19 ms·

Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)

385 points by lopespm 2y ago

aeuropean12 2y ago
Well, cute symbolism. But, pretty much common sense. Yes, if you don't own the infrastructure where you build your (content, audience, ..), then there is inherited business risk. Many screenshots and a lot of text to get that point across.
amelius 2y ago
We all built our castle in TSMC's and ASML's kingdom ...
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  While being guarded by a moat of snakes..
birdman3131 2y ago
Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself. You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see. They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well. I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.
- Apreche 2y ago
  I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad. But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately. Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL? How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    Build your castle in the kingdom that gives you the best game-theoretic outcome, but always keep in mind that it's not your kingdom.
  - givemeethekeys 2y ago
    Advertising on multiple platforms is a little less risky than building the entire business on, being able to publish to the App Store.
  - bitnasty 2y ago
    The article didn’t say you should delete all your social media accounts or never post content there…
    - dandellion 2y ago
      Right, it specifically says to build bridges from other kingdoms to yours. So using Twitter, Youtube, etc. to bring people to your own site.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Well, there's always good old fashioned off-line visibility, if your small business friends want to experience real worthless crap. If you do your work, it's not hard to get good visibility on Google and other search engines. The key is this: If you're selling product X or service Y, you need to make your website the very best resource imaginable for information about it and with an as easy purchase process as possible – with good terms to boot. But most small business owners are completely uninterested in that, and instead spend their days spamming social media and paying for ads to bring visitors to their website that turns potential customers away instantly.
- eikenberry 2y ago
  Why not both? Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you. [edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]
shadowtree 2y ago
MrBeast built his castle inside of Youtube.
- binary132 2y ago
  The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.
  - paulnpace 2y ago
    They can replace him by altering search results, so he stays around while others build up make up for the revenue. There is a reason the YouTube search engine is no longer useful for finding things.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  The leaked MrBeast PDF is enlightening in this regard; he knew he was building his castle in youtube and did so intentionally and explicitly because he thought it would get huge. He wasn't exactly wrong, either. His prediction-gamble earned him a life-changing amount of money. Whether he could or should have built his castle in his own kingdom is irrelevant. His stated goal was to build a bigger youtube castle than anyone and everyone else. > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. > Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be at the top. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649
russellbeattie 2y ago
I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them. The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.
- keyle 2y ago
  This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too. There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.
- lmeyerov 2y ago
  You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'. An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs. Our case of investigations in louie.ai is right at that boundary: OpenAI likes to support data analysis, but folks using Splunk/databricks/etc all day expect a lot more out of software here, and that's too at-odds with OpenAI's org chart and customerbase.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  Most business advice is really good at figuring out in hindsight why things went a certain way. But usually it's not that great at predicting what will work in the future.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
More discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)
philipov 2y ago
Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom. This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."
- humblepi 2y ago
  Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.
  - swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
    Piracy and DRM killed most direct-to-customer distribution of software.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      Valve Software got $8.6B in 2023.
      - BadHumans 2y ago
        Steam has DRM.
        okanat 2y ago
        Not always. There are plenty games that work without the Steam libraries. Also GOG exists and very healthy with explicit no DRM policy.
        tjpnz 2y ago
        But GOG censor their catalog for everyone after feedback from the CCP cough gamers.
        int_19h 2y ago
        GOG isn't exactly DRM-free these days. The platform doesn't add its own DRM, but it does distribute games with DRM elements. Their stance seems to be that, so long as the game is playable offline in single-player mode, it is acceptable.
752963e64 2y ago
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JohnMakin 2y ago
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow. Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway. Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
- fwip 2y ago
  Channel points are free to the viewer and automatically accumulated by watching your stream. Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    Partner here - I don’t know the precise TOS here because it’s twisty and constantly changing but I have streamed now for almost 10 years as a partner with a micro following, my account balance to this day is like $46. They make every excuse possible not to give you money or put arbitrary restrictions on how much you should stream to access it, to the point I just stopped and put a paypal link on my profile and said dont give it to twitch. They steal a lot from smaller partners. However, it’s a good platform so I just take it. Kind of on the theme of this thread, lol. You choose to build a castle in someone else’s kingdom because there’s no other place.
neilv 2y ago
I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name. But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form. I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those. I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc. (Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
