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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.
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.
Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)
I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone having a technical problem with Steam's DRM, I've only heard moral/ethical/worried-about-what-happens-when-Steam-disappears problems.
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.
Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).
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.)
And unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere. You’d need to ask a LOT of people (= a large amount of $$$) and hope a few of them make it over a bit at a time
Is your wife a representative sample of all Youtubers? If not, your datum is irrelevant.
> unless your audience is very tech oriented, they’re not going to switch off whatever platform the ads are on to watch videos hosted elsewhere.
Having now witnessed multiple creators hop from one platform to another and drag their audiences with them because they're JUST THAT ENTERTAINING... no, you're wrong. People will gladly follow artists to a better platform if it means they're able to make a living and/or not be censored.
Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is the "make money" button.
PeerTube is as close to nonexistent as a video platform can be.
It's here: https://podcastindex.org/
From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.
When you're making commerce in someone's fief, they will demand tribute as well. In the confines of your own kingdom, all the ad dollars are yours.
Which also means you don't need to chase the same amounts of people to make similar coin, especially if the deals you make with advertisers are between you and the advertiser (not you, the advertiser, and the king of some other fief).
But I suspect that as they get bigger, they enter in exclusivity / no-compete contracts with Youtube, and if they detect the same video hosted elsewhere, they get taken down or something.
For instance, https://vimeo.com/ott is an effective (albeit expensive) option, powering Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor) and other brands and allowing them to focus on content. Dropout, in particular, has found an effective model of releasing short clips from their improv-heavy shows on social video platforms, gaining virality there while subtly reminding new and old fans that they can find full episodes, and support on-screen and off-screen talent, by subscribing to the brand directly. Their growth would be impacted by the loss of a marketing channel, but not their underlying subscription fundamentals.
(The entire Dropout business story is quite inspiring and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRK_gNfFdP0 )
The YouTube link at the end is ironic ;-)
You start needing alternatives when you're already established and have a following. With this comes large enoug influence and thus the ability / risk to step on some big toes, including Google's.
I laughed, told him I wasn't interested, and warned him that he didn't own his network: that the MLM could take it from him at any time, and it's why most of the experienced salesmen I knew lived well below their paychecks. He grew very upset, told me I didn't know what I was talking about, and basically behaved as if I had insulted his religion.
Well, half a year later I was laid off and found a new job with a marketing automation firm. On my second day, we had an all hands meeting where they were announcing that the MLM he worked for would be immediately breaking contract and leaving our platform because they reached a settlement with the DOJ over their methodology. Effective immediately, they were going to a distributor model and ceasing all payouts for network related sales.
I knew his world was going to collapse before he did. In the end, he had to sell his house and most of his possessions, his wife divorced him, and he tried to break back into the MLM world but could never get anything started. Nobody wanted to hire him for a traditional sales role because they regard MLMers as lazy and dumb. He's back at another chemical refinery, hoping to work there for another 20+ years to earn another pension.
I don't understand that... If he was two years from retiring, then he only needed two more years of salaried employment somewhere lese - didn't he ? What country did he live in ?
They only exist at taxpayer funded employers or legacy businesses like oil and gas, but most everyone else has switched to defined contribution pensions, but those are referred to as “401k” or “401b” or some other letter for the appropriate section of the law that specifies the tax benefit of saving for retirement.
The latter are better ever since low cost index funds came about, as you get to skip paying the DB pension administrators and remove agency risk.
My point is it’s better for the employee who is getting paid a lot (whether it be oil and gas or tech) to receive their compensation in fully liquid cash they can invest in a broad market index fund, rather than have it be held hostage (see agency risk). Plus the employee maintains more leverage to be able to sell their labor to other employers.
They could use their popularity to promote and donate to alternatives.
Then probably dual stream for a while on your site with blended chat support before cutting the YouTube cord loudly and with warning.
If you want to be a Windows developer, then yes, you have to be a Windows developer in order to be a Windows developer.
But you don't have to want to be a Windows developer. You don't even have to want to be a developer.
I think a better comparison would be iOS or Chrome, where you’ll realistically have to submit yourself to their stores if you want to reach most users. Which is sort of even more locked down than YouTube as some content creators on YouTube have managed to move their audience to other platforms, though sometimes by still posting teasers or at least some content on YouTube.
