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Nachimir

Ello.co

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The whole 'artist collective' thing is apparently bullshit, though, they've taken VC money and will thus inevitably compromise the usefulness of the service. But yeah, ello.co is not a government enterprise and is thus incapable of repressing free speech nor censoring.

 

ello.gov, on the other hand...

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The whole 'artist collective' thing is apparently bullshit, though, they've taken VC money and will thus inevitably compromise the usefulness of the service. But yeah, ello.co is not a government enterprise and is thus incapable of repressing free speech nor censoring.

 

ello.gov, on the other hand...

 

I don't think there's any problem with artists taking funding; assuming they can build up an audience and develop premium things that people will want to pay for above and beyond the basic service (which I believe is their premium plan?), there's no reason to think they'd have to compromise the service.

 

That being said, the world is the way the world is so it'll definitely inevitably be compromised and degraded ¯\(°_o)/¯ 

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"VC money" is not just "money". Angel investor money is fine; grant money is fine; VC money means there will be an acquisition or Ello will collapse because that is the business model of VCs. They are designed to buy parts of cheap companies and then sell off those parts when those companies are worth something.

 

There is no future in which a company like Ello will be allowed the time they need to grow. These days, you can't launch a social network and be an overnight success because you need to persuade people that they should get their social network from you, which means they also have to be convinced that there's enough people on Ello that they're not going to abandon their existing social network. That means steady growth, identifying obstacles to new users and removing them. This is not how VCs run things: they want big explosive growth, which they aren't going to get from social networks in 2014, and their efforts to make actual money off this will undermine what everyone hopes.

 

I think we've got six months at minimum before anything happens, though, so until then...

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That's definitely the way much VC spending goes; I might be more mellow on it because the VC folk I've met are small scale and actually interested in developing things over the medium term rather than looking for explosive growth. 

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Thanks!  Now to post something (currently leaning towards the dad joke-y "ello, wot's all this then?") and figure out if I'm actually going to use it.

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Before anyone goes crying about VCs, it's worth noting that the amount they raised was something on the order of $400,000, which is astonishingly little by venture funding standards. And I'd be really curious to see how people think they'd be able to afford any infrastructure in the first place without some sort of funding. Servers, power, and especially networking aren't free, even if you have staff doing the initial work pro bono.

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Before anyone goes crying about VCs, it's worth noting that the amount they raised was something on the order of $400,000, which is astonishingly little by venture funding standards. And I'd be really curious to see how people think they'd be able to afford any infrastructure in the first place without some sort of funding. Servers, power, and especially networking aren't free, even if you have staff doing the initial work pro bono.

That article was pretty lopsided I have to say. He was making the whole thing out to be a massive expensive click bait on my reading!

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The whole 'artist collective' thing is apparently bullshit, though, they've taken VC money and will thus inevitably compromise the usefulness of the service. But yeah, ello.co is not a government enterprise and is thus incapable of repressing free speech nor censoring.

 

ello.gov, on the other hand...

 

Since when is government affiliation a measure of whether or not the entity is capable of restricting people's right to express themselves? I get that perhaps there are very specific lawful interpretations of what things like 'free speech' and 'censorship' mean, but as far the conceptual interpretation goes it seems pretty unsavoury to me that they're suppressing people's ability to discuss what they wish to discuss — in this case, because of a hash tag they chose to use? Is the next step blocking contributions from anyone who doesn't align to specific beliefs and movements?

 

I guess I'm just having difficulty seeing a genuine pro of using this service. Perhaps I don't use Twitter enough to see what's fundamentally wrong with it.

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Since when is government affiliation a measure of whether or not the entity is capable of restricting people's right to express themselves? I get that perhaps there are very specific lawful interpretations of what things like 'free speech' and 'censorship' mean, but as far the conceptual interpretation goes it seems pretty unsavoury to me that they're suppressing people's ability to discuss what they wish to discuss — in this case, because of a hash tag they chose to use? Is the next step blocking contributions from anyone who doesn't align to specific beliefs and movements?

 

I guess I'm just having difficulty seeing a genuine pro of using this service. Perhaps I don't use Twitter enough to see what's fundamentally wrong with it.

The problem with Twitter is the reporting system is terrible and they hardly ever do anything useful to help or protect people who are actually threatened.  One could argue that its restrictive of free speech and in a way you'd be right.  But at the same time not doing anything to prevent people from making rape threats or exposing private information isn't helpful to your user base either.  Twitter and Ello are free to be as restrictive or non-restrictive as they want because in the end its their service in the same way that the Thumbs have the right to ban people on these forums who come here only to make harassing posts.  I guess the hope is that Ello will have a better system for moderation than Twitter because Twitter basically doesn't have one.  Whether that's better or not is up to you.

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For those who have been using Ello, how do you like it so far?  How does it compare to other social media networks?

 

Frankly I have no idea what I'm doing with it.  I'm still trying to figure out the UI.

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Their system is very barebones right now (for example no retweeting) but the other main selling point of theirs is that they don't plan on harvesting/selling user data to third parties or using ads. No idea how they will pay the bills, but that's a central tenet of theirs.

