In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors.
I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been.
We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.
HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic.
I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic.
Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod.
Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles.
I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.
Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration:
In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell.
Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.
I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest. If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually knew your stuff. There was a finish line.
Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.
Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.
The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.
IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.
I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.
Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.
That look like my kind of book, I'll definitely be checking it out. Overall I'm still pretty pessimistic about hypertext making a true return, there's too much money in the web as an app-delivery mechanism, plus we have an entire generation of adults who are younger than Facebook, and now companies are trying to gatekeep the content itself because they want to be able to charge for LLM training on their text (I've noticed a significant increase in how many CAPTCHA challenges I get and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with DDOS).
But I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who misses the old web when it really was all about exchanging ideas and information over open protocols. I will never get over this massive sense of nostalgia whenever I remember browsing through weird groceries fan sites and seeing people just documenting their love for whatever hobbies they had and the platforms weren't always pushing political BS to "drive engagement" by making me angry.
His legacy still exists and continues today. Even updated to modern sensibilities, cross-platform, and compatible with all your legacy Hypercard stacks!
As far as I remember, progression was Hypercard -> Metacard -> Runtime Revolution -> Livecode.
I was a kid when this progression first happened, my older brother Tuviah Snyder (now at Apple), was responsible for much of these updates and changes first at Metacard and then at its acquirer Runtime Revolution.
I even wrote some of my first programs as Hypercard compatible stacks. Was quite fun to see my apps on download.com, back in the day when that meant something :).
I always joked it required please and thank you due to its verbosity, but was super simple, accessible, and worked!
How nice, that even today one can take their legacy Hypercard Stacks and run them in the web, mobile, etc. Or create something new in what was more structured vibecoding before vibecoding :).
This seems like something completely different? Livecode looks like just another toolkit or SDK for developing standalone apps, which might be great for the handful of developers using it but certainly doesn't do anything to re-shape how users interact with their computers
Nope, is completely the same base. Scroll the homepage, and you'll see an example of Livecode (updated HyperTalk).
You can open your HyperCard stacks, or MetaCard stacks, or Runtime/Livecode Stacks in their IDE, code, edit, etc, similar to what you would have back in Hypercard days, but with modern features, updates, and additions.
It's backwards compatible with HyperTalk, its current language is an updated HyperTalk (i.e. an updated MetaTalk), that incorporates all that was, but adds new features for today.
Your Livecode apps can be deployed and run as cross-platform desktop applications (Mac, Win, *nix) , mobile applications, and as far as I remember, web applications with HTML5 deployment (so they say).
Not affiliated with them in any way, just sharing my understanding and memories.
Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about this.
(More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This performed much better than button icons or any other approach I could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)
I think that would be Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat thing is that it works in the browser.
HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the most recent updates I see are from last year, and it can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent release was yesterday morning.
There's a fair amount of usage of it on Itch.io, if you are into that indie crowd. I was skeptical of it at first -- the whole 1-bit dithering aesthetic seems a bit too retro-twee, but I find it it is the best Hypercard-alike in terms of functionality -- it "just works" as compared to most Hyperclones that seem more like a proof of concept than a functional program.
- Minecraft
- Roblox
- LittleBigPlanet
- Mario Maker
This is what kids do to be creative.
Slightly more serious (and therefore less succesful):
- Logo/Turtle Graphics
- Scratch
- HyperStudio
HyperCard was both graphic design and hypertext (links). These two modalities got separated, and I think there are practical reasons for that. Because html/css design actually sucks and never became an amateur art form.
For writing and publishing we got Wiki, Obsidian et al, Blogs (RIP), forums, social media. Not meant to be interactive or programmable, but these fulfill people's needs for publishing.
(see the subsubsection "Arcs for toolpaths and DXFs")
Jupyter Notebooks come close to allowing a seamless blending of text and algorithm, but they are sorely missing on the graphic design and vector graphics front --- which now that I write that, makes me realize that that is the big thing which I miss when trying to use them. Makes me wish for JuMP, a Jupyter Notebook which incorporates METAPOST --- if it also had an interactive drawing mode, it would be perfect.... (for my needs).
