The experiment with feeding Soylent articles: your comments!

by
in ask on (#2QM4)
Well, unless you were holed up with Dick Cheney in the underground security bunker, you probably noticed Pipedot flipped the switch on a new feature that feeds articles from other sites. The idea is, as I understand it, anyone running Pipecode can eventually have a whole series of these feeds, and automatically populate their site with articles.

That led to a rash of new articles here, all of the Soylent comments, and a bit of anger over at Soylent despite NCommander having generously and magnanimously offered the feed of articles to Pipedot.

Nonetheless, this mirthful article suggestion poked up in the Pipe today:
Pipedot caught willfully plagiarizing Soylent News! As noted on https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3587&cid=85807 and https://pipedot.org/story/2014-08-26/database-to-track-suspicious-memes-on-twitter and in particular, https://pipedot.org/comment/1409062920_n1_soylent_news_org , the majority of content being posted on pipedot.org is taken without permission from soylentnews.org

Given that the copyright of comments on soylentnews.org is not transferred from the people that posted them, this ongoing action constitutes wilful, mass copyright infringement.

You are hereby given notice on behalf of John Doe and Jane Doe * 4,000 under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, as amended, Section 512(c)(3)(A) that:- ...
Glad nerds haven't lost their sense of humor. So, what did you think of the feature? Your comments here about the feed, the pipe, and the future direction of Pipedot.

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.
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