4 ms·

What do you think about Wordpress as a counterexample? There was a time a decade ago when lots of blogs under the wordpress.com domain; I don't remember anyone

• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  Blogspot is a weird example too, because there are some very fringe, extremist people using that domain.
• danpalmer 6y ago
  That's a good counter example. I wonder if it has something to do with the discovery flow and perhaps even the theming? Did Wordpress provide an index of all the websites? They don't appear to now? Also the fact that every site could be themed meant that many sites looked really quite different and so the website brand was stronger than the Wordpress brand. Just hypothesising. I feel like it is quite different but I'm not entirely sure why as, you're right, Wordpress worked in a similar way.
• rchaud 6y ago
  That's because WP arrived at a time when corporations weren't selling people pipe dreams about how to get famous and rich on the web through their platform. The motivation to wrote blogs on Xanga, Angelfire, Geocities etc was for recreation, not monetization. Wordpress offered a self-hosted, open-source blogging platform from day 1, in addition to WYSIWIG Wordpress.org. The idea that WP would attempt to use its audience as some sort of competitive moat is something I could imagine had they arrived 10 years later. Which it did, in the form of Medium.com