Building something like Ello costs money. They have a team of at least seven people, and have worked on it for months. That doesn’t come cheap.
The About section makes it seem like Ello was built independently, a group of artists making something for themselves, presumably funded by volunteer effort and maybe a seed investment from Ello president and CEO Paul Budnitz, who also founded Kidrobot and Budnitz Bicycles.
But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March.
Why is this a problem?
The Ello founders are positioning it as an alternative to other social networks — they won’t sell your data or show you ads. “You are not the product.”
If they were independently-funded and run as some sort of co-op, bootstrapped until profitable, maybe that’s plausible. Hard, but possible.
But VCs don’t give money out of goodwill, and taking VC funding — even seed funding — creates outside pressures that shape the inevitable direction of a company.
Before they opened their doors, Ello became hooked on an unsustainable funding model — taking cash from VCs — and will almost certainly take a much larger Series A round once that $435,000 dries up. (Which, at their current burn rate, should be in a couple months.)
And they’ll have no trouble getting it. There’s a lot of money out there right now, and it will be extremely tempting to take it, especially if refusing it would mean closure or layoffs.
The problem, of course, is that VCs aren’t like Kickstarter backers, or even like angel investors. Kickstarter or Patreon backers just want the thing being made. Angel investors may have other reasons to invest beyond equity: fame, insider access, or maybe just the joy of helping something exist.
VCs may invest in things they think are interesting or want to exist, but they primarily invest money in startups to get a return on their investment, on behalf of their limited partners. That return usually takes the form of an exit: an acquisition or an IPO.
Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values. Sometimes, this push comes subtly in the form of advice and questions in emails, phone calls, and chats over coffee. Sometimes, as more direct pressure from the board. (FreshTracks’ Managing Director sits on their board.) Or, if things go bad, by replacing the founders.
The Ello team knows that how a startup is funded shapes how it behaves. They spend a good chunk of their About pages talking about how they’re not going to make money (not ads or selling your data), and a little bit about how they hope to (paid premium features). I hope they’re right — it’d be great to have more startups that aren’t reliant on ads.
But they completely fail to disclose how Ello is being funded now, which matters just as much, if not more, as any future revenue plans.
I love seeing people build new stuff. More people trying to build crazy experimental communities on the Internet is a very good thing. And nothing’s more audacious than trying to build a new social network.
Social networks become the glue that connect people together — the foundation for friendships, relationships, and new works of creative expression.
Building a social network is like opening the doors to a huge party and inviting everyone in. Without a way to get your stuff out, shutting down a social network is like locking the door and burning the place down.
At the moment, Ello is a free, closed-source social network, with no export tools or an API, fueled by venture capital and a loose plan for paid premium features. I think it’s fair to be skeptical.
Like everyone else here, I hope Ello can stick to their principles, resist outside pressure, fight market forces, and find a unique and sustainable niche.
On Saturday, a Twitter account appeared that perfectly predicted the outcome of the final World Cup game, down to who scored the winning goal for Germany. It was a con—and a classic one. (We’ll talk about how the con works in a moment.)
But it also felt like a missed opportunity, and immediately made me think of a much more serious con perfect for the 2016 election.
The Long Con
On November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election, a YouTube video appears.
In the video, uploaded six months earlier, a member of Anonymous holds a leaked memo from the CEO of an electronic voting machine manufacturer. The memo states they’ve been contracted to manipulate the results of the upcoming presidential election, and clearly outlines what those results will be.
The memo goes on to say that the chosen presidential nominee will win by a small margin, and detailed state-by-state breakdowns are included in an attached spreadsheet.
To prove their claims, the Anonymous whistleblower points to Flickr and Instagram accounts with detailed scans of the memo, a Dropbox with 50 state-separated CSV files with election outcomes for each, and, finally, a Twitter account that details the electoral results for every state, the outcome of several key Senate and House races, and a final electoral tally.
Every single timestamp, across four different services, checks out—June 2016, shortly after the Democratic and Republican nominees were chosen.
And every single prediction is accurate. The Internet implodes in the biggest conspiracy theory ever.
How It’s Done
The scenario above is totally possible, easy to fake, and doesn’t require a nefarious conspiracy and Snowden-level leaker to pull off.
All it requires is a little programming knowledge, and six months of patience. Here’s how.
Start by creating new private accounts for YouTube, Flickr, Dropbox, and Twitter.