Pretty sure the next after Hypercard was Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. I recall running an early version of a Director animation on a black and white Mac not long after I started playing with Hypercard. Later I was a Director developer. I recall when Future Splash released -- the fast scaling vector graphics were a new and impressive thing. The web browser plugin helped a lot and it really brought multimedia to the browser. It was only later that Macromedia acquired Future Splash and renamed it Flash.
Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it.
It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG editor that anyone can use.
HyperCard did all that and more long before the web existed, was fully scriptable years before JavaScript existed, was extensible with plug-in XCMDs long before COM/OLE/ActiveX or even OpenDoc/CyberDog or Java/HotJava/Applets, and was widely available and embraced by millions of end-users, was used for games, storytelling, art, business, personal productivity, app development, education, publishing, porn, and so much more, way before merely static web page WYSIWYG editors (let alone live interactive scriptable extensible web application editors) ever existed.
LiveCard (HyperCard as a live HTTP web app server back-end via WebStar/MacHTTP) was probably the first tool that made it possible to create live web pages with graphics and forms with an interactive WYSIWYG editor that even kids could use to publish live HyperCard apps, databases, and clickable graphics on the web.
HyperCard deeply inspired HyperLook for NeWS, which was scripted, drawn, and modeled with PostScript, that I used to port SimCity to Unix:
Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook
>"Apple’s Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and “symmetric” (in the sense that the “reader” could turn around and “author” in the same high-level terms and forms). It should be the start of — and the guide for — the “User Experience” of encountering and dealing with web content.
>"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser." -Alan Kay
>[...] This work is so good — for any time — and especially for its time — that I don’t want to sully it with any criticisms in the same reply that contains this praise.
>I will confess to not knowing about most of this work until your comments here — and this lack of knowledge was a minus in a number of ways wrt some of the work that we did at Viewpoints since ca 2000.
>(Separate reply) My only real regret about this terrific work is that your group missed the significance for personal computing of the design of Hypertalk in Hypercard.
>It’s not even that Hypertalk is the very best possible way to solve the problems and goals it took on — hard to say one way or another — but I think it is the best example ever actually done and given to millions of end users. And by quite a distance.
>Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important principles of “good programming language design”, but they achieved the first overall system in which end-users “could see their own faces”, and could do many projects, and learn as they went.
>For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming problem — that takes advantage of what was learned from Hypercard and Hypertalk — has never been done (AFAIK). The Etoys system in Squeak Smalltalk in the early 2000s was very successful, but the design was purposely limited to 8–11 year olds (in part because of constraints from working at Disney).
>It’s interesting to contemplate that the follow on system might not have a close resemblance to Hypertalk — perhaps only a vague one ….
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
>The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data
>Hi Alan! Outside of Sun, at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, Arthur van Hoff developed a NeWS based reimagination of HyperCard in PostScript, first called GoodNeWS, then HyperNeWS, and finally HyperLook. It used PostScript for code, graphics, and data (the axis of eval). [...]
>What’s the Big Deal About HyperCard?
>"I thought HyperCard was quite brilliant in the end-user problems it solved. (It would have been wonderfully better with a deep dynamic language underneath, but I think part of the success of the design is that they didn’t have all the degrees of freedom to worry about, and were just able to concentrate on their end-user’s direct needs.
>"HyperCard is an especially good example of a system that was “finished and smoothed and documented” beautifully. It deserved to be successful. And Apple blew it by not making the design framework the basis of a web browser (as old PARC hands advised in the early 90s …)" -Alan Kay
>[...] All this is written in PostScript, all the graphics. The SimCity engine is in C, but all the user interface and the graphics are in PostScript.
>The neat thing about doing something like this in HyperLook is that HyperLook is kind of like HyperCard, in that all of the user interface is editable. So these windows we’re looking at here are like stacks, that we can edit.
>Now I’ll flip this into edit mode, while the program’s running. That’s a unique thing.
>Now I’m in edit mode, and this reset button here is just a user interface component that I can move around, and I can hit the “Props” key, and get a property sheet on it.
