Always Own Your Platform

http://alwaysownyourplatform.com/

by rauhl • 7 years ago

463 211 7 years ago

alwaysownyourplatform.com

rauhl• 7 years ago

Esp. relevant now given the concern around Medium …

nopriorarrests2• 7 years ago

Generic 'oh guys let's make world better' stuff, without explaining how it could be really done irl.

I mean, popular vlogger owning his own platform, really? Eating hosting costs, solving discoverability problem, etc?

dsr_2• 7 years ago

Solve the underlying problem, which is:

What do I do now so that when the platform doesn't work, I still can?

Now the answer is obvious: you don't need to stop using platforms, you need to stop being dependent on any given platform.

Store all your videos in two different storage providers, plus your house archive. Have accounts on at least two different video distribution systems. Get people interested in seeing your own website regularly, so they don't just subscribe on one platform and ignore you otherwise. Get them engaged in several communities. Occasionally put special bits on just one of those video distributors, and then add them to the other(s) later. Get people used to following you.

This is, obviously, more work than just shoving everything to a Youtube channel, or just posting to Medium, or just hosting with Wordpress -- but the point is that when one of them folds, has a service disruption, declines your credit card, or is invaded by leet script kidz, your business survives and merely suffers from hiccups while you re-point things.

nopriorarrests2• 7 years ago

good advice to follow, but the problem is...

if you are 21 y.o. vlogger focused on barbell training and restoring old american muscle cars, this advice will sound like "dude just do more straight deadlifts and focus on hi-rep kroc rows, they will help you with development of your back" -- aka, some special gibberish speak. it takes so much knowledge to do so, it just won't happen.

ben5092• 7 years ago

But "always own your own platform" is a message that tends to explain how to do it.

If lots of people own their platforms and are sharing links to their peers, they can solve the discoverability problem.

If they become collectively big enough, even video hosting can become commoditized. That is, you'd pay to host your videos, but multiple CDNs would compete to provide them, all under your domain.

And you can even distribute archival. If you're a vlogger, there is a whole mess of people who want to preserve your old content, possibly even because they dislike you. If you're willing to digitally sign those videos and release them under a liberal license, file hoarders can publish them via e.g. bit torrent.

throwaway13337• 7 years ago

This is important but it doesn't address the reasons why people don't own their own platform.

Audience.

Successful platforms have solved the empty room problem. Until there is a decentralized solution to that, there is nothing new to talk about.

mooreds• 7 years ago

And the answer is: syndicate. You see people doing this time and again. Leveraging a platform for audience, then driving traffic to their own site/someplace they own. "Their own platform." Not everyone will follow, but the people who truly value you will.

gatherhunterer• 7 years ago

If I post an article on Medium, will the platform drive traffic to it on its own? Is my job done at that point, or will I still need to generate interest by posting it around and getting a lot of visits before Medium suggests it?

When new readers enjoy the content will they come back to me or will they come back to Medium?

jaabe2• 7 years ago

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either.

I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages.

But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

jsgo2• 7 years ago

No, chances are you'll still want to share it on Twitter, HN, or whatever other locations you have an audience with. The benefit is that I may be reading an article about natural language processing and then after it is done, your article about NTLK pops up near the bottom with a catchy title and then I decide to go to it and read it. All this while you and I have no networking connections whatsoever, yet you gained me as a reader.

fwip2• 7 years ago

Some of both. You'll still want to self-promote, but Medium will recommend your article to other readers, and followers will be notified when you post new articles.

ElFitz2• 7 years ago

Isn't this what platforms like hackernews or google do?

Solving the empty room problem while still letting you own your own platform.

CiPHPerCoder2• 7 years ago

They solve it poorly. That's why HN allows up to three resubmissions for interesting material that fails to make the front page.

A lot of well-deserving stuff still doesn't get lucky, and never makes the front page.

ergest• 7 years ago

Actually I don't think that the audience is the problem, I think it's the "tech friction" Do you really want to figure out how to host your own HD videos without a video platform? How to run your own email list without an ESP? How to use SEO/SEM to attract an audience? How to host and maintain blog software? Handle your own payments?

Any company who's serious about their business, eventually gets there, but still they're not 100% independent. AWS is one of the biggest platform providers out there and they don't provide an audience, they merely smooth out the "tech friction" of building a tech company. It's not a coincidence that investors always seek SAAS/PAAS companies with massive switching costs, it's in fact the biggest type of moat there is. http://news.morningstar.com/classroom2/course.asp?docId=1440...

I agree with the poster who said that the solution isn't to "host your own" but to be ready to move providers at a moment's notice, to build resilience in your tech stack as much as possible so if your provider shafts you, it's easy to ditch them. This is really hard to do for small content creators/businesses as they don't have enough resources to make it happen. This is what the article should actually cover.

fwip2• 7 years ago

They're both problems.

