Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 114 posts

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#21

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #18
Multicomp wrote: post #4

I like the idea, but 2 things. 1) where did they get the prices of $4.99 a week? Facebook's average revenue per user per quarter is ~$25. That's approximately $1.50 a week, for their most profitable section. Elsewhere, FB makes $6 ARPU per quarter, or around 37¢ a week. I'd be willing to pay $1 a month for a social network if it manages to get around the network effects etc. but ~$20(!) for something Facebook enables…

I love the outrage about $20/month. It's clear that social networks create almost no individual utility at all, and that the reason we have privacy violating ones in the first place is that people "really want it" but also really don't want to pay for it. Facebook will clearly win, based on the comments about pricing. People don't value privacy, they value free stuff.

The comment your replying to said they would be willing to pay $1 a month for a social network, so there’s definitely appetite for paid social networks, but $20 a month is understandably a crazy price.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#22

Post by farazbabar »

About time. I have been working on a similar problem ever since I found out about the Saudi agent that was uncovering twitter user identities to the royals (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/saudis-recruited-twitt...). The main idea is to have zero knowledge for social graphs (both the connectivity and communication). The product behaves like a newsgroup clone with subscriptions and threads featuring zero knowledge (for host i.e. me and any other parties not subscribed/authorized to the topic).

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#23

Post by throwaway_law »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20
choward wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$4.99 a week has to be a joke, right? $20 a month is about double what I pay for Netflix and half of my phone bill. Just to send messages to people? I'm sure the article is leaving things out but as of right now I don't get this at all.

> Just to send messages to people? That's not what they're selling people. They're selling people a solution to loneliness.

>They're selling people a solution to loneliness.

I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#24

Post by pavel_lishin »

throwaway_law wrote: post #23
pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to send messages to people? That's not what they're selling people. They're selling people a solution to loneliness.

>They're selling people a solution to loneliness. I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.

Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't think they can deliver on what they're promising.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#25

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #19

> Friended wants to give users a deeper and more meaningful connection to one another, which the company believes they crave. > The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them. I'm…

> There is no short conversation you can have that'll turn a stranger into the kind of friend they're seeking.

I'm actually not sure this is true. And I say that because I'm actually not sure this is true:

> It. Takes. Time.

And I say that because of things like [0], which seems to say that connection is more about vulnerability and depth of understanding than anything else, and achieving that depth can be accelerated.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729723400...

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#26

Post by snazz »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #15
Multicomp wrote: post #4

I like the idea, but 2 things. 1) where did they get the prices of $4.99 a week? Facebook's average revenue per user per quarter is ~$25. That's approximately $1.50 a week, for their most profitable section. Elsewhere, FB makes $6 ARPU per quarter, or around 37¢ a week. I'd be willing to pay $1 a month for a social network if it manages to get around the network effects etc. but ~$20(!) for something Facebook enables…

> 2. Why is this iOS only? Limited resources excuses can be answered with 'do a mobile web so all mobiles can'. Is it the 'sometimes iPhone users tend to pay more for the same things Android users are too cheap to'? Even simpler... Progressive Web Apps will install on both and I believe you can have a PWA in either app store... Code once. Run anywhere...

PWAs still feel very janky in real life. They’re slow, you can’t do any complex animations, weird bugs always show up, etc. Most importantly, they still feel like websites, which isn’t a good thing.

Reimplementing something of the complexity of Snapchat as a PWA would be impossible: seamless camera usage, real-time AR filters, smooth animations, swipe gestures, usable built-in maps, video without buffering, and it’s fast for their target audience (recent iPhone users).

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#27

Post by throwaway_law »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #24
throwaway_law wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They're selling people a solution to loneliness. I'll one up you, they are selling hope. Odds are this will be seeded with a bunch of bots, and these lonely people may or maynot get some sense of temporary relief thinking they are interacting privately with someone else, when its really just a bot.

Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't think they can deliver on what they're promising.

I know its unfair and maybe even disparaging, especially my suggestion they would seed their own thing with bots...but the reality is the social network/SV startup well has been poisoned and so it would be my (our) own fault not to approach these things with a ton of skepticism.

>Today, a new social app is launching. Called Friended...Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors...

That is what it is all about.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#28

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

Bombthecat wrote: post #3

> Right now, users can only post a conversation starter every eight hours. The premium tier, which costs $4.99/week, allows users to post as frequently as they want, and also includes a few other premium features, like the ability to talk to people in your location. Woah.. That's really expensive...

It might be a useful method of pre-selecting only people who care at least a little bit. And rich people.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#29

Post by dmos62 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #19

> Friended wants to give users a deeper and more meaningful connection to one another, which the company believes they crave. > The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them. I'm…

This might not be about establishing "real" friendships. What is it that we lack when we're lonely? What helps? These aren't easy questions to answer, in my opinion.

The obvious unsympathetic suggestion "go do some social stuff" ignores that lonely people often experience a non-negligible inertia that keeps them from doing exactly that. Sometimes it's better to say "now what" than "stop doing that".

I don't dismiss the possibility of a technological solution to the problem. Even if you don't get a real friendship out of some platform, maybe you get something that's good for you anyway. I personally like the idea of "cold call" one-on-one talks.

Re: Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

#30

Post by sorenn111 »

Perhaps I may be very wrong, but the name of this network, "Friended", comes from a term that Facebook turned into common vernacular. "Friend me on Facebook" or "I friended you on Facebook". If you're starting point is a term coined by your goliath competitor, I'd be concerned.
Post reply on HN