21 ms·

Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms

218 points by riidom 5y ago

rp1 5y ago
The advice is, in essence, to prioritize your mailing list over audiences on proprietary platforms like Twitter and TikTok. This may work for some, but mailing lists seem like they would be really ineffective for a lot of use cases.
- riidom 5y ago
  Yes, it's pretty focussed on mailing lists as alternative. Having a comment section may work too, but then, it shouldn't be hosted by discurs of course, and you have the trouble of managing it. Same goes with your own forum, but it's not worth mentioning it almost, since nowadays everyone seems so opposed to a forum. But I believe, a good alternative for a mailing list is RSS (for the people who are tired of signing up for stuff).
- LegitShady 5y ago
  A mailing list is generally made of people who are a lot more engaged and willing to support you. Twitter and tiktok are places you use network effect to try to grow your committed customer base but the conversion rate is much lower than a mailing list. I think it also depends on business model and product but mailing lists are fundamentally more targeted than social media. You still need both to some degree.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Not necessarily "prioritize" so much as "make sure you have good and solid backup." Proprietary platforms are free advertising that can get taken away whenever, so understand the risks of using them. Good mitigation is to maintain strong lines of communication beyond those.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  The advice is more generalizable than that: move your audience into content in spaces that you own -- not spaces that Zuckbook or Google or TikTok own.
  - rp1 5y ago
    I don't think the advice is the move your audience to spaces you own. The advice is to move your audience to spaces you own that intersect with spaces they go often. E.g. moving users into a forum you run wouldn't work because it would require your users to explicitly go to your forum. Mailing lists work because people go to their email inboxes often. I'm struggling to think of another place people go often that isn't a proprietary platform.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Mailing lists probably don't work well for some demographics that don't use e-mail significantly, e.g. teens.
ipsin 5y ago
Here I am reading, following this reasonable argument and... boom pop-up "call to action" interrupts the hell out of it. I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? If I really enjoyed it, that seems like the point where I'd be on board with signing up.
- anm89 5y ago
  Agreed. Just out of principle, I'm never signing up for anything that attempts this method.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    Yep. Jump in my face, and I'm not only not going to sign up for your newsletter/install your app/whatever, I'm going to actively avoid ever visiting your site again. Your metrics may show that you get 0.2% signups with this method rather than 0.15%, but they likely don't show the much larger number of people who won't be coming back to your skeevy site, ever.
  - 9387367 5y ago
    Same, stopped reading and closed the tab.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  > I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? It seems you've answered your own question.
- thrower123 5y ago
  When I am "called to action" like this, my action is usually to close the tab.
- foogazi 5y ago
  The subscribe to newsletter button ? It seemed unobtrusive enough on mobile
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anm89 5y ago
This lesson extends to almost everything in life. Too many people wrap up their goals and aspirations to things that are really someone elses thing at the end of the day. It frequently doesn't end well. This is a really great article.
- riidom 5y ago
  Definitely, it's not only about games, and not even only about marketing your content of whatever topic on SM. Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business. Or any other business that also knows how to deliver its stuff inside a package to your door. (Just in case it wasnt obvious: Not my blog, just following it)
  - spaced-out 5y ago
    >Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business. What if you can't afford to buy real estate in your local community, and don't own any stake in any local businesses? How does spending more money, and driving 20+ minutes, enrich your experience in any way?
    - riidom 5y ago
      I wrote that from the customers perspective, though. If the shop is too far away to be comfortable to reach (20mins in your example, mileage my vary), there are usually options to get it sent to your house. Yes, you need to make a new account probably, but that's just minutes, and only in case you are shopping there for the first time. I had a talk with someone about that, and he was like, "Well I'd had to open 1-2 accounts every week at various shops and completely loose control over it". But I think the true problem in this case is a different one.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Seriously that talking point of "buying stuff on Amazon hurts your local businesses" is such an incredibly false dichotomy. The stuff on Amazon has long often been from a local business, often one you haven't heard of because of its obscure but cheap location. And that is before getting into the other trade fallacies, opportunity costs, and relative advantages.
teddyh 5y ago
One thing about domain names: Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your default choice unless you have strong indications it does not fulfill the above criteria. 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298
- nightfly 5y ago
  And if you have an exotic/fancy tld, have a backup .com/.net domain ready and maybe live at all times
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    I'd argue that on today's Internet, if you don't have a .com domain, you do have an exotic/fancy TLD and therefore need to have the .com domain live and redirecting to your exotic TLD.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Your local ccTLD is the exception.
      - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
        .us? That sounds like some .gov phishing scam or del.icio.us domain name hack. Sites using .us are the exception.
        frosted-flakes 5y ago
        Except .us because the USA has so many other common TLDs commonly associated with it. In Canada, .ca is the norm, and I tend to associate .com with $USD and expensive shipping.
tomphoolery 5y ago
I got about 20% of the way through and clicked off after the author went down a whole analogy rabbit hole.
- tejohnso 5y ago
  > I got the pixelart itch again and have a blog to write so I thought I would combine the two. This week I created a little metaphorical fable about building your castle in other people’s kingdoms. At least you were warned :)
- allemagne 5y ago
  The title (and the section headings) communicates the analogy really well, much of the following article really was a fun if indulgent deep dive into it.
Igelau 5y ago
> racist barbarians I got a good chuckle out of the unintentional cognitive dissonance of this phrase.
asasidh 5y ago
The king's rug pull. This is why open standards like podcast are much better than being in a walled garden. Monetization will be based on the quality of content and your own efforts towards it and not instant. Look at the ease to exit just like the ease of entry.
- rambambram 5y ago
  > Look at the ease to exit just like the ease of entry. Amen.
opatdchan 5y ago
Web3 solves this.
- namlem 5y ago
  That's the hope, but it's far from certain that it will.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  We don't understand the dynamics of "web3" at all yet, but early entrants look pretty much like another layer of abstraction that simply rolls up to the same thing.
  - opatdchan 5y ago
    You don't understand it because you refuse to even try it.
    - the_optimist 5y ago
      You explain here that you do not know me, which is perhaps obvious. Please provide the counters to the original statement, if you have them.
jonny_eh 5y ago
Don't open your store in a mall. What if the mall closes or raises your rent?! (sarcasm!)
- josephcsible 5y ago
  If the mall kicks you out, or raises rent so high you can't afford to stay, there will be other nearby places to go, and it's easy to retain your customers when you move somewhere else. If Apple kicks you off of the App Store or YouTube bans you, it's way, way harder to keep your users or audience.
- lapinot 5y ago
  The power relationship between a mall and a store has nothing to do with the one between you and some multi-billion dollar evil corp.
  - Kye 5y ago
    Simon Property Group isn't any more moral than Google or Amazon.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      The point is that Simon's ability to harm you is way lower.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  I've seen enough store-owners get bankrupt because they decided to move into a mall.
- esjeon 5y ago
  That's why businesses always try to make their revenue model diverse, so that, even when one or two of them dry up, the business still have some breathing room left. This is a business 101 stuff. When you open a store in a mall, you better have another store outside the mall. Otherwise, you'll get killed rather quickly.
- 5y ago
cletus 5y ago
This is nothing new. In tech circles we've been talking about this since at least the Zynga-Facebook era (eg [1]) and probably much earlier. I mean it's good advice. Often you don't have a choice or at least the alternatives are so bad you'll hamstring yourself by avoiding a potential loss (eg Youtube). There are risks on another's platform but there can be benefits too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796
devmunchies 5y ago
Article never used the words, but it comes down to owning your own "channels" and owning "distribution". Everything else is modular and changeable without disruption to $$$.
antonzabirko 5y ago
A lot of people need to see this. If you don't control something, you will be disappointed eventually. Philosophically this can even be extended to your mortality.
- 9dev 5y ago
  Ah, but this brushes an interesting, yet inevitable fact: there is no such thing as control. We tend to imagine to have control to various degrees, as that makes it easier to cope with the chaos around us. Still, we have to accept the fact that we’re all going to die, eventually, for example. Many people never do that; they simply pretend they’re immortal, until one day something bad happens and shakes them awake. I guess what I’m getting at is that change is inherent to life. By accepting that things will change, no matter how much „control“ you imagine to have about them, you will probably be happiest in the long run.
  - marc_io 5y ago
    True, but we always have some sort of agency over this.
simonswords82 5y ago
Same applies to fintech - I see a lot of new fintech startups building their solutions on existing no/low code platforms. Whilst this gets them out of the gate faster all the problems in OPs article apply. In addition, their margins are squeezed as they have to pass on the cost of the no/low code platform. Also means the no/low code platform now needs to be InfoSec/Due Dilled which doubles that pain too.
- soco 5y ago
  They hopefully imagine moving out of that platform once a certain size has been reached.
  - simonswords82 5y ago
    Perhaps - but that's a lot of work to do in addition to scaling up a company/adding features etc. that you've perhaps just managed to get traction on.
splitstud 5y ago
Yeah but what if you don't have a kingdom? What if you don't need a catle?
schnevets 5y ago
Nice article, but some of the writer's earliest examples are "rug pulls" that happened 10+ years ago... surely the "new" generation of creators have ingrained these lessons already? As a follow-up, I'd want to hear the writer's opinion on how to filter the corrupt kings from the "safe products". MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp? It is going slower than one would expect (or desire), but I do think technology is bringing us to an ecosystem that is more equitable for creators. Personally, I'm interested in the rules and expectations for tools that would be equitable to creators while remaining sustainable. It seems like there are offerings beyond web hosting and e-mail distribution that are worth exploring.