>I’ll show you what it really is. See, every one of these HyperLook objects has a property sheet, and you can define its graphics. I’ll zoom in here. We have this nice PostScript graphics editor, and we could turn it upside down, or sideways, or, you know, like that. Or scale it. I’ll just undo, that’s pretty useful.
DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:
>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.
- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
You're right. Flash and its legacy would have been better if it had built in "Edit Source".
The earliest Flash projects were these artful assemblages of scripts dangling from nested timelines, like an Alexander Calder mobile. They were at times labyrinthine, like they are in many similar tools, but there were ways to mitigate that. Later on, AS3 code was sometimes written like Java, because we wanted to be taken seriously.
Many Flash community members wanted to share their source, wanted a space where interested people could make changes. We did the best we could, uploading FLA files and zipped project directories. None of it turned out to be especially resilient.
It's one of the things I admire about Scratch. If you want, you can peek inside, and it's all there, for you to learn from and build off of, with virtually no arbitrary barriers in place.
We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access. People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even without being a programmer.
I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were some ways you could use them to access database servers, but setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents and purposes limited to local, single user programs.
HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web won.
Yes! I used FileMaker a lot, and built my first journaling system with it. Like a cross between hypercard and a wiki. It really changed my life and this lead to programming.
"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..."
In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.
On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand it would have been a total security nightmare that makes early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.
Not sure that sculpting clay is the best analogy. Lots of sculpting is hard, as is turning clay, especially if you want to successfully fire the result. Maybe it is an accurate analogy, but people may understand the difficulty differently.
Hypercard is more like Lego - you can simply buy completed sets (use other's hypercard programs) - or you can put together things according to instructions - but you can always take them apart and change them, and eventually build your own.
Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question.
Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed.
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?
SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.
>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.
>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.
>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.
>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”
>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.
>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.
I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.
Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack:
I actually had an experience like this yesterday. After reading Gruber talk about how Markdown was never meant for notes, I started to rethink things. I wanted plain text, to be future proof, then stumbled across CotEditor as a means to edit. Inside I was able to use the code highlighting and outline config to define my own regex and effectively create my own markup language with just a dash of regex and nothing more. I then jumped over to Shortcuts and dragged and dropped some stuff together to open/create yearly and daily notes (on either my computer or phone), or append to a log with a quick action.
It is a custom system that didn’t require any code (if you don’t count the very minor bits of regex (just a lot of stuff like… ^\s- .).
Is it a good system, probably not, but we’ll see where it goes.
inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove
There are a bunch of settings in Firefox that affect this (if you don't mind occasionally breaking a Web site in a way no one will bother to diagnose): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer
The misspelling of referrer was introduced in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the "Referer" header field into the HTTP specification.[7][8] The misspelling was set in stone by the time (May 1996) of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945[9] (which 'reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.0"' at that time); document co-author Roy Fielding remarked in March 1995 that "neither one (referer or referrer) is understood by" the standard Unix spell checker of the period.[10] "Referer" has since become a widely used spelling in the industry when discussing HTTP referrers; usage of the misspelling is not universal, though, as the correct spelling "referrer" is used in some web specifications such as the Referrer-Policy HTTP header or the Document Object Model.[3]
I would say that HTML/Javascript is not a "tool" in the same sense that HyperCard was.
HyperCard's real strength was that it allowed mere users (not programmers) to create their own apps (or "stacks", in the HyperCard parlance) through pointing and clicking, plus an English-like scripting language (HyperTalk).
We have largely abandoned the idea that users should be able to create their own apps, so there is no popular, modern analogue to HyperCard, though some people keep trying. For instance, LiveCode is a commercial product that is directly inspired by HyperCard. And CardStock is an open source HyperCard clone that swaps out something English-like for Python as the underlying scripting language.
If you install the django-extensions package and use runserver_plus instead of runserver, when you hit an exception you get a live REPL in your browser where you can poke around and inspect at will. It's not CL-level power, but it's mighty useful.
For non Django code, the IPython REPL with the %pdb magic enabled drops you in a ipdb debugger on an exception. Doesn't allow resuming but still very useful.
You can see by the URL slug, someone (editor possibly?) renamed the article from "Computer Mouse Evolution". The description ("The mouse is sorely missed.") and social share messages ("The computer mouse has receded into the shadows(..)") reflect the original.
