In late July, I promised that a new standing format would soon join our Wednesday rotation. “Soon” is, of course, a relative term (!!) … but I’m glad to finally deliver on it. 

This is the first in an ongoing series I’ve dubbed “Rabbit Holes”: light, fun and mildly obsessive dives into various online communities, personalities or subcultures. I want to introduce more opportunities for fun and serendipity in the newsletter … and I also want to free myself from my conventionally journalistic preoccupation with stuff like “NEWS PEGS” and “RELEVANCE.” 

Please nominate new rabbit holes by clicking “reply,” and let me know if you like this one. Jason, Nemo and I ate a lot of bad “bread” for this edition. 🙃

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If not for the handlebar mustache and wire-framed specs, I might’ve kept scrolling along.

But when I dithered momentarily over Don Cabbage’s face, I plunged down a fantastical faux-bread rabbit hole I haven’t yet managed to climb out of.

Cabbage “bread” was my ignominious entry point. (The Don has made his name, quite literally, off a troubling assortment of brassicaceous foods.) Then came the cloud “bread.” The cottage cheese “bread.” The breads made from nuts, protein powders and lentils. Don’t even get me started on chaffles.

There is, it turns out, a vast universe of bread pretenders, lurking unseen on TikTok and Reels. Watch one, and faux breads will multiply like proverbial loaves and fishes across your nearest feed. These videos often share certain aesthetic markers — veined marble counter tops; manicured hands — and a pronounced, surreal dissimilitude to actual, historical, grain-bearing bread.  

That the faux-bread internet could insist otherwise struck me as both an affront and a challenge. And so last weekend I decided, perhaps unwisely, to dabble in this black magic myself. I chose three recipes based on popularity and my unwillingness to special-order niche ingredients. Then I headed to Aldi for more eggs, cottage cheese and (… naturally) a bag of cabbage.

“This is — so — flippin’ — good,” promised one blogger, her mouth still full of cottage cheese “bread.”

“My kids devoured this,” wrote another, as she whisked peanut butter powder into eggs and syrup. 

I didn’t believe them for a second. But I’ve been wrong about other stuff. What did I have to lose, exactly, besides my appetite and $20? 

I do want to clarify one thing up front: I realize that many people have allergies and health concerns that mean they can’t eat traditional bread. The videos I’m seeing don’t target that community, and my snark also isn’t directed at them. Instead, I’m interested in the universe of creators, influencers and nutritionists who promote high-protein, low-carb foods as a general-purpose health (read: weight loss) tool. These folks sometimes follow keto or low-carb diets, but these recipes also circulate outside that world.

The baking process began smoothly enough, if you could call it that. I found myself Googling the meanings of words for which I’d never before needed definitions. Bread, noun: “a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal.” Bake, verb: “to cook by dry heat, especially in an oven.” 

I started with Alissa Francis’ three-ingredient peanut butter loaf, mixing PB powder, baking powder, eggs and maple syrup as Jason watched Sunday’s Bills game in the other room. The sound of his repeat “ah shits” and “oh nos” felt like a good soundtrack to my endeavors. 

The batter looked fine, if dry and … sparse. I poured it into ramekins instead of a loaf pan. Francis invites us to put chocolate chips on top, but I left mine mostly bare in the bleak expectation that Nemo would eat most of them. 

Sure enough, their texture resembled the crumb-less, springy interior of a natural sponge. The mouthfeel whipsawed between rubbery and grainy; the peanut butter flavor had all baked out. My #highproteindessert and “dream come true” tasted chiefly of overcooked eggs … with subtle notes of self-reproach and PB powder waste. 

“How many of these are you doing?” Jason asked. “And do you, uh, want me to eat the whole thing?”

“That should be the worst one,” I reassured him, though I couldn’t say it with any certainty. Fifteen years of casual baking from physical cookbooks and credible blogs had not prepared me for whatever fringe food science was playing out in my kitchen now.

Still, I had two more “breads” to bake. So I dutifully blended cottage cheese with eggs and spices in a spare smoothie cup. In another time and place, with different hashtags at play, you might reasonably call this a low-budget frittata.

This recipe was by far the most popular of the three I tried; my version came from Mac McCrary, via Real Simple and a zillion TikTok likes. It was also the least offensive of the pack, yielding a flat, craggy rectangle of baked egg like a washed-out, unspooled French omelet. With it, I made an anemic turkey sandwich that I ate in two minutes, standing over the sink. Then I spread the extra cottage cheese on a slice of toast, in certain violation of the whole #lowcarb thing.

But it’s not about low carbs anymore, Liane Walker told me on a recent phone call. The managing director of the consultancy Foodie Digital, Walker is an encyclopedia on all things food blog. The faux breads, she told me, are all downwind from the big craze around cottage cheese. And that, in turn, derived from the growing, decade-old preoccupation with protein. 

Google searches for the term “high protein” — as in: high-protein muffins, high-protein breads — have risen steadily for more than 10 years as dieters turned on other macronutrients. But the cottage cheese craze was something special, Walker said: a veritable web-traffic watershed. Now bloggers and creators are chasing the next cheese (... or some other protein-heavy cheese applications). 

Later, this conversation made me think about the power of platform incentives. AllRecipes’ crowdsourced, democratic model fostered its meatloaf-and-casserole ethic. Food blogs have contorted their recipe styles because Google search demanded the change.1 It follows that TikTok and Reels might spawn recipes that take trend- and clout-chasing to unsavory extremes. 

I don’t mean to pick on food bloggers, either — we’re all shaped by the platforms where we post. But the influence of Substack’s culture or interface on my writing is far more abstract to me, personally, than the burn of wasabi mayo down my throat.

Incidentally, wasabi mayo — in as large a quantity as you can stand — greatly improves the thin flavor of a cabbage-bread-and-sliced-chicken-sandwich. I ate mine with my body curved over the plate, the better to avoid a great cabbagey mess, as limp bits of egg and vegetable disintegrated in my hands. This was my fault, I soon realized; I hadn’t shredded the cabbage super-finely, as Don Cabbage’s Reels always show. But even super-fine cabbage wouldn’t elevate this from “lackluster pancake” to “bread contender.”2 

I scraped the refuse into Nemo’s bowl, rinsing the mayo off in the sink first. He, at least, has ADORED this project. I am now looking for second dinner.

