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SoylentNews is people

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posted by mrpg on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-are-we? dept.

tl;dr:

This is a meta post concerning Soylentnews' background, finances, operations, staffing, story scheduling, and a conclusion. If this is not your cup-of-coffee++ (or tea, etc.), then please ignore this story — another will appear shortly.

Background:

In February of 2014, a group of ticked-off Slashdot users got together, said "Fuck Beta!", and launched an alternative web site focused on the community. It started with an out-of-date and unmaintained open source version of slashcode which was promptly forked and renamed 'Rehash'. We incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation. We experienced site outages, questions of leadership, and faced predictions of failure. Thanks to persistence, dedication, many late nights (and some very early mornings), we persevered and are still here today.

Soylentnews is a place for people to engage in discussions about topics of interest to the community. Not all topics are of interest to everyone, of course. In large part it is up to the community to submit stories — the large majority of these do get accepted to the main page. This is all the more important during the "silly season" &mash; summer in the northern hemisphere — when many people are on vacation and fewer scholarly articles are published.

Finances:

We are still an all-volunteer organization. Nobody here has made a profit off this site. In fact, Soylentnews is still in debt to the founders who put up the funds required to get us up and running. I am happy to report that we have finally made enough progress that some payback to the founders may be possible.

Here are the unaudited numbers from site subscriptions for the first half of our fiscal year (2017-01-01 through 2017-06-30):

Base goal: $3000
Stretch goal: $2000
Subscription count: 133
Gross subscription income : $3795
Net subscription income: $3645 (estimated - after payment processor fees)
Net over goal: $645

So, thanks to all you Soylentils who have donated, we have a surplus at the moment. The ultimate decision is up to the Board of Directors, but the current sense is that we should build a prudent reserve of some months' operating expenses before paying back the founders. In light of the foregoing, we are aiming for the same fundraising goals for the second half of the year... $3,000 base and $2,000 stretch goals. More in line with business norms, however, these are now being presented in the "Site News" box as quarterly goals: $1,500 base and $1,000 stretch goals, respectively.

Operations:

We've been forthright and upfront right from the start and it is our continued commitment to keep you informed of any issues in the site's operations.

To wit, we recently received a notice from our web-hosting provider, Linode, that one of our servers had been reported as having been added to a spam-blocking list. Staff immediately responded and found a misconfiguration in our link-shortening service. (It was only supposed to shorten links originating on Soylentnews.org, but was accepting links for other domains, as well.) A dump of the database was taken, non-SN sites were purged, the shortening service was updated to correctly implement the restriction to only shorten links from soylentnews.org, and Linode was informed of these actions.

We also recently experienced a problem with our slashd daemon which, among many other tasks, hands out moderation points each night. This fell over on us for a couple of nights leading to our handing out mod points manually to all users. This seems to have been rectified — please let us know if you see a recurrence.

Staff:

Lastly, one of the senior editorial staff has been on hiatus to deal with major illnesses in his family. His dedicated efforts in helping them has brought ill health upon himself, as well. I ask you to keep janrinok and his family in your thoughts and, if you are of a mind to do so, in your prayers.

Scheduling:

There have been discussions in the past as how we should best handle circumstances when there is a dearth of acceptable stories in the queue. Do we post something marginal just to fill the time or should we hold out and only publish when we have enough suitable material to publish. Past efforts and comments have suggested the majority prefer we avoid posting stories just to fill time slots. In short: quality over quantity. Further, staff cannot work 24/7/365 without a break either. We all need a break sometimes and summer is a good time to take one. In other words, we have been running with reduced staffing for the past couple of months and will continue to do so for the next few months as well.

The result? Over the past month or so, we have experimented with further spacing out stories on holidays (Independence Day in the USA) and on weekends. Instead of the usual cadence of a story appearing every 90 minutes or so, we have tried slowing to posting a story every 2 hours or even every 2.5 hours.

My perception is that this has worked okay. At least I have not noticed any complaints in the comments. It could well be that I had missed something, too. So I put this question to the community: How has the story spacing been working out?

