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So, what is SoylentNews? This is your chance to tell us!
I am announcing the first ever SoylentNews online video contest. The rules are pretty simple.
- Upload an original video (no more than about 60 seconds, please) to the site of your choice (but please tell us where it is up loaded and ensure it tracks views) that answers the question, "What is Soylent News?" Your video should ideally contain the phrase, "Soylent News is ..." but this is not strictly required. Let us know what site you upload to.
- Tag your video SoylentNews.
- Watch as the hits roll in.
- ????
- Profit!
Too easy, right? We will count the views on 31 March 2014, at 11:59 UTC. The winner is the individual video that has the most views.
You do not actually have to appear in the video! Make a cartoon, do CGI, do a voiceover of a movie, whatever. Be creative and explore your artistic vision! (Yes, you have one. It may be underutilized at times but it is there).
We have not yet determined the prize for the winner, but it will be jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring (it's a key-chain I found on the sidewalk somewhere). No, it'll be something good. At a minimum we'll feature your video on the site here and interview you for the "making of" your entry. But probably more (it's a keychain).
On behalf of the entire staff and volunteers, we continue to be amazed at the response we've gotten from the community so far. We will continue to provide ways that you can interact with us and help define us. I hope you enjoy this contest. If you have any other suggestions for how we can better meet your needs, feel free to let us know in IRC, the Forums, or the Wiki. Thanks for reading!
~Mattie_p
p.s. keychain!
p.p.s updated based on feedback
(Score: 1) by adolf on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:26AM
First, I agree with (some) others: The video idea is probably not going to work (video strongly implies camera work, but this is not a photogenic crowd, therefore we're camera-shy, therefore we don't futz with cameras much, and doing stick-frame animation with grep, awk, sed, and imagemagick is difficult)... But that's reason at all to avoid the effort, and I look forward to see what floats to the top.
We've got a lot of ground to cover here in this new place before end of March, and certainly no harm can come from some people being creative. Even if you only get one submission and it is terrible, that's still one submission more than you would've gotten last month.
Aaand. Since I've been looking for a few minutes and can't find private contact info for anyone at dev.soylentnews.org to drop them a line. Perhaps contact info is hidden in plain sight and it is my own fault for not seeing it: it is late for me, and the wine is yummy. So I'll just leave my opinions as a community member here instead.
First, whitespace. I know, I know: Everyone hates extraneous whitespace -- including myself. As I write this comment, my blank lines occupy a whole line. But if I preview or post the comment, my blank lines occupy much less than a whole line. I'm not suggesting that a blank [br] be fully-space, just that the spacing be increased: As it is, there is a lot of disparity between how my comment looks in the editing window, and how it presents itself. I'd double-blank-line-delineate my paragraphs ...but that doesn't work here either. (there are five blank lines between this partial paragraph and the paragraph above, as shown in my preview window, and I'm inputting "plain old text" just as I normally do with Slashcode)
And while I realize that HTML is a markup language instead a layout system (and et cetera), if I can't (de?)lineate my prose, then I (for one) will continue to be annoyed. And you know: I didn't come here to be annoyed. :) I haven't looked at the CSS to see how it lays out for real, but it looks like about .5, while perhaps .8 or .9 would be good.
Aaaand: Blockquote. Before /. introduced a vertical line to the left of blockquote, people used all kinds of ways to quote other people: Cut and paste with bold, leading and trailing hyphens, italics, etc, all within or without a [blockquote]. But once the vertical lines showed up, folks generally learned how to use blockquote by itself, and that greatly improved the consistency of the comments (which is the only reason I show up here, and used to show up there, to begin with).
I don't know if /.-style vertical lines are best, or something else. But mere indentation, as seems to be done now as it was done before on some other site that I'm having an extremely hard time not making comparisons to, is insufficient. [blockquote] needs to be more than than indentation.
Aaand, that's all for now. You folks have done a great job here, and I'm pleased as hell to be a part of it. I look forward to many years of senseless debates, and (this is the important part) occasionally changing people's mind, and occasionally having my own opinion swayed.
I have no further complaints at this time. Thank you. :)
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 1) by adolf on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:35AM
This problem is particularly bothersome on very short segments of blockquote. For example, quoting myself from minutes prior
See what I mean? Yay! A few words are indented.
. . . . but so are these. A stylistic way to differentiate a quote (whatever the quote) ought to have more than indent.
especially when spaces are allowed
but blank lines aren't.
(and thanks, again. srsly.)
I'm wasting my days as I've wasted my nights and I've wasted my youth
(Score: 2) by mattie_p on Wednesday February 26 2014, @12:38PM
Well, if it doesn't work and no one comes, we've learned something. And that is ok. We are going to try very hard to avoid forcing change on the community. Some changes (like bug fixes) will come down, and some UI changes will come (minor) that will make the site more usable.
But we will offer ways for people to participate in building the future of the site. We will never be able to please everyone all of the time. Our aim is to serve most of the needs of most of the community most of the time. Sometimes we'll make mistakes, and as long we we learn from them it is ok. I'm not yet convinced this is a mistake, but even if it is I will learn from it, and mark an item in my notebook: "no more video contests, evar!"
We have a couple of places for suggestions. Some of them have been submitted as bugs (although we'd prefer you don't do that), some of them have been posted to our wiki page [dev.soylentnews.org], and we now have suggestions (at] soylentnews [dot) org available. We'll get them to the right group if you email.
Thanks for reading and contributing! ~mattie_p