11 ms·

The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

• jl6 3y ago
  Looks like Archive Team didn’t manage to get anything before it disappeared :(
• jchw 3y ago
  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 providing social networking and chatting services? VC funding has a lot of problems. Funding via advertising is similarly fraught with peril, maybe worse, especially the most lucrative stuff. You can fund things by selling premium content or features, but this too is rather tenuous: if you are say, SoundCloud, one of your primary customers is inevitably going to be artists, who themselves are by and large not rich. Not to mention, no matter who you focus your monetization on, $1 is infinitely more than $0, and monetizing useful features or access to content will inevitably lower the overall value of your platform. This is presumably part of why advertising is so enticing: end users don't have to "pay" anything. Sure, advertising isn't literally free, but users do not have to set up a payment method and take money from their account and send it to yours, which is a massive difference, and massively increases accessibility. Then there's stuff like crowdfunding. Platforms that let you do one-off funding campaigns like Kickstarter or Gofundme, or platforms that let you do monthly subscriptions in exchange for "rewards" like Patreon or FANBOX. There even is a platform that is partly funded by monthly subscription payments (Misskey.io) and although I'm sure it is a relatively small part of the funding (at least I would certainly assume so) it still seems to have been successful nonetheless. And that's just funding. What about structure? Becoming a non-profit or public benefit corporation is seemingly not any kind of sure-fire way to avoid trouble, as can be seen here. While I don't know exactly how the legalese works around a lot of these topics, it feels like these measures simply don't do enough to prevent corruption or at the very least, undesired future changes in direction. You want a company to have autonomy to carry out its vision and try to survive in the process, but you don't want it to compromise its core values in the process. Is there anything you can do legally and/or socially to provide better assurances? This is very frustrating because I think a lot of us see the sad state of the Internet and want to do something, but it's hard to work towards it because you can also see a graveyard of good intentions gone horribly awry. There's all kinds of attempts to work around it, but as a wise man once said, "Mo Money Mo Problems". It seems that the temptation to exploit things always manages to find a way around your safeguards to prevent things from being exploited. Just to beat a dead horse even more, remember the last time you were excited for a Google product announcement, like say, GMail? I'm not saying they were ever a charity or intending to be... but it's hard to not see the painful way in which values that were once hard-fought slowly fade away. Somehow, eventually, everything becomes rent-seeking, a game to see how much money you can get back from an investment. One would hope there is a way out that doesn't involve a very painful upheaval of society, but over time it's getting harder and harder to believe it.
  • creer 3y ago
    Day to day corruption is a problem. And if we had a solution, it would be known (the concept of bug bounties goes in the right direction, perhaps). I think this is a fundamental problem and research opportunity with the legal forms for institutions and staff incentives. Even "winding down" doesn't necessarily need to be a problem. It's all in the "how" it's done.
  • laurex 3y ago
    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.
• kristopolous 3y ago
  Social networks and marketplaces are the hardest things to get going
  • myfriendnewton 3y ago
    That's one of the things that makes Ello's story a bit sad. It started out as a community of people that had this natural gravity, and the early community was admirably dedicated to the experiment.
  • edhelas 3y ago
    *centralized and siloed social-networks Federated, standard and decentralized network just live by themselves :)
    • forbiddenvoid 3y ago
      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.
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  > 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 president of blockchain gaming company Dapper Labs. They are now focused on “synthetic celebrities” and AI influencers.
  • SpaceNoodled 3y ago
    Grifting is more lucrative than ever!
    • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I thought this recent article was so insightful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014737
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    This is the game. Raise money, steal it, let the company go to the dogs.
    • TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      I am often jealous of the people who make huge sums of money grifting investors, but the thing is I care too much about what I do and I’d be bad at pretending I don’t. The flip side is I instead love what I do and I’m very proud of my work, which I don’t think someone could really say if they’re shilling crap like plastic toys and NFTs. Or maybe they could say that, but I never could. Grifting is just not for me.
