SoylentNews

[[Ask Soylent]]

In response to rampant internet surveillance, the imminent demise of network neutrality, and problems with the certificate authority system, MaidSafe is designing new protocols to access the internet in a decentralized, cryptographically secure manner.

Briefly, the project is an open source app development platform based on client-side encryption and redundant online storage. Websites using the system would be immune from mass surveillance and censorship, and provide anonymous login and site verification without a certificate authority.

Should SoylentNews run under MaidSafe?

SoylentNews was formed to show people how good things might be without the abuse, as push-back against ruining "our garden", but the scope has narrowed considerably due to the change in management. Without a "product distinction", something that marks this site as "better" (or at least, "different") it runs the risk of being "just another news aggregator".

Throwing weight behind MaidSafe would give momentum to their project, while giving us product distinction and help solve some of the abuse. As early adopters we would help set the direction of their project, and we bring an enormous amount of technical insight and debugging ability. It would empower both projects.

MaidSafe is just getting started, so there will be kinks and issues. Also, SN should be dual interface until the new system gains momentum - perhaps "read-access" to the general internet using the existing protocols, but with user registration and login using MaidSafe.

SoylentNews is also just getting started, and there's been talk of house-cleaning some of the code. This is an opportunity to be an agent of change - to take back a measure of control - while at the same time becoming demonstrably different and better.

The domains are sold, the linode account is transferred, it looks like I'm out of here. This was a bad action to take, but the purpose was to get me out fast. In that regard it worked very well.

I could have stayed with the project and remained positive and upbeat were it not for the constant meanness shown by members of the staff.

Keep this in mind the next time you contemplate a palace revolt. Putting the dirty laundry out for everyone to see is hurtful and disruptive.

I wish everyone the best of luck in the new adventure.

Fuck beta!

Am I the bad guy here?

They say that Al Capone couldn't understand why the press hated him. He thought of himself as the "good guy", who had done so much for Chicago that the city should be grateful.

I understand how he must have felt.

To date I've tried to be positive, upbeat, and helpful during the transition - turning over accounts and passwords, answering questions, providing help where needed. I initially gave Michael passwords for everything about the project, including the registrar.

SoylentNews was pushing probably 7 million pageviews a month. Some acceptable [to the community] advertizing and it could have net $10,000/month. Despite this, Michael doesn't want to reimburse me $2,000 for startup costs.

Michael's behaviour is so *rotten* that I just cannot fathom it. I'm also baffled as to why the staff is being mean. Because of this I've taken back some of the account access: the registrar and my three linode accounts. I'm tired of being shat upon, and I need to look after my own interests.

Since the change in ownership, the site worth has dropped from $2700 to $470, the stark reality of the "palace revolt".

The truth is, no one wants to see dirty laundry. I crafted my resignation in a politically neutral manner because I was taught that it's not appropriate to say bad things in public. Michael's hit piece came as a complete shock.

This whole thing started because one person didn't like someone else's choice of OS, and couldn't let it go and couldn't put it off, even for 2 weeks. I've read about these types of religious wars, choice of editor being another one, but I never thought that people would go to these sorts of extremes. I wonder if "can't let it go" will be a recurring theme.

Throughout the transition, only a *single* staff member showed integrity, and only two showed any sense of loyalty.

I did my best to accommodate people, to give them important positions with interesting tasks, encouraging them to experiment and be creative, and most of all to grow. As an example, Michael originally declined being head of dev. He wanted the position, but felt that his people skills were not up to the task (he said this in so many words). After much thought and deliberation I came up with a plan to pair him with Mattie, a professional manager, to work on his management skills and help him grow into the position. I made special arrangements to give Michael the best seat in the house because he deserved it.

It came as a complete surprise that none of the editors were happy (per Michael's piece). No one had complained, I had several conversations with the head of that section and sat in on their group meeting.

Overlords had specific authority to decide split consensus, they were told this when they were made overlords (per my script). At the time of the revolt, none of the overlords had complained or even asked about this. Mattie had full authority to resolve disputes between groups, it was stated in so many words in the E-mail. I don't know how Michael thought otherwise, especially in light of the E-mail record. Michael was an overlord and was specifically told all of this.

