If your feeds haven't been taken over by this whole "Ello" thing, let me get you up to speed:
Paul Budnitz (successful artistpreneur), Berger & Fohr (his frequent design collaborators), and Mode Set (a dev shop) want to free us from our oppressive social overlords:
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.
You are not a product.
While I agree with their premises, there is something seriously lacking from their conclusion. Let me explain...
All communication is transmitted through channels. This includes everything from in-person conversation to TV to Facebook, Path, and even Ello.
Channel bandwidth is expensive. Channels can be compared along two dimensions: build/maintenance costs and reach. For example:
- In-person conversation has no real costs and scales poorly beyond a few dozen people;
- The TV industry spends tens of billions a year to reach 94% of American households [1];
- Facebook spent $3.05B in 2013 to serve 1.2B users worldwide [2].
Mass channels must be developed and maintained. While the internet has helped break the once-perfect correlation between cost/reach (see TV vs. Facebook), it's still really fucking hard to produce, curate, and deliver content that keeps an audience engaged.
This isn't even new; humans have committed "evil" acts to build and maintain channels since the 1200s. Look at Khubilai Khan:
He destroyed cities on the less-important or more inaccessible routes to funnel commerce into more routes that his army could more easily supervise and control. To stop trade through an area, he demolished the cities down to their very foundations. [4]
Innovation is awesome. Don't get me wrong, I want a solution. It's why I'm holding Ello to the fire: releasing a staunchly anti-advertising manifesto is wonderful and all, but it begs the question of how they will fund continued innovation. (As an old English prof once quipped, "If I told you I'm neither a door nor a window, what do you really know about me?")
In spite of their epic team and early success, I've seen this story play out too many times to be bullish without a positive answer to the funding question. Ham radio, public access television, Diaspora, App.net... all of them are empty husks of similar experiments. Some had promising beginnings (looking at you, Dalton!) but all ultimately learned that their revenue model could not produce the resources needed to sustain an early community. [3]
Notes
[1] The TV industry spent ~$31.5B in 2012; they reached 115.6M households w/TV out of 122.5M households overall
[2] Facebook spent $3.05B in SG&A expenses in 2013, and saw 1.2B monthly active/728M daily active users in Oct 2013
[3] Not to knock on subscription channels, as one commenter on a Facebook thread pointed out; services like Vimeo, 500px and others have vibrant communities. However, those are typically special interest services that provide you with commercial tools relevant to said interests; they are not a pure channel offering.
[4] Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Thanks to Jamie Thompson, Gonzalo Riva, and Brian Alkerton for the thrilling conversations leading to this post.