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Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand what value Ello brings. It seems to be a social media network for the sake of being a social media network.

Myspace let young people (and then everyone) connect online, share photos, and declare who's their friend.

Facebook let young people (and then everyone) chat with and follow their classmates, and eventually let everyone keep in touch (using that phrase loosely) after graduation.

Ello let's -- uh, let's say tech-savvy 20- and 30-somethings? -- do -- uh, let's say send messages? -- without seeing ads.

The mission statement is equally vague.

"Ello is a simple, beautiful, ad-free social network."

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Your descriptions about Myspace and Facebook are post-hoc. It's easy once something grows big to retrospectively say {Service} let {certain people} do {something} in {some way} (e.g. I recall music being a thing for all my friends on Myspace). When something is small, it's not always clear how things will pan out or what direction they may take.

Misson statements are always vague in some sense. "Organise the world's information" was probably strange once upon a time.

I think the benefit of FB was very clear from the beginning: Connect with people from your campus. I remember signing up for that exact reason, beginning of freshman year, after realizing that many other classmates were on it.

Indeed, and I recall there being only rudimentary profiles and I'm not even sure there was messaging functionality. You had to actively visit people's profiles to see what they were up to and had to follow conversations from wall to wall. We all signed up but we jokingly referred to it as Stalkerbook.

In other words, it was nothing like it is today, where it has become a replacement for a bunch of existing things (e.g maintaing address books) and allowed a slew of new things (light touch contact, wider networks and news feeds).

Ello has a few USPs as I understand:

1. They let you choose any name you want (none of the "real name" stuff)

2. They are very friendly, focused and responsive to the needs of LGBT community

3. No ads (and thus less incentive to data mine the users, one hopes)

4. They simply don't have the history of Facebook and co

5. At least right now they are young, hip and very exclusive with invite-only membership (unlike Facebook that has everyone AND your grandma)

>4. They simply don't have the history of Facebook and co

They're new. It's hard to get history yet. That's not a USP unless you're easily bamboozled by the latest shiny.

> 2. They are very friendly, focused and responsive to the needs of LGBT community

What special needs does the LGBT community have, that are not being filled by other social networks?

I'm not sure if Ello solves this, but facebook took a really long time to allow _some_ gender-neutral pronouns. Some people would like to define their own.

Also, transgender people had some issues with facebook recently. [1]

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/16/living/facebook-name-policy/

I am gay and even I don't know the answer to that question

There's some kind of homophobic troll(s) reporting drag queens' profiles in violation of Facebook's real name policy: http://www.towleroad.com/2014/10/facebook-continues-to-freez... The content moderators (good article on them in the current issue of Wired: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/) are suspending the accounts.

But none of these points solve any problem. They're "features" of the product, but what is the product for?

Put in your terms:

Ello lets somewhat older young people (and probably eventually everyone) chat with and follow their friends, acquaintances, and people they find interesting, without needing to use their real identity or make their private data available to advertisers.

The market definitely exists, but is probably quite a bit smaller than the facebook market, and people have tried and failed to tap it in the past. Its time may have come due to the various real name policy backlashes against other services. It's also very possible that it will run into the same brick wall as everyone else who has tried this has.

Regarding number 3, are they actually committed to not data mining their users for commercial purposes? Because if not, they're not selling ads - isn't the incentive to instead sell that data to the highest bidder?

All of those sound like initial selling points of FB.

I read it as a kind of a second-generation solution: it takes a previously solved problem (a social network) and tries to solve a perceived problem with the existing solutions.

Whether it succeeds or fails will hinge on if there is a market for something that has similar features to Facebook/Twitter but solves a problem that people have been objecting to.

>> Myspace let young people (and then everyone) connect online, share photos, and declare who's their friend.

Don't forget that it also allowed significant customization of user homepages, up to and including embedding music. Sure it got annoying sometimes, but it also added a lot of excitement to the experience. Things felt very... wild wild west.

It allows people to signal that they care about privacy, their data, and stand against commercialism. Both the users, and the operators.

It's like asking "what value does Nike/TapouT/Starbucks logo have?" Sure, you can get better coffee for less, but good coffee is not really what they're selling.

I can understand what Starbucks or Nike are selling... I'm just trying to figure out what exactly Ello is selling. So far, all I can find is "beautiful" and "ad-free."

Standing against commercialism sounds very noble, but a very small percentage of my friends and family care enough about that to jump ship to a new social network.

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