Even after you solve the technical problems, you face an uphill battle of convincing people to log onto fwipsvlogs.com every day to get your new content, versus showing up in YouTube's recommended (or subscribed) videos list.

threatofrain• 7 years ago

I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't all redundantly own our metaphorical washing machines. It's okay to have a collective model for washing machines.

xwdv• 7 years ago

No point in owning your own platform unless you are in the business of building and running a platform.

The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario. What’s your contingency plan?

jimktrains2• 7 years ago

The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor. Always be preparing for this scenario.

Especially if you've built a business around a SaaS this is fairly impossible/difficult to do unless you don't embrace the features that set the SaaS apart, in which case, why bother with the SaaS at all.

I'm always an advocate for in-house control of any system that can't be abandoned in a week.

coding123• 7 years ago

Why give the platform all that seo. In the long past era we used to have a bunch of random webshops. Now sellers can barely survive unless they are on Etsy eBay or Amazon. We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn't.

rchaud2• 7 years ago

Yeah, and back in the day the random webshops you're referring to didn't do a fraction of the business that Ebay, Etsy and Shopify are doing now.

If people thought they could not pay those platforms' fees and still do OK, don't you think they would have? They're going to those platforms because that's where the shoppers are.

You can definitely attempt to control your own SEO, but most sellers are there to sell stuff now; they don't have time to learn SEO and implement it if it doesn't bring them more business or save them more time compared to using another merchant's platform.

cortesoft• 7 years ago

As a consumer, though, it sure is a lot nicer to not have so many random webshops.

askafriend• 7 years ago

Why give the platform all that seo.

Because the business-person gets something valuable in return. It's a fine tradeoff to make if you make it explicitly and have a strategy.

amelius3• 7 years ago

We gave them all that free SEO and now we are wishing we didn't.

Isn't a search engine required by law to be non-biased?

So if you move to a different (or your own) platform, search engines should still allow people to find you just as easily.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

What’s your contingency plan?

So you could rephrase(?) it as, "always own your platform"! Where "own" means to take ownership of one's choices and have a contingency plan, so one is not in the extremely embarrassing position of trying to blame one's bad business decisions on one's provider's business decisions (valid or not).

tonystubblebine5• 7 years ago

Exactly. These sorts of "Always" messages end up being overly simplistic. People should approach it as a business decision and part of that includes risk. I recruit a lot of authors into my publications and I'm hyper aware of the cases where we might not be offering a good deal. For example, for authors aspiring to write mainstream books, the size of their book advance is going to be heavily correlated with the size of their mailing list. So I always point out that these types of authors would be better off publishing first on their own site with an email collection CTA and then only secondarily republishing to other places like the pubs I run. However, not all authors have that goal and so they end up with totally different factors to weigh.

HelloNurse• 7 years ago

I suppose that, since you are not in the "business" of owning a house, you prefer to be a guest of your friends, ready to abandon your bed at any moment and move on to another friend should you overstay your welcome.

mdonahoe• 7 years ago

Not quite sure what point you’re trying to make.

But people rent apartments as a middle ground between owning a home and sleeping on a friend’s couch.

untog• 7 years ago

What on earth kind of parallel is that?

The actual comparison here is that people who are not in the "business" of owning a house rent one, and are able to swap their rented house for a different one at will, taking advantage of market changes but also accepting the downsides of renting.

la_barba2• 7 years ago

The real advice is to always be ready to abandon your platform at any moment and move on to a new one should its policies no longer be in your favor.

Okay, but how is this advice useful or practical? You can't build or grow a business without being able to rely on at-least some core tech. It is hard enough having to turn a profit, and make payroll without the additional burden of having to structure an organization where any technology is easily removed, replaced ($) , tested (more $$) and staff re-trained (more $$$) at a moments notice (even more $$$). All that assuming that easy drop-in replacements exist. In my domain (pharma) such a business plan would be the quickest way to bankrupt a company.

levesque• 7 years ago

Maybe own your content? If you can own your content it doesn't matter what's the platform. If the platform forces you to release control over your content, then it's a big red flag.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Despite marketers who told me to create custom content for Facebook and Tumblr, I focused on creating content for my website.

3 years later, I imagine it paid off. Facebook being pay to play and Tumblr never evolved to include my demographic makes the hindsight look good..

Brand name is important, but having your users come to a third party site for access to your own work sounds extremely risky.

imsofuture• 7 years ago

Counterpoint: https://i.imgur.com/CJVL9bF.png

dgudkov• 7 years ago

It's not a counterpoint. It's the point.

atian• 7 years ago

  Not Found
  The requested URL / was not found on this server.

  Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Always Own Your Platform

cabaalis• 7 years ago

The server is responding, though, so maybe an argument for owning your platform is being able to permanently remove your content if you so choose?

libria2• 7 years ago

Should return 410 Gone though.

Here's a cache from another more resilient platform: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybKXu0F...

afiori• 7 years ago

Or maybe it is a meta statement of what can go wrong. probably no :)

Nux• 7 years ago

It'd better be! :-D

Lesson no 1: don't use shared web hosting.

