SendGrid Responds to Amazon's Simple Email Service - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-word-from-your-friends-at-sendgrid/ <comment><USER2> Customer of SendGrid as well and we're shelling out $400/mo with them. Definitely planning on taking a look at SES.

SendGrid is a nice service, but we've had several nagging annoyances:

1) The credentials to send emails are the same as to login and change plan settings. Seriously? Impossible to lock down the account on a large team from a security perspective. Makes their subuser management feature totally pointless.

2) Our dedicated IP got blocked by an RBL and we had to go to them about it. If I'm paying them for the pain of deal with email crap, I expect them to monitor their own logs and detect when an IP is blocked and come to me, not the other way around. And it wasn't just our IP... the whole class B our IP was on was blocked.

3) Their default behavior for bounces is once it fails, they never even attempt delivery to that address for future messages. They accept the messages our app sends, but just drop them. We had a DNS issue for a few days cause daily email alerts to fail for several big customers and this behavior bit us hard. Wasn't well documented. Come to find out we had a lot that were being blocked.

4) Website is horrible. "Recent Activity" section says last bounce was 8 days ago, but when you drill down to the "Email Activity", there were several as recent as a half hour ago. Clicking the buttons to clear all entries on the email lists don't do anything. Site is just slow and feels overly bloat. Almost feels like a template.

<comment><USER3> 1) We're aware the credentials thing - it's a problem, and we're working to resolve. Here is a community discussion with more details: <http://send.gd/CLf>

2) We do our best to monitor blacklists and proactively notify customers as soon as we detect their placement on an RBL. We also recognize that some RBL information may get past us in certain instances. To address this, we're increasing support staff by 66% next Monday. Finally, it should be noted that some RBL's are legit, while others are, frankly, scams and exist for the wrong reasons.

3) Some things we offer to address this issue: set your own policy for bounce removal and remove them as often as you like; disable bounces so that we don't track bounces at all; get bounce notifications - as soon as the bounce occurs, you can remove it over our Web API.

4) This example could be account specific (please contact firstname.lastname@example.com so we can look into your account and work to debug). However, it could be more general - we realize our website is far from perfect and are working daily to make improvements. We invite any and all bug/feedback/feature reports so we can investigate, address, and deploy the fixes and enhancements that are most important to users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't really a response. Only two lines relate to this at all: "We've heard the news, read the blogs and monitored the tweets. And as the thoughts, reactions, and sentiments roll in, we're plugging away at what we do on a daily basis: delivering on the future of email."

This is just a post saying what they do, how they do it, and why they're good. It has nothing to do with Amazon SES at all.

<comment><USER5>
        > This is just a post saying what they do, how they do it, and why
        > they're good. It has nothing to do with Amazon SES at all.

The implied point I got from it is that all those things they do and are good at is what Amazon doesn't do. Somewhat like how Apple doesn't do a point-by- point comparison of the iPhone vs. Android -- they just let the iPhone features speak for themselves.

<comment><USER3> You're dead on with that interpretation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer: happy customer of both SendGrid and MailChimp.

The risk of one of the Borg companies doing this to you at any time is yet another reason why you should not attempt to compete on price, and relatedly why you should probably not seek the business of equisitvely price sensitive customers.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, the price isn't just slightly lower - it is nearly an order of magnitude lower. Sending 500k messages a month with Amazon is $50, and with SendGrid it's $400.

If you send that level of email a month (which is easy to do if you send a weekly newsletter to a few hundred thousand users) you're now talking about saving yourself a few grand a year with Amazon.

Given the "switch" can be as simple as changing some SMTP settings, this is a big deal. I don't think the people who jump ship are necessarily hyper-price- sensitive customers. Amazon is just turning this service into a commodity.

<comment><USER8> Amazon SES doesn't have an SMTP interface.

You can, however, configure an MTA to deliver through SES by delegating delivery to a Perl script (e.g. [http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/IntegratingWithServer.Postfix.html)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an extract from "Do More Faster" wrote by Isaac Saldana, the CEO of SendGrid:

"When I offered dozens of companies SendGrid for $100 per month, they all said yes. I raised the price to $300 per month, and they all said yes. $500?—yes. Today, we are working with hundreds of companies, including well-known ones like Foursquare, Gowalla, and GetSatisfaction. When you're selling a solution to a problem and you find that nobody is saying no to your prices, you've found some serious pain. We're building SendGrid to solve a very specific problem that I discovered just by paying attention."

I guess it's time to change...