      • EdwardDiego 3y ago
        I used to work in public service (in chronological order, ranger, social security, LLC incorporation and radio spectrum licensing and management) before jumping into software with glee. And I have the exact same thought about providing software for government and other large organisations. The number of "solutions" my public service employers paid millions for, that didn't fucking work properly or reliably is mental. I'm really not sure how contracts keep getting signed by big organisations that don't impose massive penalties on providers for failure, but it they do. Or the sister org that finally had enough and wanted to switch providers, and had to go to court in order to be even be able to pay a large amount for the IP rights to the source code of their system, because they'd signed a contract that let the provider retain IP, and the provider really liked that sweet sweet taxpayer money for buggy bollocks. So naturally, when they contracted HP to maintain the system they ensured that the contract retained IP ownership for their org. Haha, no, I'm kidding, they let HP keep IP rights on changes HP made, and later on had to fight HP in the courts so they could pay HP for the source to switch providers again after getting sick of being charged $2K (USD) by HP to update the text of a single link on a website. And I keep thinking that I'd very much like to be in the market of earning millions by providing broken software to people making big decisions who aren't competent enough to jump to private sector, broken software is easy. But then the guilt of stealing taxpayer money kicks in (it's not legally stealing, but morally, it's stealing. As the saying kinda goes, any great criminal needs a great lawyer, a great accountant, and a corporation), as well as the guilt of professional ethics. (What's the old joke about software ethics? An ethical programmer would never write a function called destroyBaghdad, they'd write a function called destroyCity and pass Baghdad as a parameter.) But look at Birmingham Council in the UK, bankrupted by shit software and Oracle's fearsome legal team. The entire fucking disgrace that is Horizon (although being fair to Fujitsu, nearly all of the evil was on their customer's side, it was only aided and abetted by Fujitsu employees lying in court). In my country, IBM sued our government (and won) because IBM wanted to be paid even more for not delivering a massively expensive and broken project to the Police (INCIS), more recently our Education dept spent $180 million on a payroll system called Novopay (they also paid the provider Talent2 to administer payroll with it) that was terribly broken and underpaid some teachers (and perhaps more egregiously, slightly overpaid some teachers, then the provider would eventually realise and demand the teacher repay the overpayment be returned in full in a short timeframe or debt collectors would be brought in, and threats of civil litigation or criminal complaints were used to pressure them) to the extent that teachers had to go on strike to get the government to take it seriously. Eventually the government took back the admin side of it, and then gave Talent2 another $45 million to get the system working, and are still paying them to maintain it today. The idea of being in a market where delivering badly broken software leads to you getting paid another 25% of the upfront cost to get it actually working, and you don't get fired, is wild. I suppose there's a reason that Oracle and similar are described as law firms that incidentally write software, but damn, they make crypto grifters look like complete amateurs. And I'll begrudgingly admit that Oracle et al are selling a product with actual utility at least, as opposed to NFTs which I'd call digital tulip bulbs, but that is mean to tulip bulbs because they can at least be used to grow flowers. I've seen 0 use cases for NFTs / ICOs that aren't gambling/unhinged speculation (usually with some fraud involved to make Number Go up to suck in the rubes), or just good old fashioned direct to the consumer fraud dressed up in complicated jargon.
• NetOpWibby 3y ago
  This post is a long-ass “told you so” and honestly, I’m here for it. I too had an Ello account and thoroughly enjoyed its minimalist nature. VC money really seems like the beginning of the end.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • indymike 3y ago
    > VC money really seems like the beginning of the end. For a lot of businesses, raising VC money is a mistake because rapid growth just isn't the right strategy. VC is expensive - you give up a lot of equity every round and are betting that your ever shrinking slice will be bigger because the whole pie grew faster. That is a very tough target to hit.
    • NetOpWibby 3y ago
      You’d think everyone would understand this by now.
      • reiichiroh 3y ago
        Just one more web boom please, say 4.0 with AI.
• ErikAugust 3y ago
  "But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March." People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing. I once spitballed with a certain VC at FreshTracks Capital about an idea I had, which lead to him running off with it and burning millions of dollars making it into BRIDJ, which shut down a few years ago.
  • myfriendnewton 3y ago
    > People forget (or mostly never knew) that Ello was a Vermont thing. True, but a little misleading. The majority of the co-founders of Ello, plus nearly all of its staff, were based in Colorado. Source: I worked for Ello.
    • dopeboy 3y ago
      Well now I have to ask - what was it like inside the cauldron? Any learnings you took into your next step?
      • myfriendnewton 3y ago
        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 couldn't quite catch up, and by the time the money started running out and interest started to wane, it was too late. A few learnings: - 7 founders is a lot. I don't want that to sound like a criticism, it just means the company is going to feel a bit different vs a more classic 2 or 3 founder setup. - Positive feedback loops within a tight team of highly skilled people has a huge impact on getting more stuff done. That's how I would characterize the engineering team, and it was one of the highest-performing teams I've ever been a part of. - Don't build a startup on a custom, in-house UI framework ;)
• cole-k 3y ago
  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.
  • spencerflem 3y ago
    I would have said bandcamp, until recently Itch.io continues to be great, for now
  • gwern 3y ago
    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?