Though looks more like Dreamhost removed a site that was hogging down a whole server thanks to HN.

willvarfar• 7 years ago

Lots of web hosting providers have this kind of thing on cheap tiers if you go over the quota. So we can speculate that we've HN-hugged it to death.

bitwize• 7 years ago

Now, LoneStarr, you see that evil will always triumph -- because good doesn't scale.

tdhz77• 7 years ago

Why do I love this quote so much?

libria2• 7 years ago

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform:

* SEO, discoverability

* ability to handle HN hug-of-death

* distribution

* some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd

* backups

etc.

Avoid unnecessary middlemen.

They just proved why they're necessary.

maehwasu2• 7 years ago

Everyone (or at least most people here) knows that Google has all those advantages. The issue is that we keep falling back on those advantages, rather than doing the work necessary to make owning your own platform realistic.

I also laughed at the irony of OP's site going down, but these are the growing pains that will ultimately be necessary if we don't want the internet to be walled gardens run by 3-4 companies.

quickthrower22• 7 years ago

Netlify or s3 or cloudflare + learning seo covers the above points.

Unless no one wants to learn stuff anymore. We need an evil corp because no one can change their oil anymore?

gambler3• 7 years ago

On the other hand, a big platform can arbitrarily delete your account/content with no recourse, or just shut down. Happens all the time.

kazinator2• 7 years ago

A server in the cloud doesn't necessarily mean you're using the host company's application platform.

The article is "RSS and blogs vs YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. ..." not "iron in my closet vs. rented server".

majewsky2• 7 years ago

ability to handle HN hug-of-death

Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period.

Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

zaarn2• 7 years ago

The HN "Hug-o-Death" can be handled by a potato unless your product is layers of bad code. No reasonable app should just die from 20MBps of traffic.

okaleniuk3• 7 years ago

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing.

I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity.

The whole thing is just a set of HTML pages with embedded CSS and JS. There are no 3rd-party dependencies or even inner dependencies. No frameworks, no libraries. Each page is self-contained.

At first I thought that writing the whole thing from scratch would be cumbersome, that maybe I need some framework for plots and UI. Now I just enjoy the freedom I have. I can turn any UI idea that comes to mind into some JS code. And even if the code appears redundant because of no dependency policy, each page still comes tiny. With all the JS inside, every one my pages is still under 64KB.

This makes it not only lean and fast but reliable as well. Words And Buttons Online has 5'000-100'000 monthly visitors depending on success of every particular page; never had a problem with Reddit-effect.

In general, I am quite satisfied with this no-platform/no-dependencies decision. Yes, writing HTML manually is a bit tedious and sometimes boring, but the benefits way outweigh the cost.

discreditable• 7 years ago

Similar story here. I use pelican to generate my site. I wrote a very lightweight theme for it too (under 10k per page). I can host it anywhere that serves html.

dublin2• 7 years ago

Well, you can hand-craft HTML is you want, but there is a huge variety of tools out there designed to give you full control of building and managing blogs and other websites (list sites courtesy of the Netlify folks): https://www.staticgen.com/ https://headlesscms.org/

megous• 7 years ago

100000 monthly is nothing. That's like 2 visits per minute.

Any random vps should handle 10-100s of visits per second (mostly limited by size of your pages and bandwidth if you use static content).

provolone• 7 years ago

Can be done with dynamic content as well. I'm serving 10-100 per second with postgres, jetty and jstl/jsp on $10/month dedicated servers.

robbrit• 7 years ago

How do you host it? Do you own the machine, or use a cloud VM?

okaleniuk3• 7 years ago

I used to have a dedicated server, but I figured that with my needs, cheap shared hosting works just as good and at a fraction of a cost.

anderspitman4• 7 years ago

I took a similar path with my personal site. I did get to the point though where I didn't want to duplicate things like my site banner across all my pages, so I ended up writing a very barebones site generator[0] for compiling handlebars templates.

[0] https://github.com/anderspitman/assg

okaleniuk3• 7 years ago

This is sure a way to go too.

I prefer scripts to do monkey job for me instead of templates. They take html as input and produce html as output. It's trivial text processing. But this way every text pattern, even that I would have never thought of beforehand, may become a 'template' in the future.

gargron• 7 years ago

It's an odd page that doesn't offer any solutions or calls to action... But "own your platform" is basically the principle of Mastodon [1], where you don't have to sacrifice the idea of "reach" because all individually hosted Mastodon servers are interoperable, so you can get followers and go viral all across the network.

[1] https://joinmastodon.org

rchaud2• 7 years ago

It's probably an alpha stage project that's in the feedback gathering phase. Given who's behind it, I fully expect this to become a fully "productized" thing later, replete with newsletter/ebook popups and some SaaS offering.

jawns2• 7 years ago

From the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190324154559/http://alwaysowny...

