Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University....

Ello's got at least that many daily actives, and about 200k monthlies. That's much larger than Facebook's founding class, though also a different mix.

It's also worth realizing that many influential online communities were very small relative to their impact. The WELL and Usenet had core userbases in the tens of thousands of users, best I can make out.

I'd chalk Ello's exposure up to a few factors. One was the whole "David vs. Goliath" meme that struck when Ello was first revealed. World+dog are trying to figure out how to take on Facebook, and that's how the story was pitched. Ello's leadership makes quite clear that's not their take on things. Another was that, at least for a time, Ello had attracted quite the credible crowd. Clay Shirky, Charlie Stross, Bruce Sterling Paul Mason (UK/BBC journalist), Quinn Norton, Meredith Patterson, Tim Bray, danah boyd, Jonathan Zittrain, and others all created accounts, some posted for a while, a few still do.

It was too early. I've posted a few long lists of features Ello desperately needed to be viable, and lack of those, along with various bugs, were really hampering it.

While it's still got some technical shortcomings, the team's been addressing them quickly, doing a good job of it, and surprising me with some quite ingenious (and not always technical) solutions to problems or ways of offering capabilities. And they've directly addressed most of my major issues. That responsiveness has been notably missing at Google.

The site also has quite the creative set present, which tends to be a good early adopter set -- think artist colony.

But technical features and a cool vibe aren't enough. Though they're a good start. I'm encouraged by the feature set, community, leadership, direction, and foundations. Rather more so than by a few other systems -- G+ was already faltering badly in its first months out of the gate, Ello's avoided those faux pax entirely.

I'm also getting some sense of the HN effect: a front-page placement seems to be good for about 3.5k hits in 3 hours or so, based on this item.

I'm assuming you work at Ello, which makes it surprising that you didn't mention the LGBTQ community which seemed (and still seems) to be the driving force behind most user adoption after the initial first wave of users. This coincided with the backlash against G+ for forcing users to use their real names/photos, which was a touchy subject in a lot of queer communities.

Beyond that, there was a rather large social media "landgrab" when Ello first hit mainstream circles where popular social media personalities claimed both accounts with their usual pseudonyms and also the pseudonyms of friends and rivals (as both jokes and pranks).

Both sources of growth don't seem sustainable, has there been any organic community growth from within Ello from either one of those groups? That would be a much stronger indicator of future success to me than a comparison with 2004 Facebook.

I'm assuming you work at Ello

No, I don't. Just one of the early (Sept., 2014) adopters.

The analysis I'm presenting of Ello activity, as my earlier G+ analysis, is based entirely on publicly visible characteristics and my inferences based on them.

I did join Ello during the genderqueer rush, though that's not a community I identify with. My comments at the time were along the lines of "artists and drag queens is as good a foundation community as any". Influence of the group as a whole seems to have leveled off a bit, though Ello's currently celebrating Pride, with a post on that topic from Paul Budnitz today:

https://ello.co/budnitz/post/mnwJqqER_ieTA6qe4YzV8w

And yes, a lot of notables grabbed their Ello seats, a few spoof accounts were set up (the Zuckerberg one may still be active).

I don't have any access to user numbers and haven't looked into building those, though the Ello crew have talked of growth and a few notable spurts. As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, I've seen both a lot of attrition of early accounts and new arrivals. I noted the same trend on G+ (and did a major housecleaning at one point of long-dead profiles from my circles there).

The FB comparison has far more to do with what that group represented than how large it was. Dynamics of online community growth (and decline) are fascinating -- I've been watching online communities develop, grow, and decline for nearly 30 years. Harvard students (or grads) are an attractive social cohort, it's an easy base to grow if you play your cards right. That was FB's strength. Now it's the overall size of the social graph, but they're vulnerable to defections and evaporative cooling effects given that, by definition, most members aren't high-social-status:

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

Colleges and creatives make good seeds, though they're not perfect. Balancing out traits within communities helps a lot -- e.g., geeks can be level-headed and realistic, but may lack enthusiasm or interpersonal engagement other groups can bring (I generally identify geek myself). Finding and cultivating the righ mix is an art, but it can be exceptionally powerful.

People are not gonna leave Facebook anytime soon, sorry. I am very open-minded and I won't either - I can only imagine the more conservative or those who don't know about alternatives. It took many years for people to switch from email to Facebook - I'm sure most of them won't "invest" time in anything else. The "social network" is where your friends are and most of mine are on Facebook, so, I have no choice pretty much.

Yes, but the person who would disregard TheFacebook based on this data would be completely rational and making the right decision. There were a lot of websites with this DAU, a lot of very ambitious startups; almost none succeeded.

If we are making comparisons with TheFacebook early days, we have to look at different data, that set apart TheFacebook from competitors then: K factor, session length, various engagement metrics of individual user. But they are not discussed in this post, so we can not draw such comparisons. From data that we do have, Ello doesn't seem to be any close to TheFacebook than to any of those thousands of perished start-ups.

> First: remember that TheFacebook launched at a school with a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,700, of which its first user cohort was a subset. Of course, that school happened to be Harvard University....

You can't compare user activity/behavior in 2015 with user activity/behavior in 2004.

Facebook launched against extant MySpace, which had tremendous initial advantage.

My point isn't that Ello will clobber FB. That's not the stated goal of its founders. But a modest initial community can grow. The selection of the early adopter class is far more important than its size.

My point is that you can't simply use historical data and events to justify data and behaviors half a decade later because the market is completely and utterly different.

Unlike the Facebook/Myspace era, social networks are a dime a dozen, with most receiving a little traction and news articles, and then dying soon after. You could use the same arguments you've presented for the inevitable "success" of Google+, and look what happened there.

Very true. I was overjoyed when I had 400-600 readers on my blog back in 2001, I still get interviewed for being one of the first bloggers in my country back then.

Now I have more followers on Instagram and it's like... whatever, it's a drop in the bucket.

It's not fair to trivialize the traction that services like Ello are able to get. It's really hard to gain any ground when something is dependent on network effects, especially in a field as competitive as social networking. 6-10k sounds like a perfectly reasonable base to me, and with that inertia, there's no reason to believe it won't continue to grow. All businesses start somewhere (generally much lower than 6-10k, as Ello surely did), even the business that will eventually outcompete Facebook.

Ello's DAU is down from 6 months ago. They may be trending up locally, but most of us who gave them a shot when they launched found the site ugly, unusable (buggy, impossible to find friends), and unneeded. I know roughly 4 dozen folks that gave Ello a shot and all of us have not been back.

Ello's DAU is down from 6 months ago.

Do you have any sources on that?

I can attest to a lot of early-user attrition. But also lots of new users. Churn's part of the game.

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