Meteor Development Group spends a couple of years building a JavaScript framework that helps us build apps at a level that we could not do before. They are proud of their achievement, as it is the result of all of their development experience and hard work.
Along the way, a lot other options came along, some of them clearly “inspired” by the work of Meteor Development Group, taking apart the successful parts of their execution. As this happens, Meteor’s community begins to point the finger and say “but this thing has that feature! I want it now!”
The Game
Write a post on how you think they react to the stuff we post on the forums and about them from their perspective, through the context suggested or otherwise. Please keep it constructive.
The Goal
I think there are problems on both sides, but I thought we as a community can take a moment to picture how they experience us, not just how we experience them.
If this becomes a thing, then the most constructive post with the most likes one week from now will get a free Meteor Toys license (chosen by me) I’ll do a couple just to start things off…
A: "Ah these forum people, again they are complaining "
B: “What’s wrong now?”
A: “Well, they are upset that Blaze does not support child components.”
B: “Can’t someone build a package to do that?”
A: “Yeah but they want us to do it”
B: “Ah, so annoying. We gave these guys a backend for free and all they do is use it and then complain”
A: “Right, it’s like for every 100 people that use our product for free, maybe 1 will do nice a blog post about us, 1 will do a bad one, and then 10 will complain about wanting more”
B: “Well, nor you nor any product can please everyone… we gotta focus on the big picture”
A: “Yeah, but how do we explain that to them?”
B: … “I dunno, I gotta finish this integration that we will give away to them”
Not the kind of game you would expect from a productivity tool. If you award anything, do so for the highest utility for the platform, like the best, filtered meeting minutes of community opinions.
Don’t appreciate this de-voicing of contribution very much. Other communities would wish for such luxury problems.
The game is coming from me, not my project, and it’s not clear what you mean?
I do see a mention of awarding the prize to the most constructive post - good point - I’ll update the prize criteria to allow for more flexibility in the future.
Well, let me explain. From your examples it appears like community contributions - no
matter how repeating or novice - would be an annoyance to MDG. That they hold of progress. De facto: discouraging contribution because they could be “too stupid”, “too basic” or “against current plans”. That is bad.
If anything, MDG is not a one person sweat shop that needs to decide daily between replying to emails and writing code. It’s a business with customer relationship processes where employees such as @sashko and @nickcoe face the community; to my appearance, not getting annoyed - while also so not acknowledging - every demand.
For a business, community engagement means people spend their mind share, time = money on your product. Me as well, because I care that MDG solves my business problem well (ok, maybe because my vacation time is getting boring too). If anything, you would want more of that. That “dump/repetitive” user / customer input is unwelcome, is a believe of the past. Today, it’s an KPI for areas of improvement, health and valuation. This game seems to point into the opposite direction.
If you want to give awards, help sashko & co. filter out relevant information. Though I believe they prefer their own processes… without getting bothered much.
(Does not mean blind double posts are great for the usability of this forum.)
It’s a two sides of the coin type of thing: some of it is valid, some of is not. The goal here is to take an empathetic approach and see what we can learn from it. The examples refer to single occurrences and are meant to be taken with a hint of humor. I do not understand why you generalize them across the entire community and everyone’s actions. If you have another narrative in mind, feel free to participate
A: "Aw man people are fighting over syntax words and how they’re offensive or not offensive"
B: "Hey don’t you know the author of cucumber?"
A: "yeah, so?"
B: “Let him deal with it…”
At first I was kind of skeptical, but I think something like this is needed to ease the tension. There’s been so much drama in the past couple months, I think we all need to step back and appreciate some perspective.
MDG is not perfect, MDG is not Rails or 37 Signals. MDG has their own issues too and I, for one, am glad that we’re at least taking some time to consider how they might feel when reading some of our own comments.
I mean, this is the internet, but I would hope we’re all civilized adults AFK as well. Meteor’s not perfect, but it’s definitely changed my life for the better.
