[HN Gopher] AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
___________________________________________________________________
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
Author : jmsflknr
Score : 144 points
Date : 2025-10-29 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| neom wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
|
| Interesting comment from last year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| So companies go there to die
| kbar13 wrote:
| holy smokes this is worse for consumers and employees than
| being bought by PE
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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]_
|
| Damn.
| marstall wrote:
| How does that possibly work? How do they continue with zero
| of the staff?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| They replaced them with staff in Italy. Bending Spoons is
| an Italian (Milan) company.
|
| They wanted the product not the developers.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Simple. They get new staff whose job is to shove intrusive
| surveillance and advertising into the product and push out
| an update, they don't have to support or develop the
| product.
|
| The company bought the product to bilk money out of its
| existing users. They throw the product in the bin once all
| the users have gone.
|
| Sadly, some ants get infected with corydceps. Tragic for
| the ant, but the other ants get it the fuck away from their
| colony, because they don't want to be next.
| mtgentry wrote:
| As an Evernote user, Bending Spoons has been iterating
| fast over the past couple years to improve the product.
| It's much better than it used to be.
| dangus wrote:
| Transitional severance agreements to have the current staff
| transfer operations to new staff.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Almost anywhere in America is also cheaper than California.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'm still waiting to see how they complete destroy Vimeo they
| just bought.
| dancc wrote:
| Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:
|
| 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._
| everfrustrated wrote:
| 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.
| veidr wrote:
| I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I
| know nothing much about them (except that they named their
| company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty
| reasonable principle that might apply here:
|
| _If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until
| Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)_
|
| Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I think they're actually named after the scene in the
| matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the
| spoon with their mind.
| veidr wrote:
| Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I
| never looked up the name. Fascinating.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks
| paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup
| continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good
| chunk of their user base may already be dead and still
| being billed.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.
|
| Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very
| strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon
| here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big
| multinational.
| luismedel wrote:
| All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up.
| The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business
| needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and
| doctors do it too.
| croisillon wrote:
| oh wow and they got Vimeo and WeTransfer too!?
| dotcoma wrote:
| And Komoot and Meetup, and of course Evernote.
| A_Duck wrote:
| And clearly they're hard at work whitewashing that page...
| check the Talk Page
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bending_Spoons
| internetter wrote:
| 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.
| mooreds wrote:
| https://archive.is/Ouc0B
| alberth wrote:
| At one time, AOL had a market cap of $200B
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
| bdcravens wrote:
| When Verizon sold it and Yahoo, they were sold for less than 2%
| of their peak market cap
|
| https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
| ec109685 wrote:
| That is a silly comparison. The alibaba assets of Yahoo were
| carved out before it was sold to Verizon was worth $58.62B.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| 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.".
| JustExAWS wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2019/02/googl...
| bsimpson wrote:
| At the turn of the millennium, they were valuable enough to buy
| Warner Bros.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| We'll probably be saying the same about a lot of AI companies
| as well....
| dylan604 wrote:
| at the end of the last tech bubble, Herman Miller chairs were
| available for cheap. wonder what the score from the ashes
| will come this round?
| mschild wrote:
| Hopefully some more chairs. Mine's running on 25 years now
| and it has at least 1 broken part which is expensive to
| fix.
| deepserket wrote:
| rack space i guess
| Anarch157a wrote:
| dirt cheap Nvidia GPUs, perhaps ?
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Lots and lots of powerful GPUs I would imagine.
| NickC25 wrote:
| what does AOL even do these days? genuinely curious.
| tartoran wrote:
| I wasn't even aware they were still around until a couple of
| days ago I received an email from an aol.com domain. Best bet
| is they're just a dead mall.
| mikestew wrote:
| It wasn't until the end of last month that they finally turned
| off dialup:
|
| https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discont...
|
| And I have people in my contacts whose active email ends in
| "@aol.com".
