Ello: You are not a product. | Hacker News Reader

Ello: You are not a product.

ello.co

42 pointsesolyt75 comments

  You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using 
  Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now
  and then for a very small amount of money you support 
  our work and help us make Ello better and better.

This is way too generous and altruistic to be practical. They obviously mean well, but this is effectively a donation-based model and it very rarely works in practice.

What I think they should do is to offer personal accounts for free and charge for enterprise presence. I know a handful of people who use Facebook and Twitter in read-only mode and who follow just the companies. They effectively use social networks as a news feed of product updates, coupons, deals, discounts, etc. Moreover, they explicitly seek out the companies and follow them. If you think about it, it's an insane arrangement - you have people opting in to hear to what you have to say. This is valuable, this is something worth paying for and it keeps the network free for the individuals.

Yesterday my Facebook newsfeed blew up with non-tech friends posting about Ello. No-one is signing up because it works better, they just all want out of Facebook.

I don't know if Ello will take off, but there is definitely a massive demand for "anything but Facebook".

And how many are still using Facebook today?

All of them, minus that one guy who likes to be contrarian.

I'm sorry, but the UI is so confusing and clunky, it does not appeal to me. Plus, if we don't want ads, there's alpha.app.net - scalable, has a powerful API, actively developed, and embraced by many of us already. They just need to rebrand as this whole subdomain/alpha thing bothers.

Eh, http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/

I'm not sure app.net can be considered a viable long term solution.

It would be if people signed up for it and used it. What does Ello offer than App.net doesn't?

Same would apply to Ello. If not enough people buy the premium features, it will collapse. Ads on websites are not because developers want to overwhelm people with ads and sell data, it's to keep the lights on when most users just want a free ride.

My point is, it tried and failed to make enough to pay for FTEs. Ello might have runway to try for awhile.

Sad to hear that. Not sure how I've missed this. I'm a paying customer since day 1, so, I've done as much as I could to help the project.

Life. At least it'll continue to exist in some form.

Agreed, The UI is all over the place. It took me some time to figure out what its all about.

I'd prefer to go with a distributed social network, of which there are many (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...), but none seems to have developed a great deal of traction.

They'll continue to not gain traction until someone tries to figure out why. I ran into roadblocks trying to interact with people on different sites. I'm not sure exactly how to overcome them, but I guess it's something like an OpenID sign-in. I never bothered since I had other networks to try out.

This is probably why ello is gaining traction where app.net and similar didn't. You make an account, and there's no counterintuitive steps--relative to dominant social networks--to connecting with other people.

The reason why is because most people don't want another social network. The problem that Diaspora, app.net and Ello are trying to solve is not actually seen as a problem by most people.

Broken in Opera 12, astonishingly badly. Literally no way to contact anyone of their team in any way (email, twitter) but through ello itself.

Edit: It was pointed out that there is an email adress, though a very skillfully hidden one.

On Chrome, the back button wouldn't take me back here to make this comment - it kept switching between the first two items in their list.

FF too. Same issue.

Same here. Looks like their javascript is adding a lot of history entries so the fastest way to get back is to hold down the back button so you see the entire history list.

> Literally no way to contact anyone of their team in any way (email, twitter) but through ello itself.

From the FAQ (https://ello.co/wtf/post/faq)

"How do I contact Ello? Ello is run by a small team of real people who are very busy building Ello, so we ask that you only contact us if you can't find help elsewhere. If you are having a serious problem, please send an email to hello@ello.co. We'll get back to you as fast as we can. Forgive any slow replies. We're busy working on Ello!"

You're right i missed that. It was hidden too well. Amusingly it doesn't help either. Sending mail to that results in a google-ish auto-response that virtually says "yeah you're gonna be really lucky if we read this at all, and don't even think about getting a response".

Isn't Opera at v24 now?

Only the Chrome version on Windows and OSX. The previous engine (or the Linux version) is v12.

> the Chrome version

That's like calling Windows 98 "the DOS version". While factually true, it's utterly irrelevant. We're on Windows 8 now.

And there is now a version of Opera 24 for Linux.

I don't understand why you had to pour anger into your post. That version of Opera uses the Chromium engine, that's important to distinguish the old vs new versions...

Perhaps the OP was simply unaware of that?

Opera ASA had a management shift.

