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This is the post I never thought I would have to make. I am also writing this post on behalf of SoylentNews PBC, the legal owner of SoylentNews, and not as a member of the staff or the community.
SoylentNews is going to shut down operations on June 30th.
This wasn't an easy decision to come to, and it's ultimately the culmination of a lot of factors, some which were in my control, and some that weren't. A large part boils down to critical maintenance to the site not properly being performed for a very long time. To pay back the mountain of technical debt we've built up, it would require relaunching the site from scratch.
I'll discuss this more in depth below, but I can't personally justify the time any more, especially due to the negative impact that SN is having on my personal life.
Before we shut down, at least for the foreseeable future, I'm going to outline the situation as I see it, my own personal responsibility, and what happens next.
Technical Reasons
Let's start with the technical nitty gritty. SoylentNews was, in November 2022, at the point where it was about to have a fatal database crash. The database cluster was wedged in an invalid state. Backups weren't properly being done. As it was, we lost several days of postings after a hard crash. On top of that, we had multiple public facing machines running outdated versions of CentOS and Ubuntu running net facing services.
There's two distinct problems here, both of which have to be addressed.
The first is the site itself, and specifically what we can or can't do with it. At this point, rehash, the backend that runs SoylentNews, is nearly 30 years old, and it was written in what can be generously described as angry and especially esoteric Perl. Perl was already going extinct when we launched in 2014, and at this point is mostly relegated to legacy backend code which is slowly but surely disappearing.
Complicating matters is that rehash is specifically tied into Apache 2.2 via mod_perl, a version that is well past end of life and significantly out of date. While the website is well sandboxed and battle hardened, running obsolete code on the public Internet is not a smart move especially when combined with many of the other factors listed below.
To just keep up with patched software, we would either need to port the site to Apache 2.4 and a recent version of mod_perl, or break the Apache dependency with an alternative like FastCGI. This would also require updating the base version of Perl5 to something more recent and hoping all the necessary CPAN modules have either been updated, or can be reasonably replaced, which is doubtful at best
As the person who actually did the base port of rehash from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2, this is a massive project regardless of which way we would go. This would require a full rebuild of the /srv/soylentnews.org directory which alone could easily take weeks or months of work. That doesn't take into account all the other bits of infrastructure and software that would need to be reworked, rebuilt, or replaced.
When we migrated to rehash, we had more staff who could QA the site and quite a bit went wrong trying to do that relatively simpler migration.
As we are now?
I don't see how it's possible anymore.
After everything that has played out, I'm having trouble working up sufficient motivation to work on the site and bring it up to a serviceable state when combined with the amount of friction I've experienced just getting us here.
I had hoped to hire outside help or at least raise enough through livestreaming other SN related work to offset the costs. At this point though I believe that is a lost cause as well. If this was the only major problem, it would be bad enough. Unfortunately, it's just the tip of a very large and very ugly iceberg.
The deeper problem is that everything else has bitrotted over time.
SN's backend is something of a jigsaw puzzle which is documented in one of three places: on the site, on the internal technical wiki (which is currently down), and on the old public facing wiki which is also down. None of that documentation was or is consistent with the actual state of reality, and quite a few parts, like the MySQL cluster, were somewhat esoteric.
In practice, if you want to know how anything was plugged into anything, it was a matter of pulling cables and figuring out what broke. It also doesn't help that the backend is notoriously noisy. That makes it hard to sort out real errors from the chaff. This was a large part of why the Zoo plugin, which does the sidebars, was broken for most of December. It also didn't help that we had three different OSes (Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo) which complicated system administration.
Furthermore, there have been major disagreements among the sysops on actually doing any major upgrades. Someone would complain that we should do something. There would be a lot of arguments about it. In most cases, nothing got done. Because of this ongoing friction, it became increasingly more common for no one to install updates. This is why we never upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 back in 2016. I eventually said we should just go to Gentoo, since there was a widespread belief that upgrading the distribution would break everything. This suggestion ultimately just ended up with only our development machine on Gentoo, and that too was woefully out of date.
When I finally checked in in November 2022, after two years, the site had finally reached a breaking point. I talked with some people in #chillax, and I got a state of affairs from mechanicjay, and I decided to do what should have been done long ago.
Clean house.
I didn't ask for permission. I didn't wait for people to answer DMs. I just did it because we had done this go around one too many times in the past.
I will let the community decide if I was justified or not in doing so.
A lot of this involved installing over a decade of upgrades. Setting up and configuring firewalls and removing unneeded services. Backing up and decommissioning old boxes. Given the extended period of time without updates, you can imagine that I at least have some concern at the number of potentially vulnerable backend services that were exposed to the Internet.
I found no evidence of breach, but given the period of time, and general lack of maintenance, I am at best uneasy.
I could have done better.
In the end, I finally installed almost a decade of upgrades in December of 2022, but that only postponed the inevitable. I also trimmed the number of machines and services in an effort to be at least slightly more secure on the Internet. However, ultimately, without a way to bring in new users, SN is slowly going to attrition itself to death.
Some might argue that I simply let it be, or should have let it be in November, but I really did hope that I could pull it out of this death spiral. Over the last few months, it has become clear that the only way work is going to be done is if I do it or if a miracle happens.
The problem is: as part-owner, where do you go from here?
There's also the matter of liability.
