Difficult Times at Soylent News
What seems like a 90s throwback may have survival issues
TODAY, for the first time in weeks, non-authenticated users could access the #soylent IRC channel again (in the Soylent News network). This wasn't the first time such a restriction was placed and it seemed rather pointless as anyone could just create an account for trolling/abuse purposes.
So I got back to the main channel and not many people were left there. I had been trying without success for a while.
So it basically looks like Soylent News isn't doing too well and some superficial Web survey (spyware) says that soylentnews.org is losing readers. While the above site (spyware) is "blocked by gratuitous javascript," as a friend says, it suggests that readership is down sharply and "if I had to guess," the friend says, "there are fewer accounts active at SN" (Soylent News).
There's an explanation for this: "there were a couple noticeable drops related to outages where not only was the site down for a while but a few days worth of comments were lost. That was really demoralizing and it looks like more people gave up each time. There is a sale coming up soon and that is not entirely clear what that is about or to whom. That also led quite a few accounts to go dormant."
"Discussion forums are not in vogue any more. There is so little news that the aggregation function is only of marginal value any more. And many people, especially, younger eschew independence and self-sufficiency and seek out tightly controlled skinner box environments like bytdance's tiktok, ksa's twitter (now 'x'), and zuckerberg's facebook and his other properties. Apparently kids get their illegal drugs and such via instagram but the police efforts seem to be against other services."
The bottom line is, Soylent News seems to have shed off many active users (or readers) and in IRC many folks are gone after efforts to stave off trolls.
We hope that Soylent News will recover from this. █