- mdoms 5y ago
  > MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp? The author does not say you shouldn't use other kingdoms. To the contrary he says you should use the heck out of them. Just don't set up your whole castle there.
ed 5y ago
The insane amounts of money people have made building products on “other people’s kingdoms” suggests the author is wrong.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  It's high-reward, sure, but the point is it's high-risk too. Look at everyone who was doing great in someone else's kingdom until the king kicked them out with no recourse.
  - ed 5y ago
    The author is making a moral argument and presenting it as if it’s a business argument. It’s not. Zynga still made boatloads of money, and employed thousands of people, before the rug got pulled. The article does not specify good vs bad platforms. Is Apple’s App Store good or bad? Would the author not want to start Epic? What about building B2B tools for Salesforce, or apps for Shopify? Platform Risk is a form of risk that can be mitigated. Building on platforms is itself a mitigation for distribution risk.
okhuman 5y ago
This message applies to your repo on Github too.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Not nearly to the same extent, though. It's easy to move your repo over to GitLab or Savannah or something if need be.
  - c_joly 5y ago
    Except when folks use the github url of their repository as their homepage I guess.
  - okhuman 5y ago
    it's not git thats valuable, it's all the social interactions around it - your issues, discussions, actions would be very hard to move. Github is only releasing more vendor lock in features as time goes on.
jnwatson 5y ago
This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies. Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving money on the table. I’d wager that Japanese game manufacturers missed hundreds of millions of dollars by being late to embrace Steam.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > Steam could go away tomorrow. Sell your game on your own website too. > The game engine you license could go out of business. Use a FOSS engine, so even if the original maintainers totally abandon it, someone else can fork it. > Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. You can switch to a new hosting/DNS provider transparently to your customers.
- eldavido 5y ago
  Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science. What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or leave, but don't pretend you're better off doing everything yourself. "Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty" as a famous economist said. Incidentally I've been watching the walking dead again (season 8) and a lot of this stuff is the subject of the show. It's definitely had some rough patches but at its core, it's a show about how to build communities and large-scale civilizations, and what effects various leadership styles have on each society's long-term prospects. Very relevant.
  - allemagne 5y ago
    The political angle here is totally disconnected with what the analogy is trying to get at. We can safely assume the author is not trying to advocate complete and total self-sufficiency in every context all the time.
999900000999 5y ago
My counter argument is it can be nearly impossible to build an audience outside of a kingdom. Many popular YouTubers will try and splinter off and create websites where they can monetize better. I'm even subscribed to one of these websites because I really do want to support the Creator, but I still consume almost all of their content on YouTube. YouTube makes it very easy to upload something and for people to consume it. If your video on getting better gas mileage is on GasBro.net I'll never find it. If it's on YouTube I might .
- domador 5y ago
  Additionally, often there is only a single kingdom for a given type of audience. One can't simply migrate to another kingdom, and it's very difficult to create a new, viable kingdom. One of the ways these kinds of problems could be addressed could be through laws that limit the speed and the degree to which monopolistic platforms can unilaterally change their terms and conditions. Other kinds of laws could help protect creators that earn a living through these platforms, such as laws mandating a certain rudimentary level of customer service for money-making creators. Hopefully these kinds of laws would reduce the number of horror stories where a platform simply decided to ignore a creator's customer service request to the point where they lost their source of income, oftentimes due to a technical problem caused by the platform itself, and which the platform was unwilling to have an actual human look into.
- esjeon 5y ago
  Just bait and switch. You don't have to be loyal to the platform that helped you grow, because it has been using you from the beginning. It has always been a mutual relationship, but people somehow realized it late. YouTube being the most profitable platform only means that people will consider it as /a/ primary target, but nothing prevents them from using other platforms. As long as the cost is justifiable, multi-platform approach is always better. Luckily, operating on multiple platform is extremely cheap.
  - notTheAuth 5y ago
    Agreed. Just put your commercials on YT, Twitch, but always link to your wallet; whether it’s Patreon or a tshirt store elsewhere. Decouple. Take advantage of network effects. Model income generation wide and deep. It’s all about extending social geometry.
rvz 5y ago
Seems like any startup that is an app-only product or is sitting on someone else's open APIs will learn the hard way. Notable victims: Meerkat, [0] YOLO and LMK [1]. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3043716/twitter-only-gave-meerkat-2-hours-notice-before-cutting-access-to-the-social-graph https://www.fastcompany.com/3043716/twitter-only-gave-meerka... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yolo-lmk-anonymous-messaging-apps-after-lawsuit-over-teens-death/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yo...