Ultimately speaking, if something happened with SN, Matt and I would be jointly responsible since our names are on the legal documents. I tried to find someone to take my place, and failed. I am legally attached to something that is barely being maintained, and frankly, I can't carry this cross any further.
My Role In This Outcome
I guess this falls down to a lot of my personal responsibility. While SN is at its heart a community project, it is also a business, one for which I have served as its president for its entire life. I really had no idea what I was doing when we started, and this had long term effects on SN as a whole. Part of this was that we only had subscriptions as a revenue stream.
Without a more solid revenue stream, the PBC was essentially hostage to the small trickle of money subscriptions. In a volunteer organization, it's a matter of "who shows up to do the work" dictating the direction of the site.
In the early days this wasn't a problem, I had plenty of free time, and people were often willing to help. That's largely how the site got ported to Apache 2, and why we were able to stay up for more than a year. Meanwhile, solving UTF-8 support was one of TMB's and MartyB's projects. As the early enthusiasm died off and staff began to leave, essential tasks were becoming less and less likely to be done.
That ultimately created a negative feedback loop in which technical debt continued to pile up.
SoylentNews also doesn't have a growing community, partially because we have very few inbound links, and are fairly low in search results. In our early days, folks followed us from Slashdot, and some viral posts on places like reddit and HackerNew did help to build the community, but this has largely evaporated.
Growth of some sort is important because communities have a natural attrition rate. People leave, die, or otherwise go inactive. Year over year, the community has shrunk, primarily because we don't bring in a lot of new blood.
Furthermore, the Internet as a whole has changed. When we started, GamerGate was yet to happen. The world couldn't even imagine the rise of the Trump presidency. In theory, the moderation system should have been able to handle disinformation, but the mod system requires a certain critical mass to work. Slashdot's mod system could only work as it does on a large community, and we found at least one critical flaw with its base assumption:
People rarely if ever downvote.
This, combined with ineffective anti-spam meant that it was relatively easy to game the system, and allowing bad actors outweighed good. My perception was SN's signal to noise ratio was becoming more noise year over year, and there were many conversations on this, which ultimately went nowhere. For me, personally, it finally reached a head with COVID. The amount of medical misinformation and similar such disinformation got to the point that I felt we needed to drastically overhaul the site.
This lead to some very bitter arguments.
Ultimately, I was overruled, and I attempted to resign after bitter arguments in the staff channel. My resignation was written, but ultimately never posted, and I left on bad terms with the staff at the time. Consequently, I remained President of the PBC. At that time, I requested Matt remove me from the position, but we never formalized this, primarily because there was no one to replace me. It should also be noted that we were missing a secretary and unable to find a replacement after mrcoolbp withdrew due to personal life reasons.
I could have, and perhaps should have, forced the issue then, but I could still remember how the domain was hijacked in our early days, and didn't want this to be a case of sour grapes. I also had a reasonable belief that SN would still be maintained by the active staff. I turned my attention towards my other endeavors such as my YouTube channel and tried to put it behind me.
Two years passed.
That was not the end of the infighting, and that ultimately led up to TMB leaving in 2021. The site was now running with the bare minimum of maintenance mechanicjay supported by audioguy could give it with no hope of a long term solution in sight. Had I not checked in, and decided to do emergency maintenance, the odds are that it would have been a matter of weeks or months before a severe system crash would have irreparably corrupted the database.
As it was, we had two hard crashes that lost weeks of posts. There were no functioning backups that I could find.
I did two emergency rounds of maintenance that saw the backend database replaced with a standard vanilla MySQL instance and drastically downsized the number of machines, cutting the monthly bill more than half.
However, it's become clear to me that this was too little, too late.
Many of the issues that were present when I resigned were still here. At the end of the day, I found myself caught between my responsibility towards my site and my own frustrations for what it had become. This combined with a personal disaster in my life starting in December meant that I had very little time for SN.
This was also combined with the dawning realization of how difficult it would be to get new sysops and devs to replace myself and those that had left. While I was willing at least to put some of the legwork in, no one really wanted to sit down and help with the business side of things. It felt like everyone else decided we should all hum loudly. While we had some volunteers for sysops, my lack of time, combined with the relatively arcane nature of our backend mostly nothing being done.
I honestly don't know if there was one specific misstep that led to this outcome. However, the need for sites like Slashdot and SoylentNews was already passing when we launched. Slashdot is a shell of itself, and most of the role of news aggregator is taken up with sites like reddit and HackerNews. The need for something like SN has largely disappeared.
That means for SN to exist, it has to exist for itself, and well, that's the rub of it. SN stopped being maintained while I was absent. It wasn't being well maintained well before that point. It's not going to be maintained now simply because I can't justify the time and effort anymore and no one else is putting time or effort into this either.
Suggestions like running ads to try and pay for some of the maintenance costs have either been rejected or at least treated with enough skepticism that makes me doubtful it would help.
Finally, I'm tired of fighting over every single issue which in the end leads to nothing being done and everyone just walking away unhappy.
What Would Have Been Needed To Save SN?
As before, I'll break this into two sections, involving the technical, and the non-technical. To summarize, it essentially required people to take responsibility and pledge to fix it as well as relieve me from my position from the PBC.
Technically speaking, we'd need to be able to refresh the site infrastructure as well as the site's backend dependencies. You're essentially dealing with a legacy Linux install that has been upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 22.04 that at least a dozen of sysops have worked on.