You wanted to have friends over for dinner and impress them. Now the kitchen has become your personal Jackson Pollock canvas. Flour has turned the countertops into a winter wonderland, a lone egg yolk is weeping into the sink, and you’re wearing most of the other ingredients.

Why is this so hard? The recipes always call for some fancy ingredient that you’ve never heard of and couldn’t find if your life depended on it. (What the hell is fennel pollen, and why does it cost more than your car insurance?) And oh, the kitchen gadgets. Every recipe seems to require some obscure tool you’ve never heard of. (Why does this cookbook say I need a mandolin?)

Apparently, your stove has only two settings: raw and cremated, so the smoke alarm is your kitchen timer. By the time you’re done, your food has morphed into something that could be used to patch potholes. The dog won’t even eat it, and he licks his own butt.

So how do we use science to turn you into a better chef? No, I am not going to teach you about molecular gastronomy. That requires knowledge of biochemistry and a pantry stocked like a “Breaking Bad” lab. It would also require me to know something about cooking — which I don’t.

We’re going to make you a better cook without actually discussing cooking. We’re going to learn about gastrophysics (yes, that’s a real thing.)

“Gastrophysics can be defined as the scientific study of those factors that influence our multisensory experience while tasting food and drink.”

It’s the intersection of experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, marketing, and behavioral economics. Welcome to the dark arts of the culinary world.

This isn’t cooking; it’s psychological warfare with a side of mashed potatoes. Your mind is a big player in any meal and it has a lot to say about how we judge what we eat. How much of our enjoyment of a meal originates in the food itself versus how much comes from everything around the food?

The experts say it’s 50-50. Yup, 50-50. No matter how great a cook you are, if you’re not leveraging gastrophysics, your meals aren’t nearly as good as they could be.

And who the heck are these experts? Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist at Oxford where he leads the Crossmodal Research group. His books are “Gastrophysics” and “The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Use The “Peak-End Rule”

The peak-end rule. Yes, it sounds like some obscure mountain-climbing regulation, but it’s actually a psychological hack that can improve a guest’s perception of the meals you serve.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that people don’t evenly weight the experiences they have — they disproportionately remember the worst or best moment (the peak) and the end. Everything else is mostly just filler, like the plot of a Nicolas Cage movie. You could serve a pretty mediocre meal, but if you give them one or two mind-blowing bites and end with a bang, you’re gonna impress your guests more than you think.

Brass tacks: what’s the first takeaway here? More courses! Simply having more dishes increases the chances of hitting an impressive peak. It’s like playing the lottery; the more tickets you buy, the better your chances of winning.

An amuse-bouche here, a palate cleanser there or a surprise mini-course. Consider doing a “tasting menu” or a tapas-type spread. Each one is a chance to create another peak.

Second takeaway: nail that ending. Charles cites a study where researchers ended a meal by giving subjects an oat cookie followed by a chocolate cookie. Meanwhile a second cohort got the same meal but it ended with a chocolate cookie followed by an oat cookie. Guess what? The ones who got the chocolate cookie last rated the entire meal as being better.

Purchase a chocolate lava cake so decadent it’s borderline illegal or a crème brûlée so soothing it could replace their therapist. A great dessert is your chance to literally rewrite the narrative of the entire meal.

How else can we use low-effort tricks to get high impact results?

 

Naming Matters

Would you order “Patagonian toothfish” at a restaurant? Of course not. Sounds like the aquatic cousin of the chupacabra. You’re not alone. Nobody did. Sales were terrible for years.

But now sales have increased over 1000% in many major markets. Heck, you may have ordered it yourself. What happened?

They changed the name. “Patagonian toothfish” is now widely known as “Chilean sea bass”, a fish that sounds like it should be serenading you with a guitar under a moonlit sky.

Names matter. They have a huge effect on people’s perception of the food and how they rate its taste. Would you rather eat “Cold Tomato Soup” or “Chilled Gazpacho with a Touch of Basil”? It’s the same dish, but one sounds like it’s served in a hospital cafeteria, and the other seems like it’s served in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean.

In general, “exotic” names are chosen over more concrete descriptions but it’s always important to consider how open-minded your guests are and what might enthrall them.

Adding descriptive elements is always good. You can’t just say you’re serving “chicken.” That’s how peasants talk. Tonight’s special is “Pan-Seared Organic Poulet with a Delicate Balsamic Glaze.” Did you catch that? “Poulet.” Because French equals fancy. The name alone transports your guests to a charming farmhouse in the Gallic countryside, where a loving grandma prepared it just for them.

Okay, we’ve got the word trickery down. Time to manipulate people’s senses…

 

Smell Matters

Airplane food, much like jury duty or attending a friend’s improv show, is a universally dreaded experience. Why is it so awful? It’s not just because it’s mass-produced, reheated misery. No, the real culprit is altitude.

With the lowered air pressure and lack of humidity you can’t smell properly. And when you can’t smell, you can barely taste. It’s like trying to enjoy a symphony while wearing earmuffs.

About 80% of what we perceive as taste is actually smell. So select foods with enticing aromas. You know the ones that hit hard: fresh bread, rich coffee, garlic, truffle oil… Sizzling bacon is so powerful it’s almost unfair.

Get that dining room smelling like the food. Leave the kitchen door open. Get those aromas circulating. Your guests will think they’ve walked into a Michelin-starred restaurant, not your one-bedroom apartment where the cat’s litter box is precariously close to the kitchen.

And don’t be afraid to add things to the table to increase the good smells. Top chefs leverage this. Lay out a sprig of something fragrant next to each plate. Flowers for a centerpiece. Heck, spritz some vanilla extract into the air if you’re feeling extra. (Of course, there’s a fine line between mastering the art of scent and turning your dinner party into a Yankee Candle convention. Moderation is key.)

