Ello mocks Facebook by being creepy | Hacker News Reader

Ello mocks Facebook by being creepy

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38 pointshalfimmortal45 comments

Unfortunately, the Ello ecosystem seems more or less resist any non-artsy content like an immune system warding off a plague. They've quite thoroughly positioned themselves as an alternative to Tumblr photoblogs, and little else. The recommendations and suggested users are all weighted towards hipstery, partly because the algorithms all seem to be seeded off connections to the founders, themselves artists.

The end result is that everyone not interested in posting art photos inevitably seems to get bored and wander away.

I'm finding it quite useful for longer-form bloggy posts, especially where including multiple images is preferred.

I'm less enamoured overall with the styling, though I've taken my own spin on that: http://stylebot.me/styles/9519

(You'll need to have an account to use that as unauthenticated Ello sessions still default to the Ello v1 style: http://stylebot.me/styles/8070)

Basically: with a slew of embeds (video, audio, codepen, and others), graphics, and a decent (though still somewhat flawed) Markdown support (biggest omissions are blockquotes and lack of distinguished headers, though a few other glitches annoy me), it's possible to create well-structured long-form documents.

Yes, there's quite the artistic community there, and no, discussion's not yet up to the level I'd like to see it, though I'm finding a few interesting voices.

One thing Ello's taken to heart is hacking around the very small social graph (~6-12k daily viewing users, estimated, around 100k monthly), by providing curated communities and integrated re-shares, so that popular content gathers rather than splits discussion as it's re-shared.

The company's done a really good job of not repeating the glaring faux pas of Google+ which alienated much of its core community early on (myself included, though I remain active there), and has been highly responsive to user suggestions, picking up quite a few of the ones I've made over the past months.

There's more I'd like to see, but progress has been impressive and in the right directions, generally.

You'll find me there as @dredmorbius.

I'm not so sure about that. I recently wondered if the mundane would be accepted on Ello. I've seen that everyday plain text is quite ok with the community. You get what you put into it though. With smaller numbers, you have to reach out and comment on other posts. Eventually, people find you and decide to follow or not if they click with your previous posts too. In many ways, people on Ello take a follow decision more seriously than elsewhere I think. Someone said Ello is Twitter's overflow. When you want more than 140 chars (not that Twitter should ever change that), Ello is a great place for the long form.

I never got the whole "facebook alternative" hype that happened. Social network that uses art sales to support itself? I've been on deviant art since 2005 - well before facebook hit popularity.

It's not totally a bad thing though is it? Seems almost natural for a social network to start with a sort of single focus

No, it's totally a cool place, if that's what you're into.

As a writer and a techie though, I struggled to even find anyone else on the network with similar interests, and of those, they seemed to wither away over time.

The end result is less a "Facebook-killer" and more a "Tumblr/Pinterest alternative for upmarket artists".

@ddailey has some amazing SVG examples, I highly recommend him:

https://ello.co/ddailey

There's @ellotech: https://ello.co/ellotech

And @ellowrites: https://ello.co/ellowrites

Search can turn up people writing on topics of interest, say:

https://ello.co/search?terms=webdesign https://ello.co/search?terms=python (about 90 posts in 9 months)

Or you can enjoy the art.

My suggestion: be the Ello you want it to be, if you're going to play there.

Since Markdown's supported, (with a few quirks), content from any other Markdown-based site works well. You don't need to polish text much.

Add in images. They boost viewership.

Submit posts to appropriate Communities:

https://ello.co/wtf/resources/community-directory/

Search (both internal and external search engines) helps turn up stuff related to keywords of interest. The social graph is small. My experience elsewhere (G+) was that it took a few years for a real community to gel.

And no, it's not a challenge to HN, StackExchange, or Reddit. Or Facebook or G+, for that matter. Yet.

But it's got some good basics and the founding community ain't bad.

Good stuff does eventually get noticed and passed around.

Indeed, finding nerds on ello is a bit tricky, and as you say some of them went silent after trying it initially.

Amongst my friends https://ello.co/danyork has been impressively insistent in using it, but that's among the only of my friends that managed to sustain the activity there.

That said, with iOS client + with freedom re. your data that they seem to have, I plan to switch over more to it for the longer stuff that does not fit into a tweet - it feels pleasant to write there, even if as an archive for myself.

I feel Ello so far as a club-like with whiskey and cigars as opposed to a common living room feel that the FB is.

>resist any non-artsy content like an immune system warding off a plague

I might be being pedantic, but the immune system didn't do a very good job of resisting the plague, in fact it mostly let it do it's thing...

Somebody should write an open protocol for social applications. Then convince the governments to enforce companies to use that open protocol (like it is already the case for telephony, for example).

I think for the European government, this would not be impossible to achieve.

That would bring the kind of unbridled, exuberant innovation that typified telephony for decades to the internet.

I think you're trying to make a joke, but AT&T's Bell Labs was one of the greatest centers of innovation in engineering and applied mathematics of the 20th century. The output was remarkable.

I guffawed, but then I remembered that these same people gave us sendmail.

Sendmail? No, but they invented the transistor. And UNIX. And introduced the discipline of information theory. Confirmed the wave nature of electrons. Pioneered cell-based (cellular) communications. Invented the solar cell. And the laser. Created the first trans-Atlantic communication cable. The first communication satellite. The C programming language.

