
App.net is shutting down - antinanco
http://blog.app.net/2017/01/12/app-net-is-shutting-down/
======
milesf
So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale"
appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into
Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app
ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's
knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived
and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump
came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is
shutting down.

And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.

~~~
fraserharris
Twitter finances (TTM):

revenue: $2.52B gross profit: $1.49B

It's only losing money because of stock grants.

~~~
nickbauman
Which is a lesson in how VC can easily destroy a viable, profitable business
with a "money-chasing-money" strategy.

~~~
nl
How do you figure that?

1) VCs own hardly any shared of Twitter[1]

2) Stock grants are used as compensation for people working at Twitter, NOT
something that benefits investors (except in the sense people are working at
the company the investors invested in I guess).

It's easy to blame VCs for everything, but I don't see how this makes any
sense at all in this case.

[1] [http://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitter-stock-
owner...](http://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitter-stock-ownership-
takeover-acquisition-challenges)

~~~
nickbauman
Who is in line for a buyout before other investors and at what multiplier?
That information is usually not public and can be more important than what
percentage of ownership a particular investor has.

~~~
nl
They are a public company, with a single class of shareholder. They can all
choose to buy or sell via the public market.

Your comments would make some sense if they were pre-IPO.

~~~
nickbauman
Derp, you're right. I'm an idiot.

------
nicholasjbs
This is a refreshingly honest shutdown notice.

Congratulations to Dalton and co for trying something hard and worthwhile, and
wrapping it up responsibly when it didn't pan out.

~~~
ChuckMcM
My sentiment exactly. And I agree with Dalton it was worth trying to see if it
could fly.

It raises a lot of interesting questions about the sustainability of the "app
economy" for me.

~~~
dalton
I appreciate both of your sentiments, thank you.

I continue to be at least somewhat optimistic that non ad-supported models are
worth trying. It seems like Patreon is doing really well and is perhaps
something we can all learn from.

~~~
mst
I paid into the very beginning. It was never useful to me. I don't regret
spending the money to see if it could work.

For me, the lack of apps/integrations made it essentially impossible for me to
get the people I wanted to talk to on there on to there.

But I'm really glad you tried, I'm even more glad you've documented what did
and didn't work, and I definitely got value for money.

Good luck with whatever's next.

------
jelv
Sad to see them go.

Mastodon, [https://mastodon.social/](https://mastodon.social/), is a new and
positive alternative. Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server.
It's GNU Social-compatible and federated.
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

Diaspora is also still going strong with 20k MAU but there is no interaction
between the pods [https://the-federation.info/](https://the-federation.info/).

~~~
akjainaj
And there's also [https://gab.ai](https://gab.ai) if you're into free speech.

~~~
fpig
I just looked at their community guidelines and saw this:

 _Non-U.S. residents and citizens must follow the laws of their domicile
pertaining to online conduct, communication and content. Gab AI, Inc. will
respect the territorial sovereignty of nation-states and their applicable laws
pertaining to online communications, though we urge governments of the world
to consider Articles 18, 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR)._

So does this mean they are willing to censor content from people who live in
less-free countries based on those countries' laws even though they don't have
to, being based in the US? Isn't that weird for a "free speech" network?

~~~
akjainaj
Free speech for the western world. Their admins are right-wing, so they are
respectful of the sovereignty of all states and their laws/customs, as
expected from people from the right.

On the other hand, there's Mastodon/GNU Social (what GP recommended) for
people from the left, where they ban fascists/nazis, but they apply the same
rules to users from all countries, as expected from people from the left.

It makes me kinda sad that these alternatives to Twitter are so politically
polarised...

~~~
daveid
Mastodon the software is not politically aligned. mastodon.social the flagship
instance of the developer (me) that simply runs/demonstrates the latest code,
is, in this case, leaning left. You can run your own.

------
kylec
This is an unfortunate, but not unexpected, end of an era. App.net was created
at a time when discontent was high with how Twitter was treating its users and
3rd party app developers. Even though App.net wasn't hugely successful, its
existence provided a needed check against Twitter exercising user-hostile
control over their platform.

However, it has not been a viable platform (one that people actually used) for
many years, so while I am saddened that it is finally being shut down, I'm not
surprised. Many thanks to Dalton and everyone who built it and kept it going
these many years!

~~~
tlrobinson
Did Twitter actually do anything in response to App.net?

~~~
kylec
App.net came out in 2012, and while I can't really remember the specific areas
of discontent that I experienced with Twitter back then, here's an article I
found:

[http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/01/14/twitter-
in-2012/](http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/01/14/twitter-in-2012/)

I think what everyone was worried about back then was that Twitter was
changing the nature of what Twitter was. Twitter started placing limits on API
tokens, introduced new UI in the form of cards, which could also be used for
ads, etc. There was a sense that the freedom and openness of the Twitter
platform was quickly diminishing.

Twitter's response was basically no response, but in a good way. They slowed
down making those sorts of radical changes, and to this day you can still
browse Twitter with a 3rd-party app like TweetBot and never see cards or ads.