I'm a customer of sendgrid but I have to admit not a really happy one (the website is shitty, the search is working half of the time, and I have the 20$ plan with heroku which mean that my mails are send about 30min after my request because apparently on shared IP we need to wait...)

<comment><USER3> What bothers us is that you are "not a really happy [customer]", yet your reasoning is understandable. Your website issue is covered above in our response to @krobertson. With regards to Email Activity Search: we're working on making this feature more stable (we've brought on a new web architect to help as well) - also, we probably should have released it to a private beta group for testing first. We will be taking a new beta testing approach going forward (planning it now for our new newsletter app). For Heroku: we're close to having a fresh API integration with them, which will be a huge improvement. Future, similar integrations with other hosting services will be much better with a seamless integration process for them and their users. It's a top priority item for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As mentioned elsewhere, Amazon is one of the largest email senders in the world. They probably know a thing or two about deliverability.

<comment><USER11> While I agree on principle, Amazon is also a giant merchant who should know a thing or two about payments, and their Amazon Flexible Payment System is a horrible beast to work with.

Sometimes the "massive online store" domain knowledge doesn't seem to transfer over to the AWS team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was a good response, if a little arrogant. But they have a right to be arrogant. SendGrid is an amazing story. The execution has been exciting to watch from afar. A great example. I have been a customer since they launched.

My issue is the pricing model, where you pay for 50k (or whatever) emails "per month" but don't get them. If I send 45k one month, and then 55k the next, I have to pay more for those extra 5k emails. I will pay a premium for a premium service, but this is irritating. Irritating enough that I have been monitoring the space waiting for a viable competitor. And with this policy, they are certainly not earning any loyalty on my part. I would leave in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER13> Have you checked out our "pay for what you use" model at <http://postmarkapp.com>?

<comment><USER14> Postmark do not allow bulk email, such as newsletters, and hence are not a comparable product.

<comment><USER13> There's a reason for that - ISPs throttle delivery based on message type - bulk vs. transactional. We work very hard to make sure that transactional emails have NO reason to fail to be delivered, or even delayed. By allowing bulk sending, your message is likely to get through eventually - but it might end up behind a several hundred thousand/million message bulk email queue - meaning that your customers' "forgot password" email or account verification message could take hours to show up. For our customers, that's simply not acceptable.

We've got 5+ years of experience with our bulk email service, Newsberry, to back this up. Not only are our IP reputations carefully monitored and maintained, but we keep bulk and transactional as far away from each other as we can because they're treated SO differently by ISPs.

<comment><USER14> I've been sending both transactional and bulk email using SendGrid. If I understand you correctly the only downside to that approach is that transactional email may be delayed because it is coming from an IP that also sends bulk email?

I was aware of Newsberry, but I still think that it is not comparable to SendGrid.

Even when we concentrate on bulk email, on one hand there is Newsberry, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, etc. And on the other are SendGrid, AuthSMTP, and now Amazon. The former provide an all inclusive solution: WYSIWG editing, templates, subscriber management, analytics, etc. while the latter are an order of magnitude cheaper, but offer a bare-bones solution that doesn't have much in the form of niceties and UI.

SendGrid is somewhere in the middle actually (and so is their pricing). They have analytics (and subscriber management if you wish) and even a crude UI where you can define email campaigns and newsletter templates (although clearly not their core business.) These feature put them above and beyond AuthSMTP which is basically an SMTP server. If Amazon has per campaign analytics (from my very brief look they do), then SendGrid should really be shacking in their boots, because Amazon has just undercut them big time without compromising on core competencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> SendGrid has about 1 month to lower it's price to at least $0.20 per thousand if they want to keep my company (We send about 3 million emails per month). They have provided me with a good service so far and I hope they are ready to compete on price.

<comment><USER16> For their sake, I hope they are not planning to compete on price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Deliverability is the biggest issue. The other things they mention are just nice-to-have. If they can prove Amazon's system has a significantly lower deliverability rate they've got a solid argument to hold on to (for now).

<comment><USER3> We truly believe that deliverability is where we win - it's been our focus from day one. We've learned a lot about it (and continue learning every day), and we use the lessons to serve customers better. While we're confident in our practices that help with deliverability (namely, dedicated IPs), we can't jump to conclusions - so we'll just have to wait and see how SES customers fair in this area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A customer of sendgrid as well and we send over a million emails a month using their services. Now we will try to send alerts/non transactional emails through amazon ses to test them out. The price difference is too big to ignore.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think what we're going to see are companies like SendGrid, AuthSMTP, etc move to providing deliverability and analytics services on top of Amazon email ala Heroku building on top of EC2.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats sounds good in theory, but I think the technical details will make it impossible in practice.

