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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#101

Post by TheTruth54321 »

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.

F@ck off ... keep sucking BigEvilsHost d!ck ...

I'll take a timed out website that has a message I'll return to read after d!cks like you have stopped clicking on it ... than some bullsh!t piece of boll@cks sitting on Facebook that you probably wrote.

Have a wonderful day.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#102

Post by jasode »

Here's something for HN'ers to ponder.

Jeff Bezos published the reply to Mr Pecker's sex photos on Twitter[1] and Medium[2] instead of his own platform. (He does own his own domain "jeffbezos.com" as of 2011).

I'd love to hear HN readers' theories on why he used someone else's platform.

Let's lay out the factors we know that would favor JB using his own platform:

+ Obviously, JB is not a technology or internet luddite. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He's probably seen HTML before so he could bang out a static page as a url such as "www.jeffbezos.com/MyReplyToMrPecker.htm" or use any web authoring tool.

+ But, he's also a busy guy because he runs Amazon so he doesn't have the time to do that himself. Therefore, he could simply pay anybody with sysadmin skills to put the text on his website. He's worth ~$160 billion so he can afford the staff. He also can afford the bandwidth costs to avoid the 404 errors that "alwaysownyourplatform.com" is having from the HN-hug-of-death.

So we are left with 2 possibilities:

1. Jeff Bezos is actually stupid and ignorant about the dangers of platforms like Medium and he needs to be lectured by Sean Blanda (author of "alwaysownyourplatform.com")

or

2. He already understands Sean Blanda's point and in fact can display the ultimate flex of "I already own my own platforms which includes AWS and the Washington Post."

And yet, JB posted on Twitter & Medium. He didn't even bother with the POSSE[3] advice. Why?

Does JB's reasons possibly overlap with others' reasons for using someone else's platform?

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1093643321732464646

[2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146...

[3] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#103

Post by HelloNurse »

xwdv wrote: post #7

No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform. The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?

I suppose that, since you are not in the "business" of owning a house, you prefer to be a guest of your friends, ready to abandon your bed at any moment and move on to another friend should you overstay your welcome.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#104

Post by jolmg »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I wonder how much variance there is in traffic for sites that are on the front-page. That variance could be based on a combination of the hour of the day (because of the varying timezones of HN readers), the day of the week (we don't all check every single day), and the particular topic of a post (I would think that the average individual doesn't click on everything). It could be that while your site was on the front-page, others at other times, other days, or of other topics could have received visits many times more (or less) than what you received.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#105

Post by tonystubblebine »

jaabe wrote: post #18
gatherhunterer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either. I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages. But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that).

Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service and those that aren't.

If you post outside the service, you get free hosting in exchange for Medium running "recommended stories" at the bottom of your post. These are essentially ads for the subscription service. But they don't promote your article or bring you any extra readers other than the ones that you bring yourself or who come through SEO. Obviously, this is a much less appealing deal than it used to be and so there's a sorting out where a lot of people who want to post outside Medium's subscription service are leaving.

However, if you post within their subscription service you get a pretty good deal. You keep your copyright and could republish elsewhere. Medium will promote your article to their readers. You'll still get SEO. You'll make some amount of money, not usually life changing money though especially if you have a programmer's salary. Also, more and more, you're likely to run into an editor who will at minimum offer to give your piece a copy edit and sometimes work with you on how to make your piece even better.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#106

Post by ben509 »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #3

Generic 'oh guys let's make world better' stuff, without explaining how it could be really done irl. I mean, popular vlogger owning his own platform, really? Eating hosting costs, solving discoverability problem, etc?

But "always own your own platform" is a message that tends to explain how to do it.

If lots of people own their platforms and are sharing links to their peers, they can solve the discoverability problem.

If they become collectively big enough, even video hosting can become commoditized. That is, you'd pay to host your videos, but multiple CDNs would compete to provide them, all under your domain.

And you can even distribute archival. If you're a vlogger, there is a whole mess of people who want to preserve your old content, possibly even because they dislike you. If you're willing to digitally sign those videos and release them under a liberal license, file hoarders can publish them via e.g. bit torrent.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#107

Post by louwrentius »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Same for me, I have a static HTML site and it never even broke a sweat.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#108

Post by _bxg1 »

jandrese wrote: post #92
saurik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.

The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.

Yeah; static pages like blog posts should really be cached out from templates + data, to avoid this problem.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#109

Post by forrestthewoods »

noxToken wrote: post #91
weberc2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect open connections to be the bottleneck (not CPU or mem). Do you just have very low latency and thus relatively few concurrent open connections (yes, I saw the graphs in your link, but it's hard to figure out how many concurrent connections are open at a time)? EDIT: Downvoters, would really like to know why you're downvoting? Am I being naive in thinking a blog would be bottlenecked on connections?

Or low total bandwidth. A personal blog not expecting a lot of traffic may only have puddle of transfer bandwidth per month. Depending on the content of the post, that can max out a cap rather quickly.

I don’t understand the downvotes here.

A small blog can randomly get a 100,000 view spike. If the blog contains images and maybe even a gif it’s easy to blow through bandwidth caps for most free tiers.

I use netlify’s free tier but actually host my videos on BunnyCDN. I also make sure to optimize my pngs and jpgs. This isn't precautionary. It's actually necessary.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#110

Post by eterps »

llao wrote: post #90
majewsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

A blog typically comes with a comment function. That's something dynamic which requires lookup in some sort of database. Your page is purely static and does not even have pagination between posts. Hosting that is trivial and nothing to boast about. Your comparison is really unfair and needlessly nasty.

Displaying comments doesn't have to be dynamic. Most need reviewing anyway. https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman
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