Ello, Goodbye

Is ello.co the first social network to jump the shark before it’s even out of beta?

Today has not been a good day for the fledgeling application. Their expansion coincided with a mass exodus from Facebook as a consequence of Facebook’s heavy-handed enforcement of their “real names” policy, and a flood of new users found a system that wasn’t ready for prime time. Simultaneously serious doubts have been raised about their potential business model.

First, the beta went live without any form of block or muting functionality, which ought to be a fundamental part of any social networking application, and guarantees it will turn toxic the moment the trolls turn up in any numbers. Which also makes it unsafe for anyone who’s concerned about being stalked or harassed online. They did have a lengthy and rather vague list of speech codes, some of which were themselves problematic, which combined with a lack of a block function gave the impression they wanted the sort of centralised top-down moderation typical for smaller community sites rather than the sort of decentralised user-level moderation that actually works for larger unfocussed networks. This might explain why knowledgeable and reliable people believed the hoax that ello were banning users referencing “#GamerGate” as “hate speech”.

Second, it’s another closed-source proprietary system with no API and no means of exporting the data you’ve been putting in to it. The world really doesn’t need yet another walled garden that retains complete control over your data and your connections. I still live in hope that the next generation of social networking will be an ecosystem of open source applications which no one corporation controls. I’m not holding my breath though.

Finally, the founders never revealed the fact that they were funded by venture capitalists, which suggests the promises of being ad-free and not selling user data may well not survive the exit strategy demanded by the VCs. Vague promises not to be evil seldom survive IPOs or sales.

At the moment, I don’t think ello.co is for me. There is a chance that it might take off. But at the moment at its best it’s value little more than an insurance policy against Twitter turning bad. I can’t see it becoming the Facebook killer it’s been touted to be. It’s more likely to fade away like app.net did.