I think historic content is very valuable which is why I am offended by this absurd response on hacker news where people are conflating the actions of a protest with the consequence of a law.

If someone chooses to protest this law by deleting their website then more power to them but we must be honest about what it is: protest.

People should be considerate about the consequence of the services they release onto the internet. We can debate the specifics of whether certain requirements are reasonable/fair/beneficial but it’s patently absurd to label choices these website owners are making as being caused by this law. The law has zero to do with historic content, there’s not a single risk to anyone who leaves a website online in read only mode as an archive.

Forums and small websites have been killed off by changing consumer behaviour, the shift to big social media platforms. Using big numbers to suggest that the UK Online Safety Act is responsible for killing off these smaller independent websites is disingenuous.

If you do the same exercise for the other forums, you’ll find they’re all long dead too.

Reality: the forum has negative 358 posts in the last month. The forum has negative ~2k posts over the last 12 months. The forum is so inactive that they’re deleting posts faster than creating them. 8 people have created accounts in the last year.

The forum has been long dead.

(is the domain for sale?)

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

"We’ve heard concerns from some smaller services that the new rules will be too burdensome for them. Some of them believe they don’t have the resources to dedicate to assessing risk on their platforms, and to making sure they have measures in place to help them comply with the rules. As a result, some smaller services feel they might need to shut down completely.

So, we wanted to reassure those smaller services that this is unlikely to be the case."

As a solo developer walking a well-worn path you're in a fortunate position. You can poach customers from competitors and differentiate based on customer's having direct engagement with you, the founder, and price, because you don't have expensive developers to pay.

Identify a single use-case that your software is good for today, and then spend some time identifying prospective customers based on companies using your competitors for that use-case, then reach out and undercut your competitors based on your values. A competitor's case study / customer stories page is the classic poachers first port of call.

Persistence will pay off. Most of your outreach will fail, most of your ideas will fall flat, most of what you think matters won't matter and most of what you think doesn't matter will matter. That's okay.

Anything can be made into a company. Can you make this into a company? Nobody really knows until you've tried, but the idea has potential and you have the necessary skills to pull it off so there's no reason it shouldn't be possible.

The biggest difference between developers who write software and founders of software companies is a focus on customers. If you're struggling to see a clear path forward, it's a sign that you are probably spending too much time writing code and not enough time thinking about / talking to customers. You'll know you're doing enough business things when you start to feel like you're letting the software slip.

[1] I think it's great but that would undercut my point that it doesn't matter

If economic opportunity is your motivation then the U.S. is a much better place to be than the UK, but if you'd just like to live a normal life with healthcare and a house, the UK is a far better place to be than the U.S for most people. "Economic opportunity" as a motivator is itself a U.S. mindset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7001996?hl=en-GB

edit: My hunch is that the channels the OP's attack was able to target are not actual channels but rather YouTube users (who have a "channel" because that's how YouTube represents users): so "YouTube User" is the correct description of this attack, which is distinct from what you're thinking of as a channel.

The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is.

Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough.

Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.