
Posterous will turn off on April 30 - brownday
http://blog.posterous.com/thanks-from-posterous
======
chrisacky
To be totally honest, I'm surprised it's taken this long.

 _Everyone_ knew a year ago when they were acquihired that Posterous would be
discontinued. Why do I say this? Well, Twitter's bread and butter is in 140
characters, if they wanted to look at branching out into micro-blogging they
wouldn't need to acquire a company, of whom the majority of their customers
already use Twitter. (It was borderline a zero-value gain for Twitter if you
take out Posterous' talent)

As it stands now, Tumblr clearly won (Although there has been a few emerging
startups of insignificant size. Soup.io is one that springs to mind that is
currently in an accelerator). If you are looking for hosted solutions for your
startup's blog (or you are at all technical), I'd _genuinely_ think about
using GitHub. Start to pull your posts from Posterous and use a static content
generator. Jekyll / Punch / Middleman / Hyde / Korma / nanonc / Frank + (any
of the other 10 static generators)..

The operative point from using services that generate static content is that
you are _always_ in control of your plain-text content. Just push your new
post and GitHub will handle your site. If you are worried about traffic on
your site or extended build periods (I believe GH does rate limit static
sites, and as a comment below mentions, on infrequent occasions builds can
take upwards of several hours) then you can still use any other solution...
Push to Amazon S3 and proxy through Cloudfront, then you will have probably
one of the fastest, geographically distributed blogs on the internet.

This was always happening... Especially when you consider that for the last 12
months I haven't seen a single new feature since they were acquired. I've
logged in, see the same "Posterous has been acquired" header for the last 12
months.

Move on, and safeguard your future content.

~~~
bitcartel
Wordpress is for bloggers, Github is for developers. Why not keep things
simple?

~~~
minimaxir
What about developers who are also bloggers?

~~~
RegEx
Roll your own! It's fun. My site is a custom made file-based blogging platform
written with Python Flask, and it's a joy to use since I made it exactly how I
wanted it to be made. One feature that I really enjoy is being able to call
source files into the post. This allows me to create/update code snippets
extremely easily. Markdown + calling includes on my source files is exactly
what I needed to efficiently produce content, so I made it myself.

~~~
samstave
What about bloggers that want to be developers?

Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?

~~~
RegEx
> Can you do a writeup/tutorial for your setup?

Sure. I can just open source the site after I remove some private stuff and
improve the documentation a bit.

I have a similar site (my old web design partnership vertstudios.com) that
already has an open source mirror[0], but it doesn't have source file
inclusion or tags like my joequery site.

[0]: <https://github.com/joequery/Vert-Flask>

The article linked in the repo has information on setting up nginx and uwsgi
when it comes time to run the thing live.

Keep in mind that my site's workflow isn't perfect by any stretch, but it's
perfect _for me_. That was my main point.

------
fascinated
Obligatory link to "Posterous launches new tools to switch from dying
platforms: A new importer per day for the next 15 days"

<http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous>

~~~
filmgirlcw
Right! And when I wrote up that newsstand the time and noted that Posterous
made it really hard to get your data out, as I recall I got a REALLY bitchy
email from one of the founders.

~~~
jveg
We couldn't win either way. I got a super pissy email from David because he
thought I was covering Posterous too much, as I think you recall.

~~~
filmgirlcw
Indeed! As you said, we were screwed either way!

~~~
fascinated
oh dear :/

------
dave1619
Can somebody please help me out? I'm confused here. I thought Posterous
(before being acquired by Twitter) was doing quite well and was seen as the
biggest competitor to Tumbler. It would seem that Posterous had a ton of users
(would love to know details) and that they could monetize those users fairly
simply through display ads. So, with a ton of users creating content and even
more viewing that content, I would imagine it to be a pretty good business
model.

What confuses me is that rumor has it that Posterous was sold for $10m. I
really don't understand that. That basically is treating all of posterous.com
users/content as worthless, and just buying the team. And it appears that
Twitter did think like that (considering that posterous.com is shutting down).

But my question is how many users did posterous have? What was their traffic
like? Were they doing well, or were they a sinking ship and thus they sold? Or
did Twitter offer much more than $10m (maybe stock options worth 30-40m
more?)?

I'd like to know because I think it would be helpful for startups to
understand this space (blogging, content creation) and what kind of business
models work and what kind of traffic is needed to make a successful business.

So, if there is anybody with inside knowledge on this stuff, please speak up.
I'd also love to hear directly from the Posterous co-founders. Please share
your experiences.