Oh, and a side note from Charles’ research for whenever you’re enjoying beverages: no straws, no lids on cups. Love the taste of your coffee? And taste is mostly smell? Well, when you drink coffee from that cup with the plastic lid your nose is getting pressed up against… plastic. Not the best way to enhance the aroma – and taste — of your coffee.

Okay, smell is numero uno when it comes to enhancing flavor but you also need to think about what your guests are hearing…

 

Sound Matters

Charles did a study where they altered the sound Pringles made when you bit into them. Increase the high-frequency pop and people rated the chips as 15% more fresh and crunchy. Were the chips more fresh or crunchy? Nope.

Your perception of food is an amalgam of all the inputs your gray matter receives. Your brain takes in the sound of those chips and interprets it as “freshness” and “crunchy.” (No, your teeth don’t have “crunch receptors.”)

So add some sound to your food. Right now that salad is on mute and the lettuce is being perceived as more wilty than it really is. Throw some toasted seeds on there. Or big, obnoxious, jaw-breaking croutons. But why stop there? Get yourself some crispy bacon, pickles, or even little snap peas. Fancy restaurants use gherkin or Batavia lettuce to give that crunch to your burger.

Feeling adventurous? Pull a trick that some top chefs use with dessert: sprinkling popping candy into chocolate mousse. Suddenly, your mousse is alive with sound, snapping and crackling like a tiny bonfire in your mouth. It’s not just dessert; it’s a fireworks show.

Ambient sounds matter too. The research indicates that playing Italian music while serving Italian food is very likely to get it rated as more authentic. Your guests are marveling at the authenticity, and all because you had the foresight to swap out Kenny G for “La Traviata.”

But the single best tip when it comes to music is simple: play music they like. Studies have frequently shown that when people like the music better, they like the food better. It’s brainwashing, but with a playlist. The garlic bread might be a little burnt, but your guests will be too busy belting out the chorus to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to care.

Now it’s time for a big surprise. Yeah, the food matters but what’s really shocking is how much what we eat it on and with matters…

 

Plates And Cutlery Matter

Desserts are judged as 20% sweeter on a round, white plate than other plates. Sound like some quirky study result that won’t survive attempts at replication? Well, it has already been replicated, numerous times by different researchers. So if you’re looking to reduce calories and sugar without reducing sweetness – round, white plates, always.

In a number of ways, our choice of tableware matter. A big factor that goes underappreciated is weight. Remember that joke from “Jurassic Park”? “Are they heavy? Then they’re expensive…”

True or not, our brains seem to operate by this rule of thumb. Charles says, “Time and again in our research, we find that adding weight to a soft-drink can, to a box of chocolates or to a carton of yogurt leads people to rate the product, no matter what it is, more highly.”

Your brain thinks, “Wow, this plate weighs as much as a baby hippo. This food must be gourmet!” And sure enough, food in a heavy bowl was judged as 13% more flavorful, 25% more expensive and was enjoyed 13% more than the same food in a lighter bowl. Sure, you might need a forklift to get it to the table, but it’ll be the best-tasting meal they’ve ever had.

And that weight issue applies to cutlery as well. Get forks and knives that could double as murder weapons in a game of “Clue”. Fancy restaurants have known this forever. Charles doesn’t beat around the bush: “I cannot emphasize enough just how important weight is to the design of cutlery.” In studies, diners given heavy cutlery judged food more highly and were willing to pay significantly more for it than those eating the same food, on the same day, in the same dining room with lighter forks and knives.

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up — and learn one more very powerful tip…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how psychology can make you a better cook…

• Use The Peak-End Rule: To pull off a culinary “Ocean’s Eleven” serve more dishes and finish strong. When you hit them with a “peak” experience and a solid ending they’ll barely notice your chicken looks like it was cooked in a blast furnace.
• Naming Matters: You’re not just serving “mashed potatoes.” You’re presenting “Pommes de Terre Purée with a Butter Emulsion.” Use phrases like “a hint of,” “a touch of,” or “an essence of,” and watch as their eyes widen with unearned admiration.
• Smell Matters: Your home should smell like the inside of a French patisserie, not a fish market on a hot day. Get those aromas flowing.
• Sound Matters: Welcome to the Twilight Zone of gastrophysics, where your salad needs to double as a percussion instrument. Add crunch and good music.
• Plates And Cutlery Matter: This is not the time for paper plates and Solo cups. No, no, no. You’ve got to go full Downton Abbey here. Dessert only on round, white plates. Bowls that feel like they’re made from depleted uranium. And if lifting your cutlery feels like they’re wielding Mjolnir, the food will be worthy.

Remember some years back when Coke bottles had people’s names on them? Did that seem corny? Well, that works. Charles says personalization is power: the power of showing you care.

Did John mention once, three years ago, that he had the best steak of his life in Argentina? Serve up some steak and casually drop, “John, I know you love a good Argentine cut.” Watch as John’s eyes glaze over with the realization that, at least once, you actually listened to him.

Or throw in a little backstory. “Hey, Sarah, I made this lasagna because I remember that time in college when you tried to make lasagna and accidentally set the fire alarm off?”

Is this lasagna any different from the one you’d make if you didn’t know Sarah? Not one bit. But now, Sarah’s laughing, reminiscing, and that lasagna just got a whole lot tastier. It’s like you’ve sprinkled it with nostalgia and good times instead of just oregano and cheese.

Personalization turns mediocre meals into unforgettable experiences simply because you made someone feel special.

So add some lessons from gastrophysics to your next meal. You’re still going to need a little bit of skill in the kitchen but don’t neglect the 50% that comes from psychology.

You’re not serving dinner; you’re curating an experience. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the food — it’s about how you make them feel.

The post How Psychology Can Make You A Better Cook: 5 Secrets from Research appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

Road & Track deleted this outstanding story by McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner shortly after publication, with no explanation #

Ello launched on August 7, 2014 with big dreams and big promises, a new social network defined by what it wouldn’t do.

They laid it all out in a manifesto, right on their homepage:

Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

You are not a product.

From its launch, Ello defined itself as an alternative to ad-driven social networks like Twitter and Facebook. “You are not a product.” (The “I Disagree” button linked to Facebook’s privacy page.)