Position yourself as a video creator and post your videos also to Instagram (when possible) and to Vimeo. Seed free / back catalog episodes via a torrent. Run a mailing list announcing and discussing your videos, with some premium content for paying subscribers only. Maybe have an X / SkyBlue / mastodon feed with more compact announces, comments, and high-virality short clips from your longer videos.
Cross-link and cross-reference all the channels of your presence. Make your brand recognizable across the publishing methods. Gently prod people to touch more than one channel of your video distribution, just to get the most avid viewers acquainted with several.
Yes, this is significantly more work. It also may bring significantly more results if your videos are good. This gives you a much stronger assurance that your brand and your following will not be lost, should you lose access to YouTube / Instagram / Vimeo / X / whatever other platform. Commoditize your complement, as they say.
It seems these days, most Youtube creators are at least somewhat aware of the problem and have websites, discord channels, patreons etc. While I still think many would struggle if they lost their youtube access suddenly, they do have additional channels to reach out to at least part of their audience.
But if you want to see people trying to make the conversion just scroll the front page of Rumble. Many of them are trying to get out form under youtube and many have YT channels too. But Rumble is just another YT waiting to happen and they know it.
The people there are both video creators and their own hosts, or so I read. Got together and built themselves a host because YT was not what they needed.
i saw they post pretty well produced videos on youtube -- for folks like me
but also promote a more elaborate/detailed video series on the same/related topics on a separate subscription based platform
That's what PeerTube is supposed to be for. You can set up a PeerTube host yourself. Or there are some public PeerTube hosts that accept uploads. When people are watching your videos, the ones with good bandwidth are also hosting them for other users. The hosting site is just handling the original copy and coordinating the peers. (This isn't like Bittorrent; hosting is centralized but playout is distributed. When no one is watching, the only copy is on the original server.)
PeerTube really should be popular like WordPress, for self-hosted content. But it's not. Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery. Few PeerTube videos have more than a handful of viewers. I use PeerTube for technical videos, to keep them ad-free, and it works fine for that low-volume application.
Here's the Blender 4.2 showcase reel on PeerTube.[1] It's a good demo. Will it overload if watched by many HN users? Please try.
While I was digging up an additional link, it appears Cloudflare R2 allows no egress fees.
https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/r2/
10GB free to host, no egress fees.
Combined with a cloudflare worker, it seems reasonable that the object storage could be managed.
In this case you’re already paying for storage so egress is free.
A 10 gig fibre connection is another way to start.
The internet always costs someone.
This works well only if many of the watchers have significant upload bandwidth and aren't behind firewalls that prevent them from outputting blocks of video.
This is different from torrent-type systems or Usenet, which distribute persistent copies. With Peertube, only the original server permanently hosts the video. Everybody else is just caching. So the disk usage of watchers isn't that big.
It's all done in the browser.
That's not search engines discriminating against it in this case.
This, it's surprising and somewhat annoying, but people ~20ish and younger pretty much just don't use email.
The bigger you are, the more well-known, the larger is your following, and the more the whole enterprise is the source of your livelihood, the more you may need to hedge your bets.
Since a lot of creators today were consumers first of content, they miss the side when there was little social or video to consume online, and in turn creating was the default.
Your question seems to connect discovery of videos and distribution.
Video hosting is getting easier. There’s platforms like avideo that are relatively easy to host.
Many companies use alternatives already like or Vimeo.
Hosting your video permanently first from your own setup isn’t too far fetched.
YouTube can be secondary.
Many people use social media to build their own email lists and communities.
YouTube can achieve the same. At the same time I think YouTube is more going to eat cable tv up or at least offset it more first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
A year is enough time to kill a business.
This is simply false. We were locked out of Meta Ads Manager for no apparent reason. When we contacted Meta customer support—setting aside the casual racism I faced for not being a native speaker—all they could offer was, "Oops, that shouldn't have happened; we'll refresh your account." As a result, we lost approximately $5k in business because we couldn't reach our audience at its peak.
Knowing what's more likely and what's less likely is still useful information: social media turning bad is a daily occurence, while dns registrars' family members have been safe for a pretty long time now.
