Comment 2QZ1 Re: Alright then, I'll start

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The experiment with feeding Soylent articles: your comments!

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Alright then, I'll start (Score: 5, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 13:32 (#2QMB)

A couple of thoughts from one of your volunteer editors:
  1. Our current poll shows most of us also read Soylentnews. That's good news - we should be sister sites, not competition, and it's my preference to avoid duplicate content. That's sometimes impossible but I have noticed any article that has also been submitted to Soyent gets no comments, so maybe we should avoid multiple submissions.
  2. Pipedot flipped the switch on the Soy feed after (A) the pipe had been dry for a whole week, and (B) I was too busy with my day job and a database project to be able to provide content. If no one submits articles here there aren't going to be any to read. Thanks to the handful of you who do provide content.
  3. I noticed the soy feed instantly killed discussion at Pipedot. Because you could comment on the article over at Soylent and have them replicate here, that's what everyone - including yours truly - did. It seems with the Soy feed turned on, Pipedot became nothing more than an alternative GUI to Soylent (like a reader). That makes Pipedot not very useful, particularly because you could read but not comment on articles, or if you did comment, they wouldn't be replicated back.
In general, I like having both Soy and Pipe, and i like it that they're separate. That allows both groups to develop their own personalities and focus, and it allows everyone to see how the differences in moderation etc. lead to different characters of site. I don't see these two sites as competition, as I contribute to both. But I would like to see them diverge a bit, and that will probably happen over time.

Re: Alright then, I'll start (Score: 2, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-08-27 15:01 (#2QPH)

In regard to your point about NCommander giving pipedot permission to run SN content. The rest of the SN staff had no idea this was the case, and when it was originally brought up yesterday, it wasn't clarified.

When statements by NCommander had been found it still wasn't exactly clear that it would also include sharing of the communities comments, not just stories submitted. At the moment it's a bit tricky, as you can reply to an SN comment on this site, and the relevant SN user would have no idea about it. Also, at first the attribution and linking back to SN wasn't as clear as it perhaps should have been.

Personally, I don't have a problem with an arrangement like this (depending on terms), but it took the SN staff (and the community in general) by surprise.

---
n1
Editoral Team
SoylentNews.org
[These are my views and are not necessarily representative of all the SoylentNews.org staff.]

Re: Alright then, I'll start (Score: 1, Interesting)

by joshuajon@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 16:17 (#2QR3)

I'm glad to see this experiment over. I think it was a major blunder on the part of NCommander to not give this a great deal of public discussion before allowing it to proceed.

Re: Alright then, I'll start (Score: 5, Informative)

by mrcoolbp@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 23:37 (#2QZ1)

I'd like to clarify a few things here:
  • There was no anger on the part of the SoylentNews team that this happened
  • We were mostly surprised by a huge server load (took up half the CPU's capacity on the initial scrape) and finding out about this via user comments on IRC
  • NCommander said this in a post here on pipedot:
If we ever manage to get an API for our database coded, I don't think the staff (or I) would have any issue if you spooled in our articles directly (obviously, we have to get a license on new content hammered out before you could do that, but that's on our TODO).
(emphasis mine)
  • There's no hard feelings anywhere, we just would have liked to know what was happening ahead of time
  • Bryan's always been a great guy and remains one in our books

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2014-08-27 23:38 Informative +1 bryan@pipedot.org
2014-08-27 23:49 Informative +1 rocks@pipedot.org
2014-08-28 06:55 Interesting +1 seriously@pipedot.org
2014-08-28 11:38 Informative +1 nightsky30@pipedot.org

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