Note: Many of the links are to the Amity Arena Library, a website devoted to the game which includes tracking the history of it through patchnotes and a running history of what cards entered and left the meta. Their website was a valuable resource for this post.

Mobile gaming has taken off like a wildfire since the advent of the smartphone boosted the average processing power a phone could carry. Initially it took the form of crossing over older, more easily runnable games onto the mobile market to... mixed success, but in recent years we've seen both the West and East use mobile gaming to replace the old fashioned movie tie in game. It's easily accessable, has a much wider reach than consoles or PC, you can take it on the go and standards are inherently lower for mobile games than they are a full 60 dollar game.
Since the 2010s, mobile gaming has shifted to what's called the "Freemium" module. The game itself is free to download and start playing, but is insideously designed with obnoxious paywalls or artificial limiters put in place to limit how much you can play each day. If the game is part of a pre-existing franchise, additional money can be made through a premium currency or a chance to obtain high-powered units by rolling a slot machine random chance mechanic. And thus, gacha gaming was born. This sub has had several threads in the past on high profile gacha games, such as the monolithic Fate Grand/Order, Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact. One of the more popular things to roll for in gachas as a consequence is wallpapers for your homescreen, especially for high-grade units as they're usually animated to move a little bit on the homescreen. Today we're looking a low to mid-tier gacha game that rose and fell with the advent of one catgirl. Let's talk RWBY.
RWBY is an online web anime made by Rooster Teeth focusing on four prospective monster hunters who get embroiled in a world-spanning shadow war. It's of debatable quality in matters of animation, combat, voice acting, story, worldbuilding, romance, and it's kind of a little racist if I'm being honest, but one of the major positives of RWBY is that the series tends to have good character design. Series creator Monty Oum set in the guidelines for the show while making it that most if not every design should be made to be cosplay friendly, hence why most of the outfits have things most costume designers haven't heard of like... pockets. And Rooster Teeth, above all else, likes making money. So they know people like RWBY's character designs, enough so that in 2017 plans were made to release a gacha game themed around RWBY called Amity Arena, which would be developed by Korean company NHN Entertainment.
Amity Arena is a PvP tower defense game. Each player controls two turrets and a tower and has three minutes to use units themed from the show to destroy the other player's structures. Whoever took out more wins, destroying a tower is an instant victory. When the game launched, it had three tiers for units- Common (generally held for mooks or low-tier characters in the show), Rare (roughly protagonist-level or elite mooks go here) and Epic (High tier characters usually with an active ability that did lots of damage or stopped enemies in their tracks). The game launched in October 2018 to generally positive reviews from both mobile game players and RWBY fans alike. Fans were happy to get a lot of new official art for the characters in the game and the base gameplay loop was fun. Criticism at the time was largely themed around the lack of content besides PVP matches and some issues with the meta but overall, the launch went well. Each month, the developers would add new units, including popular characters like Neopolitian, Cinder Fall, Zwei the dog, and more.
But everything changed with February 20th 2019, which introduced Neon Katt, the titular catgirl (RWBY characters are themed around fairytales, except for Neon, who is themed around Nyan Cat, and her partner Flynt Coal, who is themed off a potentially racist joke made by Rooster Teeth).
Neon is a character from RWBY Volume 3 who's part of a team that RWBY face during a tournament arc. Her partner, Flynt Coal, was part of the game at launch, and Neon would join him a few months later. Neon in the show is a cocky fighter who taunts the heroes and zips around on rollarskates, which in-game is represented by Neon skating towards the nearest enemy structure to her and hitting it, while all units within a radius of Neon are taunted and provoked into attacking her above all other targets unless they-selves are coded to hit structures. On its own, not a bad idea for a unit, but Neon came with four big caveats:

• Neon was the fourth corner of the square that became known as the Artillery Arena meta, which saw Neon, Cinder (who had an AOE ability she could use which was wide enough to hit a turret and tower and single-handedly killed the entire launch meta of using fragile swarm units), Zwei (an on-summon high damage AOE on any part of the map) and Penny (another AOE ability that instead did chip damage and locked a location down) turn the game's meta into a chip game. Every player ran at least one of the above cards, if only to counter the others. Neon was the universal counter in being anti-swarm and the hardest to stop, especially at launch where her taunt range was so large, it could grab units from the other lane.
  
• Neon launched with a unit weight of "Heavy", which meant that if she was behind a unit she could push it on her way to the turret. This launched a sub-meta where Neon was placed behind a larger unit such as the Ursa (which like Neon was a unit that focused on structures but was made slow to cover its tankiness), to push them towards the turret faster. This was called Disco Bear. They eventually patched this so Neon phased through units by making her a lightweight.
  
• Neon couldn't die. She was invincible until she hit a structure, which combined with her taunt meant that Neon was very annoying to fight and could lock down an entire lane of the battlefield by being placed well and taunting enemies to let you prepare a counter.
  
• Neon was a very cheap unit to summon. Amity Arena uses a mechanic called "Aura" where all units cost a certain amount and it recharges over the match- for instance, protagonist Ruby Rose has a Rare card that costs four Aura to summon, while Weiss Schnee has two rares that cost three and five. Neo only cost two Aura, which made her one of the cheapest units of the game and thus disproportionately powerful for her cost and easy to cycle through your deck so you could spam her.
  

From the word go, Neon is an unpopular unit; she's clearly overbalanced and elements such as the Disco Bear glitch have players thinking she'll have to get knocked down in a nerf- she'll either be made slower, more expensive, or able to die pre-hitting a structure, right?
Neon doesn't show up in the next patch. Instead, before she's fixed, an entire new class of units called Legendaries are introduced, and this is where the game goes full gacha. Legendaries were meant to represent the highest tier characters in the game, the ones who were either the most popular characters or the highest-tier fighters in the show. Or in some cases, the popular ships such as combo cards for White Rose (Ruby/Weiss), Bumblebee (Blake/Yang) and Flower Power (Ren/Nora). Legendaries, representing their value, were impossibly rare and had an infinitely small chance of actually appearing (The most reliable method was to buy the premium chests and hope you'd roll a Legendary, which often cost tons of money), and if you did get one, there was no way to guess which Legendary you'd actually get. Some such as White Rose and Adam were high tier units, others like Hazel or Checkmate were... kinda broken at launch. The playerbase isn't happy at this, especially as free to play players are left out in the cold and reliant on the game giving them high tier units effectively out of pity.
Neon would get a small nerf in the April patch which lessened her taunt range and killed the Disco Bear meta, but her invincibility would be left untouched, even as players submitted feedback regarding how to make it more efficient. The official Amity Arena discord has a weekly feedback section on Tuesdays where players could submit up to four suggestions on how to nerf/buff units and general requests for quality of life such as "Can this character get a new skin from this part of the show," or "Can we have an option to lower music volume that's not just muting all music?" (they never did add that second request) Neon would then remain in this state until the November patch, despite constant weekly requests for a Neon rework, and all it would do is make Neon functionally mortal, in that she had a flat shield bar of 20 that would be lowered by one for each attack before the next hit would kill her. Neon could now die... but your chances of actually doing enough damage to stop her were slim, and regardless, you were now at a serious Aura defecit.
It took seven months for this one unit to get a substantial nerf, all while the game added new units every week and the number of units being affected by patches each month began to gradually sink. To round up some of the major issues people had with Amity that developed throughout 2019 alongside Neon's general existance making life hell:

• Common units were meant to be chump fodder, but could level up the most amount of times with a level cap at 13. This meant longer-term units that had a long time to level such as the Xiong Family card, the AK-130s the Beowolf Pack, or the White Fang gunners, could become shockingly strong if players grinded the money up to reach max level.
  
• A pre-existing divide between free players and players willing to burn money IRL to get access to premium currencies led to a huge disparity in play. Free players have long complained about how hard it is to scrounge money together to level up units at higher costs as even the basic currency of Lien is hard to get large quantities of (you get a certain amount every match win but otherwise you need to burn the Schnee Premium Dust currency for the highest payouts, but SPD is also needed for shop resets, buying crates or unlocking cosmetics). The developers used to do frequent double weekends where all gains were doubled for a weekend, but these became less and less frequent as time went on. Legendaries only added to the divide, as their rarity was bad enough for players willing to spend money (one player, known as one of the largest whales in the community, in trying to get Sienna Khan, reported burning nearly nine hundred dollars on her, while taking nearly six hundred to get the Ice Flower card).
  
• One actual counter was born to fight Neon in the Argus Shield, a stationary unit that existed solely to stall units and take damage. At 2 Aura, it was the first structure to counter Neon, which allevated one of the primary problems with Neon in that no way to counter her was cost-efficient for an enemy player. They buffed the Wall to 3 Aura eventually which killed that hope, and all this happened before Neon's November nerf.
  
• The Summer of 2019 saw a large number of defensive units released; alongside the Argus Shield, several different units were released themed around turrets for the technological kingdom of Atlas, such as the Beam Turret. The Atlesian Burrow Gun was the straw that broke the camel's back and made for a miserable meta as the Burrow Gun would only appear (and be available to take damage) when a unit entered its range. These three units together were all very overpowered on launch and led to a large exodus of players sick of defensive and chip-based metas, especially as what few offensive units that were good enough to counter these metas (such as Professor Port and Adam Taurus) were often nerfed into the ground within a month of release.
  
• Also around this time it became apparent that the developers were unable to meet the quotas that Rooster Teeth was forcing on them. The social media team admitted that a certain number of units needed to be in the game in time for Winter 2019 when Volume 7 was set to start, and as the year went on more and more game-breaking bugs were being found in units, or they were at best horrifically undertuned or overpowered. The Apathy was perhaps the largest case of this, as an unfound bug pre-release meant that the Apathy (who have a passive ability that let them self-duplicate) had no cap on their power, meaning that they could immediately overwhelm defenses and in the case of some phones, be such a resource hog the phone would crash. Many Legendary units were especially guilty of being under-tuned due to low Legendary availability meaning they were simply weren't powerful enough to compare with high-levelled units. Checkmate's ability simply didn't work at launch, and Neon made several more such as Hazel Rainart a joke. May Marigold's invisibility bubble would have been an interesting game changer... were it not for a bug that made it that units placed in the bubble still played their sound lines, meaning players knew what to expect. Things were so bad that when Flower Power launched and wasn't broken or needed an emergency patch, the playerbase were shocked.
  

Unfortunately, the Novemember patch did little to stop the problems with Neon, and a new problem would rear its head for Christmas: Jinn. This unit embodied many of the problems players had: She was a Legendary so it would be hard for free players to get her, and only added to the sheer number of Legendaries that were out there. She was another structure card, and she was horrifically broken. Stopping time for seven seconds in an area around any friendly units, Jinn broke the game overnight, with players horrified at how little playtesting she'd clearly had. Most chip units now couldn't damage structures as Jinn simply could stop time and freeze the turret for the duration of the attack. And to make matters worse? She cost two Aura, meaning it was very easy to cycle a deck and start Jinn spamming.
And yet at two aura she was still one of the only cost-efficient Neon counters... until they patched her to be worth three Aura instead. Talking of the feline menace, January saw Neon get a HP nerf that set her shield at 14. Finally, Neon could be realistically be taken out, still at an Aura defecit but at least it can be countered and now they just have to raise her Aura- why are you buffing her game?
Less than a month later, Neon got, of all things, a buff. Her HP shield was set at 20, and her attacks now did double damage. This is around the point where a lot of players begin to suspect the developers aren't listening to feedback and more long-term players dip out or drop the game. Neon got touched one more time in April, which slowed her down (which itself was a problem as Neon's lessened speed on spawn simply made her better at generating aggro), she dealt 10% less damage and made it somewhat easier to hit her enough to kill her, but a new problem was on the horizon. Because Neon was now no longer the game's White Whale for patches.
Meet the White Fang Gunner Barracks. Added in September 2019, the Barracks fell under many player's radar simply because they were horrifically undertuned. Their gimmick was that every few seconds, a White Fang Gunner would spawn, with three spawning on death. In April, as Neon got her last appearance in the patches, the Barracks got a huge buff and became the centerpiece of the meta; they now spawned two Gunners, which made them immensely valuable for just five Aura. You could overwhelm many anti-swarm units before they had a chance, and shred your way through turrets.
The Barracks would then go six months before this overtuning was rectified, barring one nerf in August that lowered their health to try and stem the tide of units. To sum up every other thing that went wrong during the year meta-wise:

• The playercount was getting so low that players were able to make lists of the AI bots the developers had in place so lower-level players had a challenge (Amity breaks up players by a trophy system where you gain trophies with every win, and by this point most of the active players were in the 2500 to 3500 range. This also meant new players steamrolled through the lower levels only to hit a brick wall in the 3000 range, with the only reliable solution being to willingly lose matches until you were in your optimal range and grind victories until you reached a certain level.
  