Create four fake memos representing four different scenarios—Republican and Democratic victories with either marginal or landslide results.
Upload four videos to YouTube explaining the four different results, and show closeups of the respective memos you’ve created. Upload the scanned memos to Flickr and Instagram.
Create comma-separated text files with your electoral results, two for every state. Since each state’s electoral votes are winner-take-all, list the nominee and electoral vote count in each. Upload the 100 CSV files to Dropbox. (Knowing a little code will make this much quicker.)
Using the Twitter API, post tweets with every possible outcome. You should end up with two tweets for each state result or Congressional race. (Three if there’s a strong third-party contender.)
Finally, for the electoral tally, write a script that uses the Twitter API to tweet every possible permutation of the final national electoral tally. With 538 electoral votes, you should end up with 1,076 tweets — from a 538-0 Republican washout to a 0-538 Democratic landslide, and every variation in between. (The variations could be easily narrowed by taking swing states into account, but why bother?)
When all the results are in, delete every single incorrect prediction.
Make the account public.
What’s left appears impossible: four social media accounts with six-month-old predictions, and 100% accuracy.
Selective Memory
This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures. The result is that you look like you’re either psychic or a goddamned genius.
Variations of this scam have been used for centuries in finance, magic, and gambling.
Mutual fund companies bring new funds to market by incubating new funds outside of the public eye for years, then actively market the strongest performers with the highest returns. Poof! You’re an overnight Warren Buffett!
Magician Derren Brown provided a perfect demonstration in the context of horse race betting, sending consecutive race predictions to 7,776 individuals divided into ever-shrinking groups, until he was left with one person who’d received five consecutive winning predictions. Convincing her to hand over her life savings was trivial.
The FIFA hoax last weekend took a conspiracy bent, alleging that the governing body overseeing the World Cup was corrupt.
The account, @FifNdhs, posted four flawless predictions of the final World Cup match between Germany and Argentina, implying that Argentinian players took a dive.
The account went viral in minutes, with each prediction being retweeted tens of thousands of times.
But the would-be leaker made a fatal mistake: they forgot to make the account private before deleting their wrong predictions. Multiple people were able to grab screenshots, instantly debunking the hoax.
— Suresh Nakhua (सुरेश नाखुआ) 🇮🇳 (@SureshNakhua) July 13, 2014
This hoax plays into our biases:
Technological.We trust that timestamps on social media can’t be manipulated.
Cognitive. We tend to attribute credibility to those things we can see that survived a process, and not those that are less visible. See: Survivorship bias.
Emotional. Conspiracies can confirm our existing distrust in particular entities, whether it’s FIFA or the federal government.
The beauty of this hoax is that it works with any scenario limited to less than a few thousand permutations, and on any service that lets you mark posts or accounts private. Want to prove the Oscars are rigged? Your local school board election? Apple’s stock price? Go nuts!
But for everyone else: never trust a prediction revealed after its outcome.
For the second time in 18 months, I’ve lost a friend to depression—a unique, young talent with their greatest years ahead of them.
Chloe Weil tasted words. She was vulnerable to rich emotional experiences in the summertime. She hated her birthday, and she hated surprises. She had a cat named FACE that was famous on Reddit for a day. She helped us listen to songs traveling across the stars.
She was, in short, a badass.
Chloe was a person who made things. She made things with code, with fabric, with yarn, with charcoal, with sugar.
She poked fun at her depression, even as she was fighting it.
Chloe, I wish I’d told you in life how much I admire you, how incredibly talented I think you are. You continually made things, and like your synesthesia, they revealed someone who experiences the world unlike anyone else I know.
I wish I’d been able to say these words to you in person, instead of writing them to you in death, so that you could have tasted every one.
I love indie games, and follow the indie game scene pretty closely. I read gaming blogs, follow dozens of game devs, and keep a close eye on interesting new releases for the festival I run every year.
But I can’t catch everything. So, last month, I was boarding a flight to NYC and asked for some recent iPhone game recommendations:
Hopping on a plane in 20 minutes. Anyone have any recent unusual, wonderful, newish iOS game recommendations?
All of these underrated game were all buried in the App Store, hidden in plain sight for months, but it took Twitter to find them.
Next month, the iOS App Store turns six years old. In that time, iPhone and iPad owners have downloaded its 1.2 million apps over 75 billion times.
