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sillema sillema nika su
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 18 2022, @03:23PM (8 children)
Talking shit to the people submitting stories, on the other hand, is going swimmingly!
Maybe you should check the rejected pile, I heard there's some gems in there! And I keep my political flamebait in my journal already thankyouverymuch.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 18 2022, @05:32PM (7 children)
By the time we received and processed your last submission it had already been covered by the green site and was being widely shown on sites such as imgur.com, acidcows.com etc.
That is just the way it goes sometimes. Submissions are not rejected by a single editor.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 18 2022, @05:41PM
It's the deflection that bothers me, not my submission acceptance rate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 18 2022, @07:47PM (4 children)
When you reject good, high-quality stories like that one, some of hubie's stories, a story [soylentnews.org] about a serious vulnerability in some of Intel's datacenter products, a story [soylentnews.org] about the architecture of future space stations, a story [soylentnews.org] about the drawbacks of pig-human organ transplants and ethical issues, and other high quality stories, sometimes you end up with a shortage of stories in the queue. That is just the way it goes sometimes. You're right that editors don't get paid for their work. Neither do members of the community. We also provide contributions for free.
As a member of the community, whinging about a lack of stories on the front page comes across in a particularly bad way after the editors rejected many recent high-quality stories by the community. I interpret it as a lack of gratitude for the work the community has already done for free, saying it's not good enough, then requesting more free work.
I'm all for rejecting political stories, aristarchus spam, and other low-quality nonsense. But there were several good STEM-related stories that were submitted and rejected. Maybe you didn't mean to come across this way, but your comments feel like a slap in the face to the community. I suspect that might be why other people like DeathMonkey aren't reacting kindly to this either.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hubie on Wednesday May 18 2022, @11:13PM (3 children)
I've recently submitted more stories than can be reasonably published, and I'm fine with that. Any of the ones that don't get published, I'll put in my journal. I try to find stories that I think will generate some conversation or that I find to be personally interesting and that others might not know about, but I'm not bothered by whether they get published or not. You want to strike a balance with stories so that they aren't all off the NASA feed or whatever, and I know that my stories don't span the range of interests that cover this site. I would bet this need to request stories is partly my fault in that the queue had gotten fairly low at one point and I submitted a whole bunch of stories on the same day or two, and it seems the remaining ones all timed out at the same time and the queue took a bigger than normal drop. Since then I have paced out when I submit stories to keep that from happening again.
Having recently become an editor myself, I can fully appreciate being on the other side of the subs queue. Being an editor seems to be a lot like being a sports referee in that you do the best that you can and people are going to be upset with you. It is a job, again like a referee I suppose, where you are much more prone to hear the complaints than the accolades, even if the accolades are out there. There are only a few editors and we get on when we can, look at the status of the release queue and what is currently sitting there. There's a number of factors that go into how something gets turned into a story, which are all mainly practical. I'll comment on a few that go into my thinking, which again is based only upon my own very limited experience and I'm sure the other editors have their own approach. If the release queue is filled going out a decent amount into the future, like more than a day ahead, there isn't a lot of need for me to jump in and get more stories into the release queue, so I'll check back in later. Some stories are a wall of text, with 3000 words or more in it, and you realize that will take a good bit of effort to distill it down, so it may or may not be high on the list of contenders to put into submission. There are some that are the opposite, which are basically only a single URL pointing to a story, which would take a bit of effort. Some come in from experienced submitters or maybe even former editors, and those are usually "copy-ready" and ready to release. Those are the easiest to get in the queue. I actually enjoy distilling down the long stories or building up the single story links, but I need to set time aside to do that and sometimes I get to it and sometimes not. If you submit a story and it gets rejected, the rejection notice even invites you to resubmit it if you want. I had a few stories rejected recently for being on the queue too long, but I'm not resubmitting them because I will just find new ones to submit in their place.
I will comment on that pig-human organ story you mentioned as an example. I looked at that and I thought that was an interesting opinion piece, but it was very long, and if I recall, it made many points in the argument that were something like one per paragraph. To me that looked like something that would have taken a lot of effort to cut it down for a summary, probably with me needing to write a summary paragraph or two to pull in all those individual points to keep the summary concise. If somebody else had done that kind of distillation before it was submitted, it would have had a much better chance of getting selected, so that's an example of if there are a decent number of stories already in the queue, there's not a lot of motivation for a volunteer to spend a lot of effort getting that particular story into shape even though it can be an interesting topic.
