Bye – Why I'm leaving Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@charlesomeara/bye-11224eca4a99 <comment><USER4> > "There are far, far, far too many advice articles on this site. It's one > thing to say 'I lost my job and this is how it affected/changed me,' that's > personal experience. But advice articles always contain the same implied > subtext: you're doing it wrong and I'm the genius who is going to show you > how to do it the right way. Hence, how to fix your relationship, how to > manage your spare time, ten things your boss does that you haven't figured > out, etc. etc."

I've seen this attitude in _so many_ different situations IRL and online. It's so refreshing to read it so clearly and fearlessly stated like that.

It's unfortunate that Medium have attracted all the seagulls ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3e0EkvIEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-3e0EkvIEM)), because they've done so much awesome technical work on the platform, for example with editing ([https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is- terribl...](https://medium.com/medium-eng/why-contenteditable-is- terrible-122d8a40e480)).

How can platforms like Medium cultivate a culture that deprioritizes and devalues the types of spam content the article author is referring to?

EDIT: Accidentally pasted the quote twice, fixed (thanks yxlx)

<comment><USER5> Micro-payments for publishing. Medium (and other quality essay sites) should charge per essay. Nothing too big, have a scaled system that is affordable to all. Even a small payment of 1GBP/USD/EUR per post is enough to keep the spammers away. It might not deter the paid for corporate shilling, but it would be a good start.

I've not thought this through in depth - feel free to pick holes in it, but I firmly believe that the mess we're suffering on the self-published areas of the internet are because it's free-to-post. So to maintain a level of quality there needs to be some sort of barrier to entry.

<comment><USER6> I can see that it would lead to a deluge of 'Like this post? Please consider donating so I can continue spewing forth banal crap I lifted from Internet articles about Elon Musk' quite quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As if to prove his point, the 'recommended' articles below the post from 'Life Lessons' are:

* 'Whatever you do, just start.'

* 'How to build the self confidence you need.'

* 'Even a genius has to sell himself… the remarkable resume of Leonardo da Vinci'

Written in turn by a founder, a marketer, and the author of 'Massive Life Success.'

The recommendation algo seems to be serving a heavy dose of irony today.

The OP is right- Medium is drowning in trash, and kudos to him for saying it.

Edit: It's quite possible that Medium is going for the 'mullet' strategy of HuffPo. If you go to the front page of medium.com - it's okay, it's not exactly super high quality, but it's not the kind of crap that gets punted around on email and social. Maybe that's what they're going for? If so, shame.

<comment> d--b Haha, well spotted. I agree, I just joined medium last week because I had read great articles there, but the articles curated by the medium staff as well as articles that pop out as "top articles" are really really bad. I'm particularly surprised because the goal of medium was to avoid this kind of low quality content. I guess social media just has no future...

<comment><USER7> Can't they just rebrand that kind of content as "Medium Social" or something like that?

<comment><USER6> They probably could, but then 'Forbes Contributor' is synonymous with 'barely vetted blogger.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He complains in a very infantile way about "Business types" who only cares about selling an idea, but ultimately he's leaving Medium because it's a bad marketing decision for him. He says he doesn't want to be associated with medium because it conveys an image of bad content that he does not think it's good for his artwork. He's leaving Medium because of his personal brand.

There's nothing on Medium itself that inhibit the display of the art he wants to share. Medium as an platform, it's enough for his needs. But it is the brand and the marketing aspect of it that he does not like. He is not that different from those "business types". He doesn't see just a platform for sharing content, he sees a brand, and this brand is bringing a negative value to his own brand as an artist.

Besides, this world view of "business types" and "artists" is simplistic and childish, is a persuasive argument to convince us of the legitimacy of his artwork. It is Another marketing strategy: I am the real artist, my artwork is of original legitimacy, different from this capitalist world we live in.

He is obnoxious, loud, and his reasons are contradictory.

Even though he has a point: There's too much self-help on Medium.

<comment><USER9> _He 's leaving Medium because of his personal brand._

Congratulations. You possess exactly the lack of irony necessary to have just proved his point for him.

What if I told you there are more ways of looking at the world than market- capitalist terms? That some people value things on whole different axes than what will and will not make them more money?

<comment><USER10> The author said in the comments section: "honestly, i didn't come here to follow people. i came here to build an audience"

He also said in the article: "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots and I am no longer comfortable telling people, 'Yeah I post on Medium, check me out.'"

To me, this sounds like he is concerned about his personal brand / reputation, which he aggregates with the content of Medium as a whole. As such, I think that lucasnemeth's points are reasonable.

<comment><USER11> Building an audience is not the same as building a business. And the fact that most people now-a-days can't see the difference between the two things goes on to prove the all point of the article.

Some people just want to create and show it to the world, they are not obsessed in getting millionary over it. But that goes against the "entrepreneurial" culture installed over the last decade where everyone thinks it's a nice thing to actually pass all your time promoting yourself like you are some kind of brand.

From what I got from the article, that's exactly what the author of the article is against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree. Medium is riddled with advice articles written by "Motivational Speaker and Coach living in San Francisco" types who have never done anything consequential. It's also turned into a speaking podium for womens' rights activists who I frankly don't care about. Not to mention 50% of the articles there usually starts with "You're all missing the point of X".

Rather read a real book about people who have actually done great feats. Elon Musk's biography, and Pixar's Creativity Inc have had much better advice than the fluffy articles I see on medium.

Props to this guy for having the balls to speak honestly about Medium.

<comment><USER13> Important lessons from Musk's biography:

\- Wherever possible, get extremely rich early on by having the good fortune to be bought out by Paypal.

\- If the opportunity arises to be brought in as a charismatic figurehead for an existing electric car company, take it.

\- Be sure to absorb as much government largesse as possible in the form of subsidies and federal contracts, while portraying yourself as a champion for private-sector innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe I got to medium late, but a medium link has always been a sure sign to me that the content I'm about to read is obviously wrong and likely lacking in humility

<comment><USER15> That's too bad.

I post to medium, but I treat it as essentially a more modern Blogger. Do you skip any content you see posted to blogger.com or wordpress.com sites too? When I post there, I don't care about what other people are posting there, no more than I would avoid creating a website because many websites are shit.

As a blogging platform, Medium is OK. It's not brilliant. It's just OK. The editor is nice but too limited. The clean formatting is attractive but often I want more flexibility. The stats are useful but oddly, they refuse to show you more than 30 days worth at a time. Etc.

I have sometimes thought about going fully self hosted, but running my own blog is something I did years ago and I can't be bothered with that any more. Virtually all blogging software appears to be written in PHP by people who can't write secure code to save their lives ... WordPress is just a rolling disaster zone of exploits, I don't want viral articles to give me a big bandwidth bill, I don't want to have to set up my own analytics, etc.

Perhaps at some point I'll get over my inertia and move off of Medium, but it'd be unfortunate if I end up being motivated by "lol medium users are all idiots" becoming a meme rather than technical tradeoffs.

<comment><USER14> I do click on medium links if the content looks interesting, though they probably have to hit a higher bar than other sites to get past my nagging prejudices about medium content. Certainly anything that sounds like it might be hyperbole gets instantly ignored.

I'm afraid I actually find the clean formatting a little oppressive, although at least it's a consistently usable interface on mobile which is something you can't depend on in random blogs. The value-add features like read time and suggested articles don't add to the experience at all. In terms of the stats etc, I don't mind total views and uniques, which you could get from GA. Beyond that I think stats are part of the problem - I want to read things that people felt moved to write, not something that hits some kind of ROI metric.

<comment><USER16> I noticed the same happen, i click on some medium articles from HN. They might have okay title and theme, some can begin mildly entertaining, but then more often than not just end up being self indulgent marketing bs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've never seen his blog or a crow cartoon before. But I knew when I clicked that since it was hosted on medium.com, it was going to be at least mildly interesting because lots of good articles hosted there get linked on HN. This was the crappiest medium.com blog post I can remember reading this year. He sounds like an angry asshole! How's that for irony. But I'm merely an outsider, so I have no clue if the site is actually going down the shitter. If Medium is indeed swimming in trash, they still have time to fix that, because someone like me doesn't see it yet. So this one angry exit might be a martyr that gets the rest of the community motivated to change the problem, if it exists at all.

<comment><USER18> You've had your medium experience curated by HN if you're clicking through from here.

There will be others who are getting their medium experience curated through reddit, tumblr, facebook, other forums etc.

And HN doesn't tend to go in for "outrage linking", elsewhere people will link to blogs for the sake of "look how awful this opinion is" which may also affect their perception of the platform.

Medium is an open blogging platform, it seems unfair to blame an open platform for the authors on it, but part of the problem here is that medium used to be invite only, so perhaps people are still judging it based on the authors on there, this article's author for one.

<comment><USER17> I thought it was still invite only! You're right, I only access articles on there from HN. If they indeed are open-access like facebook now, I can completely see it being a festering cesspool of crap articles. Good riddance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I totally agree with him.

When I first heard of Medium, it seemed to have some well written articles. Then it turned into exactly what he's complaining about. Anyone can throw anything up there and wind up linked to on reddit, as if it was handed down from a mountain top.