You know, it wasn't that long ago. There was RSS. There were blogs. There were sub-groups and communities. The weirdos found each other. The non-weirdos found each other. It wasn't perfect. But it was distributed. It was ours.
It was yours.
Now? The original dream of the web is dying. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. They control what gets amplified and what gets monetized. A few conference rooms in Silicon Valley dictate our online culture.
It's time to take it back. Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms. Be in charge of the relationship with your audience. Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.
Always. Own. Your platform.

The pages says it was created by Sean Blanda. On his personal site http://seanblanda.com/, it says he's the Director of Editorial for InVision and founder of Pilcrow House.

He's got an active Twitter account -- last post was within a day -- so I guess he's comfortable not owning his platform.

BoiledCabbage• 7 years ago

I don't own HN, should I not post here?

Seriously, is the recommendation that everyone who posts content own the platform? That's impossible to have a shared location for content.

jsgo2• 7 years ago

Not the author, so no idea, but it seems to be directed more at people who put their content directly on other platforms to be doing wrong.

Creating content on yourblog.tld and linking to it from Twitter/Facebook/etc. is fine, but creating content on Twitter/Facebook/etc. prevents you from really owning it. Same audiences, but now you have control over the content (for the most part. People can copy your content or there is caching).

maehwasu2• 7 years ago

If you were relying on HN as a place to build your own brand, and maybe a business, in a way that was not robust to the future whims of HN's operators...then no, you should not post here.

If you're like me and just want to fuck around during the day and post a few things, then it's totally fine.

Searching for trivial proofs by contradiction in fields with lots of fuzzy variables is one of the worst habits of math/CS people.

MickerNews2• 7 years ago

Are you seriously trying to say that he can't make this point unless he builds his own twitter?

https://i.imgur.com/iBAIRqF.png

jawns2• 7 years ago

I'm both a programmer and a pedant, so my opinion is that he's allowed to make this point and be an active Twitter user if his domain is OwnYourPlatform.com, but not if his domain is AlwaysOwnYourPlatform.com. :)

Grue3• 7 years ago

The original comic implies that abstaining from owning an iPhone is equivalent to not participating in society. Basically if your principles are so weak that you can't abstain from owning a luxury phone brand, which should take a literal bare minimum effort, then you don't really have these principles.

A Twitter account is not a requirement to participate in society either. You don't even have to build your own Twitter, there are a few open-source clones that can be self-hosted.

diminoten4• 7 years ago

Why would this person use Twitter, and why wouldn't the reasons he comes up with for using Twitter not also be valid for using Facebook or Medium as well?

jdauriemma• 7 years ago

"Always own your platform" doesn't necessarily mean "never use someone else's platform."

ecmascript• 7 years ago

I host my own stuff on a vps that I rent, so I am already a big believer in "owning your platform". But I don't think this is always the wisest point.

My projects are rather small, and I plan to build a real business I might take care and actually use a managed platform just to not face hurdles in the beginning.

If the service succeeds and I can finance my time I would happily own my own platform. But stuff like databases is nice to have managed sometimes if you want to be able to go on vacation without worries.

kuu• 7 years ago

Is it still possible? I mean, how can an individual compete in someway with the giants as Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. How can you get visibility? How can you get the audience when everyone is somewhere else (even here in HNs)?

michaelmior• 7 years ago

I agree with the advice although you can often make use of platforms without sacrificing too much in terms of SEO. For example, Medium and dev.to both allow you to import blog posts from your own site and they set the canonical URL to the original post hosted wherever you want.

tonystubblebine5• 7 years ago

Also, I imagine that Medium will eventually switch their payment terms to reward SEO and that might be a good deal for some people.

I just made an offer for someone's back catalog that was based on $7 CPM for their SEO traffic plus whatever they would have made in Medium's performance program. I think it would have worked out to about $12 CPM on what they would have gotten on their own.

That's probably not the peak CPM they could get if they went their own way. But it's not a bad deal given that they don't have to do any work besides just write.

gambler3• 7 years ago

Talking to the HN crowd about platform ownership is pointless. It's obvious that most people here are not able or willing to grasp the long-term consequences of super-centralization, including many so-called security and scalability experts. Not a big surprise, because a lot of them work for highly centralized platforms, aspire to become one, or to be bough by one.

amelius3• 7 years ago

I bet most people here totally grasp the long term consequences; it's just that they are eager to grab the short term benefits.

pricechild• 7 years ago

Or misjudge the probability of realising those consequences.

soulofmischief5• 7 years ago

What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.

gambler3• 7 years ago

HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites

...on AWS.

m12k• 7 years ago

Of course the HN crowd is willing and able to grasp the long-term consequences of super-centralization. But we also recognize that for the vast majority of the population, some of the benefits that a centralized solution provides - such as UX, discoverability and 'it just works' - are essential, and so far none of the well-meaning open alternatives can compete on those parameters, no matter how much I cheer for their cause. For the vast majority of people, a platform plagued by relatively vague issues like censorship and privacy is still better than a platform that is too cumbersome for me to understand or get started with (and let's be honest, that I've probably never even heard about) - it's simply a non-starter.

