I don't know enough about @ravelry's situation or the politics of online knitting(!) to know if theirs is ultimately the right decision. But crocheted hats off to them for doing *something*, when tech companies a thousand times their size have found it expedient to do nothing.
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May I gush about Rav for a bit? Because they do many things extremely right. Biggest is how they handle advertising. Yes, they are ad-supported. But ads must be relevant to their market (yarn) and approved by a human. Nothing dynamic, no scripts, not even animations.
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Just static banner ads, that they deliver themselves (no outside ad networks involved). This makes me happy both as a knitter and as a security person. Another is that they don’t try to be all things to all people. They know they’re not Facebook. They serve a niche market,
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And cater to that niche. This gives them the freedom to do features that specifically serve that market. Like magic-linking patterns, or projects. That makes no sense outside of Rav, but is everything to its users.
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Also, everything is completely custom code. Other than AWS, there’s not much in the way of weird 3rd-party dependencies. This allows them to build exactly what they want, without being limited by what other people have made available.
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A lot of this is possible because it is an extremely small team. It wasn’t until relatively recently that there were actual employees. I am always super-impressed by what they accomplish with the resources they have.
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I know this decision will anger a bunch of people, but this is what you can do when you don’t have shareholders: you can do what you believe is right for the community you’ve built.
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Replying to @TindrasGrove @ravelry
You can do it when you have shareholders, too!
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Yes! But it’s way easier when you don’t even have to think about them :)
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The big tech companies are structured in a way that gives a controlling interest to the founders. Zuckerberg and Page/Brin can do whatever they want, just as if there were no other shareholders.
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Yeah, but there’s that whole making a *profit* for the shareholders thing. And when your entire business model is ad/click/number of accounts-driven, restricting activity isn’t good business sense. Which is annoying because I would happily pay for ad-free Twitter.
0 replies 0 retweets 1 likeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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