I don't trust most articles there anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> I mean medium no worse than any other blogging platform. Who cares if there is crap content on there? The internet is a sea of crap. You just use your brain when reading to see if something sounds like bullshit, and take everything you read with a grain of salt, just like you would anywhere on the internet.

It's not like many people actually browse medium.com, we all just get linked there from HN and reddit, which could happen on any platform. Any crap is really the fault of a the community linking to it.

And in my honest opinion, I haven't really seen that many genuinely awful posts to medium. Perhaps some of you could link to some of the terrible posts this guy is referencing?

</comment><comment><USER21> Although he's coming across as throwing his toys out of the pram, he's completely right.

This was obvious from the beginning when Medium opened the floodgates.

There is definitely room for a writing application that brings together original good articles from both professional and non-professional writers, a bit like Blendle[1] but more open.

1: [https://launch.blendle.com/](https://launch.blendle.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> All I took away from that post is that this dude is an asshole. Sure, I have noticed an influx of self-help/how-to articles, everyone has. But his insistent whining about "business types" is laughable. In his post he mentions his new blog twice and then continues to link to it in almost every comment he posts. If that's not a form of marketing, I don't know what is.

> "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots"

Yes it has, and you sir, are one of them.

<comment><USER23> I found his article a bit obnoxious. I've never heard of this guy, so all I can judge him by is statements like this:

 _" To those folks who worked so tirelessly to make Medium the shit pile it's become, i say this: fuck off."_

Medium has some great writers. Even if I find their ideas uninspiring or disagreeable, I still appreciate great writing. This isn't great writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Medium is swimming in crap. Like reprints or links to other pages. Why? > > That's for social media. Don't repost things. Where's the originality in > that.

What if I told you, ... "Medium IS social media"?

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the larger context is being missed. Any sort of open-to-the-masses forum will be gamed by people trying to get more out of it than you. More karma, more exposure, more information, whatever. Every system like this is eventually taken over by people who increasingly amass more power or influence, drowning out the "little" guy. It's probably easiest to see the direct actions taken by marketers and promoters, and you can say that all the voting and influence is just the way the systems work, but it's all politics and wrangling, in every platform, including this one. The key is to find ones that do a good job mitigating this gaming, as I believe HN does. It's ironic. If you have something to say, you want to do it at a place that can help amplify you, but if a place is good at that, it will attract bad actors, and it becomes self-limiting.

EDIT: I think this is why I continue to use Reddit. I created an account to subscribe to only a sub-section of subreddits, and none of them are defaults. It's what Reddit intended to be before it became what it is today. I get most of the benefit of "the platform," while avoiding _most_ of the bad actors.

<comment><USER16> > EDIT: I think this is why I continue to use Reddit.

I struggle to find good subreddits in the same way as subject specific forums can be (i.e physicsforums.com). Even those related to science and tech have huge chunk of crap floating around. Can you suggest how one could filter reddit content better?

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately, no. I've built my list of 50 subs by clicking links, using existing subs' sidebars, and, honestly, a lot of clicking the "random" button. I've winnowed and added and winnowed for years now. Like you, I find many subs that SHOULD be interesting, just aren't, and I scratch them and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Medium was a mark of "interesting, well thought out content" when it first launched and was invite only. I gained access later on (early 2013), but definitely before it was widely adopted like it is today. I stopped spending much time there once it went that way, but I wasn't angry like this guy. I don't feel as though I am owed anything by others, as he seems to believe (more power to him).

</comment><comment><USER27> Charle's crow comics: [http://crowhoho.weebly.com/crow- cartoons-2016.html](http://crowhoho.weebly.com/crow-cartoons-2016.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> > Medium is swimming in crap. Like reprints or links to other pages. Why? > That's for social media. Don't repost things. Where's the originality in > that.

Reposting (or the principle behind sharing someone else's work you find interesting) is something that's been around since the web's inception, and is actually a _great_ thing: Hacker News itself is a link aggregator which is essentially a centralized reposting system, ordered by interest (up/downvotes). Hyperlinking is all about sharing awesome content, and there are thousands of things I never would have known about if somebody didn't reblog it, retweet it, share it on fb, or crosspost it from a different subreddit.

Originality is cool, but I'll never know about your original work if a friend of a friend of a friend didn't share it all the way down that chain until it got to me.

</comment><comment><USER29> _Sigh_ Another "Why I'm leaving X" post.

You could have written the best post the internet has read all year, but I can't bring myself to read past the title.

</comment><comment><USER30> Pretty infantile and obnoxious post, though I agree with the main point - <USER2> content you see on Medium's front page is low quality.

That happens because Medium has a bad discovery system - which is a huge bummer, because they have really nailed everything else.

The solution is simple - just allow users to control which content they read, simply by copying what reddit has already figured out how to do. Allow people to follow tags and browse top articles of the week/month/year, and have a separate stream where I can see posts from the people I follow.

Instead, they have an opaque algorithm, and my front page has a bunch of seemingly random posts I would never choose to see.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think this guy shows good insight and great instinct. In my view, he's completely right about Medium. It was quite clear to me early on that Medium would go that way and I'm sorry to see me proven right.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's even worse since Medium's transition to a paid content (paid by the industry, not by the reader) platform.

I wonder why not more people just use a static site generator like Hugo and host their blog themselves.

<comment><USER33> 1\. Most people don't want to generate a static site. 2\. Most people don't want to host a static site. 3\. Most people don't know how to do either. 4\. Most people do want others to read what they write. 5\. More people will visit your curator / aggregator of choice than your website.

That being said it would be kind of neat if they took on more of a wordpress strategy: 1\. The blogging engine gets open sourced and is made self-hostable (in addition to hosted option) 2\. They host an opt-in disqus-like widget for comments / likes. 3\. The medium website did recommendation and curation for all blogs that use the widget. 4\. They ran an opt-in ad-network for hosted and self-hosted alike.

<comment><USER16> Hugo is great though, easy to use, its not more difficult than other software to use. Users are just afraid of command line tools.

I don't think wordpress strategy would work for medium. The best they can do is to improve their algoritms so that people can get good suggestions on the things of their interest. Sort of like subject circles, marketing ppl get to see their shit, engineers get to see their and other nerds can have their own cirlejerk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Author is breathing the same air, as bunch of obnoxious idiots breath too. That might cause some discomfort, should we leave the planet? I think he pays too much attention to the platform. All most people see is just a link. They click it, if they like what they see - they stay. And it doesn't bother them a bit if some obnoxious idiot has a blog on the same domain. I think author should let it go and focus on his work rather than on watching who else is standing next to him in line.

PS And, what is wrong with being dressed as a biker?

</comment><comment><USER35> When Medium first launched I believe it was invite only. Which bootstrapped a community of mostly writers who cared about the problem that Medium wanted to solve, a better platform for writing on the web.

Then Medium opened the doors to everyone. This caused the inevitable problem that those who came flooding in didn't necessarily care as much about the craft of writing. They just wanted to ride the wave of popularity and have their advert hosted on Medium.

The only way to solve this is careful curation which comes with it's own set of problems. The takeaway is that _any_ platform that intends to open the doors to the general public eventually will inevitably exhibit a degradation of content. It should never be a surprise. If you don't want to be part of the next Buzzfeed then be aware going in that this is the eventual fate of all open access and free platforms for content publishing.

</comment><comment><USER36> My simple response is: go make your own blogging platform for artists then.

While I never subscribed to the idea of some centralized blog platform (though I've tried them), I don't begrudge others for taking part, nor do I judge them because they're not "artist" enough.

Whine less, do more.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think a more interesting question is...can any _successful_ self-publishing website do the things necessary (whatever they may be) to prevent it from becoming the marketing shit-heap he describes?

I have my doubts, but anything is possible I guess.

<comment><USER38> Since it is just as much Sofia media as it is a publishing platform/blogging tool-- I agree. I like Twitter, but there are a lot of idiots there. I like Facebook (sometimes), lots of idiots there as well.

We all like tools to encourage free speech here (I'd assume), this is just one of the negatives that comes with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Medium's openness to everyone - even, shock horror, businesspeople - <USER3> than a pretentious clique of self-described artists with rich parents - is its great strength. It's why it's succeeded over the likes of svbtle. The democratization of content is the heart of the web's success, and you have to take the bad with the good.

Curation/recommendation is a hard problem that needs work. But I sincerely hope that Medium continues to offer a great platform for anyone to write, about anything. That's worth paying a lot for.

<comment><USER40> Medium and Svbtle actually opened to the public right around the same time, in October 2013 and January 2014, respectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I hope Medium have stayed invite-only. It's really hard to keep the content high quality when a lot of people flood in. The atmosphere changes, and that changes the culture and everything.

And I'm really sad that Signal v. Noise has moved to Medium, too. I miss the "Happy Monday" every time I come to the site. It feels like walking in a local bakery and having a friendly chat with the waitress. It's a warmth and sincerity I seldom find in today's websites.

<comment><USER42> > I hope Medium have stayed invite-only.

They haven't. Anyone can sign up now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've never understood Medium. I've always just thought it was Blogger with a locked (although very nice!) theme.

