It’s not necessarily an obvious distinction at first, but the “this is my work” checkbox means you wrote the linked article, not necessarily that you built the thing the linked article is about. For example if I wrote an article explaining why I think Pokémon Go was successful and linked it here, I’d check that box (and lobste.rs would then indicate that the article is “by” me), but I wouldn’t tag it show because I didn’t make Pokémon Go.

Thanks for the reply, hopefully by understanding each other’s positions we can conclude this particular thread of comments. It’s getting complex, but I’ll respond to each of your points for the sake of completeness.

Before I go any further, I do want to say that you have a very nice site, and a product that looks like it’ll be handy and useful for people who are its target audience. It has nice polish, and the docs look like a helpful start even if they are a little rough in styles in some places. I don’t want to imply you have a bad product–but your appearance and actions here are part of an overall trend in technical communities that is harmful.

I truly appreciate that. I think the docs are still a bit lacking and need to be normalized – but it’s a slow process and sometimes framework changes happen faster than I can write/rewrite docs.

That’s great! I’ve spent many many hours working on client work and employer work, and I never talk about it here! Your allocation of resources is just that, your allocation of resources. It doesn’t automatically grant you any more a right to be here than Larry Ellison or Crazy Larry.

I don’t doubt that you (or other people here) have! I think you’re understandably mistaken regarding my relationship to this software… so a little background:

I have been a freelance dev my entire adult life, 12 years ago I started Directus as a side-project thinking it would be useful in my workflow, and made it open source because: why not. I alone concepted/designed/programmed the first 5 versions over almost a decade. No contributors, no funding, nothing corporate about it. Then I started a small dev shop in 2011 – and shifted Directus under that agency in an attempt to substantiate it in a congested field. I posted in forums exactly like this one and received feedback that the idea was great but the codebase itself was sub-par (I went to school for design and will be the first to admit my self-taught coding has its limitations). So, still believing in the platform, I paid my employees to rebuild it properly in backbonejs, funded by our other projects.

Now, a few years later, Directus is still my side project – I work on it every night after work and still try to gather feedback in community discussions on my weekends :/ . The entire Directus team is myself and my one (lead) developer who is similarly impassioned. This is not some “get rich” service my huge agency dreamed up – it’s a very personal project that I am trying to improve. And in my eyes, the best way to improve it is to get more people to use, critique, and contribute to it.

Right from your navbar. You’re not being entirely honest by claiming otherwise.

Correct, there is a Hosted side to the software. My dev and I created it a few months ago to try and offset the absurd costs of the project in hopes of being able to continue to afford working on it. It in no way even comes close to covering my expenses, and if it ever turns a profit, that money would only get put back into more dev/support. If I wanted to link to the pay side I would have posted the directus.io URL – though I understand how commingled these two are.

So, by your own admission, you didn’t watch this place, but immediately found and joined it without lurking to observe the cultural norms. This was advertising on our board. You didn’t do this to help other devs, to solve our problems, or to explore solution spaces, but explicitly to hawk your wares. I get it, you’re with a PHP agency and you all have to do massive hustle to stay relevant and marketable.

Correct, I posted immediately. I’m being honest in that I don’t have time to deeply engrain myself in every web community before contributing. But, please don’t presume my intentions. Respectfully, this is a tiny site with very little traffic (comparatively) – I came here because I knew it wouldn’t be some huge marketing thing. We still have a few small bugs/issues in the code/ux… I came here to get opinions and feedback from other developers before moving into a marketing phase.

Also, we’re not a PHP agency (ugh, these assumptions!). Our work is extremely varied and we can’t solve every problem with the same language/frameworks. I actually pushed for Node, as I loved the idea of the entire framework being js. But Node was a bit younger (and unproven) then, and with limited resources I had to work with what I had available. And as an aside, I have never hustled or advertised my agency – we’ve remained relevant and profitable by communicating well and providing quality work… not sure why you’re so intent on thinking the worst.

You have to show new (free but consulting-friendly) products to drum up support work in Ye Grande Open Source Model. That’s totally awesome, but here isn’t the place to do it.

I don’t even know what you’re trying to say here.

Some of us benefit from a bit of anonymity. If I wanted to put my real name next to everything, I’d be on Facebook. Other users here doubtless feel the same, and you’re kind of out of line acting otherwise. Of course, you’d know this if you had spent time on the site before posting.

Are you saying I’m “out of line” for using my own name? That’s my choice the same as anon is yours. Just pointing out that I am not trying to hide anything. But please, it’s the internet – I don’t need to spend time on this site to know that most users don’t want to use their real name.

This is good, props and no complaints–except that the show tag is intended for functioning community members. There are a handful of cases I can think of where a user almost immediately posted a project, but again, those were projects and not products.

Directus is my project. Anything can be a product if you’re selling it. Feel free to call it a product if you want (it does have a Hosted version) but you should take my comments here in context… does this conversation seem like a marketing ploy? If this were an ad I would have not responded to comments and either abandoned or deleted the post when the comments derailed.

Also, I maintain that this is the internet, people do what they want. If you want to make a rule that you can’t post in your first X days… then add a conditional to the site. Otherwise, stop citing invisible lurk/post ratios.

Both fair questions. The purpose of the site is always evolving, but content tends towards “Here’s information that will help a developer program something better or engineer something more reliably”. This is somewhat distinct from “Here’s a product that you can use to do your job and you can optionally pay for it”. Your submission is a turnkey tool, and it’s our bad for not having a tool tag to help mark that. We don’t want to become another marketing channel and dumping ground for advertisements. Any individual product team has nothing to lose from posting under such circumstances, but it rapidly destroys the signal-to-noise ratio in a forum like this. If you wanted to lurk, I’d suggest a week or two just to see what kinds of articles pop up and how people react. It’s a slow-moving board, mostly because it isn’t constantly inundated with people trying to sell their company’s products (the stream.io folks notwithstanding).

Maybe it’s just your subjectivity, but the post was intended for: “Here’s information that will help a developer program something better or engineer something more reliably”. If you don’t understand the framework, or don’t want to use it, fine. But that doesn’t preclude other devs here needing to manage a custom-schema database… this is a great tool for them. The rest of your comment still assumes I’m here to sell something – I’ve covered that and will move on.

Please understand–for you this is just another chance to get users for your product and free QA work. For us, this is where we talk to each other without the din of people hawking their wares (that’s HN). Have some respect that you might be called out on that as you were here.

I hope that by this point you see the dichotomy in simply posting a link. You can say it’s me just “hawking wares” all day, I can say I’m here to get feedback – arguing either side won’t do much.

Let’s say I was here for a few weeks first, the only difference in my post would have been using the show tag instead of the ~8 tags I chose. That’s it. The only way to have a discussion about this software without you thinking it was an ad would have been to not include the link. Something like: “Hey, I created a framework over the past decade and would love to use this comment section for feedback dialog, but I can’t link to it or say the name because you’ll think I’m here to sell it to you.” A bit absurd.

Haha, no problem! Your post was quite helpful in my Lobster onboarding ;)

People are protective of spaces like this in an attempt to keep them true to their roots – I respect that. Some people just need to calm down (or grow up) in their approach.

Little late, but good for you! Thanks for making the web a better place :)