This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm in the domain name business
it's called "cybersquatting". fuck all the way off.
also
> "my wife and i met on okcupid and i want more people to make connections like that"
> creates an app that's only available on 20% of phones and requires meeting in person to connect
this guy is delulu
That was my thought process too.
"This app helps you make friends without algarhythems, or ads, or data tracking"
"Cool! How do I use it?"
"By having friends."
"But I don't have friends anymore! I'm over 30, and as work and responsibilities have taken over my daily life, I no longer have the time required to maintain healthy friendships. I was looking to this app to make new friends. How would I do that here?"
"By having friends".
It's what plants crave.
iOS is 60% of users in the US, where the author is from.
iOS is 60% of users in the US, where the author is from.
But only 30% of the known universe, where the author is from.
I'm a wee bit stoned but this math is concerning, right?
Yes
but the us is only 5% of the potential market, and most countries don't use primarily iphones. western europe is around 35% apple and that's as high as it goes internationally
Fun fact, most Americans don’t give a shit about any of us who don’t live there lol
Apple stuff is super expensive here, so few of my friends have iOS. But it's their work phone.
I wish I had $30k to waste on something stupid. Like medical bills.
People here are super negative for no reason. It looks like someone's garage project, why does there have to be immediately an android app ?
I find the idea of tapping the phones to connect a nice one, it looks like a unique feature, but i also think that's not enough to make people want to use it. Actually it will serve as both, a reason to use it, and maybe even a stronger one not to.
With services like this, you need some critical mass of people to get it off the ground, and i don't see how he can achieve that without some strong capital making the push(and yes, it does need the android version for that to happen). The social network market seems quite saturated already - unless you have something amazing your competitor can't add in a week, i don't see it happening.
the reason i'm super negative is that the blog post makes no sense. he's overpaid massively for a domain because it used to have an old forum on it, and he is now announcing his intention to build a thing using that name which is nothing like it, to recapture a feeling of nostalgia for another app which is nothing like the first two. and he is marketing it as a way to meet new people despite he fact that you have to meet people before you can see them in the app.
this has amico written all over it.
like, how do you even reach critical mass if the barrier to entry is intentionally set 20 meters off the ground? why market yourself with an old forgotten name despite not resembling the old thing at all? why announce it before you have something to show?
why does there have to be immediately an android app ?
Because back then Friendster was the leading social media site in Southeast Asia, and later it got dumped as people went to Facebook, beginning with the games. That the people who grew up with it are now mostly on Android phones.
The social network market seems quite saturated already - unless you have something amazing your competitor can’t add in a week, i don’t see it happening.
There do exist people who are trying to get out of toxic social media networks run by supervillains, and looking for alternatives asides from Mastadon. While it's so tempting to think the guy who bought the domain name and trademarks could do something, I doubt his project could fly given his previous Medium posts.
It's clearly a passion project but even his goal of it paying for itself is highly unlikely. More importantly, making sure those homebound, living in rural areas, using an android phone etc. are persona non-grata is just such a douchecanoe move. There's a lot of ways he could have incentivized IRL contact without telling everyone not able to do that that or running an android phone that they're not welcome on the platform.
It reminds me of Fetlife.
If you've never heard of Fetlife, it's a fetish social network. At least that's what it markets itself as. In reality, everyone on fetlife knows what it is.
It's a fetish dating site. And also a fetish hookup site.
But the thing is, lets say I'm a male between the ages of 18 and 65. And I want to find a woman, in my city, who is single, and into monogamy......and also a whole list of fucked up fetishes. Don't worry, these women would ALSO list these fetishes as interests so it's consentual.
As a fetlife user you can't do that. You can't search by gender. You can't filter by age. You CAN see who's available by city, but you literally get EVERYBODY in that city. It's more like getting a whole phone book, rather than a filtered search list.
So it just ends up being way harder to use than it should be. They claim it's to "protect women", but that's bullshit. Women are not these defenseless creatures who need you to break your whole search system to shield them from the world. Also, there's an easy fix for that. You add search opt out in your own personal settings. They already have the ability to limit who can message you, it would not be hard to add a checkbox that says "remove my profile from search".
I'd be good with that. I just want to search women in my area, who share my interests, are single and monogamous, and want to be messaged. The system they have makes that SUUUUUUPER hard.
Fetlife isn't a dating site. Sure, you can try using it like one. Just like you could try using Facebook like one. Or Lemmy. But just because it's sex positive doesn't mean it is for hookups. Like you noticed they are deliberately limiting people's ability to use it like a dating site.
Dating sites (especially the fetish ones) attract creeps and bots and Fetlife already has plenty of those. Managing it like a dating site would just make that so much worse.
If you are desperate to meet someone go to the events listed in your area. But again, if you go there with the intention of immediately hooking up you're going to be severely disappointed.
If you want to be derogatory towards Fetlife call it a porn site. Because that is the main reason people pay for it. To get access to videos.
Sounds like they are incentivizing people to make external search sites from scraped data, which means the users wouldn't be able to opt out. From your description I'd be pretty surprised if that doesn't already exist
About 10 years ago there was an ASL search greasemonkey script as a browser extention.
Funny thing about that is, it was made by a gay guy who disabled the ability to search for women. And when people asked him about it, he said some things that I will not repeat here, but just know it was like if toxic masculenity also took on the form of abusive and hateful commentary.
Within a week somebody released an alternate version of that script with modified code that let you search for anyone. And as Fetlife is a very all inclusive site, the revised script also had options for numerous variations of trans. Basically every gender identity you can think of was included in the updated script.
Fetlife couldn't control use of the script, but they could detect it. Which they then banned users for using it. Since that time the script no longer works. Fetlife did something behind the scenes to disable it.
There did exist some scrapers but they are fighting to keep those off the site. The first hurdle is that you need an account with a phone number to see anything on there. Makes it easier to ban anyone caught scraping or trying to do other shady shit.
Ah, that does make sense
But it will certainly pay for itself when following enshittification path already laid out.
Needs to tap phones with a real friend? I guess I'll never be able to use it then :D
Also, no android app..?
Also, also, it was not the first social media. Irc-galleria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria) and other were first :)
I can remember Hot or Not being before Friendster. I don't know when it started, but I found it around 2000.
For anyone unaware, the idea was simple. Go to the website, and you'd be presented with a random picture. Could be male, could be female. You could adjust these settings to be more specific as to which pictures you'd get.
But basically, you'd see a picture. Then you vote. Hot? Or not? And after you vote, you can see another picture to vote on, as well as the score from the previous voted on picture.
That's it. Thats the whole thing. No messaging. No interacting. Nothing. Just you having an account that you upload a single picture to. Then other people can randomly get the chance to vote on you, and you can also check your own score. The ONLY other thing you could do is share your URL with friends. Usually through AIM or YIM or ICQ or MSN Messanger.
I really think that concept was ahead of its time. I think it would have worked really well as an app in 2016.
was gonna say, i think lunarstorm had like 700k users in 1998. but then again i've never heard about friendster.
He replied to a comment in the post asking why theres no Android app and says he does plan to make one
Modern social networks are pretty trash, but I don't have an iPhone so this is a non starter.
Even so, I'd rather just... text my friends.
most useless purchase of a domain ever
I've fantasized about doing something like this but putting in a nonprofit, foundation-based system run by a board of mental health workers, that was designed to actually bring people together. It may still happen. I don't have the high barrier to entry it takes to start a social network so I'm starting from the other end and doing community organizing instead. Power to the real people offline, who aren't trying to make a profit off our need for human connection.
Very cool!
