Posterous will turn off on April 30 • Hacker News Board

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#61

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 11:58 PM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #59

jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the rough operating costs of posterous? If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/ ). I don't like large gaping holes in the web.

Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive. When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive. Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it. Twitter and other acquirers usually o…

I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#62

Post by kintamanimatt » Fri, Feb 15, 2013, 11:58 PM UTC

This is probably one of those times when we can thank the Internet Archive for preserving the internet that's no longer with us, or, in this case, the part of the internet that's about to go dark.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#63

Post by _2xb0 » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:00 AM UTC

When Posterous emerged I had high hopes for it.

But I quickly understood that their service wasn't meant to improve at all. Every problem I reported to them was dismissed (directly or indirectly).

I thought about the idea of posting via (plain-text) mail seriously, but they weren't sharing my mindset.

I left posterous long time ago and I see it was a wise decision.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#64

Post by RegEx » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:00 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #25

bitcartel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is for bloggers, Github is for developers. Why not keep things simple?

What about developers who are also bloggers?

Roll your own! It's fun. My site is a custom made file-based blogging platform written with Python Flask, and it's a joy to use since I made it exactly how I wanted it to be made. One feature that I really enjoy is being able to call source files into the post. This allows me to create/update code snippets extremely easily. Markdown + calling includes on my source files is exactly what I needed to efficiently produce content, so I made it myself.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#65

Post by wyck » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:04 AM UTC

akurilin wrote: post #3

Any solid alternatives HN could recommend?

Jekyll with https://github.com/bhollis/maruku for markdown on steroids.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#66

Post by jff » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:04 AM UTC

dave1619 wrote: post #43

Can somebody please help me out? I'm confused here. I thought Posterous (before being acquired by Twitter) was doing quite well and was seen as the biggest competitor to Tumbler. It would seem that Posterous had a ton of users (would love to know details) and that they could monetize those users fairly simply through display ads. So, with a ton of users creating content and even more viewing that content, I would ima…

I don't think I have ever viewed any content on Posterous. I didn't even know what it does until I started reading these comments. On the other hand, I get sent Tumblr links daily. Multiple times a day.

If Posterous is the biggest competitor to Tumblr, it seems that says Tumblr has no real competition.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#67

Post by larrys » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:09 AM UTC

chrisacky wrote: post #8

To be totally honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long. Everyone knew a year ago when they were acquihired that Posterous would be discontinued. Why do I say this? Well, Twitter's bread and butter is in 140 characters, if they wanted to look at branching out into micro-blogging they wouldn't need to acquire a company, of whom the majority of their customers already use Twitter. (It was borderline a zero-value gain…

Tumblr and twitter both USV companies. Surprised they didn't just segue users to tumblr.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#68

Post by nikcub » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:10 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #61

nikcub wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive. When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive. Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it. Twitter and other acquirers usually o…

I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.

I'd be more than happy to help out if Twitter are willing to do it with Posterous. Register a non-profit and then go out and approach some of the larger co's for funds and/or resources to keep it running forever.

Make static backups of these sites using their sitemaps[0] and then ask them to donate or point their domains

[0] https://posterous.com/sitemap.xml (warning: 1.5MB)

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#69

Post by citricsquid » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:19 AM UTC

dave1619 wrote: post #58

jsnk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare Posterous to Tumblr in terms of user base. Tumblr is in top 50 websites in the world. I doubt that Posterous even cracked top 500.

Sure, but if they were able to get into the top 500 shouldn't that be a business worth more than $10m? Especially since it's user created content, and if they do it right they could keep rising in the ranks of top sites. I'm curious if they were experiencing a growth stall or even negative growth before selling. Because if they were growing, I don't understand why they would sell and abandon their product unless the…

Posterous could have been growing but if the users were never going to generate any revenue it was inevitable they would have to shut down or be acquired later on. The sale could have been as much for the team (who wants to work on a product that isn't really going anywhere?) as it was for the investors. Keeping Posterous open could have just been delaying the inevitable.

As an aside, Tumblr is apparently having financial troubles (this seems to be speculation based on supposed leaked investor feelings) and Tumblr is huge compared to what Posterous is (especially when you look at how Tumblr cornered the social side of micro blogging and Posterous hadn't).

Having 10 million users is appealing to investors because there's the chance that they might turn into revenue in the future but for a company like Twitter that already has most of those users using their service they're probably not worth very much at all.

Posterous could have been stuck in the stage before becoming a proper business, it could be a fantastic service that tens of millions of users loved but if there's no way to move those users into revenue generating users their most valuable asset could have been the team.

Re: Posterous will turn off on April 30

#70

Post by tobyjsullivan » Sat, Feb 16, 2013, 12:25 AM UTC

dave1619 wrote: post #43

Can somebody please help me out? I'm confused here. I thought Posterous (before being acquired by Twitter) was doing quite well and was seen as the biggest competitor to Tumbler. It would seem that Posterous had a ton of users (would love to know details) and that they could monetize those users fairly simply through display ads. So, with a ton of users creating content and even more viewing that content, I would ima…

I think the issue here is simply Money In As an outside observer, it's easy enough to realize that Posterous could have monetized but that doesn't really answer the question of whether they could have monetized _enough_ to pay their ongoing costs.

Most likely they were bleeding money at an extremely fast rate and probably running out, fast, which is why they sold for $10 million and over time under Twitter's wing weren't able to figure out a monetization strategy that would be worth the ongoing costs of running the business. The case is even more convincing once you consider the opportunity cost of keeping high-quality talent away from Twitter.