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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#151

Post by badatshipping »

This general movement has a “screw the system, man” vibe that I think steers it away from reality.

It’s already possible to own your platform. The problem that no one else will use it. Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are where everyone else is. That’s where audiences are, hence that’s where all the creators are, hence that’s where all the audiences are. These companies spend millions in research to make their apps as engaging as possible. Sometimes that takes the form of unhealthy Skinner box type psychological manipulation, but sometimes they are actually pretty good at suggesting content people want to consume.

Building up network effects and an engaging user experience takes a lot of money, labor, resources, research and executive organization that open source projects generally lack. We should work within the constraints of reality, and figure out policies that dictate what Facebook should/shouldn’t be allowed to do.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#152

Post by amelius »

coding123 wrote: post #13
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?

Why give the platform all that seo. In the long past era we used to have a bunch of random webshops. Now sellers can barely survive unless they are on Etsy eBay or Amazon. We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn't.

> We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn't.

Isn't a search engine required by law to be non-biased?

So if you move to a different (or your own) platform, search engines should still allow people to find you just as easily.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#153

Post by neilv »

ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

I don't recall it being hubris. What happened when Web browsers appeared is that there was a brief period when a university (usually you were at a university) would host your pages, and you could believe the decentralized dream (if you heard that part), but there was a sudden commercial gold rush, and motivations switched to greed (not hubris).

You didn't want to see X happen; you wanted you to get the money for X happening. And maybe that reduced to you want you to get the money, and X was a path to that, and the actual X didn't matter.

Also, there were relatively few people who already understood Internet, online, or software development at the time. Perhaps the majority of people pitching Web startups were all new to all of that.

CS department culture never recovered from the gold rush, and a lot of the gold rush ideas were institutionalized.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#154

Post by nishmastime »

jwr wrote: post #141
ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

I think the problem is not with being tech-savvy but with not wanting to spend anything. It isn't difficult to create a ready-made self-maintaining decentralized publishing tool in the form of a VPS image that people could run. But then people would need to pay for hosting the VPS (single dollars per month) and probably for the software, so that somebody maintains it (also single dollars per month). I think people ar…

Well, there's also no real payoff. Hosting your own blog is just a major HN circlejerk. Who cares?

There are 100 other things I'd rather focus on in the day than die on the hill of owning my own platform, or spending even one second remembering which server I have to SSH into or how it was setup again, revisiting the Jekyll docs just one more time, ctrl-r recursive searching for the last time I used that one command 6 months ago when my blog broke (again).

People don't like to admit this. We like to fixate on some sort of ideological purity as if we're immortal or something.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#155

Post by Bakary »

jasode wrote: post #120
sdinsn wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you explain clearly what you are trying to convey? I don't think the Bezos example is very helpful since it's an outlier with a very specific situation.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#156

Post by jasode »

Bakary wrote: post #155
jasode wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Could you explain clearly what you are trying to convey? I don't think the Bezos example is very helpful since it's an outlier with a very specific situation.

>I don't think the Bezos example is very helpful since it's an outlier

He's an outlier in terms of being richer than Warren Buffet and Bill Gates but I would disagree he's an outlier in terms of the reasons for not following Blanda's advice.

I argue Bezos has similar reasons that many others have who also prefer to post on Twitter/Medium instead of "owning their own platform". Another example is Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack and cofounder of Flickr); he also posts to Twitter & Medium instead of owning his own platform. As a cofounder of Flickr, he's presumably self-educated on the tradeoffs of using others' platforms and yet he still chose to post on Twitter instead of his own "stewartbutterfield.com".

>Could you explain clearly what you are trying to convey?

The absolutism of "Always own your platform" is wrong.

The advice should be "Understand the _tradeoffs_ of using your own platform or someone elses's platform." -- It depends on your goals and going through the effort of "owning your own platform" to duplicate Youtube/Medium/etc may be a unnecessary distraction from your objectives.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#157

Post by Moru »

jwr wrote: post #141
ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

I think the problem is not with being tech-savvy but with not wanting to spend anything. It isn't difficult to create a ready-made self-maintaining decentralized publishing tool in the form of a VPS image that people could run. But then people would need to pay for hosting the VPS (single dollars per month) and probably for the software, so that somebody maintains it (also single dollars per month). I think people ar…

Also, what happens when I'm not around to pay those peanuts? All gone? Not acceptable to most people.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#158

Post by EamonnMR »

neilv wrote: post #153
ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

I don't recall it being hubris. What happened when Web browsers appeared is that there was a brief period when a university (usually you were at a university) would host your pages, and you could believe the decentralized dream (if you heard that part), but there was a sudden commercial gold rush, and motivations switched to greed (not hubris). You didn't want to see X happen; you wanted you to get the money for X ha…

This is a very interesting angle, care to expand upon it? Which gold rush ideas do you feel where institutionalized?

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#159

Post by diminoten »

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.

Some of us realized long ago that feeling moral superiority in a professional context wasn't very valuable.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#160

Post by diminoten »

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.

I can't even count how many people comment on this website about how they host their own mail servers.
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