unsungNovelty 5y ago
TLDR; Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) :) https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
mdoms 5y ago
Excellent article. One of the best examples I have seen of this is an instructional wood worker named Steve Ramsey. He has excellent content on Youtube but almost every video he makes has a call to action to buy his complete video sets on his website. And, for me at least, it worked! I knew I'd be getting excellent content beyond the scope of what was available on Youtube (eg, complete with PDF plans, cut lists etc) and he charged a very fair one-off fee, not a Youtube recurring subscription. And now, his viewership is drying up due to changes in the Youtube algorithm (and his lack of posting, caused by the algorithm preferring a style of video he's just not interested in). But he is moving a lot of content to Tik Tok and other platforms, and continues to drive viewers to his own kingdom.
namlem 5y ago
Easier said than done. Mailing lists suck because email sucks. Running things off an independent website sucks because getting traffick to an independent website sucks. Platforms make things way easier because the returns to scale are enormous. I hope that someday we have platforms that are more democratic, so that those who use them aren't at the mercy of petty dictators. Perhaps something like the Ethereum blockchain could help with that, who knows?
rkunal 5y ago
You can not create the universe. When building any thing new, you have to rely on current ecosystem. Earlier people relied on Kings and Bishops. Today, it's the banks and the platforms. The advice should be, create your own mini ecosystem as soon as possible.
aunty_helen 5y ago
> OnlyFans ALMOST banned porn which would have left content creators out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only Fans (under heavy pressure) reversed the plan… for now. This is the problem, at face value this happened and is now being used as evidence for the article's premise (which I enjoyed and agree with). In reality it was a viral marketing move by onlyfans to promote porn on their website. You can't just come out and say to a bunch of Dads hey we got porn come take a look. But you can say hey we're banning all the massive amounts of porn we've got! oh no oops no we're not, all the porn you know and love is still there. We're sorry (TM) Just like how no wives at some school are getting jelous how their husbands are looking at another mum's onlyfans... but I see paid articles about this all the time.
gjvc 5y ago
wise words
golemotron 5y ago
The same message as this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...
legrande 5y ago
I never liked digital/virtual sharecropping. Hosting your own site might mean people can't discover you as easily, but if it means a service like Youtube/OnlyFans doesn't pull the rug from under your feet, then self-hosting is essential. I operate a BBS that has been going strong for over 15 years, and it's all self-hosted, well sort of (it's on a VPS) but the VPS provider is well-known and renowned and unlikely to go under anytime soon. The VPS provider also has many customers they wouldn't give up too easily. That said: I have prepared myself if my BBS gets banned for whatever stupid reason. I've practiced and developed my own drill to get everything up and running again under a new provider should that happen. It's important to do this, because communities don't like down time and will go elsewhere like Discord etc if they notice a bunch of downtime on your server(s).
amelius 5y ago
Yes, this is why AppStores are such a bad idea.
amelius 5y ago
Facebook built their castle in Apple's and Google's kingdoms.
Hithredin 5y ago
But..., that's the way to conquer the welsch. It worked well
zukalous 5y ago
Author here. Hey whoever linked to my article thank you for post. I just got notified of this. To answer the most common questions, I am not advocating "build your own youtube." Instead I advocate what @notTheAuth said below. Basically treat youtube and twitter as my commercials. I don't care who follows me on those two platforms, they are just the entry point. The following that I truly care about is my mailing list and my own personal site. Those are my owned platforms and that is what I care about. Think of it like the old days of TV. If I am advertising on TV channels and it goes out of business that isn't that bad. Oh shoot I can't advertise on there anymore. It would be worse if my TV show was hosted by that channel because then my TV show isn't there any more.
zukalous 5y ago
There was another question about it being vague advice and wishful thinking. This is actually how I run my business. So I post threads on Twitter to get attention https://twitter.com/AdventureMtn/status/1450141976976781312 https://twitter.com/AdventureMtn/status/1450141976976781312 But I don't care who follows me there. You will notice the last post I link back to a site that I own and make money from. I am not advocating building your own Twitter or building your own youtube. Instead I just sell premium versions of what most people would most likely post on Youtube. For example I created a whole video series on a site that I created called gamemarketingideas.com. I charge for that in real dollars not ad revenue or fractions of a cent with affiliate money. I own it. That content could have gone up on youtube but I don't trust a business hosted on the back of Google. So instead I am basing my revenue on selling it off of a site that I own. None of this is a perfect libertarian utopia of total self-sustainability. I am 100% not a libertarian. And there is no risk free business. You just need to reduce risk. My advice is basically a friendly reminder to be careful with these big tech sharks. Don't put your whole head in the sharks mouth. Instead just put a hand in the sharks mouth. It is less risky that way. Don't ask me where the shark metaphor is going it is early and I haven't had my coffee yet