• The patches became more and more threadbare, going from 8+ units getting changed each month in early 2019 to three units at most getting changed in 2020 patches outside of the anniversary patch going back to the golden days of eight. The only area where they didn't get more threadbare was in the cosmetics and emotes that the developers were cranking out, all of which were only available through hours of grinding or premium currencies. This was despite the fact that the units were being released slower, going from once a week to once a fortnite.
  
• The majority of units added in 2020 were Epic or Legendary tier, which were the hardest to get for free players unless they got lucky and they were added to the store (and if they had the lien as a Legendary in the store costs a flat 40,000 Lien). One Common and four Epics were released compared to twelve Epics and seven Legendaries. The release of Moonslice Adam especially was annoying for this regard, as Adam already had a Legendary released (at least for Team RWBY, each of them headlined a Legendary when it came to the team attack cards), and this was clearly done to pander to Adam's fans again as his first unit saw a spike in interest in the game. The math was done and showed how artifically scarce Legendaries were made.
  
• The undeovertuning was still in play. Colossus is seen as one of the worst cards in the entire game because of its gimmick. I have literally never seen anyone play it. Flynt became overtuned and now he's a staple thanks to his trumpet's AOE attack being able to hurt turrets and shred most units. Launcher Nora was an especially overtuned unit thanks to her high-damage constant AOE barrage and long range meaning she could annhilate most anything if given enough cover. Even after patches she's still dangerous. September saw the White Fang Dropship Formation added, which was widely seen as a terrible unit and done as an emergency addition because the planned unit for September in the Grimm Seer had to be cut last minute for technical reasons.
  
• The game has barely had significant content added since launch, with the primary gameplay still just being PVP. Barring Battle of Beacon (a mode where you can play as Ruby and Weiss and fend off Grimm which most players just use to grind chests, and no, they still haven't added Blake or Yang) and Plaza (a lobby where you can dress up as a character and run around Beacon), the game has added no new features and quality of life content players have requested since launch (rerolling in the shop, Superior Crates having guaranteed Legendary spawn rates) have been released at a snail's pace (you still can't reroll Legendaries if you're looking for a specific unit). Academies where players can unite to trade units and chat still lacks features that have been requested for years such as the ability to delete messages. And Plaza immediately went to hell because players were doing erotic role play in the chats and after people came forward with proof that minors were being sexually harassed in the Plaza or being coerced into side-channels, the dev response was to... just turn off the chat entirely instead of banning the accounts or implementing moderation. This also removed the chatlog which deleted a lot of the evidence of said harassment.
  

As OctobeNovember comes in, the players are getting more and more furious. The weekly feedback includes a near constant demand for an acknowledgement from the developers given how often it feels like the feedback is being ignored. The social media team get caught several times hyping up how the coming patch would address player concerns, only for said patch to lack those units. The meta has been locked down to the Xiong Family, Flynt, Launcher Nora, Spider-Mines and the hell-cat herself in Neon. Everyone runs at least one of these, people run meta decks not because they want to, but because it's the only way to have a chance of victory.
And then in December, things implode. The patch for the month was set to launch on December 10th with the monthly event missions. But when the clock rolls around, the event missions (which usually take about two weeks to do if you're doing as many as you can a day)... has a six day timer. And the update doesn't come out. The art team doesn't release new unit art. The shop has no special timed bundles. There's no patch notes. And then the Twitter team who've been hard carrying the game through... actually talking to the players and acknowledging the grievances they have... admitted that they don't know what's going on either. The best guess is that the devs have come down with Covid, but no statements to confirm or deny this leave it as guesswork. The timer eventually got reset and people could do the event, but then on Christmas itself, another issue.
Ruby has appeared in the plaza on Halloween (her canonical birthday) and Christmas, and if you go talk to her you get free stuff. But on Christmas people, people discovered that Ruby was talking as if you'd already talked to her. Because they hadn't updated Ruby yet for 2020. She still thought it was 2019 so if you'd talked to her then for goodies, she had none now. They patched it eventually but a lot of people didn't see this fix before the timer ran out to get the free stuff.
Some have resorted to memes to cope with the fact that the game just seems to have died out of the blue. Others have been trying to desperately rally the players and find a way to save it. Some resorted to friendly mockery of the whales who'd spent thousands on a game that seems to be dying (seriously though gacha games need to curb this shit but they won't because whales are godsends for their bank balances).
If the game doesn't get an update in January then two months without new content will mark the end, and the already significant playercount drops will only increase. And it's hard to say if any one thing could have turned Amity Arena's fate around beyond just "Have a better balancing team who can respond better to feedback." Neon began the time of death, but by the time December rolled around the meta was in a horrifically toxic place where if you wanted to make any progession, you had to get down and dirty with the pigs. The team just constantly failed to balance problem units outside of their emergency hotfixes of Jinn, and more often then not they went after units and buffed or nerfed them at random going off playcounts to determine what needed fixing instead of the actual written feedback they were getting. It's clear from the references to the show and some of the attempts to reach out to the community that at least one person in the team genuinely wanted to make the good appealing to RWBY fans, but somewhere during the game's lifespan, they lost their way. Less focus needed to be put on how to milk the players, and instead focusing on making a game sustainable and enjoyable enough to warrant the cosmetics and emotes. The game's failure ultimately isn't on the playerbase. It's on the people who were actually making the game who chose to slack off because they thought it acceptable to do so.
Thanks for reading.
EDIT: HOT OFF THE PRESSES, I JUMPED THE GUN
Had I waited one more day, my story would have had a far more sudden ending, as the game just announced its shutdown for January.
RIP.

The Expanse returned with Season 5 on December 16th! This sticky contains the latest information and links to our discussion threads, and keep being updated as the season progresses. Please read to the bottom, especially the spoiler and flair rules, before making any Season 5 posts.
Episode-By-Episode Discussion Information
We are looking forward to having live episode discussion threads again! Each episode will have 2 official threads: One that allows all show spoilers up to the current but no book spoilers whatsoever, for those who only watch the show, and one that allows all show spoilers up to the current episode, and free discussion of book spoilers. We will open the threads for each episode when the episode is released on Amazon. Links to all the episode threads will activate here!
(On mobile? You may need to click the arrow to show the table here.)

Date and Time	Thread Without Book Spoilers	Thread With Book Spoilers
12/16/2020, 01:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 501: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 501: With Book Spoilers
12/16/2020, 02:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 502: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 502: With Book Spoilers
12/16/2020, 03:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 503: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 503: With Book Spoilers
12/23/2020, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 504: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 504: With Book Spoilers
12/30/2020, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 505: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 505: With Book Spoilers
01/06/2021, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 506: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 506: With Book Spoilers
01/13/2021, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 507: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 507: With Book Spoilers
01/20/2021, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 508: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 508: With Book Spoilers
01/27/2021, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 509: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 509: With Book Spoilers
02/03/2021, 00:00UTC	Official Discussion Thread 510: No Book Spoilers	Official Discussion Thread 510: With Book Spoilers
		Season 5 Books-To-Show Discussion (Spoilers Through Nemesis Games)

Episode Release Time Information
Amazon released the first 3 episodes of Season 5 together on Wednesday, December 16th. After that, one episode is released each Wednesday through the season finale (Episode 10) on February 3rd. Episodes arrive at midnight UTC time, which is late Tuesday night / early Wednesday morning if you live in Europe and Tuesday evening if you live in the Americas.
As of this writing, we don't yet know what time precisely each episode will become available online. We've done significant research on past Amazon shows, and the data point to episodes most likely being released at midnight UTC, with individuals' Prime accounts possibly taking some time to receive the update. We are making plans as if that will be the case, and will update them as we find out more.
Note: All the event times we reference here will be given in UTC to avoid confusion. You can find every event we reference here on the community Google Calendar. Click the +Google Calendar button in the lower-right corner to subscribe to the calendar, and then view it in your own calendar to see the events in your own time zone. For example, if you are in the Americas, watch parties in the early hours on Wednesdays UTC will be on Tuesday evenings on your home clock.
Plans for Season 5 Premiere Week

• Saturday, 12/12, at 21:00UTC - The Great Rewatch finishes, with the last 3 episodes of Season 4! We've been having a great time, and it's not too late to join us to reacquaint yourself with how the last season ended.
• Tuesday, 12/15, at 22:00UTC - The Expanse Fan Community Celebration, my local (NYC) fan group's annual party which will be virtual this year. It will be a multi-room party on Zoom, with themed discussion areas, galleries of fan art and cosplay, and events like live music, a Belter name workshop, and guest speakers. You can join in from anywhere in the world, just don't forget to register so the meeting information is sent to you. After registering, visit our always-updating list of digital resources to bring the party to life at home! The virtual "doors" will open around 5PM EST for guest check-in, with official programming beginning at 6PM.
• Wednesday, 12/16, at 01:00UTC - Planned watch party and discussion threads for Episode 501. Again, this is just our best educated guess, assuming the episodes will arrive around midnight UTC and building in some time for them to propagate through Prime accounts. We won't be too surprised if the season actually drops later, and we'll adjust our plans if that happens!
• Wednesday, 12/16, at 02:00UTC - Planned watch party and discussion threads for Episode 502.
• Wednesday, 12/16, at 03:00UTC - Planned watch party and discussion threads for Episode 503.
• Saturday, 12/19, at 21:00, 22:00, and 23:00 - By popular demand, secondary watch parties for Episodes 501, 502, and 503, for those who would like to watch the episode alone first and then enjoy it with a group. We'll continue this throughout the season.

Watch Party Information
We've really been enjoying watching together using Amazon's Watch Parties feature. With the new season, we will have watch parties, with quick text chat available on Discord as well as longer discussion in our discussion threads. Our watch parties will follow the same schedule as our discussion threads. We will post the current watch party link in the discussion thread, on Discord, and on the big Watch Parties document. (This document is also easily found at bit [dot] ly [slash] ExpanseWatchParties to make it easy to remember, but Reddit often marks posts with link shortening as spam so I won't link it directly.) Because the Watch Parties chat interface is so very limited, we recommend hiding it and doing your discussion on Reddit or Discord.
Update: By popular demand on Discord, we're adding watch parties on Saturdays as well, so people can watch once alone and then once with a group if they'd like to.
Flair & Spoiler Rules & Reminders
In order to be kind to fellow fans who can't watch on our schedule or are waiting until February to binge, please be extra thoughtful with the flair and spoiler systems for Season 5.

• Spoilers from future episodes of Season 5 aren't allowed in individual episode discussion threads.
• If you make a post of your own discussing Season 5, choose one of the 3 Season 5 flair types to govern whether book spoilers are allowed, and edit the flair to include the episode number you're discussing. If you're creating a post on mobile, click "Add Flair", then "Edit" in the top-right corner, then click the Season 5 flair you want to customize, edit and save it, and hit "Post." If you forget, one of our bots will send a message reminding you and include a link to contact the moderation team if you're having trouble.Some example flairs:
  • Season 5, Episode 1 (Absolutely No Book Spoilers Allowed)
  • Season 5, Episode 5 (Book Spoilers Must Be Tagged)
  • Season 5, Episode 8 (Book Spoilers Discussed Freely)
• Remember that spoilers in post titles are never allowed, and titles can't be edited, so picking a spoiler-free title is important.
• Spoilery content that has only appeared in reviews, clips, or trailers, not in episodes that have been released by Amazon, must always be tagged using Reddit's system.
• Malicious or highly negligent spoilers in posts or comments will get you suspended or banned from the community.

See you soon for another season's adventure!

