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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#211

Post by Bakary »

jasode wrote: post #183
Bakary wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> relevant to a small scale user trying to make a name for themselves. If you're small trying to become big , expending resources in trying to duplicate what Youtube or Medium does is often contrary to becoming big. Mr. UnknownNobody hosting his own videos and writings at "www.unknownnobody.com" and charging a fee for access (as Blanda recommends) will severely limit his audience. Blanda's simplistic advice only spea…

I actually already agreed with most of what you said! It's just that you mentioned the audience problem, and I nodded my head, but then you seemed to have a further point relating to Bezos and others like him, and I couldn't figure out what you meant beyond that audience/disoverability problem. I understand your point now.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#212

Post by vivekd »

dangravell wrote: post #209
jwr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that its not money that is the obstacle. But I dont know if its convenience either - there are platforms out there now that will let anyone host a website with less effort than sigining up for facebook and learning the platform.

Maybe the problem is that unlike buying, music making a website requires people to be creative and the majority of people are just not creative and don't wish to be creative.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#213

Post by jasode »

Bakary wrote: post #211
jasode wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> relevant to a small scale user trying to make a name for themselves. If you're small trying to become big , expending resources in trying to duplicate what Youtube or Medium does is often contrary to becoming big. Mr. UnknownNobody hosting his own videos and writings at "www.unknownnobody.com" and charging a fee for access (as Blanda recommends) will severely limit his audience. Blanda's simplistic advice only spea…

I actually already agreed with most of what you said! It's just that you mentioned the audience problem, and I nodded my head, but then you seemed to have a further point relating to Bezos and others like him, and I couldn't figure out what you meant beyond that audience/disoverability problem. I understand your point now.

>, but then you seemed to have a further point relating to Bezos and others like him, and I couldn't figure out what you meant

Thanks for letting me know you tried to undertand my viewpoint. I think my earlier messages being confusion instead of clarity -- were caused by me not "showing all my cards". Allow me to go back to your earlier comment to explain further:

>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

I actually thought _I_ was one of the targets of Blanda's "alwaysownyourplatform" message. I don't have any huge things going on and _I'm_ in the audience he's trying to convince. But I didn't want my earlier replies to be about me or why I don't choose to prioritize owning my own platform. I figure nobody cares about my story. Therefore I chose to mention more prominent people like Bezos and Butterfield to avoid talking about me. The reasons they use someone else's platform would overlap with mine -- even though I'm not a famous person like them.

Unfortunately, I do think readers think I brought up irrelevant examples of people even though I was trying to emphasize their reasons for using Medium instead of their net worth. I don't run a big company but nevertheless, I also don't have an urgent business need to stream content from my own "www.jasode.com". That would be premature optimization and I have other much more important priorities than owning my own platform.

I think there was an unspoken underlying message in Blanda's plea that I didn't like. He seemed to be more concerned with weakening Twitter/Medium/Youtube rather than explaining how someone like me can use them as a stepping stone to other success. His messaging is more about harming the "big guys" rather than enabling the "small guys". I don't like simplistic advice that reduces down to platitudes rather than real discussion of tradeoffs and strategies of using others' platforms. His suggested idea of "build your audience on your own terms on your own website and charge them money" often means no audience at all.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#214

Post by tonystubblebine »

jaabe wrote: post #208
tonystubblebine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure there are plenty of people like you who aren't Medium users, but if I understand your question, you're asking how many people there are who are dedicated Medium readers.

I'm saying, yes, obviously there must be a lot because when we publish articles they get read by people from within the network. I also sometimes see my own stats split into web vs. app and the app numbers are about equal. Only dedicated users would be using the app. Then on top of that the money is coming from paying subscribers, the most dedicated type of user.

I'm not that interested in what the total number is across Medium because what actually effects me is how many show up at a given article. It's common to get thousands or tens of thousands. The best article I ever published got 1.1M total views with 407k views from within the Medium network. HackerNews or other external sources that drive you to Medium get counted as external views.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#215

Post by jwr »

dangravell wrote: post #209
jwr wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that convenience is required, but hosting has an inherent cost to it, which can't be ignored. Similarly, maintaining software (any software!) has a cost to it, which we do our best to ignore, but which in the long term needs to be taken into account, otherwise we end up giving our data to corporations which offer "FREE" hosting and software.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#216

Post by tracker1 »

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 seem to remember being able to use something like geocities, or a cheap/free /~user/ hosts and FrontPage or similar to generate badly formed HTML that let me share a lot of ideas before I was deeply familiar with programming and specialty knowledge.

Yeah, I had to learn about FTP, and not much more. There was a lot of availability, and diversity without a lot of overhead to it.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#217

Post by brokenmachine »

ci5er wrote: post #207
brokenmachine wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am aware of the reality, I was just making a facetious comment.

I'm not in the US. We have our own problems here in Australia. We did all pay for IT infrastructure but the government completely fucked it up as expected.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#218

Post by ci5er »

brokenmachine wrote: post #217
ci5er wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am aware of the reality, I was just making a facetious comment. I'm not in the US. We have our own problems here in Australia. We did all pay for IT infrastructure but the government completely fucked it up as expected.

The whole Telstra privatisation, split-up-ification, semi-not really privitization, going public with monopolist rights thing was a little weird to watch from over here. But, hey! At least some "very important people" made a lot of money!

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#219

Post by provolone »

megous wrote: post #75
okaleniuk wrote: post #21

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing. I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity. The wh…

100000 monthly is nothing. That's like 2 visits per minute. Any random vps should handle 10-100s of visits per second (mostly limited by size of your pages and bandwidth if you use static content).

Can be done with dynamic content as well. I'm serving 10-100 per second with postgres, jetty and jstl/jsp on $10/month dedicated servers.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#220

Post by soulofmischief »

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.

Yep. Literally nothing is wrong with this. You're barking up the wrong tree.
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