I’ve been playing Destiny for quite some time and I’ve enjoyed the community around it a lot, but the one thing that frustrates me the most about Destiny is how little the community actually knows about game development. It’s driving me crazy, so I wrote this whole thing down. I’m a game designeproducer myself, I’ve never worked on a project as massive as Destiny (not many people ever do), but I have worked on several gaming projects, some of them big in large companies, some of them small gaming apps. I know enough to explain the basics here, but I’m definitely not the ultimate authority on videogames and I’m not representing Bungie whatsoever, everything here is only from my experience. My goal here is to give you some useful info and calm my mind about this.
The Destiny community is incredibly vocal, especially this sub, which is generally a good thing, but the lack of understanding really damages not only the enjoyment of the community members but also the game itself IMO. I’ll explain some of the basics I think any hardcore fan should know here with an example and then I’ll outline some specific problems.
How Games Are Made
A videogame pipeline can be simplified into this flow: Demand from the top/the market -> top management decision -> design and prototyping -> development and feedbacks -> in house testing -> public testing -> marketing and publishing -> data collecting and analysis -> feedback implementation. It’s a circle that applies to everything from the big picture like the main campaign, to the smallest details like colors of shaders or proofreading of even the smallest posts. Every decision made in this system, even the tiniest ones, has to be debated, supported by data and expertise, approved in multiple places based on the priority, and checked multiple times after it’s implemented.
Game developers, especially in a powerhouse like Bungie, are very skilled, talented, experienced, and passionate people who always do their best to navigate that flow to satisfy the demands with a quality product delivered on time. I can’t stress this enough, developers (including QA testers, designers, artists, marketing, publishing, the whole team) are pretty much always incredibly hard-working people with a love for video games, because otherwise, they would never stay in this scummy business. They’re underpaid, overworked, and most likely overqualified for what they have to do. Some of them know almost everything there is to know about their field and they’re always improving as well.
Because video games, especially gargantuan living games with real-time action combat like Destiny, are insanely complicated, you need sometimes hundreds of experts to put them together. The pipeline needs to be perfectly planned, flexible so you can adapt to problems, and also easy enough to implement so you can deliver the product on time. All of these factors result in a tight-rope walk that never ends.
Now it’s time for an example. Let’s say during Season of the Worthy you get an assignment to create a catalyst for Thorn that would make it more popular in PVE, but doesn’t make it overpowered in PVP. Seems simple enough, right? There are dozens of posts about this topic on this subreddit, how hard can it be. The answer is, very, very hard.
You start working on your designs. You analyze all other exotic catalysts and hand cannon perks in the game - how they were made, their philosophy, psychological effects, and how they influence gameplay, you discuss everything in your team. When you create your first version, your design lead tells your whole team that hand cannons are getting a range buff and Thorn is now a 140 RPM and you have to adjust your design. After that, your priorities get shifted to helping with Beyond Light and the DSC weapons so it’s finished on time, so you put Thorn on hold. You don’t want to waste time though, so you give the art team an assignment to create the catalyst icon.
After two months of work on Beyond Light, you come back to Thorn, but now you basically have to start over because the future meta has changed so much. You create new designs and this time they’re approved by management, so you move onto prototyping. Developers are way too busy debugging and QA testing Beyond Light, so they have no time for Thorn and that task gets put into their To-Do list. You have no choice but to move onto your other tasks and start working on weapons for seasons 13 and 14.
When development starts finally working on Thorn, they find an exploit in your design that would allow it to two tap in PVP, you have to rework it again and hope they’ll have time to implement it this time. They don’t and the Thorn catalyst now officially misses its deadline and is pushed from Beyond Light. The marketing team doesn’t hear about it though, so they publish the icon you had made four months ago, leaking the catalyst coming out. This is of course your fault, but these things happen during all the chaos and there was almost nothing you could have done.
When you finally push this task through and it’s checked and approved dozens of times in different places (weapon design team, design lead, writing, sandbox team, development, QA, studio director, etc.) you have to make sure it’s published correctly in the right build, it has all necessary descriptions and marketing texts done and translated into all languages and the community managers know about it so they can get ready to collect data.
This single task took you a year to complete even when you did your best to do it fast and well and I left out about 90% of problems you would normally encounter. THIS is game development.
Community Attitude and Feedback
Now we get to why the uninformed community hurts the game so much. This sub would only see Thorn getting a catalyst and it would immediately be flooded with posts like “The catalyst sucks in PVE, buff pls”, “Bungo doesn’t care, the catalyst sucks for Warlocks” and a few “Why catalyst for Thorn, but not for Skyburner’s Oath”, completely missing the point of the catalyst and adding nothing to the discussion.
Bungie devs are way more informed, skilled, and experienced than us, the community. The only feedback they are interested in from us is quantitative - basically what we like and what we don’t like about the game. Any posts giving them ideas, elaborate reworks, or straight up negative outrage will accomplish nothing, because they already know everything about the game and discuss it daily in way more detail than we could ever imagine. The only qualitative feedback they should collect and measure is from content creators and the top 1% of the player base because those people actually know some aspects of the game Bungie doesn’t. I know it may sound like the hated “Bungo only listens to sweats and Youtubers”, but that’s kinda the point, they should be listening.
It doesn’t mean that our voices are ignored or not listened to. I would bet all of my money that all forums are constantly monitored and analyzed. The truth is, however, that the only valid opinion we can give that Bungie should consider is what aspects of the game we like, and what aspects we don’t. Anything beyond that we already tell them through data they collect from our play sessions.
As I wrote above, any change within this massive game is complicated and could take months or years to be implemented, so being upset we don’t have everything now is just useless. Bungie is hard at work to make good stuff, we should respect them more and not bring out the pitchforks every time a season slows down a bit and we can’t play for four hours a day every day for the whole year. There will always be problems in a live game and they are doing a fantastic job, I can’t even imagine how much work must go into it. So before you post about something in the future, take a moment to think about the process and figure out what exactly you can provide to the devs with your feedback, because otherwise, you’re fanning the flames on something that probably isn’t actually burning. It’s just taking its time as it should.
With all of the above said, it isn't the community's fault that we're not informed. The fault lies entirely with Bungie not educating people enough and this problem could be avoided.
Reasons Why Things Suck
I’ll close by giving my two cents on why the game isn’t perfect and never will be, just so you know where the community's frustrations should go.

1. The biggest reason that influences everything - Bungie is a company owned by a group of shareholders that will always force the studio to grow and provide more profit. With every extra dollar, the value of the company grows and the board of directors gets richer and because of the super predatory capitalism we live in now, Bungie has to justify every single decision with a monetary value. It's not the fault of the devs, they don't make much money themselves.
2. The game is massive and always online. I’m pretty confident that no other studio would be able to support Destiny for so long without the game completely crashing down. Technology always evolves and it’s almost impossible to keep a living game up to date, so some parts of the front end of the game will always suck because Bungie has to upkeep the back end we will never get to see.
3. The project has been going on for a decade, which leads to people wanting to naturally move on. Replacing team members on a living game is very difficult, which leads to problems and delays.
4. The community is not educated about the game enough, which is why I ended up writing this. The continuous cycle of negative outrage that comes from a lack of understanding damages the game because the devs are forced to deal with it without disclosing information. If people knew more, they could help Bungie, but no company that wants to make big profits will ever open up its communication because it would show just how many decisions are influenced by the search for profit.

That’s it, sorry for the length of this essay. I hope you learned something and let me know if you’d be interested in more stuff like this (takes on sunsetting, sandbox, etc.). I would like to give people more info so they don’t waste their precious time on stuff completely outside of their control and maybe educate people about the industry. I love the game and I hope you’ll appreciate it a bit more now.
Edit 1:
This post is not meant as a defense for the faults of the game or an excuse for bad decisions, it's meant as a resource to give you perspective and information. If you believe the game is not as good as it was promised to be or disagree with some design choices made, you are of course entitled to your own opinion, and there are quite a few things I myself absolutely hate in Destiny. I can't answer questions related to design on Destiny with confidence, because I don't work for Bungie and I won't speculate much on why certain decisions were made. I can give you my opinion on stuff like sunsetting based on my experience in another post, but ultimately it's only speculation with little benefit. All I will say is that there is always more stuff we don't know about the game than we do know and design should be judged in context.
When it comes to questions related to Bungie's scummy tactics when it comes to monetization and bad communication, I agree with you, as I said above. Money is the biggest factor of why Destiny suffers and the best way for us to do anything about that is to stop buying it. I know it's a cliche statement, but it's true.
And lastly, for the comments saying stuff like "shut up, Bungie sucks and you know it", please read what I said again and think about it. The devs most likely love the game just as much as you once did, if not much more.
Edit 2:
I'll add one thing that keeps popping up. It's clear that Destiny is a product developed for profit, so if your outlook is "I don't want to know about development, I'm just an unhappy consumer that didn't like this product", I agree as would most likely everybody that it's absolutely a valid stance, but that's not what my post was about. If that's how you see any product, you should tell the producer why you didn't like it if you care enough to do so and move on. The post is meant to inform people who don't want to move on from Destiny, especially those who continuously engage with the product from a place of understanding even if they don't have it, which wastes their time and does nothing for the product. If you don't like this game or any other game, it's absolutely OK and you should move on from playing it, complaining about things you don't want to understand won't help you achieve what you want and only makes the game worse. As I said above, the best way to show your disagreements is not to support the company and if you don't like Destiny, please stop playing it and take care of yourself. Your time is valuable, don't give it away to someone you don't agree with.
Edit 3
This will be the last edit on this post. I appreciate all the awards and great discussions happening below, but holy cow did this get a lot of vitriol. I expected a lot of negativity, but it still surprised me. It's partially my fault for trying to talk about so much with not enough room so I'm sure I made a few mistakes. I'll reply to a few things that I want to make clear and then leave this alone, it's way too long anyway.
If you see any malicious intent, attacks, arrogance, or "Bungie shilling" between the lines, I put none there, at least not on purpose. My goal was to inform, as I said right at the start, so if you see any other agenda, it's not there and my writing either wasn't clear enough, or you're looking for something that I didn't write. Take the post for what it is, a stranger on the internet telling you something you may not know from their experience. If you disagree with me, downvote the post and explain why, no need to insult anyone, you're once again wasting your precious time.
I didn't mention management as a problem on Destiny, because I don't know enough about it. Leadership is very often a problem on any collaborative projects but calling someone out without the necessary data is exactly what I warned about in my post, so I won't comment on it, but feel free to disagree with me. Maybe you know more about the subject than I do and I'll be happy to read your reply.
I never put myself up as an ultimate authority on the subject, all of this is just basics I thought hardcore fans should know and I communicated that. This post was already very long and I didn't have time, nor did I want to describe theory in detail, so insulting me over not explaining how scrum works in a post meant for people with no experience is not necessary. If you want to argue about production methodologies, my reasoning on examples given, and how healthy management looks like with me please feel free to message me and I'm sure we'll have a cool conversation, I'd love to hear about your experience from working in gaming.
And that's it, I hope you got something out of this. Have a great day and see you around.