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| At least for my parents, there was a real fear of losing
| access to their 20+ year old email address if they stopped
| paying. I don't know if it was founded on anything, but it
| got them to keep paying through a decade-plus of non-AOL
| broadband.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a
| sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary
| services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and
| they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing
| she used was their (free) email service -- though of course
| during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and
| ID theft protection that she apparently had access to. It's a
| legacy of when people paid them for their internet access -- no
| telling how many retirees (or estates) continue paying each
| month.
| underlipton wrote:
| "Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is
| another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a
| widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick
| myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan
| with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _" Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a
| thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money."_
|
| I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which
| helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could
| arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't
| imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card
| bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless,
| RocketMoney seems like a widely used product.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| A surprising number of people clearly simply do not look
| at their credit card bills.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Doesn't help that sometimes the charges are coded like
| *TST VENDOR ACCT #1541*
|
| I don't go over my bill every month but get a
| notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the
| only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is
| the same one I got a notification for is because the
| charge amount is some relatively unique number.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my
| cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I
| didn't need.
|
| I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I
| think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even
| though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO
| customers must have had a lower priority, because their
| service level was noticeably worse when literally the only
| thing that changed was the SIM card.
| havaloc wrote:
| Not all MVNO are the same in this regard, some sell the
| same quality of service data tier.
| jandrese wrote:
| I switched from T-Mobile to Google Voice a few years ago
| for this reason. With 5 lines on the plan the T-Mo
| version was way too expensive. But then Google Voice
| raised their prices and T-Mobile offered as much better
| multi-line discount and I ended up switching back. Also,
| Google Voice tech support is absolute dogshit.
| xp84 wrote:
| There's a good reddit, i think NoContract, where you can
| go to learn more about MVNOs. There are several tiers of
| them in practice and they each have their own "catches"
| and "advantages". I used Cricket many years ago when they
| had a punishing speed cap. In the modern days some of
| these caps have been relaxed, but as you suspected,
| prioritization is the main way the actual carriers
| differentiate themselves from the MVNOs that sell access
| to the same towers. The worst MVNOs have terrible
| priority and in any well-populated area congestion makes
| them super slow almost all the time.
|
| The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also
| geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer
| similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one,
| which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat
| advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim)
| that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also
| let you port between them without any other change to
| your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people
| will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state
| with different "best carrier", since there's nothing
| stopping you.
| veidr wrote:
| Ain't just boomers. Anybody with kids, and no existential
| financial crisis. I just finally managed to cancel an
| unexamined legacy subscription paid without a thought --
| after I noticed _WTF I have one Adobe subscription, not 3,
| across 2 cards_ ... unfortunately the noticing part took
| like 3-4 years.
|
| Additionally: it seems likely that it was the result of gas
| station pump skimmers, just because the card in question
| had never been used for any other kind of transaction.
| cpach wrote:
| I hate to admit it, but it's like me and my Digitalocean
| bills (:
|
| I don't want to think about how much money I've paid them
| over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I
| finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too
| soon...
| LogicHound wrote:
| It is easy to miss a subscription for something on a bill
| when it is less than PS30. I had a match.com subscription I
| had forgotten about for about 7 years.
|
| That business model is what a lot of tech companies
| actually bank on that why they require a credit card on a
| free sign up.
| flakiness wrote:
| This podcast episode has a couple of guests from that company.
| Recommend to whoever interested in this company:
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
| dep_b wrote:
| If I would work at AOL I would start polishing up my resume. They
| usually fire 80% after acquisition.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| AOL was already owned by private equity so I'd imagine not much
| left to cut.
| jjice wrote:
| 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.
| avrionov wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Someone's got to cover the costs of all those non-paying
| users.
|
| 20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place
| of Anthropic.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| 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.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| 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.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Bending Spoons is a joke company that buys company with hopes to
| restructure them to meet some nonsensical financial numbers made
| up in an excel spreadsheet.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Still have no idea why they have so many job applications, they
| don't actually hire.
| lormayna wrote:
| AFAIK (I am Italian) they have a very long and difficult
| hiring process, comparable to a FAANG.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Everytime I hear Bending Spoons it's just ugggh. Too much money.
| It feels so predatory. And for what? Absorb and abuse the
| userlist or whatever they're actually trying to get ahold of.