218 points by riidom 5y ago

rp1 5y ago

The advice is, in essence, to prioritize your mailing list over audiences on proprietary platforms like Twitter and TikTok. This may work for some, but mailing lists seem like they would be really ineffective for a lot of use cases.

riidom 5y ago
Yes, it's pretty focussed on mailing lists as alternative. Having a comment section may work too, but then, it shouldn't be hosted by discurs of course, and you have the trouble of managing it. Same goes with your own forum, but it's not worth mentioning it almost, since nowadays everyone seems so opposed to a forum. But I believe, a good alternative for a mailing list is RSS (for the people who are tired of signing up for stuff).
LegitShady 5y ago
A mailing list is generally made of people who are a lot more engaged and willing to support you. Twitter and tiktok are places you use network effect to try to grow your committed customer base but the conversion rate is much lower than a mailing list. I think it also depends on business model and product but mailing lists are fundamentally more targeted than social media. You still need both to some degree.
jrm4 5y ago
Not necessarily "prioritize" so much as "make sure you have good and solid backup." Proprietary platforms are free advertising that can get taken away whenever, so understand the risks of using them. Good mitigation is to maintain strong lines of communication beyond those.
setpatchaddress 5y ago
The advice is more generalizable than that: move your audience into content in spaces that you own -- not spaces that Zuckbook or Google or TikTok own.
- rp1 5y ago
  I don't think the advice is the move your audience to spaces you own. The advice is to move your audience to spaces you own that intersect with spaces they go often. E.g. moving users into a forum you run wouldn't work because it would require your users to explicitly go to your forum. Mailing lists work because people go to their email inboxes often. I'm struggling to think of another place people go often that isn't a proprietary platform.
kingcharles 5y ago
Mailing lists probably don't work well for some demographics that don't use e-mail significantly, e.g. teens.

ipsin 5y ago

Here I am reading, following this reasonable argument and... boom pop-up "call to action" interrupts the hell out of it. I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? If I really enjoyed it, that seems like the point where I'd be on board with signing up.

anm89 5y ago
Agreed. Just out of principle, I'm never signing up for anything that attempts this method.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  Yep. Jump in my face, and I'm not only not going to sign up for your newsletter/install your app/whatever, I'm going to actively avoid ever visiting your site again. Your metrics may show that you get 0.2% signups with this method rather than 0.15%, but they likely don't show the much larger number of people who won't be coming back to your skeevy site, ever.
- 9387367 5y ago
  Same, stopped reading and closed the tab.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
> I realize the conversion rate could be lower, but why not put this CTA in a non-pop-up form at the end of the article? It seems you've answered your own question.
thrower123 5y ago
When I am "called to action" like this, my action is usually to close the tab.
foogazi 5y ago
The subscribe to newsletter button ? It seemed unobtrusive enough on mobile

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anm89 5y ago

This lesson extends to almost everything in life. Too many people wrap up their goals and aspirations to things that are really someone elses thing at the end of the day. It frequently doesn't end well. This is a really great article.

riidom 5y ago
Definitely, it's not only about games, and not even only about marketing your content of whatever topic on SM. Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business. Or any other business that also knows how to deliver its stuff inside a package to your door. (Just in case it wasnt obvious: Not my blog, just following it)
- spaced-out 5y ago
  >Somewhat also applies to buying your stuff mostly on Amazon, hurting your local business. What if you can't afford to buy real estate in your local community, and don't own any stake in any local businesses? How does spending more money, and driving 20+ minutes, enrich your experience in any way?
  - riidom 5y ago
    I wrote that from the customers perspective, though. If the shop is too far away to be comfortable to reach (20mins in your example, mileage my vary), there are usually options to get it sent to your house. Yes, you need to make a new account probably, but that's just minutes, and only in case you are shopping there for the first time. I had a talk with someone about that, and he was like, "Well I'd had to open 1-2 accounts every week at various shops and completely loose control over it". But I think the true problem in this case is a different one.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Seriously that talking point of "buying stuff on Amazon hurts your local businesses" is such an incredibly false dichotomy. The stuff on Amazon has long often been from a local business, often one you haven't heard of because of its obscure but cheap location. And that is before getting into the other trade fallacies, opportunity costs, and relative advantages.

teddyh 5y ago

One thing about domain names: Choose both a registrar and top-level domain for your domain name carefully. Neither your registrar nor your chosen TLD registry should be in the habit of suspending domains at the drop of a hat, or be at risk of going out of business suddenly. For TLDs, I have said before¹ that if you mostly trust your local government, your national ccTLD should suffice. In fact, it should be your default choice unless you have strong indications it does not fulfill the above criteria. 1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614298

nightfly 5y ago
And if you have an exotic/fancy tld, have a backup .com/.net domain ready and maybe live at all times
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I'd argue that on today's Internet, if you don't have a .com domain, you do have an exotic/fancy TLD and therefore need to have the .com domain live and redirecting to your exotic TLD.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Your local ccTLD is the exception.
    - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
      .us? That sounds like some .gov phishing scam or del.icio.us domain name hack. Sites using .us are the exception.
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        Except .us because the USA has so many other common TLDs commonly associated with it. In Canada, .ca is the norm, and I tend to associate .com with $USD and expensive shipping.

tomphoolery 5y ago

I got about 20% of the way through and clicked off after the author went down a whole analogy rabbit hole.

tejohnso 5y ago
> I got the pixelart itch again and have a blog to write so I thought I would combine the two. This week I created a little metaphorical fable about building your castle in other people’s kingdoms. At least you were warned :)
allemagne 5y ago
The title (and the section headings) communicates the analogy really well, much of the following article really was a fun if indulgent deep dive into it.