    • renewiltord 3y ago
      When ICANN was in danger of violating charter, CA AG was the one who enforced on them.
    • komadori 3y ago
      I suppose if the PBC was in debt then it could sell its assets, such as the Ello site, to pay its creditors and then dissolve.
    • steveklabnik 3y ago
      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/ https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/ So it would look like any other shareholder grievance against management in form.
• mawise 3y ago
  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 trust me. It continues to be an interesting journey as a side-project (not raising money means I'm still working a day-job). [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Most of these platforms will never reach "popular" scale. You need to think about the killer article or feature.
    • Aeolun 3y ago
      > You need to think about the killer article or feature. Well, no. I think the point is kind of that they don’t.
      • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
        Then they will never get popular.
        • lacrimacida 3y ago
          They avoid it getting so popular such that the audience does not grow faster than the ability to cater to the expectations from new users. Finding niches works out pretty well where they do and for longer periods of time with a lot less friction.
  • gameshot911 3y ago
    FYI, clicking the "Try the Demo" button doesn't do anything for me in Chrome or Firefox.
• dopeboy 3y ago
  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 _have_ to know that from the outset, else it's just trouble.
  • laurex 3y ago
    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.
    • dopeboy 3y ago
      Good points - social communities have less of an autopilot component than b2b SaaS.
    • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > Bootstrapping social tech ain’t easy. Expectations that this tech is free, plus the immediate need for support and safety for general populations Start with and focus on an audience that has different expectations than the general population.
      • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        Remember when The Face Book was for college kids only and GMail was invite-only? That's how to start.
        • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
          These are indeed possible examples.
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
• micromacrofoot 3y ago
  It's a shame that it's completely lost, they had some interesting layout conventions and it was kind of fun to browse images even in the later days. The network never really caught on, but there was some good work being done there.
• draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I thought this was a fantastic post. I think it really dovetailed with what I've been thinking a lot about recently regarding my disillusionment with tech (or, rather, with big tech companies). I think everyone should understand (and, honestly, repeat daily) that in our modern capitalist system where never-ending growth is an expected requirement of any company that has ever taken outside funding, it is simply an impossibility for a company to have any kind of durable values that conflict with that growth-at-all-costs requirement. It's as much of an impossibility as the sun rising in the west, and we should stop any pretense that it's not. Enshittification is inevitable. Nearly every tech company starts out similarly: an absolute laser focus on users and their needs, because that is how you first grow. At some point, though, all of that fruit is picked, and you then start going into features that are "user neutral" but that make money, until finally you chip away at features that look like they can be user neutral in the short term ("We A/B tested and nobody minded one more ad!"), but the long term effect is that you've completely destroyed your founding ethos. For example, it's easy to pick on Google these days because it's, well, so easy. Their total about face from a company that was nearly universally loved by engineers to one that, if not loathed, is at best seen as the "next IBM" is so obvious. E.g. Google got huge originally with a world-first search engine by not "selling out", by not masquerading ads as organic search results. Now when I search for any remotely commercial term the entire first page is ads that are nearly indistinguishable from organic results. It's not just Google, though. Apple loves to crow about user privacy, but it's hard to square this "value" with their insistence that anyone on iOS who uses iMessage to talk to anyone on Android gets 0 encryption (oh, and if even a single Android user is in a group chat, nobody gets encryption). I don't think that makes any company "evil", but it does make it somewhat sociopathic in the sense that there can ever only be a single goal: growth at all costs. The sooner we all recognize it means we can treat all companies with an appropriate level of caution. One final note related to this, is that this is one reason I'm not really a fan of PBCs as mentioned in the article. PBCs are a smoke-screen. As the saying goes, "Follow the money". When push-comes-to-shove you'll also see PBCs compromise their "values" the second growth starts to be at risk.
  • ajhurliman 3y ago
    Yes, this is a tech thing in particular. You don't see VC being raised for a plumbing company, they'll get an SBA loan or bootstrap. They don't need to grow 10x every year, if the owners can pay their bills and send their kids to college they're happy. And plumbing is such a constitutionally important thing: having hot, running water and not having feces in your house is so much important than seeing what that guy from high school is up to. I think the issue lays with how high-variance tech is due to the scale: either it is marginally profitable at a massive scale and is worth billions of dollars, or you have something that is unprofitable at any scale and is worthless. It's like there's all of the sudden (in the last 15 years) become an appetite for throwing fortunes onto a roulette table (which may be giving better odds than a lot of VCs).
