PhoenixReborn

FWIW, I do think it's an excellent email product. However, it is generally not going to be worth the money unless you send a ton of email all the time (exec, sales person, director+ eng leader).

The reality in today's world (at least for software developers in the US) is that government work pays so much less than private sector work that I don't imagine it pays to go into government work at any point of your career.

I would respectfully disagree that open core doesn’t work - companies like Confluent, Databricks, MongoDB have shown that you can succeed with open core. DGraph I think tried to do too much rather than focusing on graph databases, which caused the commercial product to fail.

Unlikely that it's related. For example, here's a report about the September quit rate: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/12/a-record-4point4-million-peo...

That was 4.4 million people, even before the vaccine mandate was around.

Have you looked at Hasura for the second question (graph frontend + relational backend)? That's basically GraphQL on top of Postgres.

As for the first question - I've tried using Neo4j and ArangoDB for relatively large-scale graph querying (1-2TB of data) and both couldn't hold a candle to Postgres or MySQL in terms of query performance for cost. Neo requires you to store most of your data in memory and Arango isn't great for cross-shard querying.

Unless there's some major new graph DB that comes out in the next few years I would still bet on relational being dominant in 2030.

Because BQ is great for the ETL/data warehouse/BI use case but is terrible for online applications. I tried using BQ as the backing store for an online analytics application back in late 2019, and it was so much worse than using Clickhouse/Druid/Pinot for the same use case. IDK how much that has changed since, but I'm not too terribly surprised that it isn't higher.

Sure, but let's say that the quota is not met organically and only 3% leave voluntarily. Then to achieve the target 6% unregretted attrition for an org, you'd necessarily need to pick a different 3% to fire/push out.

I don’t particularly buy this idea since Mastodon has already existed for several years - and in that time, all the major social media players have only increased their market share.

As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream.

By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.

Substack is good, and certainly much better than Medium! But I think it serves a different purpose, since it lets content creators monetize their audience rather than managing P2P user interaction like most social media.

I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I honestly don't have any hard feelings or ill will towards Reddit - I liked my coworkers and my time there was fun overall. I worked on mostly backend/data stuff during my time there, but over time it became painfully clear that there was no way Reddit would make it as a business without resorting to the kinds of shady tactics that you see today.

I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.

The meaningless emoji stuff was added later to boost sales (think of it similar to skins in video games). You used to not get any of that, and the clear thing you did get was no ads (IIRC, this is still the case and if you have Reddit gold you get no ads on the site).

Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018

Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.

How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Reddit but left in 2018)

While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make.

Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable.

Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

People have predicted that for at least 5 years now, and it hasn't happened. Unless they shut down old.reddit.com, I doubt the exodus will happen.

Cannot agree with this recommendation enough. I bought the book and read it, and it's excellent reporting.

Ah, thanks for the correction. The policy I had in mind when writing the above comment was the one on petty theft: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1273848

Perhaps not, but it's clear that reduced police funding and enforcement hasn't been working...so I think it's a natural shift in the other direction from leadership. While I'm sure many in SF will be disappointed by this, many others will probably be much happier.

I would guess more so the latter.

Fox has been going more to the right for a few years now, but CNN has really been fading out especially with the recent scandals hitting Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon. Their core audience is older centrist-leaning folks and securing someone like Chris Wallace may help them bring over some center-right viewers from Fox.

The $93M number in the headline is somewhat misleading, as it's cumulative across all the rounds of funding. Can the title be changed to state that the specific round raised now is a $68M Series B?

Article quote:

> We just closed a $68M Series B co-led By Lux and Tiger Global, with participation from Greenoaks Capital Partners, Lightspeed, Addition, and Haystack.

There are quite a lot of apps that do a JS frontend and Django backend these days, I myself have done quite a few.

There are countries with mandatory voting already (Australia is a good example). It hasn't really changed very much about their elections though.

This seems overly pessimistic. I work on a React codebase that uses only plain CSS files (no CSS-in-JS), and have never encountered any problems with that.

Sure, there are certainly people who exclusively used CSS in JS, but I would hardly say that they are even a majority of frontend devs.

Rather than seeing Notion as a Google Docs alternative, it might be better to see it as an alternative to Atlassian Confluence or other wiki softwares. I can certainly say that Notion was a much better fit for us than something like Confluence was for use as a team wiki.

The ORM connection pooler is client-side - so each instance of your application using SQLAlchemy will have its own connection pool. This may become unwieldy as you scale up the number of app servers/containers/processes.

In contrast, connection poolers like Odyssey or pgbouncer live external to your applications, meaning that:

1. You can connect to them from any application written in any language (not just Python) 2. They provide a global pool for all of the applications connecting and help to not overload Postgres.

Very cool and thanks for the response! I will definitely give Hightouch a try.

I am probably missing something here, but how is Hightouch differentiated from other similar tools like Census (https://www.getcensus.com/)?

Poetry helps alleviate some of the issues mentioned here, and lets you separate dev vs prod dependencies. As far as the "new PHP" goes, it'd be great if Python ever powered almost 80% of websites: https://kinsta.com/blog/is-php-dead/

They actually made 100M in a single quarter recently, and not a year. Source: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/reddit-raises-410-million-in...

So let's say their annual revenue is 3-4x since ad spend is usually weighted heavily towards Q4. At 300-400M per year and growing that's actually pretty solid.

> why Flink and not Kafka ?

I assume you mean "Kafka Streams" when you say this, as Kafka is just a event bus and Flink can be used to read messages from it.

The biggest advantage of Flink (IMO) is that you can write the Flink logic once, and reuse it for both batch and stream processing. So if I write a Flink job that consumes a Kafka stream and produces some aggregated outputs, that same job can be run against my data lake in S3/GCS/Azure Blob Storage, etc.

Kafka Streams does not support batch processing, or working on top of anything other than Kafka. Flink supports building on top of other message buses like Pulsar as well: https://flink.apache.org/news/2019/11/25/query-pulsar-stream...

The alternative monetization model is usually subscriptions / freemium features. These don't usually work out for social media sites as people are not willing to pay for user generated content, and the main draw is the content itself so freemium features are usually not high-value enough. Thus, the only remaining viable model is ads.