6 ms·

Ballparking Ello's active user statistics

33 points by Leynos 11y ago

bovermyer 11y ago
I'm glad that Ello is growing. I like niche social networks. I just don't understand which niche Ello caters to.
- gabrtv 11y ago
  I'd say the niche is "creatives". Designers, artists, musicians, hipsters, etc.
  - mmccaff 11y ago
    Agreed. Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there much more if I could do it on my phone.
brador 11y ago
Ello could be smoking hot with the right management team. It's got the pieces/UI but missing the marketing/polish/UX chops.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  What specific thoughts / suggestions do you have?
  - brador 11y ago
    Color would be a good start. All black gives nothing for the eyes to focus on.
- wtmt 11y ago
  Update: I checked it out again. It's improved a tiny bit, but still isn't good UI design at all. All those tiny icons that expand with a mouse hover - annoying and not accessible. I still can't easily find several things I can easily do on Facebook (despite Facebook's terrible UI and menu options). Not usable for someone used to Facebook or Google+. ~~~~~ Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either. The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an intuitive and viable alternative in the first place. P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie. P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and services when it comes to privacy.
  - mmccaff 11y ago
    I haven't checked it out in awhile, but the last time I did, I also remember not being able to find the Logout functionality. "I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating. I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    The logout function's been moved around a bit, it's currently under the "More" inverted caret ("∨") glyph in the Omnibar (top bar). I do tend to agree that the interface is a tad _too_ minimal. Tooltips have recently been added. Arguably, Ello misuses the hamburger as well. Behind the scenes though, the styling's very clean. Icons are all SVG and could be resized (or re-coloured) with a CSS tweak. CSS and HTML are both quite clean, and restyling the site (I do it for my own use) is trivial. Some small-sample usability testing likely would be a really good idea. Holding up G+ as a paragon of UI design jars with me. There is _so_ much wrong with that site. And its guts are a goddamned disaster (Closure's CSS minification hashing is a crime against humanity).
robotnoises 11y ago
I always appreciated the minimalist approach ello was going for, I just wish their execution was a little better. Thinking about Svbtle...
golergka 11y ago
6-10k DAU? That seems minuscule to me. Also, shows how skewed is HN viewpoint: although by these parameters, Ello is tiny, everyone knows about it, while other application and games that are used by thousands amount of people are completely unknown.
- jsnell 11y ago
  > everyone knows about it I had never heard of it before this post.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University.... Ello's got at least that many daily actives, and about 200k monthlies. That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different mix. It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were very small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the tens of thousands of users, best I can make out. I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs. Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched. Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd. Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist), Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do. It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really hampering it. While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. That responsiveness has been notably missing at Google. The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good early adopter set -- think artist colony. But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction, and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those faux pax entirely. I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Author here. I've made something of a habit of doing various site-based activity estimates: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
Grue3 11y ago
When you're comparing your user engagement to Google+, you know things are not going well. They don't call G+ a ghost town for nothing. Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  I use both sites extensively, and have investigated activity and engagement on both. I'm the source of a fair bit of the G+ ghost-town press coverage. That said, there's more to a community than simple size (take HN as an example). I also disagree with many of Ello's styling decisions (and G+'s for that matter). My Ello CSS revise: http://stylebot.me/styles/9519 http://stylebot.me/styles/9519 (That only works on logged-in sessions, unauthenticated still uses the earlier Ello v1 style.)
filmgirlcw 11y ago
Who here remembers ADN (App.net)? I think even towards the end, ADN had better metrics than this. I like the premise of Ello, but it's metrics and user-engagement figures are not promising.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Another site-comparison datapoint: Metafilter, a small but significant forum, reported about 12,000 daily actives as of a year ago. That from a HN post, by way of comments at Ello: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243

33 points by Leynos 11y ago

bovermyer 11y ago

I'm glad that Ello is growing. I like niche social networks. I just don't understand which niche Ello caters to.

