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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#171

Post by jaredklewis »

And don't forget to write your own compiler, OS, DE, and IDE, lest someone pull the rug out from under you. /s

Specialization is at the heart of increasing productivity. Let's say a given person makes awesome travel videos. If that person can find a way to broadcast and monetize those videos with YouTube, Vimeo, or whatever, that almost certainly makes more sense than devoting their time to maintaining their own streaming platform. That's time the person could have spent continuing to refine their actual product: travel videos.

Video editing and production are extremely time intensive tasks that require a lot of skill; people work on these skills their whole lives. Likewise, dev ops and infrastructure management are incredibly deep rabbit holes to jump down. The idea that every hobbyist blogger, photographer, and indie band should learn about server administration seems crazy to me.

Does not owning your platform have risks? Of course. Everything has risks and business is always about tradeoffs. Platforms like YouTube solve a lot of problems for content creators. For most creators, those benefits are going to outweigh the costs.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#172

Post by CM30 »

Mostly importantly, because pretty every company and platform will turn on you when it's politically/legally convenient for them.

We've seen it all the time on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Suddenly a post or video that's fine legally is blocked/removed because the angry mob is complaining about it with torches and pitchforks. A video or piece of content that's arguably under fair use is removed because a large compant files a claim or strike, legality be damned.

Having your own platform is a significant advantage there. It means you're a lot tougher to get rid of when the angry social media mob forms over something 'wrong' you said/did in the past, and many, many companies will not risk legal action by going after an independently hosted site/service.

Obviously that doesn't mean the site is invincible. A determined enough adversary can put pressure on hosting companies/registrars/cloudflare, and a DMCA notice can lead to a court case as well.

But many won't go to that level of effort, or depend on these platforms being willing to turn on their users at the drop of a dime.

Yeah that's not for everyone, and admittedly many users would fine on these platforms. But anyone even remotely likely to get into any type of controversy would certainly be best to own their own platform.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#173

Post by dfeojm-zlib »

Former enterprise AWS consultant here. Renting and leasing tech (AWS, GCP, Azure) is $$$$. At scale, a little cloud is okay for limited uses, but going down to EBGP and floor-up is cheaper. If a shop can't handle that, rent actual hardware (co-lo), not virtual servers because they cheat you with over-subscription.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#174

Post by MaxBarraclough »

anaphor wrote: post #82

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) is a much more flexible idea IMO. You ultimately own your content, and it's the source of truth, but it gets automatically syndicated out and linked back to whatever proprietary or open platforms you think people will see it on. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Silly that the page didn't link to IndieWeb.org - a whole community about exactly these principles.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#175

Post by forgottenpass »

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…

>The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

I hate this meme and other criticism like it. It belittles work accomplished (asserting that there was nothing done). Ascribes intent from that perceived outcome (that nobody even tried). And ascribes motivation for that intent (hubris).

I haven't found a better way to demoralize people from trying in the future than this sort of quip.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#176

Post by Bakary »

jasode wrote: post #156
Bakary wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

All of these examples are almost non-sequiturs because these people operate in a different world altogether compared to the audience the article is supposed to target. They have their own huge things going on and are not waiting to make the front page of HN or any other metric relevant to a small scale user trying to make a name for themselves.

As the other user said I think we need a dose of Occam's razor in there. The posts went to Twitter and Medium because they're the relevant platforms du jour for this sort of famous person announcement. The employee in charge of social just put them there and voilà. I honestly doubt Bezos even gave a single thought to the finer points discussed here.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#177

Post by old-gregg »

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.

> ...on AWS.

so? you're not implying I'm supposed to buy land, erect my own datacenter on it and lease my own backbone connectivity just to host a blog?

I think the author's rebellion is against user-generated content, when everything you post becomes someone else's data. That's definitely not the case with any cloud hosting providers.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#178

Post by monksy »

The network isn't an issue. The entire problem is that those who are creating the network want to be the source content creator as well. We need good networks. We need good creators. The networks should incentivize good collaboration, curation, and give discoverability. Reddit is an example of this. Facebook and Medium want to take content.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#180

Post by Bakary »

CM30 wrote: post #172

Mostly importantly, because pretty every company and platform will turn on you when it's politically/legally convenient for them. We've seen it all the time on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Suddenly a post or video that's fine legally is blocked/removed because the angry mob is complaining about it with torches and pitchforks. A video or piece of content that's arguably under fair use is removed because a large comp…

Most people who post controversial content don't just want to put their views out there, they want to build a large audience and want their views to be successfully distributed or to make money from them. It's almost impossible to completely ban access from online content unless you are a nation state.

It seems reasonable to want free speech but entitled to want successfully monetized speech as a baseline.

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