Dev.SN ♥ developers
Sections
Dev.SN
By now, you have had the chance to read the updates of both NCommander and Barrabas. Nonetheless, you may still be wondering quite a few things about the site and its staff. Here is your chance to ask us anything. These questions can be general in nature, in which case the staff will select a spokesperson to answer it, or it may be specific to an individual. If the question is for an individual, please ensure you identify that person specifically enough.
We will select the best questions from the thread and provide answers to the community. These questions may not be the highest rated, although we will probably use those first.
In keeping with tradition, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Interview: Ask SoylentNews Staff Anything
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 1000 moderator points
| 238 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:25PM
I don't believe that money is the "bottom line" of this site.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:28PM
True, but running a site requires a certain amount of money.
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:46PM
i wonder if debian would be willing to host soylent news, if it adopts similar foss principles (which it seems to be), or maybe one of the other foss hosts
don't necessarily need to use their domain (could use a freebie from freedns.afraid.org if they become really desperate) but the foss community should be fairly supportive of a not-for-profit discussion forum for geeks, and organizations like the linux and apache foundations no doubt have some fairly wealthy backers.
(Score: 1) by edIII on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:42PM
It would be nice to be able to donate at some point too.
There was also an article about Tidbit. I'm very interested to know just what the viability of cryptocurrency mining using client-side architectures would be.
If the mining could generate enough revenue from the user base to replace advertising, that may be all we need to keep the site alive and functional without external financial support.
I'm not opposed to that, or running a native app to donate processing cycles to SoylentNews.
(Score: 1) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:07PM
Well, my site is only fifteen bucks per year, but soylent needs a bit more than I do. But I, too, wonder what will happen if they can't get cash. I hope they're getting advertisers, at least enough to break even.
In my case, the money for my site comes from the books, which are the only reason it exists. But like I said, my needs are very, very minimal.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:36PM
What about Memberships?
Would each user consume more than $5/year of bandwidth and server space?
Sometimes I think when you pay for something you are less likely to crap all over it by starting flame wars etc.
Even maintaining the site will take someone's time and money. Otherwise the first good paying job that comes along snuffs out the interest in maintaining SN.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:29PM
Maybe subscriberships, like at slashdot, but I wouldn't want soylent to be paywalled. We're not going to grow our community with a paywall.
And as far as "when you pay for something you are less likely to crap all over it by starting flame wars etc", well, there are other, non-monetary ways to invest in it... like contributing good stories, good comments, modding trolls and morons down (which is how you stop trolls and visible flamewars), putting stuff here for free you're selling elsewhere (see my sig and journal)
We were all pretty invested in slashdot or there would not have been such a backlash against Beta, everyone would have simply disappeared, shaking our fists in vain at Dice. I had the same feeling when K5's community deteriorated, and that's what I did -- I disappeared.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 1) by frojack on Thursday February 20 2014, @05:01PM
When writing that recommendation, I wasn't thinking about paywalls so much as the Wikipedia way of raising funds (begging banners), that could be turned off by tossing a few bucks via paypal or something like that.
Also, (Mentioned in other posts in this thread)...
Keeping "For Profit" an option as an founders want to maintain, does not seem inconsistent with seeking donations. There are many ways to seek income.
Note:
I almost suggested No ACs, or no way for AC posts to be modded above zero. I understand the anonymity angle, but i'm not sure its worth the disruption ACs cause. But then the thread was about funding, and ACs didn't seem on topic.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:30PM
I think those are good ideas. As to ACs, even though 99% of them are trolls, morons, or trollish morons, sometimes folks do make insightful comments anonymously that deserve +5s. As long as the moderators do their jobs you shouldn't have to see many.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 21 2014, @01:11AM
Maybe a "Right to Post AC" is one of those "Achievements" the server can hand out.
(I know, I know, the job of getting slashcode running at all is big enough that
adding fluff at the beginning is a step too far).
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 21 2014, @11:44AM
I don't know, I haven't seen any need or had any want to post AC here. I've posted AC at /. a few times when I was on a terminal I didn't want to log in on. Once you have karma, why would you want to post with a starting score of 0 when you could post at 1? No point writing if nobody's reading.
Free Nobots! [mcgrewbooks.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:29PM
May not, but some revenue is needed.
Who's paying the bills now, and what are the plans for covering expenses in the future?
(Score: 5, Informative) by DarkMorph on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:41PM
One cannot ignore the fact that presently we have nothing foreign loading on the site. No third-party elements, no advertisements, beacons, trackers -- nothing of the sort. Yet we're all aware that keeping the server running has a cost. Surely many of us are curious how we will keep it running, and it's worth asking if there will be a method to facilitate donating to the SN fund to help with the costs.
Back on
(Score: 2, Interesting) by internetguy on Wednesday February 19 2014, @02:32PM
"the Internet existed once without ads just fine, and it will continue to exist with or without them."
I wonder what triggered costs on the Internet to increase to the point people found it necessary to create ads. It seemed to happen during the dot-com erra. Any ideas?