So we work for private equity mostly, and they are in the business of buying and selling steady growth, profitable businesses, as opposed to VC/bubble stuff, so our expectations are a lot leaner. But at a guess, I think we'd expect that to be a 40-50 person company. 118 seems high.
The app is tiny, it has changed very little in who knows how long. Infrastructure is obviously the big thing, so there would be a solid size infra team. Then standard business, product, marketing stuff. I just can't see that warranting more than 50 people unless it's raking it in. Sounds like they could be wasting money on marketing initiatives that may or may not be worth anything at all. Six full time writers seems pretty out there given the questionable ROI of those articles.
Obviously, take this with a huge a grain of salt as this is a guess based on being a frequent user of the app, and having done about 60 diligences and been a part of another 30 or 40 in review capacity. But it seems significantly oversized on what I normally see looking at business that have to be run sustainably. For whatever that's worth!
EDIT: someone had a good point that bandcamp takes international payments, which is complex. So I would revise my first WAG up based on that for sure. Thinking further I would probably guess 50-60 people - which is about what I guess it is after the layoffs. Still a total WAG, but slightly better informed...
Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet. It’s the kind of no-skin-in-the-game perspective that ruined Boeing, and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.
I would also add that Bandcamp was pretty publicly profitable prior to their sale to Epic. Given that they didn’t significantly grow the staff after the acquisition, they would have had to make huge blunders in a very short period of time they owned it. So at this point we’re talking about laying folks off purely for better looking numbers, not really for sustainability.
You are making some wildy off base assumptions. I'm not a finance guy, I'm a hacker. We do technical diligence. I was a developer for 20 years and am doing a music and CS phd right now. I've slung code in over a dozen languages, I'm the open source developer of Scheme for Max and the csound6~ port to Max, an electronic composer, and a gigging musician. I am currently bootstrapping a music education product in Python, Javascript, C++, and Scheme. You would be very hard pressed to find someone as embedded in the problem domain of bandcamp who also does acquisitions related work.
So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
As for most people abhoring PE, believe me, I am under no illusions about our clients. But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%), so while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
Apologies on misunderstanding your role here, most of the speculation on this thread has been related to finances and staffing so I made an assumption there when I shouldn’t have.
> I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all
n=1, but that’s true of my perspective as well so perhaps it’s a wash. I do think the editorial staff were more important to some genres than others.
> they sure like to sell their companies to them
I might suggest that this is a case where upper management’s desires directly conflict with the people making the noise (staff and users)
> while people might like to make public noises about hating PE, they sure like to sell their companies to them.
I suspect that there's not a lot of overlap between people who publicly fume about good companies being ruined by profit-hungry buyers, and people who start companies explicitly so they can flip them to profit-hungry buyers and ditch.
Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
>Does anyone still start businesses with the intention of building and maintaining a really excellent product/service in the long term? Do any of them hold on to that ideal after a few years?
Define "a few". You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end; eventually, they want to do something else or retire. So at some point, they have to sell. Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually. If the company is just a passion project, no one buys it and it just goes under when the owner gets tired of it.
> You can't expect most company owners to want to continue running that company for decades on end
That's not actually weird, though. The idea that everyone should be expected to change jobs every few years is very recent.
> Who's going to buy an existing company that's profitable? Someone who's "profit-hungry" usually.
I didn't think this needed specifying, but there's a large difference between the goals "Create a great, enduring service and make a profit doing it" and "generate as much short-term profit as possible regardless of long-term consequences."
Inheritance assumes that the founder's kids actually want to run their parent's company. Many times, they don't, so they sell. Running a company is a pain in the ass, so it's understandable many people don't want to be bothered.
There's a middle ground between giving a company to your kids and selling it to someone who you know will suck it dry for short-term gains. You can also give (or sell) it to someone that you know and trust to keep it sustainable.
Who? Where do you find this person? Do you have any experience in running a business and selling businesses to others?
And why do people assume that the kids are going to run it well or the same way the founder did? If anything, it seems like the kids of highly successful people are usually spoiled brats, and nothing like their parents. Did Bill Gates' kids create any successful software companies?