I’d link to that manifesto on Ello’s site, but I can’t, because Ello is dead.

In June 2023, the servers just started returning errors, making nine years of member contributions inaccessible, apparently forever — every post, artwork, song, portfolio, and the community built there was gone in an instant.

How did this happen? What happened between the idealistic manifesto above and the sudden shutdown?

It’s a story so old and familiar, I predicted it shortly after Ello launched.

Ello’s Funding and Launch

Ello, for those who don’t remember, described itself as a “simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.” It launched with a distinctly minimalist monochrome interface and an even more minimalist set of features.

Like Diaspora and App.net before it, Ello partly defined itself by its opposition to the exploitive business models and content moderation practices of major social networks, so quickly found itself deluged by people fleeing Facebook and dubbed by media outlets as an “anti-Facebook” or “Facebook killer,” something the Ello team never intended it to be. It was an uncomfortable balancing act, but they leaned into the publicity, at least for a while.

In September 2014, one month after it opened its invite-only beta, I wrote a post about Ello on Ello.

Digging through SEC filings, I discovered that the newly-launched indie social network had taken nearly half a million in seed funding from a venture capital firm, which seemed counter to its indie manifesto. Since nobody else mentioned the funding, including Ello themselves, I wrote about it.

Here’s what I wrote:

Building something like Ello costs money. They have a team of at least seven people, and have worked on it for months. That doesn’t come cheap.

The About section makes it seem like Ello was built independently, a group of artists making something for themselves, presumably funded by volunteer effort and maybe a seed investment from Ello president and CEO Paul Budnitz, who also founded Kidrobot and Budnitz Bicycles.

But a little digging shows a much more predictable source: they took a $435,000 round of seed funding in January from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based VC firm that announced the deal in March.

Why is this a problem?

The Ello founders are positioning it as an alternative to other social networks — they won’t sell your data or show you ads. “You are not the product.”

If they were independently-funded and run as some sort of co-op, bootstrapped until profitable, maybe that’s plausible. Hard, but possible.

But VCs don’t give money out of goodwill, and taking VC funding — even seed funding — creates outside pressures that shape the inevitable direction of a company.

Before they opened their doors, Ello became hooked on an unsustainable funding model — taking cash from VCs — and will almost certainly take a much larger Series A round once that $435,000 dries up. (Which, at their current burn rate, should be in a couple months.)

And they’ll have no trouble getting it. There’s a lot of money out there right now, and it will be extremely tempting to take it, especially if refusing it would mean closure or layoffs.

The problem, of course, is that VCs aren’t like Kickstarter backers, or even like angel investors. Kickstarter or Patreon backers just want the thing being made. Angel investors may have other reasons to invest beyond equity: fame, insider access, or maybe just the joy of helping something exist.

VCs may invest in things they think are interesting or want to exist, but they primarily invest money in startups to get a return on their investment, on behalf of their limited partners. That return usually takes the form of an exit: an acquisition or an IPO.

Unless they have a very unique relationship with their investors, Ello will inevitably be pushed towards profitability and an exit, even if it compromises their current values. Sometimes, this push comes subtly in the form of advice and questions in emails, phone calls, and chats over coffee. Sometimes, as more direct pressure from the board. (FreshTracks’ Managing Director sits on their board.) Or, if things go bad, by replacing the founders.

The Ello team knows that how a startup is funded shapes how it behaves. They spend a good chunk of their About pages talking about how they’re not going to make money (not ads or selling your data), and a little bit about how they hope to (paid premium features). I hope they’re right — it’d be great to have more startups that aren’t reliant on ads.

But they completely fail to disclose how Ello is being funded now, which matters just as much, if not more, as any future revenue plans.

I love seeing people build new stuff. More people trying to build crazy experimental communities on the Internet is a very good thing. And nothing’s more audacious than trying to build a new social network.

Social networks become the glue that connect people together — the foundation for friendships, relationships, and new works of creative expression.

Building a social network is like opening the doors to a huge party and inviting everyone in. Without a way to get your stuff out, shutting down a social network is like locking the door and burning the place down.

At the moment, Ello is a free, closed-source social network, with no export tools or an API, fueled by venture capital and a loose plan for paid premium features. I think it’s fair to be skeptical.

Like everyone else here, I hope Ello can stick to their principles, resist outside pressure, fight market forces, and find a unique and sustainable niche.

Let’s hope their investors feel the same way.

The Founders Respond

That post quickly blew up on Ello, and then went far beyond it, with coverage in articles from The Verge, The Guardian, VICE, The Atlantic, and Business Insider, among others.

Ello’s CEO, co-founders, and investors dismissed the concerns I raised, starting with co-founder and CEO Paul Budnitz, who told Betabeat it was “silly.”

“In fact, Ello is controlled executively by its 7 founders, who own a majority share in the company,” wrote Betabeat’s Jack Smith IV. “They say that the cynical claim that they’ll sell out eventually, or that anyone can tell them what to do, is ridiculous.”

Co-founder Todd Berger laughed at a GigaOm writer who asked him about my post. “There’s seven founders and we own 82 to 84 percent of the company, so we can do whatever the hell we want,” Berger said.

“We’re not going to sell out our soul to grow our company,” continued Berger. “Maybe it’s hard to believe.”

I followed up with a second Ello post:

I’ve received a dozen emails in the last day and a half from journalists looking for quotes about Ello. I didn’t reply to any of them. I have no interest in being the anti-Ello poster boy, for one main reason:

I think Ello’s pretty neat, and I want them to succeed.

Like I said in my post, more experimentation with online communities is a very good thing. We’ll only break away from the dominant players by trying new crazy shit, and I think it should be applauded. (And, yes, I even like the design.)

But I think taking VC was a bad idea that works against their ethos, and will inevitably lead to a much larger Series A by year’s end.

I think the intentions of the team are pure, and they genuinely believe in what they’re building. But I’m not sure intentions matter unless they can wean themselves off outside funding.

I really, really hope their revenue plan works out, and quickly.

Series A and the PBC

One month later, Ello announced they’d raised significantly more money: a $5.5 million Series A round co-led by TechStars and Foundry Group, who took a board seat, with participation from FreshTracks Capital, who already sat on the board.

