Ello? Goodbye.
January 18, 2024 8:50 AM Subscribe
Social Networking site Ello, is no more.
Ello launched on August 7, 2014 with big dreams and big promises, a new social network defined by what it wouldn’t do.
They laid it all out in a manifesto, right on their homepage:
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.
You are not a product.
Ello launched on August 7, 2014 with big dreams and big promises, a new social network defined by what it wouldn’t do.
They laid it all out in a manifesto, right on their homepage:
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.
You are not a product.
kudos to waxpancake for well-tuned antennas at the outset, and for this detailled post-mortem; thanks for sharing.
posted by progosk at 9:25 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]
posted by progosk at 9:25 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]
I think I speak for many people when I say, Oh shit! I remember Ello. That was still a thing?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:26 AM on January 18 [23 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:26 AM on January 18 [23 favorites]
Bluesky and Mastodon seem to be pretty strong right now, and people are sending me links to a threads as if it’s a viable thing so I guess it is now?
posted by Artw at 9:33 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 9:33 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]
Andy is such a great writer, this is as thoughtful a piece of journalism as I'd expect to find in any top tier publication. So many of us from our era in the industry have been warning how VC investment corrupts companies, even those with founders with the best intentions. This story is a nice summary of one such tale. The dismal end, the gradual decay until it all fails all at once.
I feel bad for the members who lost important writing or images. Does anyone remember if Ello had a proper backup / data export option? Too late now of course. I've been regularly taking such dumps from the services I use. It gives me peace of mind but using the export is hard. There's still no great self-hosted version of your Twitter archive, for instance.
(Oof, my comment on the 2014 discussion.)
posted by Nelson at 9:42 AM on January 18 [10 favorites]
I feel bad for the members who lost important writing or images. Does anyone remember if Ello had a proper backup / data export option? Too late now of course. I've been regularly taking such dumps from the services I use. It gives me peace of mind but using the export is hard. There's still no great self-hosted version of your Twitter archive, for instance.
(Oof, my comment on the 2014 discussion.)
posted by Nelson at 9:42 AM on January 18 [10 favorites]
In that previous MeFi thread, from 2014 (ten years ago!), anotherpanacea wrote: Is this the right time to note that the destruction of Google Reader actually made Facebook more powerful? Because Google could and should totally be onto the task of creating open-source social media options, which they could crawl with their bots. And they're not.
And they should have, and the fact that they killed Reader and didn't come up with some open replacement was one of the signs that Google had changed.
posted by JHarris at 10:17 AM on January 18 [15 favorites]
And they should have, and the fact that they killed Reader and didn't come up with some open replacement was one of the signs that Google had changed.
posted by JHarris at 10:17 AM on January 18 [15 favorites]
I don't remember this thing At All
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:20 AM on January 18 [7 favorites]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:20 AM on January 18 [7 favorites]
I joined Ello when it was new. It settled into a niche and I didn't fit in with it. I had high hopes for it when I read about it at the start. Sorry to hear it closed up.
posted by thatgrrl at 10:21 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]
posted by thatgrrl at 10:21 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]
Their main funder was a custom titanium mountain bike builder and semi-maniac in Vermont, and the main designer bros were famous (or perhaps infamous?) for using the same basic design language for every project in Boulder during the early 2010's. When I first saw Ello, I thought it was the internal banking transfer portal I built for some bank in the Midwest, since it was almost an identical design to what they had delivered to me at my consulting company about 9 months before. Honestly shocked this thing lasted until the end of 2014 knowing the people involved.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:30 AM on January 18 [9 favorites]
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 10:30 AM on January 18 [9 favorites]
How to succeed at a social media platform:
1. Professional blue background
2. 1st 14k or so members free, after that $5 entry fee
3. Effective moderation from people who are invested in the platform
4. A few ads in the sidebar, but seriously limit them to the sidebar
5. Really, really ethical leadership with the foresight to recognize that if you make something people care about, people will care enough to donate money and time to keep it alive
posted by caution live frogs at 10:34 AM on January 18 [66 favorites]
1. Professional blue background
2. 1st 14k or so members free, after that $5 entry fee
3. Effective moderation from people who are invested in the platform
4. A few ads in the sidebar, but seriously limit them to the sidebar
5. Really, really ethical leadership with the foresight to recognize that if you make something people care about, people will care enough to donate money and time to keep it alive
posted by caution live frogs at 10:34 AM on January 18 [66 favorites]
Hey, thanks for the link. I found a lot of lazy and snarky articles about Ello while researching this, treating it more like a punchline and a punching bag than something that real people spent years working on and a dedicated group of real people used and enjoyed. Ello's founders made a decision before launch that resulted in a predictable outcome, one that couldn't change no matter how many manifestos they published or corporate restrictions they put in place, and I thought that was worth documenting in detail, if only as a case study.