gabrtv 11y ago
I'd say the niche is "creatives". Designers, artists, musicians, hipsters, etc.
- mmccaff 11y ago
  Agreed. Also, I suspect that the release of mobile apps (supposedly this spring) will be a huge boost for them. I know that I would be checking in on activity there much more if I could do it on my phone.

brador 11y ago

Ello could be smoking hot with the right management team. It's got the pieces/UI but missing the marketing/polish/UX chops.

dredmorbius 11y ago
What specific thoughts / suggestions do you have?
- brador 11y ago
  Color would be a good start. All black gives nothing for the eyes to focus on.
wtmt 11y ago
Update: I checked it out again. It's improved a tiny bit, but still isn't good UI design at all. All those tiny icons that expand with a mouse hover - annoying and not accessible. I still can't easily find several things I can easily do on Facebook (despite Facebook's terrible UI and menu options). Not usable for someone used to Facebook or Google+. ~~~~~ Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either. The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an intuitive and viable alternative in the first place. P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie. P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and services when it comes to privacy.
- mmccaff 11y ago
  I haven't checked it out in awhile, but the last time I did, I also remember not being able to find the Logout functionality. "I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating. I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  The logout function's been moved around a bit, it's currently under the "More" inverted caret ("∨") glyph in the Omnibar (top bar). I do tend to agree that the interface is a tad _too_ minimal. Tooltips have recently been added. Arguably, Ello misuses the hamburger as well. Behind the scenes though, the styling's very clean. Icons are all SVG and could be resized (or re-coloured) with a CSS tweak. CSS and HTML are both quite clean, and restyling the site (I do it for my own use) is trivial. Some small-sample usability testing likely would be a really good idea. Holding up G+ as a paragon of UI design jars with me. There is _so_ much wrong with that site. And its guts are a goddamned disaster (Closure's CSS minification hashing is a crime against humanity).

robotnoises 11y ago

I always appreciated the minimalist approach ello was going for, I just wish their execution was a little better. Thinking about Svbtle...

golergka 11y ago

6-10k DAU? That seems minuscule to me. Also, shows how skewed is HN viewpoint: although by these parameters, Ello is tiny, everyone knows about it, while other application and games that are used by thousands amount of people are completely unknown.

jsnell 11y ago
> everyone knows about it I had never heard of it before this post.
dredmorbius 11y ago
First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University.... Ello's got at least that many daily actives, and about 200k monthlies. That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different mix. It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were very small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the tens of thousands of users, best I can make out. I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs. Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched. Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd. Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist), Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do. It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really hampering it. While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. That responsiveness has been notably missing at Google. The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good early adopter set -- think artist colony. But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction, and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those faux pax entirely. I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Author here. I've made something of a habit of doing various site-based activity estimates: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ

Grue3 11y ago

When you're comparing your user engagement to Google+, you know things are not going well. They don't call G+ a ghost town for nothing. Also, I find Ello's font pretty hard to read. I'm all for minimalism and I use monospace fonts for coding all the time, but perhaps it's not the best choice for long blog posts?

dredmorbius 11y ago
I use both sites extensively, and have investigated activity and engagement on both. I'm the source of a fair bit of the G+ ghost-town press coverage. That said, there's more to a community than simple size (take HN as an example). I also disagree with many of Ello's styling decisions (and G+'s for that matter). My Ello CSS revise: http://stylebot.me/styles/9519 http://stylebot.me/styles/9519 (That only works on logged-in sessions, unauthenticated still uses the earlier Ello v1 style.)

filmgirlcw 11y ago

Who here remembers ADN (App.net)? I think even towards the end, ADN had better metrics than this. I like the premise of Ello, but it's metrics and user-engagement figures are not promising.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Another site-comparison datapoint: Metafilter, a small but significant forum, reported about 12,000 daily actives as of a year ago. That from a HN post, by way of comments at Ello: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7770243