Easier said than done… if you are a YouTube creator, are you supposed to set up your own video hosting to compete? And how many of your viewers will move over to watch your stuff there? This advice probably works for blogs and mailing lists but isn’t really actionable for other content.
I think one method here is to incorporate your own site into the content as much as possible. For example, if you are a creator, get people to sign up to a newsletter to get the source files. Get people onto your platform/forum/whatever as well as watching through YouTube. Easier said than done, but better than not doing anything.
From there, you also ensure that you have a backup of all your videos. I've talked to people that only had their stuff on YouTube/Facebook/whatever. It is super risky. If you have a backup, and YouTube bans you, you can rehost elsewhere, it won't be as big, but you might still have a business afterwards.
Also something that needs to be noted, you don't need the same original numbers of people in your kingdom to make equivalent money.
When you're making commerce in someone's fief, they will demand tribute as well. In the confines of your own kingdom, all the ad dollars are yours.
Which also means you don't need to chase the same amounts of people to make similar coin, especially if the deals you make with advertisers are between you and the advertiser (not you, the advertiser, and the king of some other fief).
One way is to release videos 1-2 weeks early on your own site.
Well there is podcasting and PeerTube.
YouTube offers millions of dollars in free advertising to content creators along with tens of dollars in free hosting.
Indeed, I was just trying to point out some decentralized alternatives.
With podcasting you’ll almost certainly be reliant on being searchable on the major podcasting apps.
PeerTube is as close to nonexistent as a video platform can be.
With YouTube people can just click the "make money" button. YouTube handles the ad sales and payments. Both are your job if you're podcasting or publishing on PeerTube.
Hosting video content is not an unsolvable problem. YouTube's moat is economies of scale and user base. YouTube's draw is the "make money" button.
You're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider.
Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom.
This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.
Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.
On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.
> On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day.
If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
Everyone has to worry about being downranked to oblivion, which is the new normal on most SM sites.
My wife got randomly banned from Facebook Marketplace for a year. Appeal after appeal was ignored, then randomly they restored access more than a year later.
A year is enough time to kill a business.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
That's not correct, just on HN you can frequently see articles about people getting locked out of Google, Paypal, Facebook, etc. with no explanation given. I've been banned for suspicious activity on a social media site on an account I hadn't used in years, probably because someone was trying to steal the username.
> If you're at all legit, you don't have to worry about being locked out.
Complete ignorance of the people who arbitrarily get flagged by algorithms to no fault of their own or get on the bad side of someone at these companies who have a grudge.
You mean like the Texas home schooling Facebook group that keeps getting dinged because Facebook keeps asserting that the word "Texan" implies they are selling drugs?
This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".
At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.
Having your own nuclear weapons is probably like having firearms in your home in that you’re actually more likely to be the victim of that class of weapons.
The alternative is you don't have them and you rent protection from someone who does.
Right, I’m hinting that it’s probably not worth maintaining your own nuclear weapon system in order to host your own website and email newsletter.
This is addressed in the article…
You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well.
One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.
The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.
If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)
Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.
When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.
For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc
Can publish updates on a telegram channel.
Interesting article but it only talks about 1 half of the coin. For the sort of stuff they are talking about you can't get near the visibility and ease of use building it yourself.
You will see a fraction of the traffic that somebody doing the same thing on those platforms will see.
They try to hand wave it with build a tower and bring them back to your site but that rarely works well.
I need to create an account to use your site has a significantly higher bar than I hit subscribe to see your next video in my feed.
I have friends dealing with this very problem. They strongly believe in and agree that they should build in their own kingdom. They hate the platforms and all the ways in which they are bad.
But they are small business owners. They make their living entirely based on digital visibility. They need to get their message out to where the eyeballs are. They may try to get people to subscribed directly to their e-mail newsletter, but that's not enough. Most people find them on Instagram, Twitter, etc. If they delete those accounts, as they would like to, their business will be in deep trouble almost immediately.
Web discoverability has had the same dilemma since its inception. People only remember and actively engage with a few things. A search engine, some media platforms, some communities they are involved in, etc. If a link appears in one of those places it's extremely visible. If a web page does not show up in one of those places, discovering it is next to impossible. What are they going to do, guess the URL?
How can someone get some amount of visibility on the web without putting anything in anyone else's kingdom? Even someone following the POSSE model (post on own site, syndicate elsewhere) is extremely dependent on the elsewhere if they want to be visibility. Without the elsewheres to syndicate to, they will build an empty and isolated kingdom.
Advertising on multiple platforms is a little less risky than building the entire business on, being able to publish to the App Store.
The article didn’t say you should delete all your social media accounts or never post content there…
Right, it specifically says to build bridges from other kingdoms to yours. So using Twitter, Youtube, etc. to bring people to your own site.
Build your castle in the kingdom that gives you the best game-theoretic outcome, but always keep in mind that it's not your kingdom.
Why not both?
