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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.
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Interview: Ask SoylentNews Staff Anything
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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: 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!