AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B • Hacker News Board

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#211

Post by xandrius » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #174

I had never heard of Bending Spoons before. Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion. So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

Dark-patterns all the way.

They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases.

Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#212

Post by theandrewbailey » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC

bongodongobob wrote: post #171

agoodusername63 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be super down for GPUs to be cheaper again.

An rtx 3070 ti is like $300. If you want latest gen top of the line, that's never been cheap.

$300 would buy a current generation midrange card not long ago. That much for a 2 generation old midrange card is outrageous.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#213

Post by xandrius » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:32 AM UTC

Alright, if anyone is still using AOL: get the hell out of it. Bending Spoons is probably one of the companies I loathe the most from what I know from outside and even more from insider's knowledge.

Anything they touch turns into dark pattern ridden turds.

I honestly wish there was a page with all the products they purchased, so that I can avoid them forever.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#214

Post by magarnicle » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #194

muglug wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.

For customer facing streaming sites they also don't seem to be the clear default choice. I think dropout.tv is one of the few "secondary streaming services" to still be with Vimeo (and with the strong overlap in their networks I'm sure they got a good deal), while many other ones like Nebula evaluated them but went with other providers. It looks like the majority of their business is in employee training portals for…

The Nebula apps are pretty bad. Vimeo white label has issues but the app experience is much better than whomever Nebula are using.

One reason Vimeo is a good deal is that they charge for video transcoding by the minute, not by the file size. So you can upload full ProRes 4K movies and it doesn't cost the earth.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#215

Post by walletdrainer » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

MangoToupe wrote: post #206

Mistletoe wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel world.

Is there any streaming option with non dogshit quality?

For streaming movies and TV at reasonable prices? No, but you can DIY with Plex and get Blu-ray quality

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#216

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:39 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #174

I had never heard of Bending Spoons before. Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion. So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

Maybe they just run companies like they should be run when VC money runs out. Which is somewhat hard for consumers that have gotten used to getting everything for free.

ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#217

Post by Tarsul » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 10:45 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #174

I had never heard of Bending Spoons before. Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion. So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?

I noticed that, too. If one only had the wikipedia article to go on, it would appear that they made way too much money with the covid app for Italy. Which is probably true, but probably not billions?! So, after reading another article[1] (which does not really give strong pointers but leads to) my conclusion would be that they simply somehow became a darling for investors and could finance all these big acquisitions.

[1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#218

Post by riffraff » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 11:05 AM UTC

zipy124 wrote: post #128

riffraff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But BP is not a PE firm, they do have developers. Most (all?) of their acquisitions are still being updated albeit presumably on a skeleton crew.

They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside investor money recently but that doesn't make them not PE. In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective. Bigger PE firms now usually focus on ro…

But PE firms don't have their own workforce, Bending Spoon does, which is why their model differs from, say, Apollo.

The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#219

Post by riffraff » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 11:08 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #138

jrochkind1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.

Yahoo tried that business model and it didn’t go too well for them. Maybe we’ll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.

I may recall wrongly, but IMO Yahoo used to buy hyped companies for a ton of money and let them die, it was the opposite strategy.

Re: AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B

#220

Post by consp » Thu, Oct 30, 2025, 11:10 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #192

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

> Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong. Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard…

> by default you think they are in the wrong.

They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.