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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

i think the branding "open source Amazon" is just way too ambitious/big. invites a lot of confusion/criticism if Amazon is different things to different people.

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They previously submitted the same link with a different title and got... 3 upvotes.

The Amazon comparison clearly helped to get on the HN front page.

> Show HN: I'm building an open-source order management system and marketplace API

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=openship.org

Just goes to show that for all of HN's hyper ad awareness, we still fall for basic click bait in our own territory.

Another way to frame it (from the opposite direction) is a collective failure on "our" part (if there is such a thing as "us") to explore and promote genuinely interesting things just because they lack the sparkle of click bait on the outer surface.

Maybe it isn't that we "fall for" click bait, it's that we very loudly ignore stuff that isn't.

Either that we actively (doubtful) ignore non-click-bait, more that we are programmed (in some sense) to only pay attention to click-bait.

It is genuinely difficult to ignore things which sound alarming but usually either nonsense or much less alarming, than it is to actively investigate everything, whether it seems alarming or not.

The later is much more difficult but also a lot more fruitful - it is why Google News was so good, a simple collation of all news instead of only click-bait-y news, and why it is genuinely terrible now (mostly dominated by click-bait-y news again).

And again, an illustration of active versus passive - actively filtering google news feeds was fruitful, passively filtering led to algorithmic optimizations which ultimately favored high click counts and therefore more click-bait-y news...and ultimately at this point to being "click-bait highlights of the day", akin to some nonsense like yahoo or msn news.

An open source order management system is interesting to a certain number of people, but probably doesn't affect me personally. It sounds like another open web storefront builder if i had to guess based on the title.

An open source Amazon is a big deal, it implies that it aims to do what Amazon does, not just a repo you can clone and build an online store, and I might be placing orders there someday.

A distributed open source Amazon. Storing goods in people's rooms. Creating a distributed worldwide warehouse, kinda like P2P. With a fleet of uber-like delivery persons. Each participant gets a share of the profits.

Sometime I feel like submitting to blackhole when not receiving any comments, but I've adjusted the expectation over time

I think we get excited by big ideas, and things that sound like big ideas. That makes us a great sounding board. On another forums it'd be 'i like amazon, down vote' or 'i don't need that, ignore'.

At least here, we move on perceived merit, however superficial

"Show HN: I'm building an open-source Amazon in Rust" would be even better

I think it’s good marketing.

Amazon’s primary source of revenue is as a market-maker/logisticics provider, so why not position yourself as a competitor if it gets contributors interested?

I had thought until now that Amazon primary revenue stream is running a good chunk of the internet. Quick research tells me, you are right.

Revenue for Amazon is in the retail business. The margin however is a lot better in the AWS side. Warehouses and logistics cost real money to operate.

Amazon to most is primarily a website where you get everything mostly reliable and mostly with a consumer focussed service (I for one never had any issues when returning things, any problem was like "yeah ok, send it back, we send you a new one or do you want a refund?" ... For sellers they play a different game with their market power, discounts or they won't offer your things or rank competitors higher)

should start small, like an open source Google, then work your way up to an open source Amazon.

Harsh, but true

literal LOL

Nobody ever wants to open source Pornhub. Wide consumer interest, no physical products to worry about, lots of advertising potential - and your not competing with Amazon, Wal-Mart, Google, Apple, or Target. Sounds like a better deal to me.

Constant hassle with payment processors deciding to ban smut once you get too big, though.

> Constant hassle with payment processors deciding to ban smut once you get too big, though.

Not doing something because you might get too big is not sound reasoning.

When you get too big, that's the time to worry about it.

The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.

> The payment processors will shut you down even for your first payment if it's for porn. More likely - you'll never get to a first payment anyways, they won't sign the contract.

If that was even occasionally true, the tons of paid porn sites wouldn't exist. The fact that they both exist and take popular cards tells me that that cannot possibly be true.

There are special payment processors catering to porn/etc, but the problem is that they require extremely large collateral and have other unusual requirements that are untenable to new businesses. Most probably they won't even talk to a startup (I tried, didn't get a reply). There's a reason why startups like OnlyFans used normal payment processors and tried to convince them they're not porn instead of beginning with these specialized ones.

Edit: BTW, a large portion of seemingly independent porn sites are actually run by only few companies. Especially the Xvideos corporation.

So we should pivot to building an open source payment processor for porn?

A payment processor is an entity that handles bureaucracy. It's not a piece of software you can run and forget about. It is many people working around the clock taking phone calls.

I should have been clearer and said "software to aid in running a payment processor" but I used "payment processor" as a shorthand. Just as "open-source Amazon" is shorthand for "software to aid in running an entity like Amazon."

If someone got it to be popular enough, MindGeek would buy it and you'd be back at square one.

Maybe practice creating an open source Microsoft before quitting your day job?

Many have already done open source Google and MS. We have those solutions already, and they are great though not yet pervasive. We need open source market place and logistics, and that is where they should stay focused.

For some blissful seconds I thought this post would be related to reforestation efforts.

Probably for this crowd anyway. My first thought at seeing the title was AWS, not the store front.

Also very difficult to compete with Amazon. Amazon makes their operating profits from cloud computing and subsidizes their retail market with it. That is how they keep prices so low.

The result is a form of predatory pricing which should be illegal.

Instead a company should subsidize their product with VC funding like every single company on YC does..

I would be down for an open source AWS services. Shouldn't be to hard to make web front end to the fire cracker instance, but make everything in the backend open source, so any one can run the community edition.

Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, and then you run your "open source AWS" on AWS xD. I believe what you mean it's called Open shift, kind of.

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