DonHopkins 2y ago
The term is "sharecropping".
echoangle 2y ago
Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.
- chillfox 2y ago
  One way is to release videos 1-2 weeks early on your own site.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    YouTube offers millions of dollars in free advertising to content creators along with tens of dollars in free hosting.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      Indeed, I was just trying to point out some decentralized alternatives.
    - EarlKing 2y ago
      It really doesn't. To understand why, you have only to comprehend the following: Whether someone is searching under a particular keyword, or just browsing whatever pops up on the home page, the average browser has a finite amount they're willing to scroll before abandoning their search... and chances are your video is NOT going to be placed highly in those results unless you're directing a firehose at it from offsite via Twitter, forum posts, news aggregators, or paying Youtube to promote your video flat out (which is such an obvious moneygrab on their part its disgusting). In other words: If you rely on their algorithm to promote your work you're literally playing the lottery and, much like the lottery, statistically you're going to lose. It makes far more sense to find bandwidth and hosting, negotiate with an ad network, and direct a firehose at the resulting site... but that's more work than some are willing to do. shrug Oh well.
miki123211 2y ago
You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom. If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider. Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom. This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
- lolinder 2y ago
  When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B. Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone. On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
  - Veuxdo 2y ago
    > On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Yeah, build a business on an island.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  in the "cloud"
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs. Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.
- alexdobrenko 2y ago
  yeah i came here wondering about substack which does give you everyone's email addresses...
alexdobrenko 2y ago
curious how ppl feel about substack in all this? its def not your kingdom but you do have everyone's email addresses
- dceddia 2y ago
  It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide. Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.
muscomposter 2y ago
which by this point, is nowhere at all. we cannot even go die and just drop dead in a ditch like the animals we are oh no. now we need a certificate, and we need to essentially buy, a lot of land for our rotting remains to rot in, lest a single lot of land go unclaimed…
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
openrisk 2y ago
The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal. The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity. Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies. It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
    - Moru 2y ago
      History isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        History is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.
ramshanker 2y ago
Nice. Convinced me to add a mailing list to my website. :D I promise, 1 mail update per month. Exceptional cases, 1 mail a week.
uxx 2y ago
Is this a political post? :D
mylastattempt 2y ago
While the article admits that it’s pretty much necessary to use “other people’s kingdoms” to get any interest in or visibility for your castle in the first place, I feel it still greatly underestimates the power of the few large kingdoms that are in actual place on the internet at this point in time. If your goal is to monetize your castle, you generally need the masses. And while you should indeed spread your risk, be it throughout multiple kingdoms or having one of your own, it is naive or even ridiculous to assume you can get the bulk of your revenue-generating visitors to continuously add 'visiting your castle in your kingdom' to their routine. That is a conscious effort they have to make, not just a mental choice but an actual action, to go to your (e.g.) website. Simply put: the majority of visitors to any castle do their visits in the FB/X/IG/YT/TT kingdoms. Only a negligible few of them will consistently make the effort to go to your kingdom. Spread your risk, but don’t delude yourself.
jorisboris 2y ago
I started a newsletter on Revue. Then Elon shut it down quite drastically after my 17-ed edition. I'm using Convertkit now where frankly speaking I'm running the exact same risk...
renewiltord 2y ago
Meanwhile, Mr Beast.
ricardobayes 2y ago
This actually piqued my interest, does anyone know of any good resources to learn digital marketing?
- meiraleal 2y ago
  I always start by searching HN. I'm no techbro so I take a good amount of what I read with a grain of salt. With such an open query (Digital marketing), you should limit to past year and there will be good content first one: Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413
immibis 2y ago
You will never own every dependency. The raw IP Internet is also someone else's kingdom, more and more by the day. Best you can do is try to balance the utility of someone else's kingdom with its risks.
high_na_euv 2y ago
>know it sounds good to be anti ad but that means they have no clear way to monetize. Nitro
nextcaller 2y ago
Building castles on the intern-net is fun. Maybe the knowledge can be transferred to the doctor-net.
guyzero 2y ago
This advice goes back to previous generations of web entrepreneurs, way back to 2015 or earlier: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634 https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634 " It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. "
jonstaab 2y ago
Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph. Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.
- fire_lake 2y ago
  The mailing list is king here. Always push people to your mailing list so you can do direct contact.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Lot of young people just don’t care about emails anymore
hshshshsvsv 2y ago
Also generally a good idea not to build any sand castles.
shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
Yes, build a place where people can reach you at any time if the place where they met you becomes out of reach for any reason in the future.
N8works 2y ago
....as everyone builds their core digital infrastructure in the cloud... :/
k99x55 2y ago
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385 points by lopespm 2y ago

