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Comment by jacobgkau | Hacker News Reader

People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).

AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.

(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)

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Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.

Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.

For customer facing streaming sites they also don't seem to be the clear default choice. I think dropout.tv is one of the few "secondary streaming services" to still be with Vimeo (and with the strong overlap in their networks I'm sure they got a good deal), while many other ones like Nebula evaluated them but went with other providers.

It looks like the majority of their business is in employee training portals for megacorps.

The Nebula apps are pretty bad. Vimeo white label has issues but the app experience is much better than whomever Nebula are using.

One reason Vimeo is a good deal is that they charge for video transcoding by the minute, not by the file size. So you can upload full ProRes 4K movies and it doesn't cost the earth.

I dug in a bit and did a little research. Criterion and Dropout, as mentioned, use Vimeo. So does Arrow's streaming service (cult films, mostly). From there on in it gets even more fringe: Taskmaster (the British game show) has a streaming service built on Vimeo, the Z-movie titans Troma and Full Moon Features use Vimeo, and so on. So not insanely crucial but I still think it's a better world in which those services can keep doing what they do.

Bending Spoons also bought Brightcove so they actually own two of the white label streaming providers.

Would not be surprised to see the two merged into a single service.

Yes, there are alternatives. Nonetheless, the niche streamers I'm thinking of would find it a moderate burden to move to a different provider and they're operating on slim margins as is.

Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel world.

Is there any streaming option with non dogshit quality?

For streaming movies and TV at reasonable prices? No, but you can DIY with Plex and get Blu-ray quality

Dont do Plex! Closed source that leaks what you upload to Plex. And they're owned by big media - so only time they start suing users for files they know they have.

Instead, check out FLOSS server Jellyfin!

That’s alarming. Do you have any sources where I can learn more about this?

What does "uploading" have to do with using Plex? As far as I was aware, My media is sitting less than a meter from me right now. Does Plex upload my content to a server without asking or something?

Plex has a lot of dubious partnerships with companies like Lionsgate and Kliener Perkins but is not owned by Big Media

Many — but you have fork over a significant chunk of change to view them.

Criterion is an extra layer below dogshit. Kanopy, which is free with your library card, blows it out of the water.

> free with your library card

Maybe with yours. My local library's offerings are abysmal.

With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts, play/pause always works within a second. I am sure I'm not always getting HD but I wouldn't call it dogshit. All the other streaming services though, random hiccups are common, and the UI is slow enough that it's not just play/pause, it often takes 30 seconds just to resume what I was previously watching if I closed the browser tab.

> With Netflix, there are never visible artifacts

Uwotm8. Any sufficiently dark scene will have artifacts out the wazoo.

Not to mention other stuff like subtitles mentioning the wrong spoken language (ie. the character is speaking French, but the subtitle say they're speaking English), the UI unloads after some time, and the only action you can take is to start the video (you can't go back), the button for info when hovering over a card doesn't work half time time, video controls disappear at the end of an episode while transitioning to the next (the 'next episode' button is present and animating, but you can't pause the video at the credits in that moment), etc... In short, the UI is shit and so is the video quality.

Vimeo isn't dogshit. In fact it's one of the only quality ones I've found which also support HDR / Dolby Vision.

Yes, yes it is. And there was some sort of bug that pushed the top quality down to 720p last month.

Dropout as well I think.

Yep. Vimeo is the tech infrastructure from the original collegehumor, and Dropout still uses it.

It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to die? I guess that's private equity for you.

That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests, they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology improvements.

seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).

Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month.

Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.

I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.

In this sense I mean maintain as a business not necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to efficiency in the business sense.

If you increase your price as substantially as they did, you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in this yet, losing market share to other competitors.

That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from their existing customer base who find exporting their data hard.

We've seen this before with lotus notes and other software and we will see it again.

Evernote was bleeding way before they have been bought by Bending Spoons. They were trying to find their way around the market, and Notion hit them like a train.

Considering the features they have added and polished, I can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.

They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't kill any integrations or export options.

The .enex format is still the best export format for these kinds of tools, from my experience.

If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.

As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended this long to survive in a good shape.

> find the minimum amount of money and people needed to maintain it

> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting

You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.

And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.

Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.

The hard part with any of these turn arounds is convincing users that a product they once used and loved, which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it die, is worth going back to. The “cool factor” is gone, nostalgia plays are weak, and people don’t like being burned twice by the same product.

That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote that much, I'd be still continuing to use it.

For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate back at this point.

Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned into garbage.

I found it to be garbage, seven years ago. I stopped using them, when my meetups kept getting stuffed with fake accounts, and Meetup would then pressure me to upgrade to the next tier.

I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.

I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...

Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.

The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right

Wow, that's interesting.

I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.

I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.

I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.

Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based editing" from Notion.

They are actively improving the product in every way, and they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an interesting watch.

For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital garden.

I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best of luck.

I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.

Migrating to Obsidian looks to be very easy now: https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote

When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).

Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.

Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.

Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.