Wall street are learning fast and we are fighting experts in their field. We are the majority with little money taking on a minority with a lot of money.
What does AMC stock holders need to learn right now?
Lesson 1. We need to support each other and trust that we are in it together. A positive stream of support and knowledge to say were doing it. Keep the messages flowing and the support flowing. The second someone thinks they're alone, they panic. Youtubers, Social Media Influencers and Celebs. Speak up and speak out if you're in, dont give advice, just let everyone know youre in.
Lesson 2. Learn from the GME mistakes. How many times do you need to be told? If you sell when its dropping, you lose your money and 100% lose your fight. If it goes up, you at least have a chance to recoup some if not all. Its basic, the reason why people do not do well in stocks is they sell low and then buy again as it goes up, expecting it to go up further. Its madness.
Lesson 3. Set realistic tolerances for your own sanity. We work together to get to 20$, then 30$, then 40$. When it's time to leave you make that call. If you have more tolerance. Stay and see if you can moon it.
Lesson 4. The Hedgefunds do have systematic methods of breaking the prices down. Clearly, day in, day out, the ladders are showing this and they are moving shares around like mad. Check out videos and charts of previous unnatural changes and ladders.
Lesson 5 and the final lesson. Do not buy these shares thinking it's an easy win. Buy, close the app or website and ride it out. If you cant manage this until the shorts are repaid. Then do not go into this in the first place or go before it harms your bank.
We need diamond hands and a willingness to tough it out. Do not use money you do not have and do not make decisions off others opinion. Make your own mind up about your risk. If more shares than the Hedgefunds can handle stay in AMC then they must pay it back. Then and only then will you see profits off the Hedgefunds. If not, you're seeing profits off your neighbours, brothers and sisters.
Chin up and best of luck
Not a financial adviser - personal views.

I don't get what you guys are worried about with PLTR.
Here's my personal DD on PLTR, you're welcome to read and do whatever you want. Other helpful info or pointing out mistakes in my DD is very welcome.
Fears preventing you from buying PLTR

1. Targeted ads on your phone from Yahoo Finance or Zacks telling you PLTR = BAD!!!1!eleven
2. Shills spamming "pLtR tO tHe MoOn" and :rocket: on PLTR thread comments.
3. Last quarter's seemingly bad financials/earnings.
4. Financials Moving Forwards
5. Soros who owns 21 million shares "threatening" to sell his shares upon DPO expiry.
6. DPO expiry 3 days after February's earnings and possible insiders and DPO holders sale and dip.
7. What does PLTR tldr.
8. Other Information

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#1 Targeted Ads
Ads and articles are both paid for by someone.The fact that in the past 3 weeks i've been getting multiple multiple targeted ads on my phone related to PLTR since i love PLTR so much.
Ads are telling me that PLTR is bad, doesn't provide a dividend, they're telling me PLTR's fair price is 20 instead of 25 based on some financial model and have gone as far as to provide a list of alternative stocks to buy.
To me, this all screams: SCARE TACTICS
Additionally, the last few weeks of ups and downs in PLTR's stock price is another indication of the attempts to short the stock to sh!t and drive investors out. (For what reason? I don't know.)
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#2 Shilling PLTR
I myself love to shill PLTR to people whenever i can. I do this because i legitimately think this company will do great. I work as a product manager in a software development house and understand what PLTR does. PLTR is not cryptic.Regardless, i think when people shill PLTR to you, they are right to do so as you're probably missing out on a great opportunity to make money in the long run. If you're looking for big gains short term, maybe try something else.
Shillery is OK, but at least give the facts.
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#3 Last Quarter's Bad Financials
If you'd done your DD not by searching reddit posts but by checking PLTR's actual quarterly report, you'd know that PLTR's "bad" last financial quarteearnings were due to the costs of listing themselves on the New York Stock Exchange.~855million were spent on listing and stock related compensations and this is the big reason.
Direct quote by PLTR here: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2020/Palantir-Reports-Revenue-Growth-of-52-in-the-Third-Quarter-Raises-Full-Year-2020-Guidance/default.aspx

We incurred a loss from operations of $847.8 million, which includes $847.0 million in stock-based compensation following our recent direct listing.

I would like to remind everyone that this is a 1 TIME THING. Put simply, this means that PLTR won't have as excessive losses next quarter as they did this last quarter.
Additionally, let me go into further detail on this and not just leave it to that.

• PLTR's quarterly operating expenses for the past 3 quarters were at around ~260 million.
• PLTR's operating expenses this quarter were ~987 million.

ADDITIONALLY...
PLTR also had a higher R&D cost this quarter that just passed. Normally they'd pay 80 million on R&D, but somehow ended up paying ~300 million this quarter. No one knows why, but this is another thing that influenced PLTR's earnings.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2020/Palantir-Reports-Revenue-Growth-of-52-in-the-Third-Quarter-Raises-Full-Year-2020-Guidance/default.aspx

On September 30, 2020, in connection with the Direct Listing, we incurred $769.5 million and $8.4 million of stock-based compensation using the accelerated attribution method related to the satisfaction of the performance-based vesting condition for RSUs and growth units, respectively, that had satisfied the service-based vesting condition as of such date.

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#4 PLTR financials moving forwards
PLTR is deep in bed with the government and the Biden regime although may look like it would be against using PLTR is in fact secretly very pro-surveillance e.g pro Palantir.
Here's some of the known organizations in the US Govt that use PLTR:

1. CDC
2. Office of the Secretary
3. Food and Drug Administration
4. Immigration and Customs Enforcements / ICE
5. Internal Revenue Service / IRS
6. National Institute on Drug Abuse
7. DOD/ARMY - ACC Aberdeen Proving Ground
8. Coast Guard / DHS
9. DOD/NAVY - Naval Information Warfare Systems Command
10. US Attorney's Offices / DOJ
11. US Special Operations Command / SPEC OPS

Boys. The big institutional people know these things. You just found this out. See how deep PLTR is already in bed with the Government?????? Palantir IS the next Raytheon/Lockheed of DATA aggregation and visualization.
UPCOMING EARNINGS
I've done some quick maths and it looks like PLTR is more likely to be in positive earnings this quarter and with a 0.02 cent EPS target, we can easily assume that they'll destroy this with maybe 0.04 or 0.08 EPS. In the worst case scenario, PLTR's EPS this quarter could be somewhere around MINUS -0.05 ish due to interview costs and ad/campaigning costs that were not there before the company was listed.
WHAT CAN DESTROY PALANTIR
Now, there's big possible downsides and Palantir can fail IF contracts that expire are not renewed. That's biggest REAL reason for Palantir's balance sheet getting screwed.
I've seen a disturbing pattern with PLTR's financials and that's that every year, it's R&D cost is rising by between 150 and 350 million dollars. This is quite a bit of negative revenue and if new contracts are not constantly coming in, PLTR's balance can start going into the negative.
WHAT WILL NOT DESTROY PALANTIR
Some people may have concerns over the new left leaning government dumping PLTR. An article was posted that is behind a paywall EVERYWHERE that goes something like this:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cdc-officials-urge-biden-team-to-dump-palantirs-covid-tracker
In my opinion, i believe this is inconsequential and that a few people crying to daddy Biden to kill a multimillion contract with PLTR is a stretch. Also we know the current new Biden team has his hands full and will have them full for at least the next 1 year with what's going on.
There is no time to deal with a few crybabies and even if he did deal with it and did decide to kill the PLTR Tiberius Covid tracker contract with the CDC which he WONT, these things take months and years to deal with, and by then the contract/s will have already brought PLTR tons of money and revenue in.
HOW MUCH DOES KARP AND HIS GOONS GET PAID
Short answer is... A LOT. The amounts below are PER YEAR. That's a lot of money in the hole and contributes to annoying amount to why PLTR is always just at the edge of just barely being profitable.
https://preview.redd.it/ba58nqcurob61.png?width=2615&format=png&auto=webp&s=55d45833faad4d60ea8dc142a9601c44b4cc7395
Palantir's prospectus 311 page document's 130 last pages are almost all exclusively talking about extremely complicated options trading schemes that are made by Cohen and others to make sure they can squeeze out a LOT of money out of PLTR.
Mithril Investments has existed from before and is not a new company. Owned by Thiel/Cohen/Karp as a way to launder and exchange options for more options and more money for all 3 of them. Also Shyam Sankar to me feels corrupt which scares me a bit, he's had some very shady dealings and has brought his wife in PLTR that gets paid 200k per year.
Prospectus Document: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1321655/000119312520230013/d904406ds1.htm
I suggest you skim through it, it contains EVERYTHING about Palantir.
Palantir is going to need to have to be getting AT LEAST 500 million in NEW contracts per year to REMAIN BARELY profitable. It's doable in my opinion, but just barely and it's why they made the company public to try and get more people's attention and increase the inflow of contracts.
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#5 Soros and his 21 million shares
First of all, i think we can all agree that Soros can suck it.
If you've read a few articles here and there, you'll know that Soros owns/owned 1% of Class A PLTR shares. No one knows whether he's sold them yet or if he's an DPO holder who'll sell 3 days after February's earnings.
Whether he sells them or buys more will be mostly inconsequential in my opinion. We see dips and pumps every day. He legally cannot sell his shares all at once, he'll have to sell certain amounts daily and over time. This will create annoying sideways motion as shares exchange hands and consolidation starts for 2-3 weeks until his and insider shares exchange hands.
Nothing special to see here, move along just a little draw down resulting in some consolidation.
PLTR is exposed to OIL more than anything, so fluctuations in the general market and general market crashes affect PLTR much less than other stocks. Also PLTR does not track ANY benchmarks. NONE.
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#6 DPO expiry 3 days after earnings in February
To my limited knowledge, this is how BIG plays who are holding DPO shares usually work:

• If a stock has performed well up to earnings and investors are more than happy with the returns, they're more likely to not sell their stock or just sell less than they normally would.
• If a stock hasn't performed as well as investors thought, these investors are more likely to sell stock or reduce their positions more than normal.