Well, cute symbolism. But, pretty much common sense. Yes, if you don't own the infrastructure where you build your (content, audience, ..), then there is inherited business risk. Many screenshots and a lot of text to get that point across.

amelius 2y ago

We all built our castle in TSMC's and ASML's kingdom ...

doublerabbit 2y ago
While being guarded by a moat of snakes..

birdman3131 2y ago

Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself. You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see. They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well. I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.

Apreche 2y ago
I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad. But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately. Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL? How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  Build your castle in the kingdom that gives you the best game-theoretic outcome, but always keep in mind that it's not your kingdom.
- givemeethekeys 2y ago
  Advertising on multiple platforms is a little less risky than building the entire business on, being able to publish to the App Store.
- bitnasty 2y ago
  The article didn’t say you should delete all your social media accounts or never post content there…
  - dandellion 2y ago
    Right, it specifically says to build bridges from other kingdoms to yours. So using Twitter, Youtube, etc. to bring people to your own site.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Well, there's always good old fashioned off-line visibility, if your small business friends want to experience real worthless crap. If you do your work, it's not hard to get good visibility on Google and other search engines. The key is this: If you're selling product X or service Y, you need to make your website the very best resource imaginable for information about it and with an as easy purchase process as possible – with good terms to boot. But most small business owners are completely uninterested in that, and instead spend their days spamming social media and paying for ads to bring visitors to their website that turns potential customers away instantly.
eikenberry 2y ago
Why not both? Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you. [edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]

shadowtree 2y ago

MrBeast built his castle inside of Youtube.

binary132 2y ago
The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.
- paulnpace 2y ago
  They can replace him by altering search results, so he stays around while others build up make up for the revenue. There is a reason the YouTube search engine is no longer useful for finding things.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
The leaked MrBeast PDF is enlightening in this regard; he knew he was building his castle in youtube and did so intentionally and explicitly because he thought it would get huge. He wasn't exactly wrong, either. His prediction-gamble earned him a life-changing amount of money. Whether he could or should have built his castle in his own kingdom is irrelevant. His stated goal was to build a bigger youtube castle than anyone and everyone else. > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. > Youtube is the future and I believe with every fiber of my body it’s going to keep growing year over year and in 5 years Youtube will be bigger than anyone will have ever imagined and I want this channel to be at the top. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41549649

russellbeattie 2y ago

I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them. The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.

keyle 2y ago
This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too. There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.
lmeyerov 2y ago
You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'. An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs. Our case of investigations in louie.ai is right at that boundary: OpenAI likes to support data analysis, but folks using Splunk/databricks/etc all day expect a lot more out of software here, and that's too at-odds with OpenAI's org chart and customerbase.
rqtwteye 2y ago
Most business advice is really good at figuring out in hindsight why things went a certain way. But usually it's not that great at predicting what will work in the future.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

More discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)

philipov 2y ago

Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom. This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."

