11–20 of 108 posts
At this point, it seems like there is more people talking about App.net than people potentially using it.
It's going to be a self-fulfilling conspiracy. All this talk about how it's gonna succeed, and how noone understands it.. sooner or later, some misled company like FB or Google will just acqui-hire App.net for millions of dollars because everyone is talking about it.
I don't know if red herring would be the way to call it, but the general summation that the "success" of App.net is due to marketing (particularly the out-pouring of Dalton Caldwell to the internet masse) is spot on. Most people, especially on HN, pointed to the way "Dalton handled things" as the reason for wanting App.net to succeed. What drives the majority of the activity on App.net are these continuing discussion…
But what got me excited was his basic insight -- not entirely novel, I'll grant -- that any giant social media company selling ads is going to be beholden to advertisers, and that a social media company that is beholden to their users might be a different thing.
Lots of things are possible here. The product might suck. They might get totally overwhelmed. They might not be able to sell it. Their API might end up being worse than the others (though it doesn't look that way to me).
But people kick in to kickstarter-style things because there's some idea they want to get behind (e.g. "sword fighting games should be better"), even if it doesn't pan out. And to be honest, even the OP -- in the throes of his cynicism -- is obviously experiencing the same sensation.
So the author of this post can't see the reason why anyone would want to pay for this, and yet backed the project himself anyway? It reminds me of the people you see who write forums posts like 'I just got my first Mac, now what?' when the answer is always 'do whatever you wanted it for in the first place'
So the author of this post can't see the reason why anyone would want to pay for this, and yet backed the project himself anyway? It reminds me of the people you see who write forums posts like 'I just got my first Mac, now what?' when the answer is always 'do whatever you wanted it for in the first place'
"By the way, I put my $50 in out of pure morbid curiosity of what’s under the hood. In retrospect, I should’ve donated to a charity." That's a pretty callous way to end a post, Alex. It's not either-or. If you really feel that way, ask for a refund. Donate the money to charity whether you get the refund or not.
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So the author of this post can't see the reason why anyone would want to pay for this, and yet backed the project himself anyway? It reminds me of the people you see who write forums posts like 'I just got my first Mac, now what?' when the answer is always 'do whatever you wanted it for in the first place'
Per the OP:
"By the way, I put my $50 in out of pure morbid curiosity of what’s under the hood."
I think you can both think something probably isn't going to work or have issues with it and support it as a hedge or out of, as he said, "morbid curiosity". People do this with politics quite frequently.