<comment><USER19> Mailchimp launches Simple Transcactional Email service on top of Amazon SES: [http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches- transactional-e...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches- transactional-email-service-on-top-of-amazon-ses/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a very happy SendGrid user, but I simply cannot ignore the huge price difference. I will be giving Amazon a shot.

Before SendGrid, I was using Campaign Monitor, it was great, but outrageously expensive. SendGrid kicked off because it was an order of magnitude cheaper that CM, Mailchimp, etc. It seems that Amazon did to SendGrid what SendGrid did to "1 cent per email" providers such as Mailchimp.

<comment><USER20> Sorry for missing the point but this all seems like a lot of money for email. 100K/day outgoing is nothing that should tax a dual core CPU w/ SCSI disks and 100Mbps connectivity.

Are we talking about emails that aren't 100% legit? If so then what does SG offer other than an ever changing set of geographically disperse outbound MXs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The pricing of Amazon SES is certainly very attractive, but it's worth considering why the price is so low. If you are looking for a minimalist service, then it makes sense to go with Amazon SES. I work for JangoSMTP and we often have clients coming to us from other transactional email companies, because they needed more than what these companies offered. Deliverability is a major issue that comes up. You may be able to send out mass quantities of email, but without an experienced email marketing provider you may struggle to reach people's inboxes. Delivery is as much an art as it is a science, and it takes constant focus to stay on top. JangoSMTP offers the choice between sending via API or SMTP. With Amazon, you have to use the API. We also offer open and click tracking, as well as advanced reporting (Google Analytics, logging, etc.). If reporting is important to you, you will want to consider a service like JangoSMTP that is more advanced than Amazon SES.

</comment><comment><USER3> We believe in our service and the premium value it provides over competing services. We have our sights set on long term success and plan to continue our leadership in the industry. Your comments here are awesome, and we welcome further feedback at any time - on these topics and any others you want to bring up. We appreciate the supporters and detractors, because all perspectives must be taken into consideration in our efforts to continually improve. Contact us directly (email, chat, phone, twitter) or just keep on having your discussions here on Hacker News - we're listening ;)

\--Tim Falls, SendGrid

</comment><comment><USER22> How long before someone starts a start-up that adds open / click tracking to SES for a small fee on top? Given that SES is an order of magnitude cheaper, there is quite a bit of room to play with.

</comment><comment><USER23> Argh. Logo anchor != Home page

</comment><comment><USER24> Having played with the SES api they're just not the same thing. Sure ultimately they deliver email but the functionality you get from an app like SendGrid is far higher. SES might make sense for some transactional emails but for anything marketing I don't think I'll be moving away from SendGrid/MailChimp.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've an account there because of the appsumo deal.

Please, fix your website and write some docs.

"Documentation for this feature is coming soon. Meanwhile, contact us if you need any help."

<comment><USER3> We recognize that documentation is of utmost importance for a service such as ours. In most cases, a lack of documentation is intentional and reflects that we are working on improving existing docs or writing the original content. All we can say is that this will get better and better over time. Your feedback/suggestions are always appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Put a fork in it.</comment>


OpenSSL code beyond repair, claims creator of LibreSSL fork - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/openssl-code-beyond-repair-claims-creator-of-libressl-fork/

<comment><AUTHOR> "'Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers,' de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. […] De Raadt told ZDNet that his team has removed 90,000 lines of C code. 'Even after all those changes, the codebase is still API compatible,' he said. 'Our entire ports tree (8,700 applications) continue to compile and work after all these changes.' The OpenBSD team started working on LibreSSL about a week ago, he told Ars."

</comment><comment><USER2> _" As for Heartbleed, 'the mystery is not that a few overworked volunteers missed this bug', Marquess wrote. 'The mystery is why it hasn't happened more often.'"_

Couldn't agree more. I'm sure there's lots of folks now combing through every line of OpenSSL, trying to find some new 0-day.

A hard fork seems a good option. Fresh start, with no cruft or a bunch of legacy code. Painful, but positive.</comment>


How to use checklists effectively in your tech company - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netguru.co/post/56407614152/how-to-use-checklists-effectively-in-your-tech-company

<comment><USER2> It's kinda cliched for someone with a username containing "ops" to come out and say "i love checklists", but i do!

