Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

At 10/26/13 09:21 PM, Viper50 wrote: I think it's more that he hardly ever even pays attention to Newgrounds' existence anymore. He doesn't upload the little he does do on here. And I honestly don't remember the last time he was even on here.
He just sticks to YouTube.

He isn't the only one, and we DO notice this. I'm not sure what the answer is.

At 10/27/13 01:51 AM, Ron-Geno wrote: Labeling them a traitor is definitely the WRONG answer.

Agreed. To me, it's more about getting some feedback to figure out if there are some changes / improvements we could be making on our end. It's not about labeling, blaming and shaming people because that always seems to backfire.

A blog from today might point us in the right direction.

You linked me to a video...

After that, it's like leaving the minors for the big leagues.

I can understand that. NG is definitely a niche.

2) Any incentives that will keep'em posting on NG?

Well financially speaking, I think it only makes sense for people to post their work elsewhere (as well as on NG if possible we hope) if they can make money doing so. Aside from exclusive agreements, I can't see why people can't post here as well as YT etc.

I can think of some non-financial incentives as well. Users have direct access to Tom and everyone else that works on NG. We listen to feedback and make changes as much as a small staff can. There isn't some disconnected authority out there making decisions.

I built the backend system that encodes video uploads, for example, and am working on a case that involves one particular problem video right now. They just can't (or won't) do that at YT scale. I've also looked into network problems with specific users and other things like that.

Also, site support: if YT makes a change that pisses people off (like demanding you use your real name), who can they talk to? There really isn't any easy way to provide feedback to Google and there is near ZERO support for this stuff. I've seen where they've deleted people's entire accounts (email and everything) and there is NO 800 number to call or any way to get that email back.

That's why I pay for Google Apps even for my personal account. This way I at least have someone to call if I have problems. With NG, people can post to the forums, PM us and email us with problems / feedback and this is all free of course.

We also have fewer content restrictions than YT. I think it's great that people don't have to censor themselves here like they do on YT (OK maybe this is a little terrifying at times as well ha).

The other thing that I don't think is too widely known (and most people probably don't care for the most part) is that NG runs on enterprise hardware and is hosted in a proper data center with fire suppression, battery and generator backed power, etc.

When hurricane Sandy hit last year, most of the east coast lost power, but our data center didn't and the site stayed up. A lot of data centers in Manhattan flooded and lost generator power, but we didn't have that problem.

We also keep extensive off-site backups; any project file uploaded here is backed up off-site. If anything should happen to the data center, we have a complete archive of all data elsewhere on a completely different system. Backups will be expanding with the new system I'm putting in too, so we'll be able to archive project files for longer periods of time for example. If someone uploads their hard work, they should know that it's safe from just about everything up to maybe a nuclear disaster.

The feedback here seems to be of higher quality too. Someone on Reddit asked recently "what's the worst online community" and YT came up time and again (and I agree). I went quite far into the thread, and didn't see any mention of NG. The comments I see here are generally much better than YT, but I guess that's to be expected when you're more of a niche site and don't cater to the general population as much as YT does.

We've worked hard in 2013 to improve site reliability, load times, and fix long standing bugs with the project system, the audio portal, etc. The site is probably as stable and fast as it's ever been and we're continuing to improve upon this. We're also planning on adding other cool stuff in 2014, like a multiplayer system. Hopefully we can keep adding more incentives so people will keep posting to NG even if they are posting elsewhere.