To reduce site admin burden, we'd probably end up migrating email, and most services beside IRC and the website to third party hosting providers. This would have solved many of the email and registration issues that have plagued the site since GMail made their spam barriers extremely hostile to external SMTP hosted mail.
We would also need a development environment that properly tracked with production to allow changes to be done incrementally and rolled back, something that was a continuous problem throughout every major site upgrade. This would let us test each aspect of the overhaul and deploy it piecemeal instead of having the site be broken for weeks or months as happened with the much smaller November upgrade.
Ideally, we would use an automation deployment solution such as GitHub Actions which would make sure the machine state was always in sync with the build files, and allow for easy and rapid deployment of backend patches and security updates.
With this all done, it would have allowed site maintenance to easily be done en masse to all machines and without risk of the site breaking in new and arcane ways.
I did talk to Matt about the possibility of either fundraising or selling stock in an effort to finance it.
I also made multiple efforts to find someone who was willing to seriously take over the site and take over the PBC. There were a few email discussions that went ultimately nowhere.
What it boils down to is that to do anything with the site, I would have to put in legwork that, after everything that has been said and done, I am no longer willing to do nor is anyone truly stepping in to try and take over for me.
It doesn't help that nearly every single thing I've laid out here was shot down by at least one other member of staff while at the same time no realistic alternatives were worked on or even proposed.
What Happens Now?
At this point, we need to get the expenses of the PBC to zero. We have about $1,500 USD in the bank, most of which will go to handle our shutdown fees. I want to give a window for people to exchange contact info and write goodbyes. Subscriptions will be disabled on the site by time this post goes live. SN doesn't have a robust infrastructure to process refunds, and TMB wrote most of the code involving that. I am discussing with Matt what our options here are, but in the worst case scenario, any leftover will be donated to the EFF.
A final backup of the VMs and site database will be taken and soylentnews.org will be redirected to a static page. Everything representing the site be archived and taken offline. I'm going to hold the domain name and backups in trust in the hope that circumstances in the future may allow for the site to return in some form.
I wish I did not need to say such a thing might happen, but all things must end.
Until we meet again, ~ NCommander
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 22 2023, @06:11PM (10 children)
Some modest proposals, probably about to get shot down, but WTF here it goes:
Unban them all for the last X where X is a day, week, maybe whatever is left, etc. I miss ethanolfueled, aristarchus, a couple of the other oldtimers. I'm not part of the cabal and have no idea what happened to them (well, not in detail...) but I assume they got banned when I wasn't looking. Might have even deserved it, probably did. But invite everyone to the last homecoming while we still can.
Probably less controversial: Anyone die other than MDC? I miss MDC no sarcasm. Should have some kind of memorial post or moment of silence or something for those who now shitpost far from home out in the great beyond.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Monday May 22 2023, @06:48PM (1 child)
Uh, I thought ethanolfueled never was permabanned as it were? Just couldn't keep civil and so always got modded into oblivion. Which wasn't what he wanted.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @06:52PM
As near as I could sus, Ethanol_fueled is in prison for anti-semitic violence in San Diego. Not banned, because janrinok supports anti-semitism. Mostly.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Common Joe on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:42AM
I disagree. Let's have a nice ride into the sunset instead going down in a blaze of what we had in the not too distant past. What's done is done.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:38AM (6 children)
Only one account has ever been permabanned. All the other accounts that you are thinking of still exist today - they have simply moved on.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @11:56PM (5 children)
Except that one, the one that burns janrinok a new hole of enlightenment. Never will he allow the unnamed one to return, he will ban him again, or anyone who sounds like him. In other words, anyone with education and knowledge who therefore has progressive views, will be banned, re-banned, and banned some more. I love how Ncommander stuck to the technical issues, ignoring the clash of personalities that some call politics.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 24 2023, @06:26AM
And your response is another attempt to create a whole bunch of sock puppets with the names of "Fuck You Niggers 74 - 105".
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @09:21AM (3 children)
"therefore has progressive views, will be banned, re-banned, and banned some more. "
Oh, Yeah SN was a hot bed of conservatism.<sarcasm>
I was sympathetic until: "The world couldn't even imagine the rise of the Trump presidency. "
Oh, well, fuck this site. Another bunch of libtards failing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @06:20PM (2 children)
libtard == retarded libertarian? Tautology.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday May 26 2023, @10:28AM (1 child)
Or maybe "tardy librarian"? They always seem to be late getting the books out on the shelf.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2023, @09:11PM
And I got downmodded for even trying to talk about taking horse de-wormer! Right wing stupidity gets censored here.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday May 22 2023, @06:37PM (3 children)
I posted in janrinok's thread, but I noticed someone mentioned refund processing.
I have not re-reviewed the Ts&Cs*, but for the avoidance of doubt, I choose to waive any refund I might be entitled to. Put it in the staff entertainment/provisions fund.
*I sincerely hope you are not forced to refund part-used (annual) subscriptions. That's a hassle you could do without.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @08:45PM
No refunds wanted here (it's been awhile since I donated anyway).
Saw one comment that any leftover funds go to EFF, that certainly has my vote.
I wonder if EFF would possibly be interested in picking up and somehow owning/managing SN -- they are (imo) "keeping the faith" with a set of values I can agree with.