I've never found a better tool for communicating what to do and in what order. Everyone just understands them, with zero training. You can even play with the format slightly and people still get it, e.g. break out a formal time column? Sure! People just start using it.

I especially like them for high pressure situations. E.g. for handling prod outages i've consistently found checklists work better in practice than flow charts, knowledge bases, call trees... etc.

I use them for many things, from the fairly benign (releases?) to the relatively rare (new joiners).

I recommend, just based on my experiences so may not apply in all environments, using a simple web based app to handle all your check lists. It'll be accessible from any device, without installing anything up front.

A couple of small extra features will make it infinitely more useful:

1) Allow for both a "ticked" / done status and a "working on" / "i've grabbed this one" status. Display the user who's grabbed it and the time they grabbed it.

2) Allow for checklists to have all their boxes reset on a schedule, e.g. daily reset of the "start of day" check list.

3) Archive completed checklists - they capture useful information about who and when, so I don't bin them when they're completed

<comment><USER3> Can you recommend any those web tools please?

<comment><USER4> A checklist can be as simple as an spread sheet, so you could use:

-A shared network- or Dropbox folder containing Excel sheets

-A google docs account with check list spreadsheets

-Smartsheet.com

-Any wiki software, self-hosted or managed, i.e. wikidot etc.

-Any of the myriad of todo-list apps, just be sure the todo-lists (actually checklists) can be re-used as templates.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also think in this case the simpler the better. GitHub pages is pretty nice solution. +100 to Google Docs too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From experience, a checklist should be exactly that: a way of checking this off a list once complete. "Did I do this?" \- "Yes". Check.

But for me a checklist should never be a step-by-step guide. "Do this, then do this." People are reluctant to be told how to do things that can easily take more than one path.

<comment><USER6> I handle that by doing stuff like:

        [ ] Copy foo data file to foo server
            [ ] "scp foo.dat server:/path/to/foo.dat"
        [ ] Copy bar data file to bar server
            [ ] "scp bar.dat server:/path/to/bat.dat"

It's a reminder of one way to do it, but it's not necessarily the only way of doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of checklists too. I find juniors don't like using them until they've made the same mistake many times, and then eventually they swear by them.

It's not a manual, it's not a process, it's just a checklist.

<comment><USER8> What about people who have done the same task many times? I imagine that they would also be reluctant to follow it closely enough.

<comment><USER7> Yes. There is resistance from the "I've been here for XXX years crowd" but they can be co-opted into helping write the checklists. Especially if the existence of the checklist allows them to pawn off the grunt work to juniors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So as soon as I start scrolling down to the article I get a bloody great pop- up obscuring most of the text, making it impossible to read.

Checklist item:

* Make sure your web site is actually usable.

Funny, for a company called "Net Guru."

 _Added in edit:_ Looking at the posting history, I'd guess filozynka is associated with the company. So, if you read this, it would take me time and effort to take screenshots of the multiple problems and issues I have with your web site. Do you want me to do that?

<comment><USER10> Colin,

which browser are you using? Looks good here.

<comment><USER9> FireFox 11.0 on Ubuntu 10.10. Screen size 1024x768.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At the end, this article mentions Atul Gawande's book, _The Checklist Manifesto_ (although the title is mangled in the link). Gawande's 2007 New Yorker article that was the basis for that book can be read here:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER12> What tools do people use to manage the checklists? (some features I am looking for: easy to write new checklists, view history, allow to discuss them, ...)

I know about [http://howtracker.com](http://howtracker.com) is there anything else out there?

<comment><USER10> I'm testing [http://launchlist.net/](http://launchlist.net/) right now. Looks solid

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A TODO.txt file shared over dropbox has worked for me for the lsst 4 years (yes, i keep the whole history in a DONE.txt file!)

<comment><USER10> I think that's a bit different. Checklists are reusable and shared. It's not a one-time todolist

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> are you using "checklists" internally? how do encourage people to use them?</comment>


Virtually Unlimited Memory: Escaping the Chrome Sandbox - <AUTHOR> https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/04/virtually-unlimited-memory-escaping.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> This is yet another use-after-free in C++ code. It's modern C++ code written by excellent programmers following state-of-the-art security practices. Smart pointers, lambdas, you name it: it's all there. Yet a critical memory safety vulnerability still slipped through the cracks.

<comment><USER3> Of course, rewriting in Rust is the only moral choice, right?

<comment><USER4> We don't tear down every building when we update the building code. We just improve how we build the new ones.