This sordid affair has left me soured on the entire community. Slashdot users think we're a bunch of spoiled crybabies, and 'ya know what? I agree. I'm not a member of this community, and now that I'm an outcast I see that I don't *want* to be a member.

I'm not a nerd, I'm a scientist. Go do your own thing, I wash my hands of you.

UPDATE

I've had several offers for the site - thank you. I'm contacting the first one and then I'm gone.

Working with NCommander is certainly a challenge.

After agreeing to reimburse me for costs of the project, NCommander now wants to only pay for certain things.

Perhaps others in the community could speak to him? Given that he took the project against my wishes and agreed to reimburse me, I'd like him to keep his part of the bargain.

Is this behaviour truly representative of the our community? It would never even *occur* to me to do this. I suppose that makes me an entirely different type of person - and for that I am glad.

The excerpt from IRC:

23:47 NCommander: Pay me back for startup costs?
23:48 Barrabas, agreed.
23:48 Barrabas, prefer check, or paypal
23:48 NCommander: Check is good. I'll E-mail you my address.

Here is MY E-mail request:

Michael:

Please reimburse me for SoylentNews expenses by sending a check:

[my address]

You'll find a complete accounting of expenses on the wiki:

http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/index.php/Expenses

I'd like to be free and clear of the project ASAP, so if you could drop a check in the mail tomorrow or the next day I'd appreciate it. I'm sure you can get a letter from Panama to the US with no trouble. Please let me know when it's posted so I know to look for it.

The package from NY is being returned, but hasn't arrived. When it does, I'll contact you to find out how you'd like to proceed.

Here's his response

I physically don't have checks to send as of right now until I return to the continental US which won't be for another week. With the exception of PayPal or perhaps Western Union, the only other method of money transfer I can do right now is a wire transfer.

We need to split out some of the costs; some of the initial linode charges were on my card and some of these charges look off. Can you provide the receipts so I can get an accurate total of what went
where? I also need the reciepts for handling the accounting side of the business.

In addition, there's a lot here that needs to be sorted before I'm comfortable with writing a check. First off, I'm hesistant to pay for things we won't use. The linode annual subscriptions are split on your Linode account, and won't be using more than one Linode 1024. We need to talk to linode, see if they're willing to offer credit and get that transfered to my linode account which can be used to pay for nodes we are using. (as of right now, that's two Linode 2048s, and a 1024 for misc servers. I expect another 2048, and likely upgrading the existing nodes).

Here's what I'm willing to pay as is:
  * Domain registration costs ( $220.76 + any fees to transfer to a new register; I don't have a problem with gadhi itself, so if we can send them a email asking for the domains to be moved to a new account, we can call this good.)
  * March payment for the production + dev linode + my personal node which are on the 'NCommander' linode account
  ** When you changed the autobilling information, my personal node got charged against your card
  ** 2x Linode 2048s, 2x Linode 1024s + backup services for 3 of those boxes
  ** Total of $145.00, I have the receipt for this one
  * The virtual phone number (I'm not even sure what this is, but I'm not going to dispute $14.83)

Undisputed amount of right now: $379

My biggest issue is I'm hesitant to pay for things we either didn't use, or won't use.
* Linode 1024 annual payments ( $662.22 )
** As I said, these are simply too small to be useful for anything except misc services. We're already migrated everything to a single node for email, IRC, and LDAP. Once I confirm with robind, nothing from these boxes are used at all.
** I will cover this if we can get linode to cancel the linodes, and convert the unused credit applied to my linode account. If that proves impossible, we'll discuss other options.
** The costs for backup service look wrong, can you please check it (I'd expect all three number to be the same)? Same deal as above

* BlueHost ($178.20)
** Honestly, this was paid for before I was even involved in SN (the wiki was already up at this point), and I'm not sure how we ran up a bill *this* high for one month of service. We never used it for SN except as organization for altslashdot, and it was moved as soon as practical. Furthermore, it was clear even before golive that bluehost wouldn't meet our needs very early in the bringup process.

