People usually mention Evernote when Bending Spoons is brought up, but I also know them as purchasing Meetup (after it was already sort of struggling) and, more recently, entering an agreement to purchase Vimeo (of which I'm a paid user).
AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.
(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)
Vimeo is the really interesting case for me, because they are the white label hosting providers for a large number of niche streaming services -- Criterion Channel comes to mind, for example. Evernote failing is sad but lower on indirect effects. Vimeo going down would leave a noticeable hole in the streaming world.
Vimeo won’t “go down” anytime soon. It might get worse/more expensive, but it’s not in imminent danger. And it’s also not the only white-label provider around, either.
Is this why Criterion streaming quality is so poor? It’s completely unacceptable for a service that is supposed to pride itself on loving movies and preserving them. Sometimes the scene will be dark and I will descend into some sort of weird 8 bit pixel world.
Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.
I’ve heard the same evaluation of SoftBank, IBM, and Micro Focus/OpenText/Rocket Software. There’s some truth in that, but you can still get Visual Cobol even after a number of ownership changes. https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/cobol/visual-c...
Yeah, I was a paying Meetup member for a short bit back around 2018-2019 when I hosted events with my own group, and have been a very active attendee of others' groups (but no longer an organizer of my own group) since 2020 on. I feel like the payment situation hasn't actually gotten that much worse-- the price for organizers that can be achieved with coupons is similar to what it was before, and attendees don't actually have to pay-- but they've made it feel a lot worse by making organizers dig for coupons and trying to trick attendees into thinking they need to pay.
But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).
Meetup now is weird.. they hide everything behind blurs (for example people's last names), but the blurs are CSS, and one could modify the CSS and get the obscured info.
I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
Bending Spoons are the GOAT enshittifiers. Meetup has become a mess where you constantly get popups for their premium accounts and the price changes almost every week. The site is also quite buggy
Bending Spoons bought Meetup in Janaury 2024. I recall Meetup's pricing getting crappified before that, and their website's always been a mess. So imo, we can't point to Bending Spoons as the cause of that, necessarily.
(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains, mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at that time.
I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
I think my mom spends several hours a week talking to a live person at Compuserve because she lost her password or various other reasons. They don't seem to be under any time pressure and are happy to chat with her as long as she wants.
I always look at the AOLTimeWarner merger as the thing that broke them, distracting them at the moment they should've been prepping to roll out broadband. I also look at that merger through the lens of "don't fight a land war in Asia" in terms of breaking empires -- "don't let your company acquire Warner Bros.".
AOL did exactly the right thing. They knew their stock was overvalued and did some shady accounting to prop their stock up until the acquisition and it immediately crashed.
How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.
> In November 2022, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Evernote.[19] The acquisition was concluded in January 2023.[20] In July 2023, Evernote laid off all of its existing staff and announced it would relocate to Europe to be closer to Bending Spoons' headquarters.[21]
This is exactly how European companies do when they acquire American ones, especially "Tech" companies that have well-paid technical staff. You can hire in Eastern Europe for far less, and can hire in Western Europe for still a significant bargain compared to what engineers and associated people make in California - plus, dealing with an 8+ hour time difference is brutal compared to keeping it all in Europe.
A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.
No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.
I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.
Another way to look at it: When a companies bubble bursts, when people realise that it is just a note taking app (or whatever), and that its never going to grow 10x again, VC investors want shot of it.
Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.
So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
Bending Spoons is correctly following the [[Wikipedia:Conflict of interest]] process. They are pointing out information which could be improved and are requesting an independent party confirm they are correct. They disclosed their conflict. All companies are allowed and encouraged to do this. Not many do.
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.
My wife's grandparents use and pay for AOL. I think they pay for a premium package? All I know is that it handles their internet, web browsing, and email.
One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.
I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.
Are you using the word scam to describe AOL overcharging for helpdesk service or was the helpdesk not affiliated with AOL and they just happened to know how to fix the problem (or maybe they caused it?)?
AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you.
The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for.
The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!
The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.
I don't know much about Bending Spoons, but I associate them with Evernote now. Not sure if Evernote's downfall is associated with them or predates them.
I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
Evernote was in decline in more than 5 years before their sale to Bending Spoons. The sale didn't improve anything, because Bending Spoons act as private equity. They layoffs, moving the job to cheaper locations and increasing the prices.
For all the shit that PE gets, what you described is probably the best outcome possible from the POV of shareholders. If done well it should increase earnings per share. It's perhaps the best you can hope for in a situation where the company has been in decline for 5 years and you have no levers to effect change as a small shareholder.
This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
Bending Spoons has taken at least one of the apps I’ve used and stuffed them full of subscription models in a pretty blatant attempt to wring as much money out of the existing user base before the app becomes obsolete.
It's quite likely that the app was bleeding money before. Whether they're wringing money or being responsible with their finances I can't tell, but consider that the alternative could have been no app at all.
Evernote sucked by that time. Their user-driven support forums were so obviously a ploy to string along users while nothing changed. As a dev it was glaringly obvious to me they were milking not investing. Moving to Apple Notes was the simplest and best decision.
Readit News
AOL was already a husk, and has been arguably since they got rid of the triangle logo. It was already owned by a private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, as a subsidiary of Yahoo!. Some of the still-relevant tech news sites like TechCrunch and Engadget were apparently moved from AOL to being directly under Yahoo! a few years ago. So I'm not too worried about AOL, but it's interesting how often I've heard about Bending Spoons in relation to brands I know over the past few years.
(Edit: AOL deleted all of my childhood emails back in the 2010s-- on an account that had previously been part of a paid AOL family subscription for years-- after I failed to sign into my account for more than 6 months, which also contributes to my current feeling that it's dead to me.)
My partner organized one a decade ago.
I’m still a member of a couple but now they’re really going after group members with ads and upsells. It still works but has become kind of icky.
Bending spoons, the name just sends up red flags as parlor trickery.
But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).
I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In honour of the ur-bender, Uri.
Oh hey, the company that orchestrated my first layoff!
Highly recommend Plunder (ISBN: 978-1541702103) for those who want to learn more about the enshittification these companies bring.
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(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
I lost access to it during an iPhone upgrade, I paid $12.95 or something for a 'premium' membership that allowed me to have the password reset by a REAL LIVE PERSON.
ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...
Dead Comment
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
How could they “get into broadband”? They weren’t going to be able to create the last mile infrastructure. We see how that worked out for Google.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
Damn.
A friend I know is going through such an acquisition, funny thing is it's a European company acquiring his, but owned by an American PE firm. The American PE firm knows that cutting-edge tech is developed by expensive engineers on the West Coast, but when it's time to milk a more mature company for cash flow, you want cheaper European staff.
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
I enjoyed this part:
No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.
So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.
One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.
I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.
AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you.
The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for.
The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!
The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.
I never used Evernote, that's just what I hear. From what I've seen over the years, people don't like the way the product has moved and they really don't like the frequent price increases for not product change.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
This only works profitably because the users let themselves be stepped on, of course. But then again users who put their notes into a remote company's computer are those kind of people.
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