Posted by jmsflknr 10/29/2025
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.)
Would not be surprised to see the two merged into a single service.
It looks like the majority of their business is in employee training portals for megacorps.
One reason Vimeo is a good deal is that they charge for video transcoding by the minute, not by the file size. So you can upload full ProRes 4K movies and it doesn't cost the earth.
Instead, check out FLOSS server Jellyfin!
Uwotm8. Any sufficiently dark scene will have artifacts out the wazoo.
Not to mention other stuff like subtitles mentioning the wrong spoken language (ie. the character is speaking French, but the subtitle say they're speaking English), the UI unloads after some time, and the only action you can take is to start the video (you can't go back), the button for info when hovering over a card doesn't work half time time, video controls disappear at the end of an episode while transitioning to the next (the 'next episode' button is present and animating, but you can't pause the video at the credits in that moment), etc... In short, the UI is shit and so is the video quality.
Maybe with yours. My local library's offerings are abysmal.
I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong.
Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so that it can keep existing?
The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.
- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep
- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the product for years = real shit
They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.
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.
(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)
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.
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.
When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).
Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.
Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.
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.
Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.
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.
The fact they use some of the same tools doesn't mean they are doing the same thing. The majority of Blending Spoon's employees are devs, not finance people.
1) Nope, they are focused on taking advantage of customer lock-in to raise prices, while reducing operating expenses to increase cash flows. There may be some initial reinvestment to increase surplus of its users, before raising prices substantially. 2) "recoup the cost of investment+ profit"? Yeah lets see if that pans out. The acquisition price is assumed to be under a going-concern basis in perpetuity, if they muck things up with the choices they make the acquisitions have a limited life to increase and capture those cash flows to deliver a positive NPV investment. The demand for the firms products are not perfectly inelastic w.r.t to price.
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.
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.
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.
> you must improve the software to keep users from just up and quitting
You’re shifting the goalposts. Either they’re doing the bare minimum to maintain it, or they’re improving it with new features. And that too improving it with enough new features to justify a higher price.
And honestly, neither of these are bad things because none of their products have strong lock ins. Either they’re maintaining a service that was otherwise failing and therefore keeping existing users satisfied, or they’re growing and improving it.
Software is hard, so whether they’re successful or not remains to be seen. And turnaround stories almost never happen in software so they’re taking on an even harder job, but so far there’s little evidence that they’re been user hostile.
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.
I could never prove that the fake accounts were them, but the optics weren’t good.
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.
But I think most of those changes happened before Bending Spoons bought Meetup. I don't think it was a situation where everything was great, then Bending Spoons bought them and it started going to crap (which I've heard some people in these groups retroactively claiming recently).
I think it also advertises "get premium to see gender ratios"...
Eww.
'Spoon bender' was a deep insult in my circle when we were ~18. In honour of the ur-bender, Uri.
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.
(This is a similar story to Vimeo; they've been forcing a pricing scheme update gradually over the past year, and now Bending Spoons is buying them. I'm sure some people will get the timeline mixed up since it's so close and claim that Bending Spoons raised the prices.)
Did they want to be a white label video hosting provider? Did they want to be a social media network? Did they want to be prestige TV for the online age? Did they want to be IFC (indie movies) for the internet?
If they had picked one track and stuck to it they would have done a lot better but they ended up at the intersection of all those disparate spaces which ended up being a very tiny place.
They had several opportunities to become a legitimate competitor to YouTube with the number of times YT dropped the ball over the past decade but they never made the big move they probably should have.
Granted, I'm armchair CEO postulating about it, but that always seemed like a good niche that would cover the rest of the subsets in a variety of ways, especially if they had embedded a monetization program via ads like YouTube as a sub-brand for creators. A possible 1-2 punch to sustainable revenue.
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.
ProTip: Honestly, just buy your own domain, control your own email address(es)...
Using the email address directly as the username/key is a more modern trend (mid-late 00s). I believe this coincided with the dominance of gmail where people would have a forever email address. Before that, your email address would regularly change if you moved ISPs/schools/jobs so it wasn't a good identifier.
I don't think I'm missing any point, thanks.
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.
/s
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/15/how-aol-dominated-the-intern...
https://www.axios.com/2021/05/04/verizon-aol-yahoo-valuation...
I'm guessing excess GPUs maybe? Everyone gets their own AI home lab!
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...
Maybe use their temporary dial-up riches to line up long-term rights to premium content. I suspect before YouTube took off, nobody knew the potential for online video, and they could have probably locked in contracts at very low prices.
Interesting comment from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38968476
Damn.
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.
So on par with actual value created.
They wanted the product not the developers.
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.
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.
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?
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.
But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.
In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.
We get time and money compensation for that.
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-lay-off-75-185...
2. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/route-planning-app-kom...
Without a constant stream of new investment, the company simply can't afford to be loaded up with SV staff producing features that nobody will pay for. Bending Spoons change the business model to 'normal business'. They move to much cheaper European staff, stop work on nonsense 'features', concentrate instead on servicing their existing customers with a stable platform and well thought out incremental advances.
So they take businesses that are dying because nobody will give them free money any more, and make them into real sustainable businesses that can stand on their own two feet?
It's not about sustainable business, they are literally enshittifiers. I know quite a few employees, they literally debate whether a UX change to make a X to close a payment modal almost invisible is "too evil or not" and they go with it anyway.
So, we're not kind to companies who ruin their product for a short-term revenue increase then why all this positive spin for a company whose business model is to do exactly and only that?
Source: I'm a wikipedia editor unaffiliated with bending spoons.
Edit: I see another complaint about IP editing. I am looking into this.
One day they had issues setting it up, so they call a help line. They ended up being scammed, and paid this person ~$200 to fix their issue. After it happened, they immediately called me up and asked if they were scammed.
I told them that unfortunately, they were. Surprisingly though, the scammer did actually fix their issue.
AOL doesn't charge for any helpdesk service at all. It explicitly says on their website that all helpdesk services are free and they'll never charge you.
The scam was that the scammers had a fake helpdesk service that showed up that my wife's grandparents ended up paying for.
The scammers did actually fix the issue, but the scam was that the grandparents should have never been charged!
The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.
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.
20 years from Bending Spoons will be the final resting place of Anthropic.
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.
Their Wikipedia article makes them sound like kind of a failure, but the entire second half of the page is talking about all of their acquisitions, more than one of which cost over $1 billion.
So what am I missing? How did this company get so much money?
They have tiny internal teams split per product with the sole purpose of hiding the "not now" button as much as possible to increase trials and purchases.
Absolutely cancer of a company, run away if you see their name on anything.
ZIRP era with free flowing money, probably did lot of bad in this respect. Running products cost actual money. And those surviving on advertising is more limited group.
[1]https://weeklysiliconvalley.com/bending-spoons-from-humble-b...