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

81–90 of 264 posts

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#81

Post by SamBam »

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 believe GP was referring to the Ello founder Budnitz, who said that line, as the "dick."

I agree. He was responding to perfectly justified -- and accurate -- criticism by saying how sad it is to be a person with such views of the world.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#82

Post by vdaea »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #58

I wonder if it's possible to take the Wikipedia model (open source, non profit entity) and use that to build a social network.

Wikipedia is special in that 1) it's very cacheable so the infrastructure costs are low and 2) it's not too expensive in terms of development since I assume people don't expect many features.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#83

Post by steveklabnik »

gwern wrote: post #21
cole-k wrote: post #9

Even the supposedly indie anti-social social media outright violated their own manifesto. Is it any surprise that we're skeptical of the big promises of a bright future that corporations make all the time? I'm curious to know if anyone has evidence of a post similar to this but for a company with a (so far) happy ending.

I'm interested about the public benefit corporation part here. Did the PBC status wind up changing anything at all here? How does a PBC sell itself or get acquired? How is a PBC supposed to terminate or wind down? If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?

Nobody should trust my opinion, I am not an attorney, let alone one specialized in this area.

In my understanding, a PBC is effectively the same as a for-profit company with regards to these sorts of things. Unlike a non-profit, a PBC has stock, which it can sell, so that's how it would get acquired. I believe that there were even some PBC SPACs back when that was fashionable.

> If they violate their charter as Ello may have, who exactly enforces it or file a lawsuit, and what is their compensation?

The only real thing a PBC does is change "shall maximize shareholder value" to "shall be managed in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation." See here for Delaware: https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/

So it would look like any other shareholder grievance against management in form.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#85

Post by StreetChief »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #18
unsupp0rted wrote: post #3

> After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former…

This is the game. Raise money, steal it, let the company go to the dogs.

> CEO Harry Stonecipher, a cutthroat corporate operative who liked to say, “You can make a lot of money going out of business.” - https://jacobin.com/2024/01/boeing-malfunction-ceo-pay-stock...

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#87

Post by novagameco »

Rodeoclash wrote: post #74
novagameco wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought it would be cool if every NPR/PBS station also ran Fediverse nodes of mastodon or whatever the Fediverse version of Facebook is. Would provide a public-funded option with more transparency

Yeah, I like the federated idea, but I think it had its chance when Elon took over Twitter and they never managed to capture the exodus of users in any significant way. The barrier to entry was just too high (but they have taken great steps to reduce the complexity).

Well my experience with Mastodon has been that it's almost entirely tech people who are joining mastodon for the technical novelty. If every NPR/PBS station launched a social network concurrently, then people would quickly find other people on the platform to connect with

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#88

Post by Thrymr »

B56b wrote: post #39
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…

That's exactly it. I'm not sure what about software in particular makes people think that it can exist without funding. People have no problem paying for a physical product, but virtual products are hard to justify for some reason.

A large part is that the marginal cost per copy approaches zero. It was hard enough to charge for software when it came in a box on a store shelf, now it has to be wrapped in a service.

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#89

Post by wtbdrgb »

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…

and how much do you know about the internal workings of that community? how much do you know about it's "future"? how transparent is it about how much time top level management and leadership are investing and how they are compensated for it? how much do you know about the financial sponsors of the members of your community?

Re: The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

#90

Post by riffic »

mdasen wrote: post #69
bdcravens wrote: post #56

That's a name I haven't thought of for several years. I wonder if Fediverse, Blue Sky, etc will catch, or if it'll end up in the same boat. Threads too (yes it's backed by Meta, but G+ had Google behind it ...)

The reason I feel confident in the Fediverse's longevity is that it's independently hosted. If BlueSky ran out of money tomorrow and shut down its servers, BlueSky is gone. If mastodon.social ran out of money and shut down its servers, the Fediverse would continue. There would be pain if mastodon.social failed with zero notice. People would lose access to their accounts and would need to find a new server where they'…

the genie that is the Fediverse (based on interoperable and open web protocols) is impossible to place back into its bottle.
Post reply on HN