The first paragraph was a direct response to your "you can give it to someone you trust" claim.
The second paragraph wasn't related to your response, it was related to prior posts by others and just an add-on for the discussion at large (in case anyone's even still reading it, which I doubt).
And if the loan doesn't get paid off? That city/state is now in a huge hole, having spent money that could've been used to build schools and maintain roads on buying companies off their retiring owners.
In any case I don't see why you would need the detour via local government? A bank could lend the money to the group of employees just fine.
It doesn't have to be the choice between "sell to profit-hungry buyer's and ditch" and keeping a company forever.
Sometimes people just want to do something different with their time after running their business for a long time and a PE deal is the easiest and most structured way of doing that.
Sure. But (assuming you'd reached sustainable profitability, as BandCamp reportedly had) you can choose whether you sell to someone who intends to maintain what you've built, or someone who you know will suck it dry for short-term profits.
> So I use bandcamp all the time, I have purchased tons of music on it, and the articles have not made any difference to me as a user at all. The only thing I care about is the band I'm purchasing from! I use bandcamp for three reasons: lossless audio, no DRM, fair payments to the band. None of those are at all relevant to their article efforts.
Just to add a conflicting opinion, I love the articles and often use them for music discovery and purchases. Of course, the primary function is to purchase music from known entities but the discovery part keeps me coming back. In terms of ROI, to me the articles seem like a pretty smart marketing move…without them I would not have discovered all kinds of artists and made numerous purchases.
I'm sure you're right and some do find bandcamp through them. The really hard part is quantifying that though. Does it generate enough business for six writers? If it does, awesome, and I'm totally wrong.
My guess is the big content initiative was someone's brain child, and once companies get past a certain size, it's very hard to pull the plug on a leader's baby. Until the company changes hand and the next set of leaders want to eat the previous young and put their own babies in there.
> Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community.
Hahaha I don’t think that they have as glowing reputation as you think. I’ve heard creators complaining about lack of transparency, lack of communication, poor customer service, arbitrary decision making with no reason given, etc.
They could be trusted by a bunch of people to probably screw things up less than alternatives and to at least be -trying- to care about the community, while still having made more than enough mistakes to generate a bunch of justifiably unhappy people.
Think about how e.g. your favourite hosting provider nonetheless has a bunch of unhappy ex-customers.
(I'm not asserting what -is- the case here, mind, just trying to flag up a part of the possibility space that I've seen quite a few times over the years)
I work with the parent commenter above and have overseen 500+ tech diligence projects. We get to see a whole company's tech operations, so our views aren't necessarily just "consultant in a suit".
> Your view of bandcamp seems like a cartoonishly perfect representation of a consultant’s perspective with very little understanding of what the company actually does beyond the balance sheet.
And your comment reads like a typical HN armchair technologist.
> It’s not a very complicated product,
Yup, here we go. Classic "I could build this in a week".
>and it’s why most folks absolutely abhor private equity.
Actually it's not. Much of PE is what is driving people to start companies, because it provides a reliable exit path. I know many tech founders who are grateful PE exists, otherwise they would not have the capital available to them to grow their companies. People typically abhor large cap PE which focus on financial engineering. Many growth PE firms (the ones the parent and I usually work with) are value focused, which means focusing on profits (EBITDA) and growth.
> Bandcamp has been successful because of the trust they have within the internet music community. It’s not a very complicated product, but people buy music there because the whole thing feels like it’s a part of the music scene, not the tech or business scene. Given that the Daily is well regarded in that community, I highly doubt those six writers, who were likely paid significantly less than the median staff member, were the problem here. Even if they didn’t have the purely trackable ROI, they were a huge part of the platform’s only moat: its goodwill with the artists and listeners who used it.
To provide an opinion from a user of the platform with "no skin in the game" regarding non-technical aspects of the platform, the social presence of Bandcamp was a significant portion of its appeal to me. I did not (and generally do not on other platforms) regularly seek out new media, and instead tend to rely on on various social media feeds and suggestion algorithms to help expose me to new music. I used to follow Bandcamp on multiple platforms until their acquisition by Epic, when I stopped following them for ideological reasons. The headlines/titles/posts that Bandcamp produced up until that point were far more alluring and generally attractive than any other music platform that I also followed, and their articles were generally of a significantly higher quality than others as well, with a large focus on the artistry present.