(Score: 1) by Aussie on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:02AM
I'm another who doesn't require a refund, just grateful for the time we had SN, buy a coffee or 2.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday May 23 2023, @04:57PM
I likewise don't want or expect a refund. In fact, I'd prefer to make an additional contribution in thanks, and to slightly offset the founders' losses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Monday May 22 2023, @06:50PM
Well, this is disappointing. I personally view soylentnews as more of a continuation of the original slashdot than the current slashdot itself.
Also, one of the few web sites that still works well on Windows 95 with Retrozilla.
Where am I going to bitch about stupid smartphones now? :P
I'm very disappointed that these technical dependencies can't be made to work. It used to be that Linux was all about backwards compatibility. But these days it has to be about throwing everything away and buying all new stuff.
I wish I had time to derp through all that code myself, but I hardly have time to fart these days. (if AIs are so freaking powerful these days then you should just have an AI write it for you. ha ha. ug. barf.).
I do hope that at least a static version of the site can be made available at some point.
There is not as much nerdy tech news anywhere at all any more. If it isn't about buying dresses using smartphones these days then no one cares.
Sigh. One less good thing on this planet. Have I mentioned, I hate this planet?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EJ on Monday May 22 2023, @07:39PM (10 children)
If you want to create a site that isn't a complete shitshow, then you need to introduce an AI bot that immediately deletes and bans all political opinions and other such bullshit.
If it isn't about some really cool science or tech, then it isn't worth talking about.
The world doesn't need any racist bullshit, "woke" bullshit, or any other nonsense. If you want to push your conservativeliberalindepententvegancarnivore narrative, there's a place waiting for you on Reddit.
(Score: 5, Touché) by tizan on Monday May 22 2023, @07:58PM (5 children)
Sadly everything technical is political now.
Science, history is considered political whether you like it or not
You know you say that exposure to benzene is shown to cause cancer...will be labelled anti-labor or anti-capitalist and what not.
Good luck to AI to filter the crap, it is not yet a super human intelligence....right now it can be as good as the training data.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Monday May 22 2023, @11:04PM (2 children)
Super human intelligence was just achieved yesterday by a potato.
It's trivial for AI to filter out the bullshit. If a human typed it, it's bullshit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:55AM (1 child)
I used to have a link to a relevant Dilbert cartoon, until Scott Adams went over-ripe.
Sigh.
(Score: 3, Touché) by kazzie on Tuesday May 23 2023, @04:58PM
This turn of affairs seems overwhelmingly apt for our current situation.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Common Joe on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:47AM (1 child)
It's been political for many decades. Long before SoylentNews existed, I used to send out links to specific stories on Slashdot to a group of people to show them the dark road we were going down. In other words, technology news has been highly political for a very long time -- long before Assange and Snowden. And there are history buffs which can probably do a good job of showing that the space race, WW2, WW1, and the civil war were also political even when you looked at it from a technical point of view. For better and worse, politics slithers its tentacles into everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:41PM
Because politics is how humans run large organized groups we call society. Politics is part of being human, thus it us part of everything we do. Few topics are scientifically pure enough to get away from the politics side, and when society is having such political problems as Earth post 2000 well yer gonna have a lot if political talk.
What communities should do is set guidelines for what is acceptable, but that means some jerks are going to have to suffer consequences. Goes against all the libertarian ideals, but they forget that freedom of speech simoly means the government can't imprison you for speech. No other rules, no guaranteed platform, and we've seen what happens without consequences, the bad actors drive away others.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @08:48PM
*WOOOOOSH*
why is it always the bigots that try and play enlightened centrists? what a crock of shit as evidenced by putting quotes around "woke" but hey nice attempt
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 23 2023, @12:29PM (2 children)
Just one problem: Define what it is you're looking for. A modbot that cuts out anything you personally find inappropriate is, well, arbitrary and capricious at best.
And it's not like science and tech discussions are free from often-political Holy Wars: Windows vs Linux vs BSD. Emacs vs vim vs nano vs an IDE. rpm vs dpkg. Systemd vs anything else. SpaceX vs government space programs. Compilers vs interpreters. etc etc etc
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by EJ on Tuesday May 23 2023, @10:55PM (1 child)
Everything I don't like. Stop liking what I don't like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @07:03PM
It may sound like aristarchus, it might look like aristarchus, and it could smell like aristarchus, but don't let that fool you, it really is aristarchus.
aristarchus
[ref: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162471-he-may-look-like-an-idiot-and-talk-like-an [goodreads.com] ]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday May 22 2023, @08:02PM (1 child)
Here is my hope:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
:(
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:51AM
Nice quote. And unfortunately, appropriate.
(Score: 2) by timbim on Monday May 22 2023, @08:13PM (2 children)
Bro just rebuild it from the ground up in the most simple way possible. It needs to look like slashdot though. This isn't over!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @09:51PM (1 child)
Hanging over the precipice by their earlobes, buzzards circle above, alligators gather below, and all the while smothering in a swarm of killer wasps:
Now, here's my plan...
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:58AM
...end of the original The Italian Job.
Someone ran a competition on how the gang could get out of the situation they were in. There were some inspired solutions...
Here's hoping for SN...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DarkMorph on Monday May 22 2023, @08:19PM
This had been my primary news site like so many others here. Although I rarely posted comments, only writing when I felt there was something of merit to contribute, I read posts beneath the articles far more heavily than the articles themselves. This had always sat at the very top of my RSS feed client as well.