~~~
tobyjsullivan
I think the issue here is simply Money In < Money Out.

As an outside observer, it's easy enough to realize that Posterous could have
monetized but that doesn't really answer the question of whether they could
have monetized _enough_ to pay their ongoing costs.

Most likely they were bleeding money at an extremely fast rate and probably
running out, fast, which is why they sold for $10 million and over time under
Twitter's wing weren't able to figure out a monetization strategy that would
be worth the ongoing costs of running the business. The case is even more
convincing once you consider the opportunity cost of keeping high-quality
talent away from Twitter.

~~~
ahoyhere
From where I'm sitting, you hit the nail on the head.

They COULD have monetized, theoretically, but not once the die was cast.

Yes, lots of people have built CMS platform businesses where they charged
money. But Posterous was probably, as you say, bleeding money, because they
were not designed from day 1 to subsist on $12-49/mo subscriptions.

The choice of the "grow big or go home" model of startup results in a catch-22
when you cannot grow big, nor do you want to go home. The only thing you can
fall back on is (if you're lucky) a 7 or very low 8 digit acquihire. Which is
what this always has appeared to be:

[http://unicornfree.com/2012/the-startup-graveyard-
continues-...](http://unicornfree.com/2012/the-startup-graveyard-continues-to-
fill-up)

------
jxf
The handwriting was on the wall for this when Posterous built data export:
[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-
postero...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-posterous-
finally-lets-users-to-back-up-their-data-will-it-now-close-down-in-2013/)

I do give them a lot of credit for providing a means to export data (albeit a
somewhat clunky one), because way too many services simply shut down without
providing a reasonable way to get your data out.

Will also be interesting to see what the "key initiatives" that Posterous will
be doing at Twitter are: [http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-
team-to-...](http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-
flock.html)

~~~
a4agarwal
We want to make sure our users can move to other sites easily. If you have
suggestions for our exporter, please let me know

The XML file in our export can be uploaded to Wordpress.

~~~
jacquesm
What are the rough operating costs of posterous?

If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down
(like what I've been doing with <http://www.Reocities.com/>).

I don't like large gaping holes in the web.

~~~
nikcub
Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be
interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that
can keep these sites alive.

When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point
it to the mirror to keep it alive.

Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people
working on it.

Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening
more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised
if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms.
Either way the URLs and links all die.

~~~
jacquesm
I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every
month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got
about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is
well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so
I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.

~~~
nikcub
I'd be more than happy to help out if Twitter are willing to do it with
Posterous. Register a non-profit and then go out and approach some of the
larger co's for funds and/or resources to keep it running forever.

Make static backups of these sites using their sitemaps[0] and then ask them
to donate or point their domains

[0] <https://posterous.com/sitemap.xml> (warning: 1.5MB)

~~~
jacquesm
Hm, that sitemap seems to be limited to 10K entries and it isn't clear how it
links to the next level sitemap. I'll get to work on this.

------
bambax
> _We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on
> our incredible journey._

Yeah, right.

How was that "incredible", BTW? I feel I've read that same story many many
times.

As a Posterous user, I'm so glad I used my own domain.

~~~
harryh
Oh come on, have some empathy! They started their own business. They gave it a
go! They had a decent degree of success. Just because they didn't make it work
doesn't mean it's ok to be so dismissive.

~~~
bambax
They are the ones lacking empathy! Did you read the OP?

They left their users out to dry, and instead of telling them (us) that they
are sorry and that maybe they understand our situation of being burned yet
again, they sound like they're very happy with themselves, _"building features
to help [us] discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even
larger scale"_.

I don't even know what that means.

You may argue that the world doesn't end with Posterous shutting down, and
you'd be right. But the tone of that post is not ok.

------
helipad
As a product I was always impressed by the just email, no setup approach.

With the current trend towards people posting one-off or irregular essays
instead of full-featured blogs, it seems as if they veered away from the
simple email posting route too soon.

What was once an interesting approach to blogging was pivoted into a samey
metaservice with nothing notable for me.

~~~
ldng
"they veered away from the simple email posting"

IMHO, as a product, this is where they lost their way. This is when I stopped
caring. Yet maybe this is where they had to go for a successful exit (read
$$$). I don't know.