<comment><USER5> Or we require people to bring it up to code when they do major renovations (seems more in line with the Firefox rewrite)

<comment><USER6> FF does abide by this rule in-fact. Almost every new component is written in Rust. [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I knew about this unlimited memory for years Chrome uses all the memory it can get. This is why I was testing firefox the other day.</comment>


Anywhere but Medium - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/0900.html <comment><USER2> He never seems to identify anything actually wrong with Medium except that it's popular already. People _might_ be disinclined to write anything critical of Medium on Medium itself? Weak sauce. It comes across as a hipster-ish "I was blogging before it was cool" whine, or maybe somebody from Medium stole his girlfriend. What it's _not_ is convincing. I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before.

<comment><USER3> I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind?

My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years?

The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem.

[1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen?

<comment><USER4> To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam.

Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away?

As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years.

<comment><USER5> > What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let > users take their content away?

Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this?

You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot.

<comment><USER6> Medium already has an export feature. If you're arguing that they may take it away (which I think is vanishingly unlikely), then that's another thing entirely. The feature is there, though, so incentives about building one don't seem relevant to the discussion.

<comment><USER7> But even if you can get all your articles and re-upload them (and they look nice still) the URLs will change so anything that links to your channel or individual articles is going to break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _So I suggested he post the comment to a blog so I could give it greater > circulation by pushing it through my network._

> _In the back of my mind I thought that he 'll probably put it on Medium. > ..._

> _Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment > saying that I was worried he 'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his > post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium._

What an ass.

If you feel that strongly about it, say something up front. But don't wait for someone to do the obvious (for better or worse, if you don't have a blog and want to get out two thousand words, Medium is the obvious place to do it) just so that you can lord your self-decreed moral superiority over them.

<comment><USER9> > don't wait for someone to do the obvious

For what it's worth, I would not for a moment consider that someone might use Medium when publishing something in a blog post. I'd expect some Wordpress install, or perhaps Blogspot or wordpress.com if they're lazy. In fact if I'd have to rank methods of publishing by likelihood among my friends, a text file might be higher up than Medium.

Perhaps in Silicon Valley it's very popular and perhaps this 'friend' (that posted it, to his dismay, on Medium) is indeed from there, but it's not as if it's that obvious that everyone would post to Medium.

But yeah I do agree, if you think of something like that, you might as well say it instead of waiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For someone with any amount of tech savvy, I just don't think there's any excuse for not posting writing on your own, self-hosted system. HTML in its most basic form is literally designed for this use case.

Medium's cool now, but it won't necessarily be in a few years. And it's completely within the realm of possibility that they will disappear entirely at some point. It happens all the time. Big sites that people have contributed mass amounts of content to blink out of existence on a very regular basis. Sometimes without warning or the ability to back-up data. But the best case, like Winer points out, is that any links in become broken, comments get lost, etc.

Your writing is yours. Own it.

<comment><USER11> I don't write a blog. I've thought about it quite a few times, but it turns out writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is even harder.

If I ever get over that hump, I certainly wouldn't want to make it harder on myself by hosting my own web server. I would want to _write_ , not manage a server, with whatever complications that brings. That's what makes Medium (and others) attractive.

<comment><USER9> > writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is > even harder.

For the second part, I don't write regularly. I don't look for an audience tuning in every Thursday evening. I write when I feel like I have something to write about; when I learned something new and interesting that I want to share, that more people should (or might want to) know about.

This gives me a URL I can share with friends and/or post on sites, instead of telling friends individually or writing a post on a gated community like Facebook. It gives me some of history on what I've been doing over the years, showing a potential employer I've been doing IT stuff out of school as well (very useful as a young professional). It even serves to remind myself now and then, e.g. my IPv6 post[1] I fairly regularly use to check stuff like "what was the maximum address length again".

In fact, not writing regularly might be more useful to many potential followers. If you only write now and then, they can follow you without fearing their inbox/feed will be flooded, and posts are much more likely to be of quality. When deciding whether to follow back, irregular or semi-regular Twitter users are much more likely to get one from me because they are usually more interesting and not a day to day burden.

[1] [http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6](http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I have my own reasons why you shouldn't post to Medium. It makes you look like an elitist blowhard. The majority of Medium blog posts that I have read are:

* 25 year old founder wants to explain how the reason his startup failed wasn't his fault.

