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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2MfT4eY
pillowfort-io:
joons:
robatics:
pillowfort-io:
It’s day 4 of our Kickstarter! If you are looking for a social media platform that lets you:
choose who can see, reblog, and comment on your posts
create and join user-moderated communities
blacklist posts containing certain terms or tags
talk to other users via nested comment threads
then you might like Pillowfort.io. Check out our campaign for much more information about the site, our business plan, and how you can get into the private beta!
I backed this because it’s super cool! If you visit the site right now you can check it out as a demo user, which is helpful to see if you like what it looks like.
New platforms generally depend on a critical mass of interest. At work, my team and I have tried out almost everything that looks promising, and we’re testing PF as well. My professional (lmao) opinion is that it could be big…but we have to decide it’s going to be big. We can’t wait for the pool to fill up and then jump in. We’re the pool people. This metaphor is bad so I’m abandoning it but hopefully you get my drift.
The framework is there, but Pillowfort has decided they’re not going to depend on venture capital financing or corporate sponsorship–which is frankly counter to all conventional wisdom about how social media works in this day and age, and is risky. Based on what I’ve seen, I think they’re taking an informed risk.
But that means we’re kind of the VC here. We’re the ones who have to take a chance on it knowing that it’s still in development, that it’s not fully populated right now, and that it won’t immediately be Better Than Tumblr in all the ways we’re used to. There will be stuff you don’t like, and you will have concerns. That’s all good.
Honestly, though? Nobody is out there building a Tumblr-killer who has the capacity to launch a fully-featured website. This is probably our best bet if we really want something tailored to our needs to take off.
This has become an essay about social media so the rest of it is under the cut.
Keep reading
This essay is great at articulately the meta value of places like Pillowfort. I want to also emphasize that, currently, sites that Pillowfort is going up against – Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr – are all facing blowback about the ways in which they’ve commodified their users’ data and engagement. It’s the users and their habits that are being sold, and all three sites have experimented with algorithms that show their users content they do not want to see (pulling popular posts from tags onto the main dash; showing likes as public timeline posts) or aggregating timelines based on relevance and interaction rather than chronologically. YouTube also does this to the point where “subscribing” or “following” is a basically meaningless term. Amidst all that, Pillowfort is providing a service to its users that lets them shape their experience and be the investors who decide, yes, i am willing to see ads to pay for the customization I am not getting anywhere else, or yes, i will pay to get more icons and features (like Livejournal). I see Pillowfort following the AO3 model of financing, and I think there is more than enough interest and incentive to support sites like this because of the way they center user experience over data collection.
Thanks for your very thoughtful write-up @robatics! You’re right that we are intentionally taking a risk in pursuing crowd-funding instead of venture capital specifically because we’d rather be beholden to the users who are actually involved in the site, rather than a small group of people who are going to primarily see the site as a vehicle to make a return on the money they gave us. I was around when LiveJournal was in its heyday and I watched it make increasingly poor business decisions that were counter to user experience after getting bought out. Then, when people migrated from LJ to Tumblr, we eventually saw the same thing happen to Tumblr (with the added fun of Tumblr never having been built for the kind of interaction and communication that people wanted to use it for to begin with).
It’s certainly a gamble, and there’s no doubt we’re a small team without a ton of resources behind us. You could call us ‘scrappy.’ But we’re building this site because it’s the site that we have been waiting for years to spring up and counter Tumblr, and when it never happened I just said, “well, guess I ought to try it myself.” And I know that there are tons of people on this site and other social media sites who are sick of the norms that social media has settled into and want a change; enough people that we could make this site successful if we all chipped in and signed on. And I understand, of course, why people are hesitant to trust us, because we are new and scrappy and small; but we’re also building this site from the perspective of long-time bloggers who just want to make a site that’s functional and actually provides us with the tools we need to talk to each other. And we need your help with that, and we hope you will lend it to us, because otherwise we either won’t have the money to develop the site at all (and we have been developing the site basically for free for over two years now, but we can only do that for so long, especially if we want to really start competing with established platforms)– or we’ll have to go looking for venture capital funding, and if we do that we’ll be under drastically increased pressure to design the site with maximum profit in mind. And we don’t want that any more than you do.