There's a total of 1.16Billion Class A PLTR shares currently (Give or take don't flog me). We are currently trading with ~250 million shares while the rest are locked away in the DPO.
When those shares are "unlocked" in February, the price of the stock won't be diluted. These shares already exist and are accounted for. They are simply locked. Also when they are unlocked, the share price won't simply multiply because all shares are now tradeable.

According to Palantir’s after-hours filing with the SEC this afternoon, the company has 1.16 billion Class A shares, 484 million Class B shares and 1 million Class F shares on its cap table outstanding today, or a total of roughly 1.64 billion. Only Class A shares will trade, and Class B and F shares are convertible to Class A shares on a one-to-one basis. On a fully diluted basis, which Palantir says represents 2.2 billion shares total according to its most recent S-1 filing, the company is valued at $16 billion. The difference between those two aggregate numbers comes from outstanding stock performance grants, warrants and other financial instruments.

What WILL affect stock price:

• Employees exercising their non class A options into Class A shares. This IS dilution.
• The bigwigs e.g Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and a few other bigshots exercising their options and then selling them for a profit.

To note, regular employees will barely affect the price of the stock with their miniscule share holdings. Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and a handful of other high ranked executives in PLTR are the ones that will create a tiny but manageable ripple in the stock price.
What COULD affect the stock price a lot:

• Massive sell off by the big institutional holders.
• Not shorters. (Citron and Citi can suck it, we're in control here)
• People with weak spaghetti wet paper hands.
• Everyone fomoing the same weeklies e.g like when everyone bought Jan 15 calls on everything.
• Big but silent scare campaign (that's already going on) to scare off normies like us.

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#7 What does PLTR do, tldr.
Imagine Facebook's database of everything about everyone & Youtube's Database of everything & Geolocation data in a database made by the US Army for known terrorist cells.
Palantir allows you to select and match varied data TYPES from several different database, combine it in any way you want and visualize it so that it's human readable by even the dumbest person in the room so that even they can see patterns and come to conclusion on a subject matter.
It's kind of like filling an excel sheet with data and then visualizing it with a bar chart, except the date you filled the sheet with can be anything and not just numbers or dates or countries and you can make various combinations using all the different rows of data to maybe come up with a pattern to something like how to best distribute the Covid vaccines in the counties in a very specific state in the US.
Literally what you see in SciFi movies where people combine random data by smashing keys on a keyboard and somehow find the murderer, the location of a terrorist or the percentage that someone will commit a murder in the future based on a lot of random data about that person or the area, country, family, history... anything.
While this all might sound super cool and amazing, it is. Maybe in 10 years time there will be a few more companies doing this, but for now, it's only Palantir, Circles, Alteryx and a few other private entities that do this type of thing. Many of them work with governments and are hush hush due to the kinds of things they use this type of software for (terrorist cells, warzones, etc) and the public backlash this could cause.
tldr: Glorified data aggregator and visualization platform/software with different access levels for different people.
PLTR is superbly positioned to offer their software to SLOW and Boomer like organizations like Governments.
Governments are stupid and don't have neither the time, nor technical knowledge to develop this software themselves for internal use. This is what PLTR capitalizes on and why Governments use them so much.
Governments could have spent the a fraction of the money they spend on PLTR contracts to make the software themselves but only for their own internal systems and use, but they can't and if they tried, they'd fail because technocracy in governments is not a thing. By the time they'd even complete a project like this, it'd likely be out of spec, unusable and would require further development and money and we know how slow and bad governments are at doing even the basics. Again PLTR wins because of this.
PLTR is likely NOT to be adopted by giants like Google or FB or other modern tech organizations of any size because they are not stupid. They have their own purpose built internal systems that they use to do everything related to data aggregation and visualization because they have the technical knowledge and resources. Buying PLTR for their use is a joke.
PLTR capitalizes on being general a general purpose tool and is set up manually by an engineer over the course of 4-10 days for each customer. The engineer customizes and configures the system for each company's custom use since the software allows you to do so. Regular aggregation and visualization software CAN do the same, but typically lacks data input types and features that PLTR has because PLTR has cultivated a special set of features over many years that were suggested by their existing clientele in battlefields and other places.
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#8 Other Information
\*Big known PLTR Holders*\**
https://preview.redd.it/a404oalxrob61.png?width=1631&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c2dbcfac5a7ca207127771ec4e3133f8d943359
\*PLTR's Price List (2019)*\**
https://www.esi.mil/Download.aspx?id=7186
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\*Personal TA and Crayon Mania*\**
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLTnrjqL4dw-PLTR-Risky-April-100-200-possibility/
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLT5YcdCye0-PLTR-Schizzo-Technical-Analysis/
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLTCkCTvtqM-PLTR-PLTR-train-leaving-the-station-get-ready/
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\*PLTR stock pumping events*\**

• 7'th Jan - Interview
• 26'th Jan - Demonstration
• 11'th Feb - Earnings
• ~15'th Feb - DPO expiration - Havoc

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\*Similar Companies*\**

• PLTR - Palantir - Stock Price ~$25 - Market Cap 48bln
• AYX - Alteryx - Stock Price ~$125 - Market Cap 8bln
• Semantic Research - Private

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\*Known Contract Info*\**

• 240 million Palantir Air Force contract expiring soon in 3 months. If it's re-signed, it'll be a big catalyst for a PLTR pump. If not, it'll be a sad dump day.
• Mithril, investment/financial company owned by Karp and Thiel buys a 3.15million share stake in Palantir. Somehow this makes them major stakeholders.
• Sompo holdings has 5% of all PLTR shares.

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\*Past and new US KNOWN gov contracts. Source* govtribe.com\\**
https://preview.redd.it/kbim7afrrob61.png?width=1392&format=png&auto=webp&s=9abc99d9995c4972919e275f407e1bba6382dfdd
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\*Quotes from Won and LOST contracts from Federal Agencies*\**
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH) - WON

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) intends to award a contract without providing for full and open competition to Palantir Technologies, Inc., 100 Hamilton Ave., Suite 300, Palo Alto, CA 94301.

Veteran Health Association - WON

The pandemic-related data management and operational decision-support requirements have led the program office to determine that the Palantir data management and analytics platform is the only viable solution that would maintain the current operational capability, without a degradation in VHA COVID-19 decision-support.

AFLCMC Wright Patterson AFB (DOD - USAF - AFMC - AFLCMC) - LOST

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) held meetings in January/February 2020 timeframe with potential vendors to determine their capabilities and their abilities to meet this mission requirement. They met with Palantir, Recorded Future, Altyrex, In-Q-tel and Semantic AI. From the information they gathered in those meetings it was determined that Semantic AI would be the only company that could fully meet the requirements of this effort without further delaying the project and incurring additional costs

​

​
Now friends, here's my position on PLTR. I'll be holding onto it for the next year. If it's not at least 300% by then, i'm selling it and moving on to the next stock. App i'm using is Revolut.
Also yes, i'm ALL-IN only on Palantir because i know my money will multiply itself in the short term. I'm not holding this till 2025 as others are supposedly doing. I'm selling in 2022 with 300% or more profit. PLTR is severely undervalued, underpriced because it's a DPO. Give it till EOY and we're going to be rich. If it was an IPO it'd be trading at 180+ already imho.
I've spent the last month and a half holding PLTR. I've gone full schizzo mode when it comes to PLTR. I lose sleep daily and i love it. I hadn't slept for 37 hours a few days ago because i spent so much time researching PLTR and scraping the internet for all possible information.
I come from an IT/Development background, so i understand what PLTR does completely.
My PT's for PLTR are:

• 48-89 by March or April.
• 75 - 125 by EOY.
• 200+ 2022 IF they solve their income and constantly increasing R&D cost issues.

https://preview.redd.it/4t0k1ujprob61.png?width=407&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b3a16265edafa290432e6b79f9009e3df99f495

Welcome to… a series I don’t have a name for. Tracking Trump? Trump Watch? Do titles really matter?
Housekeeping:

• HOW TO SUPPORT: I know we are all facing unprecedented financial hardships right now. If you are in the position to support my work, I have a patreon, venmo, and a paypal set up. No pressure though, I will keep posting these pieces publicly no matter what - paywalls suck.
  
• NOTIFICATIONS: You can signup to receive notifications when these posts are done.
  

Investigations

Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron again ruled against the Trump Organization, ordering the company to turn over more documents to New York Attorney General Letitia James. In December, Judge Engoron required the Trump Org to produce records it had tried to argue were shielded by attorney-client privilege. The judge went further this time, ordering that the company’s communications with a law firm also had to be given to AG James.

Some communications that had been marked as privileged, he wrote, were “addressing business tasks and decisions, not exchanges soliciting or rendering legal advice.” He also said that communications related to public relations were not of a legal nature and that privilege was waived in some circumstances where third parties were involved in the discussions.

James’ office is conducting a civil investigation into whether Trump inflated his assets in financial statements to obtain bank loans and understated them elsewhere to reduce his tax bill. While the probe is wide-ranging, the rulings from Engoron focus on Trump’s Seven Springs property in Westchester County, New York. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is also looking into the property as part of his criminal investigation of the Trump Organization.
Now that he is no longer in office, the IRS is expected to advance its review of a $72.9 million tax refund Trump claimed and received in 2010. The tax agency has not given any indication of how it may rule and it’s possible the public may never learn of the outcome either way. If the IRS determines the refund was not issued appropriately, Trump could be required to pay it back with interest - a more than $100 million debt at a time when his biggest properties are “suffering severe revenue losses”.

• Note that the commissioner of the IRS is still Charles Rettig, appointed by Trump in 2018. His term is slated to end in November 2022. Rettig has numerous conflicts of interests, including a 50% share of two units in a Trump building that has earned him $100,000-200,000 a year since 2006.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) told the Washington Post that he will continue to seek Trump’s tax returns. Ultimately, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen can unilaterally surrender Trump’s tax returns to the committee. There is a court case still open on the matter, but the judge is waiting on the Biden administration to take a position before moving forward. In other words, the Biden administration can decide to no longer fight the committee’s request.

• Trump-appointed judge Trevor McFadden ordered the new administration to give the former president’s attorneys 72 hours’ notice if it decides to give Trump’s tax returns to Neal’s committee. The Treasury and DOJ have until March 3 to submit a status report to the court; lacking a Senate-confirmed Attorney General may lead to another month-long delay in proceedings.

Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, have opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the state’s election results. On Wednesday, numerous officials in state government - including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger - received requests to preserve documents related to “an investigation into attempts to influence” the election.

