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Hopefully someday we'll start recognizing the pattern. Sites built on large amounts of venture capital are literally too good to be true. They're able to lose

Hopefully someday we'll start recognizing the pattern. Sites built on large amounts of venture capital are literally too good to be true. They're able to lose tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year providing completely unsustainable services, but they can't keep doing it forever. When they start monetizing, they have to use methods that are far more aggressive than would have been needed originally, because they're starting at the bottom of a giant hole they dug themselves into. Yes, a store that sells dollar bills for 90 cents would be very popular. The tech industry needs to stop acting like there's anything impressive about that.

propter_hoc 7y ago
Hi Deimorz, are you the same /u/Deimorz who used to be an admin on reddit? I'm very interested to read this perspective from you. Do you think there is a viable third way forward for companies like Medium and reddit?
- Semaphor 7y ago
  He is. And he is currently running the tildes.net non-profit, so I guess that says a bit ;)
- Deimorz 7y ago
  That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it: A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093) The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net https://tildes.net Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.
  - perfectstorm 7y ago
    > including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?
    - Deimorz 7y ago
      The current level of donations is already over 5x what's needed to pay for the server expenses, and it can probably handle 100x the traffic. "Sustainable" is a much easier goal than needing to be worth billions of dollars to make your investors happy.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      I’m still surprised that I can’t donate my resources toward a distributed DB/web server for this kind of content. E.g. by subscribing, I automatically start serving content and/or augmenting other mirrors. As some channels I subscribe to become stale, I automatically start re-assigning my resources to keep it alive. Basically a BitTorrent/Tor-like decentralized system for distribute DBs with a web front end. The amount of server resources I consume from fora must be 1/10000th the excess CPU/HD/bandwidth capacity I have. I’m sure some cryptocoin project is working on something like this.
      - rolleiflex 7y ago
        Ha, I’m working on this. It’s called Aether: http://getaether.net http://getaether.net. You contribute bandwidth / cpu / storage by being a peer on the network. It’s less Medium and more Slashdot / Reddit though.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  If you're looking for a replacement to reddit - there's https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/ - it's still fairly new, and if you sign up (well, happened to me - maybe it's changed since a few weeks ago?) they subscribe you to all of the subs (so you have to manually unsub from those you don't want to be in - and yes, several of the "ugly" subs from reddit migrated there after the last "great purge"). I don't know how sustainable it will be or can be, if it will stay ok or devolve into a weird "4chan-like" mess, or go the same way as reddit (if it gets popular, gets money, or what). I'm not even sure who's really behind it (that probably isn't a good thing). But - it's one option that I know of (and if you find out more about it or others, let me know if you can or want to).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

propter_hoc 7y ago

Hi Deimorz, are you the same /u/Deimorz who used to be an admin on reddit? I'm very interested to read this perspective from you. Do you think there is a viable third way forward for companies like Medium and reddit?

Semaphor 7y ago
He is. And he is currently running the tildes.net non-profit, so I guess that says a bit ;)
Deimorz 7y ago
That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it: A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093) The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net https://tildes.net Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.
- perfectstorm 7y ago
  > including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads What are your plans when user-supported revenue is not enough to keep the servers running?
  - Deimorz 7y ago
    The current level of donations is already over 5x what's needed to pay for the server expenses, and it can probably handle 100x the traffic. "Sustainable" is a much easier goal than needing to be worth billions of dollars to make your investors happy.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    I’m still surprised that I can’t donate my resources toward a distributed DB/web server for this kind of content. E.g. by subscribing, I automatically start serving content and/or augmenting other mirrors. As some channels I subscribe to become stale, I automatically start re-assigning my resources to keep it alive. Basically a BitTorrent/Tor-like decentralized system for distribute DBs with a web front end. The amount of server resources I consume from fora must be 1/10000th the excess CPU/HD/bandwidth capacity I have. I’m sure some cryptocoin project is working on something like this.
    - rolleiflex 7y ago
      Ha, I’m working on this. It’s called Aether: http://getaether.net http://getaether.net. You contribute bandwidth / cpu / storage by being a peer on the network. It’s less Medium and more Slashdot / Reddit though.
cr0sh 7y ago
If you're looking for a replacement to reddit - there's https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/ - it's still fairly new, and if you sign up (well, happened to me - maybe it's changed since a few weeks ago?) they subscribe you to all of the subs (so you have to manually unsub from those you don't want to be in - and yes, several of the "ugly" subs from reddit migrated there after the last "great purge"). I don't know how sustainable it will be or can be, if it will stay ok or devolve into a weird "4chan-like" mess, or go the same way as reddit (if it gets popular, gets money, or what). I'm not even sure who's really behind it (that probably isn't a good thing). But - it's one option that I know of (and if you find out more about it or others, let me know if you can or want to).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]