* 25 year old founder has a list of "10 ways to live a meaningful life"

* 23 year old Javascript programmer proclaims "Node.js is dead, long live Node.js" (3 paragraphs)

* 20something Bay Area resident thinks he's solved the housing crisis in 4 paragraphs.

95% Egotistic tripe. I can't think of any Medium posts I ever shared with someone else.

<comment><USER13> So I shouldn't post to Medium because other people, who to you are essentially just assholes, post there?

Assholes use blogspot, or tumblr, or WordPress, or really anywhere on the internet. So my only option would be to host my own or go through some fairly unknown blog hosting service to avoid being included with the assholes of the service?

I've only used Medium once, so I'm not really here to defend my use of it, but from my use it was incredibly easy to type up and piece and have it look decent.

Is there anywhere that you recommend someone writes what they want to write without being included with assholes? Otherwise, They're just going to go with the easiest solution, which happens to be Medium.

<comment><USER14> There's nothing wrong with using Medium as a glorified pastebin; the OP does that by having Medium mirror content they post elsewhere, and it completely avoids the "assholes."

The problem only comes if you actually go in on the "game" of the platform—allow your writing to be led around by the incentive system inherent in the structure of the platform's network effects: recommendations, promoted posts, likes and shares, front-page status, etc.

If you "buy into" the platform like that, then the culture of the rest of the _community_ on the platform (i.e. the other people who have "bought into" the platform) will start to matter. If they're mostly assholes, you'll have been tricked into playing a zero-sum game against assholes.

You know what a private Minecraft server with no moderation is like? It's an infinite expanse of dick-shaped monuments, where anything genuinely creative is quickly torn down or blown up. The parent poster is basically saying that Medium is the same way. The dick monuments are figurative, but they're still dick monuments; the tearing-down is social, but it's still tearing-down.

If you don't play the platform's game, none of this matters; you just get your little sandbox within the dickscape and can ignore the community around you. But the platform wants to engage your readers—through links back to a front page, or recommended follow-up posts, or whathaveyou. Building your sandbox in a dickscape leaves open the possibility that your readers might look out the window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> WTF did I just read? The guy relates so many ways in which he thinks we shouldn't use Medium, but never presents an argument on _why_.

<comment><USER16> Yeah..weird. I think somehow he is going to rant about how medium is a close platform, bad for the web...But in the end, it seems like all leads to Medium is a start-up and will eventually die???? What the heck...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As with the Mac App Store I think the danger is to think about your content as something that only should live one place.

I decided to treat my content as I do my apps. As individual assets which are just looking for distribution.

That's why I have my personal blog and then use medium as just another distribution channel for the content I write there. I also post it on linkedin and a couple of other places.

If something else comes up I will also put it there if it makes sense.

I normally get a healthy number of visits on my blog and while I wont get the traffic to my personal post I still get my thoughts out there when i use Medium (and some of the readers do cross from one destination to another)

Just my 5 cents.

</comment><comment><USER9> TL;DR: Medium is a single platform with many blogs, instead of having each blogger have his own server to host on. Posting on Medium centralizes (as in, the opposite of decentralization). And Medium does not publish a 'statement of principles' to declare that they won't not put things on the front page just because they're critical of Medium itself. And the Medium page is larger than the plain text version, how terrible. We should not let Medium 'own' the media type called 'blog posts' (like Youtube 'owns' videos).

My thoughts: he's saying Medium is evil because it's like every online platform ever. Now I'm a sucker for principles and host my own email, vpn, ftp, btsync and web server, and I indeed don't use Medium because I want to own and have control over what I publish, but saying Medium is evil because of these properties... maybe if it had been a post about online platforms in general, it might have had a point.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't disagree with the OP's overall sentiment, but it's worth noting why Medium has succeeded in attracting authors despite being yet another blogging platform. The implicit integration with Twitter probably helped adoption...but undoubtedly the "beauty" and simplicity of the authoring and reading interface had an effect...It's always been frustrating me to explain to people who want to get into blogging that _writing a blog post_ is separate from the work of making the blog itself look beautiful, and that should focus on the former and we can then work on the latter.

Medium gives the latter without much work, and for aspiring writers, that's the incentive to finally try blogging out and feel like they've done something substantial. If it gets more people into the mindset of being creators instead of passive web consumers, I think Medium has been a good thing overall.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, Medium is big. That's pretty much all I took from that. He lists no problems with it, except maybe they might one day be the sort of company to do something you don't like.

This isn't a criticism. It isn't even a rant. It's not focussed enough to be either. It's somebody worrying about writing on the Internet being largely controlled by a single company. Which, of course, it isn't. Never was and never will be.

