I want to clarify how decisions are made at Trakt. There is no sole decision-maker, so please don’t take it personally. Each team member owns the decisions within their area of expertise.
We build the product for ourselves first. We prioritize our own needs because we can clearly describe user scenarios and persuade others to help build them. For example, I focus on TV apps even though they currently have fewer users.
Then we prioritize what is most used by our community of millions of active users. That’s why we rebuilt our web experience around mobile-first core features. We are data-driven rather than simply responding to individual requests.
Finally, we have to consider the long-term sustainability of the platform. We invest in infrastructure scalability so this year we avoided service interruptions while traffic doubled. Reliability comes at a cost, which is why we also have to limit users and apps that abuse the API without paying for the service. As a result we have the highest growth of VIP subscriptions.
-Thanks to this team of passionate people around the world!
What about limiting paid users? You’ve quietly limited the amount of items that can be added to a list for VIP members. These aren’t people abusing the system without paying, they’re people paying for a service that you quietly and arbitrarily limit.
You say you build for yourself first, which employee(s) of Trakt feels they want to limit themselves with lists? Which employee doesn’t like private notes so decided to remove it for people who already paid for it?
This is something many PAYING users have been asking about for a week and you’ve buried your head in the sand hoping it will go away. There was even a post about how Trakt wants to be more transparent and yet you do stuff like this‽
“We build the product for ourselves first.” Well, that explains the last two years.
It takes some nerve to tell frustrated users that the team prioritizes its own preferences, then invoke a “community of millions” to justify the result. When users complain, they’re just individual requests. When VIP subscriptions grow, suddenly those same users are proof you’re getting everything right.
Congratulations on keeping the servers running. That’s the bare minimum for a service people pay for, not a rebuttal to how you’ve treated them. If this post was meant to make disappointed customers feel heard, you’ve managed to do the exact opposite.
Seems more and more that they want to force everyone to VIP. Kill everything for free users so they have no choice. That’s greed and doesn’t work out in the end.
A couple of guys built something because they personally wanted it. Their friends wanted it. Then the XBMC community wanted it. And eventually it turned into Trakt.
Justin Nemeth later described it particularly well: Trakt began as a side project because they wanted Last.fm-style scrobbling for XBMC and they had no idea it would eventually become a full-time job.
It’s actually one of the more charming tech-origin stories because it wasn’t “we identified a market opportunity.” It was much closer to “we want this thing and nobody has built it, so we’ll build it.”
Yes, a lot of the angst around here is due to that side project radically changing direction & design, uprooting literally decade-plus habits for some folks. And the couple of guys who used to discuss everything with us have gone completely silent in favor of new faces we don’t know.
The current direction definitely feels more like “we identified a market opportunity” btw.
odd post, well anyway the website and api have actually been down several times this year so reliability is down, the site was also down again today, also highest growth of vip members? i have watched the forums all year because of outages, and well many people unsubscribed for various reasons, outages being one.
Allow me to clarify this statement: first, you took an application that already offered specific services and used the funds allocated for its development to create something entirely new for yourselves, completely ignoring the community’s opinion. Subsequently, you launched it to the market unfinished, persuading other developers to complete the work for you. All this while keeping users’ money—users like me—who have been left unable to use the application we paid for.
Since the implementation of TRAKT LITE, I have been proposing ideas, improvements, and solutions, as well as requesting explanations for various doubts (and yes, I admit that on some occasions with better manners than others). The result? Absolute silence, the temporary suspension of my account, and the systematic deletion of all my contributions.
You may have experienced the greatest growth in VIP subscriptions due to your new usage policies, but along the way you have lost the vast majority of those of us who were already VIP members. Instead of adding to the community, you have chosen to replace it. Now all that remains is to see the actual usage time statistics and the number of simultaneous active users, among other revealing data.
Your way of proceeding has forced me to look for an alternative, and at this point, I thank you for it. I have found a substitute worthy of praise, developed by a team that truly works for its users instead of seeking others to work for them.
Over the past months, you have not implemented a single one of the improvements demanded by the community. Instead, you have introduced new features that do not solve at all the serious shortcomings we continue to suffer in this LITE version.
I can only thank you for the good times and the satisfaction that the platform provided me in previous years.
I’ve been using Trakt since the dawn of time, back when it had that first dark blue design, with only one other similar site around — Share… something? Share.tv, I think.
Back then, it was basically a small community built around what its users needed. If you wanted the same thing, you simply joined.
I personally talked to Justin quite a lot in the past and for what’s it worth he really sounds like a nice guy. Unfortunately, he seems unreachable these days.
Trakt has obviously grown a lot, but I still feel that it follows the same philosophy: “We build the product for ourselves first.”
For those who don’t like the direction it has taken — and personally, I find V3 horrendous — there’s always the option to leave and find an alternative. They’ve made their decision, and it’s a done deal. There’s really no point in continuing to post about it. I did it … and the result was me loosing my Lifetime VIP.
V1 was GREAT. V2 was OK. V3… I honestly don’t know who was responsible for the layout, design, and functionality. I can’t believe it was the same person.
Hello, Marius.
I appreciate your explanation At the end of the day, this is a business, and decisions are made, some are right, others aren’t, some users like them, others don’t, just like in any business. I have to use the phrase “it’s not you, it’s me” here, and frankly, I don’t like V3, nor do I like many of the decisions all of you’ve made. I respect your decisions, but one should be where one feels comfortable, and honestly, I can’t seem to adapt to the changes and cutbacks, so when my VIP subscription ends, I’ll migrate my data and import it into my Postgres database.