------
dendory
This is yet another reminder of how important it is to own your content, and
why a blog is best hosted at a domain you control.

~~~
arketyp
I distinctly remember reassuring myself when I created my blog one year ago
that there is no way Twitter would leave out the option to download your data
if they decided to kill off Posterous. It would just be way too bad PR.

------
danso
This has only been mentioned once in the thread, but if Jekyll seems like too
much work to setup, I highly, highly recommend Octopress:

<http://octopress.org/>

It's based off of Jekyll but handles a lot of the boilerplate, including rake
tasks to deploy to Github pages. I've been following the github/octopress
project for awhile and have seen a lot of activity in the past few weeks, so
hopefully version 2.1 is just around the corner.

edit: Also, as a Tumblr user (for my photoblog), I would not recommend using
Tumblr for those who are into technical/indepth writing. The set of HTML you
can use is limited...for example, I don't think tables are allowed. Its social
network of sharing is also more suited toward visual blogs, not ones of deep
content.

~~~
sbilik
I like the idea of Octopress and Jekyll, but the few times I've tried them, it
seems that they don't easily scale. My blog has over 2900 entries. Build from
scratch. _chug chug chug_ That I understand. Now add a new entry and try to
get an incremental rebuild in less than 30 seconds.

Has anyone tackled this in either project??

~~~
glesica
I use a makefile. Only rebuilds the pages that have been added / modified
(which, of course is the point of a makefile in general).

~~~
sbilik
I'm a bit unclear. Do you use a makefile instead of Jekyll/Octopress? Or
somehow in combination with it?

Yes, I do remember that years ago I read about a static web management system
that was makefile-centric, but think it lost popularity as more advanced CMS's
came out.

Also I have trouble thinking about how a makefile can help you manage the
'Prev' and 'Next" attributes on a page. This is, not only make HTML from the
page I just generated, but also go back to the previous writeup and update it
to add a 'Next' link to it.

~~~
glesica
I just have a hacky Python script that reads each file, runs it through Jinja
and spits it out. That is then managed with a makefile. I don't have any
dependencies between pages (next, prev links) so there's no need to touch old
pages on build. I've literally never used those features on any blog I've ever
read, so I don't care about them. The makefile also generates an index file
using the Python script.

------
xfax
These sort of shenanigans make me wary of using _any_ service that has raised
a considerable amount of external funding. Believe it or not, VCs (as opposed
to angels) are only in it to get a good return. This frequently forces
companies to sell out at the detriment to their customers (given the lack of
IPOs as a viable exit option). I get that the founders are in it to make money
as well, but don't expect anyone to use your service knowing well that you
could just _choose_ to sell out tomorrow.

I wonder if we studied funded start ups over the last 10 years, whether we'll
see a pattern of selling out and then discontinuing service.

~~~
jonpeda
angels don't want return?

~~~
xfax
They do, but they are investing their own money and can choose to value
whatever they please (e.g. Social responsibility). VC firms on the other hand
have a fiduciary responsibility to their limited partners to maximize returns.

------
dylangs1030
I really dislike that startups are acquired so often just so they are
discontinued by larger companies. It feels very disingenuous. As if the only
point is to be acquired and get a sizable amount of money.

~~~
Jaigus
It seems it _is_ the only point in many cases. As an example, consider the
vast amount of superfluous twitter-helper apps that were endlessly sprouting
up a couple of years ago. I don't think many of them were seriously intending
on starting a legitimate business out of a web application that helps twitter
users keep track of the followers that didn't follow them back.

~~~
dylangs1030
I don't mind striking it rich with technology.

But I think a part of me would hate to see my blood, sweat and tears poured
down the drain by a large company intent on remaining where they are (not that
Twitter did exactly this but you get my meaning).

------
nell
Services that don't get traction shutdown. Services that get traction and
become successful eventually shutdown anyway. I wonder whats the point of
investing my time in a free service.

------
marizmelo
Not a surprise. I saw posterous as a better option for Tumblr, but after they
create the "spaces" version I felt like lost. The original idea it was simple
and worked, but after they got traction I think they lost the vision, and
after twitter bought them they totally mess up. Well, good luck at twitter.

------
przemoc
When Posterous emerged I had high hopes for it. My first post was quite
enthusiastic.

[http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-
her...](http://przemoc.posterous.com/rouse-e-by-post-ie-why-i-am-here-at-
posterous)

But I quickly understood that their service wasn't meant to improve at all.
Every problem I reported to them was dismissed (directly or indirectly). So I
created following page to warn the others.

<http://faulty.posterous.com/>

I thought about the idea of posting via (plain-text) mail seriously, but they
weren't sharing my mindset.

I left posterous long time ago (well, my CNAME still points there, have to fix
it...) and I see it was a wise decision.

Rule #0 of the internet: you have to constantly backup it!

