It comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they plan to recoup that.
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
141–150 of 280 posts
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#142I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them. I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve used and stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app becomes obsolete.
It's quite likely that the app was bleeding money before. Whether they're wringing money or being responsible with their finances I can't tell, but consider that the alternative could have been no app at all.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
Relevant coverage of some acquisitions doesn’t bode well for AOL staff:
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185...
2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#144People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too. My partner organized one a decade ago. I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky. Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.
Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.
But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#145People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy
Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily.
(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#146I didn't know AOL was still alive.
Dead now though. Bending Spoons is the kiss of death.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#147Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious fraud.
The name comes from the Matrix, supposedly. But yeah, they seem more Uri Geller than anything else.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#148People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user). AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Ya…
Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too. My partner organized one a decade ago. I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky. Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.
Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info.
I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.
They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008. Switching would be painful for me given how familiar I am with it but I came close this last year when it stopped letting me stay logged in on multiple Mac computers at the same time...
I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch. Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a combination of the two. Sorted.
Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive surveillance and advertising into the product and push out an update, they don't have to support or develop the product. The company bought the product to bilk money out of its existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all the users have gone. Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck awa…
As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating fast over the past couple years to improve the product. It’s much better than it used to be.
What the value prop of continuing to use Evernote versus other newer solutions like Notion? Interested to hear from someone still using the product