Hi everyone,
About 3 months ago, I posted this thread discussing what I did to get a sudden growth spurt of 33 to 170 subs in just 2 weeks. As I'm now at over 2100 subs, with an average 28 day gain of ~630 subs, I thought I'd follow-up on it to help spread new knowledge I've picked-up.
Here are some of the things I've done since that last post, ranked in no particular order:

1 - I Still Do Everything From My First Post

First thing's first, I didn't change a thing in my original post. So if you haven't read it, be sure to do so! I'm constantly looking into improvements on my channel, tweaking the tags I use, make sure to release on roughly the same schedule, engage with my audience in the comments, etc.
I do want to point out that I'm constantly tweaking my thumbnails to see what generates a better CTR. About once every 2 weeks I change something major about them and try it out for a week. If it works I stick with it, if not I revert. This last week I changed the font from Impact to another font I found off DaFont. That being literally the only adjustment I made and the videos I released are my fastest growing of all time, so it's safe to say I'm sticking with it.

2 - I Made A Discord

When I hit 350 subscribers, I put together a Discord server. Chatting with YouTube comments helps, but I wanted to foster a place for my most loyal subscribers. So, I made sure to advertise it in every video for the first month, and then just left it in the description. I've currently got 160 users in it, which represents 7.6% of my YouTube subscribers, and I make sure to constantly engage with people here. Not only that, but via the bot MEE6 I have it announce whenever I have a new video. This almost immediately pushes the video to over 100 views in the first 10 minutes, which is something the YouTube algorithm loves.

3 - I Made A Patreon

Yes, really. Even though I gained 4 patrons when I announced it and none since, the first tier gets all of these patrons added to the end card of my videos. That little bit of social proof goes a long ways towards making your small channel look just that much more credible. I also include tiers for early video releases and other perks in order to incentive a little bit more income from it for those that want the perks.

4 - Researched My Competition

And I truly mean researched. There are four total people in my niche at under 10k subs, and 3 above 100k (oddly haven't found anyone in between). I'm checking all of their accounts on socialblade every other day to see if they had a video take off, then seeing if I can spot what they did to maybe cause that (change in video structure, title, thumbnail, or just a hot button story). If I can, I try replicating what they did, but with placing my own spin on it.

5 - Reinvested My Early Adsense Checks

Chances are your first few adsense checks aren't going to be a ton of money. And unless YouTube is your only job, they aren't going to impact your monthly take home. So why not reinvest them into your channel?
I run a voice over channel and spent my first two checks on converting my closet into a voice over booth and getting a decent XLR mic + recorder. This easily improved my audio quality by 10x as I went from having audible echo's in every video, to incredibly crisp audio. I can't go back and watch my older videos anymore because it's so painfully obvious, lol. I also subscribed to Storyblocks for a wealth of royalty free music and sound effects to use in my videos.
I'm now using December's check to hire an artist to redesign my channel header, and hire another artist to create some animated backgrounds for my videos so I can avoid stock videos.
The best part? Because I reinvested 100% of my YouTube royalties in 2020, I can effectively write it all off as a business expense and pay no taxes, so it's basically free money if you exclude the time I spent making the videos. Though consult with an accountant before doing this yourself as I'm not liable if you mess-up.

6 - I'm Always Looking To Make My Videos Better

This is a tip I read a few months ago that has stuck with me: make sure every video you release does something a little better than the last one.
Yes this is basically the same point as point 6 from my original post (even being point 6 of this post too, lol), but if there's anything you take away from this post it should be this point. You see, viewers will subconsciously (or consciously if it's glaring enough) judge your videos quality. So by improving a little bit with every video, you'll eventually reach a point whereby you pass the subconscious quality check and people stick around. Like Thanos, it's a literal inevitability.
And for those that say there's literally nothing to improve, trust me, you're wrong. No film director or producer thinks they've got nothing else to learn. In my opinion, Schindler's List is a perfect film, but you still see Steven Spielberg experimenting.
And for those that say they release too many videos and that this is too hard to do, trust me, you still can. I release 3 videos a week and every video has a little improvement here or there.

7 - Community Post Once A Week When Unlocked (New - Added ~12 Hours After Post Created)

Once you unlock community posts at 1,000 subs, try and post something at least once a week. You never know when one of these will blow up, plus it keeps eyes on your channel.
Alright, that's my TED Talk. Got questions? Throw them into the comments and I'll gladly answer as many as I can!

I think this list speaks for itself. Thank you for this year Nano community and see you in 2021 for even more fun! We are only getting started 🚀
​

• Introducing Nano P2PoW - Decentralized proof of work
• Stress testing of the main network with a new record of 235 CPS
• Nano Game made with Unreal Engine
• Announcing NanoDevList - Financial support for devs working on the Nano protocol and projects
• Anonymity research update
• The Nano Xmas Tree - it's back!
• NANO is now available for free in nearly every country in the world via WeNano App
• Nano added to CoinEmbed - A new payment processor service
• Gonano, a command-line tool written in Go for creating and managing Nano wallets
• WeNano SpotChat Update: 17 Nov, 2020
• Earn Nano from playing Just Cause 2 Multiplayer
• NanoGift for YouTube has been approved for Chrome, Brave, etc.
• Introducing Nanomart!
• Unreal Nano: A 3D transaction visualizer with VR and multiplayer support built with Unreal Engine
• [Released] Unreal Engine Nano Plugin v1
• An exchange has been released to trade Reddit Moons/Nano
• Introducing NanoGift for YouTube
• Nano based patent granted to RoboCash / FynCom!
• Disaster Nano Node - my backup survival principal representative for this uncertain world
• Bitcoin vs Nano - Solving the Double Spend Problem
• WeNano Community Update: 01 Oct, 2020
• September Nano Community Project Award: Srayman
• The Nano Foundation announces Deepa Mardolkar as Chair of the Advisory Board
• Introducing Nano Arcade — fusing Nano with Space Invaders
• Update from the Charity Project in Sierra Leone
• Athena V21.2 Release Now Available
• A proof of concept implementation of atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Nano has been released
• RoboCash app now pays you for every blocked call
• 2000+ Games and DLCs, from Steam, Playstation, Xbox, and all main platforms, now available at PlayNANO
• Nano demolished its previous beta stress test record today. 1465+ CPS
• DegenTrader.com allows you to get Nano currency with fiat in just a few clicks
• Introducing Nendly, the Notion-Friendly Forum
• August Nano Community Project Award: SonderDev
• Introducing MoonPay to WeNano
• Announcing WeNano Business for iOS and Android
• New onion faucet
• BrainBlocks Announces Sunset
• Nalli, the SMS supported wallet is now on the App Store
• New Nano record last night! 161 peak CPS on the mainnet
• Nano as the backbone of Financial Communications
• Nanowallet.io says bye
• Experimental ledger pruning - V22
• PlayNANO now allows users to top-up their mobile phones
• NanoKe - Play on NANO Blockchain
• Nano is now available on the Guarda Wallet Mobile App
• Article: The security of using Nano
• Optimizations bring back to 0.3 seconds per PoW
• The Nano Foundation has joined FITSPA Uganda to help amplify Nano as the go-to digital money solution for the people of Uganda
• July Nano Community Project Award: Nault
• Nault wallet redesign
• Development update: Increased work difficulty upgrade status
• RoboCash app in Google Play - Try the Nano-powered phone spam blocker today!
• Say hello to the new ultra-secure remote/offline signing feature in Nault!
• Introducing PhraseFile: A file-based 2FA method for Nano seeds
• NANO Founder Colin Lemahieu LIVE with Barely Sociable
• V21.1 Athena release now available
• NanoFusion - Project Update and Next Steps
• Announcing the winners of the $75,000 Nano Build-Off
• June Nano Community Project Award: Nano Tip Bot
• The re-birth of NanoVault: Nault
• Nano now available on GuardaWallet
• Interview with Colin LeMahieu - Hosted by Keyword: Crypto
• RoboCash Beta + NanoCenter Update
• Notes from Nano Foundation Dev AMA on Discord
• You can now buy NANO instantly or recurring using Buy Crypto on Binance.US
• Nano Repeat - Subscription Bot for Discord
• New version of CSGO - Nano tournament released
• NanoTicker upgraded for v21 with new features and improved data accuracy
• V21 Athena is live on the Nano network!
• Competition to come up with the best marketing ideas to increase Nano adoption
• Community-made marketing video: 10 reasons to use NANO instead of the Dollar
• The Nano Faucet Distribution: Visualized and Analyzed
• V21 Athena RC1 Released
• Nalli, the new mobile wallet with SMS support is now available for iOS in TestFlight
• NanoAuth - Authentication service (Build-off submission)
• NanoWire - Sell/Buy unused bandwidth (Build-off submission)
• Nano Profile - IPFS hosted profile picture network for Nano (Build-off submission)
• NANO Connect Messenger - Message app with Nano transactions (Build-off submission)
• Nanoom - Service for pulling Nano payments (Build-off submission)
• Bloesem - App with nano rewards to stay focused (Build-off submission)
• Nanowall.link - Content monetizer (Build-off submission)
• Nalli - Mobile wallet with sms support (Build-off submission)
• Upstart - Digital content hosting and sale platform (Build-off submission)
• Natricon Update - Natricons are changeable now
• Introducing TIX Wallet - Simple web wallet
• Nano on Tap - Docker backend (Build-off submission)
• Natricon - Icon identifier for accounts (Build-off submission)
• Nano-it-all Live Trivia Competition (Build-off submission)
• NanoSpider - Block explorer (Build-off submission)
• NANO Espresso NFC - Coffee machine acceping NANO payments (Build-off submission)
• FlappyNano - Flappy Bird against friends (Build-off submission)
• Linuxserver.io Nano Stack (Build-off submission)
• Sendr.space - Social media platform using Nano (Build-off submission)
• InstantCash - Point of sale for Android (Build-off submission)
• May NCPA Community Award Winner: Natrium
• NanoBlog - Decentralized blogging using IPFS (Build-off submission)
• NanoRequest - Payment link generator (Build-off submission)
• CoinChores - Teach your kids about Nano (Build-off submission)
• Polyrun - Workout rewards (Build-off submission)
• KojoSlayer - Battle RPG (Build-off submission)
• Rock Paper Scissors Online (Build-off submission)
• Nanotify - API and web callback platform (Build-off submission)
• Nano Connect - Free distributed RPC proxy (Build-off submission)
• Buy NANO with USD in Trust Wallet
• PlayNANO - Games (Build-off submission)
• Vola Wallet - iOS (Build-off submission)
• NanoRPCProxy - Now with a secure websocket layer, including free public subscriptions for block confirmations
• BlockHunters - Augmented Reality Game (Build-off submission)
• Nano Repeat - Subscription Management for Vendors (Build-off submission)
• Alexa Nano Bot is now live on the Alexa skill store (Build-off submission)
• 'How to use crypto' article (featuring Nano, because it's so easy)
• Nano now accepted at TravelbyBit after merging with Travala
• Nanolytics - Network stats (Build-off submission)
• NanoGift - Browser extension for site donations (Build-off submission)
• nPass - Web content payments (Build-off submission)
• FakeFork - Nano dashboard for tabletop gamers (Build-off submission)
• Play with Nano - (Nano Build-off submission)
• TheNanoBot (Build-off submission)
• Nano RPC Proxy - A fully customizable and secure backend for node calls (Nano Build-Off Project)
• NanoFusion (Nano Build-Off Project)
• NanoPaint (Nano Build-Off Project)
• Natrium v2.2 Released on iOS and Android
• Nanoce.net - Nano powered gaming tournaments
• Millions of Brave browser users can now seamlessly purchase, deposit, and convert NANO
• Happy Birthday Nano! Nano turns six today
• New Nano Center Bounty: Unity3D Plugin
• RoboCash alpha APK - stop spam calls with Nano
• myNanoEmbedded - Lightweight C library for IoT
• April NCPA Community Award Winner: Json
• Nano ecosystem april 2020
• Alexa Nano bot
• WeNano light for Android is out
• NanoPvP is Back better than ever!
• Nano Charts V1.13 - More Accurate Pie Chart Data, Binance True Holdings and Help Boxes
• Nodes CLI obersever: new CLI tool in php4nano repository
• Nano Foundation - CryptoFriendly AMA Recap
• Nano available on the new Binance Widget
• Great beta results for v21
• A new faucet has launched - TetraLoom
• Privacy research project update - Funded
• Nano RUM dispenser
• Announcing the Nano Build-Off - A $75,000 competition to incentivize nano developers
• March NCPA Community Award Winner: MyNano.ninja
• Nanocurrency on Reddit reaches 50,000 members
• Nano Foundation AmA with Atomic Wallet - Summary
• Counter Strike: Go Nano
• Announcing Earn-Nano.com - Collection of places to earn Nano
• Nanoquake JS Season 2
• LuckyNano 2.0 Released
• DeMixor, music vocal remover, integrates Nano
• Announcing EarnAcademy.cc — Earn money by learning and answering questions
• Bidali enables gift cards and phone top-ups with Nano
• Announcing the Nano Community Project Award
• Raesonic browser-based racing game with Nano microtransactions
• Announcing WeNano for iOS
• Binance rolls out credit card purchases of Nano, one of 12 coins supported
• Nano is now in the list of cryptocurrencies on Wikipedia
• Nix/NixOS integration
• NanoGhana Meetup
• Nano work cache available (golang)
• A Simple Nano Block Lattice Explorer on Tor
• Nano is now available on Simplex platform!
• Binance adds BUSD trading pair for Nano!
• Nano on Wikipedia!
• V21 Athena - Feature Review
• Release: New Nano wallet sweep tool
• NANORoll - Multiplayer Roulette Casino Game
• A New site that lists NANO merchants (among other crypto) - Weacceptcryptocurrency.com
• You can now update your representative in Exodus Wallet
• NOWPayments is supporting Nano now!
• Nanowallets.guide - A brand new feature guide to all Nano wallets
• Magnum wallet is now open beta on iOS
• RoboCash NanoCenter project, funding complete!
• Visualizing Nano Beta Network at 750 CPS - 20k tx in 28sec
• Results of recent Nano Display Ads Marketing project
• The Nano Center for Community Funding: NanoGhana Meet-up - Funded!
• NanoArcade - New Game Released
• Nano-PvP - Player vs Player Coinflip Matches
• NanoArcade Released
• New Swap Service: Godex Lists Nano!
• Guide: How to securely transact using an offline device + Ledger recovery methods
• An Introduction to the Manta Protocol presented by Appia
• Nano Batcoif Ad
• Development Update: Research for a new PoW algorithm
• Canoe End of Road
• The New Nano Africa Website Released
• Proposal for Nano Node Network Optimizations
• Presenting KeyTools - A brand new set of secure high-performance Nano web tools