Coinciding with this funding, and perhaps anticipating the backlash, Ello also announced they had converted the company to a Public Benefit Corporation.

In a public letter signed by their founders and investors, they wrote:

There has been some speculation in the press since our launch that Ello will someday be forced to allow paid ads on our social network.

With virtually everybody else relying on ads to make money, some members of the tech elite are finding it hard to imagine there is a better way.

But 2014 is not 2004, and the world has changed.

Effectively, Ello would be a for-profit corporation required to pursue social good as part of its charter, instead of solely maximizing shareholder value. Unlike a B Corp certification, this would enshrine their values in their legal structure, which is a pretty big deal. They were the most notable technology company to form as a PBC until that point, preceding Kickstarter’s conversion by nearly a year.

A dedicated page on their site explained the significance of the PBC, and the charter they were now bound by:

To assure that Ello always remains ad-free, Ello converted to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). A Benefit Corporation is a new kind of for-profit company in the USA that exists to produce a benefit for society as a whole — not just to make money for its investors.

The Ello PBC charter states in the strongest legal terms possible that:

1. Ello shall never make money from selling ads;
2. Ello shall never make money from selling user data; and
3. In the event that Ello is ever sold, the new owners will have to comply by these terms.

Ello exists for the benefit of the creative community, and we will never serve ads or sell personal data.

This was a commendable change, though somewhere along the way, all the public debate about raising professional money and profit maximization became solely about switching to a paid advertising model and selling user data. This was a straw man argument that was easier to knock down.

But there are many, many ways for a social network to become worse for their users than running ads.

My concern wasn’t that Ello would start running paid ads. I don’t even mind ads, as long as they’re done thoughtfully and with privacy in mind. (I ran ads from The Deck here for years.)

I was worried that, by taking outside funding, Ello’s values were no longer fully-aligned with the community: they were aligned with their investors. In time, given more money and more pressure, they would be inclined to do something the community, or even the original founders, didn’t want to do.

Series B and CEO Changes

In April 2015, six months after their Series A, Ello took another $5 million in a Series B round from their previous investors, giving a board seat to TechStars, and bringing their total raised to $11M.

Later that year, in December, Budnitz wrote a new post on Ello looking back on their first year and looking ahead to 2016:

This past week I gave a few interviews to online news organizations.

One of the journalists scoffed when I told him that Ello is built on principles we believe in, and that in 2015 we did everything we could to grow slowly. Rather than sell out and make another giant network the world doesn’t need, we decided to take our time to build the beautiful and inspiring place we have today.

I felt sad for the guy. It’s awful going through life never believing in anything.

So in the spirit of the New Year, and because it was clear that this journalist wasn’t going to believe anything I told him anyway, I figured I’d publish a short list of things Ello will never do:

1. Diverge from our mission to empower and support creators to inspire one another, and move the world forward.
2. Tolerate hate. Ello has many tools, some visible and others not, that help keep this network positive.
3. Sell ads or user data to third parties.
4. Sell out.
5. Suck.

Three months later, in March 2016, Paul Budnitz stepped down as CEO, citing the distance between his home in Vermont and the rest of the team in Boulder. He was replaced by Todd Berger, one of Ello’s co-founders and lead designers.

Under Berger, Ello refocused its efforts on artists and creators. From a May 2016 press release:

In recent months Ello has doubled down on its mission to support creators everywhere, becoming the premiere community for the world’s leading edge and contemporary artists, photographers, designers, illustrators, architects and GIF makers to share their work and ideas, connect with others, and build organic reach.

In a September 2016 interview with Wired, he said that was what Ello was always meant to be:

Berger had originally intended Ello to cater to artists, but the founding team was split on the idea. “To Paul [Budnitz] it sounded limiting. To our investors it sounded very limiting,” says Berger.

As its new CEO, Berger continued fundraising, but the SEC filing from March 2017 indicates a struggle, raising only $2.5M of the available $4M. In an interview with TechCrunch in November 2017, Berger said he was looking to raise more cash. “We have a lot of investment opportunities coming in from actually some fairly heavy-hitting firms that I hope to close.”

In the same interview, Berger said Ello now had 400,000 monthly active users, with 625,000 artists on the site.

It seemed like Ello finally found its niche as “The Creators Network,” a community of artists and designers using its visual-heavy design to show off their portfolios and promote their work. Their original freemium model never worked out, but sponsored content was handled thoughtfully, with like-minded brands offering giveaways. It was paid advertising, but it didn’t violate privacy or sell user data.

“A lot of people thought we died and went away and the whole time we’ve been cultivating a really niche and creative community that’s gotten more focused as I’ve been able to enact my vision,” Berger said.

The future of Ello seemed bright.

The Acquisition

Five months later, in March 2018, Ello was quietly sold to Talenthouse, a Los Angeles-based company whose primary business was running design contests for brands, in which independent artists competed against each other for a cash prize.

I only know the sale date because it was mentioned in the annual report of a venture capital firm who invested in their Series A. The acquisition was never announced publicly, as far as I can tell, mentioned only in this October 2018 interview with Talenthouse co-founder Maya Bogle, where she said that “earlier this year we acquired Ello.co.”

As an Ello user, I was never notified about the ownership change, even though they sold all my data to an entirely new company. As far as I can find, none of the original founders mentioned the sale publicly when it happened.

There were telltale signs, though: Ello’s social media started regularly promoting design contests from “our friends at Talenthouse,” while never disclosing the sale. The Ello homepage prominently featured Talenthouse “artist invites” to compete in their design contests from brands like Absolut Vodka, Amazon Prime, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Adidas, and Miller Lite.

The Founders Leave

The following month, in September 2018, the remaining two of Ello’s original remaining co-founders announced they had left the company.

In a cryptic post on Ello and Instagram, Ello’s then-CEO Todd Berger and fellow co-founder Lucian Föhr wrote:

Over the course of the past years we did our best to steer Ello per our vision, always with the intent of putting artists first. At times we succeeded, often we failed. Which brings us to today. We’re no longer at Ello, we can’t elaborate as to why, but it’s time for us to move on and return to studio life.…

If we let you down along the way, we’re sorry. If we didn’t, all the better.

