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The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

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Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#211

Post by thejohnconway »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #23
r3trohack3r wrote: post #20

I remember when tech twitter (or at least Node.js twitter) tried to migrate to Ello for like a week. A pretty good portion of my social network moved, myself included. But it fizzled out really quickly and we all ended up back on Twitter. Every once in a while I'd still get a notification from Ello that someone had followed me. It was always a porn bot, but the email notification was still nostalgic. A part of me is…

I remember when something-something twitter tried to migrate to Threads for like a week. And to Mastodon before that. Remember when tech Reddit tried to migrate to Lemmy? A hardcore handful of people migrate await from the Death Star and stay migrated (maybe a couple hundred medium accounts, and 1 or 2 bigger ones), but everybody else trickles back onto the Death Star eventually. The only thing that works to get peop…

Some of those definitely stayed on Mastodon. Mastodon had a semi-successful transition. Small but stable in the medium term.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#212

Post by moomin »

DeathArrow wrote: post #191
FormerBandmate wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube and Hulu did it very successfully. Twitter has just done it in a really stupid way, because their management values politics over the actual business of running a social media platform (moreso now than before, but still very much before)

X switches to subscription exactly because politics forces them to, by trying to scare and shame advertisers. Once subscription revenue is enough, scare and shame won't work and politics won't have anything to do with the future of the business.

I’m not sure you understand what advertising cares about. They care about reach and brand value, both of which have dropped for Twitter. “Politics” is a component of brand value, but it’s got nothing to do with reach, which is falling through the floor.

But equally “politics” doesn’t explain the drip in brand value, either. The FIFA World Cup has _dreadful_ politics, advertisers don’t care because it’s still a great brand with a huge reach.

Musk is rich and connected enough to be able to ignore commercial reality for a basically unlimited amount of time, but I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#213

Post by danjac »

DeathArrow wrote: post #193
sirspacey wrote: post #132

Excellent, balanced post. We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.” The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet. We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain. The escape hatch…

>But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays. Most successful founders, from Edison to Gates and Bezos went in the business to make money, not to change the world. Changing the world for better or for worse is mostly a side effect. The goal of a business is profit, not ideology.

How much profit does Amazon make these days again?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#214

Post by moomin »

DeathArrow wrote: post #196
bko wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you take VC money and run the business the way you want? They can't force you to do anything. Sure they can pressure you, but if you have ownership and they have a minority stake, you can do what you want. Ello could have stopped at any time. Why did they raise 5 million only 6 months after their first round and another 5 million 6 months after that? What were they spending their money on? I don't see how t…

>X showed that you can fire ~80% of your employees and the product could still exist. Most fired employees weren't producing profit. Most were censoring, making politics or concerned themselves with corporate bureaucracy, drawing charts and making presentations.

You say that, but the company valuation and revenue fell through the floor, to an extent that everyone can tell, even though the reporting burden is much less now the firm is private.

Maybe some of the activities you decry as censorship and corporate bureaucracy have more to do with the bottom line than you think?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#215

Post by moomin »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #184
paxys wrote: post #180

No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that. This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as t…

I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expert…

The closest thing I can think of is patio11’s Bingo Card Creator. But he moved on to… venture funded payments processing.

I think, though, the people who can and do bootstrap small businesses like that don’t necessarily hang out here. The site is literally VC-owned, after all.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#216

Post by eterevsky »

sirspacey wrote: post #132

Excellent, balanced post. We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.” The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet. We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain. The escape hatch…

I think Substack is a pretty clear example of subscription model working well. There's also Patreon that is doing very well.

I wouldn't discount YouTube Premium and Twitter subscriptions. They don't cover the majority of users, but are a viable option if you (like me) can't tolerate ads.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#217

Post by danjac »

paxys wrote: post #180

No amount of manifestos, bills of rights, public benefit designations, PR campaigns, taking VC funding, not taking VC funding, not selling out or whatever the hell else we want to talk about can make up for one simple fact – a company needs to bring in more money than it costs to run. Ello tried for 8+ years but could not manage to do that. This post is focusing solely on the VC funding aspect and proclaiming it as t…

I mean Mastodon exists, each instance requiring just a small amount of funding to keep the lights on. There is also Tildes, which I think is a nonprofit registered in Canada.

It depends on what your aim is. Had Ello followed a proper nonprofit structure from the start, they could have continued indefinitely with a small staff and volunteers maintaining an open source code base and handling moderation. It would not necessarily be easy, but it would be doable.

They didn't though, and the fact that the original CEO later got into into NFTs and now something-AI maybe shows he was something of a bandwagon-jumper. Back then everyone wanted to be the next Facebook, so that was what he jumped into.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#218

Post by larodi »

My dream is of one day being in position to borrow some 5, 10 mil, if not more from some bank, VC, whatever. And then manage to somehow.... mismanage it, burn the money. And then get away from all the troubles by filing bankruptcy!

Yes, this has ever been my wet dream growing in a country that didn't have the notion of personal default and until only recent years. Where mobs were chasing oneself if he had any debts to like... anyone. I really envy you guys burning VC capital on "dreams", while others have to solve the complex "differential equation" of markets and competition and planning, and you know managing things properly to be sustainable without external injections.

Our story is very sad, your story is a dream indeed.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#219

Post by draaglom »

danjac wrote: post #213
DeathArrow wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays. Most successful founders, from Edison to Gates and Bezos went in the business to make money, not to change the world. Changing the world for better or for worse is mostly a side effect. The goal of a business is profit, not ideology.

How much profit does Amazon make these days again?

$26 billion (Q4 2022 through Q3 2023)

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#220

Post by altacc »

DeathArrow wrote: post #191
FormerBandmate wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube and Hulu did it very successfully. Twitter has just done it in a really stupid way, because their management values politics over the actual business of running a social media platform (moreso now than before, but still very much before)

X switches to subscription exactly because politics forces them to, by trying to scare and shame advertisers. Once subscription revenue is enough, scare and shame won't work and politics won't have anything to do with the future of the business.

Complaining about the advertisers leaving X is true "leopards ate my face".

Politics has been a significant part of Twitter's success, driving relevance & audience size. Politics was fuel for growth and Twitter was influential partially because of it's openness. The moderation was there because being a relatively balanced & hate free spare without too much controversy was essential for the majority of advertisers.

To reverse those parameters and turn it into a walled garden of Musk-like right wing edge lords that increasingly promotes right wing edge lord content that significantly reduces its safety for advertisers and then complaining that it's purely down to other people making the advertisers flee requires some major cognitive dissonance or a very blinkered world view.

Musk's aim for X.com is to make it an everything app, which is obviously impossible if it does not appeal to almost everyone. As an owner he has every right to make it into a smaller, politically homogeneous message board but he shouldn't simultaneously complain about the very obvious & easily predicted effects of that.

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