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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no money to be made in this type of website. These sites come and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.

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I think it's great that there's no giant making money on top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want to store and share links :)

Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and positive sum, I think.

And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?

I’m very close to having an old Delicious style site ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month?

Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose (cached version of content, super smart search function not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like for bitwarden.

Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against the growth of that network.

Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.

I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.

How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ mo)?

Beyond some differing features and interface, there wouldn't be much difference.

They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke.

Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for 35k.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102

Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running costs in 2017.

There are some detailed blog posts from the time about running costs somewhere.

I already do: raindrop.io

Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - if you get enough network effects, there must be some way to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that this is not the case.

so they need a different model for funding

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