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I promised that we, the staff, would provide a quick status report after all the drama on Monday. The site issues today delayed that, and I thank juggs in IRC for reminding me of my promise. We've been very transparent and we want to continue that trend. Most of the comments we've seen have been encouraging of this method. However, we hope the transparency will result in less drama and in more productivity in the future.
On Tuesday, 4 March 2014, Barrabas, the "Man Behind the Curtain" resigned from his position. In his resignation, he retained ownership of the domain Soylentnews.org and associated domain registrations, as well as certain accounts on linode.com, our host. (See our article on backup plans.) Read more inside.
There were some negotiations between Barrabas and NCommander regarding compensation for money invested by Barrabas as part of the transfer of authority, along with the linodes and the domain names. Those negotiations broke down, resulting in a situation that became public on Monday, 10 March. Barrabas decided to sell his entire interest in the site. While the staff decided to create a poll to figure out which way to proceed (we were completely divided on what to do) an individual member of the site stepped up to purchase those rights from Barrabas.
That individual is known on IRC as matt_. Despite the similarity in name, he is not me. I've offered to let him introduce himself on his own schedule. For now, we are working with him to ensure all of the accounts and technical transactions are being transferred. As of right now, we believe the site is secure, he is a standup guy, and we can all move on with our lives.
However, there is such a thing as being over-zealous, and making decisions too rapidly. Today we decided to take down the linodes that Barrabas had set up. What we did not know was that those linodes contained our DNS zone records. Taking those boxes down took down our DNS records and therefore the site. Slashcode can be a little tricky, and one of its dependencies is DNS. So when we took down DNS, we took down slash on the linode as well. This was bad. We managed to get it working again, and created an incident log that provides some details to those interested. This also describes a second related incident, tied to taking down DNS.
As a result of this, we are making some changes in the way we conduct ourselves. I have asked the unit chiefs to be more proactive and less reactive. The first part of this (step 0, actually) is creating documentation of each unit. Our Team Pages link on the wiki leads to each of our 5 major groups right now. Please check out each of them for more details on what needs to be done and how to help, if you are interested.
We are currently having our poll on the future status of our IRC network, and within 24 hours we are going to launch a new poll to select our final site name (or so we hope). We have 7 candidate names (including SoylentNews). We are going to hold our initial round with all of them. If one name earns 50% + 1 vote, that name wins. If that doesn't happen in a particular round, we take the names that are within 5% of the leading candidate to the next round. If no other name is within 5 percentage points, we will take the top 2 names for the final event. Finally, look forward to updates from each of our major units regarding their work in progress and their current status over the next few days.
This is a learning experience for all of us, and we hope that the drama can decrease so that the community can grow together. Thanks for reading! ~mattie_p
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hankwang on Wednesday March 12 2014, @02:30AM
Rather than a multi-round "first to the post" voting method, consider approval voting. Multi-round does not solve the fundamental problems of "first to the post".
You can't use the standard poll engine, though. Anyway, it's better to not show the polling results until the poll is closed, in order to reduce strategic voting behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting [wikipedia.org]
Avantslash: Slashdot+SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by mattie_p on Wednesday March 12 2014, @02:39AM
I'm generally in favor of utilizing alternate voting methods, however, this is a fairly new site. That particular implementation of voting was not available to us as part of slashcode, and the development team has other things to do besides implement new suggestions, as valid as they are, like not breaking the site. Instead, I've asked them to document the existing implementation. We would like to hear your suggestions for improvement, though, and I would encourage you to send that feedback onto the wiki page for suggestions or email suggestions @ soylentnews . org.
The consensus of the staff is that the method we selected is as close as possible to being accurate, bearing in mind the constraints of the poll system we have, the possibility of artificial alterations, and the nature of internet polls in general. Your Mileage May Vary. ~mattie_p
(Score: 3, Informative) by prospectacle on Wednesday March 12 2014, @03:18AM
I understand that there are very real, practical obstacles to implementing this (i.e. writing or modifying the code), and it couldn't happen for the name decision, but mod parent up, and up again!
Once it's practical to implement, for future decisions, approval voting is a winner.
It avoids the need for multi-round voting. It avoids the problem "spoiler" candidates (splitting the vote). Yet it still allows many options.
It tends to produce consensus results rather than lesser-of-X-evils.
It's simple to count and simple for the voters to understand.
Hooray for approval voting.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 12 2014, @06:51AM
Interesting suggestion. I think I prefer voting systems where you rank the candidatees, although I haven't thought about it too much.
I don't want to get into any discussions about the details, because I'm sure the experts (political scientists? mathematicians? game theorists?) would have covered all this ground. But out of interest, have they established any consensus, or even mathematical proof, that certain systems are best in certain sets of circumstances? And if so, can any of those sets of circumstances be objectively taken as applicable to this particular vote?
Maybe every vote should start with a special meta-vote to decide the voting system for the main vote?
(Score: 2) by gottabeme on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:13AM
If I understand correctly, approval voting gives no way to indicate preference other than yes/no. I don't like this at all. I think Condorcet voting is better. Debian uses it.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 12 2014, @11:08AM
I can clearly imagine a situation happening where you choose a second candidate because you know the one you actually like in unlikely to win, and if public opinion leans enough towards your own, the second-place "more popular" guy ends up winning even though a lot of people don't really want him. I question whether this may in fact be the *likely* scenario...
From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
I'm not quite sure what that means, but it doesn't sound like a good thing to me.
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 12 2014, @11:25AM
Hmm...after further consideration, I think my two above points are actually rather contradictory. The section and the one below it in the linked Wikipedia article give the topic a pretty good workup.
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Wednesday March 12 2014, @02:30PM
Mathematically, maybe. But I challenge you to explain how it works in less than 100 words.
Avantslash: Slashdot+SoylentNews for mobile [avantslash.org].
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12 2014, @10:19AM
After this terrible week of discord and confusion, people are going to want to hang on to SOME sense of stability.
If you hold the poll now, I fear that SoylentNews (a terrible name in my opinion) will win by default, as people seek that whiff of stability amid the chaos.
It's not fair.