Build your castle in your own kingdom but have "vassels" in all those other kingdoms to get the benefits they provide and use them to promote your own kingdom. You might still rely on those 3rd party "kingdoms" for the vast majority of your income but you at least have options if one kicks you out and your fans know where to find you.
[edit: akin to a developer having the official git repo self hosted but mirroring it into github for the community]
I'm about to launch an small indie Web site, and yesterday I started going through a list of 11 social media sites on which to grab the brand name.
But initially the Web site has only an email list signup form.
I figure, if I have an array of icons for social media sites where everyone is owned, then random people interested in the site will just pick one of those.
I guess I'll soon see whether I get many connections that way, whether people actually read their email, whether they forget they signed up and flag it as spam (scrodding me with GMail), etc.
(Later, I plan to have an active Fediverse presence, for people who want some social thing like that. But I don't expect many people to be on Fediverse, so first I'll have to sell it to people. It's an easier sell if that's the only "app" on which I'm putting out stuff, rather than hypocritically supporting all the social media ranching companies by replicating content to them.)
We all built our castle in TSMC's and ASML's kingdom ...
While being guarded by a moat of snakes..
Problem is that everywhere is already someone else's kingdom. This advice amounts to "Don't bother trying to build a castle."
It's true, even assuming you do everything yourself, you're still building within the laws of a country, which is building within someone else's kingdom, as it were. I suppose the real rule of thumb should be "Don't build your castle in an autocracy."
Desktop computers still exist and will happily run games.
Piracy and DRM killed most direct-to-customer distribution of software.
Valve Software got $8.6B in 2023.
Steam has DRM.
Not always. There are plenty games that work without the Steam libraries. Also GOG exists and very healthy with explicit no DRM policy.
But GOG censor their catalog for everyone after feedback from the CCP cough gamers.
Find the kingdom where you have most friends.
More discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662 - Nov 2021 (122 comments)
MrBeast built his castle inside of Youtube.
The thing with being MrBeast is that now he makes YouTube a lot of money, so they have a good reason to keep him around.
Good advice, but really think it is a lot harder to get eyeballs than this makes out. What the big platforms brings is the audience. Yes, you can make a site to archive off the content, and direct people to your own site. But that is a backup plan. If you get de-platformed, and you go it alone, your audience will stagnate and shrink. Each little guy just doesn't have the reach or infrastructure to drive eyeballs.
Hence, why the proliferation of sites that do this for you like substack, twitch, etc... Anything with content, by being a part of a bigger crowd you can gain more eyeballs.
I've had this attitude before and missed out on some major opportunities. For example, even though I was an early smartphone adopter, I refused to develop apps for the iPhone when the AppStore was launched in 2008 because of the closed nature of Apple's ecosystem. There are a variety of billion dollar companies which can attest that building their castle in Apple's kingdom worked out fine for them.
The big question today is: Do you try to make an AI business using OpenAI's APIs, or do you host everything yourself? One could make the argument either way.
You use their APIs in a way that commoditizes them. Ideally your customers don't care if you switch to Anthropic, because the LLM provider is not the reason customers are picking you. Likewise, there is some structural reason that OpenAI will never release a feature that rugpulls you, eg, no 'chat to your PDF'.
An extreme form is self-hosted on edge-only devices where folks are buying some other hw. Ex: Nvidia selling GPUs and giving out free Triton inferencing OSS software. But most are in the middle, eg, some accounting app now with LLMs.
This is a good counterpoint. I fell for this too.
There is an argument for airbnb the lands with a castle on wheels.
The term is "sharecropping".
Kind of tangential, but this article mentions Twitch Boost - I can't imagine small creators having any real issue with this. Building momentum on twitch is hard, and usually involves a ton of luck. If you have no viewers, you get few recommendations, until either the algorithm helps you out and you get lucky or you get a big raid/rehost that gives you the momentum to grow. It's either that or you happen to be one of the first streamers of some entirely new gaming category that doesn't have any big names attached to it, you get lucky there, and grow.
Offering a shortcut to skip all that and pay for growth seems like a common sense move for a lot of small creators. I struggle to think of the arguments against it - are they concerned big creators will flood money into it and drown out smaller ones? They already drown out smaller streamers, especially in streaming categories that are very "saturated." They also have no incentive to boost their stream, they're already top of the recommendations anyway.
Great revenue idea, and a change I as a small creator was welcome to see. Often I have viewers want to spend their channel points or bits or whatever they're called and I tell them to save it, I don't seek profit off of what I do (plus twitch takes it all anyway) I have a day job - but I do feel bad because they seem to want to spend it on something and I only have enough energy and bandwidth to add custom emojis or bot commands, which are dumb and people tire quickly of anyway.
Channel points are free to the viewer and automatically accumulated by watching your stream.
Bits are purchased at roughly a 100:$1 ratio, and about half of that goes to the streamer (and half to twitch).
Yeah, build a business on an island.