We were lucky that the FuckBeta incident had occurred at all, leading to the creation of this community. You all have been nothing short of fascinating and inspiring; there may never be a site like this again, if it truly vanishes with no successor or revival. SN was even an inspiration for me to finally shake off the shame of never having learned Perl. It's become one of the most powerful tools for me at work even, and its knowledge enriches the quality of the PHP I write, which is my primary programming language for web applications.
I can only wish someone will step up to take the reigns; to lose SN would be a travesty.
Thank you NCommander and all the editing staff!!! I have been here since the very beginning and nothing can change the fact that I had a 3-digit UID, for those of us that remember caring about something meaningless such as that. :)
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Monday May 22 2023, @08:30PM (3 children)
I dropped this as a submission over on /.
https://slashdot.org/submission/17230983/-spin-off-soylentnews-will-shut-down-on-june-30th [slashdot.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @08:53PM
For anyone counting, it's currently 2nd from the top of the list at https://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org]
Thanks for sending out the "SOS"!
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:54AM
I think this was appropriate. Thank you.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:09PM
A good move, thanks.
Even better would be putting the word out over there if/when a plan on SN's next move has formed: I was months late finding out about this site when it launched in the days of slashcott: it was a kind person with a beacon who came back there to point people over here.
Let's all make sure we don't leave people lost during this next transition.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @09:32PM (3 children)
of the censorfest.
To those who have done it: maybe you believe you have done a good job for some right (for you) reasons. Maybe not. But either way, your actions result in destruction. Not creation, not even preservation.
There are many things out there, things that together make our civilization. And presently there are many people just like you, undoing those things.
Hope this notion will keep you awake some nights.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @12:15AM (2 children)
Some people are so convinced of their righteousness, they never feel any remorse for the evil they accomplish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @04:37AM (1 child)
Are you one of those people?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @08:37PM
Are you "woke" or a sleeping fascist?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Monday May 22 2023, @09:54PM
What can I say? Thanks everyone, especially the people who have been working hard to keep this site going of course, but also thanks to every participant.
I still have some stories to tell. Some aren't even finished yet, like my treasure hunt which I hope will finally be successful this summer. Being the only person in the world, that I know of, to have solved that puzzle, feels pretty special. I was planning on writing the outcome in my journal, later this year.
I have only commented about 10% of the times that I felt like commenting, I'm sure the introverts among you can relate.
Anyway, thanks again everyone. I hope we'll meet again somewhere.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday May 22 2023, @10:53PM
The spirit that drove the exodus of the Soylentils is not dead. The hardwork put into this site has fostered a community that has been equal parts angry rambling mentally sick person under a bridge and beloved family. I hope we can make it carry on - I'll see what resources I can marshal to help. But if it all goes away, the memories will stay and I will look for you all somewhere else when the tide comes in.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by PhilSalkie on Monday May 22 2023, @11:02PM
Thank you for all the behind-the-scenes work that's gone into making this site a daily visit.
If there's a follow-on site that's not just some sub-Reddit, I'll likely settle in there - this has been a good source of interesting tidbits over the years.
Your efforts are appreciated - as are the efforts of everyone who's worked and written and moderated to make SN a worthwhile site.
Your well-deserved break is, indeed, well-deserved.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snotnose on Monday May 22 2023, @11:11PM (24 children)
I wish I had the financial and/or technical resources to help the site out, it's probably my favorite website I visit daily (except maybe pornhub, but that's a different, uh, nevermind).
I'm sad but not really surprised. I look at the subs queue and wonder why more people don't submit. I look at comments and wonder why more people don't comment. I conclude there just aren't that many regular users here. Which is truly sad, as it's a great site.
Best of luck to everyone involved, and thanks to everyone who helped out.
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @12:50AM (21 children)
It was made very clear that some of us were not welcome here. So we didn't submit stories, we stopped commenting, and we never contributed any money. Most of us stopped visiting (only visiting today because I saw the notice on /.)
Why would anyone expect any other result?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:58AM (20 children)
Yep. I'm here today as a lark (have said that before). Dropping a few non-sequiturs one last time, to see how long it takes for them to get down-modded. A few years ago many high-profile sites became overwhelmed with army posts, driving some agenda at any cost... the main cost seems to be to dissuade the growth of community. No more fun, growth, health.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @08:15AM (19 children)
I don't agree. One poster who spams everybody, or who carries out personal attacks rather than argues the technical points under discussion, or believes that everyone else is wrong and only he is right is not contributing to this community. It is now obvious that such activity was part of the reason that so many people left. Such posters were the ones repelling viewers.
Allowing onto the front page again - however much I might want to do so - will not provide the same environment that we have now where intelligent discussions can take place without interruptions. I offered a solution which was rejected. The ball is now in your court to identify a workable resolution.
Nothing that you or any other of the handful of ACs who were spoiling this site were doing would have eradicated the problems related to the maintenance of unsupportable software. Nothing that you did helped NCommander or the staff to keep the site running, indeed NCommander has said that he found such things stressful and extremely disappointing.
And nothing that you have done has resulted in the closure of this site. Just like the internet, we simply routed around problems.
Several of the comments today actually say that they are happy with the size of the community just as it is. We don't need you, but you seem to need us.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @08:18AM (4 children)
* Allowing ACs onto.....
TODO: add an "Edit Comment" key to the new site with a 2 minute window!