​
u/iB0mmel

Important notice: To those who know us, please don’t share our IGNs in public. And to DECA, Please don’t announce our IGNs if we somehow win. If it is a requirement to do so, then we’d rather not win.
This is the tale of the two brave warriors (or knights.. or archers maybe?) Taco and Tiger. The two started playing realm of the mad god roughly 8 years ago. They didn’t know anything about each other by then of course.
Fast forward to 5 years ago, Taco joined Tiger’s guild, out of pure and utter chance. He didn’t even know anything about Tiger, nor did Tiger know anything about him. They didn’t interact at all at first. With time though, the two started to communicate (at last!?).. things started simple: phrases such as “tp abyss” were a staple in their vocabulary.
Okay maybe we need to pick up the pace a bit.. this is going too slow. One day, Tiger wanted to test a music bot for her guild’s Discord server, so she asked Taco, who was free at the time, if he wanted to help. Taco received the honorary role of “helpful peasant” that day!
Anyway, also that day, the two discovered they had a song they liked in common, this sparked a real conversation this time. Before long, they realized they had some more things in common. Most importantly: they were both cat addicts. LITERALLY. Taco and Tiger have never met anyone before who loved cats as much as they do.
That interaction led the two to being more friendly with each other. Eventually they had a Discord server for the two of them only, where they would listen to music and share small things about their life, share screenshots of loot, or more accurately, complain about the lack of it.. especially ogmurs (taco rage intensifies) They often did duo shatters and tombs and played realm together pretty much all the time. They were truly best friends by now.
Tiger was too scared of talking by voice, so far she had always just typed. Taco was very patient with her and some days, he would sit and wait hours for her to gather her courage and say hi. Bit by bit, tiger was finally confident enough to talk. And that was another huge step for them. Several months after that, in 2018 the two confessed their feelings to each other, it was no true confession however, as the two already knew by then! The two were officially, lovers AND best friends.
They both made sure to support each other the best they could. With Taco’s help, Tiger was no longer afraid of talking, she has never been more confident in her entire life. And with Tiger’s help, Taco who was struggling with his studies, managed to finally pull through and graduate. He also finally got an ogmur too, so that’s that! (it was from an ice cave event though so it doesn’t really count).
It was as if life magically got better for them both. They have never been happier :)
At the very start of 2020, when they finally had the opportunity to meet in real life, it only solidified their feelings for each other, and they spent the best 2 weeks of their lives together.. Since then, they’ve had more visits, even though it was hard due to the current world situation. To this day, they've been together for roughly 4 years. The plan now is for them to move in together in the coming years, and then live happily ever after. With many cats of course. And epic PC room.

Making a career out of music is a dream for most music producers. It was for me for a very long time. But it seems so out of reach to most.
And not to mention that there is so much you ‘should’ be doing, and as a result, you’re not sure what to focus on or disregard.
To help, here are some of my favorite tips I’ve come up with over the years. Some of these are my own spin on common advice, but many might be controversial or new to you.
A full disclaimer - while I have had mild success at best as an actual produceartist, I have managed to make my living from music (this is something I'll cover later on).
I don’t pretend to be a wildly successful global phenomenon, but someone who used the principles below to my advantage.
So, on that note, let’s get into them.
1: Stop looking at music production and marketing as separate things. If you’re releasing, your music is the product.
2: Marketing and promotion are only ‘evil’ if you make them out to be. They don’t have to be spammy – make them fun activities that you can enjoy.
3: Despite your favorite marketing guru’s advice, you don’t have to do it all.
Splitting your attention between Spotify, Soundcloud, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok will result in burnout and poor results. Choose the bare minimum that aligns with your goals.
And on that…
4: Set goals, and do what is necessary to achieve them. Besides worthwhile opportunities, ignore anything else – they are likely distractions.
But on the flip side…
5: Sometimes deviations are necessary. Your goals, sound, and vision will change over time, and that’s okay. Especially if you’ve been producing for many years.
6: Loosely define your sound or genre (yes, even if you hate genres), and start by marketing to that niche. No, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to publish that you’re a ‘melodic trap’ producer in your Spotify bio.
One mistake I made early on was trying to fit into too many niches, which resulted in my music not getting solid fans.
7: Invest money. For two producers with the same quality of music, the one who runs ads, pays for (legitimate) promotion and generally spends money on their project, will always get further.
8: Decide if you want money or exposure. There is always a trade-off (Spotify’s new model is an example of this). Neither is bad necessarily, but don’t be fooled into mere exposure if you want to make something resembling a salary.
9: You don’t have to rely on monetizing your music, but you can monetize around your music. Instead of music sales and shows, think merch, private lessons, Patreon, become a music journalist, or get creative. Once again, pick one and roll with it.
(I monetize around my music by making a living off working at EDMProd.)
10: Diversify your income streams. If you’re a traditional artist, you’ll likely have two: music sales and shows. Try and add to this where possible using the above ideas or others.
11: Please, please don’t quit your day job (yet). The rhetoric out there that you have to quit and go ‘all in’ is 1. a lie and 2. not reasonable for most people. It causes unnecessary stress and ruins creativity.
12: Sacrifices do have to be made if you want to make this a career, but make the right ones.
Yes, stop watching TV and Netflix, but don’t neglect friends, family, or health. It’s really, really not hard to see that even those famous artists who did neglect family and friends to reach a certain level of status, are often the saddest people out there. It doesn’t have to be like this.
13: The ‘hustle’ mentality is destructive. And it destroys musicians, producers, and many music industry workers. Working hard is a good thing, but it only makes sense if you actually focus on the right things.
There are so much promotional and marketing and career avenues you could go down, but it should always come back to two core activities: making music and releasing music.
14: Early on, try both self-releasing and label-releasing. I recommend some balance of both.
Self-releasing is more flexible and often more financially viable relative to the number of streams. Label-releasing often has further reach (on the right labels) and ends up being a greater source of overall income, but lower per-stream income.
These days I do about 80% label releases, 20% self-releases.
15: Get feedback from listeners and fans. Producers can point out technical problems, but fans highlight the level of overall enjoyment embedded in your music.
16: Whether you like it or not, quantity is important in the music industry these days. This should never come at the sacrifice of quality, but release often to keep top of mind.
Personally, this is why I release on a number of labels instead of all self-releases – I’m not relying on just my own abilities.
17: Even in this decade (COVID-aside), shows are still the primary income generators for artists. Decide if you’re comfortable with this, and if not, make alternative arrangements.
18: Don’t feel like your goal has to be to quit your job. If it is – great. If not, it’s totally fine to make a healthy supplementary income from music, without quitting your job. What I would recommend is finding a job that supports your music, both with time flexibility and necessary income.
19: Decide on your show format. It’s hot in 2020 and 2021 to want to pursue the idea of a ‘live show’ instead of just a DJ set, but you can still kill it just as a DJ (just stop being boring). See what works for you.
20: It helps to have a decent visual representation of your brand. Logos are fine, but get some basic press photos (your girlfriend/boyfriend with an iPhone is fine). People connect with faces more than they do logos (especially for an artist brand).
21: A note on publicity and promos: make sure it’s being sent to the right people before release, whether you’re doing it yourself or using a third-party service. Nothing screams wasted money more than sending your new EP to 300 trap producers when you’re a synthwave DJ.
22: Achieving virality is cool but can easily become a shiny object. Make sure it aligns with your goals. If you do want to pursue it, it can be simply engineered.
23: You know all that creative energy that you put into your music? Try using some of that in your marketing and promotion.
Plant anonymous QR codes over your city (not advocating vandalism lol), make a viral video about getting your tune heard by your favourite artist, do stupid stuff while dancing to your music (that’s what TikTok is, right?). You get the point.
24: There’s a difference between selling-out and making your music more consumable. If you’re a dubstep producer, it might mean doing a more melodic or vocal-driven track every now and then. It doesn’t mean starting to write pop music.
25: Define your audience, and accept its size. Your ambient album won’t have commercial success, but you may get superfans who will buy and purchase anything you put out. Pop-oriented music will always have the largest potential audience size, of course.
26: On social media (or any online platform) it’s all about the native content. Always assume people don’t want to leave. This is why nobody clicks links.
So if you want to promote your new single on Instagram, by all means, put a link in your bio, but make sure your music is present on the platform (even a basic screen recording video of Spotify works great here).
27: Short-term tactics are often not worth it – always think long term. Tactics like virality can work, but how many artists have we forgotten about that were memes? Too many.
28: Facebook Pages suck for everything except running ads (no, this doesn’t include boosting your posts). Your personal profile is a much better bet for connecting and sharing stuff with people. Create a separate profile if you don’t want to clog up your main one.
29: Instagram is where it’s at for artists in 2020 and 2021. It’s simple, visual, and used by a lot of music fans. Once again, you don’t have to focus on everything but make Instagram a high priority if you’re using social media.
30: A note on rebranding – I changed genres/styles a few times over my 11 years of music production experience. Sometimes I started new projects, sometimes I didn’t. If you want a fresh start from ground 0, make a new project. If you want to leverage your existing stats, rebrand yourself under the same name.
31: If you want to, incorporate related or interesting skills into your branding. If you’re a graphic designer, make sick branding and artwork. If you’re a DJ, make mixes and promote your favourite music. If you play instruments, do acoustic covers of your own music. And for the hundredth time – not all of them. Just pick one for now.
32: Work smarter, not harder. Send your music to the right people, not the most. Write short and concise emails. Use checklists for marketing and promotion to reduce mental load.
33: Ironically, sometimes opportunities that utilize your music production skills can be more of a burden than having an unrelated day job that is flexible.
Working 50 hours a week producing radio jingles might seem fun because you get to make music all the time, but in reality, you actually have no time to make what you want on the side.
Perhaps something like a part-time day job at the post office makes sense.
34: Getting a manager only make sense for two reasons – you either don’t know what you’re doing, or you don’t have the time to do everything. In my opinion, it’s better to be in the latter situation, and be your own manager at first.
It’s a lot of work, but prospective managers like to see an artist who can handle themselves well before hitting artists up. By the time you’re ready for management, it will be a mutually beneficial partnership, rather than a babying one where your manager has to sort all your shit out.
35: A common question around marketing and promotion is this: should I start promoting and marketing as soon as I start releasing? I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, and my answer is this.
Since your music is probably the most important product you’ll put out as an artist, focusing on it is the best marketing decision you’ll make for the long term. I would ignore sending your music to anyone until your music is good enough to be marketed.
36: If you’re just starting out, perhaps use a throwaway project. Start uploading music to Soundcloud and self-releasing in order to get comfortable. Once you’ve got good music and marketing skills, turn to your ‘main’ music project and start from scratch there.
37: As much as I detest TikTok, if you think it could be useful for you career, use it. If not, ignore it. Personally, I avoid it for ethical reasons.
38: Black hat marketing is a branch of ethically questionable marketing tactics (Instagram bots, paying for plays, mass spamming your links etc.) In my opinion, avoid these at all costs.
Not because they don’t work (they do, sometimes very well) but the price paid is often not worth it. These marketing tactics often trade time for reputation or something far more costly – your conscience.
39: The music industry is extremely small. If you’re an asshole, everyone will know and never forget.
40: Most people are self-focussed on social media. Often it’s those who shine a light on others who stand out the most. Make sure it’s valuable though, and not just ass-kissing.
41: You can do a lot of things without other people these days. Use Canva for basic graphic design. Use Distrokid to self-release your music. Use Google Docs/Sheets (or my favorite, Notion) to stay organized. That being said, feel free to outsource specific activities where time and expertise are short.
42: Please, please stop making music videos. Unless you want to do one to say you made one, they are often not that great of a marketing tool, and only work if you’re already big.
43: The only thing you can do to guarantee failure is to quit completely. You might have major pivots in direction, or you might take a long time to get any sort of results. In the long-term, it doesn’t matter.
44: Stop doing the same things and expecting different results. If posting your track in a bunch of Discord servers didn’t work last time, ask why. Was it the timing? Was it the right servers? Is Discord worth posting it at all? Don’t just do the same thing again.
45: Genuine friendships and relationships will always help a lot more than email blasting people you either met once or never met. This is why networking is an invaluable skill for your music career.
46: Don’t reach out to every conceivable artist, playlist, label, or promotional contact before you’re known in your scene – let some of them discover you organically.
When people start discovering you, consider it a sign that you’re on the right path. Word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing.
47: If you’ve heard bad things about someone from multiple, unrelated people, it’s best to avoid them. By their fruits, they shall be known.
48: Meet people in person where possible. Yes, it’s not feasible for everyone to do this. But one face-to-face meeting is worth at least 1000 emails or Facebook messages.
Personally, so much of my growth as an artist has come through meeting people in person.
49: If you want your music career to be successful, start working with vocalists early on so you can feature them in tracks. I’m still getting better at this, but these relationships will help you years down the track.
50: Be really, really bloody good at making music. Everything on this list won’t work if this isn’t the case. And when you think it’s good, it’s probably not.
Music quality is like a compressor with a high ratio, low threshold, and soft knee.
It has to pass a certain (very high) threshold to be accepted by potential fans (although the exact threshold isn’t ‘exact’ – a soft knee), but the higher it is above that threshold, the differences in pushing it don’t make a massive difference (otherwise Noisia would be the biggest music act in history).
Of course, for different genres, this will look different. But each one will have a similar barrier to entry.
Anyway, hope this helps some of you pursuing an artist career :)

