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> Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound.

> Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound. Maybe there really isn't any profitable business case. The author of this article tends to focus on "unbundling" as a shift from a central platform towards many platforms whose primary mission is creating a profitable business. Whereas the analog world also has plenty of examples of small and larger formal and informal communities of book lovers i.e. reading groups, libraries, writing classes, groups exchanging books,... that aren't profit based. People simply want to get together to share their experiences about that awesome book they read, right? I think that platforms such as Reddit or Goodreads enabled those groups to converge in a single place not just because of the content, but primarily because of the cost of digital infrastructure, or lack thereof. Outside of the technology community, few communities are willing to invest time and money in their own standalone private platform if there's an alternative who provides that core functionality to communicate and share information, and the complex infrastructure that supports it, for, seemingly, free and with a extremely low entry bar: just create an account, create a new group, invite others: you're done. Scaling towards millions sounds like a great proposition, but non-paying users don't even cover operational costs of building and running infrastructure. The difficulty here is looking towards alternative sources of revenue. As far as Amazon is concerned, the value of GR is that it's simply another sales funnel. That's why Amazon only invests minimally in GR: just to keep enough potential customers around. Which is a far cry from hosting communities book lovers in their own right. The other examples in the article each have their own business model in which non-paying users aren't really the immediate customers. Going back to small communities of book lovers themselves, you could imagine a small non-profit offering a platform to its several hundreds of members. It's clear that such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. Nor would they want to do that since that would be clearly overkill. Maybe it's interesting to broaden the focus beyond vast high-profile, for-profit services and look towards hidden communities on the Internet which are very much alive, such as mailing list servers or very small, independently operated bulletin boards and forums (such as there still are around). I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities hidden under the surface that are never really seen. Much like famous dark matter in the Universe.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well. That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers. The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless of how solid the site is technically. > I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people have left to the big city.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  Those are good points. Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well. I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a hard challenge. Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to keep people's attention for a prolonged time. So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms because of their non-existent entry bar. Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use tools that are available to you. Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities present on a platform.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

> such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well. That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers. The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless of how solid the site is technically. > I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people have left to the big city.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
Those are good points. Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well. I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a hard challenge. Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to keep people's attention for a prolonged time. So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms because of their non-existent entry bar. Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use tools that are available to you. Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities present on a platform.