The new management abandoned their old codebase (and users) to suffer the slow decline of bitrot. Meanwhile they took Chromium, repainted it, added 2 features nobody cares about, left out 99% of the features people used in Opera 12 and called it a day. Then to add insult to injury and cause maximum pain to their old users, and confusion to everyone else, they called the new software package Opera and gave it a higher version number, despite it sharing no code and no features with the original software.

And, just because that wasn't enough, their new management forced employees to lie on public forums and twitter about how they were going to work towards feature parity.

I love it how so many websites with terrible UI proudly proclaim that they are 'beautiful'.

It's like a good-looking person with a terrible personality. Beautiful, but you wouldn't want to live with them.

Ugh... just scrolling through that page adds TON of baggage in the browser history. So much for the back button.

If I didn't click a link or a button, don't add things to history. Please.

Back buttons? Where ello is going we don't need back buttons.

My favourite comment ever on HN :)

Classic. It is just free! Only charging (once) to add "special features". Curious what their cost projections are that they think this will work...

How much of the cost of a Facebook or Twitter is because of resource-heavy data mining? Ello doesn't have much data to mine beyond what you'd find in a typical early 2000s perl guestbook script.

Storage and bandwidth is still a huge cost.

Ello looks like it raised a seed round from Fresh Tracks Capital in Vermont:

"Ello.co is a beautiful, simple & transparent ad-free social network. Ello is designed with the end user in mind, not advertisers, promising “You are not a product”. The site is a collaboration between Paul Budnitz, the graphic design lab Berger & Föhr, and the technologists at Mode Set."

http://www.freshtrackscap.com/fund-iii-companies/Ello

Does anyone know any more about Fresh Tracks?

It looks to be a small VC firm founded in Vermont. I don't recognize the players off-hand but I do recognize the organizations they're affiliated with.

Vermont has a very small, active (activist, even) business community...they tend to like to grow things at home.

If you scroll down the page and then hit the back button in the browser; you're in an infinite loop on the ello.co website.

Highly annoying is an understatement.

It is just free., but what is it? Here:

> Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.

Someone compared it to Livejournal. I never used it, but no one complained about the comparison, so it might be apt.

Livejournal/Tumblr sounds right to me. I don't see how this will be sustainable though.

* This only applies until Facebook buys us for $5 billion. After that all bets are off, and you may become the product again.

I automatically reject everything that needs an invitation to join, no offence.

They gave me ample invites, but I'm limiting them to the few friends I think would be interested. And my circle isn't exactly elite or affluent.

The invite model worked well with GMail, because once you joined to it you could contact any one, after all, is just mail.

But with social networks it doesn't work the same, If you need to send invites, explain to them what is axactly an invite, then explain to them how to send invite if they want to tell their friends, it is to much work just to join.

The number of Facebook app invites I get daily tells me the average social network user understands the concept of invites. It's another step to get them to sign up for a social network, but I've already had people asking me for invites, and they follow through to the signup.

In your case, but in mine, my circle of friends are just computer casual users, and Facebook invites are not mandatory to join, you can go to www.facebook.com and join there, no invite required, you can tell your Friends to go there and join and not to "hey, waith till I send you an invite", and that's another issue.

Would love an invite, aharonovich(at)gmail, thanks :-)

Presumably you cannot reject it before you have got one.

Ok, i see the appeal. A social network that promises to be different than facebook can reach quite some people, and that will grow every time there is something perceived as being wrong with facebook.

On the other hand, they also claim to be beautiful. And I really don't think so. It is different, that makes it nice. But black on grey with grey typewriter font, retro-boxes and favicon-sized avatar images mixed with scroll-indicators from the latest trend - that is a mess.

But at least they are not a 0815-modern website, designwise, maybe they can reach somethin nice with the approach.

Curious to know the business model. How do they sustain?

From Ello's about page,

"Ello is completely free to use.

We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.

You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work and help us make Ello better and better."

https://ello.co/wtf/post/about-ello

Edit: Whether or not that will actually sustain them, I suppose we'll find out.

Yeah. That's not really a business model though, more of a pipe dream. You cannot support a service with one-time "very small" optional charges. Unless, of course, you start to twist users arms, in which case these charges stop being optional.

Optional charges seem to work pretty well for Wikipedia. Although who knows how well that will transfer to a social network.

