Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 222 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#61

Post by quickthrower2 »

libria wrote: post #42
atian wrote: post #20

Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Always Own Your Platform

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

Netlify or s3 or cloudflare + learning seo covers the above points.

Unless no one wants to learn stuff anymore. We need an evil corp because no one can change their oil anymore?

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#62

Post by gambler »

libria wrote: post #42
atian wrote: post #20

Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Always Own Your Platform

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

On the other hand, a big platform can arbitrarily delete your account/content with no recourse, or just shut down. Happens all the time.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#63

Post by quickthrower2 »

gambler wrote: post #60
soulofmischief wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.

>HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.

Using static hosting that can be moved somewhere else easily. URLs remain the same due to controlling the domain.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#64

Post by tombert »

gambler wrote: post #60
soulofmischief wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.

>HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.

The statement probably holds true of people who self-host in their home as well. I currently run a cluster in my basement.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#65

Post by kazinator »

libria wrote: post #42
atian wrote: post #20

Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Always Own Your Platform

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

A server in the cloud doesn't necessarily mean you're using the host company's application platform.

The article is "RSS and blogs vs YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. ..." not "iron in my closet vs. rented server".

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#66

Post by Silhouette »

Grue3 wrote: post #59
MickerNews wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously trying to say that he can't make this point unless he builds his own twitter? https://i.imgur.com/iBAIRqF.png

The original comic implies that abstaining from owning an iPhone is equivalent to not participating in society. Basically if your principles are so weak that you can't abstain from owning a luxury phone brand, which should take a literal bare minimum effort, then you don't really have these principles. A Twitter account is not a requirement to participate in society either. You don't even have to build your own Twitt…

As a long-time holdout when it came to smartphones, and a big believer in things like personal privacy and having control of your own devices, I can't agree with that argument any more. Smartphones are ubiquitous, to the point where everyday public services do assume that almost everyone has one and there are significant or even prohibitive barriers for those who do not.

Sadly, the best you can hope to do now is to turn everything off that you don't want (which will probably mean fighting the defaults for at least an hour when you get a new device and still hoping you didn't miss something important) and stick to the essentials.

It shouldn't be this way. We have failed on this one. But you really can't avoid some of these modern technologies entirely now, unless you're willing to become some sort of modern-day hermit and not participate in a lot of normal parts of society.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#67

Post by fwip »

ergest wrote: post #23
throwaway13337 wrote: post #4

This is important but it doesn't address the reasons why people don't own their own platform. Audience. Successful platforms have solved the empty room problem. Until there is a decentralized solution to that, there is nothing new to talk about.

Actually I don't think that the audience is the problem, I think it's the "tech friction" Do you really want to figure out how to host your own HD videos without a video platform? How to run your own email list without an ESP? How to use SEO/SEM to attract an audience? How to host and maintain blog software? Handle your own payments? Any company who's serious about their business, eventually gets there, but still the…

They're both problems.

Even after you solve the technical problems, you face an uphill battle of convincing people to log onto fwipsvlogs.com every day to get your new content, versus showing up in YouTube's recommended (or subscribed) videos list.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#68

Post by majewsky »

libria wrote: post #42
atian wrote: post #20

Not Found The requested URL / was not found on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Always Own Your Platform

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death

Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period.

Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#69

Post by pricechild »

amelius wrote: post #46
gambler wrote: post #45

Talking to the HN crowd about platform ownership is pointless. It's obvious that most people here are not able or willing to grasp the long-term consequences of super-centralization, including many so-called security and scalability experts. Not a big surprise, because a lot of them work for highly centralized platforms, aspire to become one, or to be bough by one.

I bet most people here totally grasp the long term consequences; it's just that they are eager to grab the short term benefits.

Or misjudge the probability of realising those consequences.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#70

Post by fwip »

gatherhunterer wrote: post #12
throwaway13337 wrote: post #4

This is important but it doesn't address the reasons why people don't own their own platform. Audience. Successful platforms have solved the empty room problem. Until there is a decentralized solution to that, there is nothing new to talk about.

If I post an article on Medium, will the platform drive traffic to it on its own? Is my job done at that point, or will I still need to generate interest by posting it around and getting a lot of visits before Medium suggests it? When new readers enjoy the content will they come back to me or will they come back to Medium?

Some of both. You'll still want to self-promote, but Medium will recommend your article to other readers, and followers will be notified when you post new articles.
Post reply on HN