I discovered several artists through this form of interaction that I otherwise wouldn't have, and haven't since I began avoiding Bandcamp after their acquisition. I can't imagine that layoffs are targeting purely technical staff (as technical staff are the backbone of the observable functionality of the business), and I fear that the strategy taken by Songtradr will result in a tremendous detriment to the marketability and external usability of the platform. This cost-cutting measure seems to signify either a terribly-fated problem regarding changes to the company, or yet another act of private capital tearing down its competition. Given that Songtradr is in the market of licensing music, I am strongly influenced to believe the latter; using a buyout to cripple _the_ commercially-successful indie music platform (which serves as a competitive and independent means of releasing and licensing and distributing music) seems like a logical way to further capture a part of a market that has historically been dominated by media giants that use legal precedence to dominate.
Interesting little aside for those reacting to the fact that it's PE who pay our bills. While the world of vampire PE certainly exists, most of the time the clients I interact with are genuinely concerned with how to make the business better. And we are far more frequently telling acquirers to spend top dollar on new hires than advising on who to cut! The expectation is that the company needs investment, and that they will get 20% year over year growth for about five years. While the bad rep of PE certainly came from somewhere, in my expereince over the last five years of working in the field, I would way rather be at a profitable, sensible, PE owned company than a VC funded "disruptor" gunning for the big IPO or google acquisition. Our world is positively normal compared to the FAANG scene. We see people who have been at at the companies for 10 to 15 years all the time.
Seriously, I feel like a broken record when I say "Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer" etc.
"Hire a top drawer test automation engineer to lead the company in how to run QA properly - this should be a senior developer"
Trouble is, they are few and far between and PE doesnt know how to find them...they only understand money they dont understand talent. Furthermore, when they do stumble upon talent they dont know how to leave it alone and won't trust it.
PE mistakenly tends to think that they are there for more than just what they are...money.
They need to understand that they are just people with money. The same way I understand that I am just a techie that produces things.
I bought a loaf of bread today, but that doesnt make me a baker or an expert in baking or running a bakery.
Same applies to PE. Just because they buy businesses and invest in them, doesnt make them experts in whatever they buy.
You are misunderstanding the dynamic. I mean, sure, that sometimes happens, but usually if they pay us for a report, the recommendations are shared. Either with the target company or the portco buying the target. So what we say is going to the CTO or VP Eng.
Very frequently what we are doing is providing an outside voice with a direct line to the top to recommend things the CTO or VP Eng already knows and wants to do. I have had many technical leaders personally thanks us and say how relieved they were to have diligence done by real hackers, and how much this was going to help.
Some do, that is becoming more common. There is, understandably, a huge variety of approaches from funds. Some are very hands on and have on staff technical folks who were previously CTOs or VP Eng, others are hands off and just take care of finance.
Any "profitably" run PE company is being sold for parts and its wiring is being stripped. Good job being better than a charlatan startup. Your employer provides nothing of value to society.
This is just completely and laughably wrong. You have no idea how many companies are now owned by PE, and the vast majority of them are run as solid, sensible businesses for five years and then sold again. You have bought into some caricature of what the PE world means.
I wonder if it's also simply selection bias, they only see the failures, because the successes are invisible. I know some tradespeople who set up their own practices and sold it to PE, and the practices are running similarly as before.
Of course if they are doing really well, than their infrastructure/scaling problem could be the big issue (and thus the big expense), and it could be at the point where improving those margins is worth throwing developers at it.
I have also seen some eye watering monthly AWS bills where it makes total sense to hire a bunch of devs to bring those down by even a few percent.
Accounting, human resources, sales (different than marketing), managers, security, operations, analysts, C-Suit, customer service, etc not including technical teams developers, sprint masters, qa, analysts, data warehousing, networking, support, devops, thought leaders.
Yeah, we know all that, I mean that's literally what we do. But I can tell you that I have seen companies with the same feature scope range over an order of magnitude in seats. There's a lot of overhiring in this business.