Honest question: What do Medium users regard as the killer features of the platform? Can these be achieved with your own site?

My guess is that the most prominent reason is that every Medium user is on a centralized platform and therefore more discoverable. This is bound to asymptotically trend to almost zero as more people use the platform.

Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER44> People browse Medium "horizontally"? News to me; I get all my medium links through other social networks and never bother with the recommended articles.

I was considering doing some vaguely highbrow blog posts and choosing Medium as the platform for it, precisely because it has some cachet as being the platform for quite a few political articles I read. Would hosting it myself add to or detract from the impression people would get?

</comment><comment><USER45> Frankly, his profile page[1] doesn't really do any favors for his content. There's great stuff in there, but the timeline has less impact than a blog index or a Twitter feed. I'm wondering if he might have been more at home on Tumblr.

1: [https://medium.com/@charlesomeara](https://medium.com/@charlesomeara)

</comment><comment><USER46> I've always felt like Medium was a more professional version of Blogger. Anyone can create, anyone can post, and anyone can post about anything. If Medium, or any other service, really wants to create a better platform, they're going to have to deal with the "anyone" factor. Otherwise it's just another blogging site.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Medium has become overloaded with loud, obnoxious idiots". I think the world is overloaded in this way too.

</comment><comment><USER16> To paraphrase some other site on the interwebs: narcissism is the cancer that's eating Medium

</comment><comment><USER48> Good advice. But rather than Weebly, why not get back to self-hosting?

The latest Wordpress version and the forthcoming Version 2 REST API (plugin, for now) is going to create huge opportunities for the creation of apps for creating and consuming great content _that YOU own_. :)

</comment><comment><USER49> A medium post about leaving medium.

Nothing more to say

<comment><USER50> He could have just... left Medium and left it at that. Instead, he brought more traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Any idea why he lists his new blog site as www.crowhoho.weebly.com? It doesn't even land there, but rather at the more logical crowhoho.weebly.com. Do people still need to see www at the beginning of a domain to think it's something they can click on?

</comment><comment><USER52> Perhaps your expectations were misplaced? Please see: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/investors](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/medium/investors)

</comment><comment><USER53> This is silly, it's like saying I'm leaving the internet because the internet or I'm allergic to cats so I can't use Facebook. I certainly don't judge someone who posts on medium just because they are on Medium.

</comment><comment><USER54> >They love to move into places where artists live and raise the cost of living and build their crappy chain stores and push us out.

To be fair, they're still part of the gentrification cycle.

</comment><comment><USER47> "There are far, far, far too many articles of a purely commercial nature."

Is there a term for this corporate and media agency pillage of any and every social platform?

</comment><comment><USER55> This is what people are talking about when they advice not to let the door hit you on the butt when you are on the way out. _just saying_

</comment><comment><USER56> I like this guy.</comment>


Show HN: We open sourced Lockitron's crowdfunding app - <AUTHOR> http://selfstarter.us/

<comment><USER3> Outstanding. I was going to try to contact you privately and beg for advice on how to run something similar.

My hats so far off to you guys, it's on the floor in front of me. Can't wait for my Lockitron to arrive.

<comment><USER4> When they mentioned that they would open source their code, I started looking at payment gateways that did cool things. Here's my research so far: [http://www.geekphd.com/lockitron-selfstarter-us-payment- gate...](http://www.geekphd.com/lockitron-selfstarter-us-payment-gateways- that-allow-pre-orders/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for doing the leg work with this. I think that anyone who wants to use this needs to look at payments _very_ carefully so as not to run the risk of rampant chargebacks or getting shut down by your processor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could start a trend towards moving away from Kickstarter. So far, the more famous projects that have pursued funding from a similar model without using Kickstarter itself (e.g. Lockitron, App.net) have done so out of necessity – they weren't allowed to use the Kickstarter platform.

But if people keep succeeding without being hosted on Kickstarter itself, that 5% fee might look more and more unattractive to people starting large projects. How much value does being on Kickstarter really add to your project, and how much is simply due to the brilliant fundraising model?

<comment><USER6> I am currently running a Kickstarter campaign and I must say that this is far from being a trend. The run away success campaigns have a track record and a following, which is leveraged to create the initial PR push. Without hitting 20% funding very early on the project has very little chance of succeeding (kickstarter stats).

A lot of our pledging happened from traffic coming directly from Kickstarter. My guess here is that people that come to Kickstarter have an intent to back and they become shoppers. User lands on one cool project, gets excited, browses, which leads to other projects being discovered and potentially backed as well.

At the end of the day, it's a funnel and your project has to be discovered in order for some users to convert to backers. It's also about connecting your project with the right audience. By cutting out Kickstarter you cut out a large portion of users that are more likely to convert, reducing chance of initial social sharing, crazy trends that create press stories, etc. This is why I don't think this is a trend.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree - I believe that hardware products that are accepted to Kickstarter should still leverage its inherent momentum. Based on reports from project creators, I have heard anywhere from 30-50% of traffic comes sources internal to Kickstarter.

<comment><USER7> Maybe the way around this with selfstarter is to have a simple directory page, anyone using the skeleton to create a project can submit their URL. That could be the agregator for those folks to browse through multiple projects. It would be another source of traffic for projects.

<comment><USER8> Like a Reddit for selfstarter projects, but the up votes are pledges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious to see what happens to Amazon FPS if these product based crowd- funding apps take off. We may be in for a bit of a Paypal style crackdown debacle.

I actually spoke with the Kickstarter guys back in 2009 when I was considering branching off their idea _specifically_ for product based ideas, thinking that it could be "Amazon for stuff that doesn't exist yet".

We all agreed that the idea should happen, but Kickstarter didn't want to do it for two reasons:

1\. Their goal is to help artists succeed. They're artists themselves, and the guy who started the site's been working on this for _years_. It means a lot to them to help the little one-man filmmakers.

2\. The risk in having products that aren't delivered on time, in the same form as envisioned, or aren't even completed was just too high. They were terrified of having a backlash of backers who thought they were purchasing a product when in fact the transaction is structured as a donation.

The second one is what makes me worried. What happens if, worst case scenario, Pebble goes bankrupt without producing any items? Who takes the hit there? Is it Amazon, Pebble, Kickstarter, or the backers? It isn't clear yet because we haven't had a high-profile failure yet. But it's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER10> I'm surprised that the idea that _anyone_ other than the backers are going to lose money keeps coming up; it's always looked pretty clear to me (even though I've gotten rewards delivered from around 30 out of 45 projects, mostly hardware, and the remaining ones are still pretty visible and active - <USER2> success doesn't feel like a guarantee on anyone's part, it's just pretty cool.) It's helped that I'm pretty well-qualified to judge these projects, though the only ones that looked unlikely to actually deliver have been _really_ obvious (the "projector" that was supposed to be something mini- maglite sized that plugged into an iPhone headphone jack comes to mind) so it's not like it's actually taken all that much effort :-)

It also seems like the small-donation structure should make it difficult for any individual to have cause for action; I see some of KickStarter's recent changes as not wanting to even get into that fight, but that's because even _winning_ would be expensive (and as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread, they're actually in it for the indie films.)

Or do you mean just the popularity risk, if enough projects don't deliver?

<comment><USER11> Eichin,

I've also backed quite a few Kickstarter design projects. The biggest risk backers face from Kickstarter design projects is personal safety, not failure to deliver. I've spent many years in new product development and the items delivered to me wouldn't come close meeting even the most basic consumer safety codes. Plus I have no expectation that the project creators have any sort of product liability insurance.

That being said, I think the Selfstarter model can directly address that risk. Backers are dealing directly with project creators. The liability is clear. I expect that in the future, project creators will need to demonstrate product liability insurance coverage and that they will meet safety regulations. I hope to see that option somehow added to the Selfstarter code so that project creators can show they have insurance coverage and that they will meet safety standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Kickstarter is going to end up being known as the company that (kick)started a phenomenon but didn't own it. They should have become a marketplace for projects, not an arbiter of what gets a shot and what doesn't.

<comment><USER13> Interestingly they don't seem to want to own the whole phenomenon. Which could be a good thing for what they want to achieve. They want to focus on creative projects over being a platform to fund anything or a store with little accountability.

<comment><USER14> The attention and revenues they would generate from having bigger and more successful products (revenue size wise) would benefit the smaller creative projects IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A couple months ago, I had added "kickstarter widget for start-up websites" to my list of ideas that I never do, but think are cool. This is a really wonderful open-source contribution, so hat tip!

We also ordered a Lockitron for our office already. We have keypads on our house, and we love them, and imagine Lokcitron will be even more love.

<comment><AUTHOR> I still believe there is room for a proper platform to manage crowdfunding for hardware - maybe with a distributed option as well.

<comment><USER16> Maybe Amazon would be in the best position to do it.

<comment><USER17> Given the new Amazon Lending program, I'm guessing they're starting to move in that direction. It's for sellers buying inventory now, but Amazon has a lot of data about what sells that can help it determine what's a good risk for investment.

Cam, you rock.