Sig: I must be new here.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DarkMorph on Wednesday February 19 2014, @02:46PM
It wouldn't surprise me if, by now, many sites figure that it's worth a shot, because there's always the chance of acquiring ad-based revenue, whereas if there is no advertisement, there is a guarantee of no such revenue.
SoylentNews represents the first time I've ever seriously considered donating to contribute to the needs of a news-oriented community. I find what SN stands for to be rather significant. Ironically the redesign of
(Score: 1) by buswolley on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:52PM
images. video.
I bet the hosting cost on SN is not as large as one might think. Very clean.
However, this disregards the labor of the people maintaining SN. Volunteer labor without compensation is finicky.
subicular junctures
(Score: 2, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:43PM
Exactly.
Servers do cost money, hosting costs money. And that's all good until you outgrow what can be handled by a single machine, or you exceed the bandwidth that your hosting situation can supply, or you sustain your first DOS attack or something.
Eventually, you realize you just want to put it all in the cloud somewhere and leave all the hardware and bandwidth issues to someone else. And THAT costs money too. Probably Big money.
But to remain interested, people have to at least make enough money to do the work even if it is only part-time work.
Just dealing with a small portion of the users that need help or want to bitch takes time and mental anguish.
Discussion should abhor vacuity, as space does a vacuum.
(Score: 1) by EvilJim on Thursday February 20 2014, @07:43PM
I don't mind the odd ad here or there, but if allowed, they should only be static images or animated gif's, no java/flash or control by advertising networks who are likely to try to sneak that crap in.
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Wednesday February 19 2014, @04:55PM
increased traffic probably
i can host a website on my home PC for next to nothing (electricity & internet access)
when "dot com" became trendy and moved beyond the realm of nerds and geeks, and corporations realized they could make a profit using the interwebs, they pounced
now there's ecommerce, bots of various sorts (good and bad), spam, viruses, multimedia, online games, etc.
the bottleneck for a popular site is generally dns and load balancing. processing requests and database load etc can be spread out.
(Score: 2, Funny) by dilbert on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:08PM
Maybe we could ask Jimmy Wales if he'd be willing to annoy every user on every page for an entire month for us so we can stay ad free.
In all seriousness though I'd be willing to donate toward the site maintenance.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Iskender on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:21PM
One source says the number of web users doubled within the years 2000-2001. Almost doubled in 1999 alone. Other sources I looked at give slightly different numbers, but they all agree that there was huge growth. The dotcom era may have involved a lot of hot air, but it certainly helped make the web more popular.
Someone said it's complex. I don't think it's complex at all - the web got popular, and when it did, one's hosting solution couldn't be "freeloading on my university's network" anymore. Another user said there were images (and video, which came later), and those made advertising even more necessary.
Now, slash-style sites are designed to require little bandwidth. But I believe even the processor requirements by themselves will drive hosting costs up if you're popular - all the old hobbyist ways of doing things fall apart when faced with modern amounts of users.
(Score: 1) by unitron on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:32PM
"I wonder what triggered costs on the Internet to increase to the point people found it necessary to create ads."
Leaving college and having to pick up the costs of a server and bandwidth instead of sponging it off of the school?
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 2, Insightful) by technopoptart on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:57PM
Donations, seems to be the best way.
I am curious to know about the hardware and hosting details. Is this hosted at a home / home office/ a company supportive of the ./ community, or a VPS provider?
But i think this community is big enough and had a good percentage of people earning a good living. Some people will give $5/$10 a couple times a year, and others will give $300 or $500 a year.
(Score: 2, Informative) by boltronics on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:41AM
Originally, they were running on two Linode 2048s running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
http://dev.soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/02/18/072 4232&mode=nocomment [dev.soylentnews.org]
However Barrabas wrote that they're also planning three additional servers for development, testing and experimentation purposes.
http://dev.soylentnews.org/~Barrabas/journal/41&mode=n ocomment [dev.soylentnews.org]
According to the front page of the Linode website (https://www.linode.com/), a 2Gb server (presumably what is meant by "Linode 2048s") is $40/month (presumably in USD). So $80/month for production. If the other three servers are the cheaper $20/month 1Gb machines, then we seem to be looking at US$140/month absolute minimum (assuming no extra storage or data transfer quota is required). That figure also does not include things like domain name registration, SSL certificates, etc.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 1) by Castout on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:22PM
Since this is more of a community driven site - I would be curious if an 'ads only' page would work.
Create a link that takes you off the main pages to one that is only ads. Make them tech relevant, load them in a decent format, and when you want to contribute, load the ads page and click around (in a Linux sandbox VM of course)
Would keep the main pages clean but allow some unobtrusive easy access ad revenue
"Think outside the box but park between the lines!" - Castout
(Score: 2, Interesting) by demonlapin on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:33PM
(Score: 1) by sibiday fabis on Wednesday February 19 2014, @11:54PM
I'd appreciate being able to support SN in this way. Unobtrusive and useful. Great idea!