On a July 2019 podcast, Berger and Föhr spoke candidly about their time at Ello, when Berger took over CEO duties and Föhr became the Chief Product Officer.

Todd Berger: The beginning of it was super exciting, super pure, 100% authentic. We built a lot of digital products, worked with lots of startups. We felt like we knew how to do this. We got a lot of momentum. People were stoked.

And then investors got interested and there was pressure to do all these other things. The CEO at the time [Paul Budnitz] got maybe a little overzealous about making lots and lots of money and turning it into a crazier thing than we ever imagined. And it kind of got out of control real fast.

And then we were just kind of holding on, trying to steer it as best possible back to its original kind of the real place we wanted it to live in. And it was tricky, that fast-paced real startup ecosystem— once there’s VC money in there and there’s a lot of press and there’s a lot of attention and you’re not necessarily meeting expectations per the media, per your investors, etc etc.

As for the acquisition, it doesn’t sound like it was a big payday for the original founders. (As preferred shareholders, VCs are typically paid from an acquisition before founders, employees, or other common stockholders.)

Interviewer: Do you feel that the sale of the company justified the time and effort and blood and sweat?

Berger: No, no. Frankly, it wasn’t a lucrative exit. It was more of a, let’s carry this thing on, someone wants it. And it wasn’t about that for us.

Like, had it been something different, who knows what we’d be doing now? But the experience, by and large, was justified. It just, by the nature of taking money in and building a company and a lot of pressure and responsibility, it went on longer and turned into a bumpier grindier thing I think than we wish it would have.

On August 22, 2018, then-CTO Colin Gray deleted the Manifesto, the foundational statement that was part of Ello since before it launched, along with all references to the Public Benefit Corporation and its charter.

Ello PBC was officially dead.

The End

In December 2019, Ello, Talenthouse, and Zooppa merged into TLNT Holdings, a new holding company backed by UK private equity firm AEDC Capital. TLNT was then sold to Swiss investment firm New Value AG, which renamed itself, confusingly, to Talenthouse AG.

In December 2021, Ello changed their logo to finally acknowledge what everyone on the site had figured out long ago.

“Our new logo represents our parent company, Talenthouse, who y’all are already familiar with as we cross promote creative briefs on the Talenthouse platform all the time,” they wrote on the official blog. “You’re creative, you understand the way businesses develop.”

Behind the scenes, Talenthouse was struggling financially.

A February 2023 report in The Observer exposed that Talenthouse was withholding funds from artists who won their creative briefs. A month later, The Guardian reported their parent company was “close to failure as debts mount,” with most of their subsidiaries closed and staff laid off.

Talenthouse, whose clients have included Netflix, Coca-Cola, Nike and the UN, is facing legal action by creditors in the UK and is understood to have laid off most of its workforce, with top executives also departing its parent company in recent days.

Its parent company, Talenthouse AG, has also announced the closure of four other subsidiaries saying they cannot afford to pay outstanding bills, including staff wages.

In May 2023, the company released a statement that it was facing a “critical financial situation,” restructuring the company while finding outside investors.

As a result of the upheaval, Ello’s website started seeing significant downtime starting in June 2023, delivering 500 errors on every page for days at a time. It came back online for a few days in July, and then more errors.

On July 18, 2023, it shut down for good and never recovered. On August 9, the web app was apparently deleted, leaving nothing but a Heroku error.

The Talenthouse corporate site is still online, but the platform is offline, and they haven’t posted anything on social media since January 2023. Ello’s social media team stopped posting in October 2022.

---

After leaving Ello in 2016, Budnitz returned to his Kidrobot roots with the launch of Superplastic in 2017, a vinyl figure company that expanded into NFTs and the metaverse in 2022, raising a total of $68M in seven rounds of funding, led by Amazon. Superplastic appears to have abandoned its NFT projects last year as the market cratered, and Budnitz stepped down from his CEO role in September, replaced by the former president of blockchain gaming company Dapper Labs. They are now focused on “synthetic celebrities” and AI influencers.

Todd Berger and Lucian Föhr reopened their Boulder design studio, which had shuttered for five years while they worked on Ello. Berger described running Ello as the “low point of my creative career,” so I hope they’re doing better.

As for Ello’s users, they’re out of luck. The shutdown spawned a confused exodus of sorts, former community members trying to figure out what happened on the Ello subreddit, on X/Twitter, and the comment section of the only other blog post about it.

“years of my writing down the drain”
“Heartbreaking. I upload my artwork in there and I love the site because it really focused on art.”
“It’s really messed up that there was NO warning to allow us to download our content. That was a very personal space for me and now it’s gone forever? It was my online diary ffs!”
“I had two groups. One had over 18k followers and the other 17k+. No warning at all. Just gone, along with 8 years of content updated a couple of times a week.”
“Did you find a way? It has basically my entire diary :(“
“18k followers and a few years worth of educational posts on fiction writing craft essentials gone.”

Some people tried to contact Ello or Talenthouse directly, but the emails bounced.

Some former members set up a Tumblr group to try to find each other again, “an attempt to maybe preserve and/or recapture what little magic Ello still had for us.”

You Were The Product

From the moment it launched, I liked Ello and wanted it to succeed. Experimentation in social networks is critically important, and there’s enormous value in making new online communities for creative people. I even loved Ello’s minimalist monochrome design, which some people bounced off of.

But from the moment I read about their seed funding, I worried that they wouldn’t be able to build a long-term sustainable business if they were hooked on professional funding and busy chasing growth.

The day after I wrote my first Ello post that blew up, Rose Eveleth published an article in The Atlantic with the blunt headline, “Ello Says You’re Not a Product, But You Are.”

The fact that you, the user, even exist and use their site makes you a product. Ello already has some amount of seed funding from VCs, which means it will need to return to them with something in hand if it wants more. And when it does, or when it is eventually bought by a larger company, you are part of that transaction—a key line in the sales pitch. Your existence on that site is a unit of currency, and it’s a unit that Ello is selling to whoever will give them money for it.

