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This is a post that I have suspected that I was going to have to write since late December last year.
You will now know that SoylentNews.org is closing down on 30 June but things have not been standing still behind the scenes since we first became aware of NCommander's decision at the end of last week. In fact, it has been a very busy weekend.
A small group of existing staff are looking at alternative possibilities for a 'replacement' site to keep the flow of stories going and allowing discussions to continue. This is a big task, especially in the 38 days remaining in which to try to achieve it. There are several possibilities which spring to mind, Pipedot for example. I have reached out to Bryan but have not yet received a response. However, things as not as straightforward as they seem. The pipecode is written in Php-5 which some of you will realise is no longer supported. We do not want to become dependant on old software which cannot be maintained into the future; that lesson has been taken aboard and reinforced by NCommander's explanation regarding his decision announced today. There are other options but at the moment it is still a search for what is available out there today which also appears maintainable into the future.
But the first thing we need to know is "Is there still sufficient interest in having a discussion site such as ours?" Do you, the community, still want to have your daily dose of stories and the ability to exchange views with many others on this site? Are there any community members who would be willing to join us in trying to establish such a site? Your views are crucial to everything that we do over the coming days and weeks. So please let us know what you think about whether a site is still required with all the alternative technology available today that simply didn't exist 9 years ago. What form should a new site take? What changes to how we operate are essential for you to continue to remain interested in the future site?
Of course, it cannot be a mirror image of what we have today - which many will see as a good thing! But I hope that we would be able to transfer existing accounts, usernames and passwords directly to any new site that we create. We would also have to start with a relatively simple site and build on that over time.
At the end of the day we would have to restart the voluntary subscriptions but not immediately. We can raise some funds to see us get established without the requirement of a financial commitment from the community. Subscriptions were always sufficient in the past and I don't see why that would not be the case in the future too. The fact that we currently have enough to keep this site going until next year bears witness to that. We have also found that we can significantly reduce our running costs based on our current community rather than being ready for a major stream of new members which never materialises. I have no grandiose ideas of becoming a huge site employing our own journalists but just a community that enjoys the discussions as we have been doing for several years. Nevertheless, we would also be trying to build on our existing community which is beginning to happen on this site now that things have settled down.
So don't hold back - let us know what you think.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dalek on Monday May 22, @10:30PM
There's some real truth in what you said, but it's a shame you had to mix in some language to incite people such as "plandemic or trump derangement syndrome." That terminology isn't helpful. What you're really saying is to separate the tech from the politics, but that's mostly what happened. The tech was the front page stories and the politics was in the journals.
You have a very valid point about people tending to upvote and downvote based on agreement or disagreement, and that's true with respect to politics. Many other topics aren't prone to controversy, so the moderation is more likely to be based on the quality of the comment. A lot of the political discussion here was already separated into journals, but some of them generated a lot of controversy, and there were many blatantly bad faith AC comments. I would support banning the discussion of politics when there isn't a plausible link to technology. Yes, that goes for journals, too.
User-created discussions has been a feature of Slash and Rehash for as long as I can remember. Before journals were added to Slash, there were hidden SIDs where users could discuss anything they wanted. I don't believe there was an index of the hidden SIDs, so journals added a way to coordinate those discussions. Some of these discussions weren't helpful, and Slashdot actually had two hidden SIDs called trolltalk: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20721 and [slashdot.org]https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31337 [slashdot.org]. One of those is still active to this day, even though I don't think it's possible to create new hidden SIDs. The name of those hidden SIDs describes exactly what they were, which was discussions about trolling Slashdot. There have to be some limits, but I don't think this feature should ever go away. It can be a place for users to ask tech questions, discuss stories that didn't make it to the front page, talk about sports, or just share life updates. I support allowing anything that's legal other than politics.
I also don't think Slashdot should be described simply as a news aggregator. Its origins were as Rob Malda's blog, where he shared whatever was interesting to him and wrote his own original content at times. He also spent a lot of time tinkering with the code pretty much right up until when he left the site. It wasn't a generic tech site, and it really focused on stories that were of interest to nerds, specifically those who ran the site. Slashdot isn't that interesting to me now, and a large part of that is because it feels like a generic tech site. There are plenty of places to read about things like NFTs and Meta, if that interested me. But there are very successful YouTube channels based on whatever is of interest to the creator, whether it's retro computing, how hardware works, gaming (sim racing is very cool, though I am very bad at it), or just about anything else. A nerd blog can still work as long as people know it exists, and that last bit might be a challenge. Even so, a site like MLB Trade Rumors [mlbtraderumors.com] is mostly a news aggregator, and it's extremely successful. There might not be a lot of comments on every story, but it still gets a huge amount of traffic. There's a lot of opportunity for a site like SN to work, provided people know about it and that toxicity stays out.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest just whinge about SN.