$5 will buy a full month of server time on a modern cloud host. I imagine that if they can extract that much out of a user, they can make it go a very long way. This is especially true if the optional charges include things that consume large amounts of disk or bandwidth (video/pictures and associated long-term retention).

$5 a month out of each and every user? Good luck with that - it would put them over Google and MASSIVELY beyond Twitter and Facebook (both in single figures annually).

Exactly. Tumblr couldn't put money together with the themes people were buying, even though that was pretty lively.

Their best recruiting sergeant right now is Facebook. (And, to a much lesser extent, G+.)

FB's use of social engineering to induce personal disclosure, and their abuse of personal content for marketing, has sensitized a proportion of their customer base who want social media but don't want to be advertised at: the sort of folks who paid for the ad-free premium version of Livejournal, back before LJ gave up on the anglophone web and turned into a Russo-centric system. Ello looks like positioning as a logical sanctuary for privacy-savvy social media users. I suspect their long term plan is that they will start charging, eventually ... but not until they have enough users to be cash-flow viable.

People have been moaning about Facebook's attitude to privacy for years and it's not stopped their growth of users, usage and revenue.

The reality is that for most users this isn't a big issue - they don't understand it or don't care. Of course people don't want to be advertised at but by and large they're not willing to pay what it costs not to be advertised at so they put up with it.

moaning about Facebook's attitude to privacy for years and it's not stopped their growth

Has it? I rather thought their growth curve had peaked and in some countries FB usage is falling. In particular, at least here in the UK, kids are allegedly abandoning FB for other messaging systems because their parents have finally figured out how to use it to keep tabs on them.

(And I for one no longer update my FB, precisely because their attitude towards monetization is so obnoxious. Meanwhile, I do continue to use a paid-for-with-real-money accounts on two other social networks that have rather more respect for their users.)

> Has it? I rather thought their growth curve had peaked and in some countries FB usage is falling. In particular, at least here in the UK, kids are allegedly abandoning FB for other messaging systems because their parents have finally figured out how to use it to keep tabs on them.

I don't know about falling usage, but facebook demographics are changing. They're losing "eyeballs" that don't have much money and are picking up eyeballs that do. I suspect that they're willing to make that trade.

Ad free and with no data mining like facebook and twitter used to be?

Things start well, but things change, and sadly I see no reason why history won't repeat itself. Goodwill doesn't pay for hosting or bandwidth and most social network users simply aren't willing to pay enough out of their own pocket, particularly not when there are free alternatives.

What makes me bullish on ello is that it seems like there is an incredible team behind it.

  - Paul Bundtz - Founder of Kidrobot
  - Berger and Fohr - Art Design Studio
  - Mode Set - Agile Software Consultancy

All these representatives would be successful on their own. It seems like they're combing forces for something BIG

I don't know how to say this.

DO NOT VISIT. It hijacks your back button and I had to close the tab. chrome on mac

I can confirm its on Firefox too. Having freedom to go back is one of the important things about a user interface.

I remember a time, back in my QuakeWorld addict days, when I use to read .plan file updates.

Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social network?

> Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social network?

People have tried that and failed. The technical reason appears to be "UI/UX/average person/etc. issues", whatever you want to call them these days. Average social network users seem to want a unified system which distributed platforms have a hard time providing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network

Unified system.... distributed platform... cough blockchain cough

Invite only. The first profile I see on their homepage is https://ello.co/bitchesonbicycles with 2392 followers. I guess I don't want to be invited.

Please edit that link and put NSFW tags. Thanks.

It seems I can't edit it. Sorry, it didn't cross my mind (and the link text is clear enough for those that would otherwise need the NSFW tag).

I expected women on bikes based on the link, but the nudity in the second photo was definitely not expected.

I've been wondering about alternatives to Twitter as Twitter slowly circles the shit-drain as they try to copy Facebook. Will wait and see about Ello.

Have to say, websites with egregious javascript can be so annoying.

Broken on my work pc. Guess I can't use it at work... guess I can be productive instead.

Not sure how they can stay in business if they don't charge and they don't advertise.

While searching for new social networks, I came across an app called Groopie. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it but you can record videos with your friends. You ping them to record. After they are done recording, their footage will get uploaded to your phone in seconds, then you can edit and blend the two to create one video. Seems like they are on to something!

Navigation kills the back button :-(

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