</comment><comment><USER20> _> Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web_

Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER21> Medium broke the "Signal v. Noise" RSS feed by truncating articles. I complained to Basecamp; they blamed Medium. I complained to Medium; they said they might consider fixing it.

Run your own blog on your own website. Then you don't have to depend on someone else to fix your bugs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Relevant discussion: "Why have most tech and startup-related bloggers moved to Medium?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118)

<comment><USER22> Thanks for posting that link.

It's important background info that apparently the other commenters weren't aware of.

They basically have, due to their excellent product, deep pockets, and professional promotion, become the default place to post not just start-up posts, but political ones as well.

All that background is assumed in my post because I've written about it many times before, in different contexts, and posted links to other commentary about Medium.

As often is the case commenters on Hacker News don't always thoroughly research the background for THEIR opinions as they excoriate others for the same. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In case you want to read it on Medium:

[https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.1y9dqf7v7)

</comment><comment><USER24> This is more fun to read as the cross-post on Medium ([https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.6dawtzuj4)), especially the parts about how people can't criticize Medium on Medium.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't use anything I don't own. I spend maybe a hundred bucks a year on a good virtual host and operate four websites off of it, along with a CloudFlare subscription for speed. I run an ownCloud server at home, everything is backed up locally and then offsite to one company I trust. If any of these entities went under I'd be out a small amount of money and some time getting setup somewhere else, but I'd be dinged, not dead.

I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it.

And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see anything particularly wrong with Medium that might not be equally wrong of Wordpress or something similar. That being said, don't people who've generated an audience with a particular URL or platform want to keep that URL or platform? I write a Wordpress.com hosted blog at jakeseliger.com, for example, and lots of links point to jseliger.wordpress.com, and I wouldn't want to lose those readers by switching.

At the same time, I contribute to a self-hosted WP blog at seliger.com/blog. From my perspective neither seems dramatically better or worse. But both have years of traction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Medium now allows custom URLs which alleviates that particular branding problem slightly.

It does not fix the branding problems of every other looking the same and having to shove self-promotion at the end of every damn article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Medium is the next generation of magazine where the users are content creators instead of the publishers. You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that people know and look to for content. Not everyone wants or can spin up their own hosted blog and drive people to it at the same time. Many people want to focus on writing, not publishing, so they use something like medium or twitter.

I agree there should be other publishers, but the doom and gloom over medium is a bit strong. Any publisher, social network, or central repo suffers from the same complaints.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that > people know and look to for content.

As noted in the article, _that is exactly the problem_ as Medium is not an impartial judge.

<comment><USER22> And of course Medium didn't pay you to write the post, another difference from magazine publishers.

<comment><USER28> And of course Medium didn't charge the reader, another difference from magazine publishers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _" When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium, you're stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which depends on diversity, not monoculture."_

If you have read enough of Daves posts you'll realise this is the Internet version of what happened with Microsoft and Apple. Something about absolute power and corruption. Dave has been remarkably consistent in this observation over the years.

 _" Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium. I asked if he'd consider putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet."_

One reason not to put things on medium is the poor url design. Try remembering then typing this url into your browser ~ [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h)

The design is ok. We can understand up to the end of the title, _' anywhere- but-medium'_ then we get robot vomit _' 5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h'_, junk parts of the url no use to anyone except machines.

</comment><comment><USER6> For anyone confused about Medium's export feature, it's available under Settings->Export Content from the user menu. Worries about platforms not providing this are warranted, but I think Medium already has this covered, even if some of the export HTML is messier than some would like.

Until Medium, I hosted my own blogs on my own web servers (for ~17 years). I eventually got tired of dealing with updates, comment spam management (even with Akismet and friends), breakin attempts, and all the rest, so I moved there. I'd still like to see friendly URL and custom domain support, as well as some fixes to the editor (bulleted lists + blockquote indentation bugs are very frustrating), but overall, I've been fairly satisfied with it.

His concerns might be a tad overblown in this instance, even if I agree with many of his concerns about the open web (and I personally still think RSS should be everywhere by default. It's still incredibly useful, even if only used for API consumption.)

</comment><comment><USER30> > _Since you 're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also > build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold > criticism._

BZZZT! Wrong! Maybe for you, but not for me!