(Your picture was not posted)
pillowfort-io:
joons:
robatics:
pillowfort-io:
It’s day 4 of our Kickstarter! If you are looking for a social media platform that lets you:
choose who can see, reblog, and comment on your posts
create and join user-moderated communities
blacklist posts containing certain terms or tags
talk to other users via nested comment threads
then you might like Pillowfort.io. Check out our campaign for much more information about the site, our business plan, and how you can get into the private beta!
I backed this because it’s super cool! If you visit the site right now you can check it out as a demo user, which is helpful to see if you like what it looks like.
New platforms generally depend on a critical mass of interest. At work, my team and I have tried out almost everything that looks promising, and we’re testing PF as well. My professional (lmao) opinion is that it could be big…but we have to decide it’s going to be big. We can’t wait for the pool to fill up and then jump in. We’re the pool people. This metaphor is bad so I’m abandoning it but hopefully you get my drift.
The framework is there, but Pillowfort has decided they’re not going to depend on venture capital financing or corporate sponsorship–which is frankly counter to all conventional wisdom about how social media works in this day and age, and is risky. Based on what I’ve seen, I think they’re taking an informed risk.
But that means we’re kind of the VC here. We’re the ones who have to take a chance on it knowing that it’s still in development, that it’s not fully populated right now, and that it won’t immediately be Better Than Tumblr in all the ways we’re used to. There will be stuff you don’t like, and you will have concerns. That’s all good.
Honestly, though? Nobody is out there building a Tumblr-killer who has the capacity to launch a fully-featured website. This is probably our best bet if we really want something tailored to our needs to take off.
This has become an essay about social media so the rest of it is under the cut.
Keep reading
This essay is great at articulately the meta value of places like Pillowfort. I want to also emphasize that, currently, sites that Pillowfort is going up against – Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr – are all facing blowback about the ways in which they’ve commodified their users’ data and engagement. It’s the users and their habits that are being sold, and all three sites have experimented with algorithms that show their users content they do not want to see (pulling popular posts from tags onto the main dash; showing likes as public timeline posts) or aggregating timelines based on relevance and interaction rather than chronologically. YouTube also does this to the point where “subscribing” or “following” is a basically meaningless term. Amidst all that, Pillowfort is providing a service to its users that lets them shape their experience and be the investors who decide, yes, i am willing to see ads to pay for the customization I am not getting anywhere else, or yes, i will pay to get more icons and features (like Livejournal). I see Pillowfort following the AO3 model of financing, and I think there is more than enough interest and incentive to support sites like this because of the way they center user experience over data collection.
Thanks for your very thoughtful write-up @robatics! You’re right that we are intentionally taking a risk in pursuing crowd-funding instead of venture capital specifically because we’d rather be beholden to the users who are actually involved in the site, rather than a small group of people who are going to primarily see the site as a vehicle to make a return on the money they gave us. I was around when LiveJournal was in its heyday and I watched it make increasingly poor business decisions that were counter to user experience after getting bought out. Then, when people migrated from LJ to Tumblr, we eventually saw the same thing happen to Tumblr (with the added fun of Tumblr never having been built for the kind of interaction and communication that people wanted to use it for to begin with).
It’s certainly a gamble, and there’s no doubt we’re a small team without a ton of resources behind us. You could call us ‘scrappy.’ But we’re building this site because it’s the site that we have been waiting for years to spring up and counter Tumblr, and when it never happened I just said, “well, guess I ought to try it myself.” And I know that there are tons of people on this site and other social media sites who are sick of the norms that social media has settled into and want a change; enough people that we could make this site successful if we all chipped in and signed on. And I understand, of course, why people are hesitant to trust us, because we are new and scrappy and small; but we’re also building this site from the perspective of long-time bloggers who just want to make a site that’s functional and actually provides us with the tools we need to talk to each other. And we need your help with that, and we hope you will lend it to us, because otherwise we either won’t have the money to develop the site at all (and we have been developing the site basically for free for over two years now, but we can only do that for so long, especially if we want to really start competing with established platforms)– or we’ll have to go looking for venture capital funding, and if we do that we’ll be under drastically increased pressure to design the site with maximum profit in mind. And we don’t want that any more than you do.
(Your picture was not posted)