~~~
johnnyn
This isn't fair at all. Posterous was very responsive to user feedback and
reported bugs. Posterous engineers spent much of their time answering support
emails directly and finding solutions for users. As a matter of fact, support
emails go directly to engineers inboxes. Perhaps the problem was that there
just weren't enough engineers.

Posterous may not have found a way to make money but the site was definitely
meant to improve IMHO. Email, Groups, Spaces, slideshows, sharing to multiple
social networks -- the list goes on.

~~~
przemoc
It was all about some bells and whistles, if anything. Email - barely half-
baked feature and my biggest problem with Posterous, as initially it was their
most hyped core feature (and I believed them). Spaces it's just ol' plain
Posterous, they enhanced the name for some vague reasons. Groups is nothing
special. Slideshows - another lightbox variant. Sharing to multiple social
networks - buggy. The list goes on? So bring it.

Meanwhile, I'll bring my own. Posterous was moderately responsive at most, but
e-mail responsiveness and fixing/improving the site and its functionality are
different things. Even CEO may be responding to my mails, but it means nothing
if it doesn't change a bit of the outcome. I guess the problem was that they
had their own vision and roadmap paved with features that will have the
biggest impact. They were simply unwilling to pay attention to anything else.
It would be fine, really, if they stated it clearly from the beginning.

1\. Initially Suyash responded to my first mail (appraisal; asking for
markdown inline images, feedburner mybrand and introduction of commenting
system such as intense debate). It looked like:

"Thanks for your wonderful email and detailed feedback. I'll pass on some of
your suggestions to the team."

2\. Second thread (Identi.ca autopost and unwanted location disclosure) didn't
get any response.

3\. Third thread (wrong URL of the post being previously private and with the
title changed before becoming publicized, i.e. premature public URL
generation)

"We'll look into changing this behavior in a future update."

4\. Fourth thread (<!--more--> doesn't work with markdown, editor doesn't
switch to markdown mode immediately, even though the post was written in
markdown, no setting for making markdown the default mail posting style)
didn't get any response.

5\. In my mail starting the fifth thread (1 month later) I collected existing
problems. Response, this time from Rick:

re commenting system - "Very few have asked for this, so it is unlikely that
we will implement without a lot more support."

re url prematurely created - "I'm not sure I understand your question."

re edit in markdown mode immediately - "this is in our queue"

re <!--more--> equivalent in markdown - "I will check on status of this to
make sure it is added the next time we update this feature"

re automarkdown mail - "this is in our queue"

re markdown inline images - "this is in our queue"

My response got no response, so 3 weeks later I asked about any progress.

"Unfortunately, no meaningful progress - these are on our list, but not yet
high enough on the priority queue for us to work on yet."

I ask again 2.5 months later.

"Your requests are still on our feature list, but not many people have
requested them so they are not prioritized very highly. We're a small team
with a lot still to add and are trying to focus on the features that will have
the biggest impact."

Finally I was so frustrated that I suggested working myself on some of
bugs/lacking features (free of charge, maybe t-shirt or something) as they are
mostly easy to implement. I wrote also that it's sad that identi.ca problem
was not solved.

"Thanks so much for your offer to help - to clarify, we did look at the
identica problem and it's on our list too. Unfortunately, we can't easily open
up our code to outside developers right now."

I mailed them no more, as you know, it was pointless.

For some time there was a forum available, when people reported their
problems, bugs, etc. It was all the same - "it's in our queue, but not high
enough."

\---

Conclusions

Be honest - if you don't want to fix reported problems and hear about even
simple enhancements, as you won't implement them how trivial they are (because
it doesn't fit into your vision or whatever, I don't know), just say it
clearly in public (on the page) or at least private (in the first response, I
wouldn't bother you anymore).

The tragedy of the present times is mediocrity in everything, but software and
web services in particular. Let's add some new flashy features no matter how
buggy the rest is. Hopefully laymen will think that it supposed to be like
that and technicians can be ignored - they are negligible minority.

------
desireco42
Posterous might not have been as big as Tumblr, but it was big. It was obvious
it's management had some lack of vision, since introducing Spaces and other
confusing additions.

Even with all this, it is completely confusing to me seeing it sold to Twitter
and just shutting down service.

I personally will not believe to use any service made by those guys,
especially Posthaven looks ridiculous in light of how Posterous got miss-
managed.

Having said all this, I am not judging founders for selling out, I think they
did a good thing and it is their absolutely their right, probably could've
gotten way more from someone else, but it's their decision, as online user, I
just can't touch anything they make.

------
kristianc
>> If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace
offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just
remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30.

Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch, huh?

------
kstrauser
I went the static site route (shout out to Blogofile
(<http://www.blogofile.com>) because I didn't trust anyone but me to run my
server and I got tired of running Wordpress and Drupal myself. I paid
NearlyFreeSpeech.NET $20 a year ago to host the static files and have about
half that still credited to my account.

OK, it's not for everyone. Initial setup certainly wasn't for the faint of
heart. But it was fun and replacing my host is as easy as finding another
cheap host for text files and jpegs. It was worth it to me.

------
markkofman
anybody looking to offload Posterous blog into Tumblr - try
<http://www.import2.com/tumblr>