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday May 24 2023, @02:15AM (3 children)
That would come with a race condition regarding modding. So if there is a 2-minute window for editing, which might be a good idea, then there ought to be a 2-minute delay before the modding can begin. That way it is ensured that the post that gets the mod points is the same one which was actually read.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 24 2023, @06:30AM
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday May 24 2023, @11:44AM (1 child)
Are there notes anywhere about what things have worked well, which thing need to change, and what wish-list items are out there?
I'd be willing to explore the idea with some simple code in the near future, if it is in Python with Postgresql or YottaDB. I've looked at the publicly posted source for SN and see that the problem is not the Perl but the excessive complexity and 1990s-style "cleverness" which it was afflicted with. I would agree with assessment that'd be easier to start over with a new code base. My preference would be Perl because it is the easiest to use and has the best string processing, but that would come with a lot of non-coding effort to enforce readable style. As mentioned way back, Perl is very flexible and allows expression of style and thus functions more like a Rorschach than most other scripting languages. So if people don't like the way they wrote what they wrote in Perl, then they ought to look inward instead.
Python is something that many people can read and write and is a half-decent scripting language and most importantly people have been trained to accept it without question. I'm not sure how it would scale, though. As for the database back end(s) maybe a hierarchical key-value data store would suit the nesting / threading better than shoehorning it into SQL.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @01:18AM
A lot of Python's ability to scale depends on which implementation you use and your architectural design. Some approaches to a new SN would do much better than others when used in one of the Python implementations and some would work better in other language implementations. One thing you also have to keep in mind is not just the data itself but its access patterns. To illustrate, trees and graphs may be better if most accesses depend on that attribute but SQL tables may be better if most accesses depend on a different attribute.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:51PM (4 children)
The "problems" in question are entirely of YOUR own making. You pushed TMB out, wanting to have total control. Then you went to abuse that control, and the site went to hell due to YOUR TOTAL TECHNICAL INEPTITUDE.
The only way to "eradicating the problem" is you and yours eradicating yourselves off the site's roster, and offering that someone else with some brains and skills takes over, now that YOU TOTALLY SCREWED UP. But, naturally, killing the project dead instead is infinitely preferable to those like you. Destroyers live to destroy.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 24 2023, @06:21AM (3 children)
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @01:03PM (2 children)
The people who were reading the site at the time, were perfectly able to read TMB's journal posts (presently deleted). Do not play coy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:51PM (1 child)
It's his pond. He can pretend to be anything he wants to.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @02:17PM
Aparently it's ncommanders and he is about to drain it.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @12:17AM
janrinok is a doo-doo head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @03:03AM (3 children)
Says it all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @07:18PM (2 children)
I blame the French.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @10:05PM (1 child)
50 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @07:08PM
50 million dead progressive French persons? And one ex-pat Brit? So says Runaway1956. It's not not fascism just because you don't like it to be called fascism.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2023, @07:13AM (2 children)
Your definition of "spam" is on a par with The Migraine Buzzard's. A post you do not like, one that disrupts your petty military bourgeois train of thought? This you call "spam"? You are an idiot, janrinok. No wonder everyone has left, and Ncommander has to shut the place down.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 26 2023, @08:25AM (1 child)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam [wikipedia.org]
e.g. Off-topic, repetitive, unwanted.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2023, @06:19PM
Yet spam mods on rightwing disinformation posted repeatedly, terrorist threats, and bigotry were all ok. We see what negative content you approve of, and it is not a good look.
So sorry, I mean we see what content you allow, you have been very clear you don't support the white supremacists round these parts. Weird how you let your anger towards one user green light abuse on others that resemble your chosen foe. If you did not double down on punishing your critics while letting a felliw conservatice off the hook then you wouldn't be in this mess.
Do not worry, seems most of the remaining userbase is aligned with your choices.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2023, @11:01PM
Philosopher Daniel Dennett:
Don't worry, janrinok, these are not real people who vex you so!
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:07AM
This is also my favorite site. I lurk on Slashdot. I read Reddit and several other sites, but this has been my home since the beginning -- even through the "family fights".
I wish I had the time and technical sources to have helped out more. I just simply couldn't. You wondered why more people didn't comment or submit more stories. Well, my reason is simple enough -- I'm too busy surviving real life. I don't have the talent, time, and financial resources that others on this site have.
I fully agree with you. No website will be without its problems meaning that despite its problems, SoylentNews was and is a great site.
And thus, I also toss a huge thank you to all those who have kept SoylentNews running all these years. It has been a valuable resource for me and a great part of my life.
Snotnose, I'm really bummed about this news and you still found a way to make me snort-laugh. Thanks. :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:52AM
Have to add my vote, that this is truly a sad day. This has been my first and favorite stop for a long, long time. Stories and comments always fresh and interesting. Will definitely leave a hole in my browsing day. To all who worked on the site, financed it, and contributed to it over the years, thank you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Tuesday May 23 2023, @01:07AM
And thank you all for all your hard work and sacrifice. You made a corner of the internet a better place for a little while. May that be said of all of us some day.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by MonkeypoxBugChaser on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:32AM (1 child)
Very few were going to sign up for an account with so few comments already. There are tons of social media to scream into the void on. So once the appeal was gone there was nothing left.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:26AM
I have to agree with this. Killing anonymous posting put the final nail in the coffin.
(Score: 3, Funny) by hopp on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:35AM
Fooey even!
