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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

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Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#91

Post by saghm »

btilly wrote: post #83
NikolaNovak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I f…

Google Plus correctly identified a major problem. Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...

That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#92

Post by Jbird2k »

godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#94

Post by quuxplusone »

derwiki wrote: post #23
zahlman wrote: post #13

> There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.” Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359

Haha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week

I agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting.

On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#95

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

wincy wrote: post #54
godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.

Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#96

Post by brentjanderson »

godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#97

Post by citizenkeen »

mojuba wrote: post #62
xgkickt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.

Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.

And yet for certain communities - like TTRPGs - it not only worked incredibly well but were still unlocking the effects of its loss.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#98

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

We have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand.

I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.

That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#99

Post by TZubiri »

This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.

But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.

To each their own I guess.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#100

Post by saubeidl »

brentjanderson wrote: post #96
godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..
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