anderspitman4• 7 years ago

UX, discoverability and 'it just works'

None of those are inherent to preventing users from controlling their data. A company can create (and make money off of) a product that provides all of them while using open protocols and data formats, with easy export functionality. I think the bigger problem is that users don't care whether they control their data, and companies are incentivized to maintain that control.

diminoten4• 7 years ago

Some of us realized long ago that feeling moral superiority in a professional context wasn't very valuable.

tomrod• 7 years ago

Duplication of fixed costs is an economic ill to be judiciously avoided.

probablyfiction• 7 years ago

Because they own their own platform, they can't handle HN traffic. Idealism, meet harsh reality.

ausjke• 7 years ago

I'm on my way there, now I just need a markdown driven, password protected, browser-editing supported CMS

anaphor• 7 years ago

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) is a much more flexible idea IMO. You ultimately own your content, and it's the source of truth, but it gets automatically syndicated out and linked back to whatever proprietary or open platforms you think people will see it on.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

tootie• 7 years ago

I remember web rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

MaxBarraclough• 7 years ago

Silly that the page didn't link to IndieWeb.org - a whole community about exactly these principles.

kristianc• 7 years ago

I assume owning your platform is also the reason why this is loading so slowly.

buboard• 7 years ago

I m hopeful about distributed distribution, things like bitchute

jasode5• 7 years ago

Here's something for HN'ers to ponder.

Jeff Bezos published the reply to Mr Pecker's sex photos on Twitter[1] and Medium[2] instead of his own platform. (He does own his own domain "jeffbezos.com" as of 2011).

I'd love to hear HN readers' theories on why he used someone else's platform.

Let's lay out the factors we know that would favor JB using his own platform:

+ Obviously, JB is not a technology or internet luddite. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University. He's probably seen HTML before so he could bang out a static page as a url such as "www.jeffbezos.com/MyReplyToMrPecker.htm" or use any web authoring tool.

+ But, he's also a busy guy because he runs Amazon so he doesn't have the time to do that himself. Therefore, he could simply pay anybody with sysadmin skills to put the text on his website. He's worth ~$160 billion so he can afford the staff. He also can afford the bandwidth costs to avoid the 404 errors that "alwaysownyourplatform.com" is having from the HN-hug-of-death.

So we are left with 2 possibilities:

1. Jeff Bezos is actually stupid and ignorant about the dangers of platforms like Medium and he needs to be lectured by Sean Blanda (author of "alwaysownyourplatform.com")

2. He already understands Sean Blanda's point and in fact can display the ultimate flex of "I already own my own platforms which includes AWS and the Washington Post."

And yet, JB posted on Twitter & Medium. He didn't even bother with the POSSE[3] advice. Why?

Does JB's reasons possibly overlap with others' reasons for using someone else's platform?

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1093643321732464646

[2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146...

[3] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

sdinsn2• 7 years ago

You are overthinking this. He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.

jasode5• 7 years ago

He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.

Of course, yes. That's where the audience is. I'm pretty sure we all know that. (A small nitpick -- Bezos actually didn't have any followers on Medium before his first and only Medium post[1]. Therefore, he could have directed the Twitter link to a blog his own domain "jeffbezos.com" but he chose not to do that.)

You are overthinking this.

Yes I am! And I want others to overthink it too. The point of my comment is to dissect the topic of this thread "Always Own Your Own Platform" -- by using a prominent counterexample.

JB didn't follow Sean Blanda's advice[2]. He also didn't adhere to the POSSE guideline. Why?

("Because JB's followers are there.")

Let's try to break the infinite loop of nonproductive discourse. _Why_ are JB's followers on Twitter? Even if they're on Twitter, why does JB even _care_ about that? He could have just followed Sean Blanda's advice and posted to "jeffbezos.com" -- but he did not. Let's overthink the reasons why Blanda's advice was not followed.

[1] only one Medium article by JB: https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos

[2] https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488

jimbokun• 7 years ago

I think that was jasode's point?

znpy• 7 years ago

I just came here to remind everyone that while this kind of things go on, wordpress is still free both as in free beer and in free software.

You can use wordpress.con as a hosted platform, pay for full customisation or host your own.

And you can start at any tier and move freely from/to the remaining ones.

I think all this fuss is really dumb, people had the answer to their problems in front of you the whole time yet they ignored it because it was not “cool”.

I guess that’s what you get for relying on “service-as-a-software-substitute”.

ygjb• 7 years ago

I second this. I spent a long part of my career bashing Wordpress and other PHP CMS platforms because of how hideously insecure they were, but came around about the time that Wordpress added the feature for automatic updates.

jaredklewis4• 7 years ago

Early in my career, during and right after college, I did a lot of consulting for simple sites, many of which used word press. Even in that short time I frequently encountered clients who had their servers owned, and then used for spamming or hosting illegal content. This would go unnoticed by the company until their web host noticed and froze their account.

