The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.
As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen.
The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
I agree about private equity: it's merely the latest incarnation of rent-seeking or enclosure-building. The playbook is the same: cut costs, jack up prices, load up with exploding debt, go public or resell before the debt explodes. There is absolutely no value being created here. We saw the same thing with the corporate raiders of the 1980s (who bought companies below book value and scrapped them for parts).
But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation.
Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason.
Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs.
Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability.
I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.
I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0?
People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.
I sure hope so! I missed the serendipity of web 1.0 and then in the past couple of years I realized it’s all still there! In fact, there or more sites than ever behind the sheen of these giant companies.
I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network.
We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/
"Web3" was hijacked by cryptocurrency promoters as the marketing term for various get-rich-quick token schemes. (Generally what made them "web3" was simply that some venture capitalist had bought a bunch of the tokens early and would get to dump them on Coinbase.)
If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...
Ya for me it's been over for quite some time, almost a quarter century since the Dot Bomb around 2000/2001.
What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now:
1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent.
2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet.
3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids.
Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism.
My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites.
Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives.
If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.
Squarespace was my first experience with a hellish technical interview process back in 2014. I went through like 4 initial screens/take-home assignments for a {something} Analyst role that was considered entry level. I eventually gave up, and from that moment on, I hated Squarespace as a company. These take home assignments weren't even relevant for the role, yet they thought it made sense to inject it into the process. I'm glad they're 1 step closer to their demise.
Conveniently after taking over all of Google Domains too! I missed transferring a couple of domains before the cutover and now I’m in squarespace hell trying to get them out. They make it so much harder by putting artificial delays on everything.
I was looking at hosted website/blog options a while back and it looks like pretty much everyone has teaser rates that blow up after some time period and have low-cost plans that almost work for a given need but you actually have to go up a tier of 2.
I have an existing blog on Blogger and have no need for ecommerce or a lot of business stuff. It's basically a home page and a blog. I came to the conclusion I should just leave things as they are and maybe add a second blog for a different purpose.
It's free and if it becomes a problem, I'll deal with it when it does.
I've been procrastinating transferring my domains after Google sold them to squarespace. Now they're getting sold again... Are domains the new junk loans?
It is interesting how most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I have tried to investigate why but could not find a good explanation to why this number is so prevalent.
I mentioned this already in a different thread but private equity behave just like adware companies that buy popular chrome extensions then ruined them for a quick buck. [1]
I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.
The current state of the markets and private equity is deeply troubling. Gone are the days when companies like Microsoft went public at reasonable valuations, allowing everyday investors to participate in their massive growth. Now, companies like Uber and Airbnb debut on the stock market at sky-high valuations, leaving little room for the average investor to profit.
Worse still, the concentration of wealth has enabled large private equity firms to gobble up what were once thriving small businesses across various industries - from veterinary clinics to engineering firms. This trend stifles entrepreneurship and limits opportunities for employees to rise through the ranks and become owners themselves.
America has lost half its public companies since the 1990s. The count of publicly listed companies traded on US exchanges has fallen substantially from its peak in 1996. Back then, the number exceeded 8,000 companies. Today that count has dropped by more than 50% to just 3700 [1].
For a more long-form answer to your question, I recommend checking out "Plunder - Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America" by Brendan Ballou [0]. He gives some insights into the tactics used by private equity firms to acquire, gut, and destroy existing companies and profit by doing so.
Absolutely, especially healthcare. Nearly everything PE touches gets worse. The only ones that benefit are those that work for PE companies (and esp. the partners).
in Tech in particular, the QE period (post-GFC through covid) with low interest rates has seen massive PE activity. most of the "highest multiple ever" or "highest premium ever" or "highest X" have all happened in this time span
as the current rate hike cycle started, PEs were less willing to transact at higher rates, companies were less likely to transact at lower multiples and M&A markets cooled off
I'm not out of the industry, but from the outside, it seems like most parties are in a holding pattern waiting for the soft/hard-landing that is yet to come. I suspect sellers are still holding their breaths for valuations to go back to where they were
I know of at least two companies in the billion+ range that could have sold at 20%+ premium to their current valuations but walked away thinking those offers were too low, only to see markets melt in the 6-12 months that followed...
It must be nice for the founder to pocket $2 billion in cash from selling his company.
For users, on the other hand, I'll hardly trust a PE firm with a SaaS product. There's just too much incentive to jack up prices to service the debt taken to acquire Squarespace, and cut costs on customer support and building new features.
Private equity will only own about 20% of the company, only 20% of the stock was public to begin with. Why is everyone singing songs of doom and gloom?
> Sorry, you have been blocked
You are unable to access web.prd.q4inc.com
> Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
What?? I'm just trying to open the page in the link.
I find private equity's enthusiasm adorable but the temporary hiatus on anti-trust enforcement that first gained momentum during the Reagan era is no longer in effect.
Some expensive lessons are about to be learnt.
(assuming democratic governance remains in effect, otherwise all bets are off)
[+] [-] renegade-otter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|1 year ago|reply
The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.
[+] [-] jmyeet|1 year ago|reply
But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation.
Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason.
Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs.
Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability.
I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.
[+] [-] qeternity|1 year ago|reply
People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.
[+] [-] thiago_fm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bjhess|1 year ago|reply
I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network.
We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/
[+] [-] dheera|1 year ago|reply
As soon as it is owned mostly by investors, everything becomes about shareholder value.
[+] [-] Aaronstotle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|1 year ago|reply
If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...
[+] [-] Alifatisk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] caycep|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zackmorris|1 year ago|reply
What happened was that the original web architects, loosely people like Jimmy Wales, had a different vision of the future than the one we're living in now:
1) The web was supposed to make nearly all information freely accessible with sites like Wikipedia and infrastructure like Coral CDN and BitTorrent.
