you are an AC). Another suggested we add a banner at the top of the main page to keep folks appraised as to their subscription status (and a link to re-subscribe).
Separately, when viewing an article which appears in a nexus other than "The Main Page", some of the links on the page are particular to just that nexus, and not the site in general. This story, for example, is in the "Meta" nexus.
Staffing: It is my pleasure to introduce a new member of our staff, Xyem, who came on board on May 16th and has already made contributions to our code base! Please join me in welcoming him aboard.
Funding - In a word: WOW! The actual dollar amounts deposited into our accounts remain to be tabulated, but the current estimated tally, (as shown in the Beg-o-meter on the main page in the "Site News" slashbox) tells the tale. As of the time of writing this story, we have reached our base funding goal!
It bears mentioning that the base funding goal only covers our ongoing operations expenses. We have no prudent reserve should something goes sideways. Further, when SoylentNews started, there were setup expenses that were funded out-of-pocket by our founders. That was over three years ago and they have more than graciously allowed us to continue operating so far without insisting on getting repaid. Sadly, this all went down so long ago I don't recall the exact amount, but I believe it was on the order of $5K, total, that is owed two to people. It would thrill me to no end to know that they have been made whole. It is also important, as a Public Benefit Corporation that we be beholden to noone so that we can continue an an entity that provides a forum where the community can have open discussions on topics of interest. The community submits the stories, writes the comments, and moderates the comments. We are here for you.
It bears mentioning, for those who might not be aware, one is able to subscribe multiple times and/or specify a larger amount on the subscription page than the amounts offered. So far this year, NINE people have subscribed at $100.00 and one especially generous person subscribed at $250.00! Oh, and thanks to this upgrade, we have regained support for subscriptions via Bitcoin!
So, we have a stretch goal of $2000.00 which, if we were able to reach it, would allow us to make a significant step towards making the founders whole and allow SoylentNews to stand on its own.
Funding tl;dr: For tax and accounting purposes, all values are based on actual transactions to our bank account. Entirely separate is what we record internally to the site based on user's interactions with the UI, and there are some historical issues which we are addressing. The amounts appearing the "Site News" slashbox are, therefore, close approximations.
[*] We just discovered a few days ago that PayPal charges different fees depending on your local currency. For example, Alice (in America) subscribes to SoylentNews for one year with the suggested amount of $20.00 US using a credit card drawn on a US bank. Günther (from Germany) also chooses to subscribe for one year and at the suggested amount of $20.00 US. He, too uses his credit card, but it is drawn from an account denominated in Euros. You can see where this is headed, right? It appears there are additional fees charged for the conversion to $USD. See PayPal's merchant fees page for the low-down. Pay special attention to the fact that the additional fees are denominated in the user's local currency, not in $USD.
PayPal does inform us of the actual amount requested, the fees charged, and the net amount we receive. (We get similar info from Stripe, but of course, in a different format.) That information is now stored in our site database. But it wasn't always this way. In the very early days, we were mostly just trying to keep the site from crashing because the code on which this site was based had not been supported in several years and was rife with problems. As things stabilized over the ensuing months and years, we could finally bring our attention to other areas of the code. Since accounting was performed strictly by what happened through our bank account, there was little concern about what was happening internal to the site's inherited accounting code. And wouldn't you know it, the historical data had the gross subscription amount, but failed to accurately account for fees. Net amount was set to be the same as the gross amount. We are in the process of rectifying this, but it will take some time. Hence, the amounts shown in the "Site News" slashbox are an approximation.
To summarize, the site upgrade went smoothly, we have one of the top folding@home sites in the world(!), we are still working to improve the site, the community has been amazing in meeting our ongoing funding needs, and we are hoping we can start repaying our founders.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Soylentbob on Monday May 22 2017, @03:20PM (14 children)
Most definitely not. Being required to log in first to post anonymously would be a big red flag for me. I notice there are many anonymous trolls around, and getting rid of them (or make them pay) might be desirable, but there might be legitimate use-cases for people to actually post anonymously, and just having the word of the staff that logging is kept little enough to not be able to back-trace might not be sufficient. (Also, one-time visitors might have interesting comments, but for sure wouldn't want to pay for that.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @04:07PM (10 children)
Absolutely agree. For all the complaints about AC comments, it seems to me that we have a LOT of reasonable ones. Sure, they may not always be as well thought-out as logged in users, but the percentage of actual trollish behavior seems roughly equal to what you see from logged-in users. Moderation stats [soylentnews.org] from last year here said that 83.5% of mods to ACs were positive.
