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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

#51

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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 understand the culture and they aren't the ones on the hook, if things go pear-shaped, as opposed to the ones that have a real, personal, stake (like all those Ello users, who lost so much).

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#52

Post by forbiddenvoid »

edhelas wrote: post #4
kristopolous wrote: post #2

Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get going

*centralized and siloed social-networks Federated, standard and decentralized network just live by themselves :)

That doesn't make sense. Federated social networks have the same hard problem as centralized ones: social networks require people.

The part that's hard is the people, not the technology. Centralization and federation have nothing to do with it.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#53

Post by rgbrgb »

Lerc wrote: post #27

Taking investor money means users will required to pay, one way or another. Without an explicitly capped profit, I can't see how this doesn't eventually lead to exploitation of the users. I would like to see a donation/optional subscription model with tiered features as is seen in Patreon/Kickstarter etc. with the distinction that the tiers are community wide instead of being bound to the individuals donating. Displa…

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.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#54

Post by tytso »

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 mind my personal date getting sold; in other cases I pay money because the service is valuable. But I certainly make backups since I don't assume that even when I pay $$$, that the company might not go poof in the night....

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#55

Post by laurex »

jchw wrote: post #32

I know that nobody is purporting to have the answer, and I am definitely not trying to suggest that there's anything wrong with the conclusions drawn here--quite the contrary, actually. But, if VC funding is clearly a bad way to go about things, then what is the best way to structure and fund an organization built around a network or service that is primarily in the game of serving user-generated content and providin…

True. I’m working on a project to answer some of these questions and consider innovations that might have an alternative outcome. We hope to make it a collaborative project with wiki-like tendencies. To me, figuring out how to create technical social infrastructure that does not inherently have anti-social incentives is one of the most important problems of this moment.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#57

Post by laurex »

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…

It’s very interesting and telling that most of the technology that connects us does not have us as a customer, or a financial beneficiary. One of the key aspects of technofeudalism is the extractive nature of most of our platforms.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#59

Post by laurex »

dopeboy wrote: post #11

I'm a recovering founder after winding down my startup a couple months ago. I've been thinking about getting back on the saddle and in service of that, meeting with folks who could be potential co-founders. One of the first ~5 questions I ask is whether they want to bootstrap or go down the VC route. Because they are very different paths, with different levels of pressure and mostly importantly, expectation. You _hav…

Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations mean that it’s very different than say, B2B SaaS.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#60

Post by woah »

Earw0rm wrote: post #45
Workaccount2 wrote: post #22

Just a reminder: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. The internet culture birthed from the early days of the internet "Everything is free", seems to have captured a whole generation who simply have no concept of cost and value. Vid.me is another start-up that comes to mind: Youtube sucks, has too many ads, and sells your data. We won't have ads, won't sell your data, and will host all your con…

It's hard to relate it to scale, is why. A sandwich costs $5 everywhere, and a car costs $30k everywhere, because that's just what those things cost to make. It's relatively difficult to look at a web service and determine whether its running costs are normal guy hobby money, rich guy hobby money, or no seriously this won't last six months without VC money. Decentralised and P2P systems run themselves, but it's hard…

Decentralized systems still need ongoing development and maintenance.
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