2) The next step was to make computing freely accessible with stuff like One Laptop Per Child and distributed computing with SETI@home, BOINC, and something like a p2p Docker cluster running on idle CPU time, presented as virtual CPUs on your computer to run any platform code you want, perhaps 1000 to 1 million times faster than today, which hasn't been invented yet.
3) The final step IMHO was to make money/resources/time freely accessible with a p2p UBI system similar to Bitcoin, where joining it would start depositing money into a wallet by virtue of need (potential) instead of ability (productivity), like Patreon on steroids.
Instead the powers that be chose greed around 2007 after a long politically regressive period which undid much of the social progress of the 1990s, ending Moore's law and starting the transition to walled gardens and surveillance capitalism.
My life experience has basically felt like living in the alternate timeline in Star Trek TNG when the Enterprise went through the temporal rift and Tasha Yar was still alive. Not only did we NOT get #2 or #3 above, but even #1 has been steadily eroded to the point that search engines have started to not work anymore. It's not just that nobody is able to get real work done because they're working too hard to make rent, but that rent is increasing exponentially faster than wages. And that any forward progress is eclipsed by transnational moneyed interests who can use regulatory capture to control the US Supreme Court for example, cementing corporate money in politics, preventing the breakup of any monopoly/duopoly and defunding the IRS/criminal justice system to prevent enforcement of even the most basic fraud/antitrust laws on financial elites.
Which brings us back to what you said: just like every other time in history, it will be volunteers working in obscurity without financial support who bring us the next revolutionary tech. I really wanted to be one of them. But after so many failed ventures, I'm realizing that I could have made more money delivering pizza and gambling on the stock market. I'll probably have to get a regular job soon to cover expenses for my aging self and family, then be too tired to work on interesting projects. So nothing much will change - the cavalry never arrives.
If someone really wants to change the world, open source something that eliminates a whole market. 3D printed hand-wound cell phone charger cases, I don't know. Something that liberates someone from suffering and removes all profit so it can't be ruined by subscription spyware.
[+] [-] treyfitty|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] creddit|1 year ago|reply
Yup, they’re right on the verge of that demise.
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
current Squarespace users about to get gouged
[+] [-] dawnerd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|1 year ago|reply
I have an existing blog on Blogger and have no need for ecommerce or a lot of business stuff. It's basically a home page and a blog. I came to the conclusion I should just leave things as they are and maybe add a second blog for a different purpose.
It's free and if it becomes a problem, I'll deal with it when it does.
[+] [-] rstat1|1 year ago|reply
After like a year or maybe it was 2 I forget, the cost of my domain was going to double from $15 a year US to to $30 with Squarespace.
Moved it to Cloudflare, and now it's cheaper than it was with Google.
[+] [-] nkotov|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonjmcghee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nasmorn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darig|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Dowwie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] berkeleyjunk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wnevets|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/malwa...
[+] [-] armchairhacker|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dpflan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gzer0|1 year ago|reply
Worse still, the concentration of wealth has enabled large private equity firms to gobble up what were once thriving small businesses across various industries - from veterinary clinics to engineering firms. This trend stifles entrepreneurship and limits opportunities for employees to rise through the ranks and become owners themselves.
America has lost half its public companies since the 1990s. The count of publicly listed companies traded on US exchanges has fallen substantially from its peak in 1996. Back then, the number exceeded 8,000 companies. Today that count has dropped by more than 50% to just 3700 [1].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/09/investing/premarket-stocks-tr...
[+] [-] manifoldgeo|1 year ago|reply
Refs: 0: https://www.plunderthebook.com/
[+] [-] ants_everywhere|1 year ago|reply
Here's an article from last year, but if you search "IPO drought" in a news search engine you can find a lot of more recent articles https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/0...
[+] [-] ipqk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] airstrike|1 year ago|reply
as the current rate hike cycle started, PEs were less willing to transact at higher rates, companies were less likely to transact at lower multiples and M&A markets cooled off
I'm not out of the industry, but from the outside, it seems like most parties are in a holding pattern waiting for the soft/hard-landing that is yet to come. I suspect sellers are still holding their breaths for valuations to go back to where they were
I know of at least two companies in the billion+ range that could have sold at 20%+ premium to their current valuations but walked away thinking those offers were too low, only to see markets melt in the 6-12 months that followed...
[+] [-] bdavisx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cpach|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tomrod|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seaucre|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jpgvm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toddmorey|1 year ago|reply
Forward-looking statements often contain words such as "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "aims," "plan," "believe," "could," "seek," "see," "will," "may," "would," "might," "considered," "potential," "estimate," "continue," "likely," "expect," "target"
[+] [-] blackhawkC17|1 year ago|reply
For users, on the other hand, I'll hardly trust a PE firm with a SaaS product. There's just too much incentive to jack up prices to service the debt taken to acquire Squarespace, and cut costs on customer support and building new features.
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jumploops|1 year ago|reply
Does anyone have a new favorite domain registrar?
I miss being able to search the search capabilities of Google Domains, specifically the exact match and TLD-specific filtering.
[+] [-] resource_waste|1 year ago|reply
My decision to pick wordpress paid off.
[+] [-] weatherlight|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moomoo11|1 year ago|reply
Personally having used squarespace I'm not a fan of their product, but that's beside the point!
[+] [-] can16358p|1 year ago|reply
> Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
What?? I'm just trying to open the page in the link.
[+] [-] orangesite|1 year ago|reply
Some expensive lessons are about to be learnt.
(assuming democratic governance remains in effect, otherwise all bets are off)