| nticompass wrote:
| RIP AOL: 1983 - 2025
| rootbear wrote:
| Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years ago. I
| wonder if this will be the end for my unused @verizon.com
| account.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Somehow, my very first email, Hotmail (which was the only
| option when I got it really) is the only one from the 90s that
| is still kicking.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Yahoo! Mail is still working
| Macha wrote:
| AOL mail and Verizon mail had both been migrated to the yahoo
| mail backend when I left the company. This one kind of feels
| like a weird acquisition to me as that's the story for a lot of
| AOL properties these days - a differently branded front end to
| the same services as their Yahoo counterpart. It would surely
| be much more costly to run AOL outside Yahoo as now you need to
| spread the costs of maintaining all that across fewer users
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Verizon handed their email service over to AOL some years
| ago. I wonder if this will be the end for my unused
| @verizon.com account.
|
| Yeah. I have some biz clients with long-held verizon.net email
| accounts. Ever since 2017, verizon.net has felt like some
| barely-there netherverse, where the laws of physics keep
| upending themselves for funsies.
|
| In this analogy, the laws of physics are pop/imap/smtp settings
| (and auth req), which aren't at all well-tethered. I suspect
| the engineers have the server settings printed on D&D dice; I
| think they reroll their mail servers whenever the game isn't
| exciting enough.
|
| So what happens to those biz email accounts now - now that the
| entire AOL snowglobe has been picked up by a different
| corporate toddler? I have no way to tell.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Press release:
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
| jacobgkau wrote:
| 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.)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| It sounds like Bending Spoons is where old tech products go to
| die? I guess that's private equity for you.
| dangus wrote:
| That seems to be the opposite of what the article suggests,
| they seem to hold on long-term and invest in technology
| improvements.
| zipy124 wrote:
| seems to be less invest, and more buy mature products and
| find the minimum amount of money and people needed to
| maintain it, whilst squeezing existing customers (which
| generally doesn't lead to long-term stategy).
| bayindirh wrote:
| Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being _actively
| developed_ with new, useful features and being
| transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by
| month.
|
| Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now
| completely integrated into the tool itself, and
| everything incl. performance is getting better.
|
| I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some
| shared notebooks there and still use it from time to
| time.
| zipy124 wrote:
| In this sense I mean maintain as a business not
| necessarily as software. E.g pivoting from growth to
| efficiency in the business sense.
|
| If you increase your price as substantially as they did,
| you must improve the software to keep users from just up
| and quitting. It's not clear they have been successful in
| this yet, losing market share to other competitors.
|
| That is they aren't actively trying to compete and take
| in new users, but stem the flow and increase revenue from
| their existing customer base who find exporting their
| data hard.
|
| We've seen this before with lotus notes and other
| software and we will see it again.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Evernote was bleeding way before they have been bought by
| Bending Spoons. They were trying to find their way around
| the market, and Notion hit them like a train.
|
| Considering the features they have added and polished, I
| can't say they're not trying to add new users. With their
| pricing strategy, they moved up tiers. They were looking
| like bargain bin software, but with the new price, they
| are not. They pulled a Chivas Regal with that move.
|
| They are one of the companies which use AI in a saner
| way, and inherit a powerful foundation, and they didn't
| kill any integrations or export options.
|
| The .enex format is still the best export format for
| these kinds of tools, from my experience.
|
| If you look at their changelogs, you can see that this is
| not a "let's optimize and extort" operation. They have
| recreated the tool, and listen user feedback intently.
|
| As I said, I'm not an active Evernote user anymore, so I
| have no skin in their game. I just want a tool I depended
| this long to survive in a good shape.
| al_borland wrote:
| The hard part with any of these turn arounds is
| convincing users that a product they once used and loved,
| which they left after it betrayed them or they watched it
| die, is worth going back to. The "cool factor" is gone,
| nostalgia plays are weak, and people don't like being
| burned twice by the same product.
| bayindirh wrote:
| That's true. For me, if I didn't move out of the Evernote
| that much, I'd be still continuing to use it.
|
| For me, it's not nostalgia or being afraid of being
| burned again. It's just I have no real reason to migrate
| back at this point.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Have you tried to use meetup recently? It's been turned
| into garbage.
| cestith wrote:
| 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...