We often look at private companies going from initial bootstrap to their first exit, and I'm telling you, those are a whole different ball of wax. They manage to do a shit ton with not very many people.
You really don’t need a ton of staff dedicated to those things in a 100 person company. This is still a small business by most measures. A C Suite? It could be a sole owner still at that size, though it is stretching the margins. Roles tend to be less differentiated in small companies, and many of those functions are filled informally.
That being said, 118 still sounds pretty lean for the scale they are operating at.
Bandcamp was profitable. Clearly songtradr thinks they can be more profitable. Assuming average comp of $100k x 60 employees x 1.3 for taxes and additional expenses thats about $7.8MM revenue.
Songtradr just did a series D in 2021 for $50MM and recently acquired 7Digital for $23.4MM. I couldn't find a statement on how much it cost to acquire bandcamp, but it seems this might be motivated by Songtradr being cash poor and not wanting to dilute further.
"But within this discrepancy lies a paradox: Bandcamp, as comparatively threadbare as it may seem, with about $20 million in net revenue in 2022, is almost certainly profitable—based on the fact that the company has stayed lean and taken on no new funding since 2010"
Interesting, thanks for posting. So what could also be going on is "synergies" as they call them. It is quite possible that Songtradr has staff/functions that they think they can share across the acquisition. This happens a lot when a portco (what Songtradr is to whoever owns them) buys an adjacent company.
Of course it's also possible that that it's specific places (i.e. the content) that are being gutted as they aren't seen to be worthwhile.
The things is that once a company sells, it keeps the name, but can instantly become a different company as far as culture goes. If we want to complain about bandcamp being crappy to its people, the finger should be pointing at the owners (whatever round it was) who a) made the hires and b) made the decision to sell. You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).
This is one of the reasons I advise any younger devs I talk to to understand their employer's ultimate game plan. If the employer is hoping for an exit in the period during which you plan to work for them, you should be under no illusions that your job is safe or will stay the same, and you should be getting compensated accordingly. This is the cost of working in the gravy train - we get the high salaries, but we also get the uncertainty that comes with working in a business where exits are so frequent. The two are connected. (And I have been on the employee side during an acquisition twice now, so I've been there.)
> You are throwing your employees to the wolves when you do that. Once you've sold, the decisions are now ultimately made by a new entity with new priorities (for better or for worse).
At its heart, tech is adapting to change and uncertainty through the fusion of creativity and process. Job changes are just another input.
Bandcamp has (or had) 118 people. Their business is music, not a chat app, so it will have different needs, both technical and non-technical. Maybe their engineering team is slightly larger than WhatsApp, but not by orders of magnitude.
Now maybe their business model was flawed (I heard it was profitable, but perhaps not profitable enough). But otherwise 118 people for a global brand-recognized business is pretty lean already: I have worked for medium sized businesses around the same headcount you have never heard of, which don't even operate outside their home country.
It’s all about the evaluation chart you take. It’s easy to pick random criteria to justify any of the following claim. Humanity is bloated. Mammals are bloated. Multi-cellular organisms are bloated. Eucaryote are bloated. Life is bloated.
Because it's a different business? No one needs to run anything. Bandcamp offers an easy way for musicians to have a fairly customizable online presence with a flexible pricing model, a merch store, and, importantly, plug into a larger platform's discoverability mechanism.
yeah but when i talk to artists, they tell me they love the process of creating music. they don't have the money or interest for procurement, warehousing or customer support. They just want feedback on their new beat...
Every band is eventually faced with making a tough decision:
1) Do it for the love of the music.
2) Become a business.
Some bands are lucky enough to do both - not most. Survivorship Bias is key here, and the overwhelming majority of bands do not make any money or perhaps even lose money chasing their passion.
"Just getting feedback" is cool when you're in it for the love of music. For the rest - you do need a way to market yourself, sell merchandise, promote your next show, sell downloads or CD's, etc.
Even then, I think Bandcamp fills the niche for musicians who want to continue doing it for the love of music and want to better serve their community. E.g. they can offer downloadable lossless music for free.