~~~
groovy2shoes
This is my first time hearing of App.net.

(This is something that happens for me regularly -- I "discover" something
only by its shutdown notice making the HN front page...).

~~~
narrowrail
You realize that when App.net launched, it was on the front page of HN and
with much discussion (relatively speaking)? Given your account's age, you were
_here_. In 2010, Bitcoin made the HN front page and you could get 5 BTC for
signing up for an email list; 3 years later 1 BTC was worth over $1k.

~~~
groovy2shoes
Sure, I realize that. But it seems I missed that initial event, and then
everyone fell silent about App.net (nobody really continued to buzz about it).

Whenever stuff like this happens, I always wonder how many people, like me,
hadn't heard of some service or product, and I wonder how many of them would
have used it if they had. Would it have been enough to save the company from
going under? Was it a marketing problem? I dunno, that's just the kind of
strange places my mind tends to encounter in its errings.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
This seems like a good juncture to point out that GNU Social, OStatus, and the
Fediverse still exist.

It still has some believers. Someone wrote a new implementation in Ruby called
Mastodon recently, which has a nice interface.

~~~
unimpressive
Do you know of a good tutorial on how to quickly get set up on one of these? I
would gladly join but have never really been able to figure out _how_.

(I'm looking to self host.)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I would assume it's just a case of installing your chosen software package on
a web server. I don't know how easy that is. The more mature packages are
probably better-documented in this regard.

~~~
muppetman
It took me about 15 minutes to install GNU Social just now (I already had a
webserver with php and mysql)

------
mbesto
App.net and Medium have the same issue (why advertising is more lucrative than
selling blogging software directly to content creators):

Let's say for every one content creator that are on average 100 eyeballs on
the content they create (1:100). Almost universally, the 100 eyeballs can be
translated to more economic value than the 1, and hence why the advertising
model is so lucrative.

~~~
Avshalom
App.net from what I understand wasn't so much trying to sell to content
creators as it was trying to create a Social-Graph-As-A-Service thing. I
thought the original pitch was essentially two fold:

build your network with App.net and users can basically just opt-in
automagically importing their data from other App.net networks thereby
reducing the friction and hopefully making it easier to over come the ghost-
town problem.

build your network with App.net and tool makers (including you) automatically
get a well defined/robust/tested API to write apps against to interact with
your network.

------
grenoire
Unfortunate. Goes to show that you really can't break even without ads or
selling/analysing data with a centralised social network.

~~~
hkmurakami
or put another way, "people don't want to pay for most things"

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Or to put it another way, people care more about money than their own privacy.

~~~
paulcole
Yep. I have a limited amount of money that I need to spend on more essential
purchases. I'll happily trade my data/privacy for the right frivolity.

When someone starts letting me pay for groceries with my browser history sign
me up.

~~~
72deluxe
If your browser history consisted of you shopping for groceries, would this be
a self-paying system and eternal free food?

Good idea isn't it?

------
filmgirlcw
I applaud Dalton and Bryan for keeping ADN running for nearly 3 years after it
ceased development. In truth, I think most of the users left back in May 2014,
but it's still admirable that they kept it running.

If you'll excuse the self-plug, I wrote about the death of ADN back in 2014
and re-reading my post, I think it holds up.

[http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/app-net-
potential/#P8.bAcE8NO...](http://mashable.com/2014/05/08/app-net-
potential/#P8.bAcE8NOqB)

------
bitmapbrother
I wonder how many people thought app.net was a Microsoft product.

~~~
WildUtah
Any association with the SharePoint people could and should doom a social
network product. Or any product.

~~~
rbanffy
I like to call it ShamePoint. Nobody can possibly be proud of deploying that.

------
mcbits
"We are also going to open-source the code behind App.net on our GitHub page."

Huge kudos for that.

------
timthelion
I have the experience, that services with generic sounding domain names are
never successfull. The only remotely successfull generic sounding domain site
that I can think of is about.com

There are some exceptions, like messenger.com which I don't think is a
counter-example. I think that messenger.com would be no-more or less
successfull if it was named barf.com. People use it because facebook already
has a foothold.

------
Illniyar
For those not in the know, what was app.net?

~~~
myhf
Twitter for $50/year

~~~
Illniyar
So a social network? weird name for a social network.

~~~
transitorykris
It wasn't meant to be just a stand alone social network/twitter clone. The
idea was to allow developers to build apps on it (even their own twitter
clone, why not?) and skip having to build a social graph themselves.

------
Zigurd
App.net combined two big ideas:

1\. Social networks are important enough that a subscription model is viable

2\. Social networks should be built on a platform for social network
applications

Obviously neither idea could save app.net. Which idea caused most of the
problems?