Igelau 5y ago

> racist barbarians I got a good chuckle out of the unintentional cognitive dissonance of this phrase.

asasidh 5y ago

The king's rug pull. This is why open standards like podcast are much better than being in a walled garden. Monetization will be based on the quality of content and your own efforts towards it and not instant. Look at the ease to exit just like the ease of entry.

rambambram 5y ago
> Look at the ease to exit just like the ease of entry. Amen.

opatdchan 5y ago

Web3 solves this.

namlem 5y ago
That's the hope, but it's far from certain that it will.
the_optimist 5y ago
We don't understand the dynamics of "web3" at all yet, but early entrants look pretty much like another layer of abstraction that simply rolls up to the same thing.
- opatdchan 5y ago
  You don't understand it because you refuse to even try it.
  - the_optimist 5y ago
    You explain here that you do not know me, which is perhaps obvious. Please provide the counters to the original statement, if you have them.

jonny_eh 5y ago

Don't open your store in a mall. What if the mall closes or raises your rent?! (sarcasm!)

josephcsible 5y ago
If the mall kicks you out, or raises rent so high you can't afford to stay, there will be other nearby places to go, and it's easy to retain your customers when you move somewhere else. If Apple kicks you off of the App Store or YouTube bans you, it's way, way harder to keep your users or audience.
lapinot 5y ago
The power relationship between a mall and a store has nothing to do with the one between you and some multi-billion dollar evil corp.
- Kye 5y ago
  Simon Property Group isn't any more moral than Google or Amazon.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    The point is that Simon's ability to harm you is way lower.
marcosdumay 5y ago
I've seen enough store-owners get bankrupt because they decided to move into a mall.
esjeon 5y ago
That's why businesses always try to make their revenue model diverse, so that, even when one or two of them dry up, the business still have some breathing room left. This is a business 101 stuff. When you open a store in a mall, you better have another store outside the mall. Otherwise, you'll get killed rather quickly.
5y ago

cletus 5y ago

This is nothing new. In tech circles we've been talking about this since at least the Zynga-Facebook era (eg [1]) and probably much earlier. I mean it's good advice. Often you don't have a choice or at least the alternatives are so bad you'll hamstring yourself by avoiding a potential loss (eg Youtube). There are risks on another's platform but there can be benefits too. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093796

devmunchies 5y ago

Article never used the words, but it comes down to owning your own "channels" and owning "distribution". Everything else is modular and changeable without disruption to $$$.

antonzabirko 5y ago

A lot of people need to see this. If you don't control something, you will be disappointed eventually. Philosophically this can even be extended to your mortality.

9dev 5y ago
Ah, but this brushes an interesting, yet inevitable fact: there is no such thing as control. We tend to imagine to have control to various degrees, as that makes it easier to cope with the chaos around us. Still, we have to accept the fact that we’re all going to die, eventually, for example. Many people never do that; they simply pretend they’re immortal, until one day something bad happens and shakes them awake. I guess what I’m getting at is that change is inherent to life. By accepting that things will change, no matter how much „control“ you imagine to have about them, you will probably be happiest in the long run.
- marc_io 5y ago
  True, but we always have some sort of agency over this.

simonswords82 5y ago

Same applies to fintech - I see a lot of new fintech startups building their solutions on existing no/low code platforms. Whilst this gets them out of the gate faster all the problems in OPs article apply. In addition, their margins are squeezed as they have to pass on the cost of the no/low code platform. Also means the no/low code platform now needs to be InfoSec/Due Dilled which doubles that pain too.

soco 5y ago
They hopefully imagine moving out of that platform once a certain size has been reached.
- simonswords82 5y ago
  Perhaps - but that's a lot of work to do in addition to scaling up a company/adding features etc. that you've perhaps just managed to get traction on.

splitstud 5y ago

Yeah but what if you don't have a kingdom? What if you don't need a catle?

schnevets 5y ago

Nice article, but some of the writer's earliest examples are "rug pulls" that happened 10+ years ago... surely the "new" generation of creators have ingrained these lessons already? As a follow-up, I'd want to hear the writer's opinion on how to filter the corrupt kings from the "safe products". MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp? It is going slower than one would expect (or desire), but I do think technology is bringing us to an ecosystem that is more equitable for creators. Personally, I'm interested in the rules and expectations for tools that would be equitable to creators while remaining sustainable. It seems like there are offerings beyond web hosting and e-mail distribution that are worth exploring.

