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Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

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Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#21

Post by james-revisoai »

langsoul-com wrote: post #5
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat an outsider (but I have used Netlify and eleventy). It's basically a tale as old as time: trying to build a sustainable business around open source technology and perhaps fleeting trends in software development. Vercel and Netlify offer essentially the same thing: easy hosting of mostly static websites + a few bells and whistles. They each support development of frameworks (eleventy, Next.js, Gatsby, and per…

One big thing is that Vercel owns Nextjs and has started to do direct integrations with their platform. Although the features can work without Vercel, it's a second class citizen. The more popular Next is, the less reason people would choose netlify over nextjs as a default option.

What features struggle to work self-hosted?

It was my (perhaps outdated) experience that in fact some elements of JS (like using scraper libraries) would not work on Vercel at the time due to memory of serverless function and other limits. But locally they worked on my dev machine.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#22

Post by bobfunk »

rideontime wrote: post #11
bobfunk wrote: post #6

Netlify founder here. The survey is a reflection of what our community responded. Next is the largest framework in usage and is really will liked by it's users. This is clearly visible in the charts of the survey. But for the first time we’ve run this survey, Next decreased in usage year over year (from 47% to 46%). Astro jumped all the way from 11% to 18% with 87% responding they want to use it more. Eleventy droppe…

None of this addresses: - The misleading title change - The missing methodology document - The missing context of absolute scores alongside deltas All things that have changed since last year's survey.

We changed the title to better reflect that the survey asks plenty of questions not directly related to jamstack (like usage of AI tools for web development etc).

Nothing changed in the methodology since last year and as always the survey was run by our data team.

If you scroll past the editorial part of what our team found newsworthy in the data and down to the actual survey data, you'll see clear charts of absolute framework usage and detailed breakdowns on satisfaction for each framework.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#23

Post by bobfunk »

jcollins1991 wrote: post #13
bobfunk wrote: post #6

Netlify founder here. The survey is a reflection of what our community responded. Next is the largest framework in usage and is really will liked by it's users. This is clearly visible in the charts of the survey. But for the first time we’ve run this survey, Next decreased in usage year over year (from 47% to 46%). Astro jumped all the way from 11% to 18% with 87% responding they want to use it more. Eleventy droppe…

This comes off as a disingenuous response, by typing out a large block of text while neglecting to address any of the individual concerns written in the article. "it’s just data from our survey" is a cop out -- the presentation of data is just as important as the data itself, and the concerns of underlying bias via communication model presented by Zach all seem reasonable to myself. It's fine to not be an expert in D…

No that's obviously not true, we have a data team and the survey is run by our data team as it's been every year.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#24

Post by kreetx »

rideontime wrote: post #11
bobfunk wrote: post #6

Netlify founder here. The survey is a reflection of what our community responded. Next is the largest framework in usage and is really will liked by it's users. This is clearly visible in the charts of the survey. But for the first time we’ve run this survey, Next decreased in usage year over year (from 47% to 46%). Astro jumped all the way from 11% to 18% with 87% responding they want to use it more. Eleventy droppe…

None of this addresses: - The misleading title change - The missing methodology document - The missing context of absolute scores alongside deltas All things that have changed since last year's survey.

But the percentage changes are correct, aren't they? I don't think readers will think that the graphs represents absolute popularity, also (IMO) any survey taken by a company will be used for marketing purposes and should be consumed as such. (It's just some text on the internet, nobody is going to take it as gospel.)

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#25

Post by bobfunk »

psanford wrote: post #12
bobfunk wrote: post #6

Netlify founder here. The survey is a reflection of what our community responded. Next is the largest framework in usage and is really will liked by it's users. This is clearly visible in the charts of the survey. But for the first time we’ve run this survey, Next decreased in usage year over year (from 47% to 46%). Astro jumped all the way from 11% to 18% with 87% responding they want to use it more. Eleventy droppe…

It would be nice if the visualization reflected the information you've shared here (including both the absolutes and the amount of change). Then it wouldn't feel misleading and you would not need to write explainer comments on HN.

The absolutes are in a bar chart in the framework part of the survey that makes the absolute usage from the responses very clear. The chart Zack took issue with is from the editorial part of the survey where we found the biggest news in the framework section to be the growth and satisfaction for Astro.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#26

Post by coolhand2120 »

As someone who has pissed away thousands of team hours working with the next.js abomination I’m very happy to see Astro take off. I keep thinking “this looks like one of my very first terribly architected, organically created messes”. Astro may not be better, but just statistically speaking you probably aren’t going to be worse. Next is a house of cards. The architecture is as bad as the code base. The only features anyone wants are perpetually in beta. The documentation is probably the only thing worse than the runtime. We dropped SSR and used prerender.io to accomplish SEO and look back at that decision as a great one. I want to try Astro, looks more professional and propose built. Not at all interested in SaaS hosting.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#27

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Thought experiment: assume the worst: next.js + eleventy is in decline; what does it change in the short-term? It is likely that people using those frameworks are getting things done in them. To me, the fact this whole discussion is happening illustrates how fickle devs are in this particular ecosystem.

It's like nobody wants to be caught dead using something that might not be the new hotness.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#28

Post by DancerOfFaran »

When my team cut our monthly Netlify costs by $1.5k, Netlify didn't inquire why, contrasting with GCP's prompt response to a similar spending reduction. Our departure from Netlify was due to significant bugs in Netlify's Next.js Edge and double billing us when Git contributors didn't map cleanly to Netlify accounts, despite us using Github OAuth. Support individuals were great, but it seems like their advocacy for us fell on deaf ears within the Product/Engineering camp.

Even more puzzling was that a few months prior, their partnerships team had been working with us to get our customers' ecommerce storefronts on the platform. Netlify's (then) head of partnerships left and nobody else followed up ever. Our customers are now pointed at Fly.io instead, and everyone is quite happy with that recommendation.

My anecdote, and this article, seems like evidence of Netlify's reactivity to Vercel over customer-oriented growth. Vercel, in contrast, is more focused on developing open-source projects that organically brings people in.

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#29

Post by rideontime »

bobfunk wrote: post #22
rideontime wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this addresses: - The misleading title change - The missing methodology document - The missing context of absolute scores alongside deltas All things that have changed since last year's survey.

We changed the title to better reflect that the survey asks plenty of questions not directly related to jamstack (like usage of AI tools for web development etc). Nothing changed in the methodology since last year and as always the survey was run by our data team. If you scroll past the editorial part of what our team found newsworthy in the data and down to the actual survey data, you'll see clear charts of absolute…

Nothing changed since last year's methodology document? How is that possible when that document is full of statistics specific to that year's survey? It's still up for anybody to view: https://jamstack.org/survey/2022/community-survey-2022-metho...

Re: Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

#30

Post by canacrypto »

abtinf wrote: post #18
canacrypto wrote: post #7

I was a happy Netlify user for years until they silently took down my app without warning. They blocked my account based on a bogus DMCA claim, the details of which point to a DIFFERENT app with a similar name. Unacceptable behavior from a hosting provider. I'll never use them again.

This seems like human error. How did they handle it when you contacted them?

Oh, that's the best part. The support team sent me an incoherent message semi-explaining the ban and then blocked my email preventing me from responding to explain their mistake! Just stone-walled with no path for remediation. And just to be clear, I was not being rude/aggressive in my messages or anything like that.
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