To be discussed totals: ( $840 + backup)

As for the Pimsleur Spanish + audio player, its a separate matter from the SN expenses; it was a gift, and I've never been conformable that it was hosted as an expense for the project. Given how things have played out, I'm willing to re-coop this if they're not returnable, but its a separate matter from the SN business.

Gift expenses: $421.14

As a final point, as a contingent of recomp of costs, I would like an agreement that you will make no claim as to the name SoylentNews, the site, basically everything related to SN transfers to me, with no further claims or liabities from yourself, and such. Basically, any costs or profits from the site stay with me (or whatever business that gets setup), the name and domains belongs to me. If we need formal wording for this, I'll get a lawyer involved.

Michael

So far as agreements, yes, he can keep the name and everything else. I actually *keep* my agreements, but it seems like I'll have to put pressure on NCommander to keep his.

(He also agreed to 1) Back my management decisions, and 2) promote my vision of the site when I made him head of dev. Those didn't last long either.)

I can no longer sustain the level of activity needed to run Soylent news, and so I have resigned as leader.

In the end, I was literally begging people to step back and let the site "just run" for a few days while I caught up... alas, to no effect. Issues must be resolved "right here and right now" continuously throughout my day with no end in sight.

NCommander has taken over as project lead - he has access to everything from the registrar down. I understand he has a different vision for the project, which will soon be revealed.

I'm sorry to leave like this, but there's really nothing for it. I'm going back to my AI studies, which happen at a more leisurely pace.

John Barrabas

(And yes, this was an amicable transfer of power. There's no hard feelings on my side.)

It's been a week (only a week!) since first rollout, and extrapolating from our usage we're serving 5 million pageviews per month. That's huge.

 
For comparison, Slashdot serves an estimated 15 million pageviews per month.

The pageview rate is also climbing - we passed the 2 million mark somewhere around our 9th day online. We'll soon need a higher service tier.

The site's estimated value grew from $43 (Tue) to $639 (Fri) to $2000 (Tue - today). Woot!

It's been a wild ride!

The sys team is building the infrastructure to support a mainstream site. We purchased 3 more linodes (full year, for a 10% savings), which are being provisioned for development, test, and production. The dev team is preparing a turn-key slashcode package that developers can run locally, and we should start to see bug fixes appear in the live site in the next couple of days, possibly by this Friday (Feb 28).

The style team has a long list of planned improvements, and the content groups have been feeding us a steady supply of delicious article summaries, spirited debate (IRC, Forums), plans and roadmaps (Wiki, status posts), with contributions from many other groups. We have our own customer relations person!

I promised that the project would be community driven, and we are largely that. Each overlord has agreed to run their department by community consensus, only making executive decisions when there is no general agreement, or if there is a global overriding concern.

This is working well. For the majority of cases consensus is clear and feels "clearly the right decision". For a split consensus, both choices seem equally good so it doesn't matter which one we choose.

The overlords have authority to make decisions in their area, which means people can get involved with areas that interest them without wading through everything. If you would like to participate, come join us!

Global issues will be decided by community vote. Notable votes coming up will be 1) Choosing the permanent name, 2) Choosing a business model, and 3) Choosing revenue streams. I have researched these and have notes and observations to set before the community as a starting point for discussion.

That's my next step: setting down the notes for discussion, some background information (such as projected expenses), and orchestrating the voting process. Once the business/financial models have been chosen we can start building a proper business.

It looks like we've got ourselves a winner!

SoylentNews is growing much faster than expected, so I need to put the project under a corporate veil to protect my personal assets (mostly my house).

I could google for a lawyer in my area, but I'd rather give some business to one of our users.

If you are a lawyer familiar with business/corporate issues (including non-profit) in Southern NH (especially near Milford) and would like some new business please contact me.

John (at) SoylentNews (dot) org

(Note: This is a stop-gap measure, done only for short-term protection. We'll still choose the business and financial models by community consent, I just don't want to be sued before that can happen. Also, this is a pre-emptive move on my part, as yet we have no legal problems.)

We have our own IRC server, often hosting some pretty interesting conversations.