Of particular note in Ms. Willis’s letter was the wider scope of the investigation. Potential violations of state law include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration,” the letter states.

While the probe reportedly focuses on Trump’s Jan. 2 call to Raffensperger pressuring him to “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s win, unnamed officials told the New York Times that Trump’s calls to Governor Brian Kemp, AG Chris Carr, and state election officials, as well.

Money and properties

Before leaving office, former President Trump issued a directive allowing his four adult children and two of their spouses to receive Secret Service protection for six additional months, at no cost. Normally, only the president, wife, and their minor children are entitled to the security. In addition to Trump’s adult children, he ordered Secret Service protection for three former officials: Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, chief of staff Mark Meadows, and national security advisor Robert O’Brien.

The perk for the Trump family is expected to cost taxpayers millions of dollars and further stress the elite federal security force, which in the past four years had to staff the largest number ever of full-time security details — up to 42 at one point...

An analysis by watchdog group CREW found that the Trump family took twelve times as many trips with Secret Service protection than the Obamas did: “On average, Obama’s family took 133.3 protected trips per year, while the Trump family has taken an average of 1,625 annually.” Many of the trips taken by Trump’s adult children were to benefit their private business, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in the process.

In February 2017, Eric and Don Jr. flew to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf club, which cost the Secret Service more than $200,000. The same month, Eric flew to the Dominican Republic to potentially relaunch a failed Trump-branded resort project, which cost $20,000. Eric Trump has visited Uruguay twice for Trump Organization business, costing taxpayers $97,830 in 2017, and $80,786 in 2019. And those are just the receipts we have obtained so far.

After losing the election, Trump managed to shift over $400,000 of donor funds into his private business. The majority - $331,000 - came from his campaign’s joint committee with the RNC. The remainder was donations directly to Trump’s reelection campaign. In total, the joint committee spent $4.3 million with the Trump Organization; his reelection campaign spent $2.8 million.

Two days after the election, on November 5, the joint-fundraising committee paid $11,000 to Trump’s hotel empire. A week later—after the Associated Press, Fox News and other major media outlets had already called the race for Joe Biden—the same committee put another $294,000 into Trump’s hotel business to rent space, order catering and pay for lodging.

Room rates at Trump’s D.C. hotel have more than doubled around March 4 due to a Qanon conspiracy. According to the baseless theory, Trump will be sworn in for a second presidential term on March 4, the day presidents took office prior to 1933. It gets crazier than that, but the main takeaway is that the Trump Organization wants to profit from the Qanon movement by changing the room rates from $476 a night to $1,331 a night on March 3 and 4.
Trump seems likely to reside at his private Mar-a-Lago club despite challenges issued by neighbors after an attorney for Palm Beach sided with the former president. In his 1993 agreement with the town, Trump agreed to change the property from a residence to a private club, barring him from making it a full-time residence. However, Palm Beach attorney John “Skip” Rudolph accepted Trump’s assertion that he’s an employee of Mar-a-Lago who just happens to also live there, which is not prohibited in the town’s zoning laws. Rudolph recommended the town council allow Trump to live at his club; no decision has yet been reached.

Marion, Trump’s attorney, has tried to counter suspicions that Trump is not actually a bona fide employee of the club by telling the council that the former president now walks around the grounds acting as if he’s “the mayor of Mar-a-Lago.” He also showed the council a list of Trump’s jobs at the club, including the sort of greeter job that senior citizens take at big-box stores: “welcomes/thanks those attending” events.

Scotland’s Parliament declined to open an investigation into how Trump obtained his golf courses in the country, saying it was a matter best left to law enforcement. Some Scottish lawmakers have been calling for the government to issue an “unexplained wealth order” to probe whether any financial crimes were committed in the course of purchasing or operating his business. In the 16 years since Trump first incorporated in Scotland, none of his companies have made a profit. In fact, they’ve run up losses of $75 million and owe around $216.5 million to U.S. companies and trusts in Trump’s name.

...[Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick] Harvie said the purchase of Menie and the Turnberry golf resort were part of Mr Trump's "huge cash spending spree in the midst of a global financial crisis".
Mr Harvie said that the House of Representatives had heard testimony which stated: "We saw patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering" - with particular concern expressed about Mr Trump's golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.

Illinois Judge Sophia Hall ruled that Trump’s Chicago hotel is liable for violating environmental laws by using Chicago River water without a permit. The state attorneys general office brought the case against Trump’s hotel in 2018, stating the property uses more than 19 million gallons of river water a day to cool its air-conditioning systems. Judge Hall has not yet set a penalty, but the AG is asking for the maximum $50,000 each for two violations, plus an extra $10,000 for every day of the 3 years the violations persisted.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s final financial disclosure reports reveal that between January 1, 2020, and January 20, 2021, the couple earned between $23 million and $120.6 million in combined outside income. $1.4 million of the total originated from Ivanka’s involvement with Donald Trump’s D.C. hotel. Furthermore, despite agreeing to divest his $25-50 million stake in Cadre, Kushner never followed through.

Miscellaneous

Far-right platform Parler was in negotiations with the Trump Organization to give Trump, then the president, an ownership stake in exchange for his membership. According to Buzzfeed News, former Trump campaign manager brought the idea to Trump last year as a way to counter Twitter and Facebook. Parler reportedly offered the president a 40% stake if Trump began posting exclusively on their app.

Four sources told BuzzFeed News that Parscale and Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon met with Parler CEO John Matze and shareholders Dan Bongino and Jeffrey Wernick at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago in June 2020 to discuss the idea. But the White House counsel’s office soon put a stop to the talks, one person with knowledge of the discussions said, ruling that such a deal while Trump was president would violate ethics rules.
...Discussions were revived in the weeks following the election, according to two people involved, but the deal fell apart after the Capitol invasion. Following that event, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon kicked the company off its cloud hosting service, forcing the site offline.

Trump resigned from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) last week with an irate letter after the group voted to hold a union disciplinary hearing over his role in the insurrection. SAG accused Trump of inciting the attack on the Capitol and “sustaining a reckless campaign of misinformation aimed at discrediting and ultimately threatening the safety of journalists,” ultimately seeking his expulsion from the union.
Trump’s letter (pdf) to SAG President Gabrielle Carteris opens with: “I write to you today regarding the so-called Disciplinary Committee hearing aimed at revoking my union membership. Who cares!” He then says he is “very proud” of his work on movies “such as Home Alone 2, Zoolander and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps…” After declaring “[y]our organization has done little for its members, and nothing for me,” Trump resigns from the union.

First-time traders are getting a free financial education on YouTube, but not everyone is as they seem:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/02/13/inside-murky-world-investment-advice-youtube/
Alternative link to article: https://archive.vn/qLxkd
edit - added full article text
Kayla Kilbride decided to teach herself how to trade during a dinner at her family home in Los Angeles last November. Her sisters had been showing her their smartphones, displaying recent winnings on the trading app Robinhood and the conversation around the table kept turning to stocks.
Unemployed and in the midst of the pandemic, the 24-year-old quickly became hooked, waking up at 4.30am to study the markets before they opened, watch YouTube tutorials and simulating trades for six hours a day, four days a week.
“When I first heard the words bullish and bearish I had to Google them,” Kilbride says. “YouTube has been the most educational platform for me, which is so funny. I never thought I'd ever say that.”
Kilbride is one of hundreds of thousands of young people bored and stuck at home turning to YouTube to learn the tricks of the trade. Apps like Robinhood, WeBull, ThinkorSwim and eToro have allowed anyone to buy and sell shares and financial instruments, but many have no idea what they are doing. Top trading channels have up to half a million subscribers each, and live streams of traders studying their screens are watched by thousands at a time.
Some are drawn by clips that attract clicks with colourful thumbnail images showing the presenter surrounded by dollar emojis and green arrows pointing up. Titles like “How one 19-year-old took his brokerage account to $187,000 (£135,000) in two months”, “How I made $1,000 in 25 minutes, and “This stock is about to explode!” promise stories of traders having fun and making fortunes at the same time.
One teenage YouTuber known as Biaheza regularly posts about the money he makes on trading apps Robinhood and WeBull to his 725,000 subscribers.
In one, he lets a stray cat decide whether he should buy $10,000 worth of Tesla puts or calls - leveraged options betting against and for the stock respectively - by placing the words “puts” and “calls” on a piece of paper placed under two dishes. The cat picked puts, Tesla shares went down, and Biaheza made $1,000.
This week, the 19-year-old shared a video in which he borrowed $70,000 from Robinhood to place on Tesla, eventually making himself $5,000.
Reddit, a very different social network, has been put at the centre of the GameStop bonanza that rattled markets last month. But YouTube also lit up with videos explaining or promoting the phenomenon. One of the heroes of the saga was Roaring Kitty, a YouTuber who also worked as a financial advisor. A Massachusetts securities regulator is now investigating whether the trader, real name Keith Gill, broke securities rules by advising which stocks to buy. Arguably YouTube's broadcasts have more power over the market than forums because they hit the web as a finished product that cannot be altered, allowing one skilled presenter to broadcast to many.
Tom Sosnoff, who sold his brokerage ThinkorSwim to TD Ameritrade for $606m in 2009, has since become a hit on YouTube with his Tasty Trades channel becoming a stop-off for more risky investment strategies.
Tasty Trades is focused on grey area instruments, like leverage, options and futures. Financial experts warn that these are challenging, high risk and can be low reward. Sosnoff, says the interest in alternative trading is a reaction to the tedium of traditional financial TV.
“There was a demand for intelligent, challenging financial content, because to me, Bloomberg and CNBC and places like that were full of stuff that anybody can watch, but it wasn't intellectually challenging,” he says. “Who cares what somebody else thinks? Who cares what the news is? I'm not looking for somebody to repeat the news to me. I'm looking for somebody to explain to me how the markets work and how can I make this actionable.”
Kilbride, who now trades just one hour a day after finding a job, says YouTube creates more good than harm. When she decided to move from fake trades to real money she started small and, after one big loss, is now up around 20pc from a starting point of $500. But not everyone will take her measured approach.
“I think overall it's probably good for markets that more people are educating themselves and that you don’t need a fancy Ivy League degree to do it,” says Vincent Deluard, a macro strategist for the brokerage StoneX and Professor of finance at Saint Mary's College in California. “Information should be public.”
"The people who fall for the YouTube videos with the man standing by a fancy red car will lose money, that is just the way markets work."
Clem Chambers, chief executive of stocks, shares and cryptocurrency website ADVFN, says people are falling for “conspiracy theories” on YouTube that promise thousands of dollars. “They’re all rubbish,” he says.
Chambers, who has 30 years of trading experience, says he recognises a similar pattern as during the dotcom boom, which he says scared an entire generation off investing.
“It is a tragedy because investing in the stock market is one of the few ways a normal guy can become wealthy,” he says. “But there's a whole group of people that try to ensnare the beginner. There's a whole gauntlet of people that will strip the unwary of their money.”
eToro, a social trading app which is available in the UK, warns on its website that 67pc of retail trader accounts lose money. Even amateurs with a level head are likely to make 3pc gains at most. Those pushing between 5 and 10pc would be destined for some of the best firms in the world, not YouTube.
YouTube traders can still generate revenue from their streams even if they make a loss trading. Those with more than 10,000 views are eligible to receive a cut of YouTube's targeted advertising revenue. Many sell merchandise and some receive compensation for promoting trading apps.
“The problem is when you have got videos saying how to spot ‘hot stock’,” says Susannah Streeter, senior markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. “It’s almost like it has become a game and people are treating the market like it is a form of entertainment, not a strategy.”
Ironically, Streeter says the vast amount of videos and user commentary on YouTube is helping the industry the presenters are trying to disrupt. “I would expect that hedge funds are analysing the YouTube videos that are being posted, as they are watching social media posts,” she says. With algorithms that take into account what is trending on Twitter, it should come as little surprise.
"YouTube is completely unregulated. When you get official investment advice published by a broker then the person publishing the advice is a licensed individual who is certainly culpable for the statements that they make.” says Kevin Mak, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “And that's not really the case for YouTube broadcasters.”
YouTube says it doesn’t allow “get rich quick” schemes but did not return the Telegraph’s inquiries into what it was doing to curb "pump-and-dump" schemes where an investor hypes to stock to sell at the peak.
As regulators will attest, it is incredibly hard to prove market manipulation. Many of the accounts that appear to be spamming comment sections with the names of certain stocks are pseudonymous. The Federal Trade Commission says it is keeping an eye on influencers who promote gambling, and British politicians have called on a ban of celebrities from Love Island and Geordie Shore promoting unregulated foreign exchange trading.
Vocal critics of the disruptors fear speaking out after a social media pile-on for anyone who dared to fault them. Hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen left Twitter after his children received threats amid the GameStop backlash. Short-seller Andrew Left, whose company Citron was one of the hedge funds to spark the battle with small-time traders, said in a YouTube video last month that his company - once the anti-establishment - would no longer publish short-selling research.
Professor Joel Hasbrouck, Stern School of Business, New York University, says he occasionally finds teachings of value on YouTube, although these are few and far between.
“For better or for worse, YouTube is a repository of popular wisdom, experience and folklore,” he says. “It appeals to our affiliation tendencies. We're told that maybe if we all pull together on this one we can bend the market to our advantage,” he says.
This coordination would be prosecuted by British and US officials if it were arranged by two large banks and caught on trading room chat transcripts, he says. But don’t expect this Wild West to be tamed anytime soon.
“In this instance the players are small and dispersed,” he says, “and the coordination is loose and casual, so regulation seems unlikely.”

