Squarespace sold to private equity

Well, shit.

Squarespace has, for all intents and purposes, been sold to Permira, a British private equity firm, for $6.9 billion. As a result, the company will go private by the end of the year – meaning it’ll no longer be publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Screenshot of the top of a news article dated 13 May 2024 from the Squarespace Investor Centre with the title ‘Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira’.

While I’m happy for CEO Anthony Casalena and his team at Squarespace, being sold to a private equity firm is traditionally a step towards enshittification.

This does me a concern because my personal website (what you’re reading this on/from) is built on Squarespace, as are two other websites that I manage. I love Squarespace and have been a customer since May 2012. I really don’t want to have to move to another no-code web host if this place goes downhill over the next few months or years.

The problem with private equity

“Why might things go downhill?” you ask. Well, when private equity firms buy companies they tend to squeeze all the value out of them before selling them off as empty, discarded shells.

To quote Cory Doctorow:

Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”

Or Nicholas Shaxson, writing in the Guardian:

To their critics, private equity firms are blood-suckers that load healthy companies with debt then asset-strip them, leaving lifeless husks. The private equity titans counter with the opposite tale: they buy underperforming firms, install whizzy IT systems and inject far-sighted management, borrow money to juice up performance, and turn them into roaring engines of capitalism, making everyone rich. As ever, the reality is a mix of the two.

The core of private equity’s problem – for society, but not for its investors – is that many of the tricks in private equity’s toolbox just redistribute the pie upwards, generating immense profits but deepening inequality and sapping growth.

And research tells us that business bought by private equity firms go bankrupt ten times more often than other businesses.

So, yeah. I’m concerned.  

A sliver of hope?

All that said, Casalena is staying on as CEO and Board Chair, and two other major long-term investors are “re-investing” in Squarespace as well. So that might be good news.

And looking through the other technology companies that Permira has invested in, the sense I get is that, while those companies might be somewhat expensive, at least they’re not shit.

So there is hope that we won’t get screwed over too badly.

Not that I’m going to wait to find out. I’ll start playing around with alternatives over the next few months and get ready to move when the time comes. If the time comes. *crosses fingers*

 

15 years of blogging

Today is my fifteenth blogging anniversary!

Well, at least that’s how long I’ve been blogging on insanityworks.org using syndicated blogging software. Before that I would add occasional life updates to a couple of static pages on this site.

Screenshot of an old webpage with a block of text titled “Summer/Winter 2006 onwards: Melbourne Business School”.

It’s been interesting to see how internet communication has changed over the years that I’ve been doing this. We started with plain blogging (with blog rings for discovery and RSS for pull notifications) and then added microblogging, photo sharing, videoblogging, podcasts, and now mailing lists.

Interest in longform personal blogging dropped off many years ago thanks to the rise of

  • microblogging (tweets take so much less effort to write),

  • photo sharing (super easy to share just a photo with a caption), and

  • video blogging (simultaneously both easier and more difficult to do).

The shuttering of Google Reader only sped things along.

At the same time commercialisation got a lot of personal bloggers to start blogging professionally instead.

Now podcasting is following a similar trajectory: we’ve gone from lots of small personal podcasts to increasingly commercial interests muscling in to this space. And what are TikTok videos if not a mashup of microblogs and video blogs?

Long exposure photo of a train going down a track behind some trees.

There has been movement in both directions though. People write lengthy, threaded microblogs which are basically just longform blogs split into small paragraphs. And lots of branding- and commercially-minded people have moved their writing to subscription-only mailing lists instead of public blogs. So the era of longer writing is having a bit of a comeback.

That said, us personal bloggers have kept on keeping on all these years. There were lean times during which I didn’t blog much, yes, but I’ve been pretty consistent these last few years. And I’m quite happy with the volume and quality of my current blogging output.

So here’s to fifteen more years!

14 year blogging anniversary

It has been fourteen years since I wrote my first ‘technical’ blog post.

I say technical because I was posting occasional life updates on my personal website before then, but this was the first time I installed blogging software on my site and posted something through there.

An email from Fantastico alerting me that an instance of WordPress has been installed on my website.

Blogs are the best because you’re the boss

Blogs – and personal websites in general – really are the best.

Social networks, micro-blogs, and photo/video hosting sites are fine and all. But on all of those you’re at the mercy of the platform. The folks who run that platform (or the AI that moderates it) can delete your profile and your entire content history if they want to. And you can’t take all your content and migrate it to some other platform either. You’re always stuck inside their walled garden and they control what it is that you can and can’t do there.

On your blog (or website) your content is always yours. You can do whatever you want with it. You do have to manage the site itself, but these days even a minimally skilled user of the internet won’t find that particularly challenging. And, sure, more functional and nicer looking blogs will cost a little, but running a basic, decent looking site isn’t as expensive as you’d think.

Blogs aren’t what they used to be though

Of course the content of my blog has changed drastically since 24 April 2007. Back then I talked a lot more about random things going on in my life (hence the name ‘random tangent’), the things I liked and didn’t like, the movies I’d watched and music I’d listened to, and what my current interests were.

Most of those topics don’t warrant full blog posts anymore. A couple of photos and 2-3 tweets usually do the trick for me. Often just a simple retweet or quote tweet is pretty much all I want to say on a topic I’m not actively involved in. Also, with a retweet I can share other people’s point of view, not just my own.

What goes on my blog these days are the things I want to remember, process, and revisit in the future. Things I don’t want disappearing into the social media black hole that are then difficult to find later on. Things that, for one reason or another, matter.

So here we are, and here’s to another fourteen years.

Decentralizing my online presence

Starting this year, I'm going to cross-post to my blogs:

  • everything I post on Instagram and

  • most of what I tweet (and retweet) on Twitter.

Why?

Two reasons.

1. I'm sick of the walled gardens that social networks force you play in.

It’s great that I can post stuff so easily to social networks. That’s where most my non-techie friends and family members are too – which is super cool.

But, once I do post stuff to a social network, there’s almost nothing else I can do with this content of mine. I can’t archive, index, search, tag, export, or repurpose any of it. And I certainly can’t share it to any other social network. So, once my content is in there, it stays in there.

That’s not the way things used to be, back when the web was more decentralized.

In the words of Tom Eastman: “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”

Now I’m still a massive RSS user (yay NewsBlur!) so, for me, most of the web still is decentralized. I want my content to be part of this easily accessible, decentralized web as well.

Which brings me to reason number two…

2. Social networks are internet black holes.

If a post of mine isn’t in currently your social news feed or isn’t pinned to the top of my social profile, it might as well not exist.

Unless you’re willing to go to my profile and scroll through years of posts, there’s no easy way to see what I’ve posted since I joined Flickr in 2007, Facebook in 2007, Twitter in 2008, and Instagram in 2012.

None of my social network posts appear in Google or Bing, either. So, as far as the broader internet is concerned, this content of mine has disappeared into a black hole that you need to be a member of to access. And, even then, there’s no easy way to find what I’ve posted there over the years. (Though, to be fair, Flickr and Twitter do have fairly decent built-in search engines.)

I don’t want my content to be this thoroughly inaccessible.

So what next?

Initially, not too much is going to change. I’ll still keep posting regularly to Twitter and Instagram.

But, because I’ll be cross-posting most of my stuff to my blogs, too, you’ll be able to go to my blogs (this one and my professional one) and look through all the great stuff (mine and others’) that I’ve been sharing on Twitter and Instagram.

The best part: this blog content will be archived, tagged, and backed-up. And it’ll be easy to search for, export, and share to any other social network.

Yay for a more (re)decentralized web!