<comment><USER11> Amazon has a "lending program"? Can you point to it. That's the magic that holds this together. Get prefunding that's only available when you are ready to ship. Secure a loan with the prefunding to go into production.

<comment><USER16> Amazon Lending through Amazon Capital Services

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044349330457803...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443493304578034103049644978.html) (google "Small Businesses are Finding An Unlikely Banker: Amazon" to get around paywall)

<comment><USER11> Excellent. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Spent the better part of an afternoon cloning the lockitron site a few days ago... you guys are fucking awesome. And I'm impatient. I'll share a python version when I have a chance to clean it up.

Thanks for being awesome.

<comment><USER19> Did you make any progress with python? I'm not much of a ruby guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i'm guessing this is in response to this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4625371> in other words, OP delivered!

</comment><comment><USER21> Something funny happened when I tried to share this on G+ (screenshot - <http://goo.gl/VK404>). Suggest the creators remove that hidden Latin div.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is the "Fork Now" button supposed to go to a Lockitron preorder page?

EDIT>> Apparently only the second fork button does this...the one I clicked after reading the page content :)

<comment><USER23> Good catch!

I just pushed a fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Was working on something similar when this came out. <https://github.com/crowdint/fundraiser>

Great job by the Lockitron team.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for releasing this. The design works well for single-product offerings, though would need to be modified for pledge-reward setups.. not too hard to do though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Thank you for this. This will be so helpful for my and many other startups. Interesting to note that Kickstarter has an Amazon FlexPay gem on their github.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very lean at this point, but hopefully it's a good starting point. Kickstarter was amazing for doing the heavy lifting and open sourcing it with their amazon_flex_pay gem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Number of tests(Unit,Integration etc) is __0 __!

<comment><USER27> So submit a pull request. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Damn it! You just ruined my startup weekend idea!

<comment><USER29> There's plenty left to do:

 _"We've kept Selfstarter really simple, but that also means that you should beef it up with your own authentication, administration and product management code."_

</comment></comment><comment> mck- This is so awesome -- have the Kickstarter guys contacted you? I wonder how they take this, and what this means for the entire crowd-funding space for that matter, especially the smaller ones that don't have the network effects of Kickstarter.

I just did a project on Fundrazr last month. If only this was available then.. kudos!

</comment><comment><USER30> This is really nice! If a project got accepted into Kickstarter, would it be better to stay with them or use this instead? The benefit of exposure to a large community as a Kickstarter project is pitted against the extra 5% that they take... How do you turn exposure into a monetary value for comparison? Pricing of ads maybe?

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Can anybody share how it is different from other crowdfunding scripts like Agriya?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is absolutely fantastic of you, guys to share an app like that. Most hardware makers cant make self-serving software like that, and you rock! I am sending the link to all of my engineering friends.

</comment><comment><USER32> Thanks for open sourcing this. We are probably going to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon, and I am excited to check this out as an option.

</comment><comment><USER7> Excellent! I was just about to look your site up again and see how you put your own crowdfunding project together.

This is perfect! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> It looks this way without flash installed — <http://imgur.com/zcPSG>

</comment><comment><USER34> I am a hardcore rails guy, but for some reason using sinatra for this app, would be a better option.

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome work, guys! Thanks for sharing. I wish you went with my suggestion for bootstarter.js...

</comment><comment><USER36> Best idea ever! Great job to all involved - wonder how Kickstarter is going to take this?

</comment><comment><USER37> This is how it should be. Most of the kickstarter projects get funded after doing lot of promotions and leveraging founders's own social network. Kickstarter taking % cut of the fund is completely unnecessary in many situations. They do provide some kind of project validation which is important in high-risk projects.

</comment><comment><USER38> Nicely done guys. Someone fucked with the wrong hackers.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is awesome thanks for making this open source.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice job guys! This is pretty awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER41> Thanks for sharing this with the community!

</comment><comment><USER42> i'm loving it

</comment><comment><USER43> Really admire it! keep up sharing</comment>


YouTube / Ogg/Theora comparison - <AUTHOR> http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

<comment><USER2> The post reacted against the Google employee's phrasing, and compared current YouTube auto-compression to custom Theora compression.

But it has since been misread by many as comparing the codecs and their capabilities.

Chris Di Bona was essentially correct when implying that the pre-2001 type of innovation in Theora/VP3 would not be technically persuasive to modern content sites.

jd/adobe

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe that the comparison to YouTube is fair. YT allows far higher resolution video("HD"), and even the default player window is 640x360. Of course YT player could be upscaling all videos from 480x270, but that would be a bit silly. I think more research is needed before drawing conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER4> The new <video> tag has to be one of those life changing experiences for the web.

Theora rocks!

(and the big buck bunny video rocks too)

<comment><USER5> No, Theora doesn't rock, or more correctly _it hasn't rocked_

Until a few months ago when they made a breakthrough in the development version of their encoder, Theora was the _WORST_ mpeg4-like codec in active development, _much_ worse than h263 (which is itself awful). Double the bitrate / encode times and half the quality -- it hadn't really improved at all since it was open sourced.

Now it's no longer the very worst modern codec (beating h263, but still mediocre), but it's at least 4 years too late.

Vorbis audio is widely used in commercial game development because it's very free and very good at low bitrates. Theora has _only_ been used by agenda- driven freetards, basically just Wikipedia. Mozilla will likely be the only browser vendor shipping Theora and not h264. Apple and MS will _never_ ship Theora, and Google is currently only shipping h264.

I wouldn't have a problem with people advocating its sole use for ideological reasons if it wasn't dogshit for so long (and mediocre now).

<comment><USER6> Couple of basic factual errors:

Google Chrome _is_ shipping Theora/Vorbis. They ship it as well as H.264 in Chrome, but without H.264 in Chromium (as they can't licence the patents).

Opera has had Theora/Vorbis supporting builds for a while. It seems very likely they will go with Theora when they launch full support.

Note also that Xiph Qicktime codecs allow Safari to use Theora as well. These codecs should just intsall from the net when you encounter such a file, but while we wait for Apple to get around to that they could easily be piggy backed onto one of the many pieces you need to install to get all video working well on Mac OS X (Perian, VLC, mplayer, or even Mozilla Firefox)

It may only be mediocre or "good enough", but it is "free". If you don't understand the importance of that to the web then congratulations on your lack of "ideology".

Or maybe letting some random corporations place a tax a vital part of our technical infrastructure in return for marginal technical benefits _is_ an ideology, just not a very good one?</comment></comment></comment>


The BitTorrent Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://mozy.com/infographics/a-history-of-bittorrent/

<comment> Asa-Nisse Regarding the 3.5 musd each figure... I just want to point out that the industry, err, bought, err, judges was much sneakier than that.

Only one person behind the pirate bay actually has any assets worth seizing. So they made the fine collective, if one person does not pay his part the others have to fill in.

In effect this makes three already poor people bankrupt and one quite wealthy also very bankrupt :)

The pirate bay will have a new trial in Sweden conveniently scheduled after the elections in a higher instance.

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool graphic. They misspelled 'attorneys' though. Also, Valve doesn't use bittorrent, they just have a bunch of servers.

<comment><USER3> I think the confusion comes from Bram Cohen apparently having worked at Valve on their CDN for a bit; [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/technology/circuits/12shar...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/technology/circuits/12shar.html)</comment></comment>


NYT gets all the news that's fit to print via Flipboard - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20120624/the-new-york-times-gets-all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print-all-of-it-into-flipboard/

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... The news is important for Flipboard, because it marks the first time the startup has convinced a big publisher to give it full access to its "premium" content. ... Now the paper says it will emulate cable TV's "TV Everywhere" strategy, where paying subscribers can read the paper using any device or software they want...."_

Outsourcing the distribution technology. A sure sign other paper might think the same but will they use Flipboard or another platform?

</comment><comment><USER2> Any details on the revenue share between NYT and Flipboard? Does Flipboard get anything if viewers use read content through their app, through in-app signups, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... The partnership involves an advertising revenue split between The Times and Flipboard. The Times will sell full-screen ads that appear between its Flipboard pages, which are intended to be more attention-grabbing than conventional Web advertising...."_ ~ [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/flipboard-in- conten...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/flipboard-in-content-deal- with-new-york-times/)

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting to know how they analyzed this decision. Besides losing readers to the web, one of the major problems newspapers face is that web advertising revenues are much lower than print advertising revenues. With a revenue split, they are whittling away at that revenue even further. While they are probably hoping for additional readers through Flipboard, there's a good chance that they will just be cannibalizing existing readership.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... one of the major problems newspapers face is that web advertising revenues are much lower than print advertising revenues. ..."_

Interesting observation and one I found when I read an article on LWN today about advertising vs subscriptions ~ <https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs> Note that Flipboard's McCue is reported saying:

 _"... publishers can charge between 10 and 15 times more for advertisements within Flipboard than they can for banner advertisements, and Flipboard takes a cut of these revenues. ..."_ ~ [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital- media/8969325/Flipboard-is-ready-to-page-the-future-says-Mike-McCue.html)

<comment><USER3> Wow, 10-15x is an impressive markup. I'm skeptical that those rates will hold after the newness of Flipboard wears off. Your typical marketer might want to see those rates justified by proportionally higher conversions.