Now, I want to say that I am a day one supporter of StoryFire. I have been with it for 4 1/2 years, but I had to drop out after the marketing push because StoryFire's quality of life has severely declined. I have been very critical of StoryFire, and sometimes harshly critical, but that's because I have always supported it and wanted to see it better.

• What I will miss about StoryFire.

I will actually miss StoryFire. Even though the last year (2020) has made it turn very sour around the time of the marketing push with oversaturated and uninteresting content, it turned into a dumping ground of rejects and washed up YouTubers. I hate to say it, but it's true. More than half of the new users didn't even stick with the platform but to no fault of their own. (I will explain in a moment.) StoryFire before the marketing push was, in my opinion, really good. It wasn't fantastic, it was a borderline 6/10, but it most certainly had the ability to improve and become a better platform.
The story portion of the platform is arguably what I might miss the most. The stories in StoryFire, the feature alone, was what made StoryFire unique and stand out from the rest of the platforms. You have other sites like Parler and Bitchute and all those AltTech sites that don't have a feature like that. Not even YouTube, Vimeo, or Daily Motion had stories on them. In fact, StoryFire once had a non-public feature where you can read a story and then watch a video after it, which is what My Virtual Escape did. I personally BEGGED Jesse for this feature, but it never came to light. The stories on StoryFire were actually decent, and the community around the story feature was humble. Although, I think it was very ironic that the web feature didn't have a dedicated section to actually read them, or browse stories. Why? Because StoryFire was trying to focus on what it wasn't; YouTube. (More on this later.)
Another thing I will miss about StoryFire is the hybrid social feed. It was a mixture of Twitter and Instagram. I noticed recently that they added a 500 character limit, which is actually fantastic. I actually remember bringing this up to Jesse on his Twitch stream (back when he was playing Call of Duty: Warzone) and he said it was actually a brilliant idea, saying "I was onto something." The 500 character limit is double Twitter's character limit, which I personally is a greater advantage. StoryFire's social feed is a better Twitter feed. Actually, no, I take that back. StoryFire's social feed is not only better than Twitter's social feed, but it's arguably much better than Twitter. It's Twitter without the bullshit. (But I must interject that the profile system on StoryFire was complete crap, and I have made a video regarding this subject with a full-fledged concept.) If the profiles on StoryFire were like Twitter or Facebook, with the big banner and organized profile picture and post placements, then I would have had more reason to use StoryFire (customization is everything) and it would have been a lot more attractive.
Freedom of speech is a much-valued right that people want to preserve online. What I really liked about StoryFire is that individuals were really able to say what they wanted. However, this was troublesome for moderators, as I have heard first hand that they did not have any tools and had to talk to Brian in order to ban someone. (More on that later.) Regardless, StoryFire, in my opinion, was really a place where you could say mostly anything that would be "socially unacceptable" on Twitter or Facebook. Like I said earlier, StoryFire was mostly Twitter but without the bullshit drama and political partisanship. (I will touch on that later.) And to mention the 500 character limit, that was also really nice. Regardless, StoryFire was able to get away with "freedom of speech" and "anti-censorship" because it did not cater to the far right or far left. It was for common folk to get on and talk civilly. And even though there was a lot of political speech on there, and I often posted about gun rights and advocacy (because I believe in minimal firearm regulations,) there was no subjection for any ban and all parties were civil because no one threatened anyone or broke the rules. On Twitter or Facebook, that would indicate you as a social bot or get you locked out of your account. So I think that StoryFire really succeeded in the freedom of speech part. And honestly, I do think that StoryFire does deserve praise for that. Jesse always wanted people to have a platform, and he really wanted everything (within reason) to be said.

• What I will not miss about StoryFire, and what can be done better next time.

What I will not miss about StoryFire... A lot of things.
What I will not miss about StoryFire is the videos that were spammed. What really made me leave StoryFire is when videos were spammed. I will point fingers and mean nothing personally. When I saw BowBlax post, not only did he dominate my sub box, but he dominated a lot of other home page elements. There was little to no competition, other than the DramaAlert videos that Daniel Keem would make. I mean no disrespect to anyone I name by hand, but for all of the people who were brought onto the marketing push, I would say that one or two-fifths of the select individuals actually uploaded consistently. Props to them, but there was no competition or original content, so I just could not stay. The only thing that made me stay for my final few months was the story portion and the social feed because the community on there (that were not involved in big organized groups i.e. BlazeClan, Flame Gang, etc) were pretty good. Something I will mention later, StoryFire should have separated amateur content from the professional or verified content. With all of them mixed together with absolutely zero prioritization, it really made the homepage look like a mess and generally uninteresting. Also, a nit-pick, Raka Raka hasn't uploaded in months, why is he on the banner? That should be space for an advertisement so StoryFire can get ad funding. Remember when YouTube used to have an advertisement on its home screen? If StoryFire was trying to go for that YouTube look, it would have taken a step forward and helped itself in the process.
Another thing would be the video applications. For this Reddit post exclusively, I will show you a video application that really impressed Brian himself. Yes, it was mostly done by us and with help from professionals, and Brian did tell me that he loved it himself. Do you want to know why that channel wasn't accepted onto StoryFire? Copyright. That's it. I'll let that slide, but that doesn't excuse the fact that the application system was an atrocious turn-off to many. There needed to be other ways, and there are, for video uploading to be far more accessible. I have seen a lot of applications back in the day when this app was popping off. There were a lot of really bad videos that had no thought, acting, or anything done to them, let alone proper editing. However, I will talk about an alternative to applications later on. But this point is for the application system alone, and just how bad it was. It turned a lot of people away. And to add insult to injury, it used Google forums and not an in-house StoryFire application.
The overall layout. The homepage and design of the StoryFire website was unorganized at best. What I did not like is that StoryFire's homepage was focused a bit too heavily on videos. It did not focus on stories enough on the web, and finding stories on the web was really hard (and the stories themselves were buggy on the web,) and there just needs to be far more organization. This will be touched on later.
StoryFire, and the logo. StoryFire does not catch. It is not a really memorable name, and not a lot of people will take interest in it. StoryFire itself suggests that it focuses strictly on stories, and not videos. Fortunately, I have been brainstorming some ideas... StoryFire should have at least had a minimalistic or 3D-ish logo. But the logo we have does not fit with the times. It makes no sense for a business graphic. It's too big, it's really bulky, and it again does not catch. (Again, more on this later.)
What does Jesse do now?
I feel that Jesse should return to YouTube for some time, and take any offers he can get that might be useful for views and financial compensation. Jesse seriously needs to focus on the quality of his content, and he needs to focus on his financial situation. I am unsure of StoryFire's financial backend, but I guarantee you that Jesse has lost a TON of money in just keeping StoryFire up alone.
So with this being said, Jesse needs to regain the money that he has lost. He needs to regain his old audience, he needs to gain viewership again. We need some old 2016 and 2018 collab series back, as those racked in a TON of views, thus resulting in more money.
I really do think that Jesse should rebuild a new platform. It needs to be StoryFire, but better. StoryFire did a lot of things right that the next platform can do better. Jesse even said it himself, he has learned a lot within the last 4 years, and he even said that StoryFire itself was a learning experience. It most certainly was.
Personally, it's been a while since I've seen a decent video from Jesse. Jesse is burnt out, and he has been focusing a lot on StoryFire. I cannot wait, and am now quite interested, in seeing where Jesse goes after this. It is getting to a point where I actually want to see what Jesse does now. Despite me being a critic and supporter, I really want to see what happens next.

