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My take would be that they set out to "minimise friction", build a user base and monetise that later, but having never seen the "Underpants Gnomes" episode of S

My take would be that they set out to "minimise friction", build a user base and monetise that later, but having never seen the "Underpants Gnomes" episode of South Park. One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. One could build a "premium" closed ecosystem within an open ecosystem which inducts new customers in. I don't think the design was fundamentally structurally flawed, so much as they didn't follow up on the opportunities created by the initial phase. That said, I think it's a very hard transition, even if you did plan well in advance.

dale_glass 3y ago
> One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. Twitter is a walled garden though. This is more like if Twitter built Mastodon, and nearly everyone ran their own server. So you what, sell ads? But everyone browses from their own install which doesn't serve any. Part of the squeezing strategy is that you have a captive audience that can be suddenly asked to pay, or watch ads and they don't want to lose their social network, so they do. But this model had no such thing. What I heard was that their intended model was "tax the economy", but besides being trivial to work around in the architecture, every content creator I met hated the completely wide open architecture. There's no way to protect content in the system. Not only it's trivial to grab somebody else's stuff, you can't be punished for doing so.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  To answer from a personal point of view, I'm very, very old fashioned. I believe that successful long term business only comes from providing compelling value to customers, building loyalty and getting them to willingly pay you for what you offer, not what you threaten to take away. Much of the "capture then exploit" thinking of the recent tech world, walled gardens and the like, is anathema to me. Once you antagonise your own customers it's a losing game. They will circumvent and subvert everything you do, and good on them for being smarter and more agile. In other words I think that whole mentality is wrong, and indeed immoral. OTOH, that isn't to say you can't build great business in other ways, and especially within interoperable, free and open systems which also add value to the whole world as well as bring you a profitable living. So for me, "squeezing" is about using the fertile ground you create through enabling freedom to grow something that's privately profitable. When you don't have to worry about "protecting content" and enforcing behaviour you can concentrate on creating value. Such businesses are not super scalable, and won't make you a billionaire, or satisfy investors. But they can make you a good living and are potentially stable and sustainable. I know it doesn't fit the cultural values of Silicon Valley, but to me that's the gold standard of business. Also my experience is that it isn't ones own customers, or peer competitors that we need protection from. It's the Microsoft, Google and Facebooks of the world who can steal your lunch with impunity, write laws, break laws... they'll steal or destroy whatever they like, so in many ways it pays to stay under their radar.

dale_glass 3y ago

> One could forgive that because the "build it first, squeeze it later" model /has/ worked for other tech businesses. Twitter comes to mind. Twitter is a walled garden though. This is more like if Twitter built Mastodon, and nearly everyone ran their own server. So you what, sell ads? But everyone browses from their own install which doesn't serve any. Part of the squeezing strategy is that you have a captive audience that can be suddenly asked to pay, or watch ads and they don't want to lose their social network, so they do. But this model had no such thing. What I heard was that their intended model was "tax the economy", but besides being trivial to work around in the architecture, every content creator I met hated the completely wide open architecture. There's no way to protect content in the system. Not only it's trivial to grab somebody else's stuff, you can't be punished for doing so.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
To answer from a personal point of view, I'm very, very old fashioned. I believe that successful long term business only comes from providing compelling value to customers, building loyalty and getting them to willingly pay you for what you offer, not what you threaten to take away. Much of the "capture then exploit" thinking of the recent tech world, walled gardens and the like, is anathema to me. Once you antagonise your own customers it's a losing game. They will circumvent and subvert everything you do, and good on them for being smarter and more agile. In other words I think that whole mentality is wrong, and indeed immoral. OTOH, that isn't to say you can't build great business in other ways, and especially within interoperable, free and open systems which also add value to the whole world as well as bring you a profitable living. So for me, "squeezing" is about using the fertile ground you create through enabling freedom to grow something that's privately profitable. When you don't have to worry about "protecting content" and enforcing behaviour you can concentrate on creating value. Such businesses are not super scalable, and won't make you a billionaire, or satisfy investors. But they can make you a good living and are potentially stable and sustainable. I know it doesn't fit the cultural values of Silicon Valley, but to me that's the gold standard of business. Also my experience is that it isn't ones own customers, or peer competitors that we need protection from. It's the Microsoft, Google and Facebooks of the world who can steal your lunch with impunity, write laws, break laws... they'll steal or destroy whatever they like, so in many ways it pays to stay under their radar.