Ello’s founders wrote in their manifesto that, with other social networks, “You are the product that’s bought and sold.” They believed, I’m sure sincerely, that Ello would be different. “We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership. You are not a product.”

Despite their idealist manifesto and their Bill of Rights, I don’t believe they could ever truly be in partnership with their community once they were taking large amounts of venture funding. All of their ideals and big dreams were easily undone, even the legal restrictions they defined in their Public Benefit Corporation charter:

1. Ello made money from selling ads to third parties;
2. Ello made money selling their user data to a third party;
3. Ello was sold, and the new owners didn’t comply with those terms.

In the end, Ello was sold to a third party without notifying its users or giving them the opportunity to opt out of handing over all their content and data, then resold to a new company, and finally shut down and deleted with no notice or recourse.

Would things have been different if they hadn’t taken funding? It’s impossible to say. In all likelihood, it never would have been built in the first place.

But if it had, I doubt it would have ended like this.

Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential features of the system, including the rule of law, honest vote tallies, and orderly succession, would be at risk.

Today, however, we can do more than just speculate about how a second Trump term would unfold, because the MAGA movement has been telegraphing its plans in some detail. In a host of ways—including the overt embrace of illiberal foreign leaders; the ruthless behavior of Republican elected officials since the 2020 election; Trump allies’ elaborate scheming, as uncovered by the House’s January 6 committee, to prevent the peaceful transition of power; and Trump’s own actions in the waning weeks of his presidency and now as ex-president—the former president and his allies have laid out their model and their methods.

Begin with the model. Viktor Orbán has been the prime minister of Hungary twice. His current tenure began in 2010. He is not a heavy-handed tyrant; he has not led a military coup or appointed himself maximum leader. Instead, he follows the path of what he has called “illiberal democracy.” Combining populist rhetoric with machine politics, he and his party, Fidesz, have rotted Hungarian democracy from within by politicizing media regulation, buying or bankrupting independent media outlets, appointing judges who toe the party line, creating obstacles for opposition parties, and more. Hungary has not gone from democracy to dictatorship, but it has gone from democracy to democracy-ish. Freedom House rates it only partly free. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s ratings show declines in every democratic indicator since Fidesz took power.

[Jacob Heilbrunn: Behind the American right’s fascination with Viktor Orbán]

The MAGA movement has studied Orbán and Fidesz attentively. Hungary is where Tucker Carlson, the leading U.S. conservative-media personality (who is sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential contender), took his show for a week of fawning broadcasts. Orbán is the leader whom the Conservative Political Action Conference brought in as a keynote speaker in August. He told the group what it loves to hear: “We cannot fight successfully by liberal means.” Trump himself has made clear his admiration for Orbán, praising him as “a strong leader and respected by all.”

The U.S. is an older and better-established democracy than Hungary. How, then, could MAGA acolytes emulate Orbán in the American context? To simplify matters, set aside the possibility of a stolen or contested 2024 election and suppose that Trump wins a fair Electoral College victory. In this scenario, beginning on January 20, 2025, he and his supporters set about bringing Budapest to the Potomac by increments. Their playbook:

First, install toadies in key positions. Upon regaining the White House, the president systematically and unabashedly nominates personal loyalists, with or without qualifications, to Senate-confirmed jobs. Assisted by the likes of Johnny McEntee, a White House aide during his first term, and Kash Patel, a Pentagon staffer, he appoints officials willing to purge conscientious civil servants, neutralize or fire inspectors general, and ignore or overturn inconvenient rules.

A model for this type of appointee is Jeffrey Clark. A little-known lawyer who led the Justice Department’s environmental division, he secretly plotted with Trump and the White House after the 2020 election to replace the acting attorney general and then use the Justice Department’s powers to pressure officials in Georgia and other states to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Only the threat of mass resignations at the Justice Department derailed the scheme.

Trump has plenty of Jeffrey Clarks to choose from, and a Republican-controlled Senate would confirm most or all of them. But no matter if the Senate balks or if Democrats control it. Trump will simply do more, much more, of what he raised to an art in his first term: appointing “acting” officials to circumvent Senate confirmation—a practice that, the Associated Press reports, “prompted muttering, but no more than that, from Republican senators whose job description includes confirming top administration aides.”

Second, intimidate the career bureaucracy. On day one of his second term, Trump signs an executive order reinstating an innovation he calls Schedule F federal employment. This designation would effectively turn tens of thousands of civil servants who have a hand in shaping policy into at-will employees. He approved Schedule F in October of his final year in office, but he ran out of time to implement it and President Biden rescinded it.

Career civil servants have always been supervised by political appointees, and, within the boundaries of law and regulation, so they should be. Schedule F, however, gives Trump a new way to threaten bureaucrats with retaliation and termination if they resist or question him. The result is to weaken an important institutional safeguard against Trump’s demands to do everything from harass his enemies to alter weather forecasts.

Third, co-opt the armed forces. Having identified the military as a locus of resistance in his first term, Trump sets about cashiering senior military leaders. In their place, he promotes and installs officers who will raise no objection to stunts such as sending troops to round up undocumented immigrants or intimidate protesters (or shoot them). Within a couple of years, the military will grow used to acting as a political instrument for the White House.

Fourth, bring law enforcement to heel. Even more intimidating to the president’s opponents than a complaisant military is his securing full control, at long last, over the Justice Department.

In his first term, both of Trump’s attorneys general bowed to him in some respects but stood up to him when it mattered most: Jeff Sessions by recusing himself from the Russia investigation and allowing a special counsel to be appointed; Bill Barr by refusing to endorse Trump’s election lies and seize voting machines. Everyday prosecutions remained in the hands of ordinary prosecutors.

That now changes. Trump immediately installs political operatives to lead DOJ, the FBI, and the intelligence and security agencies. Citing as precedent the Biden Justice Department’s investigations of the January 6 events, the White House orchestrates criminal investigations of dozens of Trump’s political enemies, starting with critics such as the ousted Representative Liz Cheney and whistleblowers such as the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. With or without winning convictions, multipronged investigations and prosecutions bankrupt their targets financially and reputationally, menacing anyone who opposes the White House.