 

Regarding censorship, like secretasianman said, Twitter can be a really hostile and threatening place and they do very little to stop it (some argue it's to their advantage). If you want to foster a certain type of community, sometimes you have to lay down the law and say that certain attitudes aren't welcome.

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For those who have been using Ello, how do you like it so far?  How does it compare to other social media networks?

 

It's super rough/buggy. Mostly I'm there to squat the username in case it takes off as a better alternative to twitter, but it isn't there at the moment.

As for censorship, well there's this, if no one has mentioned it:

http://betabeat.com/2014/09/ello-has-not-been-banning-gamergate-posts-that-screen-grab-is-a-fake/

 

That said, even if it were real, at some point you have to draw a line about what is and isn't allowed: doxxing, rape/death threats, child pornography, whatever. Some stuff IMO very much should be considered over the line. A potential user is just going to have to decide for themselves whether they agree with where the moderation staff has chosen to draw that line.

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I definitely agree that a line is needed somewhere, but I think that figuring out where and how to establish such a line is a challenge when dealing with the combination of such huge-scale services and human nature. I suspect that Twitter is trying but struggling, especially when so many entities use it as a medium of vocalising their valid but controversial opinions (politics, net neutrality, that kind of thing) where heavy-handedness will go down like a lead balloon.

 

I mean, I'm sure that there are ways Twitter could improve matters, but how exactly? If the issue is random threats and stuff, how could Ello ever stop that from happening without introducing moderation before any and all posts are exposed to recipients? If the moderation will occur after the fact, how is that governed? Do we just have a bunch of people who deal with reports? What guidelines do they use — are you blocked for saying you think feminism is a crock of rubbish? How would that scale up to broader volumes of users? Does Twitter not moderate flagged content using pretty reasonable-sounding guidelines anyway, and it's because of its volume of users that it's ineffective?

 

I suppose that with Ello being so small, at least for a while it'll enjoy being a peaceful nirvana of like-minded fellows. Alas I remember a time when Twitter was like that too, except it was all developer geeks. Popularity destroys all.

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To me, the whole ad-based service thing is inherently connected to abuse and harassment. It's the exact thing that disincentivizes Twitter from being a harassment-killing machine - why properly manage abusers of the service when their abuse directly results in more traffic? I feel this is a fairly cynical perspective, but it seems to me the only reason why they haven't been more aggressive in dealing with such a clearly widespread and public problem with the service.

 

The truth is, look at who the "customer" is. With Twitter, the customer is advertisers. To best serve advertisers, they want the most users possible actively tweeting and checking their feeds. With Ello, to customer is seemingly the users, though it's not yet clear how they plan to make money from the users. As a result, they would seemingly prioritize user experience since users are the ones they are beholden to.

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Does Twitter not moderate flagged content using pretty reasonable-sounding guidelines anyway, and it's because of its volume of users that it's ineffective?

 

I agree that scale is a problem for any moderation that requires people to hands-on review stuff (and you absolutely need hands-on review otherwise you'll have abuse of the flagging/reporting stuff to get people banned or whatever),

 

BUT:

 

for one thing Twitter does not allow you to flag something as abusive unless you are personally the target of the abuse (or, maybe they do allow it but they have explicitly stated that they will not look at any such reports, so near enough as makes no difference). This is hugely problematic because it forces the victim to be on twitter and potentially have to face more abuse when what they maybe should be doing for self care reasons is stepping away.

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I'm OK with advertising. The harsh reality is that Twitter (or anything remotely approaching it in scale) just couldn't exist without advertising. There's absolutely no way that Ello will ever be able to sustain itself without running ads, which is a glaring elephant in the room everyone seems content to ignore. Sure they could charge people for use of the service and/or run premium accounts, but that's virtually guaranteed to fail in terms of growing the user base. Other ways of raising funds are a pipe dream if the service ever gains real scale.
 
I guess it all just seems quite futile to me. I mean, if moderation and control is that important to someone then why not just run a regular website where they have absolute control over what's posted and whether or not people are even capable of commenting? Host it in whatever country you like, even. With social networking you're either part of that open forum or you're not; it's like there's the expectation that Ello will somehow just figure out how to be what it fundamentally can't really be.

 

or one thing Twitter does not allow you to flag something as abusive unless you are personally the target of the abuse (or, maybe they do allow it but they have explicitly stated that they will not look at any such reports, so near enough as makes no difference). This is hugely problematic because it forces the victim to be on twitter and potentially have to face more abuse when what they maybe should be doing for self care reasons is stepping away.

 
This definitely seems like something that Twitter should address. Not that YouTube is a shining example, but its comments would be a lot worse without a universal ability to flag. I myself have flagged things on Twitter, and while I didn't really follow up on them it's pretty annoying to think that they'd just ignore it. I'd be interested to see where they said they do this and/or the community's response to it.

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Ello's business model is apparently that they will sell features to users directly. I think this is fraught with problems, but not nearly as insidious as selling user attention.

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