(Score: 0, Troll) by girlintraining on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:17AM
This site was a breath of fresh air back when Barrabas was running the show. Then NCommander and his flunkies pushed him out and it quickly devolved into a groupthink circle-jerk. Goodbye AltSlashdot. F_ck Beta.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:22AM
Very sad news indeed. Like many others here, SN has for some years been the only news site I still read regularly (and post to occasionally). It will be missed.
A hearty thanks to all those who have kept it going for so long.
Even the code itself seems to have taken on a mournful air today -- the comment post page was presented to me with this singularly appropriate quote at the bottom:
(Score: 1) by Nofsck Ingcloo on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:37AM
my thanks and regrets. Sigh....
1984 was not written as an instruction manual.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dw861 on Tuesday May 23 2023, @04:53AM (4 children)
No good deed goes unpunished!
I have learned a lot from this community; I'll miss you so.
reddit and HackerNews lack the Soylent secret-sauce.
Newsgroups? Maybe.
http://sdf.org/ [sdf.org] 's bboard? Possibly. It is a similar spirit but they don't do current events.
I am addicted to my daily fix of SN. Assuming not here, I wonder where else I should lurk?
Thank you.
(Score: 2) by dw861 on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:03AM (3 children)
My world stopped when I hit this story. Never did I think that there would be something like this
https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?sid=23/05/22/1151231 [soylentnews.org]
So, we will see.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:32AM (2 children)
Here's one-higher on that thread, so you get janrinok's cover letter: The Future [soylentnews.org]
This is not flamebait. I'm dumbfounded. A self-described one-armed paperhanger who admittedly doesn't get the underpinnings, is planning a... something?! What?!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @08:18AM (1 child)
I literally laughed out loud the moment I read that post. It sounds like the exact same big-idealism small-practicality, all-hat no-cattle, infighting-prone, veto-filled, Hofstadter's-law-abiding, pass-the-buck, bikeshedding, boondoggle that NCommander describes in his post. It's easy to talk but hard to walk. In that regard, I am proud of NCommander for finally taking actions he felt needed to be done rather than just talking about them or putting them off. I can appreciate the intention and desire separate from the action and outcome. Maybe the fact that there is a hard deadline instead of vague talk this time will spurn true action. Probably not. Either way there are two idioms that seem appropriate here: All good things must come to an end; and you can never go home again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:17PM
He told me to go to he11 in #1307614. In another thread he projected upon me, all the ills of the world, worrying about my mental health. Can't imagine what sort of damage I've done, since I can go weeks without loading the front page.
What do they say about the sounds deadlines make?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rpnx on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:04AM
I was somewhat interested in hosting an instance of rehash at one point, but I ended up starting to write my own website from scratch using Go instead. I was originally going to spin it up as a brand new site eventually, but maybe you'd be interested in sharing the post/comment database and we could work out a transition plan? I wouldn't like to see soylentnews die and I'd be willing to put in work to migrate it to a new system. Soylentnews V2, on an entirely new engine?
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:42AM
Fuck Beta
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @07:08AM (2 children)
Slashdot: Response from the founder (Score:5, Informative) by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Tuesday May 23, 2023 @12:55AM [slashdot.org]
The post has more on SlashDot, but I decided not to copy the entirety.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:29PM (1 child)
That sounds like Barrabas - his idea was to make money. We were leaving one site because of its shift to commercialism and he wanted to create another. I don't agree with his interpretation of all of the facts - there is some truth in what he says, but not much. Most of us just wanted to have techy discussions like we had always had. At the beginning, Politics wasn't ever a topic for any stories, let alone front page ones. It was introduced by TMB in time for the 2016 election because he believed it was a significant event. That turned out to be prophetic in many ways but introducing politics was something many of us came to regret. It simply created so many arguments which were never going to be resolved by discussion and which, just like today, end up being nothing more than mud slinging and insults.
I was at those initial meetings and we kept an IRC record of them too. The whole community (as it was then) was invited to watch as the comments scrolled down the IRC screen, but to keep in manageable only a small group of participants had 'voice'.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @12:23AM
Always the mercenary, that janrinok.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:25PM (4 children)
When Anonymous Coward was axed, so too was this site.
Nice try, but you can't do shit like that and preserve the reason for the site's existence.
Someone got too much power and rationalised with his buddies that his power was good and just.
Thus, creating the "echo chamber"
I left when you did that and came here to give my respects with a hope that any future endevors walk a truer path to the spirit of what made /. awesome.
RIP
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:40PM
In the era of ChatGPT, anonymity in the way you understand it will die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @07:10PM (2 children)
It seems that AC posts were a prime reason for the rise of this site. And now AC posts are its demise.
Frankly, a few years ago I was a great AC contributor. I could single-handedly make a thread. I could drive positive interest in a thread. ... Let that sink in.
So, what's special about me?
Nothing. There were many, many people like me... bright people with decades of experience and passion, and a desire to share with like-minded people. So, where did they all go?
I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @07:12PM (1 child)
Say goodnight, aristarchus!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2023, @10:14PM
Ah yes, runaway doing a cultural appropriation because he thinks it is funny. Pretty sure the ac was not aristarchus, but that is my opinion.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Tuesday May 23 2023, @02:57PM
I strongly, completely disagree with this statement. Anyone who takes part regularly in the discussions here will know the difference very well and understand that what we created is worth preserving and worth fighting for. It's a community. We have more in common and connect on a deeper level than the vast majority of users of those other sites (Well, at least, they have less in common with us!).