Finally:

Please keep those story submissions coming, please continue to subscribe (you can offer more than the minimum suggested amount), and — most importantly — please keep reading and commenting! Discussion is


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  • (Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday July 11 2017, @01:30PM (5 children)

    by Kell (292) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @01:30PM (#537571)

    I rather agree with the ACs sentiment. This does not seem to be a need - as a community, we collectively seem to be pretty decent at responding to the occasional "shit, we're running low on money post".

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:52PM (2 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @02:52PM (#537599)

    How about announce that anytime fundraising falls more than X% behind the rate needed to keep the lights on for more than a month that the dreaded "beg banner" will put in an appearance. Carrot and stick.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday July 11 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday July 11 2017, @03:24PM (#537608)

      What is that feeling? It's confusing, I don't know how to word it ...
      This is what somewhat agreeing with jmorris feels like?

      I do have to point out that the quarterly goals list may be problematic, if people take yearly subscriptions and most did around the same times (Initial burst, other reminders). What does the DB say about the spread of renewal dates? I could easily see how there would be 3 months when few "annual" people would naturally contribute.

      • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday July 13 2017, @03:53PM

        by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 13 2017, @03:53PM (#538743) Journal

        That feeling is usually called "humanity" but too often we've all got it hidden away somewhere on our side of the screen while we're trying to tell or prove to someone that they're wrong or at least more wrong than oneself :P :D

        In the manual it says humanity should be run frequently but it has shit security and is subject to constant abuse which is why it is often neglected (man jaded or man cynic for more).

        Best wishes for Janrinok and his family, may they all get well as soon as possible.

        The longer intervals between stories is no problem at all to me, I haven't managed to keep up for years. I have 1562+131 unread RSS entries for SN and journals right now, and that's after removing stuff that I didn't find too interesting or important. I "blame" the world, the last five-six years have been very eventful.

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  • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:39AM (1 child)

    by RedBear (1734) on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:39AM (#537998)

    I rather agree with the ACs sentiment. This does not seem to be a need - as a community, we collectively seem to be pretty decent at responding to the occasional "shit, we're running low on money post".

    Good grief. Begging for cash every time you are about to go out of business from lack of revenue is a very poor way to run a business, and this is a business just as every non-profit is still a business. Cash is required to keep the lights on. Being purely reactionary means the founders will never get compensated for what they put in from their own pockets to start the site. We'd always be just scraping by. I don't find this attitude intelligent or acceptable. The goal should be to add a few subs every quarter in a reliable way, so that the site can get to a point where it isn't constantly struggling to survive financially. Any goal less than this is irresponsible.

    If we were at a point where there were so many subs that the site had a large, safe monetary surplus at all times, I could maybe understand this attitude of not wanting to be bothered. But so far the site is just barely surviving. This is not the time to be squeamish about doing a simple "pledge drive" a couple of times each year. It should be far less annoying than what happens every April 1st.

    What exactly is the difference between "the occasional we're low on money post" and a scheduled "if you want this ad-free site to survive, please subscribe" banner? The difference is the latter would be far more effective. Most people don't bother to read the site update posts, especially newbies who don't yet feel any connection to the site's history.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @10:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @10:25AM (#538015)

      We have the quite visible permanent side box. We also have occasional stories reminding you about donations. If considered necessary, I'd have no problems with more such stories, even if it would mean an occasional "story" that's nothing more than asking for money. Or maybe add another text(!) line below "SoylentNews is People", say, "(please don't let it starve [soylentnews.org])" . Just stay away from obnoxious banners.

      As I previously wrote I'm a subscriber. On the other hand, I never contributed a single cent to Wikipedia, not because I don't value Wikipedia as such, but because every time I get the big banner (and it only got even more obnoxious over time) I feel angered and certainly not in the mood of giving them money.

      Another option would be to provide some more incentives for subscription or other forms of donation. Maybe themes that are only available to subscribers. Maybe make certain new features available to subscribers first. Maybe make the site more configurable for subscribers (say, allow different, user-configurable background colours for posts depending on score). Maybe simply add a "top donators" hall of fame.