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

111–120 of 222 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#111

Post by znpy »

I just came here to remind everyone that while this kind of things go on, wordpress is still free both as in free beer and in free software.

You can use wordpress.con as a hosted platform, pay for full customisation or host your own.

And you can start at any tier and move freely from/to the remaining ones.

I think all this fuss is really dumb, people had the answer to their problems in front of you the whole time yet they ignored it because it was not “cool”.

I guess that’s what you get for relying on “service-as-a-software-substitute”.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#112

Post by mdonahoe »

HelloNurse wrote: post #103
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.

Not quite sure what point you’re trying to make.

But people rent apartments as a middle ground between owning a home and sleeping on a friend’s couch.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#113

Post by sdinsn »

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.

But they own the content and own the domain. If AWS suddenly dies, they'll have no problems switching to a new provider.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#114

Post by untog »

HelloNurse wrote: post #103
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.

What on earth kind of parallel is that?

The actual comparison here is that people who are not in the "business" of owning a house rent one, and are able to swap their rented house for a different one at will, taking advantage of market changes but also accepting the downsides of renting.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#115

Post by sdinsn »

jasode wrote: post #102

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 ludd…

You are overthinking this. He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#116

Post by ygjb »

znpy wrote: post #111

I just came here to remind everyone that while this kind of things go on, wordpress is still free both as in free beer and in free software. You can use wordpress.con as a hosted platform, pay for full customisation or host your own. And you can start at any tier and move freely from/to the remaining ones. I think all this fuss is really dumb, people had the answer to their problems in front of you the whole time yet…

I second this. I spent a long part of my career bashing Wordpress and other PHP CMS platforms because of how hideously insecure they were, but came around about the time that Wordpress added the feature for automatic updates.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#117

Post by weberc2 »

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.

Depends on your database. S3 will handle the hug just fine.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#118

Post by m12k »

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.

Of course the HN crowd is willing and able to grasp the long-term consequences of super-centralization. But we also recognize that for the vast majority of the population, some of the benefits that a centralized solution provides - such as UX, discoverability and 'it just works' - are essential, and so far none of the well-meaning open alternatives can compete on those parameters, no matter how much I cheer for their cause. For the vast majority of people, a platform plagued by relatively vague issues like censorship and privacy is still better than a platform that is too cumbersome for me to understand or get started with (and let's be honest, that I've probably never even heard about) - it's simply a non-starter.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#119

Post by Silhouette »

ben509 wrote: post #100
Silhouette wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It seems like Purism has a pretty decent user-benevolent smartphone in the works. If most services are available via website, it may be clunky but it'd work. And many public services are offering APIs, so I can imagine their app store getting a pretty decent range of clients before long.

I was really hoping that one of the explicitly privacy-focused and user-controlled phones was going to hit the market before I gave in and bought, but sadly too many things were starting to get in the way and effectively forced my hand. At least for now, it's an Android/iOS duopoly for a lot of practical purposes.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#120

Post by jasode »

sdinsn wrote: post #115
jasode wrote: post #102

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 ludd…

You are overthinking this. He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.

>He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.

Of course, yes. That's where the audience is. I'm pretty sure we all know that. (A small nitpick -- Bezos actually didn't have any followers on Medium before his first and only Medium post[1]. Therefore, he could have directed the Twitter link to a blog his own domain "jeffbezos.com" but he chose not to do that.)

>You are overthinking this.

Yes I am! And I want others to overthink it too. The point of my comment is to dissect the topic of this thread "Always Own Your Own Platform" -- by using a prominent counterexample.

JB didn't follow Sean Blanda's advice[2]. He also didn't adhere to the POSSE guideline. Why?

("Because JB's followers are there.")

Let's try to break the infinite loop of nonproductive discourse. _Why_ are JB's followers on Twitter? Even if they're on Twitter, why does JB even _care_ about that? He could have just followed Sean Blanda's advice and posted to "jeffbezos.com" -- but he did not. Let's overthink the reasons why Blanda's advice was not followed.

[1] only one Medium article by JB: https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos

[2] https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488

Post reply on HN