• micromacrofoot 3y ago
  Apologies if this is too tangential, but I wonder if we would see fewer of these "we failed, sell the bones out to any charlatan you can find" sales if the US had a better support system for people that ensures they're not out of healthcare or housing if they take some time off from working. If I invested a bunch of time, effort, and vision into something and had nothing to show for it while nearing failure... I'd be very tempted to sell just so I don't have to go straight from failure to job hunt. This situation seems outrageously stressful to me... I literally don't even know what I'd do if I broke my arm or came down with some serious illness while in the inbetween state.
• r3trohack3r 3y ago
  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 sad the site died.
  • unsupp0rted 3y ago
    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 people permanently migrated away is complete enshitification of the existing platform (i.e. Digg effect). Partial enshitification isn't enough.
    • Earw0rm 3y ago
      Twxttxr is getting pretty close now - maybe in some ways surpassing Digg in awfulness. Specifically the massive level of pornbot traffic, and algorithm changes that seem to be intentionally surfacing posts to adversarial users who will then go on the attack.
      • unsupp0rted 3y ago
        The porn bots are pervasive and easily identifiable programmatically. That they persist must mean that X wants them to persist.
      • jrnichols 3y ago
        am I the only one that has not seen porn bots or had replies from them on Twitter? I see this mentioned as a huge problem, but are users in general actually seeing this?
    • 3y ago
• Workaccount2 3y ago
  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 content. It made it four years before investor cash dried up and they said goodbye.
  • B56b 3y ago
    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.
    • Thrymr 3y ago
      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.
  • creer 3y ago
    > If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. That's a fun quip (and often correct) but the world needs a way to run this kind of project. Community? free? transparent? etc, etc. And I think this issue is not just about "free systems", culture changes and day to day corruption creeps and destroys everything. Even die-hard for-profit institutions (where entire branches might go rogue on their own objectives.)
  • Earw0rm 3y ago
    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 for them to maintain a centre of gravity without offering something specific, and given that the network itself can't produce value out of thin air, it's probably not coincidental that the ones best able to maintain gravity are offering stuff stolen from elsewhere.
• darnfish 3y ago
  Anyone wanna place a bet on how likely that an order from here would be delivered? https://ello.threadless.com/designs/white-ello-shirt/mens/t-shirt/regular?color=white&size=medium https://ello.threadless.com/designs/white-ello-shirt/mens/t-...
  • ajhurliman 3y ago
    I've got 5 on it, DM for Venmo when you get your shirt or 10 weeks have elapsed since purchase.
  • slater 3y ago
    Considering that the order would be fulfilled by Threadless (an Actually Good™ company) and not by Ello, why do you think you wouldn't get the tee?
  • waxpancake 3y ago
    I ordered one yesterday as I wrapping up the post, and it was already shipped early this morning.
• Lerc 3y ago
  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. Display an income bar. If it drops to zero the servers turn off. If it drops below 1 nobody can post. If it is above 1 you have Direct messaging, above 2 you have more features, etc. Keep the communication clear as to what is being provided and how it is being paid for. Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service. Its survival would depend upon providing a service that satisfies enough people to sustain the support. This certainly wouldn't be as lucrative as a exploit the users model, but the idea is not to make a fortune, but to simply run a sustainable enterprise.
  • rgbrgb 3y ago
    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.
    • wavemode 3y ago
      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.
      • rgbrgb 3y ago
        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.
  • d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
    Most people won't pay, but if nobody pays there is no service Wouldn't this be at risk of Bystander Effect?
• muppetman 3y ago
  I'm amazed by the number of people who trust websites like this with their memories/diaries etc. I mean, I understand why, there's an expectation when you start with these sites they'll be around forever - most people don't have the time, the knowledge or the desire to "do it themselves" - When livejournal was all the rage I decided to do it myself with Postnuke, then (and still!) Drupal. Going on 24 years now. That said, LiveJournal is still going, but owned by a Russian company I think, and it could turn off tomorrow. I guess the flipside is, if I die tomorrow and then there's a PHP error on my website, no one's ever going to know how to fix it. So my memories and diary entries die as well. My "fix" for that is to export the ~2400 diary entires every few months into one massive PDF file. Edit: I understand why this is being downvoted, I just want to clarify that I didn't mean the opening sentence to read as if people who trust 3rd party websites to their hosting were silly/dumb, though I realise now that's how it scans. What I should have said was "It's very unfortunate and a sad state of the current Internet that people trust websites like this..."