The vast majority of profession artists I know and love have a Bandcamp account. Maybe in the early stages musicians just want feedback on their new "beat". However, at some point they want to have a professional looking profile with releases that they can sell, with a community they can reach out to, merchandise they can roll out at their own pace, etc etc.
You are probably talking to very early stage musicians who would enjoy using Soundcloud over Bandcamp for feedback reasons.
I mean, the big difference is I have used bandcamp and it took me about 5 seconds to figure out how it worked… I read all your info pages and I have no idea what Kuky is. The stock images with all the latin words make it seem like it is just a scam.
our platform facilitates micro transactions with minimal fees because we take away the bank burden as much as possible. We focus on the creators, as long as they create great content people will reward them. platforms turn to crap when people find the need to sell other things. why should i sit through amazing youtube content only to be sold nordvpn? surely the community can do better with micros transactions.
We’ve built a micro transaction engine that helps reconcile payments really quickly & cheaply. This means that creators from anywhere around the world can create amazing content & reward each other instead of having to sell merchandise. We’ve tested the model with two labels so far & we’ve seen it even promotes collaboration “can I pay you for this tune to remind in my track”. This could never happen on any other platform & we think it’s something special.
Why do you think it's a good thing for companies to run at maximum efficiency? Have some slack, spread the knowledge around, let people go on vacation, have a bench, have replacements. Have a world that's more than capital owners and slaves.
It's a SaaS. That's a 10 person team at maximum efficiency. They could be a lifestyle business with 30. They've still got 50% more headcount to reduce.
100 person companies are really small. Some local car dealerships have 100 employees. I think these layoffs are more about redundancy at the buyer than the people not being useful at Bandcamp probably.
A global, international marketplace with about 100,000 sales totalling $3.5 million day. If you can swing serving that from a couple hundred petabytes in your living room then go ahead.
Ah good point! I didn't think about international payments in my first WAG - you're right that that would certainly need some people. So I would up my initial guess based on that, like maybe up another 25-30%, but that would still land us at around where songtradr is going if they are laying off 50%.
Yes I used it, it looks like a website from 2004, clearly their core competencies can not be about building their own file upload, payment etc. but creating Customer Friendly Sexy
Branded landing, working with labels etc. which they failed to do with 100 ppl
Ah yes, the halcyon days of 2004, when websites were all…minimalist?
Bandcamp has been one of the most functional and user-centered designs on the web for a long time now. They asked for far less commission on sales, and they provided options for downloading music in FLAC and even WAV formats, and were well ahead of the curve with “pay what you can” pricing. I have been a musician all of my life. I used Bandcamp exclusively to distribute my music online, and every musician I have ever known prefers it over every other option—by wide margins. Part of what we liked was how little it engaged in feature-creep and bloat.
This website from 2004 is more usable than many of the websites from 2023, it is clearly working well enough (or I guess those other websites aren’t doing their jobs right.)
What are you talking about? They work with a ton of labels. The landing page is tailored to discovery... they are long past the sexy branding stage, having millions of users and being the most loved independent music platform.
there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?
Counterpoint: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ already exists and is a self-hostable FOSS Bandcamp clone. Does it clone every feature? No. And it definitely has taken longer than a weekend to get to where it is. But it's a one-man passion project that clones enough to be a viable enough replacement for amateur musicians that I jumped to it immediately when Epic bought Bandcamp.
While a very nice project, Faircamp doesn't come close to offering what Bandcamp does. It's self-hosted, requiring the artists to have the technical knowledge to both customise the platform and run the infrastructure themselves, and it doesn't support any payment options other than a barebones liberapay implementation.[0]
It's also most importantly not a single trusted entity that people can trust with their payments like Bandcamp is.
Infra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.
Can’t you outsource all that to AWS? Bandcamp seems like an extremely simple site to me. It has some customizable artist pages, static file hosting for large music files, a web music player, and some e-commerce features for buying music.
I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.
Yes you can, but it gets very expensive in a hurry if you have a ton of load. So one justified place for head count is to bring down AWS bills. At the beginning, it makes sense to outsource it as much as possible, and later, a developer's salary to move the needle on your million dollar AWS bill is a no brainer.
I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.