Curiosity killed the cat, and I guess I meow'd, Why is Scopely naively culling their crowd? I browsed for reviews and was looking for more, After some cues, I looked on glassdoor. Honest review? Most of them not, But then I found one, my attention it got. Take a gander and read it sounds really true, It explains a lot from an employee's point of view. A money-grubbing company with only one goal, PMs who'd do anything, probably even selling their soul. This would explain the shitty events that we've had, Stuff like, "Power Cores to hit daily milestones" that make me sad. There's a link at the bottom so you can verifies, It's hard to read with my really red eyes.
​
I have been working at Scopely full-time
Pros
The company culture itself is great, and there are wonderfully talented people on each team in design, art, ux, research, and engineering. They provide free lunch. The facilities are large and despite the flaws in their games, they're making stupid amounts of money, so if you keep your head down and avoid confrontation (i.e an opinion), you can probably be comfortable for a while at Scopely.
Cons
Take a very close look at the fact that the positive reviews are all from Product Managers, and anything negative is from a different position. Even when they're anonymous, you can tell from the catchy words like "growth", "initiative", "elevation", "synergy", etc. You know, the kind of things people who want you to buy what they're selling would say. That is because Scopely is a political minefield where Product Managers reign supreme. If you don't play the game and put up any resistance to a decision a PM makes, your time at the company is limited and they *will* find a bus to throw you under and force you out. People here are exhausted by the politics and being forced to implement every idea conceived by a PM, good or bad. If something good happens to an app's revenue or retention, a PM will get the credit. If something bad happens (maybe a feature/event doesn't do so great, or there's a dip in revenue, etc), it's design/art/ux/the janitor's fault. PMs have gotten credit for features that were finished before their first day of work. We can't make the time to fix or improve something that would lead to a better user experience and overall game, but we can drag out the development of a game for an extra year so that a PM can make their team drop everything to copy mechanics and/or features from the latest app that they've downloaded. PMs have a special bonus structure that they reap the benefits of, because they control the development schedule and can manipulate it to ensure they hit their 'goals' to get that $$$. An entry level PM will not only make more money than anybody else on the team, but have more power than a seniodirector level of any other role. Scopely will nickel and dime salary offers for any other department, but a PM can come in easily making 180k+ (because a VP/Director level PM ultimately signs off on any new hire on a team), and they'll get a senioVP/duke title without resistance. PMs get promotions and raises several times a year, but you'll find people in many other positions who have never gotten a raise, and have to fight tooth and nail for title promotion. Product managers have the power to veto literally any creative decision, whether it is design, ui/ux, or art. The company is bleeding designers specifically, because PMs are either finding manipulative ways to fire/drive them out of the company when they stand their ground on perspectives that conflict with what a PM order, or they are simply giving up and leaving. To them designers are, at best, a decoration that exists to write documentation and influence team morale. A designer who expects to create engaging, innovative experiences should look elsewhere because you will just be asked to copy some feature from another app that will probably have nothing in common with yours. If the art team wants something green and product wants it blue - guess what, you're making it blue but you'll get a stern talking to about being a 'negative impact on the team' for any resistance you might have shown. The craziest thing is, most of the Product Managers at the company have no (or minimal) experience in mobile, and it shows. They have Harvard business degrees and finance backgrounds, but often no clue how difficult or easy many facets of the development process are. And yet, the C-suite thinks they are all prodigies and hands the highest level of power to some of the most inexperienced people in the company. They are also conveniently some of the most volatile personalities at Scopely. Scopely doesn't call itself a "game" company - it's an "experience" company. Their customer base isn't made up of "players", they're "users". Scopely is here to make money regardless of what they have to do to their "users" to squeeze it out of them, and making fun, high quality games is not a part of that deal. It's pretty incredible the amount of resistance there is at this company to give the creative roles the authority to do their jobs, and to keep product managers in their appropriate lane. I'd like to keep my head low, but I'm so sick of seeing good people abused and bullied out of their jobs for trying to do their jobs and make the best games they can. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Advice to Management
You've built a culture where teams are bullied by their Product Managers and GMs. They're terrified of them, because rubbing a PM the wrong way, in ANY way, means a chat with HR about how you're not "aligned with Scopely's culture" and a personal tour to the front door. You've given the most power to the very people who drive your culture down, your talented employees out the door, and the quality of your product south, instead of elevating and celebrating those doing all of the most fundamental work. People have tried to tell you this and your response every time is to have a meeting with the Product Managers and ask what they think. You have never bothered to talk to any other departments at your company about the toxicity of the team structures you've created, and that's telling.
​
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Scopely-Reviews-E714070_P2.htm?filter.iso3Language=eng

Hello everyone!
We've recently started to receive lots of similar posts as a result of recent news regarding WhatsApp updating their terms and privacy policy, which will take effect on February 8th May 15th, 2021. Any WhatsApp users who do not accept these changes will be blocked from using the service. As a result, many are now migrating to Signal. We’ve decided to make this the designated thread for all things related to this topic.
Here is a direct link to Signal's terms and privacy policy (last updated May 25, 2018). Don't worry, it's not very long. For those wondering where Signal's revenue comes from: "We are a 501c3 nonprofit. We're not tied to any major tech companies, and we can never be acquired by one either. Development is supported by grants and donations from Signal users. https://signal.org/donate/"
Some related media coverage:

• Ars Technica: "WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app" by Dan Goodin
• XDA Developers: "WhatsApp updates its Terms and Privacy Policy to mandate data-sharing with Facebook" by Pranob Mehrotra
• The Hacker News: "WhatsApp Will Disable Your Account If You Don't Agree Sharing Data With Facebook" by Ravie Lakshmanan

Some topics you may want to discuss below:

• What is the best way to migrate from WhatsApp to Signal?
• How to convince WhatsApp contacts to install Signal?
• What are some pros/cons of Signal compared to WhatsApp?
• What are your most missed features from WhatsApp?
• How do some features work differently in Signal compared to WhatsApp?

We will be updating this post as events unfold. Be safe, and always remember the human.
Edits 1–38: A brief summary of events, by day:
Wednesday, January 6:

• WhatsApp informs its users that they are updating their terms and privacy policy.

Thursday, January 7:

• Elon Musk tweeted "Use Signal". Five hours later, the Signal team tweeted that verification codes were being delayed due to the surge in new people wanting to join Signal.
• Some people mistakenly invested in some random stock called 'SIGL', to which Signal tweeted: "Is this what stock analysts mean when they say that the market is giving mixed Signals? It's understandable that people want to invest in Signal's record growth, but this isn't us. We're an independent 501c3 and our only investment is in your privacy."
• Someone asked Signal whether usernames would be coming this year, to which they replied: "According to the office Magic 8-Ball, 'SIGNS POINT TO YES.'" They also shared a tip for how to easily migrate group chats from other apps to Signal: "Drop a group link into your former chat app of choice like you're dropping the mic on the way out."

Friday, January 8:

• Registration delays continued, but the Signal team said they were working on it with the help of carriers, and that the Signal service itself was operating normally. They also said: "Some new users are reporting that Signal is slow to display their Signal contacts. We're adding more capacity to keep up with all the new people searching for their friends on Signal. Hang tight!"
• The Signal team (u/signal_app) is now doing an AMA over on technology!!
• The team is currently taking a break from answering questions in the AMA, but will be back in that thread on Monday (Jan. 18?), so there is still time if you have any questions for them!