It may not be obvious, but there is no specific direction given to editors other than that the stories they release should fit the site. There is no "we need more Elon Musk stories!" or anything. I can tell you that the job is taken seriously. The editors keep an eye on the other editors, and we strive for at least one other editor to review what goes out. I seconded the Breitbart/Musk/Twitter story, and I am aware of the reputation Brietbart has, though I had never been to the site personally. The reason I seconded the story was that it was a topic that was deemed of interest for the site, it was properly formatted and presented, and I read the story and it was a straight-up presentation of what it said it was about (no gratuitous use of incendiary words like "woke," "canceled," or blaming "the left" for anything). If this was my day job, maybe I would have set up a meeting with the other editors to discuss it, or searched the web to find the same or similar story from another outlet and rewrite the submission. The only strike against it I saw was the website it was coming from, but that's a tricky topic, I think. We don't have approved or banned source lists, and I don't think we'd want them. We've had science stories from Chinese media, which I don't consider to be bastions of truth and independence, and a number of things come in from RT and Al Jazeera, whom I know are not favorites of some people around here either. If there were two stories in the queue with the same story and one of them from Breitbart, I personally would probably go with the alternative as lead and add a "See Also" link to the former, but that wasn't the case there, I saw no obvious problems with the story, so I approved it and moved on and figured any issues would end up being pointed out in the discussions.
I apologize for this rambling on so long. I really do try to be a person of few words. But I stepped forward to help as editor when martyb had to step down because I really value this site and community here and I wanted to do my part. I have tremendous respect for people like janrinok and the time and effort they put in. You know janrinok because he puts himself out here like this and responds to direct criticism and becomes a face of the site (as others like NCommander or TMB were before), but there are also a lot of other people who you don't hear much from because they quietly do their thing to keep things rolling. Remember, the editors can only work with the stories that are in the queue at the time they need to use the queue. If the queue is low, pointing out there were interesting stories there yesterday doesn't do anything about where the queue is now. If you think he sounds ungrateful (which I would argue very strongly that he is not), just keep in mind where he is coming from as well and how some of the feedback on editing from some drifts closer to unwarranted personal acquisitions ("you are biased!", "you are trying to silence my viewpoint!", "you are incompetent!"). Like volunteering to referee a kids match and catching abuse from the parents on the sideline, it can wear on you and sometimes you may laugh or shake it off, and sometimes it may annoy you.
The very last thing before I get off my soapbox, if you like this site, please find some way to support it, whether it be volunteering as an editor or some other position of support, or by throwing some money into the till from time to time, or by occasionally submitting some stories that would generate some interesting conversations, or if nothing else, just positively engage in the discussions themselves and add your viewpoint or ask a question or whatever. Do it as AC if you aren't comfortable with using an account. Have a good technical throw down on whatever topic is your specialty. The smart, the silly, the absurd, these are the reasons I like coming here every day.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2022, @12:13AM (2 children)
If you're an editor, you can see hashes, and know that I'm the same AC you replied to.
You're right, SN staff do receive a lot of nasty comments, particularly from a small subset of users. One of these users is banned but continues to actively disrupt the site as much as possible. I generally agree with his political views but find his behavior abhorrent and believe he deserves his ban. I will say that I am not personally making such comments.
With respect to the Breitbart story, the specific article probably was fine. Bias can be an issue, but the bigger issue with that specific source is its long history of failed fact checks. Janrinok said that the content of that article could be corroborated elsewhere, and I believe him. Generally speaking, Breitbart is a lousy source because of its poor fact check record. Where I disagreed with janrinok's defense of Brietbart was his comparison to other sources. NPR is a highly credible source with a clean fact check record, and doesn't have that much of a left bias. CNN's TV programming is highly biased and has a lousy fact check record. However, news articles on CNN.com do have good fact check records. There's really no comparison between those sources and Breitbart. WSWS might be the best comparison, but it has a better fact check record than Breitbart, at least according to the fact checking I found. The specific article almost certainly wasn't a problem, but it's typically not a trustworthy source. The specific criticism seemed unwarranted to me, but it's generally a bad source. There are sites that rate the credibility of sources, so it's fairly easy to check on this and get a good idea of whether a source is likely to be good. Look up Media Bias/Fact Check and you can find evaluations of a large number of sources.
