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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#201

Post by m00x »

hazeii wrote: post #182
jaredklewis wrote: post #171

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 stre…

Except that so few people make money broadcasting on Youtube, it's very likely they'd make more by learning how to maintain their own streaming platform and using that knowledge ('consulting') to less technical (but more creative) people who think they can make money broadcasting on Youtube.

You should probably invest some time learning how incredibly hard and costly it is to make a streaming platform. Youtube can only do this at low costs because they do it at scale.

Also, The only people who could do this are already making tons of money. We're talking about people with high technical skills, not the people posting ASMR videos.

You also need to attract viewers to your platform, which is no small feat.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#202

Post by brokenmachine »

ci5er wrote: post #192
uberswe wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are talking about the US. Seems like a pretty reasonable investment if you cut some military funding or put a small tax on the richest Americans?

Or maybe, ask those consumers to pay $200/month for the Internet that they use, instead of stealing other people's money?

Creating essential infrastructure is stealing but having military spending higher than the next seven countries COMBINED is business as usual.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#203

Post by robot »

the problem is owning your content and platform is not enough.

you need much, much better UX (User Experience). Millions of people are now using facebook groups thanks to its easy real-time comments and well thought out threads. Good luck having that on your blog.

Alternative software needs to be vastly improved and centralized(1) for this to work. This is the problem, nobody is incentivized to fix it, so there you go. You get monster proprietary platforms still growing.

(1) Some people think decentralized platforms is the solution - it totally isn't. It is bad UX. They first build it, then find out it doesn't work, and this repeats. Why should everyone take the hassle of hosting their stuff? Plus, syncing everyone in a single feed is not an easy problem. I guess email is the outlier here.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#205

Post by tomrod »

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.

Duplication of fixed costs is an economic ill to be judiciously avoided.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#206

Post by seba_dos1 »

nickjj wrote: post #87
weberc2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect open connections to be the bottleneck (not CPU or mem). Do you just have very low latency and thus relatively few concurrent open connections (yes, I saw the graphs in your link, but it's hard to figure out how many concurrent connections are open at a time)? EDIT: Downvoters, would really like to know why you're downvoting? Am I being naive in thinking a blog would be bottlenecked on connections?

My site has been on the front page a few times. Concurrent requests were usually in the 400-800 range depending on where it ranked and what it was about. That's going by Google Analytics too which means it's likely higher since devs tend to disable as much tracking as possible. nginx won't even break a sweat if you're on a low end VPS and are serving static content. You'll have pretty much the same latency as serving…

I have once handled a website being HNed and /.ed a few years ago. The issue turned out to be the default Apache config from distro, which was very ill-suited for such traffic, generating tons of processes which struggled to run on a small VPS. Switching to nginx fixed it; I suppose switching Apache to mpm_event model (or even just tuning the threading configuration) would be enough too.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#207

Post by ci5er »

brokenmachine wrote: post #202
ci5er wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe, ask those consumers to pay $200/month for the Internet that they use, instead of stealing other people's money?

Creating essential infrastructure is stealing but having military spending higher than the next seven countries COMBINED is business as usual.

Well, the United States Constitution obligates the government to do a fair number of things. Providing IT infrastructure for people wanting to self-host family photo albums is not one of those things.

There is a mechanism for amending the constitution of the United States if enough people want to elect representatives to force other people to pay for their upload bandwidth.

Military spending is a different bucket. If you object to Military Spending (and I do, as you appear to do), take it up over at the counter of not-false-equivalences.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#208

Post by jaabe »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #105
jaabe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either. I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages. But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that). Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service…

But does medium have readers? I mean, I read medium articles when they appear here on HN, but I’m not really a medium reader, and unlike personal blogs, where I will bookmark you if I find you interesting I’ll never come back to a medium author unless it’s by chance.

I mean, that’s as anecdotal as it gets, but I’ve never been very unique in my media consumption, so I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in this.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#209

Post by dangravell »

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…

Didn't people used to say that sort of thing about music? That people are too cheap so they'll just pirate everything?

Maybe it's convenience that is required.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#210

Post by nswest23 »

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…

jesus, man why are the top comments to posts like this always like this? Is everyone on HN that apathetic and jaded?
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