From some reps at the hosting companies I would contact, I got the sense that such incidents were quite common. And as a consultant, it made me hesitant to recommend WP to clients.

I think those kinds of issues are probably much more likely to be a culprit for people seeking other platforms, rather than WP just not being "cool."

If WP is better security-wise now, that's good, but it can understandably take a while to repair a reputation.

tcfunk• 7 years ago

If you ask me, we're already past the point of this being effective.

Coming from the perspective of creating and selling a PC game, do you really think you can be successful by posting it up on your website with a Stripe checkout button? (Actually you shouldn't even be using Stripe, but I digress). If you do, you're fooling yourself.

I think the same could be extended to a number of industries, e.g crafts that are sold on Pinterest/Etsy. To get back to where we were will require a complete overhaul of the entire system. Until then, we are beholden to our advertising masters.

I actually don't think it's all bad, though. 15 years ago, you didn't have nearly the options available to you to make money that you do now.

anderspitman4• 7 years ago

I think the spirit of the post is going ahead and host your PC game on steam or whatever platform you want, but also host it on your own site so you're not completely beholden to a third party.

vkou2• 7 years ago

When you have no way of turning more then single-digit percentages of your Steam sales into your-channel sales, the difference between 'completely beholden' and 'not completely beholden' is academic.

Can you handle a loss of 90% of your income? If not, it doesn't really matter that you have a side gig mowing lawns, in addition to your day job.

lxe• 7 years ago

Until "owning your platform" becomes as simple and as feature-full, and as valuable overall as using someone else's platform, this movement will always be akin to "the year of the Linux desktop". Always full of zeal, motivation, and good ideas, but lacking in adoption and execution.

ender7• 7 years ago

Also, unavailable to most people.

Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming.

Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan works, then wordpress.com becomes so big that they're the bad guys now.

Facebook, Medium, and others are here because we, the tech world, didn't give the rest of the world any other options. We didn't settle on a standard, containerized server platform that was simple enough for users to drag "Wordpress.server" onto "SomeHostingProvider.com" and get a working server. The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

blacktonystark• 7 years ago

It never was too high, the bar for what constitutes an education in at least the US has been far too low for far too long.

jwr2• 7 years ago

I think the problem is not with being tech-savvy but with not wanting to spend anything. It isn't difficult to create a ready-made self-maintaining decentralized publishing tool in the form of a VPS image that people could run. But then people would need to pay for hosting the VPS (single dollars per month) and probably for the software, so that somebody maintains it (also single dollars per month).

I think people are too cheap for that and will rather throw their work into one of the black holes (like facebook), than pony up those dollars.

Moru• 7 years ago

Also, what happens when I'm not around to pay those peanuts? All gone? Not acceptable to most people.

dangravell• 7 years ago

Didn't people used to say that sort of thing about music? That people are too cheap so they'll just pirate everything?

Maybe it's convenience that is required.

vkou2• 7 years ago

The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

Building a more welcoming environment is a mountain of work, and most people would prefer to get paid for it.

And monetizing your work becomes a lot easier when you are a company selling an end-to-end product, then when you're a lone dev working off donations.

amelius3• 7 years ago

The problem these platforms solve is more discoverability than it is actual hosting.

A blog hosted somewhere on some user-owned server is not going to be easily discovered.

neilv• 7 years ago

I don't recall it being hubris. What happened when Web browsers appeared is that there was a brief period when a university (usually you were at a university) would host your pages, and you could believe the decentralized dream (if you heard that part), but there was a sudden commercial gold rush, and motivations switched to greed (not hubris).

You didn't want to see X happen; you wanted you to get the money for X happening. And maybe that reduced to you want you to get the money, and X was a path to that, and the actual X didn't matter.

Also, there were relatively few people who already understood Internet, online, or software development at the time. Perhaps the majority of people pitching Web startups were all new to all of that.

CS department culture never recovered from the gold rush, and a lot of the gold rush ideas were institutionalized.

EamonnMR• 7 years ago

This is a very interesting angle, care to expand upon it? Which gold rush ideas do you feel where institutionalized?

Zak• 7 years ago

If you get your own domain for that wordpress.com hosted site, you're free to move to other hosting if you need to.

One option is to learn enough to do it yourself on a barebones server, but that's not the only option. A google search for "wordpress hosting" turns up several turnkey solutions that a person without a lot of tech background could move to if they were sufficiently displeased with something wordpress.com did.

I think this is a good model for the hosting/platform piece of the puzzle. I'm not sure anyone has a great answer for discoverability yet

Vordimous2• 7 years ago

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a blog or social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a fully managed platform. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

forgottenpass• 7 years ago

The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

I hate this meme and other criticism like it. It belittles work accomplished (asserting that there was nothing done). Ascribes intent from that perceived outcome (that nobody even tried). And ascribes motivation for that intent (hubris).