mdoms 5y ago
> MailChimp and Squarespace are easy examples, but are name brand ecosystems like Steam and Spotify necessary evils, or would the writer encourage sticking with indie alternatives like itch.io and Bandcamp? The author does not say you shouldn't use other kingdoms. To the contrary he says you should use the heck out of them. Just don't set up your whole castle there.

ed 5y ago

The insane amounts of money people have made building products on “other people’s kingdoms” suggests the author is wrong.

josephcsible 5y ago
It's high-reward, sure, but the point is it's high-risk too. Look at everyone who was doing great in someone else's kingdom until the king kicked them out with no recourse.
- ed 5y ago
  The author is making a moral argument and presenting it as if it’s a business argument. It’s not. Zynga still made boatloads of money, and employed thousands of people, before the rug got pulled. The article does not specify good vs bad platforms. Is Apple’s App Store good or bad? Would the author not want to start Epic? What about building B2B tools for Salesforce, or apps for Shopify? Platform Risk is a form of risk that can be mitigated. Building on platforms is itself a mitigation for distribution risk.

okhuman 5y ago

This message applies to your repo on Github too.

josephcsible 5y ago
Not nearly to the same extent, though. It's easy to move your repo over to GitLab or Savannah or something if need be.
- c_joly 5y ago
  Except when folks use the github url of their repository as their homepage I guess.
- okhuman 5y ago
  it's not git thats valuable, it's all the social interactions around it - your issues, discussions, actions would be very hard to move. Github is only releasing more vendor lock in features as time goes on.

jnwatson 5y ago

This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies. Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving money on the table. I’d wager that Japanese game manufacturers missed hundreds of millions of dollars by being late to embrace Steam.

josephcsible 5y ago
> Steam could go away tomorrow. Sell your game on your own website too. > The game engine you license could go out of business. Use a FOSS engine, so even if the original maintainers totally abandon it, someone else can fork it. > Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off. You can switch to a new hosting/DNS provider transparently to your customers.
eldavido 5y ago
Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science. What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or leave, but don't pretend you're better off doing everything yourself. "Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty" as a famous economist said. Incidentally I've been watching the walking dead again (season 8) and a lot of this stuff is the subject of the show. It's definitely had some rough patches but at its core, it's a show about how to build communities and large-scale civilizations, and what effects various leadership styles have on each society's long-term prospects. Very relevant.
- allemagne 5y ago
  The political angle here is totally disconnected with what the analogy is trying to get at. We can safely assume the author is not trying to advocate complete and total self-sufficiency in every context all the time.

999900000999 5y ago

My counter argument is it can be nearly impossible to build an audience outside of a kingdom. Many popular YouTubers will try and splinter off and create websites where they can monetize better. I'm even subscribed to one of these websites because I really do want to support the Creator, but I still consume almost all of their content on YouTube. YouTube makes it very easy to upload something and for people to consume it. If your video on getting better gas mileage is on GasBro.net I'll never find it. If it's on YouTube I might .

domador 5y ago
Additionally, often there is only a single kingdom for a given type of audience. One can't simply migrate to another kingdom, and it's very difficult to create a new, viable kingdom. One of the ways these kinds of problems could be addressed could be through laws that limit the speed and the degree to which monopolistic platforms can unilaterally change their terms and conditions. Other kinds of laws could help protect creators that earn a living through these platforms, such as laws mandating a certain rudimentary level of customer service for money-making creators. Hopefully these kinds of laws would reduce the number of horror stories where a platform simply decided to ignore a creator's customer service request to the point where they lost their source of income, oftentimes due to a technical problem caused by the platform itself, and which the platform was unwilling to have an actual human look into.
esjeon 5y ago
Just bait and switch. You don't have to be loyal to the platform that helped you grow, because it has been using you from the beginning. It has always been a mutual relationship, but people somehow realized it late. YouTube being the most profitable platform only means that people will consider it as /a/ primary target, but nothing prevents them from using other platforms. As long as the cost is justifiable, multi-platform approach is always better. Luckily, operating on multiple platform is extremely cheap.
- notTheAuth 5y ago
  Agreed. Just put your commercials on YT, Twitch, but always link to your wallet; whether it’s Patreon or a tshirt store elsewhere. Decouple. Take advantage of network effects. Model income generation wide and deep. It’s all about extending social geometry.

rvz 5y ago

Seems like any startup that is an app-only product or is sitting on someone else's open APIs will learn the hard way. Notable victims: Meerkat, [0] YOLO and LMK [1]. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3043716/twitter-only-gave-meerkat-2-hours-notice-before-cutting-access-to-the-social-graph https://www.fastcompany.com/3043716/twitter-only-gave-meerka... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yolo-lmk-anonymous-messaging-apps-after-lawsuit-over-teens-death/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/snap-cuts-off-yo...

