37 ms·

Always Own Your Platform

463 points by rauhl 7y ago

rauhl 7y ago
Esp. relevant now given the concern around Medium …
nopriorarrests 7y 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_ 7y 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.
  - nopriorarrests 7y 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.
    - dsr_ 7y ago
      People can learn how to do these things. Sometimes, they don't want to. Sometimes, they would rather not. Sometimes, they would rather pay more money or spend less effort. I would guess that your hypothetical vlogger is likely to just open a Youtube channel and pray, and they will get results consistent with that. It's not a business plan, and they didn't ask my advice. If you see a business opportunity in making these things comprehensible or easier or more affordable to vloggers, you should go ahead and do that.
- ben509 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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?
  - jaabe 7y 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?
    - tonystubblebine 7y ago
      The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that). Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service and those that aren't. If you post outside the service, you get free hosting in exchange for Medium running "recommended stories" at the bottom of your post. These are essentially ads for the subscription service. But they don't promote your article or bring you any extra readers other than the ones that you bring yourself or who come through SEO. Obviously, this is a much less appealing deal than it used to be and so there's a sorting out where a lot of people who want to post outside Medium's subscription service are leaving. However, if you post within their subscription service you get a pretty good deal. You keep your copyright and could republish elsewhere. Medium will promote your article to their readers. You'll still get SEO. You'll make some amount of money, not usually life changing money though especially if you have a programmer's salary. Also, more and more, you're likely to run into an editor who will at minimum offer to give your piece a copy edit and sometimes work with you on how to make your piece even better.
deleted 7y ago
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threatofrain 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rchaud 7y 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 7y ago
levesque 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Counterpoint: https://i.imgur.com/CJVL9bF.png https://i.imgur.com/CJVL9bF.png
- dgudkov 7y ago
  It's not a counterpoint. It's the point.
atian 7y 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 7y 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?
  - libria 7y ago
    Should return 410 Gone though. Here's a cache from another more resilient platform: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybKXu0FR36AJ:alwaysownyourplatform.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybKXu0F...
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      Define resilient. In one month that snapshot will be gone.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      And from an institution dedicated to preservation: https://web.archive.org/web/20190610162920/http://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190610162920/http://www.always...
- afiori 7y ago
  Or maybe it is a meta statement of what can go wrong. probably no :)
  - Nux 7y 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.
okaleniuk 7y ago
I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ 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 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 7y 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.
- dublin 7y 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://www.staticgen.com/ https://headlesscms.org/ https://headlesscms.org/
- megous 7y 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).
daveid 7y 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 https://joinmastodon.org
- rchaud 7y 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.
jawns 7y ago
From the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190324154559/http://alwaysownyourplatform.com/ 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/ 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 7y 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.
  - jsgo 7y 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).
  - maehwasu 7y 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.
ecmascript 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- tonystubblebine 7y 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.
gambler 7y 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.
- amelius 7y 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 7y ago
    Or misjudge the probability of realising those consequences.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.
  - gambler 7y ago
    >HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      Using static hosting that can be moved somewhere else easily. URLs remain the same due to controlling the domain.
    - tombert 7y ago
      The statement probably holds true of people who self-host in their home as well. I currently run a cluster in my basement.
deleted 7y ago
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probablyfiction 7y ago
Because they own their own platform, they can't handle HN traffic. Idealism, meet harsh reality.
ausjke 7y ago
I'm on my way there, now I just need a markdown driven, password protected, browser-editing supported CMS
anaphor 7y 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 https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- tootie 7y ago
  I remember web rings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  Silly that the page didn't link to IndieWeb.org - a whole community about exactly these principles.
kristianc 7y ago
I assume owning your platform is also the reason why this is loading so slowly.
buboard 7y ago
I m hopeful about distributed distribution, things like bitchute
jasode 7y 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") or 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 https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1093643321732464646 [2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146... [3] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- sdinsn 7y ago
  You are overthinking this. He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.
  - jasode 7y 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 https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos [2] https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488 https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488
znpy 7y 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 7y 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.
- jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.
- anderspitman 7y 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.
  - vkou 7y 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.
    - anderspitman 7y ago
      I suppose it depends on the circumstances. If the conditions under which steam no longer becomes viable are extreme enough, making a ruckus on Twitter would probably drive considerable traffic to your site.
lxe 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- jwr 7y 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.
  - nishmastime 7y ago
    Well, there's also no real payoff. Hosting your own blog is just a major HN circlejerk. Who cares? There are 100 other things I'd rather focus on in the day than die on the hill of owning my own platform, or spending even one second remembering which server I have to SSH into or how it was setup again, revisiting the Jekyll docs just one more time, ctrl-r recursive searching for the last time I used that one command 6 months ago when my blog broke (again). People don't like to admit this. We like to fixate on some sort of ideological purity as if we're immortal or something.
runjake 7y ago
There's something funny when this article links to several paywalled articles.
deleted 7y ago
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bdcravens 7y 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-sci-hub-domain-names-180205/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-terminates-service-to-sc... https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is...
- detaro 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
(•_•) <) )╯Always / \ \(•_•) ( (> Own / \ (•_•) <) )> Your Platform / \
badatshipping 7y 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.
diminoten 7y ago
Can someone show me how to do this without running foul of my ISP's service agreement?
- Vordimous 7y 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/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by you the end user.
jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.
  - jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.
CM30 7y 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.
- Bakary 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
deleted 7y ago
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robot 7y 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 7y ago
Should be https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com/ https://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com/