humblepi 2y ago
Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.
- swagasaurus-rex 2y ago
  Piracy and DRM killed most direct-to-customer distribution of software.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Valve Software got $8.6B in 2023.
    - BadHumans 2y ago
      Steam has DRM.
      - okanat 2y ago
        Not always. There are plenty games that work without the Steam libraries. Also GOG exists and very healthy with explicit no DRM policy.
        tjpnz 2y ago
        But GOG censor their catalog for everyone after feedback from the CCP cough gamers.
        int_19h 2y ago
        GOG isn't exactly DRM-free these days. The platform doesn't add its own DRM, but it does distribute games with DRM elements. Their stance seems to be that, so long as the game is playable offline in single-player mode, it is acceptable.

752963e64 2y ago

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JohnMakin 2y ago

Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow. Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway. Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.

fwip 2y ago
Channel points are free to the viewer and automatically accumulated by watching your stream. Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  Partner here - I don’t know the precise TOS here because it’s twisty and constantly changing but I have streamed now for almost 10 years as a partner with a micro following, my account balance to this day is like $46. They make every excuse possible not to give you money or put arbitrary restrictions on how much you should stream to access it, to the point I just stopped and put a paypal link on my profile and said dont give it to twitch. They steal a lot from smaller partners. However, it’s a good platform so I just take it. Kind of on the theme of this thread, lol. You choose to build a castle in someone else’s kingdom because there’s no other place.

neilv 2y ago

I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name. But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form. I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those. I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc. (Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)

DonHopkins 2y ago

The term is "sharecropping".

echoangle 2y ago

Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.

chillfox 2y ago
One way is to release videos 1-2 weeks early on your own site.
paulryanrogers 2y ago
Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  YouTube offers millions of dollars in free advertising to content creators along with tens of dollars in free hosting.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    Indeed, I was just trying to point out some decentralized alternatives.
  - EarlKing 2y ago
    It really doesn't. To understand why, you have only to comprehend the following: Whether someone is searching under a particular keyword, or just browsing whatever pops up on the home page, the average browser has a finite amount they're willing to scroll before abandoning their search... and chances are your video is NOT going to be placed highly in those results unless you're directing a firehose at it from offsite via Twitter, forum posts, news aggregators, or paying Youtube to promote your video flat out (which is such an obvious moneygrab on their part its disgusting). In other words: If you rely on their algorithm to promote your work you're literally playing the lottery and, much like the lottery, statistically you're going to lose. It makes far more sense to find bandwidth and hosting, negotiate with an ad network, and direct a firehose at the resulting site... but that's more work than some are willing to do. shrug Oh well.

miki123211 2y ago

You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom. If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider. Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom. This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.

lolinder 2y ago
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B. Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone. On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
- Veuxdo 2y ago
  > On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    > If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out. Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

Yeah, build a business on an island.

meiraleal 2y ago
in the "cloud"

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs. Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.

alexdobrenko 2y ago
yeah i came here wondering about substack which does give you everyone's email addresses...

alexdobrenko 2y ago

curious how ppl feel about substack in all this? its def not your kingdom but you do have everyone's email addresses

dceddia 2y ago
It feels like a middle ground to me. If you can export your list, and use your own domain, and have an easy way to get the content out, it might be worth whatever distribution they can provide. Just generally I’d always have an eye on the exit and watch for signs of things going down hill. Anything VC-backed warrants more care. Think about how they could alter the deal and plan accordingly.

muscomposter 2y ago

which by this point, is nowhere at all. we cannot even go die and just drop dead in a ditch like the animals we are oh no. now we need a certificate, and we need to essentially buy, a lot of land for our rotting remains to rot in, lest a single lot of land go unclaimed…

deleted 2y ago

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openrisk 2y ago

The elephant in the room is the size distribution of "other people's kingdoms". Having oversized kingdoms and overbearing kings is not a god-given parameter, its down to regulation, political and economic choices. Its not for nothing that the current digital world has been called neo-feudal. The real solution is to force these kingdoms to build permanently open gates and roadways that connect the land, increase all around traffic and opportunity. Only when people turn from digital vassals to digital citizens will we emerge from the middle ages we are currently in. In this sense the most important development in the online world is still ahead if us.