~~~
acdha
#1, but not inherently as much as for the effect it had on the consequences of
other decisions: they launched with a hard pay-wall for the first couple years
and that made the identity crisis fatal. They got a good deal of initial
publicity but the first thing anyone curious got was a requirement that they
pay to use it. That's always going to be a hard sell but it was especially bad
when the messaging was so confused about whether it was a platform to build
apps on, a Twitter competitor, etc. since the cost was real and up-front but
any benefits were largely hypothetical based on enough other people deciding
to pay at all and some of them building apps.

I think a subscription model could be viable with better execution but it
really seems like that would be best with a tiered approach so the social
network wasn't held back by the payment requirement.

~~~
Zigurd
I think your diagnosis is on target: "the cost was real and up-front but any
benefits were largely hypothetical based on enough other people deciding to
pay at all and some of them building apps."

But freemium is hard: Either you make a market for ads, and have intrusive
data collection and analytics, and you have to compete with the most intrusive
ad-supported products that already dominate the ad market and you become as
bad as them, OR you have pure freemium and you have the question of how to
make the up-sell compelling enough while keeping the free level of service
interesting enough. The only good example of success at freemium is LinkedIn
where they segmented their user population and only made the recruiters pay a
very high premium price.

------
MasterScrat
[https://app.net/](https://app.net/)

When a service shuts down, it'd be really nice of them to keep a mention of
_wth they were doing_ on their frontpage.

~~~
danielsamuels
[https://alpha.app.net/](https://alpha.app.net/) has info

------
aaronhoffman
Still a good domain name. MS might be interested.

~~~
rbanffy
And then they launch a free platform, integrated with Windows 10 and Cortana,
that competes directly with Twitter...

------
erjjones
Building developer platforms is fun and exciting. Especially for the
developers creating it, knowing that they are building a rockstar application
for people just like them. Getting adoption and conversion to paying customers
is so freaking hard and ultimately the end of the road.

I went down this road once
([http://www.odatahq.com/](http://www.odatahq.com/)) and loved every minute of
it. I still look at what we made and find true joy in it. But the end game was
typical of most developer platforms ...

------
overcast
I feel strange that this is the first time I've ever heard of app.net. I
assumed it was something Microsoft related, apparently not. I suspect the
combination of these things is why this failed.

------
bradezone
Doomed to fail from the beginning. Horrible name which was leeched from
Microsoft, and Twitter was clearly already so far ahead. AND THEY WANT ME TO
PAY?

------
mergy
Really loved and appreciated what Dalton, Berg, and the team was able to
build. It was an awesome community for quite a while. Great job and sorely
missed.

------
Zigurd
IIRC YC had a bet in the subscription social network space for "family social
networks." That has obvious problems with the growth model, similar to but
different from Path which had an arbitrary limit on individuals' number of
"true friends." Path was taking the word "friend" too literally. That got
pivoted and/or rolled up. Where is it now?

------
chmars
Shutdown date according to [https://alpha.app.net/](https://alpha.app.net/):
March 15, 2017.

Shutdown date according to [http://blog.app.net/2017/01/12/app-net-is-
shutting-down/](http://blog.app.net/2017/01/12/app-net-is-shutting-down/):
March 14, 2017.

Which date is correct?

~~~
whatnotests
Depends on which side of the International Date Line you are.

~~~
chmars
Laughing tears emoticon, a few times! :D

------
myrloc
So... who gets the domain?

~~~
sideproject
My thought exactly! Always loved the domain. :)

------
nsebban
MMW : This domain will be sold a fortune.

------
LukasRos
I was an earlier user and still active to this day and it's sad but not
unexpected to see them go. Their approach towards social networking business
model was still a valuable experiment.

------
EGreg
The difference, as always, seems to be user adoption and funding.

You need both for your project to succeed. This should not be underestimated.

The nice thing is that if your platform is decentralized, hosting is a non-
issue and you just have to focus on adoption.

------
bald
"give it ample time to bake" that was the strategy? having it sell itself?

~~~
nicky0
They did try to sell it for a couple of years but by that point in 2014 I
think they had essentially given up already. But the revenue was covering the
hosting costs so it seemed sensible to just leave it going, and leave
possibilities open.

~~~
bald
as an entrepreneur, you should know when it's time to let go. either you
continue the start-up a.k.a the experiment, and try to iterate towards a more
successful direction - or you shut it down. I think standstill at such a point
is really the worst of all options.

------
coo
Good luck to Caldwell. It would be interesting to read his account on what he
would do better if he could do it all over.