<comment><USER4> Those rates will hold.

Flipboard ads are primary full-page ads, and full-page ads go for 10-15x more than banner ads.

A banner is easily ignored, and there tend to be competing banner ads on an individual page.

Full-page ads are invasive---you can't ignore them and must move past them to get to the content, and there is only one of them per page. Due to this, full page ads command a premium. They're seen as a 'reasonable' alternative to popups or popunders which go for similar rates.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study: Oxytocin mediates social reward by harnessing endocannabinoids in mice - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/oxytocin-makes-socializing-feel-fun-just-like-marijuana/ <comment><USER3> Marijuana definitely doesn't make socializing fun for all people...

<comment><USER4> I actually have never heard of it making socializing fun for anyone. My anecdata tells me that the opposite is true...

<comment><USER5> cannabis has different strains, that contain different balances of active ingredients. It's thought that high THC strains are not going to be good for social activity, while high CBD content is probably going to be better.

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Some cursory research shows that CBD isn't psychoactive, and it actually counteracts some effects of THC.

It does probably decrease anxiety, though, which could make socializing easier and more enjoyable. I'd say that makes it a "social drug" in the same way that an SSRI can be a social drug for some people.

Sources:

[http://www.wired.com/2015/07/medical-marijuana- epilepsy/](http://www.wired.com/2015/07/medical-marijuana-epilepsy/)

[http://www.truthonpot.com/2014/09/24/5-differences- between-c...](http://www.truthonpot.com/2014/09/24/5-differences-between-cbd- vs-thc/)

[http://www.canorml.org/cbd.html](http://www.canorml.org/cbd.html)

<comment><USER6> Surely if it decreases anxiety then it is psychoactive?

(Or am I misunderstanding what "it" refers to in your second paragraph?)

<comment><USER7> the blog post they refer to says "psychoactive" which cites in turn a much more authoritative source that says "psychotropic"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There also some interesting evidence that oxytocin helps with autism as well.

The effect of oxytocin nasal spray on social interaction deficits observed in young children with autism: a randomized clinical crossover trial. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26503762](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26503762)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for linking a recent study. We tried this with our daughter about 7 years ago, and will likely try it again. Readers should keep in mind that "helps with autism" is only referring to the potential to help with the social interaction aspect of some with autism (as opposed to the many other attributes those with severe autism may exhibit).

<comment><USER10> Read this and some other recent studies... do you have reliable distributor you used? What about dosing?

<comment><USER9> It was a long time ago. It was definitely a nasal spray administered maybe twice a day, but couldn't remember the distributor. I expect it came through a compounding pharmacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> Marijuana enhances social interactions (or so I've heard).

I guess so ... At least if your definition of " _socially interactive_ " is getting hungry then horny then hungry again (throw in the odd uncontrolled giggling).

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish the media, would stop using the term _marijuana_ when referring to cannabis.

<comment> _-__--- What is the difference between the two terms? I would venture that most people don't know. I know that I don't know.

<comment> vezzy-fnord "Marijuana" is an etymologically dubious term popularized by Harry J. Anslinger and other prohibitionists circa the 1930s as an exotic name so as to exploit racial tension in order to sway public opinion towards the criminalization of cannabis.

<comment><USER12> What he said - a quick Google search will bring up several articles on the subject. Granted, the term has been somewhat "normalized" for some time - <USER2> still feel as though it negatively effects public perception (see the "death tax" and other terminology used in politics).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Offtopic: this is a strange and somewhat destructive pattern I noticed on HN. In an attempt to keep submission titles == article titles I often see the title changed. However, the original title for this post used very different language, which is the reason I think it got upvoted in the first place. Basically, we see a lot of "Man finds kitten; you won't believe what happens next" get upvoted to the front page, then changed to the more proper and sometimes poorer title of "Human-feline genetic link as anthropological proof of cognitive evolution in higher primates".

</comment><comment><USER14> [Total idiot post here. As pointed out below, Oxytocin /= Oxycontin. Kept for lols.]

Opiods for social disorders? While an interesting effect, the inherent dangers of such a substance should moot any thought of practicality, like discovering that plutonium can be used to cure hangovers.

The drive to expand the market for opiod market in recent decades should give everyone pause. Addictive medicines once used to treat pain in hospitals (ie post-surgery) are now sold to old people for arthritis pain, for cronic conditions. I'm sure that lots of companies would jump on even the slightest evidence that opiods might also be used for mental disorders, disorders present in nearly every area of the population. With the current market flooded, with old people already swimming in painkillers, that is the only room for exponential growth. And it is exactly why we should not allow market forces to dictate treatments.

<comment><USER15> Oxytocin is not an opioid. You are thinking of Oxycontin.

<comment><USER14> Lol, My bad. Probably should have waited until after the morning caffeine injection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Opium - really takes the edge off.

<comment><USER17> Oxytocin is NOT Oxycontin (oxycodone), by the way.</comment></comment>


I Threw Boiling Water into -14 Degrees F Air - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-8bqT_yKYg

<comment><USER2> Didn't watch the video, but: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect)</comment>


Another take on the RIAA sob-story - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ramenmusic.com/post/3371838017/the-recording-industry-sob-story

<comment><USER2> A point of clarification: The recording industry is not the music industry, it's just one part of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I for one eagerly await the music-less dystopia that awaits us following the collapse of the RIAA

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is, sadly, typical of the anti-RIAA brigade. The modus operandi is essentially to portray small, irrelevant details ("tut, tut, no adjustment for inflation!") or imprecise or non-legalistic terminology ("It's not theft, it's copyright infringement!") as evidence variously of a sinister RIAA conspiracy, or, as is the case here, simply of their utter stupidity. Next, hands are waved, big claims are made, and untested and economically implausible business models are bandied about with the abandon of someone who doesn't have a dime invested in the enterprise (well, except for the 50 dollars or so they save themselves annually by torrenting the music they want). This is usually accompanied by a healthy dollop of macho posturing: "don't make me steal this!".

Now, I know that no good can possibly come of trying to refute these "arguments", but... to paraphrase the hero in the film "Friday": it's Saturday, and I ain't got sh$t to do! So:

1) "The numbers are not adjusted for inflation."

Adjusting for inflation actually makes the collapse in turnover more pronounced, not less. Ditto adjusting for population or median income. Doh! The fact that he doesn't see this in his own exquisitely crafted inflation- adjusted graph is evidence, were it needed, that there is none so blind as he who will not see.

2) "These are stats from the RIAA. America only."

I should start by saying that this "argument" is slightly less asinine than the previous. It's important, though, to be clear about how this fact presents a problem. If we're arguing that this graph is evidence of the death of the music industry, then we probably should be looking at global sales (on the other hand, the US is the largest and most important music market and thus is significant in its own right). If we're, however, arguing (as most sensible, informed observers are) that filesharing/etc has a deleterious effect on music sales, then it is sufficient for the graph to display like-for-like data (which it does). After all, the effects of piracy are going to be similar irrespective of geographical location. If anything, one would expect more piracy in e.g. emerging markets.

3) "The type of graph specifically masks and trivializes the growth of digital, enhancing the sob story."

Right, so the author whinges in point 1 about data not being adjusted for inflation. "We need correct absolute figures!" screamed the author. But now that we're at point 3, the problem is now that the data is showing absolute rather than rate of growth figures. "We need percentage growth figures!", screams the author. This is just silly. He admits as much by conceding "Ok, ok, that's kind of cheating because pre-2004 there were virtually no digital sales, but hey, the point is digital has been growing quickly". Sorry, but no, the point is not that digital has been "growing quickly", the point is that the music industry, as a result of the pirates' activities, have been hemorrhaging cash. If digital is growing so quickly and everything is fine and dandy save for a few greedy lawyers/execs/etc at the RIAA/choose your bogeyman, then why is EMI so dead?

Here's another turkey:

"Here's the actual situation, properly adjusted for inflation, and using a normal line chart instead of a complicated stacked area chart."

So whereas a few sentences ago the author was whinging about the data not being aggregated globally, he now wants the data _disaggregated_ on distribution format. If the question is "does piracy negatively impact music?" or "is the music industry in trouble as a result of piracy?" then cumulative values are exactly what we need to look at, which means we have to look at those pesky, "complicated" stacked area charts.

The only upshot to this fellows little "analysis" was that as a result of it, the RIAA is $25 richer. Well done!

<comment><USER5> Howdy! Well, I'm happy to have spurred further thought, but I think you might have misunderstood my point of view.

There are only 2 reasons I wrote this article:

1) The original chart is horrible. It's embarrassing that it was published by reputable sources due to it's awkward and very skewed presentation of data. The fact that figures weren't adjusted for inflation is not a "small, irrelevant detail" but rather a fundamental requirement when graphing monetary value over time.

Regarding the stacked vs. line chart: The stacked chart is "complicated" because although the formats are broken down, it's actually very hard to get a read on any individual format's numbers over time. A line chart is a more simple (less sexy) way of showing the total over time AND the individual formats over time.