But how we discover apps has stayed virtually the same since its launch: editorial picks, sales charts, and search. We’ve been using the same set of tools to navigate the App Store since 2008.
What worked for 500 apps in 2008 doesn’t work for 1.2 million in 2014.
Apple’s created a remarkable distribution platform for developers, big and small, but discovery suffered as the number of apps has exploded.
300 million people visit the App Store every week, but they all see the same handful of apps—a selection hand-picked by Apple staff, along with a stagnant list of bestsellers.
Apple’s sole attempt at personalized recommendations—the painfully inadequate “Genius,” which recommended clones of apps you already installed—was phased out last year for the even-worse “Near Me,” showing the same location-centric apps to everyone in your city.
iOS App Store: Then and Now
This one-size-fits-all model may have worked in the first year, but as the App Store has grown, it’s created an environment where discovering under-the-radar gems is impossible.
It’s especially frustrating to see developers compete with each other to win a zero-sum game—attempting to break into the sales leaderboards with exploitive free-to-play tactics, or hope that they win the App Store lottery with homepage placement.
Apple is hardly alone here.
Every major app store—the iOS App Store, Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Network—serves the same set of editorial picks and charts to every member of their community.
Only two that I know of, Steam and Google Play, have experimented with personalized app discovery using the social graph. Google strictly relies on Google Plus for its recommendations, which is great if you’re an active Plus user. (Which you probably aren’t.)
Valve has dipped its toe into social recommendations for the Steam distribution network in the past, but they’re planning to expand the functionality this year, letting community members curate their own storefronts.
Getting Social
My hope is that Apple, and every other app store, can take a page from the last decade of the social web. Give its users a public identity, an incentive to share what they love, and the ability to find and follow others like them.
Find Friends
Mockup: Finding friends from Twitter. Apologies to Foursquare.
Like Twitter, these should be relationships where you can follow someone, without requiring approval the way friending people on Facebook does.
Bootstrap the social graph using iOS’s Twitter, Facebook, and address book integration, letting users find and follow users that recommend apps they like.
It’s not just about friends, but about following people, developers, or organizations that are finding and curating stuff you like.
Public Profiles
There’s an inherent expectation that app purchases are private, so automatically sharing that activity would be a massive privacy violation.
Instead, aggregate reviews and ratings on a public profile page. Add a simple, lightweight way to favorite apps, rather than requiring star reviews and purchases.
Each profile should have a “Follow” button and follower count, and apps you’ve favorited or reviewed appear on your profile, letting individuals or companies curate apps they love for their followers.
Likewise, every App Store developer should have a profile, listing the apps they’ve published and giving their fans a chance to be immediately notified when new apps are released.
Discovery
Mockup: Timeline of recent activity from people you follow
Finally, with the social graph in place, it would be possible to replace the “Near Me” section of the App Store with something relevant and personalized—a timeline view of shared apps, reviews, and ratings from people you follow.
Alternate views could show trending or popular apps from people you follow.
Push notifications could announce trending apps from people you follow, or alert you when a developer you follow has released a new app.
It’s upsetting to see the incredible work of so many independent developers get lost in the sea of apps, with so little assistance provided by Apple to find them.
Apple is using discovery methods from the age of brick-and-mortar bookstores and videogame shops—shelves of staff picks and bestseller lists are useful, but they’ll never be able to expose more than the very surface of what’s in the App Store.
Mockup: Trending recommendations and new app releases as iOS push notifications from Apple
The failure of Ping may have left Apple scared of taking this on, but that would be a mistake. Ping failed because of bad execution, and a failure to iterate, not because it was a bad idea.
Social discovery isn’t going away, and it’s the best chance of making sure every wonderfully underseen gem finds its audience.
You haven’t made it until someone calls you a sellout.
My moment was October 5, 2005, the morning after we announced that Yahoo! acquired my side project, a collaborative events community called Upcoming.org.
“Pffft. Sellout.” — Billistic, 9:06am
Starting Up
I launched Upcoming two years earlier in 2003, after five months of working in my spare time while managing the website for an investment firm in Los Angeles.
Upcoming was a community for discovering interesting events in a city and tracking what you and your friends wanted to do. Entirely curated by its members, every event was added by someone in the community, surfacing events that were often under the radar of local weeklies and newspaper listings.
It launched on Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19, 2003, and I celebrated with a handful of friends at a nearby bar, passing out eye patches between rounds of beer.