  • creer 3y ago
    That is the main takeaway from all these. The lesson is not that venture capital ruined it. But that eventually, at some point, either the founder or circumstances change the thing. The one permanent here is that it's bit on a digital network. By definition not permanent. And so people run into this again and again and still don't believe that XYZ might be next. But it is, XYZ is their business platform, their social media network, their journals, their photo hoster, their "lifetime membership", etc. I ran into this all the time with clients. They would worry about what happens to their consultant, but never to their infrastructure. So for businesses: have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups. And for individuals, have a plan B, and have usable archives / backups.
• Andrex 3y ago
  > 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.
  • jnsie 3y ago
    It's funny, the author went out of their way to give the company the benefit of the doubt...but they come across extremely arrogant and sometimes vitriolic. I wouldn't have been so positive
  • rurp 3y ago
    Hah, same here. That line jumped out to me as a big toxic red flag. The quotes further down from users who suddenly lost all of their content were sad to read. It sucks how often regular people get burned for taking tech companies at their word.
  • tytso 3y ago
    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....
    • SamBam 3y ago
      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.
      • Andrex 3y ago
• Marlonzeo101 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  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).
  • darcys22 3y ago
    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.
    • mikro2nd 3y ago
      Sometimes -- those times when you're breaking entirely new ground with a thing, when you're starting with just a vague vision of where the thing might go -- slow is better. Slow gives you time to understand the effects of what you've already done and the possibilities that affords. I guess it depends on whether you're looking to achieve something unique and truly new, or just "get rich fast".
    • willi59549879 3y ago
      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
  • laurex 3y ago
    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.
• bdcravens 3y ago
  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 ...)
  • mdasen 3y ago
    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'd be starting over. Some may have backed up their contacts, but most wouldn't. If mastodon.social gave a couple months notice, people could migrate to other servers. given that mastodon.social is the largest server, there would be some growing pains as other servers worked to accommodate new users, but it's possible for the Fediverse to continue. Note, I'm not saying that the Fediverse will be incredibly popular. I'm simply noting that there's an amount of resilience. Once Ello's owners ran out of interest or money, that was the end of Ello. Even if others had a huge interest in seeing it continue, there was nothing they could do. Even if the Fediverse doesn't "catch" by your definition of catching on, it has caught on for enough people who have moved there and will remain there. That's why I feel happier in the Fediverse. It feels like something the community controls. Sure, I don't run my own server, but I possibly could in the future and there are enough people running servers that I don't feel beholden to any one entity. It just feels like something that can stick around - even if the cool kids aren't interested. Enough of us like it and we'll keep it going even if some of us become disinterested in it.
    • riffic 3y ago
      the genie that is the Fediverse (based on interoperable and open web protocols) is impossible to place back into its bottle.
  • forbiddenvoid 3y ago
    There's a couple of key differences between Google backing Google+ and Meta backing Threads. 1. Meta's entire business is social apps, and Google's is not. There are strategic differences in approach as a result. 2. Google+ was an attempt to disrupt Facebook's rise at the height of Facebook's popularity. People _liked_ FB then - so trying to get them to switch to another product was harder. Threads shipped during a time of volatility with Xitter and is poised to capture more of that audience as Xitter continues to decay. In terms of how things will change in the space over time, Threads choice to support ActivityPub will probably mean good things for the Fediverse in general, at least in the short term (3E notwithstanding), and could ultimately serve to be the arbiter that kills BlueSky and the AT Protocol.
• Rodeoclash 3y ago
  I wonder if it's possible to take the Wikipedia model (open source, non profit entity) and use that to build a social network.
  • novagameco 3y ago
    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
    • munchler 3y ago
      Deleted
    • rglullis 3y ago
      The BBC started running their own instance as an experiment, and it seems that they will not keep it running: https://mstdn.social/@isleofmandan/111775751771437531 https://mstdn.social/@isleofmandan/111775751771437531
    • Rodeoclash 3y ago
      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).
      • novagameco 3y ago
        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
  • vdaea 3y ago
    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.
• Kye 3y ago
  Makes me think about how Bluesky is also a Public Benefit Corporation and took $8m in funding.
  • StreetChief 3y ago
    Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it, or whatever the saying is.
    • caboteria 3y ago
      That, mixed with "there's a sucker born every minute".
    • skybrian 3y ago
      "History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes" - possibly Theodor Reik [1] I expect Bluesky to make their own mistakes. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
      • StreetChief 3y ago
        This is the quote I believe: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana
        • skybrian 3y ago
          Yes, but I like the other one better.
          • StreetChief 3y ago
            Ah I assumed you were correcting me, apologies.