posted by waxpancake at 10:56 AM on January 18 [35 favorites]
posted by waxpancake at 10:56 AM on January 18 [35 favorites]
Thanks for the excellent writeup. VC is fucking corrosive and this is just another datapoint, imo.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:00 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]
posted by restless_nomad at 11:00 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]
+1 for post title
posted by wittgenstein at 11:19 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]
posted by wittgenstein at 11:19 AM on January 18 [6 favorites]
VC is fucking corrosive and this is just another datapoint, imo.
I know you basically needed to have had an office on Pearl St during a certain point in time to understand this, but David and Brad (of TechStars and Foundry Group, respectively) aren't your typical VC bros. Dozens of companies in basically ever sector of business that have been favorites of MetaFilter over the years only were able to exist because of funding by their respective firms. Boulder would probably still just be a town in the foothills with a school and some government labs if it was wasn't for them.
But, to contribute to the circle-jerk of two minutes of hate for VCs: Kimball Musk (Elon's brother) has a restaurant a block or so over from their offices, so they have financially supported one of the most terrible families in the US, by occasionally buying lunch.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:22 AM on January 18 [4 favorites]
I know you basically needed to have had an office on Pearl St during a certain point in time to understand this, but David and Brad (of TechStars and Foundry Group, respectively) aren't your typical VC bros. Dozens of companies in basically ever sector of business that have been favorites of MetaFilter over the years only were able to exist because of funding by their respective firms. Boulder would probably still just be a town in the foothills with a school and some government labs if it was wasn't for them.
But, to contribute to the circle-jerk of two minutes of hate for VCs: Kimball Musk (Elon's brother) has a restaurant a block or so over from their offices, so they have financially supported one of the most terrible families in the US, by occasionally buying lunch.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:22 AM on January 18 [4 favorites]
Yeah I really don't care if the specific venture capitalists are good guys, the system is set up in such a way that businesses in any sector where rapid growth is not a good thing (i.e. basically any social media at all) end up getting fucked over because "sustainability" is never even a goal, let alone an achievable one. I'm sure there are sectors where it works better but this sure ain't one of them.
(And yeah, this company existed! For ten whole years! and then vanished, screwing all of its customers, and, it sounds like, most of its vendors and employees. But I bet those initial investors did just fine.)
posted by restless_nomad at 11:27 AM on January 18 [15 favorites]
(And yeah, this company existed! For ten whole years! and then vanished, screwing all of its customers, and, it sounds like, most of its vendors and employees. But I bet those initial investors did just fine.)
posted by restless_nomad at 11:27 AM on January 18 [15 favorites]
From reading the other founders' accounts, behind the scenes precisely what had been presaged by the article's author was happening in precisely in the way that it had been predicted, right on schedule. Simply based on the one fact that the company had taken VC funding.
"These VCs are good, actually"? Then show me where that benign intent made a single whit of difference to the outcome for the site's residents.
posted by tigrrrlily at 11:58 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]
"These VCs are good, actually"? Then show me where that benign intent made a single whit of difference to the outcome for the site's residents.
posted by tigrrrlily at 11:58 AM on January 18 [8 favorites]
*“In fact, Ello is controlled executively by its 7 founders, who own a majority share in the company,” *
Exclusively? Took outside VC? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
posted by kjs3 at 12:14 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
Exclusively? Took outside VC? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
posted by kjs3 at 12:14 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
Metafilter: I know you basically needed to have had an office on Pearl St during a certain point in time to understand this, but
posted by doctornemo at 12:22 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 12:22 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
Ah, I remember Ello. I made an account and posted a bit. Then forgot about it when interactions dropped off.
posted by doctornemo at 12:24 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 12:24 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
waxpancake: Ello's founders made a decision before launch that resulted in a predictable outcome, one that couldn't change no matter how many manifestos they published or corporate restrictions they put in place....
Damn, that rings a bell somehow... OpenAI, perhaps?
posted by wenestvedt at 12:26 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
Damn, that rings a bell somehow... OpenAI, perhaps?
posted by wenestvedt at 12:26 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
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.
That's a fun paragraph: the damning bits keep snowballing.
