Tell me you are a young 20-something without telling me you are a young 20-something... Your definition of success is as narrow as your life experience. And it shows. Let's talk about pet stores, and see if I can bring you some perspective you'll understand. Almost exactly 1 mile north of me is a tiny little woman-owned pet store, and she employs 4 people. We'll call it Lori's Pets. I've been patronizing her shop for more than a decade. Talking with my neighbor the other day (who moved in 4 years ago) I mentioned Lori's Pets, and he'd never heard of it and never been there. It is literally the closest pet store to our houses, and he has 4 cats and has never heard of Lori's Pets. A little over a mile south of me is PetCo. It's the size of giant grocery store and employs probably 30 people. It's the kind of big landmark you use to give people directions. ("It's in the PetCo parking lot." "Take a left at PetCo, and you'll see the place you want on the right, in the next block.") Lori owns two houses; one she lives in, one she rents out. In the hottest real estate market in America. She just had her first employee turnover in 5 years. Her business has been running for 15 years. PetCo employees are bottom-of-the-barrel minimum wage drones, with zero product knowledge or even care for pets. The products are largely mass market garbage that your pet can survive on, but will never thrive on. Employee turnover seems to be around 25-40%. But - using your metrics and valuation system - PetCo is a success and Lori's Pets isn't. Big does not equal good. Big does not equal success. In actual fact, BIG is almost universally bad; for the people who work there, for the people who engage with their products, and for the communities in which these big companies operate. Many people would argue that Hubski is an unmitigated success, having launched the same year as Google+, Snapchat, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Wikileaks, and being still in regular use today, while maintaining its core values, purpose, and intention. EDITS BELOW because my original comments were overly harsh, and that was not my intention: Don't parrot the value system of corporate America; find your own measure of value, that reflects your priorities. You have inadvertently validated KB's tirade, and taken the easy route to bash the "little guy" (Hubski/mk) because it's not Reddit-sized, or something. Which, somewhat ironically, is exactly why many (most?) of us love it here.
Hail the Lories of this world! Community is what makes the work worthwhile - with my friends I’m willing to spend a week shoveling a trench. For corporate profits, fuck off and hire an excavator. I still come to this forum, and care about everyone’s updates on the pubski. Just the plain support and reality checks have influenced my life in a tangible way. 5 years ago I had an opportunity to go drive around the states as a photographer and get paid for it - but I was scared to accept the job and had about 5 different justifications. Kleinbl00 told me I was an idiot if I didn’t go for it, and it has been one of the best jobs I ever had :)
I was so excited for you to do that photography job, too!! And yeah, as I get older and look ahead towards retirement in the next 10 years or so, I'm taking a much closer look at what "success" is, and how I define it. This leads me to shopping at small independent stores, almost 100%. Even if I am buying from Amazon, the stores I tend to buy from are small shops set up to sell via the Amazon engine, not big box retailers. I have come to appreciate that "success" is a 3D scale with many variables. And people can set those variables to whatever they want to define as "success", so each person's definition will be slightly different than everyone else's.