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| 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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending
| Spoons has done something right
| timmg wrote:
| Wow, that's interesting.
|
| I was a _very early_ Evernote (paid) user. But they lost
| their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed
| out.
|
| I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a
| way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea
| they were actually improving things.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a
| formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to
| Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.
|
| Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but
| added a lot of useful features from other tools like
| "Block based editing" from Notion.
|
| They are actively improving the product in every way, and
| they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the
| improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's
| an interesting watch.
|
| For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that
| Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to
| Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and
| converted to a digital garden.
|
| I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the
| best of luck.
| echelon wrote:
| Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of
| replacing the entire family of note and knowledge
| management apps.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I actively use Obsidian and Notion.
|
| Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge
| bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden.
| Having local markdown files and working on them is great.
| Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file
| format.
|
| On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in
| Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between
| other services etc. makes it a great project management
| tool for my life. However, due to the file format and
| everything can be interconnected forms both a walled
| garden and moat at the same time.
|
| Both serve different niches and work very differently. So
| neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all
| scenarios.
|
| But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used
| right, that's true.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's
| terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008.
| Switching would be painful for me given how familiar I am
| with it but I came close this last year when it stopped
| letting me stay logged in on multiple Mac computers at the
| same time...
| axiolite wrote:
| > 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
|
| I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few
| bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the
| price increase.
|
| And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the
| acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website
| for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some
| days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat
| idle for a couple _months_ before someone would respond
| asking for more info.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| I think the reality is most of these are already dead, and a
| PE firm taking over is giving them one more chance
| riffraff wrote:
| But BP is not a PE firm, they do have developers. Most
| (all?) of their acquisitions are still being updated albeit
| presumably on a skeleton crew.
| zipy124 wrote:
| They are definitely a PE firm. They buy up struggling
| companies with the aim to revitalise them, or otherwise
| recoup the cost of investment+ profit. They have switched
| to mainly relying on traditional debt rather than outside
| investor money recently but that doesn't make them not
| PE.
|
| In fact this is much like the older form of PE, where
| efficiency gains were the main objective.
|
| Bigger PE firms now usually focus on roll-up strategies
| (buy loads of similar companies and merge, say car washes
| is big right now for example, as well as dental, vet and
| family doctor/GP practices) as well as utilising bucket
| loads of leverage to amplify gains. This does not however
| make what bending spoons is doing not PE.
| al_borland wrote:
| Yahoo tried that business model and it didn't go too well for
| them. Maybe we'll see Bending Spoons but Tumblr and Flickr
| next.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| 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
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Apollo Global Management
|
| 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.
| acomjean wrote:
| Meetup.. the promise of meetup was the organizers pay a fee so
| the members don't have too.
|
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the name is after the scene in "the matrix"
| (there is no spoon etc).
| fortran77 wrote:
| I was thinking more Uri Geller
| BryantD wrote:
| 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.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Actual press release
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251029086811/en/Ben...
| stabbles wrote:
| They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still did
| a major redesign of the app and website afterwards. I expected
| outages, but so far it works like before.
| BozeWolf wrote:
| Except that it now has ten times the number of reminders
| popping up to please subscribe for premium, even though I
| already have the world maps package, so they got some of my
| money already.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| This might just be an accounting trick.
|
| A lot of mature products act as a lottery ticket printing
| machine for the rest of the company - spend the cash on some
| other concept and hope that new thing becomes a stand alone
| product on its own.
|
| Now that komoot is owned by a parent company, instead of
| printing lottery tickets that other employees are scratching
| off, the cash is being sent up to the parent company, who may
| just have employees in another entity being funded by the money
| from komoot.
| elAhmo wrote:
| It was mostly a cosmetic redesign, no functionality has been
| significantly changed. Websites don't just stop working after
| people are fired immediately, but they slowly die or become
| home for parasites. Twitter is a great example of this.
