5 ms·

Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"? These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on a

Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"? These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on all the things they've tried and how Tumblr is still losing $20MM a year IIRC.

EGreg 2y ago
That’s only in the capitalist system. Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn’t need money to survive, in the sense of money going to one large corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of wordpress, buy plugins etc. If you want to know more about how to monetize digital content without a trusted central actor, we are working on a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.
- tweetle_beetle 2y ago
  I persevered with your website because I am very interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the merits of these decentralised services are accessed through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient than me in my humble opinion.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest https://qbix.com/invest for instance). Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you yet, we don’t have the resources of Facebook or even Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am sure you can find many faults there. (I’d like to hear about them btw.) On the other hand, many other projects like the E programming language, Capn’proto, Linux etc. are also very complex and did not have fantastic and slick documentation, first adopters also had to read some words in order to get it. This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start marketing to a broad audience, we’ll reduce it to 10 word slides and sound bites, or jingles. Until then you can try it yourself, the documentation is at https://community.qbix.com https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide
    - 2024throwaway 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - EGreg 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        EGreg 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        carapace 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
- anamax 2y ago
  I see a lot of information about how to distribute content and revenues, but I don't see how you ensure that enough revenue comes in. Wordpress' Tumblr problem is that costs exceed revenue, not distribution. Note that "decentralized" doesn't reduce total costs - it just spreads them out. Server costs do not go down with the number of owners.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Tumblr: bought for $1.1B in 2013, sold for $3M in 2019. Now losing $30M a year.
nitwit005 2y ago
Even if they make money, the next quarter must always be better than the previous one. At a certain point, people seem to start looking at self destructive options to make that happen.
- aaronbrethorst 2y ago
  Automattic is not publicly traded.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Inflation is one thing. Rent extraction from the ecosystem isnt done only because of inflation, but because investors want profits from capital appreciation. That’s one of the failure modes of capitalism. Sure it works well in early stages (providing capital to promising startups) but there are diminishing returns and ultimately huge negative externalities to this model of stock ownership forever. Whether by pension funds or the public, the incentives are just toxic.
dgb23 2y ago
A lot of social media platforms lose money because they decide they want to grow above and beyond, even after being well established. Same thing for other software products that are perfectly fine, even loved.

EGreg 2y ago

That’s only in the capitalist system. Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn’t need money to survive, in the sense of money going to one large corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of wordpress, buy plugins etc. If you want to know more about how to monetize digital content without a trusted central actor, we are working on a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.

tweetle_beetle 2y ago
I persevered with your website because I am very interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the merits of these decentralised services are accessed through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient than me in my humble opinion.
- EGreg 2y ago
  That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest https://qbix.com/invest for instance). Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you yet, we don’t have the resources of Facebook or even Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am sure you can find many faults there. (I’d like to hear about them btw.) On the other hand, many other projects like the E programming language, Capn’proto, Linux etc. are also very complex and did not have fantastic and slick documentation, first adopters also had to read some words in order to get it. This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start marketing to a broad audience, we’ll reduce it to 10 word slides and sound bites, or jingles. Until then you can try it yourself, the documentation is at https://community.qbix.com https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide
  - 2024throwaway 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - EGreg 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - 2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        EGreg 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        carapace 2y ago
        [flagged]
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
anamax 2y ago
I see a lot of information about how to distribute content and revenues, but I don't see how you ensure that enough revenue comes in. Wordpress' Tumblr problem is that costs exceed revenue, not distribution. Note that "decentralized" doesn't reduce total costs - it just spreads them out. Server costs do not go down with the number of owners.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Tumblr: bought for $1.1B in 2013, sold for $3M in 2019. Now losing $30M a year.

nitwit005 2y ago

Even if they make money, the next quarter must always be better than the previous one. At a certain point, people seem to start looking at self destructive options to make that happen.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago
Automattic is not publicly traded.
Nasrudith 2y ago
It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.
- EGreg 2y ago
  Inflation is one thing. Rent extraction from the ecosystem isnt done only because of inflation, but because investors want profits from capital appreciation. That’s one of the failure modes of capitalism. Sure it works well in early stages (providing capital to promising startups) but there are diminishing returns and ultimately huge negative externalities to this model of stock ownership forever. Whether by pension funds or the public, the incentives are just toxic.

dgb23 2y ago

A lot of social media platforms lose money because they decide they want to grow above and beyond, even after being well established. Same thing for other software products that are perfectly fine, even loved.