(What does the bread emoji at the end of the article mean?)
posted by trig at 12:48 PM on January 18 [7 favorites]
I need a word to describe a thing I've experienced a lot in the last few years. As a working term (but I'm extremely open to better alternatives) I'm going to use "WHO?!plash": the sensation of going, in a single post, from never having heard of a thing or a person, to reminiscing about the good old days when I'd never heard of that person or thing. I'm simply reeling, darlings.
posted by BCMagee at 12:48 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
posted by BCMagee at 12:48 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
@trig I was wondering when someone would ask! It's a little bit of an inside-baseball reference to old Ello members who read the post. It apparently originated with German users on Ello, who started using the bread emoji in lieu of a heart/star/like/+1 feature, which it didn't have. Ello eventually embraced it, put it on t-shirts, and you could type :bread: to get it to show up in posts and comments. 🍞
posted by waxpancake at 12:53 PM on January 18 [13 favorites]
posted by waxpancake at 12:53 PM on January 18 [13 favorites]
That is both cute and maybe also a presager of impermanence 🍞
posted by trig at 1:16 PM on January 18 [4 favorites]
posted by trig at 1:16 PM on January 18 [4 favorites]
5. Really, really ethical leadership with the foresight to recognize that if you make something people care about, people will care enough to donate money and time to keep it alive
Yeah but also 6. being put into continual damned-if-you-do-or-don't situations over the years that result in the site periodically bleeding members. Watching people hate on Metafilter time after time when, despite mistakes once in a while, its management has always tried to do what's right, makes me despair for the future of any web community that's not run by an omniscient entity, and even then there are times.
posted by JHarris at 1:22 PM on January 18 [14 favorites]
Yeah but also 6. being put into continual damned-if-you-do-or-don't situations over the years that result in the site periodically bleeding members. Watching people hate on Metafilter time after time when, despite mistakes once in a while, its management has always tried to do what's right, makes me despair for the future of any web community that's not run by an omniscient entity, and even then there are times.
posted by JHarris at 1:22 PM on January 18 [14 favorites]
I love the 🍞 thing! I might have to start using it here!
posted by JHarris at 1:23 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 1:23 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]
Yes! Considering what a bunch of crouton-petters we are here, we should immediately declare the bread emoji part of MeFi. 🍞
posted by briank at 1:25 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
posted by briank at 1:25 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
In June 2023, the servers just started returning errors, making nine years of member contributions inaccessible, apparently forever — every post, artwork, song, portfolio, and the community built there was gone in an instant.The parts of glory lead but to the grave.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:25 PM on January 18
I love the 🍞 thing! I might have to start using it here!
Please don't! The ducks will start attacking
posted by trig at 1:28 PM on January 18 [10 favorites]
Please don't! The ducks will start attacking
posted by trig at 1:28 PM on January 18 [10 favorites]
I used it for a while. Looked cute, but I didn't find many people to fill up my feed, so I sorta fell off from using it a lot. Sad to hear that's what happened.
posted by tlwright at 1:57 PM on January 18
posted by tlwright at 1:57 PM on January 18
"These VCs are good, actually"? Then show me where that benign intent made a single whit of difference to the outcome for the site's residents.
How about the fact there was ever a site to exist to enable the possibility there could later be residents of said site?
VC money put the food on the table of every single person involved with Ello years and years before Ello's founding. I don't care what their "manifesto" said. Paul didn't hire us for Ello, but the consulting company I worked for billed him $7k per week per developer/designer/etc for engineering work on for his various business. That's $175 an hour. He'd have to sell a lot of bicycles back in Vermont to self-fund anything he was doing. Todd and Lucien (the aforementioned designer dudes who also co-founded Ello) billed us at even higher rates for design work, and clients of ours that paid for that work did so with VC money.
"VC money" is the only reason there was ever a Ello in the first place. Not just on day one, but long before day one. If for even for a moment you felt Ello was a good experience, you can thank "VC money" for that.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:08 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
How about the fact there was ever a site to exist to enable the possibility there could later be residents of said site?
VC money put the food on the table of every single person involved with Ello years and years before Ello's founding. I don't care what their "manifesto" said. Paul didn't hire us for Ello, but the consulting company I worked for billed him $7k per week per developer/designer/etc for engineering work on for his various business. That's $175 an hour. He'd have to sell a lot of bicycles back in Vermont to self-fund anything he was doing. Todd and Lucien (the aforementioned designer dudes who also co-founded Ello) billed us at even higher rates for design work, and clients of ours that paid for that work did so with VC money.