Harassing people is far more accessible and has a proven track record of success.
Do you have examples of someone successfully harassing a registrar employee into breaking the registrar's ICANN accreditation terms?
Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.
But really politics is just about "one person causes another to act". This can be through persuasion. It doesn't have to be force (or fraud for that matter).
EDIT: Also I consider economics, politics and marketing as basically "mass psychology". Hence all the problems with replication in those fields.
EDIT 2: And with these things being psychology, there's a big "default biological drives" component. A lot of the motivations for political etc actions are internal to each person.
There is the theoretical rational actor which while very misunderstood is also subject to the stochastic and entropic reality. The 'internal motivation'
Persuasion can be divided into carrot and stick. The stick the implication of force against the individual and the carrot the promise of the ability to use force against other actors. This can be further expanded to negative force inherent from a relatively worse off position for not taking the carrot.
With some creativity all behavior can be formulated from a few simple primitives.
One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.
The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.
If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)
Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.
When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.
For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc
Can publish updates on a telegram channel.
I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.
So the kingdoms have not prevented it, and many probably have facilitated it, and maybe not always unintentional (as in, someone from inside the company was "in on it").
Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this.
IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way.
But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that.
Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined)
It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.
BTW: anyone interested in this should join DN42, which is an alternative central authority, and does more-or-less this. Although 99.9% of DN42 links are internet VPNs because that's cheaper, physical links are also accepted because they're cooler.
(This reply was delayed by an hour by HN's rate limit)
If you ran your own ISP and purchased wholesale bandwidth, would that not just include an ipv6, at least?
Purchasing wholesale internet bandwidth is another way of saying purchasing internet service (a lot of it). The company that sells you that is your ISP.
>Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers.
>The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.
Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.
To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?
Well-regulated, established organizations are not threats to liberty; on the contrary, they’re required for a well functioning community (of netizens)
Some kings thought that they were bound to gods so in the name of total freedom they announced themselves as “god-kings”
They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Knowing the rough order of events (as per the flow of a story) is important, as is the relative timespan, but a lot of history schooling puts too much emphasis on knowing the exact dates of certain events, which I think really subtracts the experience for many.
NB This was ~45 years ago - I doubt such things would be tolerated these days. :-)
Mind you, the fact that it was events on the Isthmus of Panama that were one of the main causes of the union is fairly interesting:
The history curriculum I was taught in school was terribly boring and politicised. Other than the mandatory WW2 coverage, the _only_ other topics we studied were the horribleness of European colonisation, like Gandhi and Apartheid, ect… I was rather surprised to grow up and find out how interesting the topic actually was.
Don't get me wrong, it is admirable what a handful of highly motivated people have achieved with activitypub, atproto etc. (to mention just some currently trending designs). But what needs to be done to deprecate the pattern of digital feudalism is a much bigger challenge.
The main way to move forward will be to incentivize (through legislation) many more actors (not just social media reformers) to invest and experiment in this direction, away from the feudal hypersurface that is crushing our horizon. Its the only way to explore the vast number of technical possibilities and economic patterns without being hampered by biases and blind spots.
We don't know what a digital democratic economy and society exactly looks like. Its not been done before. Maybe more than one patterns are equally viable and it becomes a matter of choice and/or random historical accidents.
But we do know that we are far from anything remotely compatible with our purported norms and values.
The reality is that if you truly want to get rid of digital castles and kings, you're essentially going to have to operate a distributed digital firehose (cynically: digital sewage pipe) that anyone can submit to with no preconditions whatsoever. For many reasons (first one that jumps to mind: spam, second reason: illegal shit, third reason: trolls) most people don't want to operate something like that, and that's before the law gets involved.
Pet projects exist of course, but pretty much zero of them are made to scale up against the idea of truly nuking kingdoms; the closest to a realization of this sort of network is something similar to TORs peer2peer, and you can consider pretty much all legal risks of running a TOR exit node for a service like this.
There’s a few other neat technologies that are toying with being social network protocols.
There’s some fascinating angles for combating AI fake content compared to human ones.
Are there any common terms one could research?
