Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#101

Post by allemagne » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

eldavido wrote: post #91

jnwatson wrote: post #52

This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies. Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving…

Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science. What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or lea…

The political angle here is totally disconnected with what the analogy is trying to get at. We can safely assume the author is not trying to advocate complete and total self-sufficiency in every context all the time.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#102

Post by allemagne » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #82

colinmhayes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's easy to say "don't build your castle in other people's kingdom", but when 95% of people live in someone else's kingdom and like it there it's much harder to actually pull that off. The author laments content creators trying to bring viewers into their discord or twitter instead of personal website but conveniently ignores the fact that people are much more willing to go to and likely to return to sites they…

> when 95% of people live in someone else's kingdom Everyone lives in someone else's kingdom, except those people who own kingdoms. Articles like these, repeated on HN year after year because they represent popular fantasies (and are thus always voted to the front page), are universally misleading and wrong. Challenge someone to list how they plan to build a successful business, starting from scratch, outside of exis…

>A better premise would be: be careful where you build your castle, and consider putting it on wheels.

No, the analogy (and the article) is fine, we're just busy torturing it all to hell on our way to some mirage of isomorphic purity. The concept of "your kingdom" does not need to be something you completely control in a 100% self-sufficient way in every conceivable context to be a useful way to think about marketing indie games or other real-life situations.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#103

Post by notTheAuth » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #96

notTheAuth wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Just put your commercials on YT, Twitch, but always link to your wallet; whether it’s Patreon or a tshirt store elsewhere. Decouple. Take advantage of network effects. Model income generation wide and deep. It’s all about extending social geometry.

If Google was a bit more like Apple, all of these things wouldn't be allowed under YouTube's TOS.

Fair doesn’t mean the same.

I align with Apple a bit more as they actually do interesting manufacturing R&D; they’re all terrible on the software and privacy side.

Google is 3-4 useful websites, cloud software hype, and resource consumption.

We could write desktop software that recurses over personal data, abstracts useful metadata, and share that with each other. Users pay for bandwidth when they could just utilize their computer better.

Somehow we’ve anchored our agency to doing that via cloud providers who externalized their real costs onto startups which is why they’re rich.

I’m really hopeful the future of hardware comes with power savings and performance that make building a business with off the shelf parts tenable again. But who knows

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#104

Post by simonswords82 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 8:15 PM UTC

soco wrote: post #45

simonswords82 wrote: post #41

Same applies to fintech - I see a lot of new fintech startups building their solutions on existing no/low code platforms. Whilst this gets them out of the gate faster all the problems in OPs article apply. In addition, their margins are squeezed as they have to pass on the cost of the no/low code platform. Also means the no/low code platform now needs to be InfoSec/Due Dilled which doubles that pain too.

They hopefully imagine moving out of that platform once a certain size has been reached.

Perhaps - but that's a lot of work to do in addition to scaling up a company/adding features etc. that you've perhaps just managed to get traction on.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#105

Post by Karrot_Kream » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 8:20 PM UTC

allemagne wrote: post #100

jnwatson wrote: post #52

This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies. Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving…

Calling this article a "libertarian fantasy" seems unfair. The author does explicitly recommend entertaining new platforms, but being prepared with a backup plan for when these platforms are no longer viable for whatever reason. Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough": - A website on a domain you own - A mailing list - Own and license your Intellectual Property - Sell your mer…

> Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough":

Is there any data around why these are safer than the alternatives? Because the article is just a classic case of nerd philosophy; there's _no_ justification of the actual risks involves in these platforms aside from vague anecdotes and analogies, then using these vague anecdotes to drive recommendations.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#106

Post by rp1 » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 8:27 PM UTC

setpatchaddress wrote: post #27

rp1 wrote: post #5

The advice is, in essence, to prioritize your mailing list over audiences on proprietary platforms like Twitter and TikTok. This may work for some, but mailing lists seem like they would be really ineffective for a lot of use cases.

The advice is more generalizable than that: move your audience into content in spaces that you own -- not spaces that Zuckbook or Google or TikTok own.

I don't think the advice is the move your audience to spaces you own. The advice is to move your audience to spaces you own that intersect with spaces they go often. E.g. moving users into a forum you run wouldn't work because it would require your users to explicitly go to your forum. Mailing lists work because people go to their email inboxes often. I'm struggling to think of another place people go often that isn't a proprietary platform.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#107

Post by colinmhayes » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

zild3d wrote: post #93

999900000999 wrote: post #54

My counter argument is it can be nearly impossible to build an audience outside of a kingdom. Many popular YouTubers will try and splinter off and create websites where they can monetize better. I'm even subscribed to one of these websites because I really do want to support the Creator, but I still consume almost all of their content on YouTube. YouTube makes it very easy to upload something and for people to consum…

thats why the article has > Rule #2: SHAMELESSLY USE THE OTHER KINGDOMS JUST LIKE THEY ARE USING YOU!

Ok but trying to lure people to your own site they've never heard of is much more difficult than luring them to your twitter or discord. Creating a community that spans multiple widely used platforms is much more effective than just shouting into the abyss for people to come to your bespoke solution.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#108

Post by teddyh » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

SCLeo wrote: post #89

teddyh wrote: post #6

One thing about domain names: Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your defa…

Are there aggregated lists of registrar and TLDs that match such criteria? (Read: Has anyone already done this homework for me?)

Unless you somehow live in two countries at once, there should only be one obvious option for you. However, if what you are asking is: “If my local ccTLD is not trustworthy, what TLD should I choose?”, then unfortunately I don’t really have an answer for you.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#109

Post by teddyh » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

caylus wrote: post #92

teddyh wrote: post #6

One thing about domain names: Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your defa…

Note that .us and several other ccTLDs have the unfortunate disadvantage of not allowing "private registration", forcing you to either expose your real name, address, phone number, and email, or violate their terms by providing fake information and risking suspension for that reason.

If you don’t want anything to be traceable back to you, ever, then I’m afraid that your only realistic option is .onion.

Re: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

#110

Post by ipsin » Thu, Nov 04, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

foogazi wrote: post #70

ipsin wrote: post #16

Here I am reading, following this reasonable argument and... boom pop-up "call to action" interrupts the hell out of it. I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? If I really enjoyed it, that seems like the point where I'd be on board with signing up.

The subscribe to newsletter button ? It seemed unobtrusive enough on mobile

I think that's the key distinction. On mobile you would navigate and dismiss the same way.

On a web page, I tend to scroll using a single finger or knuckle on the arrow keys. Requiring a mouse at that point (or extra keypresses, if those even work) breaks the reading experience.

If this is a castle, it's not a very inviting one.