  • Analemma_ 3y ago
• zzzeek 3y ago
  this post is a bit of a "nyah nyah I told you so", but since whoever was running Ello did not give any heads up to users a way to get at their content, they just allowed the thing to buzz into the ground and they shut off all communication, they deserve it.
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  Oh wow, I'd totally forgotten about Ello. They were never going mainstream with that yuppie aesthetic
• thimkerbell 3y ago
  HN is just doomy-doomy-doomy today. Sad.
• riffic 3y ago
  defunct social networking services, a list from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
• paulddraper 3y ago
  > I figured I’d publish a short list of things Ello will never do: > ... > 2. Tolerate hate. Ello has many tools, some visible and others not, that help keep this network positive. Geez, it's hard to take anything said as authentic with a statement like that. How can you talk about things without "hate"? "I hate shoveling snow." "I hate terrorists." "I hate this political candidate." "I hate Taylor Swift music."
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    How about "I hate reductive hackernewses who fail to engage constructively with the discourse and instead turn to gotcha language that 9-year-olds think is terribly clever"?
    • paulddraper 3y ago
      Sure, great example!
    • zemvpferreira 3y ago
      He's right though. "Not tolerating hate" is a paperthin principle, that would stand up to as much scrutiny as everything else Ello stood for, in hindsight. re, it was all bullshit and the warning signs should be called out as such so we know next time someone tries to bullshit us.
  • wideopenjake 3y ago
    I was head of technology for another "make a better world" social network, and we approached fostering positivity as a practice of encouraging constructive interaction and discouraging _destructive_ interaction. In other words, being directly abusive toward others was obviously destructive and discouraged, but disagreement, even when quite strong, was great, as long as everyone involved maintained a level of basic respect when interacting with each other. There's also a big difference between vehement dislike of a distant thing, concept or person, especially if one can express their reasons well, and using slurs or advocating violence or harm. I imagine here they used 'hate' to stand in for 'hate speech', but not being in their minds - I really don't know.
• wideopenjake 3y ago
  Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually died a few years later, but at least I ended up in the Denver/Boulder area). Anyway, the code test part of the interview involved pairing with another engineer on a small portion of the ello User model (their application was built with Ruby on Rails at the time), and I remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do, at least in terms of whether it provided a decent test of my abilities. I ended up sending a follow-up email expressing that, along with numerous polished samples of other project work. They ended up passing on me, but I stayed a member of ello for a while longer because I thought the idea might have promise. Maybe I left too early, but I eventually ditched it because... there was no "there", there. I liked their general idea, but... they could have done so much more with it, even with a small team. As it was, I left before ello ever got out of its "tumblr clone with way too much empty space" phase - if it ever did. RIP
  • DeathArrow 3y ago
    >They ended up passing on me Sounds like a win for you.
  • leoff 3y ago
    > I remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do funny how people that say this are often the ones bombing the interview. usually the ones who score well, are the ones that see how the simplicity of the given problem gives them room to show how well they understand the domain, and they appreciate it.
    • Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      Most software like this is simple; the danger is that some developers will overcomplicate a solution, or think there's more to it than there really is. A trick question if you will. Don't judge a company by its tests, if they're easy for you to do it's not a slight on the company or the skills required.
• reso 3y ago
  I'm not sure why this post focuses so much on the angel investment. There are probably 10 reasons why Ello failed, starting with the fact that bootstrapping social network userbases is hard, and ending with users won't pay for social networks. None of these are directly related to the fact they built the site with investor money and not volunteer hours.
  • urbandw311er 3y ago
    I think it’s fair critique for the post to focus on the VC (not angel) investment — the expectations of VCs and pressure to deliver a profit could easily have been a significant factor in the decision made by the CEO to focus on substantial revenue growth.
    • reso 3y ago
      But did they ever even cover their costs? If a business is stable for its current size, and then VCs push you to grow and that kills the company, then yes, that company was killed by VC pressures. However, AFAIK, ello never made much money at all, which is the most proximate reason they failed.
  • x0x0 3y ago
    They are imo directly related. Seven people working on ello means it's hard to understand, even on ramen salaries, how that costs less than $1m a year once you fully burden those salaries, buy office space, buy hosting, etc. So they've set themselves up from the beginning to spend more money than they make, and everything downstream flowed from that choice. If they had to be cash-flow breakeven from the get, they would have to have charged users. ie built a completely different product, with a different audience.
• otteromkram 3y ago
  I don't see why Ello didn't just turn into a Pinterest + Etsy + DeviantArt hybrid. Let artists show off work, let them seem their art/products, take a percentage of the sale as profit. Maybe that's a bad business model for a social-media-first platform.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't get it. Be a marketplace, and charge commission.