2) I'm kind of fed up with the "sky is falling" sad face the RIAA puts on and the overblown news stories dramatizing this fall. Come on, first digital revenues in 2004? There's a very clear business reason the sky is falling. It's simply embarrassing that after avoiding/fighting digital distribution for years and years, the RIAA tries to rewrite history, explaining their losses on lions, tigers, bears and pirates.

So, again, to be clear, the goal of the post was not to prove or disprove anything, but to correct and clarify.

Regarding my relationship to this story: I have many dimes invested. I am a musician and run a small business selling digital music by subscription (which _encourages_ sharing) and which was profitable from the day of launch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Comparing the uptake of CDs and digital downloads to cassettes is not really valid.

Cassettes complimented vinyl, rather than replaced it. Even many who primarily wanted portable music would purchase on vinyl and then tape themselves. That gave much better quality than buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was pretty common when I was in college for even the people who only had cassette players to purchase their music on vinyl, and have someone with a turntable and tape deck tape it for them.

CDs, on the other hand, were largely a replacement for vinyl, and now digital downloads are replacing CDs.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anybody knows what the peak around 1977 means? Disco?

<comment><USER5> I was super curious about this!

After looking at the raw numbers, I was also very curious how exactly they were aggregated and collected. Perhaps some of the "events" on the chart are along the (more boring) lines of "Label XYZ joints the RIAA and starts reporting." I'm not too up on my RIAA history though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Suing people who are giving you money...spending millions on propaganda deeming sharing an illegal act."

How is someone who is pirating music giving the RIAA money? Isn't sharing copyrighted materials in fact an illegal act?

I've long thought that a lot of the RIAA hatred stems from pirates looking for a scapegoat to portray as the "real" bad guy so as to negate their own guilty feelings. It's easier to rip artists off if you feel like you're ripping off some evil, faceless corporation instead. It's silly that anyone was upset with the RIAA over suing people who were pirating their copyrighted materials. They were well within their rights to do so, and it's their job to protect the rights of the content owners they represent.

Unfortunately, opinions like this one are often drowned out. Many people have grown so accustomed to the free ride that they don't want it taken away, and they don't want to be reminded that they are in fact ripping artists off. The artists must always be kept out of the equation.

<comment><USER9> > How is someone who is pirating music giving the RIAA money?

Because actual research shows that a lot (but certainly not all) of the people who pirate music are also big consumers of music, i.e. they both download illegaly _and_ buy music. The divide between freeloaders and honest consumers that the RIAA portrays doesn't exist, it's a complex greyscale.

Other research has pretty much proven that piracy emerges when a large section of the consumers don't agree with the pricing of goods on a market, and a monopoly or other disruption causes the market not to self-correct. Now you can fight a piracy market either with legislation and law enforcement, or you can actually compete with it, provide better service and better pricing.

This is why iTunes is such an incredible hit, it corrected the market. DRM- free music for 99 cents a song is a much better product than a DRM-laden album for 15$, and for a lot of people this product is better than the pirated product which means they became honest consumers again.

This is why Spotify and Last.FM are such incredible hits. Unlimited music, and pay 15$ a month to remove the ads. This is an even better product than iTunes, and has won over another huge part of the pirate consumers.

Where I live, kids these days do not have mp3 collections. Few of them knows what an mp3 actually is, but almost all of them have iTunes or Spotify. They don't understand why you would want to keep a file library on your computer, they open a program, search for what they want to listen to, and get to do it instantly.

And this is what piracy proponents have been arguing the entire time: The way to beat piracy is to provide a better service, not to bludgeon people into accepting your monopoly price with lawsuits and propaganda.

<comment><USER9> Then look at Justin Bieber. He started out by posting videos of himself to YouTube, and now that he's rich and famous, he _still_ gives away all of his music for free. Everything is there, for anyone to look at and listen to, no DRM bullshit, no cost, no "this video is not available in your area because of..."

But he's swimming in money, by selling "The Justin Bieber Experience", concerts, merchandise, acne ads, and now even a motion picture. And most of that money simply doesn't exist in that RIAA graph of the article, because it's not cd sales, it's simply not how he makes his money.</comment></comment></comment>


Ported iOS Game 30% Faster on Blackberry Playbook - <AUTHOR> http://kalogirou.net/2012/08/25/impressed-by-the-new-blackberry-os-or-how-ios-ate-dust/

<comment> SG- Seems like a mis-leading title, so it launches 30% faster after you clear it from the OS cache. While "interesting" it would be better to find a benchmark that can actually stress both devices or go beyond 60FPS to see which actually is faster.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it just me or did he press the icon first on the playbook, that will account for a 300-400ms difference.

Mostly noticeable on the second run.

Difference which makes this video/test mostly irrelevant. Give me 1 second or more and I will be impressed. That is the anecdotal difference on launches from iPhone 4S and previous devices)

</comment><comment><USER3> 30% sounds like a lot, but that looked like about 300-400 milliseconds, which isn't very interesting.

(That said, showing that you could port a native iOS app to RIM in X days would be an interesting metric, since the size of the App Store dwarfs the BB Store.)

(RIM, are you listening? No one cares about sub-second speed increases, Flash, external SD slots, multiprocessor whiz-bang GPUs, and most of the rest of your marketing material. Make a product that amazes my parents, and you've got something. Sell to the techies, and you seal your fate.)

<comment><USER4> Porting an iOS app to RIM doesn't matter anymore. The new Blackberry OS (BB 10) is going to run Android apps [0], essentially making the Blackberry App Store irrelevant (in my opinion).

[0] <https://developer.blackberry.com/android/>

<comment><USER5> The Blackberry App Store isn't going to be irrelevant, since Blackberries won't be running Google Play. Android developers will have to submit their apps to the Blackberry App Store for them to be available for BB10 users to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So.. how are you loading textures? As it seems to me that that's the only thing happening there.

Kind of misleading title..

</comment><comment><USER7> That is great. Too bad nobody owns a PlayBook :-)</comment>


Titanic sinks in real time – 160 minute animation by Titanic: Honor and Glory - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs9w5bgtJC8 <comment><USER2> Amazing work. I daresay it would be even more capturing with a voice over commentary.</comment>


Phoenix 1.3.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://phoenixframework.org/blog/phoenix-1-3-0-released <comment><USER2> For anyone curious about Phoenix and Elixir, I can sincerely recommend the following resources to get you started:

\- Programming Phoenix by Chris McCord, Bruce Tate, and José Valim [1]

\- The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao [2]

\- Elixir in Action by Saša Jurić [3]

Phoenix initially attracted me to Elixir, I've stuck around for that and the OTP platform: pattern matching, process based concurrency (actor model), supervision, immutability, macros, and more.

"Elixir took the Erlang virtual machine, BEAM, and put a sensible face on it. It gives you all the power of Erlang plus a powerful macro system." – Dave Thomas

[1] [https://startlearningelixir.com/r/programming- phoenix](https://startlearningelixir.com/r/programming-phoenix)

[2] [https://startlearningelixir.com/r/the-little-elixir-and- otp-...](https://startlearningelixir.com/r/the-little-elixir-and-otp- guidebook)

[3] [https://startlearningelixir.com/r/elixir-in- action](https://startlearningelixir.com/r/elixir-in-action)

<comment><USER3> Another great resource that was recently released is the Phoenix Inside Out series by Shankar: [https://shankardevy.com/phoenix- book/](https://shankardevy.com/phoenix-book/)

I just got it a few days ago and I'm about 30% into the first book. What I can say so far is that the author's approach resonates really well with me. Going through the book feels like sitting next to a colleague, who is introducing you to Phoenix and is really knowledgeable in the topic. The book is full of interesting tidbits and explanations about Phoenix internals without getting in the way. I also appreciate the TDD approach including both acceptance and unit testing. The most important thing for me though, is how Shankar condensed teaching Elixir into a single chapter. I have previously tried to study Elixir a few times with the intention of eventually getting into Phoenix but I always got overwhelmed by the OTP material. I didn't want to make the mistake of trying to learn Rails before being comfortable with Ruby again so I put off on learning Phoenix altogether. What Shankar has done is to dedicate one chapter to teach just enough Elixir for you to get started. This was perfect for what I needed and it was reassuring knowing exactly how much (or little) Elixir you need to know before diving into Phoenix.

If you have previous experience in another MVC framework and are interested in Phoenix I highly recommend this series (at least based on what I've read so far).

I should note that the current version of the book is targeting Phoenix v1.3.0-rc.2. Although Shankar has already made an announcement with the intention to update the book soon after the officially 1.3.0 release.

<comment><USER4> What is Garuda? Just a random title? A library/component in the Elixir ecosystem?

It's a strange way to sell a book, when neither the web site selling the book nor googling seem to enlighten me.

<comment><USER3> From the web site: "Create a mini-Phoenix framework using Elixir and Cowboy. What can be the best way to understand Phoenix than to create it yourself."

Garuda, I'm sure after googling you found the Wikipedia entry for it. It is just a play on words since Garuda, like Phoenix, is a type of mythical bird.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I found the Wikipedia entry, but didn't make the connection with Phoenix. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've been using Phoenix at my company in production for over a year now. So far the experience has been overwhelmingly positive, our team have totally come round to its adoption, our server costs have come down and our response times have gone down also.

