quote from the discord feature request
I freaking LOVE dgraph dgraph is the best thing that happened to me in the last 2 years its an amazing product that gives aaaaaaa loooot of possibilities and freedom to develop which saves a lot of development costs + i can build awesome apps on my own. Dgraph is a democratization of the internet, making tech more awesome, more performant, more easier, more cheap. Dgraph is what the world needs!
what drgaph really needs is:
-
marketing + storytelling. Please watch this video from sinek explaining why apple is so successful and why big innovations like bluray players failed https://youtu.be/qp0HIF3SfI4 - as @BenW said: dgraph needs a simple website rebranding. a better website which takes a different approach with a big title on the main site “Firebase & Spanner killer” catches every eye
-
marketing + storytelling + onboarding/learning. I think I am the one who is most qualified here for that question, because everyone here like @amaster507 @MichelDiz @BenW @jdgamble555 @iluminae and all other awesome people I meet here on dgraph: are awesome great devs with much knowledge and experience. But I - I am a 20 year old 0815 beginner noob shit SaaS developer that doesn’t even know how things like docker work. I am not smart, I am actually really dumb, but the only one good power I have: is patience, endurance, and big motivation for learning because I put so much passion into my charity project I’ve been working the last years. dgraph became in the last weeks crucial to me because it gives me so much power. But we all humans are individual and different, so 90% won’t or don’t want to spend much brain nerves capacity stress on learning something. they just want to swallow a pill and thats it. not getting big surgery. Professionals are permanently trapped in their pro-bubble; every tech they see they can understand awesome quickly and easy; so it is a goal to try to understand the perspective of noobs who are in a noob-bubble and need time and explanations and so on to understand things.
Most people here have much technical experience and come from cool tech products that they’ve used. I come from Firebase. The easiest thing on the world. Firebase does not need patience endurance or big motivation. The community is big, the docs are 11/10, it’s straight forward, there are awesome community tutorials, there are awesome easy-to-understand good helpful tutorials from google firebase tech-team themselves (ofc i gotta admit that firebase products are very simple and not that awesome as dgraph. tbh firestore is not that cool actually, its the same as mongodb, just with that bad expensive annoying read/write pricing model)
I just had 10 more things in my head, I could write a whole big XXL roman, but I rather just write here a to-do list that we (dgraph team + community) should do, else I could still write the next 6 hours here
- we want and need any kind of users: senior devs, and junior devs. senior devs who are in their 40s probably dont have much time to spend, and won’t find out about dgraph randomly. Also many dont want to learn new things since tech world is getting bloated with 99999 new techs & frameworks being released every day. we need to attract young unskilled devs: they will do the marketing, they will spread word, and they work in big tech companies tomorrow. (ofc seniors do marketing too)
- website rebranding. this is a very cheap and effective measure. we have to rebrand dgraph as a spanner firebase killer, as a cheap awesome powerful open-source graphql SaaS. if you explain dgraph to people like you explained to me personally on reddit, many more would fall in love with dgraph Reddit - Dive into anything
- better docs. people like the one I mentioned above don’t have a problem with the actual docs. But I am not smart. I had a problem - thanks to the big help here + the dgraph graphlql&dql Tour and my endurance i was able to learn & understand dgraph. but people dont want to spend time frustration and nerves. I was quite frustrated. the Dgraph graphql/DQL tour is 8/10, it could be much more well explained (I even spotted in the graphql tour a mistake from the DQL tour migration). More examples & explanations = more users & less spam in the forum (i really spammed the forum with dumb questions. And I am a very open person. Other kids my age would just drop dgraph instead of asking questions and continue using firebase(firestore) or mysql). The docs are 5/10. They are very very slim and a frustrating experience. The docs are great for active dgraph developers who just quickly want to refresh some knowledge, or senior devs who know how things work. But devs like me, can do not much with the docs. Please split up that whole learning and docs thing into 3 segments: 1. Docs as they are now. They are perfect for a quick refresh. Nothing has to be added, else they will overblow. The only thing that shall be added: quick 2-5 minutes tutorials on every subject. 2. DQL/graphQL tour & learn, please overblow them and explain every single dumb thing every single line. It is very frustrating to read something that I e.g as a noob does not understand, but for you as a pro is normal knowledge. it is very frustrating to open a new tab and try to understand that through docs forum and so on. its a bad disturbing experience. It’s OK to overblow things. Explain things while imagining you are explaining them to a 5 year old kid “Explain me like I am 5”. 3. Second Docs - yes you read correctly. Leave the current docs as they are, and create second Docs specially for beginner, and overblow overflow them. Put 999999 lines of text in them, no problem. put 999999 different explanations examples in there. It’s OK to overblow things. Explain things while imagining you are explaining them to a 5 year old kid “Explain me like I am 5”. create here 20-30 minutes tutorials on every subject. If things are too slow for someone, he can just jump over to the professional docs.