"VC money" is the only reason there was ever a Ello in the first place. Not just on day one, but long before day one. If for even for a moment you felt Ello was a good experience, you can thank "VC money" for that.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:08 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
Every social media site these days makes me yearn for a "just me and my friends, and I guess maybe also friends of friends and neighbors" kind of social space that mirrors the real world, lets me keep in touch with and make plans with people, gives people a way to express themselves to each other and help each other and amuse each other. Not something that's an entertainment faucet or a way for people to try to make money by recommending products to a massive following. I remember kind of hoping Ello would be like that, but clearly that didn't happen. I don't know you make such a thing self-sustaining (activity-wise or funding-wise) though. Free slack instances and group chats are kind of the closest thing I have right now.
posted by rivenwanderer at 2:25 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
posted by rivenwanderer at 2:25 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
I like how Mastodon / Fediverse is doing with its expansion. It seems to have absorbed all the Twitter refugees pretty well and while the userbase isn't really growing, it's not shrinking (much) either. My community is there. And they're doing it in a new business, mostly a more user cooperative model. Usually pretty ad hoc but sometimes formally like the cosocial Canadian server.
VC money absolutely does pay the bills, I don't begrudge that Ello pursued that path. And it's a huge accelerator which is necessary in a competitive market. Sure, maybe it's "not all VCs". But the money comes with strings and expectations. There are structural exceptions to that like Indie.VC but they are rare and come with alternate unusual expectations.
posted by Nelson at 2:33 PM on January 18 [5 favorites]
VC money absolutely does pay the bills, I don't begrudge that Ello pursued that path. And it's a huge accelerator which is necessary in a competitive market. Sure, maybe it's "not all VCs". But the money comes with strings and expectations. There are structural exceptions to that like Indie.VC but they are rare and come with alternate unusual expectations.
posted by Nelson at 2:33 PM on January 18 [5 favorites]
It sounds like Ello followed the same path of most consumer web tech companies VC funded or not — they had a big idea, couldn’t make it work as a business before they ran out of money. Eventually the creditors came in, took anything of value and sold it for cents on the dollar.
I’m skeptical that anyone made any money off this project.
posted by interogative mood at 2:45 PM on January 18
I’m skeptical that anyone made any money off this project.
posted by interogative mood at 2:45 PM on January 18
Whether you like surfing on your desktop or your phone
Neither Man nor Social Media can live on 🍞 alone
And though I've said it here before, I'll say it here again
Even masochists who move to France find they can't live on pain
posted by Sparx at 2:45 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
Neither Man nor Social Media can live on 🍞 alone
And though I've said it here before, I'll say it here again
Even masochists who move to France find they can't live on pain
posted by Sparx at 2:45 PM on January 18 [8 favorites]
Every social media site these days makes me yearn for a "just me and my friends, and I guess maybe also friends of friends and neighbors" kind of social space that mirrors the real world, lets me keep in touch with and make plans with people, gives people a way to express themselves to each other and help each other and amuse each other.
That's part of the reason there's always so much push for growth when a social media platform launches. They know they have to motivate as many of the social clusters on other sites to migrate too or they die. The Fediverse is only doing as well as it has because of the Twitter refugees. Without them it would be ello/diaspora all over again.
Like I hate using Facebook. I only use it on desktop, in Firefox in a container with a bunch of extensions to make it behave, and I only follow friends, family and sort of natural friend-of-a-friends who I spend a bit of time shooting the shit with before we connect. It's a lot more organic. It's the only way I can get it to be tolerable.
And you full on can't get that on social media platforms that do not have your mum, your technophobic sister, the dude over the back fence...Facebook is the beast because it has almost everyone already signed up. And to get another social media site to work like that you have to uproot everyone.
I signed up to ello, and used it for art for a bit. I wasn't looking to build a network but just to silo off some of my creative output from other parts of the internet (my dad, on FB, for example is a "a three year old could do that" level art critic) and I liked the bit where you could maintain control. Even the move to Talenthouse wasn't the biggest deal for me because I was just using it to display and share non-commercial art.
But the dead server no notice thing is a fuckken low blow. Like minimum bar is give the community a few weeks to get their shit off your servers. I'm a back-up-local-and-often kind of gal but for the kids who grew up under the cloud mate that must have hurt.
posted by Jilder at 3:20 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]
I remember the launch and Andy talking about it at the time; I had signed up as well and used it for a little bit but never really built up a network beyond goofing with the initial rush of other MeFites who also joined up, so it was easy for it to fall by the wayside pretty quickly. For the best, the way things played out, and I'm pretty starkly in "accept VC money at your inescapable peril" territory in general so it's not surprising to me that it *did* play out this way and mostly I'm surprised it took so long to shutter.