And there are all sorts of valid reasons for people wanting to post AC, aside from general privacy or not having/wanting an account. I personally avoid doing it, because I think it's important to be held responsible for one's posts -- I'm pretty sure I've only ever posted two AC comments here, one because I thought of a really off-color joke that I didn't really want to be associated with (but couldn't resist sharing), and one because the point I was trying to make required me to reveal some personal details I didn't want following around my account. I imagine a lot of folks have situations occasionally where the latter issue applies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @04:50PM (8 children)
See the title, AthanasiusKircher.
In my experience, people who have prodigious memories (and the concomitant verbosity) tend to have lackluster reasoning; I suppose that to such people, remembering a statement engenders the same emotional satisfaction as logically validating that statement.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @06:20PM (5 children)
See, you just gave an example of an AC comment that isn't "well-thought-out." Not because it's succinct, nor because it criticizes me personally. (In fact, if you just had commented negatively on my verbosity, I would probably mod you "+1 insightful," even with the quip about "lackluster reasoning.")
No -- the problem is that you make a logical error in assuming because I often write verbose comments that I only value verbose comments. That's very far from the case. In fact, I love a concise, insightful comment as much as anyone else. Many if not most of the comments I mod up make their point clearly but succinctly.
In fact, I'll freely admit that I have a verbosity problem. It's actually more difficult for me to express myself concisely. I can either spend a few minutes and type out a few paragraphs, or I can spend three times as long editing it down to one summary paragraph that makes the same points. But I figure my time is better spent with other things that editing for concision here. (I also try to contribute some other things to think about and discuss beyond the posted articles; feel free to ignore them.) I'm mildly embarrassed by my verbosity actually, and I would be very grateful to the site admins to reinstate some sort of comment-expansion mechanism that would hide portions of longer posts unless people want to see them.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Justin Case on Monday May 22 2017, @06:38PM (1 child)
FTFY. :)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 22 2017, @06:51PM
Thanks. Can I hire you as my editor? :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:23PM
TL;DR
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @10:52PM
Studying Strunk & White helped me there. Still struggle with verbosity, too, but it helped. It might avail you or others, too, if you've never checked it out.
One other source I'd mention, while we're on the subject of composition: Little Red Schoolhouse. It was a writing course offered at the University of Chicago when I was an undergrad. Changed my life. I think the PDFs of the materials can be found online.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:24AM
It's neither ideal nor likely intended for this purpose, but there is the option of using <spoiler> Stuff you do not want immediately displayed. </spoiler> — like this:
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday May 22 2017, @11:47PM (1 child)
Cognitive dissonate much?
How could you possibly infer this, from your past experience? You are hoist by your own petard!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:34PM
Aristarchus, you intrepid cleft explorer! Have you found any new little boys? Or, are you still banging on those near-teens?
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Monday May 22 2017, @04:56PM
Similar here. I want to be able to share my gihub-username, codewars-links etc. here, but that means I wouldn't want this account associated with comments too controversial for e.g. my workplace or stories related to my work that could, combined with my identity, damage the reputation of colleagues. So, either I maintain a second account or I post the spicy stuff anonymously.
I wouldn't mind (nor consider it ethically wrong) having two accounts for such a strictly detines use-case, but it would require careful separation and - not technically, but morally - personal integrity to not mod up your own posts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22 2017, @05:22PM (2 children)
OK there is some reasonable opposition but consider three counteroffers:
1) The population here isn't quite desktop windows users. People here are reasonably talented at sharing as much or as little as they care to. Been a long time since I set up an account here but from memory it didn't require anything interesting (no blood samples or 23andme results or fingerprint jpegs). People who are paranoid will use burner PCs or scratch vmware images for an AC sock puppet, but maybe 99% of the users are not paranoid and would be OK with "check this box to post semi-anonymously as AC" People who are really worried about the NSA are likely only lurking, or are too scared to do even that, so their attitude toward posting isn't terribly relevant.
