Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

waxy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 264 posts

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#221

Post by DeathArrow »

moomin wrote: post #212
DeathArrow wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> “Politics” is a component of brand value, but it’s got nothing to do with reach, which is falling through the floor.

I think reach was falling because of political pressure.

> I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.

I was arguing that the goal of a company is to generate profit. That should be the goal. If business owners do that or don't, it's up to them. And I am not arguing that Musk does a good thing if he doesn't have the profit as the objective.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#222

Post by helsinkiandrew »

eterevsky wrote: post #216
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.

They're both companies that help others monetize their content, Substack is still quite small and Patreon has stumbled a bit recently trying to justify it size and value:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/patreons-valuation-dropped-70...

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#223

Post by moomin »

DeathArrow wrote: post #221
moomin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> “Politics” is a component of brand value, but it’s got nothing to do with reach, which is falling through the floor. I think reach was falling because of political pressure. > I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes. I was arguing that the goal of a company is to generate profit. That should be the goal. If business owners do th…

I'm not sure what mechanism you're ascribing to reach falling due to "political pressure". Who's exerting this pressure? On whom? Why am I still using the site despite being a dyed in the wool leftie?

You say a company should have the goal of generating profit. According to what moral imperative?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#224

Post by xorcist »

tytso wrote: post #54
Andrex wrote: post #36

> I felt sad for the guy. It’s awful going through life never believing in anything. Being an idealist is fine, but being a dick is not. This article took on some personal schadenfreude after I read this line.

There was definitely a certain amount of "I told you so" vibes, but I don't blame the author. It appears that he was attacked by a lot of Ello founders and fans for raising some cautionary notes. And as it turns out, he was right and they were wrong. We would all like to have a model where users don't get charged money, and yet are not the product. But I haven't seen a model that works to date. In some cases, I don't…

> I haven't seen a model that works to date

IRC. NNTP. SMTP. XMPP. HTTP.

It's just that nobody wants to work on protocols anymore. Ever since the world's richest was suddently a computer guy, no one wants to work on anything without a business model that includes taking complete control over what is built. A product, if you will.

In the background, there's always some geeks slaving away with new protocols and federated models. That will not become mainstream, not in our current society. But societies change over time. There is always hope.

Protocols, not products, people!

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#225

Post by zer00eyz »

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…

These are called lifestyle businesses.

There are tons of them out there.

You can do a lot with a small VPS and a fixed amount of bandwidth.

Find something that 100 people will use for 5 bucks a month. IF your bills are paid and you have a day job, that's some nice pocket money.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#226

Post by bruce511 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #199
bruce511 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Why can't you take VC money and run the business the way you want? Because taking VC money let's you defer the revenue question. And by deferring it, you then have to bait-and-switch the users. Let me be clear. It's OK to get startup money. Businesses need capital to get going. But revenue should be the original business plan. In other words, who is paying for this site, and how? Ello ruled out advertising and dat…

But depending on agreement, founders can have much more voting power than investors, regardless of shares they hold.

Absolutely. You can look to raise money on any terms you like.

You may not be able to find investments as easily though.

Or you may have folk throwing money at you. What do I know...

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#227

Post by rcxdude »

steveklabnik wrote: post #161
singleshot_ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do talk about the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value when speaking generally. They are wrong. There are only two fiduciary duties in this context: the duty of loyalty and the duty of care. A director of a corporation owes no fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.

Sure. I find it easier to use the same words everyone else uses in informal contexts even though there is obvious complexity and is not fully accurate.

I think the point is the term is not so much 'not fully accurate' as 'actively incorrect' and should avoid being repeated as it leads to a false perception of how corporations actually work (or at least, it leads to an inaccurate idea of the origin of their behaviours).

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#228

Post by billy99k »

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…

"The only thing that works to get people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough."

The Digg effect only worked because the majority of users were tech savvy and hated advertisements. The average user just accepts ads for the most part.

Most people don't care about the freedom of the platform, who's running the platform, or the technology behind it. They only care about: Can I easily create an account? Are all my friends, family, people I want to talk to there?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#229

Post by nojvek »

Money is the energy for a business. With it you employ people to build, market and sell the product, rent real estate etc.

Most startups die out of either running out of money or running out of will to continue (due to founder fallout).

Money may be made up numbers, but what you can exchange it for is very real.

People buy things they value.

So if Ello dies, did they build something valuable? Valuable enough that it could sustain itself long term.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#230

Post by jrexilius »

I think people imply too much evil-intent with funding rather than understanding the mechanics of it. If you take money from an investor you have an obligation to them to make a return on that money in a finite time frame. The VC has LPs who want their money back in a finite window, so paying tiny dividends over 10 years to see a return on capital and some profit just doesn't work. Building a low-margin, profitable business does not return that investment.

So if you understand the mechanics behind it and have a reasonable path to return, say at least 5x the capital in 5 years (they want more obviously) then VC may not get in the way of your mission. But you have to ask yourself the hard question and be honest in answering it: "Can I return this investment five fold in five years without harming my customers/users/business/etc.?"..

Ethical obligations go in multiple directions.

[edit to add] Obviously there is also a fair amount of dihonesty and ill-intentioned greed out there as well, but that isn't the driver.

Post reply on HN