I don't think any of these castles were built directly by kings - although I suspect their construction was either approved by a king or by someone who had delegated authority from a king. NB I can also see a large castle about ~11 km away that was a royal castle (and still has a military garrison).
I suspect that most castles are probably in other people's kingdoms.
1. Has strong norms against castle seizure or abandonment of the king's duties in kingdom upkeep
2. Has a federation of non-king castle owners strong and unified enough to force the former point.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
Unfortunately Sierra had to accept the offer.
Moreover, Gabe Newell always had a controlling stake in Valve ever since 1996, so that prevents any shenanigans. There are comparatively few shareholders (than a public company) and they were all long-term, since Valve will likely never go public, certainly no year soon, or even be privately acquired; while Newell controls it.
In this instance your complaint is about corporate governance rather than tech; (how far back did tech people stop being in control at Sierra?)
In practice, unhappy nobles would often rather deny their necessary cooperation (at war or administering the land in peace) and thus force the king to make some amends and tradeoffs.
Passive aggressivity isn't a modern concept :)
Well, there is the practical purpose of legitimacy. It may seem too soft for modern power theoreticians, but the legitimate king has something that cannot be acquired by raw power, and that puts somewhat of a damper on potential rebels. Not on each and every one of them, of course, but it has a wide effect. Killing or deposing the legitimate monarch was a serious spiritual crime for which one could pay not just by his earthly life, but in the afterlife as well.
Even usurpers like William the Conqueror tried to obtain some legitimacy by concocting stories why they and nobody else should be kings.
We still see some reverbations of that principle today. Many authoritarians love to "roleplay elections", even though they likely could do it like Eritrea and just not hold any. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy.
Then, of course, legitimacy itself is culturally defined, and in some places being able to depose the monarch would be ipso facto proof of said monarch's retroactive illegitimacy. The notion of "divine right of kings" is far from universal.
Castles are thus more like domains where once you take hold of it, even the big powers have a hard time taking it away from you again
> Building a castle is a very good idea if you seek to entrench yourself in the power structure of the kingdom. To do this, you must be able credibly mount a defence of the castle to discourage forcible eviction without major mutual destruction (cough too big to fail).
> Don't build a wooden cottage and expect it function like a castle with a garrison under your command. Even if you slowly expand it to a stone mansion, if you don't maintain a garrison, it won't work as a castle.
Sadly, building an game on someone else's platform is more like setting up a cottage on the land. You might be able to get some farming done and survive, but if the lord fancies the grain, you're out of luck. But also good luck finding land to farm without a lord. Peasant.
And this is not cynic talking ...
Wide open.
For anything to build.
More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.
Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).
Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.
But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.
You can still build a website
You can still create opt-in email newsletters
And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.
It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.
But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.
But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.
Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.
As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.
What's weird is how deeply held this view is on HN, by people who should know better.
If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.
It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.
Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?
It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.
Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.
Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.
[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
I think the theory that luring the producers by throwing them in my face, is a really good one. And one I haven't though of.
There is an existing solution to not having to put in massive efforts to get massive private companies change their ways a tiny bit.
The open web.
We can build any web we want, at any time.
And build we should.
All large communities were small once.
Starting a community and being a part of a small community is the only way they will grow.
Maybe forums like HN and forums of the past have some of that right still.
And maybe we can give what we want our attention, instead of it being gamified away from us.
We are digital citizens of commercially owned and run countries called Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more.
A digital citizenship is in private corporations with out many rights in exchange hold our digital identities as they see fit.
It’s why we are offered digital citizenship to a digital identity in exchange for convenience of a single sign on to click.
This can setup a relationship Of being locked out of your digital identity and whatever it is tied to.
A way to keep a balance is to only use email as login, and own your identity with your own domain for email that at least can be moved between providers if you don’t want to manage your own.
Speak for yourself. Sent from my Librem 5.
Librem seems nice.
I was more referring to email accounts.
Is your email with librem too?
I get the original point of the article, but the reality is you're always building something on someone else's infrastructure. It depends on how much the infrastructure you want to build yourself and own versus how much you get to use of theirs and for how much
I promise, 1 mail update per month. Exceptional cases, 1 mail a week.
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.
first one:
Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing?
Nitro
Maybe the knowledge can be transferred to the doctor-net.
" 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. "
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.