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Ask HN: Has anyone built a platform for sharing stuff online (curating)

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone built a platform for sharing stuff online (curating)

#11

> and all the big social media platforms, but none of these do it. What were the shortcomings you experienced with del.icio.us or stumbleupon? Lots of people I know are using Pinterest for much of what you describe.

These are fine for sharing, but you have no ability to organize the stuff you're curating into a website-like presentation. You also can't control how its arranged (default chronological). I think there's a big opening for something like this, that lets people curate stuff they find and arrange the presentation. Also, if you're using a platform like FB or Twitter or Pinterest, you can't monetize, so basically you'll…

> plus it can all be deleted at any time if its on their platforms

No service like that will ever be big (ie mass consumer), if it involves installing and operating the infrastructure yourself. There are no exceptions, there never will be.

There's a reason automatic / SaaS blogs smashed the self hosting market. Handling all of that yourself is wildly obnoxious, if not entirely impossible, for an average person. Wordpress.com is far larger than self hosted Wordpress at this point. Movable Type died for this fundamental reason (they failed at the transition to being a SaaS, and died in the self-managed fire). Then you have Tumblr, et al.

There's a reason nearly all content publishing occurs on centralized systems. And a reason why basically all efforts to decentralize that have failed.

There's a reason decentralized social (eg that might compete with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit) has never taken off and will never take off.

99% of all potential users do not want to operate their own setup and they never will. Decentralize-everything is the ultimate fantasy (you'll see it in nearly every thread about social media on HN going back to the beginning). It's a near universal failure, because it's echo chamber thinking that ignores what 99% of end users actually care about. It's typically an engineer confusing what they want or care about versus what the larger market cares about.

My suggestion: do not, under any circumstances, go down the decentralized content publishing path. It's the path of failure and tears, without exception.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone built a platform for sharing stuff online (curating)

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are fine for sharing, but you have no ability to organize the stuff you're curating into a website-like presentation. You also can't control how its arranged (default chronological). I think there's a big opening for something like this, that lets people curate stuff they find and arrange the presentation. Also, if you're using a platform like FB or Twitter or Pinterest, you can't monetize, so basically you'll…

> plus it can all be deleted at any time if its on their platforms No service like that will ever be big (ie mass consumer), if it involves installing and operating the infrastructure yourself. There are no exceptions, there never will be. There's a reason automatic / SaaS blogs smashed the self hosting market. Handling all of that yourself is wildly obnoxious, if not entirely impossible, for an average person. Wordp…

Agreed, also very well written!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone built a platform for sharing stuff online (curating)

#20
I have really wanted something like this. Right now I am just using Google bookmarks, but it sort of feels like I am just dumping links into a giant black hole.

I find it hard to locate something I added over 6 months ago. The tagging is minimally useful, but I think there has to be a better way of organizing these links for easier retrieval.

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