

The problem with Ello's promise not to sell your info - NickDouglas
https://ello.co/waxpancake/post/oy73kFfDdhOPh8Jv9z9pFA

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saurik
Why is there so much hype about this service, in particular, in the first
place? Why does it matter so much so suddenly to so many people that it even
deserves Andy Baio spending his time writing this opinion?

It isn't like this idea is unique: there are tons of people who have built
"clean and ad-free" just-barely-enough social networking services. It isn't
like this idea is better: most reviews have stated it is derivative at best
(complaints of essentially just cloning other services and not offering
anything terribly unique) and awkward at worst (with very little "polish" to
the UI). It isn't like this idea is even particularly timely: right now the
big news items are about data theft in the cloud (due to "the fappening",
which is a problem this service doesn't address), not intrusive data
collection from advertisements (an idea that is "so two years ago": last year
the focus shifted to governments before now shifting to security).

The articles I read just now to figure out "what is Ello, anyway" talk about
it like it has been unavoidable: that the author's Facebook news feed was full
of talk of this service, and that certainly this was true for readers as well;
in fact, I only seem to know one person who knew of it, they only learned of
it because they follow Andy on Twitter (and thereby read this piece), and was
quite negative about the idea that Ello would be successful or even exist for
very long.

Yet, there really are tons of articles about this service, in major newspapers
and serious business weblogs. If anyone is "in the know" on what they did to
get this much press this quickly--and again, to cause someone like Andy to
spend their time writing such a response to their platform (as opposed to just
ignoring it like any other expected failure)--I would seriously love to
understand (and mean that seriously, as something very interesting has
happened here that I imagine would be very useful to understand).

~~~
xkcd-sucks
They hired Docker's PR firm?

~~~
nickstinemates
:)

------
hoodoof
Facebook without ads, right? COuldn't Facebook just provide an option to pay a
subscription fee if you want no ads?

~~~
radubogdan
I'm not sure what type of ads are on facebook since I don't have an account,
but you can block tons of ads with adblockplus and it's open source (check
github and mercurial repo - hg.adblockplus.org). You can monthly donate to
this project instead of facebook.