Saturday, January 9:

• Signal hit the #1 spot on the App Store in India, Germany, USA, Brazil, Finland, Hong Kong, Austria, and many other countries!
• There were still some registration delays. Signal said that carriers were "making adjustments on their side to keep delivering verification codes as quickly as possible."
• Facebook bought ads in order to promote Facebook Messenger when people searched for 'Signal' in the App Store. Signal's developers tweeted: "Facebook is probably more comfortable selling ads than buying them, but they'll do what they have to do in order to be the top result when some people search for 'Signal' in the App Store. P.S. There will never be ads in Signal, because your data belongs in your hands not ours."

Sunday, January 10:

• The Signal team tweeted: "Even though we're still breaking records, verification codes are back in the groove. Delivery delays have been eliminated across multiple cellular providers, so things should be more ASAP when you join the app."
• They also increased the group size limit from 150 to 1000!
• They then tweeted: "We continue to shatter traffic records and add capacity as more and more people come to terms with how much they dislike Facebook's new terms. If you weren't able to create a new group recently, please try again. New servers are ready to serve you."
• Elon Musk tweeted that he donated to Signal a year ago and "will donate more."

Monday, January 11:

• Signal raised the group call limit from 5 to 8! Reuters also reported: "The number of new users installing messaging app Signal every day is on track to cross 1 million, putting it closer to levels seen by larger rival WhatsApp [...] About 810,000 users globally installed Signal on Sunday, nearly 18-fold compared with the download numbers on Jan. 6, the day WhatsApp updated its privacy terms, according to data from research firm Apptopia." 🚀
• Some people were still mistakenly investing in some random stock. Signal's developers tweeted: "Update: Although the growth rates may look similar, this stock symbol still has absolutely nothing to do with us. We're an independent 501c3 nonprofit, but you can donate here to invest in your privacy: https://signal.org/donate/" 📈
• Signal announced that they are going to be rolling out chat wallpapers, an about field for your Signal profile, and animated stickers in a few days, as well as media auto-download settings and full-screen profile photos for iOS users (to match Android).
• Moses Tsali released a music video titled "Hit Me on Signal", filmed at the SpaceX Headquarters! 🎵

Tuesday, January 12:

• Our tiny unofficial community (signal) is now rocketing up Reddit's Top Growing Communities leaderboard. Last week, we were somewhere around #21.1k. Earlier today, we were at #135, right below AnimalsBeingBros. As of this writing, we're at #90 and have already passed ThatsInsane, which is insane! 🤯
• In their desperation, WhatsApp is now buying full page newspaper ads in India. 📰
• Signal is now ranked "at the top on App Store in 40 countries and on Google Play Store in 18 countries."

Wednesday, January 13:

• Signal's Brian Acton is now doing interview after interview with Indian mass media companies. Here is one with NDTV, where he talked about "Signal's India plans, its donation-only business model, and what makes it different from WhatsApp." 🇮🇳
• By now, many of our community members had submitted their own badges and profile pictures that they had placed in WhatsApp to show that they were moving to Signal. Inspired by this, Signal decided to tweet some of their own in multiple different languages. 🌍 Here is a blank template!
• Our community has now climbed all the way up to #61 on Reddit's Top Growing Communities leaderboard!
• Signal's Android app started with 10M+ installs on the Play Store on January 5, and it has now passed 50M+!
• u/Crazy-Lizard submitted an amazing collection of images (both in English and German) that you can set as your WhatsApp Status to convince your family & friends to switch to Signal, using an educational approach! This quickly became our top voted post of all time!

Thursday, January 14:

• Our community is now placed at #48 on Reddit's leaderboard! We've now made it into the top 50, with big names like sports, Jokes and reactiongifs. We have zoomed right past all other software-related communities in terms of popularity. Only apple and leagueoflegends remain above us!
• Acton has now said that they are aiming to add 100-200 million more Signal users in India alone over the next two years.
• Signal's founder, Moxie Marlinspike, has now tweeted: "If you've ever considered applying to work with us at Signal, now is a great time to get involved! We're just over here working on a plan to power the western hemisphere with the heat from our servers: https://signal.org/workworkwork/"
• Our wonderful community has now helped translate u/Crazy-Lizard's educational WhatsApp Status images into Slovak, Czech, Portuguese (PT), Finnish, Turkish, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese (BR), Italian, French, and Dutch! Get them here!

Friday, January 15:

• Our Reddit leaderboard saga continues! We've now reached spot #40, right between HolUp and PersonalFinanceCanada. 🇨🇦 We also made a list of posts in which our members can discuss Signal reaching the #1 spot on the App Store/Play Store in their own country. 🏆
• Signal tweeted: "We are so grateful for the outpouring of support from everyone who is contributing to Signal's ongoing operation and development. We're a 501c3 nonprofit and we couldn't do this without you. If you are on the fence about donating, you can give in here: https://signal.org/donate/"
• WhatsApp announced that they are going to delay the updating of their terms and privacy policy by three months due to the backlash. They were originally going to take effect on February 8th, but will now take effect on May 15th.
• Someone asked Edward Snowden (u/SuddenlySnowden) if he knew whether "Telegram is more secure and less influenced by corporate money than Signal". In reply, Snowden tweeted: "1) The consensus of the infosec community is that Telegram is significantly less secure than @SignalApp. 2) Signal is an independent non-profit with a $50m endowment—they can't be meaningfully influenced by money for a very long time. Telegram is a standard private company."
• The Signal service went down for about a day as the Signal team needed to add more capacity. They tweeted: "We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience."
• Signal's Moxie Marlinspike tweeted that they are now working on a group chat feature that will allow only admins to send messages in the group!

Saturday, January 16:

• signal is now at #26 on the Top Growing Communities leaderboard! If we had been included the curated "Top Growing Communities in Tech" leaderboard, we would be placed at #4, right between technews and TechNewsToday. We are flaming hot right now! 🔥
• At last: "Signal is back! Like an underdog going through a training montage, we’ve learned a lot since yesterday — and we did it together. Thanks to the millions of new Signal users around the world for your patience. Your capacity for understanding inspired us while we expanded capacity." 🙌
• In response, Snowden tweeted: "Everybody can get back to uninstalling #Whatsapp now." 😄

Sunday, January 17:

• Our community's climb on Reddit's leaderboard appears to be leveling off. We're now at #22 overall and "#3" in Tech, right after apple and technology, which isn't half bad actually! 🤔 Let's see if things begin to pick up again after Signal starts rolling out those new features they promised on Monday.

Wednesday, January 20:

• The initial hype is now clearly dying down, but our community's daily growth rate is still much larger than it was before WhatsApp made their announcement. Today we crossed 40k members! 🎉

Friday, January 22:

• Signal has now started rolling out chat wallpapers, an optional "about" field for Signal profiles, and the first official animated sticker pack to all beta testers! As always, the developers are now gathering feedback on the Signal Community forum. If you're a beta tester, check out our right-hand sidebar to get your own flair!

Saturday, January 23:

• Chamath Palihapitiya promised Signal a $10M donation if they could keep all of their own messaging infrastructure and copy WhatsApp's entire UI in order to get the whole world on board as easily as possible. Signal replied: "Hopefully there are a lot of people out there who don't need us to look exactly like their ex in order to fall in love, but you could help us make it possible for Signal to support 10M themes — one of which might look familiar enough for anyone who has a "type"..."

Thursday, January 28:

• Happy International Data Privacy Day! Signal's chat wallpapers, optional "about" field, and animated sticker pack are now officially rolling out to everyone.
• Signal also launched their first ever "global marketing campaign," using the cheapest billboard they could find somewhere in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It says: "No personal data was bought or sold in the creation of this video." #WeKnowNothing 🤣
• This campaign is starting to get serious! Signal just tweeted a more polished video ad, featuring Taraji Henson and ending with a shot of the same billboard. 👏 They are now here on signal as well, requesting photos of the billboard! 📸

Welcome to all newcomers, but also THANK YOU to all of our regular contributors who have shown up to sort by new, answer questions, and provide help! ⭐ As a reminder, this is an unofficial Reddit community (or "subreddit") that is run by the user community. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Signal Technology Foundation or Signal Messenger LLC.

My name is Jared A. Brock. Having just turned 35, I sat down to reflect on everything I’ve learned so far and made a list of the things I wish I learned far sooner. None of these are rules or commands for you to follow, just personal reflections from a decade of journaling. I hope they save you a lot of time, energy, and struggle:

1. “Save the best for last” is terrible advice.

A French monk taught me this one. Every morning, I put on the newest pair of socks in my drawer. Why wear the rattiest pair? When I sit down to eat, I eat the tastiest bits first. Why let them get cold? After every shower, I put on my favorite clean t-shirt. I have a great bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig scotch in my cupboard, but I probably won’t drink it for months because I received two bottles of reactor-aged Lost Spirits single malt for Christmas.
Why? Because life is hard enough and we aren’t promised tomorrow. This doesn’t mean we should throw caution to the wind and “live in the moment” at all times, but it does mean we should try to find the golden middle and glean a little bit of pleasure from every day we’re blessed to live. “Save the best for last” is poverty-mentality thinking. It expects worse in the future. Enjoy the best right now — in your marriage, parenting, work, travel, faith, friendship, contribution. Keep all the chips on the table. Be ready at all times to leave without regret.

2. Tools use us.

A hammer literally cannot hit a nail without using a human. A saw cannot cut through a board without using a human. A phone cannot deliver ads without using a human.

3. Avoid false dichotomies.

When given two great options, choose both. When given two horrible options, choose neither.

4. Failure is overcome by one word.

“Next.”

5. Ambition is ruinous for your happiness.

Most goal-setters (myself included) live much of life in anticipation of tomorrow, and when that day arrives, they’re either disappointed by their failures or underwhelmed by their successes.
Instead: trust the process. Whiskey, pasta, bread, beer, and cereal all require just two ingredients — wheat and water — but the outcome is completely different based on the process. Identity precedes action. Determine what you want to be, then find the process that will get you there every single time.

6. Forget what the market wants.

Listen to your gut. Your body knows the difference between good and great. Someone said you should never record a song or code an app or write an article unless it makes you laugh, cry, or orgasm. If an idea doesn’t move you, it won’t move an audience, no matter how “commercial” you think it is.

