Story

The experiment with feeding Soylent articles: your comments!

Preview

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: 4, Interesting)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 13:42 (#2QMD)

I have to say I already see them diverging. SN, IMHO, is much more general news it includes a lot of politics and general interest articles. |. is definitely more tech focused, and I like it that way. Problem being, there isn't really much opinion involved with straight up tech news so there's not really all that much to say about it. The few pieces I see on |. that do have some opinion involved are also posted to SN, which has a lot more off the deep end people to argue with... http://xkcd.com/386/

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

by hapnstance@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 14:09 (#2QN2)

I have to agree. And I prefer them to be divergent. I left /. because I didn't like what they were doing to the site. I left SN because I found only about 10% of the content interesting. I found |. and thought I had finally found a place to my liking: something as close to the old, old /. as I could get. And now |. is becoming a reader for SN. This is not what I am looking for and if the trend continues in the wrong direction then, alas, I will have to start my search again. I really want a site that honestly is "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" and not all of the other junk we get on SN (including the "off the deep end" comments). Please turn off the feed.

Re: Alright then, I'll start (Score: 4, Informative)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-08-27 17:05 (#2QS3)

Completely agree. I took very much the same path as you (although I started reading slashdot again after I was disapointed with Soylent. They haven't imposed the beta interface on me yet so I'm cool with it). It seems like the members more interested in drama made the switch to soylent (which we should have seen coming, to be honest), and so a lot of the topics are about subjects that people can discuss with little qualification and create drama about.

I instantly noticed the significant drop in comment quality on pipedot when you flipped that switch. Please don't turn it back on.... I'd rather not see content on pipedot for a few days than to let the soylent news stuff in.

Re: Alright then, I'll start (Score: 3, Interesting)

by reziac@pipedot.org on 2014-08-31 00:56 (#2RXG)

I've noticed the soy drama too :(

I like having all three sites each as their own thing. If a story gets duplicated, probably best to have each site's individual take on it, rather than a straight-up duplicate.

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2014-09-13 12:32 Interesting +1 czert@pipedot.org
2014-09-05 13:02 Funny +1 hyper@pipedot.org

Junk Status

Not marked as junk