------
mxuribe
I wonder if the code base that they open source will become the basis for
another decentralized social network?

~~~
ourcat
They have said they will be open-sourcing the codebase. But it doesn't appear
to up on their Github yet :
[https://github.com/appdotnet](https://github.com/appdotnet)

------
Kiro
If the launch would have been more humble maybe this wouldn't be such a
spectacular failure.

------
kennydude
They were trying to solve a problem, with a copy of the problem. Not surprised
really.

------
newsat13
Is app.net some social network? Why the name 'app.net' ?

------
arielm
App.net'S failures, IMO, were not a result of being too early as Dalton
suggests. Instead, they failed at building a company. Confusing branding,
wrong messaging, and ultimately a product without a need. That's why app.net
failed.

[https://arielmichaeli.com/where-did-app-net-go-wrong-
bb4326a...](https://arielmichaeli.com/where-did-app-net-go-wrong-
bb4326a440f4#.zii8m9uu0)

------
jorgemf
less than 50000 downloads in Android and 60 reviews in AppStore in 5 years. I
think you can get better numbers without marketing.

Seriously, whatever you do, you need to spend the same amount of time
promoting it, otherwise no one will notice. 50000 downloads is nothing in 5
years, it is 2.7 users a day. If you are in SanFrancisco you can get more than
3 downloads a day just going to the street and talking with strangers.

And they got 2.5M in their series A.
[https://index.co/company/AppDotNet?utm_source=thenextweb.com](https://index.co/company/AppDotNet?utm_source=thenextweb.com)

Where were their budget for marketing? At least I would have expected 500k in
marketing and 1$ per install, them we can talk about the users not liking the
product or whatever.

UPDATE: you can keep downvoting (I would appreciate a feedback comment to
explain the downvote) but it doesn't change the fact that marketing is more
important than the product and they didn't spend on it

~~~
narrowrail
I don't mean to pick on you, but this is getting tiring for me. When you say
'marketing' you mean advertising and promotion, because product definition is
part of marketing. Sizing up the market and determining what to build is
marketing (inbound), advertising and promotion is also marketing (outbound). I
realize these definitions have been in flux, but I'm talking traditional MBA
definitions. I feel a lot nuance is being lost on people who believe marketing
is a sophisticated-sounding term for advertising and promotion.

~~~
jorgemf
> I don't mean to pick on you, but this is getting tiring for me. When you say
> 'marketing' you mean advertising and promotion, because product definition
> is part of marketing.

Well, you shouldn't judge me so fast. I have an MBA with marketing and I have
been working on marketing for some time in my life. So I am aware what a
marketing plan involves, and promotion is a small portion of it. I cannot
suppose the founders knew all about marketing, but I would expect them to
spend some money in promotion even if it not wise money.

Maybe you like this more. You have to do some marketing: define your product,
know your users, define your goals, find the channels where your users are,
target them, promote your product to those users in those channels, measure
the results, analyze what happened and rinse and repeat. (that was also a
small definition because marketing is still more)

~~~
narrowrail
I didn't judge you, sorry if it came across that way (that's why I said I
wasn't picking on you specifically, but your choice of words; apparently, you
even know better than that). It is just so ridiculous that I can find 10+
instances per day on HN where people use 'marketing' when they could more
correctly write 'advertising/ promotion'.

------
johnalamos
Never heard of it

~~~
Corrado
I'm a pretty active lurker on HN and I really had to think hard about what
App.net was and why I might care. I think that is an indicator of why they
might have had a hard time surviving. Even hardcore nerds didn't know about it
so I really don't expect "normal" people to know about it. :(

------
astrodust
This reeked of being dead the day it launched, so it's hardly surpising, but
it's also tragic.

Why is it so hard to create a Twitter alternative that's popular and
effective? Does the world tend to gravitate towards single standards for these
things, like Facebook, HTTP or email?

~~~
Analemma_
Network effects, and the existing services being "good enough"

~~~
sdegutis
Yeah basically that. People don't want extensible services or open platforms.
They don't want full control over their data. They don't want 100% privacy.
These are all niche things that like less than 1% of people want. Most people
just want a thing that does one basic job and does it good enough.

~~~
narrowrail
I can see how you would takeaway that perspective, but App.net never
guaranteed what you laid out. It was proprietary just like Twitter. If App.net
ever got mainstream traction, we have no idea if they would have held to those
principles, and history tells they would not have. The free, open, federated
network's time has still not come. Most people are still coming to grips with
the existence of these social networks; they have not yet jumped to the
conclusion that makes App.net make sense. I believe it will happen.

------
jlward4th
Can I have my $75 back?

------
Apocryphon
Kinda ominous that the main Twitter alternative right now is GAB.

~~~
duiker101
What's that?

~~~
ceejayoz
Twitter for the alt-right, it seems.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_\(social_network\))

~~~
LeoPanthera
Let's not normalize white supremacy by calling it "alt-right".