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| > They bought Komoot, laid off 80% of the staff, but they still
| did a major redesign
|
| This sounds like "doing a major redesign" would be something
| positive. I'm a paying customer since ages and use the app on
| daily basis. The new design adds nothing except confusion, at
| the same time they broke the app on my smartwatch. I'm pretty
| much thinking about switching apps because I don't see myself
| buying a new watch just because of this.
|
| Some companies would be better off with less bored designers.
| This is exactly the same situation like a couple of years ago,
| when Spotify every week rearranged the GUI and every week I had
| to relearn how I can reach the same functionality. Back then I
| had to use the App Store to give feedback, but I see now I can
| do the same directly in the Komoot app. They're gonna have
| something to laugh about...
| bluedino wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| > I'm still using an email that is one of the AOL domains
|
| ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own
| email address(es)...
| mlyle wrote:
| > > mostly for accessing legacy sites that were around at
| that time.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| So change the email address on those accounts?
| xp84 wrote:
| That's not always possible.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Wow way to miss the point
| logifail wrote:
| My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I guess
| I'm also "legacy"?
|
| I don't think I'm missing any point, thanks.
| chrononaut wrote:
| A lot of these old services used the email address as the
| fixed user identifier making it much less likely
| (certainly for those bucket of services) that he'd have a
| user-facing option of changing it.
| mlyle wrote:
| > My domain registration is just over 25 years old... I
| guess I'm also "legacy"?
|
| Mine too -- I mean, I had domains in 1994-1995.
|
| Most people who have legacy AOL emails have them from
| more than 25 years ago-- indeed AOL was in decline by
| 2000.
|
| And "protip: go back in time 30 years ago and tell your
| kid self how to get a domain name, and navigate
| internic's overcharging" isn't quite as practical to
| implement.
| sdairs wrote:
| Least offensive Bending Spoons acquisition to date. I don't
| really mind if they kill this one?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Far cry from the AOL - Time Warner merger, where AOL purchased
| Time Warner for $183B, creating a company with a combined $350B
| market cap.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yes, there is much less money to set on fire this time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are plenty of other companies setting much more money
| on fire these days. The money furnace business model is as
| healthy as ever.
| ottah wrote:
| Why would it even be worth that? Patents? Copyrights? Certainly
| not the trademark.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Revenue. They've still got millions of email/portal users and
| they own LifeLock, Lastpass, and a bunch of other crap. They
| are still rumored to do nearly a half billion a year in revenue
| and the margins are good.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Then 1.5 B is a steal!
| jrflowers wrote:
| > they own LifeLock, Lastpass
|
| AOL owns neither of these
| ano-ther wrote:
| Can someone enlighten me on the economics of such a deal?
|
| From what I know about acquisitions, valuations are in the range
| of 10-12 times annual EBITDA (or perhaps even profits). This
| would mean that AOL is making 150 million a year. Is that
| correct?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| From the first sentence of the half-page article: "AOL still
| drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow"
| wat10000 wrote:
| Interesting choice to give your company the name of a notorious
| fraud.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be
| better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user
| experience, he noted.
|
| I think there's something kind of astute here, which is that
| anyone who is still using AOL products at this point is someone
| who is very resistant to changing "email and web content
| properties" providers, and is likely willing to passively
| tolerate additional enshittification and monetization
| tanepiper wrote:
| Proof we are in the weirdest timeline
| elAhmo wrote:
| Not sure how actively AOL is used, probably not really, but
| anything Bending Spoon touches is entshitified soon after. They
| most recently bought Komoot, and have already made questionable
| choices with a lot of firings and promoting paid plans. Same has
| happened to Meetup.
|
| It is a sad reality that this company keeps buying good products
| and making it hostile for users who made it good, such as in the
| Komoot's or Meetup's case.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Not sure how actively AOL is used_
|
| Perhaps more than you think.
|
| I was recently looking through an e-mail distribution list that
| my company uses and was surprised how many @aol.coms were on
| there. Easily hundreds.
|
| People in the tech bubble vastly underestimate the number of
| @aol.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @earthlink.net and other
| legacy e-mail addresses regular people still use. After all,
| it's their e-mail address. Why would they ever change it?
| apparent wrote:
| > That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be
| better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user
| experience, he noted.
|
| Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally
| dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace
| new offerings.
|
| If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old
| brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or
| something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like
| more email storage than gmail, or something).
| gregjw wrote:
| Bending Spoons hoovering up old notable names
| olalonde wrote:
| It comes down to 50$ per monthly active user. I wonder how they
| plan to recoup that.
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