For evidence to back up what I mean, take a look at how far one particular thread of discussion usually goes in the comments on say HackerNews or Reddit. You might typically get 2, 3, rarely 4 levels of reply at most. Here we discuss things in real depth and it's more satisfying. The new sites are kinda superficial. They're not willing to pause and think for very much time. It's unfulfilling.
Anyway, this place, and the green site before it, has brought me comfort, community and "stuff that matters" for many years and helped me through some difficult times. Long may it continue!
error count exceeds 100; stopping compilation
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:07PM
I on the other hand suspected SN was in such trouble that it would cease. Hoped to be wrong about that. But I saw that new members were too rare, and read most of the meta posts about technical problems, with appeals for help, and it sounded dire. I have the skills to help, but never had time, so I didn't volunteer. Just writing this post, I had to stop to take a call. When I finally post, often get that error that the resource is expired. Reading now of disagreements on which technical solutions to adopt, perhaps technical skills weren't the biggest need, perhaps soft skills were.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @03:50PM (2 children)
(quoting Jim Lovell Apollo 13)
What is most important to all of you about this site? Is the fact that it's running on rehash the sine quoa non? The hill you are gonna die on? Really?
If so, congratulations. You sure showed Dice.com/Slashdot real good. Dice doesn't even remember they owned /. anymore and the new owners don't know who you are.
Is it that every member of staff/mgmt has veto power over every little decision on running the site? Congrats, you've now vetoed the whole site. But your honor is intact. Good for you.
It's the community, stupids
Pick some software someone else maintains, throw it up on a server or four, and pick up where you left off. Or maybe even build a subreddit. You don't need NCommander's permission, just do it and announce it here.
Of course, one staff/volunteer will post a 3-paragraph manifesto why the Purity of his Essential Bodily Fluids will be Compromised by this, so Soylent dies all alone in the dark and nobody else notices. Good job guys.
You all sound like some of the progressive zealots over on Metafilter. Better to be ideologically pure than serve and bind your community effectively.
Enjoy the end, folks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtTNhPm1_xg [youtube.com]. You've earned it.
- True AC, back here one last time, the same AC who suggested migrating off Perl to pipedot software way back before AC posting was shut down and I stopped dropping by. The confident, intransigent (Lennart Poettering-level) responses to my suggestions here revealed the true 'corporate culture' of this site, which I've seen before and know how it ends. Hope your farts smell as good as you hoped.
So long
and thanks for all the fish. I've eaten better fish and met better fishermen.PS Fully expecting the butthurt among you to nuke me down to -1, proving my point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2023, @05:22PM
-Joni Mitchell
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @03:09AM
It does seem like the narcissism of small differences struck again.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 23 2023, @04:24PM
I've had a lot of good times and arguments here. I'll be sad to see it go, but it sounds like the problems are many, and the volunteers to fix them are few and unmotivated.
I'll be rooting for you guys to find a solution, but I'm not holding my breath.
Best wishes to you all on your future endeavors.
And best wishes to my fellow community members as well, friends and nemeses alike. I see a lot of you on the Slashdot as well, but for the others - it's been fun. I hope our paths cross again in the wild and woolly cesspits of other online communities.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dwilson on Tuesday May 23 2023, @04:55PM (1 child)
This [slashdot.org] may be ancient history to some here, but it's the first time I'm hearing of it.
- D
(Score: 3, Informative) by mechanicjay on Wednesday May 24 2023, @12:16AM
Yeah, that guy always kinda lived in his own reality.
In the reality the rest of us lived in, he was very clear about trying to commercialize the site. Not a single other person working on it was interested in that, lest it fall to the same fate as our beloved Slashdot. We were pushing hard to incorporate as a non-profit. NCommander acted as leader of the opposition, which was unanimous. Barrabas, as he was known here, just kept fueling the fire and wouldn't back down.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Tuesday May 23 2023, @06:20PM
Thank you NCommander, for taking the time to write all that out, and for your effort over the years. I'm particularly glad that you decided to see SN through to a fixed date, as opposed to leaving things to just randomly fall over and die on some unkonwn date in the future. If that would have happened, there would have been little chance for the community to stick together and transition to a new venue. This announcement gives that outcome a fighting chance.
The last decade has been an eventful one in the world, and in many of our lives too. Back then, I was not long out of university, struggling to make a dent in a good career. I had briefly flirted with the idea of volunteering with the editorial team, but chose to stick to making submissions. Even that's largely died off now that I have a full-time teaching job and a young family to keep me busy. Nothing's ever made me consider stopping subscribing, though: my posts in previous threads about this place being a bastion of the old internet are ones I still stand by proudly.
Even if, a lot of the time, I don't feel I have that much in specialist knowledge to chip in with these days (and I've got little to argue about here on the politics front), I've tried to reply with a quick quip that someone might find funny. I've no intention of stopping that anytime before June 30th, or even after, if a critical mass can settle on a fresh venue.
As well as NCommander, I'm thankful to all the other staff, editors, submitters, commenters, and all the colourful characters that have made this site what it's been for the past ten years. I won't quote Douglas Adams directly, as I don't think this story's done quite yet...
So long, thanks for all the fish so far, and I hope we all find a nice new pond for the future.