 
Won't you join us?

irc://irc.soylentnews.org/Soylent

Some have asked why we run our own servers instead of using a public one such as freenode.net. We did this to have control of the TOS, copyright, DMCA, and other legal issues. I like freenode (and their TOS) a lot, but we're building a community and we should make our own choices.

We've got a bot named Bender that monitors the newsfeed and posts announcements whenever a new article comes up.

Bender also posts the headlines to our twitter account, so feel free to follow us there for timely announcements. (Nineteen followers today - woot!)

And FrogSmash, our overlord of graphics arts is distinguishing our various communication channels slightly so that, for example, bookmarks have differently colored icons to make them more easily identifiable by eye. He's set up a test twitter account to try out new skins - check it out and send him some feedback.

Landon, our overlord of IRC, set all this up. He even set us up a link-shortener sylnt.us domain for the twitter account: that rocks! So send him some love if you see him on IRC - he's doing a bang-up job!

To everyone who contributed to first rollout, thank you! It was an amazing effort, and we couldn't have done it without you.

I've set down some notes and status, with an overview of where I see the project heading in the next few weeks. As always, we can stop and discuss if the community feels we should be moving in a different direction.

Thus begins the status:

Some have noticed that we don't have a structure or plan for development. This was *on purpose* for the duration of first release. I wanted to stay out of the developers' way and avoid anything that wasn't directly related to the rollout.

We were wildly successful, and can now proceed at a more leisurely pace. I have always intended to do development the right way - a strong foundation of tools, with people to oversee and coordinate the effort between people and other groups.

We have some overlords in place, but finding them is exceedingly difficult since I only know people from E-mail and for less than a week. For the near term, I'm the overlord of development, and I'm looking for someone to fill that spot. (And sys and style)

For this upcoming week I've told sys to take a break. Do minor bug fixes
at a leisurely pace if they feel bored, but I want people who are relaxed and refreshed. I don't want to lose people, and this has already happened.

The people who made the rollout happen are in the sys group. It's tiny (about a dozen people) and is concerned with system and server issues: bandwidth tiers, Varnish, Sphinx, linode accounts, registrars, load balancers, and so forth.

There's a much bigger group "dev" which is all the people who want to help develop code. There's some overlap, and of course everyone in sys has been doing dev for the past week. Anyone in sys is welcome to do dev work at any time, someone in dev who wants to do sys work has to be vetted.

A third group is "content": story editors, graphics, the wiki, forums, IRC and related. I'm hoping we'll have a more rich and varied landscape of content than just the news feed; for example, Landon (the overlord of IRC) wants to try weekly IRC chats with notable people, and Cactus (of the wiki) suggested the wiki could have entries for interesting discussions which are largely settled, but which keep cropping up.

A fourth group is "style": how the site is presented. CSS, layout, usability, ergonomics, advice on functionality.

The fifth group, "business", has not officially started (I have a total of three, count them thee, volunteers). This will be business-related topics such as marketing, legal, finance, [business] governance, and so on.

So for the near term, for a week or so, the editors are serving us delicious and interesting stories, while our users are getting comfortable with the system.

There's been some concern about decisions made during first rollout. I
promised that we would operate by community consensus, and I have to be looking at the big picture anyway. We can't afford to alienate anyone,
especially in these first stages.

In light of this:

1) We will use Git/GitHub for source control, since this seems to be consensus.

2) NCommander has proposed a heirarchy of development servers (three, in
addition to of the production server IIRC) for development, testing and
experimentation. We'll go with this because it's a good system that works for other projects (ie - the structure has been vetted) and it covers or surpasses suggestions from the community.

3) We will revisit the bug tracking system. Dev thinks it may be appropriate to have different systems with different intent (different systems, not different projects within one system). Dev should sort this out in the next 2 weeks or so, I'll make an executive choice if there is no general agreement. Start discussing!

4) The next dev effort will be version 2.0 of the newsfeed. Whether this is a rewrite or fixup will be based on community input. I've looked at
the perl code and NCommander's assessment that "it's not too bad" is entirely accurate for large swaths. I'm naming the effort v2.0.

As usual, if you have concerns feel free to E-mail and we'll talk.

R. Barrabas