• Jesse's next platform. (Proposed name: RidgVid)

Let's talk about videos, features, and how it can learn and improve from StoryFire.
I think that Jesse should have a new platform up and running by 2023 at the earliest. I want to see a bigger and better StoryFire, that isn't StoryFire. I was thinking of some names that could be... Better suited to videos and social media sharing. A name I thought of... "RidgVid." Because since Jesse has been focusing on videos more than stories on StoryFire, I incorporated "vid" and "RiDGiD STUDiOS" together, since Jesse would be head of the scene. It would sound a bit more fluid and easier to remember.
Now, what should RidgVid do? Most of what StoryFire did, but it isn't that. It will be a primary video website for what StoryFire was intending to be. On Jesse's new site, the stories will be there as it was on StoryFire, maybe expanded upon a bit, but it will mostly function the same. The only difference is that it will not be clunky and difficult like StoryFire was. It will be a hybrid of 2010's YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.
The video feature of the new site, you have to pay a one time fee of $5 USD or so (per account!) for it. You also have to verify your phone number, and have a valid email address. You start off with a 10 minute cap, you can't go over. Now, because finances are a stress point, if you want to get 5 additional minutes, you can pay $1.99 for that, and continue doing so. Payment is one easy way to do it. However, after paying the one time fee, you can circumvent buying more time and get more time to upload for free by surpassing a certain number of likes per video (i.e. if one video gets 500 likes, you are entitled to 3 extra minutes of upload length. This happens one per video and is capped at 30 minutes long.) Now, you might think that's a dumb idea.
>>Why would anyone pay $5 to upload? Well, finances. It supports Jesse and the site. But, if you are trusted in the community and have proven to upload consistently good videos, then you wouldn't have to pay the the $2 extra. And plus, the reason to pay in the first place is to completely get rid of the horrid application system that StoryFire had. Regardless, everyone wanted to upload. Now this begs the question, "with all these videos being uploaded, surely the servers will be overloaded. How do we prevent spam and nonsense videos?" Easy. Let's say you're like, 12, and you just uploaded a virtically filmed video of yourself playing Fortnite and you upload it to RidgVid (tell me if you like the name btw,) and he's talking in a high pitched voice giving "commentary" about what you are trying to see, and you see that no one liked the video (or it got disliked.) Well over time, users can flag videos they deem to be "legitimately unconstructive," or spam, or copyright (i.e. filming yourself reading a book or filming a concert straight-up with no filming professionalism or anything else.) In order for a video to be deleted in the name of spam or unconstructive content, users can flag it and it will be reviewed by a team of human spam moderators, and in good faith, they will determine if a video should be or should not be deleted. "And what about video game content?" Take a look at the video I linked above, there is a clear difference between no-commentary gameplay and gameplay with legitimate editorial substance.
Will anything be different with the homepage? I can argue that the homepage was arguable one of the worth things about the website. Had StoryFire would have had a homepage like VKontakte's social feed, kinda like how on Twitter, it immediately brings you to the social feed instead of anything else. For example, then it would have been a bit better. VK has a sidebar (in chronological order) that can bring you to your profile, news feed, messages, friends (or in StoryFire's case, subscribers. Even though StoryFire should have two seperate lists for subscribers and friends, like way far back OG YouTube did,) communities, photos, music, video, and games. There was even sections for a marketplace, which StoryFire was testing out years back, and "VK Pay," which StoryFire's answer was Blaze.
And regarding Blaze, the new site should keep Blaze's fundematal meaning, just don't call it Blaze. Drop the entire campfire and fire aspect altogether. Call it RidgCoin for all I care, I think that's a good name. But Blaze, keep that idea and fundemental.
For the moderators, I have heard first-hand stories from StoryFire mods that they do not have the proper tools to moderate the site. Jesse's next website should offer a whole slew of regulations and tools for moderators. This includes the ability to delete comments, story/social posts, view private DM's, view username changes internally, have the ability to ban users (instead of asking Brian to do it,) have the ability to leave private notes on users that can be seen only by other mods, the ability to have a moderator group DM with Jesse and other admins in it for direct conversation.
And as for video moderators, as I have previously mentioned, those would be different than social feed and story moderators. Two seperate teams, all under the same umbrella.
Direct messaging was barebones on StoryFire!!! C'mon, Jesse! I saw your video on Twitter telling people on Wallstreet Bets to join StoryFire. You showed them the profiles, the DM's. That isn't enough. StoryFire should have had group DM's like Reddit/Discord does. It should also have voice and video calling. No other video sharing website has that, maybe a few does... But more ideas for your next site!
It's a wrap.
McJuggerNuggets did in fact say that he wanted to keep the idea of StoryFire in mind. He made a phrase in his recent video that really inciuated that... StoryFire was just a stepping stone. A learning experience. And quite frankly, StoryFire was a MASSIVE learning experience. In fact, I am quite impressed with it. Although Jesse marketed it quite terribly, I feel really bad for the half a million he spent on the semi-failure marketing push and the lack of creators staying... You mostly can't blame them. StoryFire wasn't ready for it. Neither is it ready for investors. But, StoryFire was in fact an experiment. Likewise, I do not think Jesse is done. In fact, I want to see him make another platform. Using this thread and all the ideas, build off of StoryFire. Do not leave the stories part out of it. Look at the VK side bar, and it should have been a side tab on the web for people to view stories. Create other in-house features, like a documents page. Jesse's next site could be like, the Swiss Army Knife of video platforms. It could have all kinds of tools and features. Like how Google has Google Docs, Slides, YouTube, contacts, Drive... Jesse could create an all-on-one off brand site that could in fact beat other sites like Daily Motion and Vimeo out of the water simply because it has more in-house recourses and utilities.
Regardless, I hope you liked this post. It was just mostly some ideas, and complaints I had. Jesse, I am actually proud of you and of StoryFire. I know I have been very harsh since the marketing push, but that's because I was irritated with the direction it was going. I always have supported the StoryFire. Why I decided to come back, it was mostly out of shock and concern. I never expected this to happen so suddenly. The money could have gone to better areas, yeah, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that you did what other's couldn't. StoryFire will forever be a great example of "I'll make my own website because I do not like how the mainstream media and giant tech runs things." When people tell others "if you don't like it, go make your own site," this is exactly what happens when you do that. Jesse did just that. He proved to everyone that 1.) it's very expensive, and 2.) it's very hard to even begin competing.
You didn't let anyone down, Jesse. No one is disappointed. You stood up to the big tech with your own product. You did what people said to do, "go create your own site if you don't like it." You offered real solutions to big problems YouTube had. You offered a platform for everyone that was suppressed and silenced. StoryFire was better than Parler, it was better than most AltTech sites. It was just an experiment. A broken, buggy, but very ambitious Cyberpunk 2077-esque equivelant website. Big dreams, hard to do.
It took me two days to make this post. (I've been working a lot.) Sorry if I did not address any points. Tell me what you think.

This FAQ was compiled from the AmA chat performed live on 1/21/21 in the $AUDIOphiles discord. Enjoy the read below as Roneil answers some frequently asked questions alongside a bunch of others you may have wondered about!
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Question: What is the plan to integrate social tokens? How will it be easy for artists, to integrate those?
Answer: Lots of different ways this could go - we are excited by what the direct artist/fan relationship unlocks around distributing things like this. What if an artist could distribute their social token to the top 1% of their fan base? What if only folks who held your social token got to unlock access to an exclusive portion of the artist's catalog? In this sense, we believe Audius will become the most effective channel for distributing social tokens to music creator fan bases, and incentivizing those fan bases directly through earning of an artist's token. Regarding ease of integration, the plans aren't concrete enough to say - our team and community have done our best to make the product as usable as possible so far, so we will do our damnedest to make sure any new features meet the same bar :)
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Question: Are there any plans to make simplified, user-friendly options for $AUDIO staking from within the Audius website / app?
Answer: Definitely. This is a very common concern. Artists earning AUDIO should not need to know how to use metamask, buy ETH, etc. to be able to participate in staking. Our team has a few ideas on how to fix this, but would love to hear what others think too!
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Question: What is the distribution method for dealing with multiple artist rights and shares in a collaborative sense?
Answer: Right now, a single account can own a track. However - that account could also be a smart contract! This is not implemented in the Audius client today, but anyone could build their own tooling for this if they’d like. Some distributors I imagine would want to create this type of tooling in future.
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Question: What’s the advantage of using blockchain over just a distributed system? Is there a scarcity model associated with $AUDIO?
Answer: Audius is, at its core, just a complicated distributed system. The blockchain piece is a piece of infrastructure within that which provides a single source of truth for important information such as: who are the nodes in the network? How do I know I should trust them? Who controls the rights to what content? Etc.
If there are better ways to solve these types of issues, there could certainly be a future where Audius no longer uses a blockchain :)
The AUDIO token, by contrast, has a specific set of functionalities within the system, primarily around incentive alignment. It has three primary pillars of functionality: securing the network, gating access to network resources and features, and governance. More on how the token works can be found in the Audius whitepaper: https://whitepaper.audius.co/AudiusWhitepaper.pdf
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Question: Will we have the option to stake between different node types (ie content v identity service), or can we simply stake our tokens and let Audius choose? Please describe the ROI infrastructure. Do stakers receive network fees? How much, and from which fees? Does staking mint new AUDIO?
Answer: Node operators can choose how many of each type of node to operate when they stake. Delegators, however, cannot - delegators choose to delegate to a given node operator but not to a specific node.
Node operators can accept more or less delegation depending on the composition and number of nodes they run. More details on this can be found here: https://blog.audius.co/2020/12/15/a-primer-on-audio-staking/
Re: ROI, you can calculate this for yourself actually - the minting rate is determined by the network-wide 7% per annum inflation, which means a weekly issuance rate at the moment of 70mm/52 = ~1.35mm AUDIO tokens. You can divide this over the total staked number on dashboard.audius.co to calculate the weekly reward rate per staked token.
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Question: Got a good build for a first-time node host?
Answer: Most node operators on Audius run their nodes in datacenters actually - so they have to use hardware provided by their hosting provider - but the minimum spec for a node is available here: https://github.com/AudiusProject/audius-protocol/wiki/Staking-Resources
Easy to build something that fits this, but hard to run it on a datacenter-quality connection!
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Question: What came to mind when creating $AUDIO? What is the long term goal of Audius with respect to its use of $AUDIO? Assuming a best case scenario (dangerous I know) where would the platform be in 5 years?
Answer: Great question - have spoken at length on this in the past on podcasts (eg. https://podofjake.com/2020/11/13/22-roneil-rumburg/ fairly recently), but the simple answer here is to create a user-owned and user-operated
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Question: I've been saving my $audio to recommend features for audius like a comment section. When would you say we are going to be able to submit feature suggestions?
Answer: You can submit feature requests any time :) we are always listening!
That’s not quite how AUDIO works though - you would actually need to implement this feature and submit a proposal with AUDIO to get it accepted. What’s missing here is a way to signal support for something in advance - very open to 3rd-party tools around this if anyone has suggestions! I know other projects use eg. Snapshot.
You can find the governance interface here as well: https://dashboard.audius.org/governance
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Question: How will the Governance system work and when should we expect it to be fully functional?
Answer: It’s been live since October at dashboard.audius.co! More details on how to use it will be available in a blog post very soon - hang tight
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Question: I assume that Airdrops won't be happening anymore? if that's not the case, when could we potentially expect them to happen?
Answer: They will happen again - but likely in a different form. You will get to vote on what that form should look like, and anyone is welcome to propose ideas / implementations of this to the governance system too.
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Question: Does Audius run on the Ethereum blockchain? And if so, will it be upgraded to run on ETH 2.0 when that goes live? My assumption is that slower load times is due to the ether network, and can only get faster if the network has less load, or more people are operating Audius nodes, or something like that.
​
Answer: Audius runs on a combination of Ethereum, POA network (an Ethereum sidechain), and soon to be Solana replacing POA network.
The slow load time is actually not a result of these, but rather the process of connecting to and consuming from a decentralized network of nodes requiring a number of steps to bootstrap the initial node list among other things. Still lots of work ongoing to optimize things here to make it faster - if you’ve been using Audius consistently over the last 4-6 months, you hopefully noticed it’s gotten much better :)
More nodes also helps! Many more nodes have come online in the last few months which has sped things up considerably.
So with all that context in mind - to finally get to your question - the community chooses how Audius works, where it migrates, etc., but our feedback would be to use the best tools for the job. If ETH2 is well-suited to our use case at the time it launches, we should use it! If it isn’t, we should use something else. I know that’s a non-answer answer, but things are so early with ETH2 it’s very difficult to predict whether it will make sense to use it in future.
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Question:
Is there a breakdown of which activities get paid what amounts (i.e. pay per stream, playlist creation, reposts, etc.)?
Answer:
There isn’t - the distribution of AUDIO a few months ago was a one-time event, and the breakdown from that can be found here: https://blog.audius.co/2020/10/23/welcome-audio-to-mainnet/
On a going-forward basis, we will advocate for more AUDIO to be distributed to the community - stay tuned for governance proposals around this, and make sure you make your vote heard!!
​
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Question:
With the music streaming industry being very saturated, with services such as soundcloud, spotify and apple music; besides the blockchain aspect of Audius, what other aspects of Audius could make it more appealing as a preferred music streaming platform? How will artists be paid?
Answer:
Audius is a digital streaming service that connects fans directly with artists and exclusive new content. The “direct” bit there is the important one - no other platform gives artists ownership over their relationship with fans. This difference is profound, and plays out in everything from the analytics available to artists in Audius all the way to how artists monetize their fandom.
You’d be surprised - as an artist, you can’t upload content directly to Spotify or Apple Music! You have to go through a third-party distributor. Your data (and revenue) go through the same process in reverse, slowing things down and making the artist’s view of their fandom unnecessarily opaque.
Soundcloud follows a more similar model to Audius - but suffers from a number of issues which ultimately led us to begin working on Audius long ago. Artists can’t effectively monetize on Soundcloud, are often deplatformed, and have no insight into who consumes their content, how they find it, etc.
So through all these benefits, we’re seeing artists choose to build a fanbase on Audius because they can own the relationship they build with their fans. 1 Audius fan could be far more valuable to an artist than eg. a Spotify monthly listener - as an artist, you know who they are, how to find them, and what drives their behavior.
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Question:
Will we be able to endorse artists we like by donating $AUDIO?
Answer:
Yes! Many in the community have suggested this / are working on it. I would guess that it happens fairly soon.
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Question: Do you guys have any plans to let people sell beats / tracks for remix i.e. make a rap instrumental marketplace or get royalties from remixes?
Answer: We definitely do - I'd love to hear what you all think about this too, but the general philosophy guiding Audius is to maximize artist freedom around monetization. to that end, if someone wants to monetize their beats etc. in this way by making them available to others to consume and share revenue from, imo this is absolutely something the network should allow for
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Question: I'm pretty sure this has been asked a lot, but will there be another opportunity to get more $AUDIO?
Answer: Great question - the AUDIO drop in October was a one-time event, but there are significant plans brewing to get more AUDIO distributed to the hands of all who create value in the network, in line with the philosophies laid out in https://whitepaper.audius.co/
If you know Solidity, you can likely poke around in the public code and see how this could work! but part of the token supply inflation was always meant to go directly to artists and creators adding value to the network. -----------------------------
Question:
We saw that X amount from the initial drop hadn't been claimed - if that amount was intended for users, are there plans to redistribute it via the same way, or just pile it with the rest yet to be distributed to the various other 'groups' sometime in the future?
Answer: Great question - as planned, the merkle distributor system transferred the remaining unclaimed tokens into the community treasury. So there's about 19mm AUDIO tokens in the governance system which could be distributed by any governance proposal. Our suggestion to the community is to use these tokens to fund grant proposals in future, eg. to support new features, tools, etc. developed, but anything can be done with them!
To be clear: the community treasury is an on-chain thing that token holders can vote to interact with however they choose. This is NOT something that myself or our team control.
Here's the tx that did this: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x2bed31d0d1b38fc69837f83bc4232d45813451d42e7422dcb0d4f931288f462b
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Question: Any ways to prevent people bot farm listening?
Answer: This is an area of active work - unfortunately a cat and mouse game of ppl finding new ways to bot, those ways getting locked down, then people looking again and finding more. Over time, these problems tend to solve themselves as the system is hardened from different forms of manipulation. Some significant fixes on this front have shipped recently which have helped the problem we believe, eg. this content will not show up in trending. More coming soon too.
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Question: Is it only possible to tx $Audio on the Hedgehog wallet? Would it be possible to add and transfer AudioNFTs so that accounts can have probable ownership of limited edition tracks?
Answer: Though not often used, the Audius client actually supports metamask too.
We need a better mechanic to migrate an Audius account between wallets, so eg. you could switch what wallet owns or controls a given Audius account
Also someday need to work on a WalletConnect integration too - but you'd be surprised, so few people have asked for it that it never became a priority to work on
RE: the NFT part, this would be super interesting... would love to see a community proposal come together around this!
I would personally be very supportive of more exploration in that area
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Question: What are the plans for bringing in more consumer adoption of audius, vs creators? thanks
Answer: The biggest driver of consumer adoption (we believe) has always been new content. If you look at the public usage data for Audius, new content typically leads to a commensurate increase in plays and consumer engagement. Hard to prove causality here, but the pattern has existed for the entire public life of the product.
So the best way to get more listeners is to have more content! Lots more to explore and experiment with around content discoverability, engagement features, and more targeted at consumers too, but imo these will be amplifiers on the core driver of new content
To clarify a bit further, interestingly, new content network-wide leads to more listening network-wide, not necessarily tied to a given artist. So if artist A uploads lots of content, they will see an uplift in listening, but artist B who hasn't done anything will too surprisingly enough. The uplift is not as strong but it is there!
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Question: Because of the adoption of Solana, should I be looking at Solana NFTs? I forget the name of their contract but they do support NFTs
Answer: Great question - things are early in Solana land, but we are obviously very excited about what their product can offer. So many cool things can happen with nearly instantaneous, effectively free on-chain transactions. We have benefited from POA network's ability on this for a while, but solana is a multiple order-of-magnitude improvement from a throughput/latency perspective on POA network
So all that said, you could be one of the solana NFT pioneers if you start hanging out early! I know of some other good folks building on solana in that area. Some use cases could lend themselves better than others. Solana's new wormhole bridge could also help port NFT assets from ETH to solana and vice versa
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Be sure to stay connected with us below!
Audius Community Discord - https://discord.com/invite/9U757Eg $AUDIOphiles Discord - https://discord.com/invite/kZkT9ZK Twitter - https://twitter.com/AudiusProject Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/audiusmusic/