throwaway48476 2y ago
It is the same process that turned literal kingdoms into representative democracies.
- openrisk 2y ago
  Absolutely. But it is disconcerting to realize the inertia of current collective intelligence even when what is at stake is great gains in productivity and welfare and even when formally we "celebrate" the benefits of well governed, market based democracies. It goes to show that every generation has to internalize the painful way key facts about what is good and what is bad for society, even if history provides more than enough learnings for free.
  - Moru 2y ago
    History isn't exactly the most liked subject in school. Most people continue not liking in later in life.
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      History is just terribly taught and practiced. At the core history is just telling stories which are always interesting when told well.

ramshanker 2y ago

Nice. Convinced me to add a mailing list to my website. :D I promise, 1 mail update per month. Exceptional cases, 1 mail a week.

uxx 2y ago

Is this a political post? :D

mylastattempt 2y ago

While the article admits that it’s pretty much necessary to use “other people’s kingdoms” to get any interest in or visibility for your castle in the first place, I feel it still greatly underestimates the power of the few large kingdoms that are in actual place on the internet at this point in time. If your goal is to monetize your castle, you generally need the masses. And while you should indeed spread your risk, be it throughout multiple kingdoms or having one of your own, it is naive or even ridiculous to assume you can get the bulk of your revenue-generating visitors to continuously add 'visiting your castle in your kingdom' to their routine. That is a conscious effort they have to make, not just a mental choice but an actual action, to go to your (e.g.) website. Simply put: the majority of visitors to any castle do their visits in the FB/X/IG/YT/TT kingdoms. Only a negligible few of them will consistently make the effort to go to your kingdom. Spread your risk, but don’t delude yourself.

jorisboris 2y ago

I started a newsletter on Revue. Then Elon shut it down quite drastically after my 17-ed edition. I'm using Convertkit now where frankly speaking I'm running the exact same risk...

renewiltord 2y ago

Meanwhile, Mr Beast.

ricardobayes 2y ago

This actually piqued my interest, does anyone know of any good resources to learn digital marketing?

meiraleal 2y ago
I always start by searching HN. I'm no techbro so I take a good amount of what I read with a grain of salt. With such an open query (Digital marketing), you should limit to past year and there will be good content first one: Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107413

immibis 2y ago

You will never own every dependency. The raw IP Internet is also someone else's kingdom, more and more by the day. Best you can do is try to balance the utility of someone else's kingdom with its risks.

high_na_euv 2y ago

>know it sounds good to be anti ad but that means they have no clear way to monetize. Nitro

nextcaller 2y ago

Building castles on the intern-net is fun. Maybe the knowledge can be transferred to the doctor-net.

guyzero 2y ago

This advice goes back to previous generations of web entrepreneurs, way back to 2015 or earlier: https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634 https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634 " It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. "

jonstaab 2y ago

Rule #7: Use a social media platform that lets you own your identity and social graph. Social media has certain benefits that your own website doesn't. Public key cryptography, self-hosted servers, and an open protocol make it possible for your followers to actually follow you, regardless of what app they use to access the protocol. This is what we're building on nostr (in contrast to bluesky and farcaster, which are nearly as closed as the legacy solutions). It's not always pretty, but it works better for sovereign social media than anything else.

fire_lake 2y ago
The mailing list is king here. Always push people to your mailing list so you can do direct contact.
- szundi 2y ago
  Lot of young people just don’t care about emails anymore

hshshshsvsv 2y ago

Also generally a good idea not to build any sand castles.

shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago

Yes, build a place where people can reach you at any time if the place where they met you becomes out of reach for any reason in the future.

N8works 2y ago

....as everyone builds their core digital infrastructure in the cloud... :/

k99x55 2y ago

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