463 points by rauhl 7y ago

Esp. relevant now given the concern around Medium …

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_ 7y 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.
- nopriorarrests 7y 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.
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    People can learn how to do these things. Sometimes, they don't want to. Sometimes, they would rather not. Sometimes, they would rather pay more money or spend less effort. I would guess that your hypothetical vlogger is likely to just open a Youtube channel and pray, and they will get results consistent with that. It's not a business plan, and they didn't ask my advice. If you see a business opportunity in making these things comprehensible or easier or more affordable to vloggers, you should go ahead and do that.
ben509 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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?
- jaabe 7y 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?
  - tonystubblebine 7y ago
    The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that). Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service and those that aren't. If you post outside the service, you get free hosting in exchange for Medium running "recommended stories" at the bottom of your post. These are essentially ads for the subscription service. But they don't promote your article or bring you any extra readers other than the ones that you bring yourself or who come through SEO. Obviously, this is a much less appealing deal than it used to be and so there's a sorting out where a lot of people who want to post outside Medium's subscription service are leaving. However, if you post within their subscription service you get a pretty good deal. You keep your copyright and could republish elsewhere. Medium will promote your article to their readers. You'll still get SEO. You'll make some amount of money, not usually life changing money though especially if you have a programmer's salary. Also, more and more, you're likely to run into an editor who will at minimum offer to give your piece a copy edit and sometimes work with you on how to make your piece even better.

deleted 7y ago

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threatofrain 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 7y 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 7y ago

levesque 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

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

dgudkov 7y ago
It's not a counterpoint. It's the point.

atian 7y 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 7y 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?
- libria 7y ago
  Should return 410 Gone though. Here's a cache from another more resilient platform: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybKXu0FR36AJ:alwaysownyourplatform.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ybKXu0F...
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Define resilient. In one month that snapshot will be gone.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    And from an institution dedicated to preservation: https://web.archive.org/web/20190610162920/http://www.alwaysownyourplatform.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190610162920/http://www.always...
afiori 7y ago
Or maybe it is a meta statement of what can go wrong. probably no :)
- Nux 7y 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.

okaleniuk 7y ago

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ 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 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 7y 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.
dublin 7y 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://www.staticgen.com/ https://headlesscms.org/ https://headlesscms.org/
megous 7y 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).

daveid 7y 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 https://joinmastodon.org

rchaud 7y 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.

jawns 7y ago

From the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190324154559/http://alwaysownyourplatform.com/ 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/ 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 7y 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.
- jsgo 7y 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).
- maehwasu 7y 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.

ecmascript 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

tonystubblebine 7y 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.

gambler 7y 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.

amelius 7y 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 7y ago
  Or misjudge the probability of realising those consequences.
soulofmischief 7y ago
What? HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites out of any other major aggregator community.
- gambler 7y ago
  >HN probably has the largest proportion of people who maintain their own websites ...on AWS.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Using static hosting that can be moved somewhere else easily. URLs remain the same due to controlling the domain.
  - tombert 7y ago
    The statement probably holds true of people who self-host in their home as well. I currently run a cluster in my basement.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

probablyfiction 7y ago

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

ausjke 7y ago

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

anaphor 7y 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 https://indieweb.org/POSSE

tootie 7y ago
I remember web rings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
MaxBarraclough 7y ago
Silly that the page didn't link to IndieWeb.org - a whole community about exactly these principles.

kristianc 7y ago

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

buboard 7y ago

I m hopeful about distributed distribution, things like bitchute

jasode 7y 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") or 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 https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1093643321732464646 [2] https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146... [3] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

sdinsn 7y ago
You are overthinking this. He used Twitter and Medium because people follow him on those platforms.
- jasode 7y 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 https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos [2] https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488 https://twitter.com/SeanBlanda/status/1134076887821631488

znpy 7y 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 7y 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.
jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.

anderspitman 7y 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.
- vkou 7y 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.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    I suppose it depends on the circumstances. If the conditions under which steam no longer becomes viable are extreme enough, making a ruckus on Twitter would probably drive considerable traffic to your site.

lxe 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.
jwr 7y 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.
- nishmastime 7y ago
  Well, there's also no real payoff. Hosting your own blog is just a major HN circlejerk. Who cares? There are 100 other things I'd rather focus on in the day than die on the hill of owning my own platform, or spending even one second remembering which server I have to SSH into or how it was setup again, revisiting the Jekyll docs just one more time, ctrl-r recursive searching for the last time I used that one command 6 months ago when my blog broke (again). People don't like to admit this. We like to fixate on some sort of ideological purity as if we're immortal or something.

runjake 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bdcravens 7y 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-sci-hub-domain-names-180205/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-terminates-service-to-sc... https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/ https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is...

detaro 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

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

badatshipping 7y 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.

diminoten 7y ago

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

Vordimous 7y 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/ https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by you the end user.

jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.
- jaredklewis 7y 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 7y 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.

CM30 7y 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.

Bakary 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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.

deleted 7y ago

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robot 7y 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 7y ago

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