- community building. please make our discord official, I made a whole post about that
This is what people want to hear, this is what has to stand on the front page (discaimer: the things that stand at the moment on the front page, are AWESOME. you guys do very awesome good work, I feel like I am speaking that bad now. the things that stay now atm at the front page should stay there. Instead I want that more things like the following ones are added. my whole text here is just a critics I dont want to hate anything), your words from reddit:
- Yeah, Dgraph is built on the same Spanner principles – horizontal scalability, distributed ACID transactions, consistent replication, geographical distribution, etc. There’s even two Jepsen reports about the consistency guarantees of Dgraph. There’re no scalability limitations. Dgraph supports full-text as you mentioned, also regular expressions, fuzzy matching, geolocation, etc.
- In fact, it’s a mix of 3 different techs. Spanner, Search and Graph. Internally, Dgraph uses posting list format / roaring bitmaps, which give it the same speed as search engines. And joins are first class citizens, allowing it provide very powerful graph queries.
- The cloud pricing is similar to MongoDB / SQL. [1]
- [1] Dgraph Cloud
- Yes, you can scale horizontally via the interface, and Dgraph would rebalance shards internally, automatically.
- Dgraph is perfect for building real-time apps. It has a pretty strong support for datetime type, so can work well with the live incoming IOT / GPS data.
- If you have the geolocation for the businesses, you can just store that, and use Dgraph’s geo-indexing system. It can then find all the businesses nearby to a specific geolocation, or within polygons like towns / cities / states / countries, etc.
- Hope it helps! If you’re in the cloud interface, you can also ask questions to our helpdesk via the “Support” button.
these words are AWESOME and convinced me to start learning dgraph. And now 2 months later I am here! i fell in LOVE with dgraph
Your reddit comments at my post were like a shotgun and the bullets were reasons to use dgraph. You just shot at me one bullet after another bam bam bam bam bam one more reason bam bam bam one more explanation bam bam bam bam bam
BTW Reddit - Dive into anything it would be awesome to have a page on the website where you just have a list of apps you could build using dgraph. Just a list of company logos like facebook twitter tumblr pinterest youtube whatsapp discord, and so on. this are shotgun bullets too
Thank you very much!!!
PS: i dont know if I maybe wrote things to harsh, we germans are always considered harsh and rude and too direct (._.) sorry, please dont feel attacked by my text, its just my feedback
PS2: regarding your questions: dgraph is for me already perfect as it is, there are just some features that maybe would be cool like better fulltext search (maybe team up with typesense), fulltextsearch over multiple fields, nested filters, and so on. But NOW dgraph is already very very cool. it just really lacks documentation + popularity. We need to spread word about dgraph around the tech world
PS3: I NEARLY FORGOT!!! there is one feature that is very very crucial and missing!!! Increment/decrement fields. Building a basic Like counter, or warehouse stock counter of products. I think nearly EVERY app nowadays needs that increment/decrement thing. No matter if its a like feature or a crucial warehouse item stock counter. This is really the only one feature that I miss the most. Because I don’t want to use additionally to dgraph something like redis or another DB just to count numbers. We really need that feature. Feature Request: Increment/Decrement field values like Firestore - #5 by jdgamble555 Dgraph needs to support to incremtent fields 10000 times per millisecond, so that even if a justin bieber tweets something, so that 10k users can like that tweet within a second without a problem. this is really a very important feature that I really miss.
