i'd definitely like to read some less incendiary long-posts on the downfall of cohost1; so far all i've found are “single issue voter” perspectives and uncritical obituaries. i'm gonna miss the site, but i'd also like someone smarter than me to tell us why it happened

1: i feel like it needs to be able to consider the realities where the assc manifesto is unsustainable and doomed from the start, and where it's the only moral way to run a start-up these days


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bark's post:

well, the short answer is that the site required money to operate, and none of its strategies for getting money worked, because they weren't sufficiently exploitative

we did predict it wasn't going to last, from the moment we joined. the thing it was trying to be was a contradiction, because of the money and for other reasons.

so our take is that the salaries were extremely low for the type of work it was.

just to contextualize the rest of this, we have seen people saying the salaries were too low. we have also seen people saying the salaries were too high. we've seen more of the latter.

like, we intentionally took a substantial pay cut when we moved to the non-profit world. we're making a fraction of what we would in industry, and we do that by choice because we believe in what we're doing and we're getting compensated in part by the belief that we're at least not making the world worse with our work, which is something we can no longer find in a for-profit context.

the cohost staff were making less than us. nobody has any business claiming they were paid too much.

there is a case to be made that they should have paid themselves more, because they need to be able to pay market rate to anyone they bring on board later, because it isn't fair labor-wise to ask anyone else to take less than that. of course, that would only apply if the company was going to turn a profit at some point, which it did not.

so we think it was an entirely defensible choice to pay themselves what they did.

we do believe that, like....... programming salaries have kept pace with inflation, whereas essentially no other industry has. that's a serious problem. everybody should be paid more than they are, except the actual rich assholes.

the macroeconomic policy decisions made by central banks and legislators have heavily favored corporations, at the expense of the working class. that needs to change, that's super important. yes, it's true that tech workers are comparatively privileged, but the solution needs to be to lift everyone up.

was that the argument you were hoping to see, or was there another topic you wanted?

In hindsight with my massive brain I think they should have planned better for the possibility of running out of money. The vast majority of their expenses were payroll. A plan to run a skeleton crew occasionally in periods where money was tight, while searching for more funding or whatever, might have been a worthwhile idea. I've always been of the opinion that social media sites are well equipped to just go on cruise control (with at least 1 person to fix any technical issues that arise, and 1 to do moderation type stuff).

That's all speculation though, I can only really comment objectively on my experience as a casual user of cohost.

Artist alley seemed like a good idea, and then I saw it got relegated to a tab I'd have to consciously go and visit. I visited it maybe once or twice and found myself (someone who's not very consumerist) not particularly motivated to spend time in a portal entirely dedicated to looking at adverts and spending money. I wouldn't have minded seeing like 1 artist alley post on the sidebar, and I imagine it would have increased the value of artist alley to the artists too. I'm sure there's a few listings that I would have actually found interesting if I had been bothered to go out of my way to view them.

Tipping users would have been cool. Not sure how much of an impact it would have, but I imagine better than nothing. Sounds like they got screwed while going to implement it. That sucks.

The biggest thing that impacted me personally was just constantly getting logged out. I don't want to have to remember my password every time I want to just see a few posts. I imagine they lost a lot of casual users this way. I haven't been on cohost regularly the past few months because every time I open my feed there's a big login screen where it should be. Stuff like that, while small, have a deceptively large impact. Kinda crazy it's been happening for this long. Idk if it's a bug or they just set the worlds shortest cookie expiry or what. Regardless, a social media site should really put a giant priority on getting this sort of issue resolved.