As for being limited to stories that are in the queue, there is a solution to that. Stories that aren't time-sensitive and might be interesting a few weeks later can be held in the queue. That was done with COVID stories, which were then merged into a single story instead of posting each one individually. That's why the text is there on the submission queue page. Perhaps the Intel vulnerability story would be less newsworthy in 2-3 weeks, but the story about pig organ transplants doesn't have the same time-sensitive nature.
I trust you that janrinok isn't actually ungrateful, but many of his recent comments have come across in a very bad way. I thought about replying to the Breitbart argument, and I read those comments. I didn't want to pile on, and didn't think my comments would be helpful there. I've tried to exercise restraint in my criticism, and I don't take posting such criticism lightly.
I have contributed money to the site, including as recently as a few months ago. I don't remember exactly when I subscribed most recently, but I'm pretty sure that it's counted in the current funding cycle on the front page. If not, it would have been last fall, shortly before the near year. It hasn't been the only time I've given SN money, either. I'm sure there are users who contribute more, but I do the best I can given my financial situation.
But like I said, just as staff members work for free, the community also works for free, and we contribute our time and money as we are able. We do the best we can in terms of subscribing, submitting stories, moderating, and posting worthwhile comments. When someone contributes a story, even if they haven't edited it, and just submit the entire article via IRC, they're genuinely trying to help the site. It might be more work if it's a long block of text, but that user is genuinely trying to make a useful contribution. Perhaps there isn't time to edit it in the short term, but if it's not time-sensitive, it could be held for a time when the queue is low and there's time to edit the story. Most of your community members are doing the best they can, I assure you. If more people had the time available to them to edit their submitted stories carefully or actually become editors or work elsewhere on the staff, I suspect they would have done so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Thursday May 19 2022, @02:50AM (1 child)
I appreciate your responding back. With my response I wanted to give people a general idea what goes on with the editing process. Back in the Slashdot days I used to contribute a story on occasion and would have them rejected, so I stopped suggesting any (and in those late 90s early 2000s they weren't hurting for stories). When SN opened for business, I pretty quickly submitted a story and it was very quickly rejected (looking back on it, it was an interesting (to me, at least) topic with a pretty poor lead-in written by me with an implied assumption that people would follow the link and read the story). My initial response was similar to some of the comments I've seen here ("they said they wanted help, so I sent in a submission and it was rejected, so I said forget it"), but after I got over that initial feeling of rejection, my next ten or so submissions were taken. I just wanted to let people know that it happens, and maybe they're right in that there's not a great reason it didn't get picked up, but don't let that discourage submitting. The story topics themselves aren't what's the most interesting part to me and I easily find a lot of these stories on my own. What I like, for instance, is there will be something like one of takyon's hardware/processor release update stories, and I've stopped seriously following hardware quite a while ago so outside of this site I wouldn't have even read the whole headline before I moved on to something else, but here I will click in and end up coming away with three suggested alternatives for the Raspberry Pi I can't buy, and which alternative is best for running a home multimedia setup or something.
I hope my previous comment didn't come off sounding like a complaint that the submitters aren't doing their job. I think we all appreciate the stories ending up in the queue in any form and the editors will do the best job they can on them. I've looked at a story and thought "that'll take a lot of work and I don't have time for that now" only to come back later to find one of the other editors took care of it. I'll just reiterate to any who are interested that all my interactions with the editors, including a lot of training time, has been nothing but class and that they take their roles seriously.
(Score: 1) by Ironrose on Sunday May 22 2022, @06:55AM
hubie might be a keeper. Only thing, do not interact with soylentils. This was TMB's mistake, and now janrinok's. We want transparency, not whining.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bart9h on Wednesday May 18 2022, @08:32PM
Does it matter if the story was covered by the green site? I, for one, completely stopped going there a short while after this site was running.