ok i’ve been writing that text now for 2 damn hours, that’s it! thanks a lot! ok i want to control read it now again but then i would add again 999 lines of text. i hope I have no dumb mistakes
#edit I dont want to hate https://supabase.io/ or something, but how can supabase have more attention than dgraph, more VCs pumping money into it, i really cant understand that lol i know these are 2 different products. We really have to make a better website and much better docs and some simply tutorial youtube videos. - VCs want to invest into the next big thing. I dont think supabase is the next big thing because there is honestly nothing special about it even though its a neat good product I’d also use. it just looks like the next thing. that’s what VCs care about. whole wall street VC & crypto community, they are all gamblers who want to pump things up to the moon. They dont really care what is behind the walls. How else could you imagine that there were billion dollar pyramide schemes in the USA, it’s really just great marketing. So dgraph has to look also the same as supabase. It’s really only the website, and some presence on youtube with tutorials. that’s it. nothing more. really. If I am a VC, and I don’t know dgraph or superbase, and I have 10 million USD, I would pump that into Supabase just because of the website. even though in reality dgraph is 999999999x much more awesome and more sophisticated than supabase which is basically just a CRUD app
#edit2: summarised: we need a new/better website, and much better documentation/explanations/tutorials. that’s it. really. The comments you wrote to me on reddit amazed me and gave me motivation to give dgraph a try. and here i am now.
#edit3: quote of @BenW
I think the other thing is that there’s a large number of Devs who aren’t looking for specific solutions, i.e.they aren’t specifically looking for a relational database, graph database, NoSQL database. Most of the time Devs just want something that is easy to use and lets them ship faster and don’t care how it works. Devs who use Firebase don’t sign up to Firebase because it’s a document store, they sign up because of what Firebase promises which is that you can use it to ship fast and it’s reliable. The fact that it happens to be a document store isn’t even mentioned on the homepage because it’s an implementation detail. If Dgraph markets itself as a GraphQL generator it limits it’s market to developers who know they want a GraphQL API. However, if they market themselves as the ultimate backend tool (that happens to have a GraphQL API and a graph db persistence layer) then becoming the next Firebase in terms of popularity and profits becomes feasible
#edit4: UX brother UX. I was always an android fan. since I am 12 I was the biggest android fan and the biggest apple hater ever. Because iphones since jobs death are not the same anymore, they are nothing special anymore… I thought. Do you know which smartphone I have now? an iphone 11 pro max. Just because I started to dont care about cool technical stuff (since in 2021 every camera is already good). Just the UX the user experience of using an iphone makes me happy. I really love my iphone. I wouldnt exchange it for that new awesome galaxy fold phone. Even though i desire that galaxy phone, i still want to keep my iphone. i just like it. When I was a kid I always asked class comrades with an iphone 5 iphone6 “why tf do you guys use an iphone, get an android its much better better camera better battery better…” and they always responded to me “es ist einfach geil digga ein iphone is einfach geil. Ist mir doch scheiss egal wie gut dein android ist. mein iphone ist einfach geiler” - ‘geil’ means in english something like ‘■■■■■■■ awesome cool’. so the sentance translated “its just ■■■■■■■ awesome cool brotha an iphone is just much awesome cooler. i dont fking care how better your android is. my iphone is just more awesome cool”
this is the one marketing thing that apple mastered, and still helps them to make 'till today big profit with average products. Please watch that simon sinek video I linked at the start of my roman
#edit5: i just see that ■■■■■■■ gets censored. ■■■■■■■ = fuc*king
sorry for the bad words bro ._.
#edit6: supabase has big competition. dgraph has no competitoin (i wouldnt compare it to other graph solutions) . dgraph is unique. dgraph has a monopol. karl marx would hate dgraph
#edit7: marketing idea: libraries with some offline caching functionality for react native, flutter, angular, vue, react… every front end developer uses one of these. and if we offer for every of that framework a library, many will be happy to try out dgraph. Then we can put the react native flutter vue… logos on our start page dgraph.io this creates more trust credibility etc. Really, if I open a SaaS and I see they have a React Native library, I am automatically 999999x more interested. dunno why.