I haven't found a better way to demoralize people from trying in the future than this sort of quip.

mjevans• 7 years ago

The real reason this isn't available to most relates to today's DDoS supporting Internet.

Today everyone has to use a CDN to even try to defend against such attacks; and all they do is bulk filter the attack out while degrading the end user transparency of the service. Under 'load' some websites have to load an active filter page and execute code on the clients to authenticate that it's a valid client, rather than an attacker.

The proper solution is to identify compromised devices and isolate them from the Internet. For hosts under attack to use a side channel to the ISPs routing the packets to ask them: "Please do not send anything from X to me for a bit; unless they satisfy to you that a user is in control." The request should be 'signed' by an end user key, authenticated by their ISP, and filtering should begin at the edge of that ISP. If they feel it necessary, they too can send a request to their ISP. Until this escalates to the backbones. Then it can press further back, down to the compromised node. That would allow infected end users to be quarantined, informed, allowed to download security updates and some other limited website interactions (manufacturer websites for updated firmware, some after-market firmware sites/tool sites like OpenWRT/DD-WRT/Linux distros, etc).

Fix the DDoS issue, also fix the home upload bandwidth issue, and you too can host your own family photos/videos.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

also fix the home upload bandwidth issue, and you too can host your own family photos/videos.

Not possible without investing literally dozens of billions of dollars into laying fiber - and no matter where you look, actual physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and public transport is outright decaying so where should that money come from, and where in the world do enough actual digging crews exist to lay all that fiber.

DSL simply is physically unable to do symmetric high speed and for coax/cable-tv internet there always remains the problem of oversubscription.

This is the core fuck up of our time.

dragonwriter• 7 years ago

fix the home upload bandwidth issue

The “home upload bandwidth issue” is “it's not a thing consumers demand, and we have business-class service for people who do have a need forit.”

I'm not sure what there is to solve...

la_barba2• 7 years ago

Well, we already have numerous explanations of why things are the way are. Is there any proposal for changing the status-quo that people can get behind? That is always the stumbling block. Only a handful of people seem to be bold enough to let their convictions guide them..

nswest23• 7 years ago

jesus, man why are the top comments to posts like this always like this? Is everyone on HN that apathetic and jaded?

tracker1• 7 years ago

I seem to remember being able to use something like geocities, or a cheap/free /~user/ hosts and FrontPage or similar to generate badly formed HTML that let me share a lot of ideas before I was deeply familiar with programming and specialty knowledge.

Yeah, I had to learn about FTP, and not much more. There was a lot of availability, and diversity without a lot of overhead to it.

runjake• 7 years ago

There's something funny when this article links to several paywalled articles.

bdcravens3• 7 years ago

Wappalyzer says the site is using Cloudflare.

Doesn't Cloudflare have many of the same issues the article discusses?

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-terminates-service-to-sc...

https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is...

detaro• 7 years ago

Not really, no.

Unless you use things like Cloudflare workers, there's basically no lock-in. Your visitors wouldn't even notice if you switched from Cloudflare.

gesman• 7 years ago

To add to this message:

Use existing FAANG-or-whoever platform for what it's good at - finding target audience and land them on YOUR platform. Incentivize people to join your platform.

NEVER rely 100% of your business to other guy platform. Otherwise you're on a mercy of TOS and political, religious and whatever beliefs of the other guy.

jonnycomputer• 7 years ago

  (•_•)
  <)    )╯Always
  /    \
  
  \(•_•)
  (    (>  Own
  /    \
  
  (•_•)
  <)    )>  Your Platform
  /    \

badatshipping• 7 years ago

This general movement has a “screw the system, man” vibe that I think steers it away from reality.

It’s already possible to own your platform. The problem that no one else will use it. Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are where everyone else is. That’s where audiences are, hence that’s where all the creators are, hence that’s where all the audiences are. These companies spend millions in research to make their apps as engaging as possible. Sometimes that takes the form of unhealthy Skinner box type psychological manipulation, but sometimes they are actually pretty good at suggesting content people want to consume.

Building up network effects and an engaging user experience takes a lot of money, labor, resources, research and executive organization that open source projects generally lack. We should work within the constraints of reality, and figure out policies that dictate what Facebook should/shouldn’t be allowed to do.

diminoten4• 7 years ago

Can someone show me how to do this without running foul of my ISP's service agreement?

Vordimous2• 7 years ago

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. Everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by you the end user.

jaredklewis4• 7 years ago

And don't forget to write your own compiler, OS, DE, and IDE, lest someone pull the rug out from under you. /s

Specialization is at the heart of increasing productivity. Let's say a given person makes awesome travel videos. If that person can find a way to broadcast and monetize those videos with YouTube, Vimeo, or whatever, that almost certainly makes more sense than devoting their time to maintaining their own streaming platform. That's time the person could have spent continuing to refine their actual product: travel videos.

