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

241–250 of 264 posts

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#241

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

altacc wrote: post #220
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.

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…

im sure that sort of stuff is on there, but all the stuff my friends and i see on there is memes, and Id guess thats representative of most of the 20s age userbase. We didnt notice any change during the buyout or rebrand except some different meme recommendations for a bit.

There are a lot more ads between my memes now though. It hit a critical density where we dont use it anymore. 40% ads

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#242

Post by rgbrgb »

wavemode wrote: post #111
rgbrgb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income bar / donation thing sounds extremely stressful and precarious if you're paying anyone a salary. Capped profit is interesting since it doesn't limit the business model, just the likelihood of enshitification.

Running a startup AT ALL is extremely stressful and precarious if you're paying anyone a salary. 90% of startups die in flames. Stress and danger are table stakes, I would think.

absolutely, i'm very familiar with that stress. but committing to a donation only business model for a product you're giving away for free is playing the startup game on ludicrous mode.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#243

Post by Night_Thastus »

I did not use, or even hear of Ello, but I am sad to see this story play out.

What is more sad is that this exact story has played out hundreds, thousands of times with slight variation.

I don't understand how the people involved cannot see those patterns. Cannot see the history. Cannot see beyond the current moment.

I'm really not sure if it's greed or self-deception or ambition or something else entirely.

For a similar, but different story:

Some time back, a game development studio called Harebrained Schemes was created from passionate individuals in the Shadowrun and Battletech community - founders who had been involved since the early tabletop days. They rebooted Shadowrun with 3 new games, and in 2018 used Kickstarter to create Battletech, which is loved by the community and has an active modding scene.

Then, immediately following the success of BT, they sold out to Paradox. Paradox is not a terrible publisher in the grand scheme of things. But that sale did change HS's priorities. They were prevented from making another Battletech game, because frankly it's a more niche product with older fans. It does not have 'mass market appeal'. They instead made Lamplighter's league, something that clearly they did not have their hearts in.

In the end, it flopped, HS had massive layoffs and now was let go by Paradox. We will likely never get another game from them. There will never be a Battletech 2.

It's so frustrating. They had passionate individuals and a loving fan base and GREAT games, and they threw it away.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#244

Post by [deleted] »

rcxdude wrote: post #227
steveklabnik wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

[deleted]

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#245

Post by lelanthran »

DeathArrow wrote: post #198
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…

>Maybe if Ello had raised only a few million and kept around a dozen employees or so, it could have succeeded. I doubt it. It seems like a poor product market fit. I think there aren't a lot of creators willing to pay to have a small social network just for them. They won't probably be active users even if the small social network was completely free.

> I think there aren't a lot of creators willing to pay to have a small social network just for them.

They might, if you pitched it as a professional network - LinkedIn for Creators.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#246

Post by willi59549879 »

mawise wrote: post #10

I started building an open source private blogging system[1] when my first kid was born, and it eventually evolved into the skeleton of a social network--but fully decentralized using RSS and self- (or paid-) hosting. I concluded the only way for a network to actually avoid selling out was for there to be nothing to sell. If I give away the software, and don't control the network then there is no need for users to tr…

it is an interesting idea. Setup and migration should be very simple (install and done). Otherwise not many people will go that route. With other federated services, it is usually almost the same as with a private platform. Most of the users will be on a single server.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#247

Post by willi59549879 »

darcys22 wrote: post #70
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #51

I'm a participant in a community that explicitly refuses money from outside its membership. If that means we can't grow fast, or have fancy digs, so be it. The reason for that, is to avoid having influence from outside. Even "angel" investment can be problematic, as the "angel" has the ear of the leadership. I have found that even well-meaning outsiders can have highly destructive influence, because they don't unders…

The issue is that without funding a projects velocity is low and that can frustrate the community. Everyone says they are on board with supporting the little guys, until they hit bugs and start complaining.

if we lived in utopia the software could be open source, so that everyone who wants a feature can contribute. Best would be when it can easily be self hosted

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#248

Post by RobKohr »

myfriendnewton wrote: post #92
dopeboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well now I have to ask - what was it like inside the cauldron? Any learnings you took into your next step?

It was my favorite job I've ever had. It was intense in the best way. I didn't have much contact with Budnitz, but the other 6 founders showed such a strong passion for the community, it was impossible for me to not to come to work excited. I'd say most of the negative stress I felt was from knowing that the user base was growing faster than we could fill in feature gaps that would keep folks engaged. I felt like we…

That last bit - why not? What is wrong with an in house ui framework.

I have built many of them to good effect.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#249

Post by StreetChief »

wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #241
altacc wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

im sure that sort of stuff is on there, but all the stuff my friends and i see on there is memes, and Id guess thats representative of most of the 20s age userbase. We didnt notice any change during the buyout or rebrand except some different meme recommendations for a bit. There are a lot more ads between my memes now though. It hit a critical density where we dont use it anymore. 40% ads

So to summarize, you have stopped using twitter because of ad increases since elon took over?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#250

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

Substack and Patreon both largely work because the top producers there got popular somewhere else first and then brought a large audience with them. It's not clear if a creator economy consisting entirely or primarily of platforms like this would be possible.

Hell, at least at first, Ello even tried this same technique. It was meant to be an online gathering place for pre-existing communities of artists who already knew each other from elsewhere. Even Facebook did this at first, too, automatically placing people into networks for their universities, assuming they would already know many of the other users from class. Ello required personal invitations whereas Facebook required a .edu e-mail address to register.

The fundamental problem here is all the value is in the network itself, not the platform. The fact that the network is largely on Facebook is as much a matter of chance and historical inertia as it is anything Facebook did well as a company or a technology. Likewise, I don't know that Substack did anything particularly repeatable to snag people like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald right as traditional publishers tanked. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

It's not like there is no precedent. Film studios and record companies have more or less always operated this way. All of the value of their products is created by the artists, not by the company. The only way for them to moat any of it is signing artists to exclusive contracts before they get big enough to have real negotiating power. But web platforms don't want to think of themselves as another MGM studios. They want to be 1950s Ford but with near-zero marginal cost of goods sold.

Post reply on HN