The State Of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

[Posted January 20, 2016 by corbet]

Back in 2014, LWN looked at the Meteor web application framework. Now, Meteor's developers are contemplating why it failed to take over the world. "New developers love how easy it is to get started with it, but can get discouraged when they start struggling with more complex apps. And purely from a financial standpoint, it’s hard to build a sustainable business on the back of new developers hacking on smaller apps. On the other hand, many of the more experienced developers who’d be able to handle (and help solve) Meteor’s trickier challenges are turned off by its all-in-one approach, and never even give it a chance in the first place." They promise the imminent unveiling of a new approach that is going to address these problems.

Good riddance

Posted Jan 20, 2016 22:14 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (9 responses)

Who cares?

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 8:14 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (7 responses)

A quick reminder that LWN has a comment filtering system:

- Head on over to https://lwn.net/MyAccount/
- Go to the "Comment filtering" section and click "Edit filtering" then use the "Add user to filters" form.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 8:27 UTC (Thu) by liw (subscriber, #6379) [Link] (6 responses)

Note to those who use the "reset to defaults" button when playing with colour options (in order to get links to be visible): that will reset the filtering to "disabled" by default. You'll need to re-enable them. The list of filtered users does not get emptied, though.

Unfortunately, this type of filtering works about as badly as it does for mailing lists or Usenet groups. It's per reader, and even if a thousand readers ignore someone who routinely behaves badly, that person can still continue to behave badly, and a lot of people will be exposed. This makes the place worse for everyone.

I don't have a good solution for this, either.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 21, 2016 21:24 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe once enough people filter a given user, his comments are only visible to him?

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 14:29 UTC (Fri) by eternaleye (guest, #67051) [Link]

Though I suggested it for an unrelated forum software (and moreover, one with the forum as the primary purpose, which leads to certain central UI elements of my suggestion being less appropriate here), this may be of interest:

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/suggestion-a-more-g...

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 22:21 UTC (Fri) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (3 responses)

> Unfortunately, this type of filtering works about as badly as it does for mailing lists or Usenet groups.

You mean it works very well, has a plethora of advanced, time-tested tools available (as well as tons of accumulated community experience) *and* leaves control in the hands of the ones actually affected by the filtering, namely the readers? Sounds awesome.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 22:32 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (2 responses)

> ... *and* leaves control in the hands of the ones actually affected by the filtering, namely the readers? Sounds awesome.

Speaking as a reader who approves of putting those most affected in control, it would be nice to have sufficient control over the filtering to dynamically filter based on patterns (such as the number of other users explicitly blocking the account) rather than just a static list of usernames to block.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 22, 2016 23:04 UTC (Fri) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

What I'd really like is to fold threads in the unread comments view, or even better mark them as uninteresting. A topic or two aside peer week the reader and commentership here's intelligent, well informed and so on. Being able to hide the insane topucs would make it easier to see the signal.

Reminder: comment filtering

Posted Jan 23, 2016 1:22 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I too think this would be a good idea, I've mentioned it before, but I recognize that this kind of feature is not for free, it costs more db/server processing.

Good riddance

Posted Jan 29, 2016 5:32 UTC (Fri) by wtanksleyjr (subscriber, #74601) [Link]

Personally, I'm glad to read a serious postmortem on almost any project, so I care (even though I've never looked at the framework and am not sure I heard of it). It's especially interesting when someone actually remains interested enough in a failed project to do the work to attempt to revive it (the project, rather than the code).

The State Of Meteor Part 1: What Went Wrong

Posted Jan 28, 2016 4:03 UTC (Thu) by clicea (guest, #75492) [Link]

I tried to use Meteor. Like I really tried. But it always seemed to come with too much magic. No amount of googling dispelled it, just paste here and do that rather than a good explanation of what it is going on in the background. Not to mention the differences between releases that made some of the copy-paste code now obsolete leaving no answers.