7. Give yourself a shove.

The best way to eat more candy, drink more vodka, and smoke more cigarettes is to leave them in the middle of the kitchen counter.
You get it. Willpower is useless. Instead, line up a series of little nudges to automatically get you through your day. If you want to work out, leave your shorts by the door or your cleats in your fridge. My blue diode glasses rest on top of my laptop so I have to protect my eyes before logging online. I can’t not see my vitamins when I brush my teeth, or chia seeds when I reach for the Brita. There’s a book beside my bed, toilet, desk, and car’s gear shifter.
Line up enough nudges and you can shove yourself in the right direction.

8. Grandma didn’t use toilet paper.

She used pages from the Sears catalog. Splinter-free wasn’t available until 1935. The Romans used sponges. The Greeks used clay. Francois Rabelais recommended using “the neck of a goose.” Arabians used their left hand.
Never assume our extremely unique cultural moment is “normal.”

9. Ninety-nine isn’t enough.

Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius. The difference between 99 and 100 is the difference between zero and one. Not-boiling, boiling.
Corollary: 101 doesn’t make it any more boiling.

10. Old people know better.

Honoring our elders is one of the most underrated practices in our newness-obsessed society. Sure, there are a ton of old crazy far-right conspiracy theorists, but there are also good people who have survived four wars, six recessions, and twelve presidents and are somehow still smiling. Get to know them.
Also: meet your old-person self. I try to invent a new word every week — one of them is preflection. To ponder the present through the eyes of your future self. Take an hour in silence to listen to your eighty-year-old self. They might know something you don’t.

11. Fire all your employees.

The employer-employee relationship creates an unhealthy power dynamic between humans that simply didn’t exist when we worked cooperatively to feed our clan or village. I love my work life so much more now that I only work with independent entrepreneurs who are my equals. For me, it’s either a one-man show (my writing business), an equal partnership (my film company), or a co-operative endeavor. Life’s too short to be a boss or be bossed around.

12. Accept that you are a voracious locust of doom.

Nail a roll of paper to the wall and write down everything you consume for a year — food, toilet paper, electricity, car fuel, movies, music, social media content, other people’s time, everything. See what I mean?
Saint Augustine said that the human heart can only fully be satisfied by one thing aside from God himself: everything. All the sex, all the money, all the power, all the possessions, all the glory. All of it. Nothing short of everything could ever fully satiate the human heart. We are wired for more.
Understanding this truth is the first step toward real contentment.

13. Awkward is awesome.

My best friend says that The Office gave society a beautiful gift: the ability to embrace cringe. When you meet someone new and it’s slightly weird, pretend you’re Michael Scott. Just glory and bask in the discomfort.
You can awkward-proof your life by being bold: Ask for discounts. Ask for refunds. Ask for phone numbers. Ask for pay raises. Ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. Lather yourself in awkward and pretty soon nothing sticks.

14. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life.

Hitler really was following his bliss by offing millions of Jews. I’m sure Jeffrey Dahmer genuinely enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Bernie Madoff seemed content to bilk charities for decades.
Happiness isn’t the purpose of life. It’s not even in the top ten. Happiness is a seasonal fruit, not a foundational root. Find firm and fertile ground.

15. There is no ugly.

My grandpa re-proposed to my grandma on their fiftieth wedding anniversary and called her the most beautiful woman he’s ever known. Old wrinkly grandma? Yes. Because we choose our definition of beauty through our thoughts, disciplines, habits, and patterns, be they conscious or otherwise.

16. We are what we consume.

The statistical average American is a walking bodybag of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, porn, pills, and digital stimulus. Imagine how different life would be if our only inputs were nature, sleep, sunlight, organic food, and embodied human interaction?
Guard your inputs carefully.

17. We’re going to die quite soon.

Make sure you live first. Practicing memento mori will help.

18. Fame is poison.

One in four Gen Zers thinks they’ll be famous by age 25. One in 3.9999999 Gen Zers are going to have a miserably disappointing life.
Why do people desire the attention of strangers? Because we all need to love and be loved, to know and be known, but are too afraid to risk personal heartbreak to seek it out. Attention is not affection. Influence is not intimacy.

19. Boomers are to blame for half our troubles.

The Me Generation took a free ride at the planet’s expense and are hellbent on taking the rest of it with them. They’re statistically low on empathy — blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that life is hard for everyone, and no one has it easier.

20. Children are dope.

Kids are the blood transfusion in our sick system. We need to stop manipulating, brainwashing, colonizing, and propagandizing them, and learn from them instead.

21. It doesn’t have to hurt.

Joy is a choice.

22. Watch comedy before calls and meetings.

Five minutes of gut-busting laughter will prime you for even the most tedious conference call. Your co-workers and customers all have tough lives like everybody else, so brighten their day by pre-brightening your own.

23. No ragrets.

Tattoo it on your neck. Most people play it far too safe. Instead: optimize your life for the least number of regrets and the most amount of selfless contribution.

24. There are better ways to vote.

I’ve manned several local voting stations, and I’ve also hob-nobbed with politicians in Canada, America, and the UK. The reality is that they don’t work for us. They work for their corporate sponsors and private interests.
Democracy isn’t dead. It just hasn’t happened yet, with all attempts to date being stillborn or aborted. Democracy = one voice one vote. Athens wasn’t a democracy — women, slaves, and tenants had zero say. America isn’t a democracy either — no representative system is, because it’s far too easy for private interests to buy politicians. The charade of voting is illusory. All elections are sham elections.
So what to do? Vote with your money and time and attention. One sham vote every four years versus tens of thousands of dollar-votes each year? It’s a no-brainer. My wife and I haven’t stepped foot in a Walmart in more than a decade because thousands of its suppliers are based in China, the billionaire heirs are anti-democratic tax-avoiders, and they treat their employees like indentured servants. Vote for pro-democracy third-party candidates if you must — just understand the game, and vote in the ways that actually matter.

25. Everything easy has already been done.

So run a little further.
And if it hasn’t been done, it won’t be as easy as it appears. The question to ask is: what’s been standing in the way this whole time? Achievement is all about knocking down obstacles. Just make sure what’s on the other side is rightly worth the effort.

26. Broccoli still tastes terrible.

But you’re not a child anymore. Adults do hard things.

27. Fixed-order scheduling > fixed-hour scheduling.

Discipline is great, but it’s also subject to the law of diminishing returns. Life is just too dynamic to schedule with military precision. Free yourself from the tyranny of “only people who wake up at 5 AM are successful.”
All hours are not created equal. It depends on your sleep drive and chronotype. Know yourself. Unapologetically get more sleep, then do your best work at your best time in your best state.

28. “Freedom” isn’t freedom.

America wasn’t founded on freedom. America was founded on violent autonomy.
The ancient Greeks had an entirely different definition of freedom: it was the ability to choose the right regardless of circumstance.

“We talk about freedom all the time, but we’ve stopped talking about freedom a long time ago. Now we’re talking about autonomy. Freedom is different than autonomy. Freedom has boundaries. Truth is one of those boundaries. And morality is one of those boundaries. Autonomy is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want in whatever way you want. The problem is this: If I’m autonomous and another person is autonomous, and I have preferences and those matter more than the truth, and that person has preferences and their preferences matter more than the truth, when two autonomous preference-seeking beings come together and their preferences don’t match, who is going to win? If truth is on the bottom shelf, truth won’t decide. What will decide will be power. And isn’t it ironic that in our quest for “freedom”, someone gets enslaved?” — Abdu Murray

29. The Marines were right: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

As teenagers, my friend Tyler and I were in a hurry to get somewhere quickly so we drove 120+ miles per hour for forty-five straight minutes before nearly crashing when the speed burned a footlong gash through the tire. By the time we replaced it with a spare, we were late to our destination by more than an hour.
But nevermind driving. Pump the life-brakes sometimes, or at least, let off the gas. You might get there faster, with less wear-and-tear on the engine.

30. The quest for wealth is destroying life.

We’ve commodified land, water, shelter, clothing, art, time, and nearly everything else. Very little remains, and it’s amassing into fewer hands.
We need a shared global vision. My invented word for it is benevitae: the sustainable flourishing of all creation. Our collective goal should be socioenviroeconomic sustainability. Where to start? We’d do well to let biology determine ecological sustainability and real democracy to determine economic fairness. Our current trajectory is worse than the Space Shuttle Challenger.

31. Most “leaders” aren’t leaders.

Celebrities, politicians, and book-hocking business gurus all call themselves leaders. They’re not.
Real leadership is influence that serves. True leaders are selfless and servant-hearted. They put the best interests of others ahead of their own. Politics and media, by comparison, attracts sociopaths like flies to firelight. Never give power to those who seek it. Nearly everyone worth following is dead.

32. Divide-and-conquer is a business model.

Near the end of high school, dozen friends and I binge-watched multiple seasons of LOST in our friend Mike’s basement. It was one of the most hilarious, riotous, enjoyable experiences we had as a group.
And it was the last show we ever watched together.
People used to go to restaurants in large numbers, to the movies by the dozen, climbing over each other for one of the limited video game controllers, packing out our churches, cheering on our sports teams by the busload. We were almost never alone, and we were far happier. Now we order in, watch Netflix, stream Minecraft, catch the highlights, watch porn, and go to bed. It’s killing us.
Resist the urge to be alone. It’s too easy, and it’s the exact opposite of what we really need. The #1 thing that’s correlated to human happiness is human togetherness.

33. Self-improvement won’t save us.

The great lie of individualist-consumerist culture is that we can improve our way to personal perfection and communal utopia. But it’s incrementalism at best.
It’s just chasing infinity.

34. We know nothing +/-.

On the scale of all that is known, and all that is knowable, our individual understanding is essentially mathematically zero. The entirety of human knowledge is a rounding error.
This is the beginning of humility.

35. The sun is not on fire

I was at an observatory in the Davis Mountains in Texas, and it was the first time I’d paid attention to astronomy since grade school. For three decades, I’d wrongly assumed the sun was a giant ball of flames.
But there’s no fire in space because there’s no oxygen in space. (It just looks like fire because of how our eyes perceive light through the atmosphere and prism.) As I stared at the real-time image of the sun on the observatory wall, I nearly wept. The sun actually looks like a giant, boiling, grey brain.
And then it hit me: I have so many assumptions to set aside and so much left to learn. So pay attention. Don’t worship the “question everything” mantra, but instead spend your life seeking truth, and wisdom, and understanding.
You know what you need to do to get where you want to be.

I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
 
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547
I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T

Intro

• "The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
  • "I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
• "For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
  • "We're spread way too thin."
• "If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
• RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
  • Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
  • ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
  • Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
  • Widespread match fixing
  • The Pandemic
    • "People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
    • "People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
      • "To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
      • "Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
      • "People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
• "It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
  • RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
    • He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.

CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association

"Who does this union really fucking serve?"

• RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
  
  • He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
    • He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
      • He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
    • Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
    • RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
    • Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
      • "and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
• He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
  
  • "We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
  • He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
  • "They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
• He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
  
  • He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
    • He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
  • He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
    • RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
  • "I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
  • "Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
    • "Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
    • "That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
• He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
  
• He also says their rankings are a joke
  
  • "Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
• He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
  
• "Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
  

ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission

"They have been put in an impossible position."

• RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
• "ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
  • "Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
  • "Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
    • Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
      • Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
  • "They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
    • "They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
• ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
  • He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
    • Also says more coaches being banned are coming
    • He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
• ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
  
  • "I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
  • "So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
    • "Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
• RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
  

Stream Sniping

"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"

• RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
  • On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
    • "Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
      • He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
        • He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
        • The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
        • "ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
• He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
• "All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
  • He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?

Match Fixing

"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."

• RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
  • "Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
• "Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
• Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
  • Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
    • They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
      • "I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
        • "Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
• RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
• "There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
  • "It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
• "It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
  • "I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
• He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
• "That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
  • "All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
• "I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."

North America

"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."

• RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
• There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
• He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
  • RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
  • He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
• He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
  • He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
    • They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
    • When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
    • "was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
    • He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
• He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
  • He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
• He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
  • He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
• He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
• He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
  • Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
• RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
• RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."

Talent

"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."

• RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
• He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
• Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
• He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
  • He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
• He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
• He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
• New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
• He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
• He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
• He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."

Valve

"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"

• Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
  • Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
• In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
• RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
• He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
• RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
  • A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
  • RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
  • RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
• RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
• Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
  • They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
• RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
  • Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
• He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
• Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
  • RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
• "It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
  • Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
• "Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
• "People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."

Closing Statements

"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."

• RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
• "We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
• "There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
• "How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
• "Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
• "The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
  • He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
• He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
  • "If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
    • "They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
• He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
• "Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
• "This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
• "You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
  • "Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
• "Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
  • "You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
• "I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
  • "I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
• "I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."

Hey everyone!
I’m excited to announce some recent developments regarding the Meridian Network. The past week has been difficult in many ways. However, hardship brought out the best in our fellow community members, even catalyzing some extremely promising growth as we await the release of PreSaga, Meridian’s own AMM Prediction Market dApp.
​
Meridian has recently hired a new team member after having to release a long-time admin who was caught creating alternate accounts and sending death and dox threats to users within the Meridian community, thus warranting immediate expulsion. Upon release, this individual has continued to harass the community, going as far as to make sinister phone calls to a long-time community member’s place of work. In addition, since being dismissed, this ex-moderator has incessantly written large amounts of unsubstantiated FUD in response to all content created about the Meridian Network. We highly encourage any of you to join our Telegram channels and reach out to us if you see any intensely negative comments about Meridian and need clarification. We will be transparent and honest, welcoming your concerns with open minds and receptive ears.
In addition, the team recently hired a YouTuber to create a video showcasing the features of PreSaga. After failing to deliver the video as promised, this content creator lashed out at Meridian and created a heated dispute. This was an issue that bothered the community because the team paid a decent sum of money for a defective product without ensuring the transaction was trustless or contractually bound in a meaningful capacity. Although an oversight by the team, this event was a valuable learning experience and will certainly never happen again.
The final kernel of hardship is one that leads directly into outstandingly positive news. The development of PreSaga has temporarily consumed the entirety of the foundation’s funds, approximately $60k USD. The dApp is designed to generate revenue for the foundation through fees, but until the mainnet release, the team is unable to engage in any type of marketing. However, this is where things become exciting.
True to Meridian’s mission to be a community governed DeFi project, a large group of long-time community members have collectively decided to fund and lead a riveting marketing campaign over the next two to three months. It will be funded from our own pockets, organized under our own time, and voiced through our own words. This speaks volumes to the inspiring passion demonstrated by our body of investors, setting us apart as proactive and determined to build this budding democracy of influencers.
​
In less than a week, we have already accomplished the following:

• Had PreSaga listed as hot news on DexTools.
• Established relations with Coinzilla, who will be assisting us as our central agency.
• Created the PreSaga Competition, a social media contest that will award 3000 LOCK in prizes, officially launching on Wednesday, February 3rd on The Meridian Network’s Telegram Channel.

​
Our future plans include but are not limited to:

• PreSaga review/preview by a Crypto YouTuber
• Articles published on at least two hot cryptocurrency websites.
• Facebook marketing campaign.
• Ad banner marketing campaign.

​
This week, we’ll be releasing a detailed timeline of marketing endeavors that will clearly illuminate what events will transpire in the months ahead. Transparency and lucidity are at the forefront of our mission. We want nothing more than to have a meaningful impact on the future of DeFi, inspiring others to do the same.
If you have any questions, come join our Telegram channel and participate. We are always excited to address any concerns and help people know more about this growing project. Being a member will also allow you to stay tuned for the upcoming competition this Wednesday!
Looking forward to talking with you all.
By You. For You.
​
TG: https://t.me/meridiannetwork
-The Meridian Network Community

Hey guys!
There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc..
Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not.
So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are.
P.S: startups, and seo loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too.

A bit of backstory:

If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.
So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover:

• Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how)
• Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads)
• Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time
• How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts
• How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO

Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO

Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right.
Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to "Step #2 - Keyword Research."
If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this:

• Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster.
• Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed.

If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on!

Technical SEO Basics

Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool.
Proper website architecture. The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more).
Serve images in next-gen format. Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them.
Remove duplicate content. Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other.
Update your ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. ]
Optimize all your pages by best practice. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages.
If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt.

Advanced Technical SEO

Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed.
Here’s how to do that:
Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings.
After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off.
So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following:

• Images being resized with CSS or JS. This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them.
• Images not being lazy-loaded. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image.
• Gzip compression not enabled. Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster.
• JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined. If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files.
• Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1.

Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course).
Lastly, if you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use Google Page Speed Insights*.*
In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:

1. LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
2. FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms
3. CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1

Step #2 - Keyword Research

Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy.
The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research.
First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations.
You can use the sheet to:

1. Prioritize content
2. Keep track of the publishing process
3. Get a top-down view of your web pages

And here’s what it covers:

• Target search phrase. This is the keyword you’re targeting.
• Priority. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3…
  • Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time.
  • Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords.
  • Priority 1 - These are low priority.
• Status. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by…
  • 1 - Not written
  • 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week
  • 3 - The article is being written
  • 4 - The article is in editing phase
  • 5 - The article is published on the blog
• Topic cluster. The category that the blog post belongs to.
• Monthly search volume. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword.
• CPC (low & high bid). Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. Pro tip: the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well.

Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research.

How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)

There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown).
Our favorite method, however, is as follows…
Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors.
The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche.
Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors.
Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO.
Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on.
Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet.
Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done.
Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input.
Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.
At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%.

Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages

Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways:

1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”).
2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword.

Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords.
You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO.
Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it.
Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer.
Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?”
Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links.
With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.”
What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them.

Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content

Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks.
As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like…

• Lead generation techniques
• SaaS marketing
• SEO content

After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them.
On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right:

1. Create a comprehensive content outline
2. Get the writing part right

Here’s how each of these work...

How to Create a Content Outline for SEO

A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes:

• Which headers and subheaders you should use
• What’s the optimal word count
• What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover
• If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.)

Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how.
At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article.
So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process…

1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead.
2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3.
3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles.
4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words).
5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers?

How to Write Well

There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article.
Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers):

1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points!
2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible.
3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2.
4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines)
5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read.
6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent.

Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations

Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.
If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t.
In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks.
To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all:

• Well-written
• Long-form
• Easy to navigate
• Well-formatted (to enhance UX)

So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!).
Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort.
In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone.
​

Pro Tip
Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not!
Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits.
For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content.

Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: “how do you do link-building?”

4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website

There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on.
We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide).
What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more:

1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.”
2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website.
3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web.
4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people.

Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more.
However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around:

• 10,000+ traffic within a week
• 15+ leads
• 50+ links

...And so much more, all through a single blog post.

Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing

“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”
I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right?
Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple…
“Right?”
Well, not quite.
The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps:

1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels)
2. Research the type of content your audience loves
3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value)
4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1

Nothing too new, right?
Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it.
Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study:
How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result.
A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about.
Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword).
We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive.
Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc.
Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users.
So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there:

1. How to create good content to drive users
2. Promote your content
3. Rank on Google
4. Create viral infographics
5. Create a micro-site

...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words.
On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate.
Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback.
So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it.
We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article:

1. entrepreneur and startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us ~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!)
2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around ~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!)
3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive.
4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share
5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks.
6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks.
7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads.
8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends.
9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well
10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken.

And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping.
Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days.
As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it).
A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic.
The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!
And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year.

Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages

One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.
So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking.
The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site.
Say, an article on "how to make a resume" could link to (and be linked from) "how to include contact info on a resume," "how to write a cover letter," "what's the difference between a CV and a resume," and so on.
Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone.
So, how do you do interlinking “right?”
First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces.
More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works.
Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'.
The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article.
Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query:
site:yourwebsite.com "keyword"
In our case, that’s:
site:example.com “business process management”
You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management.
Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article!
You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too.

Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs

Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not.
Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position.
If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings.
On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking.
So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR.
Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR?
Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR.
Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results.
So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position.
Rule of thumb, you can follow these values:

• 1st position -> ~31.73% CTR
• 2nd pos. -> ~24.71%
• 3rd pos. -> 18.66%
• 4th pos. -> 13.60%
• 5th -> 9.51%
• 6th -> 6.23%
• 7th -> 4.15%
• 8th -> 3.12%
• 9th -> 2.97%

Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc...
Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:

• Page title
• Page URL
• Old Headline

Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:

• CTR (28 Day Range)
• Avg. Position

Add all of this data to a spreadsheet.
Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the Title Ideas cell for the respective keyword.
For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article.
Once you implement the change, insert the date on the Date Implemented column. This will help you keep track of progress.
Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR.
If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the Date Implemented column once again.

Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go

You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement.
If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate.
Here’s what this usually looks like for us:

• Audit the content
  • Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors.
  • Is the content well-written?
  • Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images.
  • Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc.
• Audit internal links
  • Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages?
  • Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts.
• Audit the backlinks
  • Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors?
  • Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links.
  • Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful.
  • Did you disown low-quality or spam links?
• Audit web page
  • Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds.
  • Did you enable lazy loading for the images?
  • Did you compress all images on the web page?

...And that's it.
Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions.
If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our SEO process blog post here.