[David Frum: Trump is back on the ballot]

Most actions carried out by the Justice Department and national-security agencies remain routine in 2025 and beyond, but that doesn’t matter: No prosecution is above suspicion of political influence, and no Trump adversary is exempt from fear. Just as important is whom the government chooses not to prosecute or harass: It stays its hand against MAGA street militias, election shysters, and other allies of the president. The result is that federal law enforcement and the security apparatus become under Trump what Trump claims they are under Biden: political enforcers.

Fifth, weaponize the pardon. In Trump’s first term, officials stood up to many of his illegal and unethical demands because they feared legal jeopardy. The president has a fix for that, too. He wasn’t joking when he mused about pardoning the January 6 rioters. In his first term, he pardoned some of his cronies and dangled pardons to discourage potential testimony against him, but that was a mere dry run. Now, unrestrained by politics, he offers impunity to those who do his bidding. They may still face jeopardy under state law and from professional sanctions such as disbarment, but Trump’s promises to bestow pardons—and his threats to withhold them—open an unprecedented space for abuse and corruption.

Sixth, the final blow: defy court orders. Naturally, the president’s corrupt and lawless actions incite a blizzard of lawsuits. Members of Congress sue to block illegal appointments, interest groups sue to overturn corrupt rulemaking, targets of investigations sue to quash subpoenas, and so on. Trump meets these challenges with long-practiced aplomb. As he has always done, he uses every tactic in the book to contest, stonewall, tangle, and politicize litigation. He creates a perpetual-motion machine of appeals and delays while court after court rules against him.

Ultimately, however, matters come to a head. He loses on appeal and faces court orders to stop what he is doing. At that point, he simply ignores the judgments.

A famous precedent suggests that he would get away with it. In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that states were illegally seizing Indian lands. President Andrew Jackson, a racist proponent of forced assimilation, declined to enforce the verdict. The states continued stealing Indian lands, and the federal government joined in. Trump, who hung a portrait of Jackson near his desk in the Oval Office, no doubt knows this bit of history. He probably also knows the consequences Jackson faced for openly defying the Court: none.

With reelection in the balance, defying the courts was a bridge the president did not cross in his first term. From the beginning of that term, when the Supreme Court scrutinized his Muslim travel ban, to the very end, when the Court swatted away his blitz of spurious election lawsuits, the judiciary was the strongest bastion of the rule of law. Its prestige and authority were such that not even a belligerent sociopath dared defy it.

Yet having been reinstated and never again to face voters, Trump now has no compunctions. The courts’ orders, he claims, are illegitimate machinations of Democrats and the “deep state.” Ordered to reinstate an illegally fired inspector general, the Justice Department nonetheless bars her from the premises. Ordered to rescind an improperly adopted regulation, the Department of Homeland Security continues to enforce it. Ordered to provide documents to Congress, the National Archives shrugs.

At first, the president’s lawlessness seems shocking. Yet soon, as Republicans defend it, the public grows acclimated. To salvage what it can of its authority, the Supreme Court accommodates Trump more than the other way around. It becomes gun-shy about crossing him.

And so we arrive: With the courts relegated to advisory status, the rule of law no longer obtains. In other words, America is no longer a liberal democracy, and by this point, there is not much anyone can do about it.

[Read: Trump soft-launches his 2024 campaign]

In the first term, resignation threats acted as a brake on Trump. They thwarted the Jeffrey Clark scheme, for instance. A resignation threat by the CIA director deterred Trump from installing a hack as her deputy. A resignation threat by the White House counsel deterred him from firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Now, however, the president has little to fear politically, because he will never again appear on a ballot. If officials threaten to resign, he can replace or circumvent them. Their departures may slow him down but cannot stop him. Besides, he finds ways to remind his subordinates that angering him is a risky business. Noisy resignations will result in harassment by his supporters (the sorts of torments that hundreds of honest election officials have endured) and—you never know!—maybe by federal prosecutors and the IRS, too.

Might he go so far as to turn even Republicans in Congress against him? Unlikely. We should rationally assume that if Republicans protected him after he and his supporters attempted a coup, they will protect him no matter what else he does. Republicans are now so thoroughly complicit in his misdeeds that anything that jeopardizes him politically or legally also jeopardizes them. He already showed in his first term that he can and will stonewall congressional investigations. Unless Democrats drive Republicans into the political wilderness, overriding his veto (which requires a two-thirds vote of both chambers) is nigh-on impossible. Impeachment no longer frightens or even concerns him, because he has weathered two attempts and come back triumphantly.

Of course, there are congressional hearings, contempt-of-court orders, outraged New York Times editorials. Trump needn’t care. The MAGA base, conservative media, and plenty of Republicans in Congress defend their leader with whatever untruths, conspiracy theories, and what-abouts are needed. Fox News and other pro-Trump outlets play the role of state media, even if out of fear more than enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, MAGA forces are busy installing loyalists as governors, election officials, district attorneys, and other crucial state and local positions. They do not succeed in every attempt, but over the course of four years, they gather enough corrupt officials to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any election they lose. They invent creative ways to obstruct anyone who challenges them politically. And they are not shy about encouraging thuggish supporters to harass and menace “traitors.”

And so, after four years? America has crossed Freedom House’s line from “free” to “partly free.” The president’s powers are determined by what he can get away with. His opponents are harried, chilled, demoralized. He is term-limited, but the MAGA movement has entrenched itself. And Trump has demonstrated in the United States what Orbán proved in Hungary: The public will accept authoritarianism, provided it is of the creeping variety.

“We should not be afraid to go against the spirit of the age and build an illiberal political and state system,” Orbán declared in 2014. Trump and his followers openly plan to emulate Orbán. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

The math is simple: many people do less than they should.

They might be selfish, but it’s likely that they’re struggling with a lack of resources or a story of insufficiency. Either way, in any community or organization, many people contribute less than their peers.

Whether it’s splitting a check, getting a project done or making an impact on the culture or a cause, if you want things to get better, the only way is to be prepared to do more than your fair share.

Because we need to make up for the folks who don’t.