I developed an open source "user management system" circa 2001 which I used on several sites, including one that had 400,000+ users, a famous preprint archive and the web site of a county-level green party. It was patterned on what sites like Yahoo and Amazon had at the time, did email verification and numerous things that were a hassle to implement, had great screens for the administrators, all of that.
I couldn't get anybody else to adopt this software despite putting a lot of work into making it easy to pick up and install.
10 years later competitors popped up like mushrooms and were adopted quickly. The thing they all had in common was somebody else owned your user database. So yeah I feel pretty cynical.
My university had a great shared browser bookmark management system, even with a basic discussion support for them. In 1998. It was not super popular because people just didn't have that many links to share, eventually it fell offline and got accidentally deleted in 2001.
I couldn't get anybody else to adopt this software despite putting a lot of work into making it easy to pick up and install.
10 years later competitors popped up like mushrooms and were adopted quickly. The thing they all had in common was somebody else owned your user database. So yeah I feel pretty cynical.