Waiting for the Exit
Those Ello invitations came with passwords that looked like they were generated by throwing words at a wall. Soldiers-round-life. House-found-species. Country-give-flower. Something about the randomness felt like a promise—that you were getting into something real, something that didn’t care about your data.
For six months, Ello had been existing in near-total obscurity. Then suddenly last week, invitations flooded everywhere, and nobody quite knew what to do with them. A few brave souls signed up, dragged their friends along, and then the media noticed. All at once, it was the hot thing. Facebook was dead, everyone who mattered said so. Here comes Ello—supposedly the future, and it looked like a half-finished Tumblr theme.
The pitch was seductive: no ads, pseudonyms allowed, nudes allowed. A genuine alternative to Facebook’s surveillance capitalism. Some of the coverage was almost giddy about it. Ello positions itself as the answer to Facebook’s overregulation,
one tech writer wrote. The LGBTQ community especially had a reason to look—Facebook’s real-name policy had been pushing people away. Here was something that didn’t care.
The numbers were wild. Twenty-seven thousand new users signing up every hour. The growth looked like something that actually mattered. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that almost everyone signing up hadn’t really thought about what happens next. Andy Baio, who worked at Kickstarter, laid it out clearly: Ello had taken in $435,000 in venture capital. Venture capitalists don’t hand over that kind of money out of goodness. They’re waiting for the exit. The plan is always the same: get the users, get the data, get bought out, and then cash out.
This is how it always goes. Facebook wasn’t built to be evil—it was just built to grow. Growth needs money. Money needs an exit. And once the exit happens, the thing you loved gets absorbed into something you don’t control anymore. MySpace went the same way. StudiVZ got bought and killed. It’s a pattern that never stops.
Being online in 2014 means you’re not a person to these companies. You’re a data stream. They’re not creating platforms for you—they’re creating machines to collect you and sell you. We march from one to the next like there’s no other option. The idea that we could build our own things, host our own spaces, create our own networks without depending on anyone—we’ve been trained to forget that’s even possible.
The tools exist, actually. WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll. People could run their own spaces for a few euros a month, build networks directly with friends’ sites. Own their words. Own their links. But it takes work, and work requires motivation that most of us don’t really have. It’s easier to complain when Facebook changes the algorithm again, easier to create a group called ’I Want the Old Timeline Back’ with 62 members and feel like you’ve done something. Then move on. Post something else.
What will Ello become? No idea. Maybe it gets bought by Facebook or Google in a year. Maybe it actually becomes something. Maybe it just gets forgotten, like everything on the internet eventually does. But before you bet on this new network being your salvation, I’d stop and think about whether there’s actually any other way to live online. Whether you’ve exhausted all the real options, or just stopped looking because it was easier not to.