Coming from Rails, the ecosystem isn't quite there yet, but it is _far_ more mature than rails' was this early on.

The hardest thing for us has been deployment, but we've solved that internally, including giving back by building exrm_deb (it works with distillery too!) to compile the entire project into a Debian package.

If you haven't already looked at Phoenix (and Ecto!) give it a try :)

<comment><USER6> Releases as a .deb?! Awesome!

<comment><USER5> You can have them as RPM as well if you are so inclined! [https://github.com/smpallen99/exrm-rpm](https://github.com/smpallen99/exrm- rpm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been working professionally in Elixir/Phoenix for the past 4 months.

Summary: It's amazingly productive, pleasant to work with and simple.

Coming from a background spanning Python/Django, C#/.net and Node/Express I really believe it blows them out of the water.

Thank you for all the hardwork of the Phoenix team and the amazing community you've made.

<comment><USER8> As a .NET developer by day, I'm curious what you like about Elixir over C#/.NET? I have a copy of Elixir in Action on my nightstand, I just haven't had a chance to crack it open yet.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't say I like things _over_ C#/.NET (I love C# and use it for mobile/desktop devel, but I've never used it for web).. but I'll list some things I like about Elixir:

Erlang's concurrency model is amazing. It's like having micro-microservices running inside your virtual machine. And you can distribute across nodes. Nothing else really has this kind of thing.

Pattern matching is beautiful and it's easy to use. Other languages have this too, so it's not like this is unique. This is one of my favorite things though; you can destructure things, you can pattern match inside a function using case, and you can pattern match on functions themselves like:

        def say("Hi"), do: IO.puts("Hello")
        def say("Bye"), do: IO.puts("Goodbye")
        def say(_msg), do: IO.puts("Where am I?")

That's basically the equivalent of having a single say() function that then does a switch/case on the input.

And a more recent addition to the language is "with". This is fantastic, it's one of my favorite things now. Usually you might have code that sets a variable from something, checks to make sure it's valid, sets another variable, checks to make sure it's valid, etc, etc... until finally you're function is ready to actually perform its purpose. Any of those checks might cause it to exit early or to switch paths. So Elixir has this "with" feature that looks sort of like this:

        def create(conn, %{"id" => group_id, "friend_id" => friend_id}) do
          with {:ok, user} <- current_user(conn, groups: [memberships: [:user, :group]]),
               {:ok, group} <- Groups.fetch_for_user(user, group_id),
               {:ok, friend} <- Friendship.fetch_friend(user, friend_id),
               {:ok, member} <- Groups.add_member(group, friend)
          do
            render(conn, "success.json", msg: msg)
          else
            {:error, msg} ->
              conn
              |> put_status(:unprocessable_entity)
              |> render("failure.json", msg: msg)
          end
        end

I love this feature. It makes code so much more readable and maintainable in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> I believe these are referred to Railway-Oriented Programming. I've seen several other examples for Elixir (incl. ones using macros), but by far this is the 'cleanest' syntax :)

Here's a similar construct in Scala:

        (for {
          user   <- currentUser(...)
          group  <- groups.fetchForUser(...)
          friend <- friendships.fetchFriend(...)
          member <- groups.addMember(...)
        } yield {
          render(...)
        }).recover {
          case e: Exception -> ...
        }

<comment><USER11> Or you could just call it what it is: a monad

<comment><USER12> "Railway-Oriented Programming" is a lot more specific than "monad".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The directory reorganization is a good sign that Elixir/Phoenix are not simply rehashing Ruby/Rails for the sake of popularity but are willing to prioritize what makes the most sense for this particular language - and asking how they can improve upon what already exists.

I recently ported my app from 1.2->1.3 and moving away from Models to Contexts/Data was a simple transition that makes a lot of sense.

The `data` files (aka your new models) are basically where the schema for your model lives and the `context` (your models API) is the interface for your data.

For example when building a blog:

Instead of having User, Session, Post, and Comment models which contains your DB schema, business logic, and interfaces for getting/setting data all models directory ala Rails:

        blog/app/models/comment.rb
        blog/app/models/post.rb
        blog/app/models/session.rb
        blog/app/models/user.rb
        blog/app/controllers/...
        blog/app/views/...

you instead create a namespace for each group of data:

        lib/blog_app/accounts/accounts.ex
        lib/blog_app/accounts/session.ex
        lib/blog_app/accounts/user.ex
        lib/blog_app/blog/blog.ex
        lib/blog_app/blog/comment.ex
        lib/blog_app/blog/post.ex
        lib/blog_app/web/controllers/...
        lib/blog_app/web/views/...

And in your data file `lib/blog_app/blog/post.ex` for example, you'd keep just your schema defining the fields like "title, permalink, body, etc" and code to handle validations and virtual attributes.

Then in your context file `lib/blog_app/blog/blog.ex` you define the API that access your data. So from your controller instead of calling:

        Post.all
        Comment.all
        Comment.find(1)
        User.new({..})

You now call:

        Blog.list_posts
        Blog.list_comments
        Blog.get_comment(1)
        Accounts.create_user({..})

It makes for a very logical structure for your MVC code.

</comment><comment><USER14> Phoenix is great! I only wish there was one recommended way for authentication and authorization - there are so many [1] different libraries that I got stuck in researching the options - I am confused, do not know which one to use. What is your preferred way? I would like to avoid to implement every little detail on my own - to get security done right was the main reason for me using open source libraries.

It would be great if there was one official way to make it easier to implement app security with the framework. I feel that this is the only missing part in phoenix - but it is a very important one.

BTW: does anybody know some tool that generates a phoenix api from a json- schema? Thanks!

[0] [https://github.com/h4cc/awesome- elixir#authentication](https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir#authentication)

<comment><USER15> The beautiful thing about Phoenix framework is that there is no "one-true way" to do things. Rails is omakase, Phoenix is not, and that's a good thing.

You want the whole enchilada? Use Guardian.

Need oauth? Use ueberauth.

Just want email and password? Use comeonin to hash your password.

It's liberating to know exactly how your system works and that it's not hidden behind some magical blackbox like Devise.

<comment><USER16> Guardian is annoying to setup but works for me. I just want something that generates JWT and takes a JWT.

<comment><USER17> I've been using Joken for that (JWT), just finished writing up some code that integrates with Auth0 and pulls in the signing certificate from the auth0 domain (.well-known/jwks.json).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm spending all my free time with Phoenix. I come from a Rails, Laravel, Django and a bit of .NET Core background. So far I am extremely impressed. I'm surprised it has not been adopted by that many folks in production.

<comment><USER19> I'm a django guy. I have no experience with functional programming.

What would a transition to phoenix + elixir look like for me?

<comment><USER20> You'll have a phase of disorientation where you'll be wishing you had x feature in Django and the reverse where you'll wish you had y feature in Phoenix/Elixir.

The thing I really miss from Django is the admin scaffolding. Phoenix just isn't there. In practice, you could continue to use Django as a front-end.

I moved away from Django when the recurring question of "this is neat, but how do I make it keep going no matter what?"

<comment><USER21> Could you give some examples of 'neat' things that needed to keep going no matter what on django (thus switching to Phoenix)

<comment><USER20> I should have said Python instead of Django.

The problem is that I was/still am a rookie of a programmer. I could not wrap my head around async in Python. I just wasn't getting it. I had a nagging sense that it was going to fail in the middle of the night and there was nothing I could do about it.

So, enter Elixir, which actually has a syntax that is kind of close to Python. It made immediate sense. If you want to do something that can cause the program to fail, do it in a process and send a message back with the result. If the program spawning the process fails, the supervisor will restart it!

Sorry - back to your question - and this will probably disatisfy you, but the answer is that everything was neat. It was just simple CRUD stuff, but doing it in Python didn't feel "robust" enough.

I'm fully aware that my reasons are superficial, but the way Elixir works has made me way more confident as a programmer.

<comment><USER22> This isn't your fault. Python doesn't get the asynchronous stuff particularly right, nor does it make it as straightforward as it should. I've moved to Elixir and one of my employers has moved to Go as a direct result of Python's concurrency model (and the hilariously needless and recondite primitives attached). Your reasons aren't particularly superficial; I'd pick the Actor model over systemd and uWSGI for anything critical!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really excited to see this out. I've been learning Elixir and Phoenix with the 1.3rc and have really been enjoying it!

I'm a fan of Contexts myself as that is typically how I architect apps on mobile as well. I like having everything separated more explicitly and testable individually and Contexts seem to promote that in a really nice way.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow.

In the past few weeks:

\- Erlang/OTP 20 released,

\- Elixir 1.5 released

And Cowboy 2.0 is in Release Candidate phase.

Exciting times.

</comment><comment><USER25> Gonna do phoenix for a side project.

I'm just a bystander reading about erlang and elixir for awhile. Did web dev in php and a little bit of nodejs.

But I think what you guys doing are great. I'm glad Elixir and Phoenix came about it really helps drive the language into a field (web dev) and get people to notice.

And that one implementation of figuring out how people is log off or not that is in Phoenix was really sweet when you presented it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would you suggest to choose Elixir / Phoenix for an api for a startup? Is it too risky now, or good enough + very attractive?