Upcoming was among the first websites to use a social network for more than just meeting people. Friendster, and Six Degrees before it, let you connect to friends but limited the interaction to just browsing your friends’ friends and writing testimonials.
According to the New York Times, Jonathan Abrams built Friendster for surfing photos of cute girls, and it showed. It was probably great if you were single and trying to hook up. I’m married, so Friendster was kind of boring.
My hope was that I could use a social network to solve other first-world problems.
Upcoming was hardly alone in this line of thinking. The zeitgeist was in the air, the early days of what Tim O’Reilly would soon dub Web 2.0. Upcoming launched a month after Myspace and the same week as Del.ici.ous, and predated Facebook and Flickr by five months. Many more followed.
Each of these sites used the social graph to solve their respective problems— finding interesting links, photos, restaurants, bands, whatever. They used the network to connect people together in new ways.
It worked really, really well.
Upcoming wasn’t a blockbuster, by any means, but it found a cult audience of early adopters that were both geeky and social — the intersection of people who liked spending time on computers in 2003, but also spending time around other people.
A year after launching Upcoming, my son was born. What little spare time I had outside of my day job vanished even as Upcoming continued to grow.
I asked two close friends, Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin, to join as co-founders and help launch a redesign with a bunch of new features and other recent innovations, including private events, tagging, mobile integration, and an open API for developers.
The week we launched the redesign, in March 2005, Yahoo! bought Flickr and everything changed.
Selling Out
Even with two new co-founders, Upcoming.org was still firmly a side project. We never incorporated or took any investment, and none of us worked on it full-time. It made enough money in Google ads to cover the hosting bills and bubble tea.
Despite that, Upcoming continued to grow in popularity. The API led to a flood of new mashups and integrations, built into every major blogging platform of the day and powering the calendars of major sites.
Upcoming’s cultural footprint was larger than its traffic numbers would suggest, since it was heavily used by the geeks creating the next wave of social startups.
Among them were Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, co-founders of Flickr and old friends from the proto-blogging scene.
After the Flickr acquisition, Caterina was tasked with bringing other interesting people and projects to Yahoo. She did it well. Throughout 2005, Yahoo hired many of the most creative people I’ve ever met. Yahoo was actually cool, in its own goofy way.
That July, Caterina emailed me to see if we’d ever be interested in joining Yahoo. Two meetings later, it was a done deal. We sold Upcoming and moved to Sunnyvale.
I kept my day job at the financial company until the day it was acquired. My resignation meeting with my boss was surreal:
“So… Yahoo bought my website.” “I don’t think I can counteroffer that.”
For me, it felt like a dream. It was a tiny acquisition by any standard, but the money was secondary to the fact that I’d finally be able to work on my own project full-time. We’d be working next to some of our favorite people in the world at one of the most prestigious Internet companies, and Upcoming would get the resources it needed to grow and thrive.
In the back of my mind, there was a gnawing worry. I knew that once the deal was signed, Upcoming wouldn’t be my baby anymore. But it felt right. I crossed my fingers, we signed on the line, and hoped for the best.
Dropping Out
At the time we were negotiating, the only online communities I knew that had been acquired were Google’s purchases of Blogger and Dodgeball, LiveJournal’s sale to SixApart, and Flickr’s sale to Yahoo. Del.icio.us joined six weeks after us.
Each one posted a gushing blog post about how they were thrilled to announce their acquisition. Here’s mine.
Each acquisition seemed to be a success, with the teams apparently retaining autonomy and thriving under new ownership.
You know how this story ends. You know because you’ve experienced it yourself, usually two or three years after something you love was bought by a big company. The founders leave because of a culture clash, the site falls into disuse or changes focus under new management, and eventually you see a notice along these lines:
“Thank you for being a part of our incredible journey and thanks for all the support. P.S. Your data will be deleted in two weeks.”
I miss Dopplr.
These breathtaking acquisition announcements and their matching closure notices are so common that they’ve become a cliché. There’s even a Tumblr dedicated to them.
Our story was similar. To Yahoo’s credit, they mostly left our tiny three-person project alone. Culturally, it never made sense.
We spent a lot of time on integrations with the rest of the Yahoo network, integrating it into everything from Pets and Autos to Local, Maps, Mail, and Search itself. But Upcoming’s small, geeky base often clashed with the core Yahoo demographic.
