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Comment by milesf | Hacker News Reader

Moral of the story: Don't sharecrop

Building something on the web on your own platform means you own it, control it, and are not beholden to anyone or any company provided you are reasonably within the law.

Building an app for iPhone? You're sharecropping. Android App? Sharecropping. Facebook? YouTube? You guessed it.

My friend Ryan Bates build railscasts.com but has been on hiatus for almost 4 years. Even so, his site still has value, and at any time he can pick it back up again and start rebuilding. If you love freedom, I don't know why you would pour your life, mind, and skill into anything that's sharecropping.

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Of course it's better to control your own destiny, beholden to no one. But giving that as advice, without addressing how much harder that has gotten over the past decade, just seems out of touch.

People use Facebook services to make a living because that's increasingly where their customers are now.

Businesses need customers, and customers have migrated to a few platform providers. Telling people to stay away from those platforms is like telling someone to open up a retail store in the middle of nowhere.

Hmmm. The trade-off that might cause one to "share crop" (which is a great analogy) is the reach one can get. It is a lot easier to build an audience on Twitter or Facebook than on the open web, because that is where the people are. Building an app for the iPhone or Android markets? That's where the people are (though fewer folks install apps than in the past).

The key is to know that you will be forced to transition off that platform, and to build for that day. (Instagram lived through this, meerkat did not: http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-ins... )

There's no trade-off. You can use platforms like facebook or twitter to increase your exposure and reach, but make sure the real content is either hosted on or duplicated on a site you control. That way, if one platform decides to kick you off, you're not completely toast.

Unfortunately, that's not an option for iPhone app makers. Those people (and their incomes) are at the mercy of Apple.

Doesn't FB specifically reward users who use its native (captive) tools? If so there's a reward to being a sharecropper and thus there is a trade off.

Agreed that Twitter does not have such tools.

FB certainly shows posts with photo and video uploads attached to more users than text and link posts.

What if your land is barren and devoid of nutrients? Share cropping might be an attractive option then.

Is the web "barren and devoid of nutrients"?

The earth may be a fertile place, but the plot of land I happen to own might be pretty barren (new domains, no audience yet, etc).

I host my own blog and use a static generator for it, but I'm aware that this introduces a drop off multiplier.

I'm happy to not be a sharecropper, but I don't fault those who choose to do so.

I think it is not quite as easy as that. There are also stories of people who got shut down by PayPal. So at some point you'll be dependent on somebody, at least a payment processor - at least until Bitcoin becomes more prevalent...

And what about the search engine - if you fall out of Google's Index, business will also be harder.

There may be ways around it, like opening a physical shop where people can pay you in cash, but these are not automatically the better businesses to build.

So he depended on Rails. If RoR is no longer interesting, neither will be his screencasts.

If net neutrality goes the way it seems this week, sharecropping might become even more of a necessity.

If you have apps in multiple store, is that 'sharecropping'?

Does the app really need to be hosted on a phone?

Does Ryan have plans to get back into doing his rails casts?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good question. Only Ryan knows.

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