2) I wonder if there would be a difference in comment quality between "I'm an AC from the random general public" "I'm an AC who has an account but feels like posting as AC for the politics or off color joke or whatever" "I'm an AC who has a paying account but posting for the politics or whatever again". I could see the first group as a -2, second as a +1, maybe 3rd as a +2 mod points at least for my own reading even if the sit default is zeros across the board. Like animal farm we're all AC but some AC are more AC than others. Not wedded to the AC name for three classes of people, call them gold, silver, bronze or 1st 2nd and 3rd tier AC or whatever.
3) Really strange idea: Random numbers aren't expensive nor is a database check to make sure its not real. Pay users can get a random looking sock puppet account. Not AC, not you, but kinda both. The information leak would be weird as modding "sock" would affect the main account so abusing the system would leak who is who's sock. Is there any form of useful information transfer for this mode of operation? Its possible, its interesting, but I donno if its useful.
I'm not ruling out that the current situation is optimal. But it is interesting to daydream some unusual brainstorms.
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Monday May 22 2017, @08:35PM
Generally, I think your ideas have in common that they are hard to apply for the casual reader, but more suited for some of our regulars.
We have a number of non-technical articles, and I appreciate very much the insight of the none-geek faction, although that might not be our regulars. Giving the email-address here is already a sacrifice to be made and can lead to identification, if not by the readership than still by the staff, or by any hacker getting hands onto the user-database. A new user, especially if he has something to lose (e.g. because he feels the need to share some delicate information) would be a fool to trust the staff that far. Especially since the clearname of the staff is afaik also not public, and he doesn't know if his neighbour, boss, or co-worker might have access to the user-data. The point is: As long as I post anonymously, without any registration, my privacy is in my own hands. I can use any combination of TOR, public-wifi, fake-MAC-address, VPN and whatever I feel necessary. As soon as I have to give an email-address, it gets far more complicated. (I think there are some throw-away services, but couldn't name one right now. It would be possible to ask someone else to create an account on his email-address, but that person would have full control on the account then.) The handling could be optionally supported by JavaScript on the User-Webbrowser (obviously non-obfuscated).
As AthanasiusKircher [soylentnews.org] wrote above, 83.5% of mods to ACs were positive already. And looking at some other regulars, I assume their rate is not better (EthanolFuled...); I guess most have a karma of 50, but once reached this also only means their rating is neutral on average. Therefore I don't see any immediate need.
See 1). Depending on the urgency of my privacy, this might not be an option. It still stays and falls with my trust to the staff not resolving the relation between my main-account and the sock-puppet. Laws can change, todays freedom of speech might be tomorrows hate-crime.
Hm. How about, for pseudonyms, allowing to add a public key to a database for a small fee? Anonymous could sign his messages like this one [soylentnews.org]. Anyone who wants (e.g. because he likes his style), can donate to soylentnews associated to the key-id. Upon receiving the donation, the public key is integrated into the database, and posts signed with this key are marked as "verified" with Anonymous ($key-owner) and a small link to the signature in case a reader wants to verify himself manually. That adds a lot of value to the post, because they are not convoluted with lengthy signatures, impersonators are immediately found out because the message as a sign "Invalid signature". Subscribed users could have one or two public keys free to add.
I still think we should allow the ordinary anonymous user, for free, just like we allow the normal account as well for free. There are good reasons for people not to pay, either because they seriously don't have the money to spend, or can't have a credit-card (i.e. minors), or simply because they are just casual visitors, and reading once or twice a year does not justify the expense. And frankly, I think the incremental costs per user are neglect-able compared to the fixed-costs. Therefore having an additional user who contributes good comments but no money is an overall win, because he keeps paying users at bay, too. It would be dangerous to discourage such contributors by making them feel guilty for not paying, or making them feel they had to chose between paying or leaving.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday May 22 2017, @09:01PM
I think we've had this discussion. It included autonomous sudo-random names for AC determined by IP address. Yeah, I recalled suggesting the NSA Name Generator [nsanamegenerator.com], and someone thought to translate the names to Russian and then back to English, then add numbers to it. I can't seem to find it now, but it was in one of the meta articles after an update or a call for comments.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base