~~~
erdogan
Free alternative?

------
akurilin
Any solid alternatives HN could recommend?

~~~
garry
Posthaven. If you liked Posterous, I promise you will like Posthaven. I was
one of the cofounders of Posterous and wrote much of the site. Brett joined us
as a cofounder and we really enjoyed working on it.

The difference this time is that we'll be 100% sustainable, and we are
pledging to keep the site online forever. It's just me and Brett coding it
right now.

<http://posthaven.com>

~~~
joedev
"Electric word life, it means 4ever and that's a mighty long time"

Forever is longer than a lifetime and we've seen how well just simple
"lifetime" hosting promises go.

------
jakozaur
Nooooo! Why so many simple useful products, that I would be happy to pay for
are simple closed after aquihires.

I know that this may be good for founders, but it let me against trying new
companies which doesn't have a clear monetization strategy.

------
bobdylan1
Is it possible to get a backup of the YC posterous.. or are they moving it?

~~~
tokenadult
Yes, I hope that the pages that were on YC Posterous find another home online,
with a redirect sent to search engines before Posterous shuts down.

~~~
pg
We're moving to Posthaven.

------
vegashacker
They should probably update this header:

 _This is where we post about new features on Posterous Spaces. You can get a
Posterous Space just like this by emailing post@posterous.com or signing up
for a new account._

------
kintamanimatt
This is probably one of those times when we can thank the Internet Archive for
preserving the internet that's no longer with us, or, in this case, the part
of the internet that's about to go dark.

------
nonamegiven
Regardless of where you physically host your blog, or email, or other service,
use your own domain name. That way acquisitions don't matter for your readers
and correspondence, just move and no one's the wiser.

------
Tawheed
If I Was CEO of Posterous (written in 2010)
[http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-
posterou...](http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/06/if-i-was-ceo-of-posterous/)

------
minhajuddin
Simple solution for developers who are bloggers <https://substancehq.com/>

------
bfe
I'd suspected as much based on the decline in performance and the vanishing of
the previously wonderful customer support.

------
jwmoz
Nooooooooo. My blog! <http://blog.jmoz.co.uk>

Best replacement, wordpress?

Need to 301 everything :/

------
erdogan
Any wisdom on how to import posterous content into tumblr? Posterous's auto
post is not working for me anymore.

------
aerolite
Wow, I never saw that coming :(

------
fiendsan
true dat, it was just a matter of time! but i think its their loss, you create
a brand and service that was really liked, i think selling it out to someone
else to develop would be the most beneficial!

------
weddingcakes
Shame, lots of good posts on Posterous blogs.

------
s800
crap.

------
hmans
<http://sloblog.io/> \- simple, responsive layout, Markdown everywhere, syntax
highlighting, BrowserID/Persona-based signup, native comments + subscriptions,
JSON export.

Coming soon: full API (someone's already building an iOS app on it), anonymous
posting, authenticating against Twitter (not just Persona), Flattr
integration.

No ads _ever_, monetization through Flattr, and I may eventually do a full
open-source release. (My business is in training and consulting, not in
running websites.)

Enjoy.

