SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
Social control media? No, thanks. SoylentNews, which has roots in Slashdot and recently turned 10, quit bothering with it and the site is doing fine, as "participating user count continues to climb" (the readers also help fund the operations and traffic seems to be growing indeed, based on surveyors)
THE world and the World Wide Web are changing. More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad (much of that has been subsidised for mass surveillance and data exploitation), so social control media companies/networks gradually perish... some get offloaded onto Wall Street after years of heavy losses and no prospects of profit [1, 2]. To be clear, what they're trading isn't anything but bias, censorship, and social control; no wonder oligarchs like to control such networks and, in Donand Trump's case, it may be a case of money laundering, washing political contributions (bribes) from overseas entities under the guise of "investment". This merits proper regulatory investigations.
Anyway, saner people learned not to participate in these tools of mass manipulation. They harm society in pursuit of power and profit.
This worrisome trend extends beyond social control networks. There's no 'free lunch' at Gandi or even at Vultr (the latest enshittification is shocking*).
What does this mean for sites like ours and SoylentNews? Well, we're seeing an increased activity level, both in the site and in IRC, which we self-host (without outsourcing moderation to a bunch of outsiders with conflicting agenda).
In the case of SoylentNews, according to this new update: "The participating user count continues to climb, as does the number of pages served each day. Many usernames that have existed for a long time but appear to have been inactive for a while are reappearing and participating in the discussions."
They have been subjected to a lot of trolling and abuse lately and this typically means they do well, whereupon some people try to undermine them.
SoylentNews recently had some technical issues, but no data was lost and there was no security incident (as in breach). It was mostly to do with disk space and they explored contingencies. When that happened we observed the downtime and the reactions to it very closely in IRC (while the site was not accessible). I personally urged them not to even consider "Clownflare" (they too say "Clownflare" - a term we likely coined some years ago).
Well, SoylentNews is back (no Clownflare or anything malicious like that) and there is a plan for "New Site", maybe with a more robust architecture and infrastructure (the IRC network was restarted several times this past day).
Here is the full statement from yesterday (less than a day ago), issued by janrinok, a key contributor who became the target of very aggressive trolling:
Outages
I would like to thank you all for your patience during the recent outages. Something is causing a problem with the database itself. It appears to be running out of room and thus having problems when creating backups. This is not a new phenomenon - NCommander observed that the database was corrupted in Nov/Dec 2022, and he fixed the corruptions that were present at that time. I know that others have done similar 'repairs' over the years. Those of you who have been with us a while will know that we have had various site outages since the site's inception in 2014. We try to get the site up as quickly as possible but we currently have a single active sys-admin who has to find the time to fix the site in between running his own business and having a decent work/life balance. The cause of these corruptions has not been identified despite speculation by some individuals.
New Site
The administration associated with creating a business continues and we think that we are now at the final stage. The paperwork has to be signed by several people and this means sending mail around the USA in order to get real signatures from specific individuals. However, we think that this should only take a week or two.
Deleting Spam
For the last month or so we have been deleting Spam from the Polls and journals. Deleting content is not new. Spam, doxxing, abusive material, CEOS, inappropriate ASCII art etc has often been deleted in the last 10 years. In fact, most of our registered community have the ability to delete some material (their own journals for example), and this has happened from time to time in the past. We also delete outdated submissions on a daily basis. The site software provides a means of making such deletions and it can cope with them. The software that is being used is not new - it has been in Rehash since the site became active.
We have received some positive feedback regarding this measure - the Polls and journals are looking much tidier as a result. Unfortunately, we are going to temporarily suspend this measure to simplify the investigations into the database corruption problems. So, as unsightly as they are, we will be returning to the use of Spam moderations on a hopefully temporary basis. We have, of course, also received some negative feedback but it only seems to have come from a couple of Anonymous Cowards, one of whom is our most prolific spammer.
Participation
Finally, I would like to thank the staff for their continued efforts in keeping the site online and active. The participating user count continues to climb, as does the number of pages served each day. Many usernames that have existed for a long time but appear to have been inactive for a while are reappearing and participating in the discussions. I hope that we will soon be able to restructure our site in an affordable yet more robust structure in the very near future.
Jan
We can very much relate to and sympathise with them because we've been subjected to similar abuse for years. Some of the abusers have apparently been kicked out from Mastodon, but we await concrete evidence of the banning (or marching orders). They're not only too extreme for Twitter (got banned) but also for Mastodon. Anyway, that's a subject for another day, maybe Monday (we try to limit how much we entertain these horrible people). █
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* After Reddit and WordPress.com (Automattic) sold people's data we now learn of Vultr doing the same (or preparing to do so), this time at a hosting company level:
I suppose the hip kids would say this is enshittification, but it’s certainly a betrayal.[...]
This is unacceptable. No other hosting company does this.
The TLDR on the side is deceitful. They say that we own our stuff. Fine. The fine print declares that we license our stuff to them, for full exploitation, without compensation.
I have not agreed to those ToS. Fortunately, I can migrate off their systems without console access, so I do not have to agree. If you use vultr, I suggest you do the same. Also contact them through their contact page and state your refusal. I’m told you can cancel via their page without logging in, but haven’t yet tried it.