• d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
  Has anyone ever considered that social networking is just a bad business model? It's something that everyone wants to use, expensive to run but nobody wants to pay for.
  • Kye 3y ago
    Mastodon and ActivityPub prove another funding model can work even up to millions of active users. There are plenty of criticisms people have for them, but they're beside the point: it works.
    • warkdarrior 3y ago
      Who is funding Mastodon servers?
      • Kye 3y ago
        The people who use them. Some are funded in part or whole by the person running it, but most still have a Patreon or something like it.
    • jrm4 3y ago
      Right. This thread should be talking about Mastodon FAR earlier. I do not care AT ALL that VCs can't figure out how to make money from social media directly; if anything, I expect that. It shows that there's nothing particularly intelligent (and maybe perhaps even useful) about VC money. There are other models. Lots of them. We've seen a ton of them work to various degrees. Now, Mastodon is probably the right model for social media. I wish folks here could get their collective heads out of VC-money-land and realize this (presuming one thinks that there is utility in social media, which I do.) And much like the internet itself, there's even money here as well. Ask Eli Lilly. If they had signed on to something like Mastodon, where they could be their OWN source of truth, perhaps they wouldn't have had their "Insulin is free" moment.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    > social networking is just a bad business model I think Meta is doing pretty well...
• dredmorbius 3y ago
  I'd joined Ello early[1] on and watched its journey with interest, frustration, and ultimately sadness. That included an on-site visit in October 2015, which was genuinely enjoyable. I'd largely written off the site around 2018 when it was sold and information on either the status of the social benefit corporation (SBC) or new ownership was exceedingly scarce. Andy Baio's account corresponds strongly with my own. The community was small (I'd estimated total accounts at perhaps 10--15 million, and actives at roughly 1% of that, generally confirmed during my visit), but vibrant in its own way, and as with numerous other social networks, I miss numerous connections I'd made there, though a small handful have resumed at the Fediverse. There really were some notable gems among the group I connected with, including Paul Mason (journalist, briefly), poet Trenton Lee Tiemeyer, authors Ksenia Anske and Bruce Sterling, SVG guru David Dailey, and others. Most disquieting was how Ello died with neither notice to its members or commentary elsewhere. TFA here is among the very few accounts I've seen of its demise. (I've written a few times about it at the Fediverse myself.) The other concern, going far beyond Ello, is how little protection or guarantee either its manifesto or SBC status ended up providing. Going forward, I'm going to give similar attestations vanishingly slight weight. Having participated in online communities since the late 1980s (Usenet, mailing lists, Slashdot, Google+, Diaspora*, Reddit, Ello, the quite short-lived Imzy, amongst others), I'm reminded of the song "dumb ways to die": there are many ways for a social network to die, most of them depressingly uncreative. The flip side is that it's also difficult for a social network to survive, let alone thrive, and survival. Commercial pressures from every thing I've seen worsen this, though even noncommercial / non-ad-supported sites may see failure modes. Of the best communities I've encountered: - Early Usenet, when access was strongly predicated on academic affiliation. - 1990s-era mailing lists, most especially those focused around Unix / Linux and Free Software topics. (Broader-appeal mailing lists ... tended to function poorly.) - Google+, in patches. The fact that the social network wasn't ad-dependent, and had strong representation from the tech community were strengths, and some of the best engaging online conversations I've had were from there. Diaspora*, though vastly smaller, saw a substantial portion of my G+ community engage there and had similar dynamics which also made for some good discussions, though not quite as often. - The Fediverse. Not quite as rewarding as G+, but I strongly suspect it will prove far more enduring. - Hacker News. As with G+, not directly intended as a revenue-generating platform. Not as good as it could be, but far better many other options, and astonishingly consistent over a very long lifetime (approaching 20 years), which would beat out Usenet by quite a margin.[2] I'd chalk up HN's durability to a few factors: unsexy tech and appearance, stellar moderation, solid design principles, and a viable founding cohort and active community. There are of course criticisms of the site and I've made a few myself, but relative to much the rest of the Net, still running strong. ________________________________ Notes: 1. The Internet Archive has some captures: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://ello.co/dredmorbius https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://ello.co/dredmorbius> 2. Usenet's birth date was ~1979. By 1999 it was well past its sell-by date, though not completely dead.