Wait a sec — you're saying you'll take the time and trouble to "... figure out how to migrate to Obsidian" rather than pay the $70-$80 renewal premium over what you paid last year? Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you spend a total of 3 hours from start to finish doing the migration. That's the equivalent of being paid $25/hour in lieu of paying the Evernote full price renewal as opposed to what you paid on sale last year. I have a feeling you would not consider that close to being what your time is worth nor to what you're paid in your day job.

I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."

I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.

Aside from the fact that such calculations aren't necessarily applicable anyway, it is incorrect because they would most likely have continued to use and have to pay for Evernote for more than just the one year.

You might be surprised to know that I also mow my lawn, I clean home, I cook sometimes, I do laundry, I drive myself to work, and I sometimes even watch TV, spend time on HN, or play video games.

Maybe, but you don't have to move that far down the salary scale for $25/hour post-tax to start looking fairly attractive. In the US, median weekly personal income is in the $1200 range, so assuming 40 hour work weeks, $30/hour, or a bit under $26/hour after federal income tax if you live in a state with 0% income tax.

I get the attraction of all these various online apps where you're supposed to be able to store everything in one place. But they're single points of failure. In spite of the downsides, I just use text notes and take pics of, e.g., conference slides, on my phone. But, honestly, I don't really refer back to the vast majority of that stuff anyway.

Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.

I actively use Obsidian and Notion.

Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.

On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life. However, due to the file format and everything can be interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same time.

Both serve different niches and work very differently. So neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.

But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used right, that's true.

They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008. Switching would be painful for me given how familiar I am with it but I came close this last year when it stopped letting me stay logged in on multiple Mac computers at the same time...

I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch. Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a combination of the two. Sorted.

Sounds like you've already moved on from it, but if people are looking for a pretty seamless Evernote replacement, Joplin (open source) is pretty much an exact replica of Evernote and can import Evernote data.

The annoyance I have when considering a move away from Evernote is that none of the recommended alternatives have IFTTT support.

(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)

Is there an option to export in Evernote?

Apple Notes crashes when I try to open it after importing my Evernote notes.

> they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition

I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price increase.

And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before someone would respond asking for more info.

Yes they have finally fixed some performance issues and that is a huge win

My guess is that's indicative of the price Bending Spoons paid - they get a positive return on investment if they collect existing subscription revenue, and do a bit of work which keeps the existing userbase happy.

Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.

> Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons

I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong.

Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so that it can keep existing?

The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.

- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep

- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the product for years = real shit

> by default you think they are in the wrong.

They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.

From what i remember they did the same at wetransfer. Doubling pricings without notification.

I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance

But BP is not a PE firm, they do have developers. Most (all?) of their acquisitions are still being updated albeit presumably on a skeleton crew.

They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside investor money recently but that doesn't make them not PE.

In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where efficiency gains were the main objective.

Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however make what bending spoons is doing not PE.

"They buy up struggling companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise recoup the cost of investment+ profit."

1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.

But PE firms don't have their own workforce, Bending Spoon does, which is why their model differs from, say, Apollo.

The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.

Yahoo tried that business model and it didn’t go too well for them. Maybe we’ll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr next.

Smugmug already bought Flickr a few years ago and that seems to be going well.

Tumblr was bought by Yahoo then sold for comparative peanuts to Automattic, of Wordpress fame

I may recall wrongly, but IMO Yahoo used to buy hyped companies for a ton of money and let them die, it was the opposite strategy.

They're the CA/Broadcom of as-a-service.

They bought Komoot recently.

They are digital private equity essentially

Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so the members don’t have too.

My partner organized one a decade ago.

I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky.

Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.

I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix" (there is no spoon etc).

I was thinking more Uri Geller

Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.

But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).

Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info.

I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...

> I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...

Eww.

> Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.

'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In honour of the ur-bender, Uri.

> Apollo Global Management

Oh hey, the company that orchestrated my first layoff!

Highly recommend Plunder (ISBN: 978-1541702103) for those who want to learn more about the enshittification these companies bring.

Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy

Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily.

(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)

I’m honestly surprised that Vimeo never jived their niche. They could have been a great alternative to YouTube, in that they could have been the ownership platform for content creators. They just never seemed particularly focused long enough to make it happen

Vimeo never seemed to figure out what they wanted to be.

Did they want to be a white label video hosting provider? Did they want to be a social media network? Did they want to be prestige TV for the online age? Did they want to be IFC (indie movies) for the internet?

If they had picked one track and stuck to it they would have done a lot better but they ended up at the intersection of all those disparate spaces which ended up being a very tiny place.

They had several opportunities to become a legitimate competitor to YouTube with the number of times YT dropped the ball over the past decade but they never made the big move they probably should have.

IMO, they would have been best as a white label provider with good editing tools.

Granted, I'm armchair CEO postulating about it, but that always seemed like a good niche that would cover the rest of the subsets in a variety of ways, especially if they had embedded a monetization program via ads like YouTube as a sub-brand for creators. A possible 1-2 punch to sustainable revenue.

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