Story Pitch: The gods can only interact with the world for a few minutes at a time by possessing a human, leaving the human with a small piece of that god's power. After getting possessed on her way home from work, Caitlin is thrown head-first into the world of the Vestiges, where alliances and favors are key, and where knowing how to remain in your god’s good graces is a matter of life or death.
Navigation: Chapter 1 | Previous Chapter | Chapter Index | Next Chapter
Other Serials: Star Child | Queen of the Desert Winds | Balance of Power || Book Info
Updates: Get Discord pings with ?rank Vestiges of Power on the Reddit Serials Discord | Reddit PMs using Butler Bot - see directions in comments
Author's Note Thanks to everyone who voted for Vestiges in the Reddit Serials Best of 2020! It really means a lot to me!
Caitlin and Lucy found their thief quicker than they anticipated, but were unable to retrieve the reference card for speaking to an Oracle. Their thief, Alex, had managed to drop the card off at a designated point up the road. After relaxing for the evening in the relative safety of hospitality, Caitlin and Lucy got back on the road to see if they could get the card back before the Jorgensons picked it up...
Following the directions Gus had given us to the truckstop and drop point was trivial. Like he and Alex had said, it was just up the road at the juncture with the interstate. I refueled Betty while Lucy went in to check the drop off spot. None of us had thought to ask Alex exactly where he had dropped the card before Gus delivered his punishment, so as I refuelled the car, Lucy carefully stalked her way up and down the aisles of the convenience store.
When I was done refueling, I joined her in the store. To cover more ground, Lucy directed me over to the drink machines and hot food bar, where I helped myself to a slushie and a pretzel. I had no clue what I could possibly be looking for until I saw drink loyalty cards. That would be an ideal place to drop something like the reference card. It was the same size as a business card, and most people wouldn’t notice the thicker, heavier material if it was in the middle or back, but whoever was looking for it would be able to find it easily.
I started flicking through the holder, hoping it was somehow hiding somewhere in the stack, and that I had just missed it when I gave the holder a glance. Something in me knew it was futile, but I did it anyways, hoping that the card was still there.
“It’s gone, isn’t it?” Lucy asked, sneaking up behind me. I tried not to jump and drop my pretzel, only succeeding at the latter. We hadn't anticipated finding it, but it had been worth the try to come here before getting back on the road.
“Someone else was flicking through there earlier today,” a store employee said, giving Lucy and I a strange look as he paused to straighten out the mat underneath our feet. “I don’t know what for, it’s rare people put filled loyalty cards in there, but whatever floats y’alls boats.” The teen kept sweeping the floor, pushing dirt and leaves through the store.
Lucy and I looked at each other. Whoever had retrieved the card might still be nearby. But tracking didn't lie in either of our skillsets. After paying for our snacks, we made a quick call to Lyle to see if he knew anyone who could help. The closest tracker he knew was on the opposite side of the state, and time is of the essence when you don’t have something to serve as a magical scent.
Instead, we continued with the social calls Lyle had originally suggested we make, making better time now that we weren't investigating potential thieves along the way.
Neither of us talked about the lost card or how we were going to get it back after we left the truckstop. If it had been anyone else that Alex had passed it along to, we might have started planning. We might have been able to sneak a look at the security camera footage to see who it was, if Lucy or Lyle could recognize them. But neither of us wanted another run-in with the Jorgensons, at least not yet. Not without a plan, and maybe some allies to help back us up.
I wondered for a moment whether Alex had been directed to steal from us specifically, or if it was a coincidence. After a moment’s reflection, I decided coincidence made more sense. After everything else that had transpired with the Jorgensons, I would have expected them to hire someone to kill us or take us hostage. But neither of those things had happened. We were just the unlucky targets of a routine theft.
“Is there a point in going to Florida if we can’t talk to the Oracles?” I asked.
“We can still speak to them,” Lucy said. “They’re just not obligated to be helpful, and will end up speaking cryptically. And besides, we already promised Gonzalo that we’d be down there by the end of summer.”
Right. There wasn’t an easy way out of going to Florida.
“What is it you have against Florida, anyways?” Lucy asked. “You seem to really want to avoid it.”
“I’d rather not get into it,” I said.
“If you’ve got baggage that’s going to be weighing you down, I should know about it,” Lucy said.
“It’s family stuff,” I said.
“All the more reason,” Lucy said. “You’re going to have to cut them out e-”
I cut Lucy off. “There’s nobody there anymore.”
“Oh,” Lucy said. “Shit, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I mean, they’re still there,” I said. “But why do you think I moved so far away?”
“That sort of break then?” Lucy said.
“You could say that,” I said. The next exit was advertising a park by a lake, so I took the exit. I could tell Lucy was going to keep pushing if I didn’t spill the beans, and I didn’t want to have this conversation while we were driving. We wordlessly stopped to refuel Betty and then followed the signs to the lake.
The lake itself was cluttered with families and children, and Lucy and I hadn’t exactly dressed for going swimming, so we tried to find the furthest picnic table and hoped we could get away with pretending we were planning to go hiking.
“I needed to get away from a bunch of shit and put it behind me,” I said. “My cousins, an ex, and some so-called friends. So I got the hell out of there in college and didn’t look back. Betty’s the only thing I have good memories concerning.”
“Damn,” Lucy said. “So how much of the state is bad memories?”
“Pretty much all of it,” I said. “My former friends went all over the place for college. And I wouldn’t put it past them to text each other to make life hell for me if I show my face near any one of them. If one of them had somehow shown up at Jacks’ bar, I can’t say I wouldn’t have intentionally messed up their orders.”
“What did they do?” Lucy asked.
“Where should I start?” I asked. “The time they left me stranded in Yeehaw Junction? Or the time Marissa nearly killed me despite having known for years that I have a peanut allergy?”
“That could have been an accident,” Lucy said.
“Then there was when I found out they had a separate group chat just to make fun of Betty,” I continued. “And the fake prom-posals.”
“Was there anything they did that counts as friendly?” Lucy asked.
So I told Lucy about my former friends. How our parents introduced us when we were young, and we played every day at the neighborhood park, and how life was pretty good when we all got along. As we got older, we’d still hang out at that park to do homework, even while the parents of younger children gave us the stink eye.
“I don’t know what happened when we hit high school that made them all suddenly hate me,” I said. “Or why I stuck with them for that matter. Didn’t feel like trying to find other people, I guess. Well, that and they didn’t start showing their true colors for me to see until the end of senior year, so I had no way of knowing. All I could do was leave them all behind and try to move on. But they’re a big part of the reason I haven’t been back to Florida.”
For whatever reason, I didn’t tell Lucy about my ex in particular. At our graduation party, where Marissa almost killed me, I found her in the bathroom with him. That had been the very quick ending of our relationship, and even when he came begging that it was a one-off thing, I wouldn’t answer any of his calls or texts. He spent the summer coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to get me to stay in Florida, sending flowers, chocolates, and all those other romantic gestures that don’t do well in Florida’s summer heat to my home, but I didn’t touch any of them. Mom pulled them all off of the doorstep when she got home, and I guess either ate the chocolate or tossed them out. I didn’t care. I was reading in my room, trying to get over the loss of my childhood, and blasting music so I wouldn’t hear the knocks or the doorbell.
I don’t know what had inspired me to apply to out-of-state colleges in the first place, since the tuition was through the roof, but after everything that happened senior year, Mom agreed that it was probably best for me to start somewhere fresh. The day Mom and I loaded up Betty and the U-Haul was one of the best days of that summer. I hadn’t known it at the time, but the day Mom left was the worst day of the summer, worse than finding Brendan and Marissa at the party, second in my life only to losing Dad, since it was the last time I saw her.
“Mom’s brothers and sisters and their families ruined my last trip back as well,” I said. “Not long after I moved out for college, her health took a turn for the worse. All of the documents were in order, so thank God they couldn’t take the house or her investments from me. But they sure raised hell at the funeral, trying to steal stuff from the house and off of Mom’s body even.”
“What did she have that they wanted so badly?” Lucy asked, astounded.
“I don’t know, they’re just weird,” I said. “The funeral home got everyone away from Mom, so nothing was actually stolen. But at least Florida’s got a lot of people, so as long as we don’t get into the news or something it should be fine, and nobody will know I came back.”
“That’s usually a good goal when you’re effectively immortal,” Lucy said. “As long as one of your old friends or cousins isn’t one of the Oracles, then we shouldn’t have any issues.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hoped that their ghosts wouldn’t chase me around.
I had been happy, not thinking about them, living my own comfortable life. After Mom died, I’d had the house sold, and moved the rest of my stuff. That’s when I got my apartment, instead of living in the student-oriented apartments near campus. It meant I had more of a commute to my classes, but with working at Jacks’s bar as well, it worked out, since it meant it was easy to get home and crash.
Lucy didn’t dig any further into my history with Florida, but I was starting to learn how to read her faces. She was thinking about it, and if it was going to affect me when we did eventually make our way down there. With my laundry out to air though, it was time for us to get back on the road.
After a few days of being awake, I was starting to get tired, so I let Lucy drive in case I suddenly needed the nap. I was still awake enough to drive, but I didn’t want to push it, especially if I needed to be alert at our next stop.
Sitting in the passenger’s seat, I ruminated on what I had and hadn’t shared, as well as what sort of baggage Lucy had with the Jorgensons beyond the relationship she had had with Zach. What sort of stuff was she hiding away? Was it decades of rivalry, or one bad fling that had festered?
I didn’t dream when I fell asleep, not the way I normally would. Nor did I make it back to the flaming room to try to puzzle out its secrets. But when I woke up, my head had one thought echoing through it. I had a distinct feeling that the thought wasn’t mine, but that it was important nonetheless. Long and low burn the flames of deep hurts.
I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, but it was certainly true. I had systematically cut out everything from my past, anything that might remind me of Florida, so I wouldn’t have to think about it. The only thing I still had from that part of my past was Betty, so it was fitting that she was how I was going back there.
And if I ran into my extended family, or Brendan and Marissa, or my other former friends, I wasn’t sure if I’d just try my best to ignore them, or if I’d do something else, now that I could.
Next Chapter