• sirspacey 3y ago
  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 is always subscription revenue. It’s true you can build a unique business on unique values for a unique community. But it’s a long slog in the MicroSaaS world where anyone can & many will straight up copy you - forever. X.com is probably the only & last experiment on whether switching to subscription rev is achievable at scale. Looks pretty clear so far that it’s not. This might seem a negative outlook, but it could be quite positive if founders know & accept it. The secret is out now that, mostly, founders make the same amount of money in the same amount of time whether they go the VC or bootstrapped route (when it’s a winning business). There will always be opportunities for finance-backed cartel-busting mega runs. But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays.
  • skybrian 3y ago
    The founders themselves could also lose interest over the years if the website isn't as popular as they hoped, and it's still a slog.
    • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > The founders themselves could also lose interest over the years if the website isn't as popular as they hoped, and it's still a slog. Rather: the founders are lying and deceiving if they talk about their great vision and its importance for mankind, if in reality they are just looking for popularity, and are eschewing the slog.
      • skybrian 3y ago
        That's one scenario. There are others.
  • 3y ago
• strangattractor 3y ago
  Replace "Ello" with "OpenAI" except OpenAI is not being silent about the changes.
• sakesun 3y ago
  oodbye
• paxys 3y ago
  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 the cause for failure but ignoring the fact that Ello was dead in the water regardless of it. The company had no users and no business model. Heck a reasonable amount of ethical advertising may actually have done some good for the community and helped the product survive.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    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 expertise + moderate programming skills.
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
      Can you give us examples of such startups? Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.
      • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
        No, that's why I asked. Where are they? What are they doing?
    • moomin 3y ago
      The closest thing I can think of is patio11’s Bingo Card Creator. But he moved on to… venture funded payments processing. I think, though, the people who can and do bootstrap small businesses like that don’t necessarily hang out here. The site is literally VC-owned, after all.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  >Would things have been different if they hadn’t taken funding? It’s impossible to say. In all likelihood, it never would have been built in the first place. >But if it had, I doubt it would have ended like this. If it had I doubt it would have lasted as much.
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  The article somehow states that money from private equity and venture capital is poison that will kill new companies and harm the public. I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed. If you are in a internet business, you either charge users for the service or sell ads. Until now there's no better proven way to monetize. If you intend to charge users for the service without selling ads, then you can do it regardless of how the money came to finance the business. In retrospect, it seems like a bad business prospective from the start, with low potential. Had the potential been better, VC wouldn't force them to sell ads and wouldn't have tried to exit the business so fast.
  • throwuxiytayq 3y ago
    > I wonder how you can grow a company without outside investors? Either you are a very rich founder or you can try to grow it organically but very slowly. If you attempt to do the later you'll find yourself in a position where is very hard to succeed, moreso if your company doesn't do anything new and the competition has lots of cash to succeed. Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (you wanted to build) straight up impossible. Turns out building companies is very difficult. If the first thing you do is sell out, perhaps you don’t have what it takes.
    • DeathArrow 3y ago
      >Hard is fine. The point is, taking VC money makes building the company (you wanted to build) straight up impossible. What if you and the venture capitalists are on the same page and have the same goals? Or what if you keep control, have a good money making plan and you don't ask for funding just to pay expenses and acquire unpaying users but use those funds for growth?
      • throwuxiytayq 3y ago
        Isn't that arguably what Ello thought they were doing?
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  What amazes me, is why would anyone sane pay to buy such a business? Why did Talenthouse buy Elo, and more important why did some investors buy Talenthouse? Have no one saw any sign of a very bad investment?
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  So they had 7 people to pay, and also pay for hosting, rent, equipment and utilities. That means at least 1 million per year. How were they going to do it without outside funding if the creators subscribing weren't paying at least that amount? Ask for donations on Patreon?
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  [flagged]
• larodi 3y ago
  My dream is of one day being in position to borrow some 5, 10 mil, if not more from some bank, VC, whatever. And then manage to somehow.... mismanage it, burn the money. And then get away from all the troubles by filing bankruptcy! Yes, this has ever been my wet dream growing in a country that didn't have the notion of personal default and until only recent years. Where mobs were chasing oneself if he had any debts to like... anyone. I really envy you guys burning VC capital on "dreams", while others have to solve the complex "differential equation" of markets and competition and planning, and you know managing things properly to be sustainable without external injections. Our story is very sad, your story is a dream indeed.
• nojvek 3y ago
  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.
• jrexilius 3y ago
  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.
  • GrinningFool 3y ago
    > have a reasonable path to return, say at least 5x the capital in 5 years Your definition of reasonable is not the same as mine.
  • burrish 3y ago
    Thank you for the clarification
• stannley 3y ago
  [dead]
• Night_Thastus 3y ago
  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.