If it had come along three or four years later when I was really starting to do a lot more visual art, I might have been a serious user and be a lot more heartbroken right now.
If for even for a moment you felt Ello was a good experience, you can thank "VC money" for that.
You could say in similar terms that because I have a mortgage on a house I should thank banks, which -- the difficulty of having stable housing without being beholden to large monied entities isn't something for which I feel like thanks are really the appropriate mood. Their near inescapability in the fabric of our economic structure isn't the same thing as their involvement being good.
Banks exist to make money. They broker mortgages because they will make money off mortgages holders. They don't give mortgages (the occasional subprime scandal aside) to people they don't think they can profit off of. They take your house if you threaten to be a net loss to them.
And VCs exist to make the VC money, and even the nicest, most thoughtful, most enthusiastic etc whatever VC is still in the VC business for that reason, or they'd be doing something else instead with and for their money. Nobody needs to thank rent-seekers for seeking rent.
posted by cortex at 3:36 PM on January 18 [20 favorites]
If it had come along three or four years later when I was really starting to do a lot more visual art, I might have been a serious user and be a lot more heartbroken right now.
If for even for a moment you felt Ello was a good experience, you can thank "VC money" for that.
You could say in similar terms that because I have a mortgage on a house I should thank banks, which -- the difficulty of having stable housing without being beholden to large monied entities isn't something for which I feel like thanks are really the appropriate mood. Their near inescapability in the fabric of our economic structure isn't the same thing as their involvement being good.
Banks exist to make money. They broker mortgages because they will make money off mortgages holders. They don't give mortgages (the occasional subprime scandal aside) to people they don't think they can profit off of. They take your house if you threaten to be a net loss to them.
And VCs exist to make the VC money, and even the nicest, most thoughtful, most enthusiastic etc whatever VC is still in the VC business for that reason, or they'd be doing something else instead with and for their money. Nobody needs to thank rent-seekers for seeking rent.
posted by cortex at 3:36 PM on January 18 [20 favorites]
What happened with Ello is just a small part of what is happening with the whole internet. From the days even before the dotcom bubble in the distant past all the way down to today.
The web wasn't made to be a platform or a center of profit. It was made to host and share information. Every time a company tries to make money off of it they have to get across that difficulty, and some have sure, but far more, tens of thousands haven't.
VC funding make lots of things possible, but the Fediverse is one of the first real answers to how something big could survive without being a complete non-profit living off another institution or contributions (like Metafilter is trying to be), or a general profit-maker. It works by being made of thousands of little pieces that are generally affordable to individuals instead of one big thing. Whether that holds up over time I can't say, but I like it in principle.
I wonder if Ello could have refashioned itself as a Mastodon server if it had been tried? If you don't federate with anyone it works nicely as a tiny Twitter and avoids a lot of the clunky elements of it.
posted by JHarris at 4:18 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
The web wasn't made to be a platform or a center of profit. It was made to host and share information. Every time a company tries to make money off of it they have to get across that difficulty, and some have sure, but far more, tens of thousands haven't.
VC funding make lots of things possible, but the Fediverse is one of the first real answers to how something big could survive without being a complete non-profit living off another institution or contributions (like Metafilter is trying to be), or a general profit-maker. It works by being made of thousands of little pieces that are generally affordable to individuals instead of one big thing. Whether that holds up over time I can't say, but I like it in principle.
I wonder if Ello could have refashioned itself as a Mastodon server if it had been tried? If you don't federate with anyone it works nicely as a tiny Twitter and avoids a lot of the clunky elements of it.
posted by JHarris at 4:18 PM on January 18 [3 favorites]
Wow, and I still haven't gotten over Imzy yet.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:50 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
posted by Literaryhero at 7:50 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
Lichess is a relatively successful non-profit social media site based around playing chess. They don’t do ads and are member/donation supported.
posted by interogative mood at 9:06 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
posted by interogative mood at 9:06 PM on January 18 [1 favorite]
There was a particular reason why Ello seemed like the next big thing for that short little while, but I can't remember what it was and I'm too lazy to look into it.