Video editing and production are extremely time intensive tasks that require a lot of skill; people work on these skills their whole lives. Likewise, dev ops and infrastructure management are incredibly deep rabbit holes to jump down. The idea that every hobbyist blogger, photographer, and indie band should learn about server administration seems crazy to me.

Does not owning your platform have risks? Of course. Everything has risks and business is always about tradeoffs. Platforms like YouTube solve a lot of problems for content creators. For most creators, those benefits are going to outweigh the costs.

hazeii• 7 years ago

Except that so few people make money broadcasting on Youtube, it's very likely they'd make more by learning how to maintain their own streaming platform and using that knowledge ('consulting') to less technical (but more creative) people who think they can make money broadcasting on Youtube.

jaredklewis4• 7 years ago

Well, yea, not just youtubers but also farmers, janitors, receptionists, construction workers, and so on could probably make more if they were instead competent dev ops engineers.

Of course, this gets at another reason why owning your own platform doesn’t make sense, which is that web infrastructure is a specialty that most people have no interest in, and if they did, probably limited innate ability and training.

If it were that easy for people to suddenly pivot into a 6 figure salary field...more people would.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

If they actually made more by learning how to maintain their own streaming platform and offering that knowledge to less technical folks, nobody is stopping them from doing so.

I suspect such an industry does exist, but it's quite a bit smaller than both the number of people profitably creating content on YouTube and the number of employees of YouTube itself, which tells me that maybe the risk-adjusted returns of it aren't as great as you think.

m00x• 7 years ago

You should probably invest some time learning how incredibly hard and costly it is to make a streaming platform. Youtube can only do this at low costs because they do it at scale.

Also, The only people who could do this are already making tons of money. We're talking about people with high technical skills, not the people posting ASMR videos.

You also need to attract viewers to your platform, which is no small feat.

CM30• 7 years ago

Mostly importantly, because pretty every company and platform will turn on you when it's politically/legally convenient for them.

We've seen it all the time on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Suddenly a post or video that's fine legally is blocked/removed because the angry mob is complaining about it with torches and pitchforks. A video or piece of content that's arguably under fair use is removed because a large compant files a claim or strike, legality be damned.

Having your own platform is a significant advantage there. It means you're a lot tougher to get rid of when the angry social media mob forms over something 'wrong' you said/did in the past, and many, many companies will not risk legal action by going after an independently hosted site/service.

Obviously that doesn't mean the site is invincible. A determined enough adversary can put pressure on hosting companies/registrars/cloudflare, and a DMCA notice can lead to a court case as well.

But many won't go to that level of effort, or depend on these platforms being willing to turn on their users at the drop of a dime.

Yeah that's not for everyone, and admittedly many users would fine on these platforms. But anyone even remotely likely to get into any type of controversy would certainly be best to own their own platform.

Bakary4• 7 years ago

Most people who post controversial content don't just want to put their views out there, they want to build a large audience and want their views to be successfully distributed or to make money from them. It's almost impossible to completely ban access from online content unless you are a nation state.

It seems reasonable to want free speech but entitled to want successfully monetized speech as a baseline.

paulddraper• 7 years ago

Suddenly a post or video that's fine legally is blocked/removed because the angry mob is complaining about it with torches and pitchforks.

The standards are indeed bizarre.

You can read a book that lead to the deaths of millions of Jews in Europe, but not a rambling angry meme collection that lead to the deaths of dozens of Muslims in Australia.

dfeojm-zlib• 7 years ago

Former enterprise AWS consultant here. Renting and leasing tech (AWS, GCP, Azure) is $$$$. At scale, a little cloud is okay for limited uses, but going down to EBGP and floor-up is cheaper. If a shop can't handle that, rent actual hardware (co-lo), not virtual servers because they cheat you with over-subscription.

monksy• 7 years ago

The network isn't an issue. The entire problem is that those who are creating the network want to be the source content creator as well. We need good networks. We need good creators. The networks should incentivize good collaboration, curation, and give discoverability. Reddit is an example of this. Facebook and Medium want to take content.

robot• 7 years ago

the problem is owning your content and platform is not enough.

you need much, much better UX (User Experience). Millions of people are now using facebook groups thanks to its easy real-time comments and well thought out threads. Good luck having that on your blog.

Alternative software needs to be vastly improved and centralized(1) for this to work. This is the problem, nobody is incentivized to fix it, so there you go. You get monster proprietary platforms still growing.

(1) Some people think decentralized platforms is the solution - it totally isn't. It is bad UX. They first build it, then find out it doesn't work, and this repeats. Why should everyone take the hassle of hosting their stuff? Plus, syncing everyone in a single feed is not an easy problem. I guess email is the outlier here.

l0b0• 7 years ago

Should be https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com/

Always Own Your Platform

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