Ello: It Was a Good Concept

Not too long ago, I talked about one of my favorite photography social medias right now. I mentioned Ello in that post for its huge spam problem. Since I talked about my favorite photography social media, it is time to talk about my least favorite.

History

Ello.co was founded in March of 2014 by Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger. Ello was known as the ad free social media at the time as well as “The Creators Network”. It has a million users, but its popularity has dwindled a bit.

The Issue with Ello

Ello has a huge spam issue. In the post that I have linked below, they interviewed the CEO, and they admitted that Ello has gained a lot of spam users. It is true that all social medias have this issue, but they work on reducing the spam and in my opinion Ello doesn’t ever seem to get better. The number of spam users isn’t really cut back. I just feel like social medias like Instagram do a much better job at keeping the amount of spam down. Maybe it is because Ello is so small. Instagram has the backing of Facebook and that might help them cut down spam.

Ello’s spam problem

The Core of Ello

Ello.co was a good concept. On the site, you can hire and request collabs if you enable the buttons in settings. I think that is a great option to have. If you were to want to hire a creator or do a collab, I think that it is great to be able to have those buttons showing that you are open to do those things.. The Discover page is amazing, you can easily find posts about photography even from the smallest users on the platform! There is even a way to enter giveaways from the biggest creators on the platform! Sadly all of these great and unique features are overshadowed by the issues it has.

Everything Wrong With Ello

Ello has more problems than just spam problems. You can see some of them in the post that I mentioned earlier but there are others. Ello’s follow page is broken, I get followers, but my following count doesn’t go up. The worst part of Ello is definitely its spam problem. Because of this spam, I can post a photo and within seconds get views on it. Some of these views could be legit but getting hundreds of photo views in under an hour is suspicious. I have almost three thousand views on my profile. I find it difficult to believe that those are all photographers coming to look at my work, especially knowing about this spam issue.

It Ello Still Worth Using

I feel that if you like the benefits of Ello and can get enough actual photographers to follow you then Ello is a great platform, despite the spam issues. By getting involved in the photographer community then you will be able to have some photographers look at your work and not just bots and spam users. This is my goal with using Ello, you just have to try and not get frustrated with the spam. I don’t know of any way to stop getting these spam followers and views but at least you can get honest feedback from other photographers on the platform.

Conclusion

As I said, the core features that Ello.co has are excellent, but the continuation from the start of Ello was problematic. If Ello was able to control the spam a bit better like other social medias do, I think that it would be a lot more popular and a lot better.

You can view my Ello profile at the link below:
https://ello.co/digitalwondersandsmiles

-Digital Wonders & Smiles