Does anyone remember? Was it something to do with a demand for real names only?
posted by h00py at 1:12 AM on January 19
Does anyone remember? Was it something to do with a demand for real names only?
posted by h00py at 1:12 AM on January 19
Oh well-o, one less thing to ignore
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:51 AM on January 19
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:51 AM on January 19
Does anyone remember? Was it something to do with a demand for real names only or something?
It's discussed a bit in some of the contemporary coverage the OP links to - FB was trying to enforce a real name policy which, among other things, could have outed a lot of people, so there was an lgbtq exodus and ello was where a lot of them went (like how mastodon saw big influxes because of people leaving Twitter)
posted by trig at 4:19 AM on January 19 [2 favorites]
It's discussed a bit in some of the contemporary coverage the OP links to - FB was trying to enforce a real name policy which, among other things, could have outed a lot of people, so there was an lgbtq exodus and ello was where a lot of them went (like how mastodon saw big influxes because of people leaving Twitter)
posted by trig at 4:19 AM on January 19 [2 favorites]
Is this really much to do with VC? It seems like they never figured out a way to make enough revenue to cover their costs. So failure was inevitable.
posted by Klipspringer at 5:25 AM on January 19
posted by Klipspringer at 5:25 AM on January 19
🦆
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:02 AM on January 19
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:02 AM on January 19
I enjoyed Ello, in the year or so that I used it. I noticed it had vanished when I went there to look for a post I'd made linking to a video of Gang 90 playing the song "Jack Kerouac", and not only was my profile gone, but also the whole site. By the end of my time there there wasn't much to do there, except look at pretty pictures, and the internet lacks in some things, but not pretty pictures. So I drifted off, reminded of its existence by the occasional e-mail from Ello to alert me to some kind of interaction. I always meant to unsubscribe, but they were infrequent and got ever less frequent, so I never did. I think of it rarely, but when I do it's with a smile.
posted by Kattullus at 11:14 AM on January 19 [1 favorite]
posted by Kattullus at 11:14 AM on January 19 [1 favorite]
I hope Vero is okay.
Is this really much to do with VC? It seems like they never figured out a way to make enough revenue to cover their costs. So failure was inevitable.
Getting investment allows you to spend money faster than by bootstrapping, sometimes locking you into a more expensive cost structure than would have developed if you needed to be profitable earlier.
posted by jimw at 10:02 PM on January 19
Is this really much to do with VC? It seems like they never figured out a way to make enough revenue to cover their costs. So failure was inevitable.
Getting investment allows you to spend money faster than by bootstrapping, sometimes locking you into a more expensive cost structure than would have developed if you needed to be profitable earlier.
posted by jimw at 10:02 PM on January 19
Getting investment allows you to spend money faster than by bootstrapping, sometimes locking you into a more expensive cost structure than would have developed if you needed to be profitable earlier.
This is actually an interesting idea. Do you have any good articles/examples? I guess the Lichess one from earlier might be one, and also MeFi itself. By not getting sucked into the growth at all costs mindset, costs remain manageable longterm. Hmmm.
Semi related aside, I mentioned this before, I am sure, but UberEATS entered Korea about 7 years ago and my city was one of their test areas. They offered special 5 buck order deals every day for like a month and I ate like a king off VC money. Unfortunately (for them) they didn't realize exactly how robust Korea's delivery infrastructure already was and they closed down within a few months.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:11 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]
This is actually an interesting idea. Do you have any good articles/examples? I guess the Lichess one from earlier might be one, and also MeFi itself. By not getting sucked into the growth at all costs mindset, costs remain manageable longterm. Hmmm.
Semi related aside, I mentioned this before, I am sure, but UberEATS entered Korea about 7 years ago and my city was one of their test areas. They offered special 5 buck order deals every day for like a month and I ate like a king off VC money. Unfortunately (for them) they didn't realize exactly how robust Korea's delivery infrastructure already was and they closed down within a few months.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:11 PM on January 19 [1 favorite]
I was there when everyone ran in, and when everyone ran back out. I checked in periodically over the years, but quit posting after the first few months. I had a moment in Nov. 2022 when Musk was really swinging the wrecking ball over at twitter, and everyone was running off to everywhere BUT ello, when I felt really sorry for the founders for just a minute. Can you imagine the “Hey, guys? … guys?” Moment they were having? Right place, wrong time.
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:13 PM on January 20 [3 favorites]
posted by Devils Rancher at 3:13 PM on January 20 [3 favorites]
« Older All the Garbage I Found on Substack | Sub Berlin : The Story Of Tresor Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Wordshore at 9:02 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]