(Imagine searching the Yahoo homepage for “san francisco events” and getting results for an MC Frontalot show, a microformats meetup, and a pillow fight flashmob and you can begin to see the problem.)
We launched a major redesign, migrated to Yahoo IDs and a Yahoo subdomain, and the site continued to grow quickly.
When we posted our acquisition announcement, we wrote up a little FAQ to put on Upcoming.org itself. It includes this deeply ironic, naïve gem:
You guys are big corporate sellouts! That’s not really a question.
Fine… You guys are big corporate sellouts? If getting paid for doing what you love is selling out, guilty as charged. But know that nothing has changed our ideals, and we won’t compromise ourselves because we’re working at a large company. We’ve always been focused on making something useful and used, and we think that working with Yahoo! will make that a zillion times easier.
All of that was true. We didn’t compromise our ideals, we focused on making something useful, and we certainly thought working with Yahoo would be beneficial to everyone.
What we didn’t anticipate was how giving up ownership sells the community instead.
Building an online community is like throwing a big party. You build the house, decorate it, and send out some invites. But it’s the people that show up that make it special.
When you sell the house, you’re not just selling a house. You’re selling everyone inside.
We now know that online communities have a very difficult time surviving that transition. For years, YouTube was the rare exception, but even they’ve had trouble in the last couple years as Google tried to cram Plus down everyone’s collective throats.
While it was great to work on something I’d created full time, I knew within the first couple months that working in a company as large as Yahoo wasn’t for me. It was no longer something we owned. We were taking care of someone else’s baby.
The site was healthy and growing, and we were all ready to try something new. I left Yahoo at the end of 2007 and my two cofounders followed shortly after.
After we left, the site fell into disrepair. Spam, always a problem, was left unchecked. Social features were downplayed or removed entirely. Updates trickled to a crawl and then stopped entirely.
In 2010, a leaked slide from an internal Yahoo meeting revealed a couple dozen products on the chopping block—including Del.icio.us, Fire Eagle, and Upcoming.
It took three more years before they pulled the plug, and Upcoming finally closed last April.
Starting Over
Yesterday, danah explained how “selling out” has lost its meaning.
For the most part, she’s right. Certainly among teens, the moral panic of over-commercialism coming from young die-hard fans is over.
If anything, it’s a mark of success. You’ve built an audience that companies want to reach. You’ve made something people love, and they want those positive feelings to rub off on their products.
These brands provide independence and financial freedom in a way that publishers never could—without sacrificing ownership or creative control. Artists still make the music they want to make. Kids on YouTube are making a living making videos. The audience doesn’t care and everyone’s integrity remains intact.
Online communities are a different story.
If you start a social startup and give up ownership, whether through significant investment or an acquisition, you’re putting a community at risk.
It’s not just “data.” It’s the collective effort and history of everyone that breathed life into the thing you made.
There’s a huge amount of trust there, and we have every right to be angry when the services we use disappear. They tie to our identity, they forge new friendships, and they hold our collective history.
In the case of Upcoming, it was a decade of memories and experiences from real people. It was my responsibility not to fuck it up. People trusted me with those memories, and now they’re gone.
It’s the only time in my life that I felt like a sellout. It’s not a great feeling.
Through my work with Kickstarter and organizing XOXO, a festival entirely about independence, I’ve surrounded myself with people who make their living without sacrificing creative or financial control of their work.
When invited, I travel around the world to talk to people about why independence matters. I’ve always talked about my mistakes in public with the hope that others learn from them. Some of these lessons came at a high personal cost, but I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure I can talk about them.
I’ve never had the opportunity to fix one of them.
Last month, through a bizarre and surprising set of circumstances, Yahoo sold me back the Upcoming.org domain.
As far as I know, this is a first. Major corporations don’t give back the original domains they acquired back to their founders, and Yahoo should be commended for it. It’d be nice to see this right-of-first-refusal become part of standard shutdown procedures.
Ever since I left Upcoming, I kept waiting for someone to build something that scratched that itch, but it never happened.
I had no idea if anyone else felt the same way, so earlier this month, I launched a Kickstarter project to fund rebuilding Upcoming and restoring the historical events.
It hit the goal in two hours. More than 1,500 people have pledged over $100,000 to bring Upcoming back.
It’s hard to articulate what that means to me.
To me, it represents a chance to make things right.