The European GSM standard for mobile telephones worked tremendously well. It enabled innovation on the hardware side and kept prices low because operators could not lock customers into their networks by technical limitations.

15 years ago the USA was a mobile backwater [1] compared to Europe and this was thanks to GSM, a standard created by committees and enforced by governments.

That's not the typical example of such a standard, but it shows that it's possible to do it right.

[1] When it comes to mobile plan prices, it still is I guess...

At least telephony is not a single silo.

Also, the enforcement could be enacted for commercial social networks with more than say 100k users. So don't worry if your personal ideas about social networks and innovation do not fit in.

I think for the European government, this would not be impossible to achieve.

Yeah, maybe they could emulate their earlier success with the Cookie Directive.

"Since this thing didn't work as expected, perhaps we should abandon all future attempts at regulation"

I'm sure you can see why that isn't a useful contribution.

We should abandon similar attempts at regulation, at least until we understand why that went so wrong.

The EU is pretty good at regulating high-level user protection (e.g. privacy directives), and can be useful to give a "push" to what is already generally accepted in the industry (USB as an universal charging port), but I definitively think they should avoid mandating particular technologies or implementations, and the Cookie directive is a good example of what happens when they don't.

I'd really like to see that as well, though it's been tried a few times and found wanting.

What Social seems to be based around is:

⚫ The directory. A set of users who are known and authenticated.

⚫ Notifications.

⚫ Search. Note absolutely essential (both Ello and G+ launched without it), but I find systems lacking this crippled.

⚫ A posting format. My general preference is for a minimal set of HTML, of which Markdown is nearly perfect (though other lightweight markup languages similarly work). Wrapping that in a user-friendly editor for those who prefer that, butalso preserving raw access, would be ideal.

⚫ Support both bloggy and lightweight ("tweet") type posts.

⚫ Some form of private messaging (Ello lacks this, G+ has a couple of inadequate and annoying options).

⚫ Notifications. These are key. I've argued that (despite many UI/UX failings) this is G+'s secret sauce. Ello lacks a few concepts (especially "subscription" style notifications), but otherwise does well.

⚫ Noise and moderation tools. Another glaring lack of many systems. Reddit's moderator tools are a moderately useful model.

⚫ Tags and/or channels. Another area in which many existing tools are poor (G+'s recent "Collections" is an utter clusterfuck). Old-school blog tags aren't bad.

⚫ In general, something that could be bolted onto a blogging engine would be really useful.

⚫ Syndication. Both inbound and outbound.

I've been casting around for options, nothing's really caught my fancy.

I would so be in favour of this. A sort of open protocol which, like email, would allow you to use whatever user agent or server you like. For most people the "Gmail" approach would be fine: some commercial company hosts your data and provides a nice user-friendly web interface, but for geeks, there would be an Emacs mode.

I would give my admittedly modest kingdom for such a thing. How to start?

Something like http://pump.io/ ?

OK so that looks quite interesting. It appears to lack search, though? For me (like one of the aunt posts) though, search is a killer essential feature—it turns something like Facebook into the global phone book. This is what i feel i miss out on, being a Facebook abstainer.

Just accidentally downvoted you. Sorry. There really should be a way to change your vote.

Like Tent?

https://tent.io/

Lots of blog posts and then none for well over a year now? I think it's dead.

Those ads will be removed very quickly. The publicity is not from the ads but from the articles about the ads. And the snake continues to eat its own tail...

Me, and a lot of my friends, really tried to use ello, but the interface is so confusing that we really couldn't figure it out (not for lack of trying!).

Reading their about page just stinks of pretentiousness, as well, which kindof leaves a negative taste.

https://ello.co/wtf/about/what-is-ello/

Much the same experience. They could do with an easier interface if nothing else.

As an avid user of Twitter, all I can say is that Ello has captured my attention to the point that I'm spending more time there these days (@teanee). Twitter is still best for in-the-moment news, tracking bugs or product updates, quirky random asides, and even finding other Elloers. Brevity is the sweet spot for Twitter. However, privacy and ad tracking (including Twitter's rush down the Facebook algo path) have made me look at Ello as a bit of an oasis. I like the company's principles and take on what a social platform should be. So yeah, I'm loving it on Ello - especially with an app now.

Ello is beautiful? Guess it really is in the eye of the beholder.

Just went to the Ello website and got greated by a flashing heading and a menu with a single-digit font size. Not very welcoming in 1995, and a turn off in 2015.

What browser/OS if you don't mind?

Chrome on Windows and similar (less usable but better looking) experience on Safari/iOS8.

Thanks.

I don't get those banners... First I thought they were placeholders not removed by my blocker.

Ello? Does that still exist?

I will def. give it a try after they published their Android app.

That's being worked on.

https://ello.co/cacheflowe/post/VCub0RNsU-EkEzPd4dKmpQ

Yes, that is why I'm waiting. I'm on that list.

The joke is on anyone who invested in this company, thinking it would be even 1/100 a successful as Facebook. Remember bebo?

I remember when Bebo sold to AOL and made its investors and founders incredibly wealthy.

AOL: http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/13/aol-buys-bebo-for-750-milli...

Thanks

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