unsungNovelty 5y ago

TLDR; Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) :) https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

mdoms 5y ago

Excellent article. One of the best examples I have seen of this is an instructional wood worker named Steve Ramsey. He has excellent content on Youtube but almost every video he makes has a call to action to buy his complete video sets on his website. And, for me at least, it worked! I knew I'd be getting excellent content beyond the scope of what was available on Youtube (eg, complete with PDF plans, cut lists etc) and he charged a very fair one-off fee, not a Youtube recurring subscription. And now, his viewership is drying up due to changes in the Youtube algorithm (and his lack of posting, caused by the algorithm preferring a style of video he's just not interested in). But he is moving a lot of content to Tik Tok and other platforms, and continues to drive viewers to his own kingdom.

namlem 5y ago

Easier said than done. Mailing lists suck because email sucks. Running things off an independent website sucks because getting traffick to an independent website sucks. Platforms make things way easier because the returns to scale are enormous. I hope that someday we have platforms that are more democratic, so that those who use them aren't at the mercy of petty dictators. Perhaps something like the Ethereum blockchain could help with that, who knows?

rkunal 5y ago

You can not create the universe. When building any thing new, you have to rely on current ecosystem. Earlier people relied on Kings and Bishops. Today, it's the banks and the platforms. The advice should be, create your own mini ecosystem as soon as possible.

aunty_helen 5y ago

> OnlyFans ALMOST banned porn which would have left content creators out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only Fans (under heavy pressure) reversed the plan… for now. This is the problem, at face value this happened and is now being used as evidence for the article's premise (which I enjoyed and agree with). In reality it was a viral marketing move by onlyfans to promote porn on their website. You can't just come out and say to a bunch of Dads hey we got porn come take a look. But you can say hey we're banning all the massive amounts of porn we've got! oh no oops no we're not, all the porn you know and love is still there. We're sorry (TM) Just like how no wives at some school are getting jelous how their husbands are looking at another mum's onlyfans... but I see paid articles about this all the time.

gjvc 5y ago

wise words

golemotron 5y ago

The same message as this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...

legrande 5y ago

I never liked digital/virtual sharecropping. Hosting your own site might mean people can't discover you as easily, but if it means a service like Youtube/OnlyFans doesn't pull the rug from under your feet, then self-hosting is essential. I operate a BBS that has been going strong for over 15 years, and it's all self-hosted, well sort of (it's on a VPS) but the VPS provider is well-known and renowned and unlikely to go under anytime soon. The VPS provider also has many customers they wouldn't give up too easily. That said: I have prepared myself if my BBS gets banned for whatever stupid reason. I've practiced and developed my own drill to get everything up and running again under a new provider should that happen. It's important to do this, because communities don't like down time and will go elsewhere like Discord etc if they notice a bunch of downtime on your server(s).

amelius 5y ago

Yes, this is why AppStores are such a bad idea.

amelius 5y ago

Facebook built their castle in Apple's and Google's kingdoms.

Hithredin 5y ago

But..., that's the way to conquer the welsch. It worked well

zukalous 5y ago

Author here. Hey whoever linked to my article thank you for post. I just got notified of this. To answer the most common questions, I am not advocating "build your own youtube." Instead I advocate what @notTheAuth said below. Basically treat youtube and twitter as my commercials. I don't care who follows me on those two platforms, they are just the entry point. The following that I truly care about is my mailing list and my own personal site. Those are my owned platforms and that is what I care about. Think of it like the old days of TV. If I am advertising on TV channels and it goes out of business that isn't that bad. Oh shoot I can't advertise on there anymore. It would be worse if my TV show was hosted by that channel because then my TV show isn't there any more.

zukalous 5y ago

There was another question about it being vague advice and wishful thinking. This is actually how I run my business. So I post threads on Twitter to get attention https://twitter.com/AdventureMtn/status/1450141976976781312 https://twitter.com/AdventureMtn/status/1450141976976781312 But I don't care who follows me there. You will notice the last post I link back to a site that I own and make money from. I am not advocating building your own Twitter or building your own youtube. Instead I just sell premium versions of what most people would most likely post on Youtube. For example I created a whole video series on a site that I created called gamemarketingideas.com. I charge for that in real dollars not ad revenue or fractions of a cent with affiliate money. I own it. That content could have gone up on youtube but I don't trust a business hosted on the back of Google. So instead I am basing my revenue on selling it off of a site that I own. None of this is a perfect libertarian utopia of total self-sustainability. I am 100% not a libertarian. And there is no risk free business. You just need to reduce risk. My advice is basically a friendly reminder to be careful with these big tech sharks. Don't put your whole head in the sharks mouth. Instead just put a hand in the sharks mouth. It is less risky that way. Don't ask me where the shark metaphor is going it is early and I haven't had my coffee yet