I’m fairly new to meteor and the community, but I’ll throw this out there. Considering all the negativity that I’ve seen on here regarding the future of meteor, I have to credit the team with their positive responses. Especially @sashko. He has a way to turn a negative into a positive. If I were in their shoes, I’d be sitting there saying, "WTH…these people are brutal. Why do we even bother??? " The reality is most of that negativity is just noise. Out of 10 comments there is 1 or 2 constructive ones. I’d say if the community wants to get results, we should express ourselves in a positive and helpful manner so the team can look at issues objectively. I’m suprised how involved they are with the forum, I’d much rather have them focus on building new features and upgrades to the platform than answering negative ramblings of the same thing over and over. Nothing in this world is free. Part of using meteor for free is dealing with the growing pains of the company and project.
Agree - people who choose Meteor chose to be on the cutting edge. And that often has a price. Although, I’d still say they are better off than with some of the other options of the time (i.e. Angular 1, Ruby on Rails, etc).
I don’t want to fight negativity with negativity but it feels like after MDG started investing a significant amount of time into communication with the community (more official blog posts, more forum posts, in-flight design proposals posted on a visible place) the amount of accusations of not having enough open communication has bombed. Often I find people saying “MDG doesn’t communicate to us” actually mean “MDG doesn’t communicate to us the ideas I want to hear”.
But hey, in 2012 the twitter hashtag #meteorjs always had comments like “it is too magical”. Now, as we unwrap the magic, I am glad we can have a conversation about what is inside of the box.
How about we approach all the feedback of the last couple of months a little bit more positive. How about we approach it as “People care so much about what happens to Meteor, that they take the time to let their doubts be heard”. Instead of plainly leaving for the next thing.
I don’t use Meteor daily anymore (wanted to weather out the sh*tstorm first ). So I’m a semi-outsider. But I was worried by the lack of true insightfull communication by MDG as well. If people tell me they were communicating… well I mean something truly informing then. If you look at all the questions people asked the last couple of months and the events that happened, it’s not hard to call that lack of communication. (e.g., the whole Blaze debacle).
The last couple of days, I see a lot of good news, so I’m approaching everything way more positive now. Kudos to MDG for picking this up.
One of the things that irks me about it is that a lot of the top Meteor people visit the forum daily (if not more), as you can see in their “last seen” field of the user profile. It really doesn’t take much to respond to a few posts here and there, especially if there is a pattern of questions. So - I cannot say communication has improved much, often it only opens more questions, but it’s nice that the first step has been taken.
Hi All,
being a new guy here and investigating Meteor for my new startup i am too concerned with the communication.
when i found meteor i couldn’t believe i hadn’t seen this before, being new to JavaScript, and dived into the docs and tuts, then i popped on to the forum and all the doubts crept in.
Having no idea about the inner-workings, politics and history yet i still plan to evaluate fully the Meteor stack and trying to see which will fit in the best with our new venture.
One thing that is worrying me is the communication/replies/insights from MDG but i am hoping it will change
tl;dr I believe MDG cares about what we have to say but can only do so much because the community wants everything and we want it RIGHT NOW.
I’m a big fan of MDG. Early to mid 2015 I was upset with them because my company was struggling with scaling due to live data. I went on a rant about how “no real production quality application can be built with this type of scaling problem” but what ended up happening is that despite my frustrations and idea that I couldn’t build a production ready application I ended up building a production ready application. Right now people are upset with MDG because of xyz forgetting it’s a new tool. It will never be perfect because there is no perfect framework.
There are two types of frameworks, frameworks that people complain about and frameworks that nobody uses. Twitter was written on rails when rails was in its early years and they struggled to scale it so they switched to scala (I think). Now some of the biggest sites on the Internet are written in rails: AirBnB, Genius, Github, Fiverr, Dribbble, Kickstarter. I could go on.
I think MDG cares about what the community has to say as well as the complaints we have. @sashko spends a lot of time on the forums and answers a bunch of questions. If MDG didn’t care about what we complain about then he probably wouldn’t spend so much time on the forums. At the end of the day MDG can only do so much in a given amount of time. The community is important to them because if people aren’t complaining about the framework that means nobody is using the framework. MDG is a startup that is going to make money off the community using its framework which means they have to listen to us and I believe that they do.
I’ll do a couple just to start things off…