"An imminent threat grows. You must prepare.''

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Welcome Tenno! We'll see you in the stars!

Welcome to the SpaceX Starlink 8 Official Launch Discussion & Updates Thread!

I'm u/Shaha603, your host for this mission.
Mission Overview
The ninth Starlink launch overall and the eighth operational batch† of Starlink satellites will launch into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. This mission is expected to deploy 58 satellites into an elliptical orbit about fifteen minutes into flight. In the weeks following launch the satellites are expected to utilize their onboard ion thrusters to raise their orbits to 550 km in three groups of 20, making use of precession rates to separate themselves into three planes. Riding along are 3 SkySat satellites launched for planet labs. The booster will land on a drone ship approximately 628 km downrange. Half of Falcon 9’s fairing previously flew on the JCSAT-18/Kacific1 mission, and the other half previously flew on SpaceX’s third Starlink mission. Get updates on Starlink news and service availability in your area by going to Starlink.com
† The first Starlink mission launched a batch of prototype satellites that do not form part of the operational constellation.

Liftoff currently scheduled for	June 13 9:21 UTC (5:21 a.m. EDT local)
Backup date	June 14, The launch time gets about 20-24 minutes earlier per day.
Static fire	Not expected
Payload	58 Starlink version 1 satellites and SkySats 16, 17, 18
Payload mass	~ 15 400 kg (Starlink ~260kg each, SkySat ~110kg each)
Deployment orbit	Low Earth Orbit, 212 km x 386 km (approximate)
Operational orbit	Low Earth Orbit, 550 km x 53°, 3 planes
Vehicle	Falcon 9 v1.2 Block 5
Core	1059.3
Past flights of this core	2 (CRS-19, CRS-20)
Past flights of this fairing	JCSAT-18/Kacific1 and the thirst Starlink mission
Fairing catch attempt	Likely
Launch site	SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
Landing	ASDS
Mission success criteria	Successful separation & deployment of the Starlink and SkySat Satellites.

Timeline

Time	Update
T+00:41:00	Webcast coverage is over
T+00:38:00	Waiting for fairing recovery
T+00:38:00	Starlink batch deployment confirmed!
T+00:26:00	Starlink batch deployment is supposed to be happening right now. We will know once signal is reacquired in 3 minutes
T+00:13:34	SkySat 16 Deployment
T+00:13:04	SkySat 17 Deployment
T+00:12:34	SkySat 18 Deployment
T+00:10:00	The second stage is starting to roll
T+00:08:53	Second stage Engine Cut Off
T+00:08:43	Landing success. What an amazing landing and view!!
T+00:08:23	Landing startup
T+00:08:00	First stage is transonic
T+00:07:08	The first stage is gliding towards the droneship
T+00:07:40	Both stages continue nominaly
T+00:07:07	Eentry burn shutdown
T+00:06:50	Eentry burn startup. This burn slows the rocket down before it hits the atmosphere.
T+00:05:00	First stage is at apogee. 137 km above earth and 326 km downrange. traveling at 1972 m/s (7099 km/h, 4411 mph)
	A beautiful shot of the first stage, the grid fins and the RCS thrusters firings (the flashes of light) that reorient the vehicle for reentry.
T+00:03:11	Fairing separation. The fairings will deploy their parachutes soon and glide back to be recovered.
T+00:03:00	The first stage is coasting to apogee (the highest point in its ballistic arc) and is slowly reorienting itself for the reentry burn
T+00:02:43	Second stage engine ignition
T+00:02:36	Stage separation
T+00:02:32	MECO
T+00:02:23	The first stage is throttling down to maintain acceleration lower than 3.8g
T+00:01:12	First stage throttle up
T+00:01:12	Max-Q. This is the point of maximal aerodynamic pressure on the rocket.
T+00:01:00	First stage throttles down to ~70% max thrust to reduce aerodynamic pressure
T+00:00:04	Falcon 9 has cleared the tower!
T+00:00:00	Liftoff
T-00:00:02	Ignition
T-00:00:03	Engine controller commands engine ignition sequence to start
T-00:01:00	Command flight computer to begin final preflight checks
T-00:00:45	LD GO for launch
T-00:01:00	Falcon 9 is on internal power
T-00:07:00	Falcon 9 starts engine chill prior to launch
T-00:04:18	a livestream from both fairing recovery ships! Good luck for both teams.
T-00:09:00	The contract with SkySat has been signed only 6 months ago!
T-00:11:00	Webcast coverage is starting
T-00:12:00	Webcast has started. SpaceX FM
T-00:16:00	Second stage LOX loading started
T-00:35:00	RP-1 loading started
T-00:35:00	First stage LOX loading started
T-01:00:00	Weather looks good at the launch site! Hopefully we'll get to see a great launch in 60 minutes
T-24:00:00	Thread goes live

Watch the launch live

Stream	Courtesy
SpaceX Official Webcast	SpaceX
SpaceX Mission Control Audio	SpaceX
SpaceX Official YouTube Channel	SpaceX
YouTube Video & Audio Relays	u/codav
NSF YouTube Livestream	NasaSpaceFlight

Previous and Pending Starlink Missions

	Mission	Date (UTC)	Core	Pad	Deployment Orbit	Notes [Sat Update Bot]
1	Starlink v0.9	2019-05-24	1049.3	SLC-40	440km 53°	60 test satellites with Ku band antennas
2	Starlink-1	2019-11-11	1048.4	SLC-40	280km 53°	60 version 1 satellites, v1.0 includes Ka band antennas
3	Starlink-2	2020-01-07	1049.4	SLC-40	290km 53°	60 version 1 satellites, 1 sat with experimental antireflective coating
4	Starlink-3	2020-01-29	1051.3	SLC-40	290km 53°	60 version 1 satellites
5	Starlink-4	2020-02-17	1056.4	SLC-40	212km x 386km 53°	60 version 1, Change to elliptical deployment, Failed booster landing
6	Starlink-5	2020-03-18	1048.5	LC-39A	elliptical	60 version 1, S1 early engine shutdown, booster lost post separation
7	Starlink-6	2020-04-22	1051.4	LC-39A	elliptical	60 version 1 satellites
8	Starlink-7	2020-06-04	1049.5	SLC-40	elliptical	60 version 1 satellites expected, 1 sat with experimental sun-visor
9	Starlink-8	This Mission	1059.3	SLC-40	?	58 version 1 satellites expected with Skysat 16, 17, 18
10	Starlink-9	NET June 1051.5	LC-39A	Version 1 satellites expected with BlackSky 5 & 6
11	Starlink-10	NET July	SLC-40 / LC-39A	60 version 1 satellites expected

Daily Starlink altitude updates on Twitter @StarlinkUpdates available a few days following deployment.

Stats

• 3rd flight for booster 1059
  
• 10th SpaceX launch of the year
  
• 55th landing of a SpaceX booster
  
• 87th launch of a Falcon 9
  
• 95th SpaceX launch overall
  
• 481st through 538th Starlink satelites to be deployed
  
• Fastest pad turnaround!
  

🕑 Your local launch time

🚀Official Resources

Please note that some links are placeholders until updates are provided.

Link	Source
SpaceX website	SpaceX
Official Starlink Overview	Starlink.com
Launch Execution Forecasts	45th Weather Squadron
Watching a Launch	SpaceX Wiki
Hazard Area	45th Space Wing

🛰️ Useful Links for Viewing Starlink

Link	Source
See A satellite Tonight	u/modeless
FlightClub Pass planner	u/TheVehicleDestroyer
Heavens Above
Live tracking
Pass Predictor and sat tracking	u/cmdr2
n2yo.com
Starlink orbit raising daily updates	u/hitura-nobad

They might need a few hours to get the Starlink TLEs

🤝 Community Resources

Link	Source
Wtching a LaunchSpaceX Wiki
Launch Viewing Guide for Cape Canaveral	Ben Cooper
SpaceX Fleet Status	SpaceXFleet.com
FCC Experimental STAs	SpaceX wiki
Launch Maps	Google Maps by u/Raul74Cz
Flight Club live	Launch simulation by u/TheVehicleDestroyer
Flight Club simulation	Launch simulation by u/TheVehicleDestroyer
SpaceX Stats	Countdown and statistics
Discord SpaceX lobby	u/SwGustav
Rocket Watch	u/MarcysVonEylau

🎼 Media & music

Link	Source
TSS Spotify	u/testshotstarfish
SpaceX FM	u/lru

📸 Photographer Contest!

Check out the SpaceX Starlink-8 Media Thread (Coming a day before launch). You can submit your pictures related to the mission. It could be the Falcon 9 on the pad, a launch picture or a streak shot of a Starlink overfly. The winner will be allowed to post their photo directly to SpaceX. May the best photograph(er) win!

Participate in the discussion!

🥳 Launch threads are party threads, we relax the rules here. We remove low effort comments in other threads!
🔄 Please post small launch updates, discussions, and questions here, rather than as a separate post. Thanks!
💬 Please leave a comment if you discover any mistakes, or have any information.
✉️ Please send links in a private message.
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