<comment><USER27> It's used by fairly big projects/Companies bet365, Bleacher Report, New Relic,Discord, PagerDuty, Puppet labs, FireEye etc.

<comment><USER28> I had not heard New Relic was using it

<comment><USER27> [https://elixirforum.com/t/senior-software-engineer-new- relic...](https://elixirforum.com/t/senior-software-engineer-new-relic/2258)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I actually love the domain driven work done in this release. I think it was a bold move from the team and breaks them even further away from Rails on EVM that people tend to think.

I have been bit so many times with trying to figure out where to put things like authentication/registration in a traditional MVC rails like app.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've always been intrigued by Phoenix/Elixir but I was worried it may just be a fad. Seems like it's had solid growth over the last couple years though, so I may end up diving into it over the weekend.

</comment><comment><USER31> We are using Elixir and Phoenix. Its amazbalz. The properties of the erlang VM (100k processes, individually garbage collected etc) are going to make it a killer platform. (edited)

</comment><comment><USER32> Are there any "here be dragons" for Phoenix? Does it play well with legacy systems? Support for different protocols, etc.

<comment><USER33> I don't think Elixir has production-level support for gRPC which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me.

<comment><USER34> There seem to be plenty of gRPC libraries for Erlang though, according to a quick googling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great news! Been waiting for this so I could tinker and then make a pitch to my office where I think it's an ideal fit.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does Phoenix 1.3.0 fully support Elixir 1.5? I keep getting warnings when compiling since I upgraded to Elixir 1.5.

<comment><USER36> It does. You may also need to upgrade your mix dependencies, I'm sure many of their authors are busy fixing the deprecation warnings as I type

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I use Phoenix with all my newer projects. The performance is stellar. I single-handedly was able to create what many startups out there have built with 100s of thousands of engineers[1] in a short period of time. This may be possible with Rails too, but then, I found a lot of things are much more convenient to get done in Phoenix than in Rails - For example, Contexts (nested models), Routes, etc.

When I started with Phoenix I was anxious that the experience was going to be just like when I first tried out Play/Scala, but no. To my surprise, my experience was fantastic. Truly, this framework allows you to focus on your business problems rather than fighting with configurations/conventions.

One of the best decisions the team has made is introducing the concept of contexts from DDD[2]. Initially, I was pretty confused, but now, I simply cannot imagine myself going back once that I've understood it. It's basically breaking down your business into smaller tiny modules, like I've done in [1]. The other thing I love about Phoenix is the concept of umbrella applications. I'm not sure if Rails has an equivalent, but I think this alone is worth exploring Phoenix for.

I don't even have micro-services in my architecture yet, but because of these patterns, I'll be able to break out and scale my application if I require to, in the future.

Phoenix has proven to me that it can not only scale performance-wise, but also architecture-wise. Last time I tried developing [1], it was in PHP and I had to hire 5 devs to get it done..6 months later and we still weren't done. However, in just a matter of weeks, I was able to finish a complete working prototype of this mammoth application, with UI and frontend. As for my production setup, I use Docker + AppEngine (using a custom VM) and it has served me really well. The performance is top notch and everything works so flawless.

As for the language itself, I really love Elixir. I simply cannot imagine going back. It really forces you to think differently about your code. Last time I tried to learn a functional language, it was Scala - also a beautiful language on top of the JVM. But, the problem is, it's so academic in the sense that even a good book on scala had 400+ pages. Some of them had 700+ pages. But Elixir isn't like that, you can pick up the language in a matter of weeks (YMMV, it took me 2) AND build a project in no time.

For Elixir, if you're coming from a Ruby background, you'll be able to pick it up fairly easy. However, you will find it challenging when you hit a situation where you would have used a traditional for loop, but in Elixir, you would be forced to re-architect your code. And that's a good thing.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209)

[2] [https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html)

<comment><USER38> Interesting. I've been trying to decide which language to learn next. Between Scala, elixir, and haskell at the moment. Was leaning Scala, but all the praise here is starting to convince me to go elixir. What problems did you run into with Scala?

<comment><USER37> In Scala, there are many ways to write a function. I wish I can share some code snippets, but, I'll just summarize for the sake of simplicity:

1) Functions have different forms and even nomenclature based on how many parameters they accept, how they are represented, etc.

2) Scala still has OO, which means it needs to carry a lot of baggage. The breadth of Scala's nomenclature combined with OO will take you a long way to learn the language.

3) Scala still runs on JVM which means you need to learn some of the JVM concepts if you'll be using it in prod. If you're from a Rails background, this is completely a new arena, because this is usually the Java guys' arena.

4) I wanted to be able to simply open up the source code and be able to understand what's happening. This was possible in Ruby/Rails, and ultra easy to do in Phoenix/Elixir, but painful in Play/Scala. IF you open up the source code of a Play! framework project, there's code so succinct that you would need to be strong with the language's understanding to get the full picture. Case class, implicit, etc., just to cite a few. In Elixir/Phoenix, it's just modules and it's just simple, yet elegant.

5) That being said, it's still good to learn Scala because there are tons of libraries out there with special use cases which you can use Scala for - It's still a good strongly typed language to build a robust project on. IF I remember correctly, David Pollak mentioned in his book that he'd written an app in Scala that ran for years without any problems.

As for Haskell, I read this somewhere - "Haskell is nice and all, but it's no Erlang." Since Erlang also has a bit of a learning curve, the next best alternative is Elixir.

P.S, - languages should be chosen based on one's own philosophy and in this case, Elixir strongly resonates with my own philosophy and all this is just my own opinion on why I chose it :)

Cheers.

<comment><USER39> > I wanted to be able to simply open up the source code and be able to > understand what's happening. This was possible in Ruby/Rails, and ultra easy > to do in Phoenix/Elixir

While it is possible to look at source code in Ruby/Rails, in practice for me (even after a few years of production ruby experience) it was extremely painful to look at any number of libraries due to the amount of redirection and implicit state, and monkey patching. But Elixir has (almost always) been VERY easy to follow, sometimes the code is just so simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's truly amazing when you see the numbers yourself, as Elixir/Phoenix produces some wicked TTFB(time to first byte) speed and concurrent performances you can't get from other languages.

I wouldn't be surprised to see one elixir server replacing 5x - 10x servers.

<comment><USER41> In some cases, more like 30x - 75x:

[http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped- bl...](http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bleacher- report-handle-8x-more-traffic-3653957/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Been following Phoenix for a while now. It looks amazing! One small complaint: the lack of code highlighting in the documentation really bugs me.

</comment><comment><USER43> How are people hosting their Phoenix projects? I'm used to Heroku or Laravel Forge. I don't really want to mess too much with servers.

<comment><USER39> Phoenix works well on Heroku: [https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html](https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html)

I also want to try gigalixir which has a free tier: [https://gigalixir.com/](https://gigalixir.com/)

<comment><USER36> Note that Heroku has some drawbacks with regards to Elixir:

1) Daily restarts, which kill any app-side state such as a cache or ETS table

2) Can't take advantage of any clustering

3) Can't do hot upgrades

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does anyone have any favorite open-source Phoenix codebases?

<comment><USER45> [https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com](https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I had to switch to the home page and go below the fold to figure out what Phoenix _was_ (a web framework in Elixir).

</comment><comment><USER47> Quote interesting release, many useful features. `action_fallback` looks really nice. Contexts ... not so much imo

<comment><USER48> > Contexts ... not so much imo

I'll prefix my comment by saying I'm someone who is more on the sysadmin side of the scale of things. My code isn't pretty, but it generally works well enough to get the job done. I'm learning (probably the most important thing, I guess).

Contexts are one of things that I felt the same about. Until I tried really using them, rather than stressing over whether or not I was using them properly.

I made the mistake of trying to think of them as microservices, which bogged me down and for my purposes was complete overkill. I've now reached a kind of happy medium, which I've realised that I really should have already been using. I've kinda realised I suck at api design. And for that I'm very thankful to the phoenix team, because it feels like I'm learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Oh finally! I've been using RC for quite a while now. Glad it is out.

</comment><comment><USER50> Awesome work Chris, thanks for everything you and the team are doing!

</comment><comment><USER51> Thanks for the hard work! Looking for to upgrade

</comment><comment><USER52> How is it better than F# and Akka.NET?

<comment><USER53> I wouldn't say "better". Like any other framework, many things have to be weighed. In the case of F#, it's a fantastic language with a fantastic runtime. It is still "windows only"* for the moment though. Akka (and yes, I realize that you mentioned .NET) is also very good in its varieties. Scala being one of the ones that I've actually used. I believe where the sweet-spot is for Elixir, in general is that Rubyists will feel mostly at home. The language itself is just very, very nice. Phoenix continues this by copying some of the nice ideas from Rails. But again, It's not better than the language and tech that you mentioned, but it fits a certain swath of developers. I wouldn't recommend someone who is well versed in F# with Akka.NET drop what they're doing to migrate.

*Yes, I'm aware of Mono, but I've been completely unhappy with my experience using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Awesome, nice work!</comment>