I have no ingrained suppositions that the platform, free of charge, which hosts cheap-ass text in a usable format, and seems to be stable, would actually be bothered or compelled to promote my material. Not one bit of assumption on my part. I use it as a writing platform simply because it fits a need, and I didn't have to fork over for a domain and the maintenance that goes along with a self-implemented system. Or, if flow simply refers to it working, yeah, I guess I'm assuming that, but that's like a core competency.

It almost reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, the one where a chef becomes a master chef, and then a person asks, "Well, can you farm?" as though they should be a master of every aspect. I write. Medium hosts my writing, and I like the way the software works. Good deal for now, if it changes, I'll tear down and move on (like I did with Blend.io when they pivoted in a way I did not want to follow).

If we're talking ownership, well, that's a "backup" issue for each writer. For serious, lengthy pieces, I'm working in a software like Word before I'm posting online. It's just habit, and I can save locally/backup and Medium is the finished, public product. Simple.

In my experience - coming from music - the distributor is distinct and separate from the promotions arm. Though they may collaborate (PR working in conjuntion with Distributor to announce big release, etc), they are separate avenues in my opinion.

In this piece the author really undercuts their own point by referencing Facebook...mostly because if I had to write a correlative article about the one website where _NOT_ to host music or artistic endeavors because of the single-platform lock-in risks mentioned...it would be Facebook. Anywhere but Facebook.

Distribution and Publicity are moving targets, faster now than ever. ReverbNation. That's a site that does distribution and promotion, and I don't think it's very good. BandCamp is more about distribution than promotion, and I see a lot of pretty happy customers over that route. Facebook is, for lack of a better concept, a necessary evil but simply one aspect in a fully functional, diversified approach to coming to market. Which also includes YouTube, the radio of the internet generation.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you wanted both a platform and an OSS approach why not just deploy something like ghost:

[https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org)

I like supporting OSS business models that allow me to host my own platform or just post my content to their hosted version of said platform.

</comment><comment><USER32> Dave Winer makes a point about how he posts to his own blog and only syndicates his content to medium.com via rss because he wants his content to live on for years.

Ironically when you visit the medium.com version of his post[1], all the links in it were hijacked by ifttt.com and turned into ift.tt shortlinks. So his effort to escape the medium.com content jail landed him right inside the ifttt.com content jail as well. Double jail.

Will those ift.tt shortlinks still load in 5 years? Who knows.

[1] [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.53guhnze5)

</comment><comment><USER33> The very same reasoning could be applied to any market leader. So then why is this guy hosting his repos on GitHub? Hell he should host his own GitLab instance, or even go all-in and ditch git altogether...

</comment><comment><USER34> I think everyone using Medium at least owe it to themselves to try out the export feature and migrate one blog post.

I did that with a few for archival purposes and such, and the export feature is basically an HTML file with all kinds of stuff going on in it.

The idea of Medium is awesome, but the combination of their weird CMS and the way in which they store blog posts is annoying. Pros and cons and all that.

That said, it's not like other blogging platforms are saints. I'm sure it'd be a mess to export my Tumblr posts too.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can't read this page without Javascript.

Anything but scripting.com.

</comment><comment><USER36> No mention of svbtle?

Edit: I just visited the site for the first time in ages, and noticed it's no longer free to sign up.

I take back any implied endorsement thereof.

<comment><USER37> What is it and why would people use it? Mentioning something nobody uses and nobody has heard of doesn't seem like much of a a priority when critiquing a popular service.

<comment><USER38> It's an invite-only blog network, for people that are sufficiently intelligent and witty. If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because you're unintelligent and not funny.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314)

<comment><USER39> <If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because you're unintelligent and not funny.>

What if I'm unintelligent, but _funny_? Can I get a part-time account?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The text is too large on this blog post on a mobile device. If it were written on medium, at least it would be more legible.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well, at least medium.com loads. (site is down this moment)

</comment><comment><USER42> We need to all go back to GeoCities.</comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for ETL learning sources - <AUTHOR> I work for a small company and am in charge of an ETL application. I only learned of the acronym in the last few months and have been on this project for over 18 months. I am in the process of re-working some aspects of what I built to handle de-duplication better. I will be touching core components of the application so this is a good chance to make changes. I would like to learn more about common practices before I reinvent the wheel a second time. <comment><USER2> if you're using AWS then you can check AWS Glue [https://aws.amazon.com/glue/](https://aws.amazon.com/glue/)

Apache Spark is another option [https://databricks.com/session/building- robust-etl-pipelines...](https://databricks.com/session/building-robust-etl- pipelines-with-apache-spark)</comment>