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I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

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Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#431

Post by e12e »

> All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.

I understand the sentiment - but this would make it useless for my closest friends - we live in different cities and countries now - and it would take years to fill in the social graph. We would all have to travel and meet everyone else.

I suppose this is alleviated by the talk to a friend of a friend feature - but does sound like it partially excludes friends with limited mobility.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#432

Post by buggymcbugfix »

dgellow wrote: post #422
ineptech wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the…

I’m not convinced that’s the case. A relatively small subset of bad actors can join the network, create new accounts on a second phone, tap (or find a way to fake that process via the API), then eventually use those accounts from bots. It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated

I think this point is crucial:

> [...] would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#434

Post by weird-eye-issue »

probably_wrong wrote: post #420
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody wouldn't even bother to download an app for a social network they probably wouldn't stick around for very long either

What about the opposite situation? I'm not installing an app without first having taken a look at what the network has to offer.

Yes, of course some people will feel that way, but also having less friction is not always necessarily a good thing because it requires less of a time investment for the user to get started, so therefore they are actually more likely to just churn. It is a balance

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#435

Post by rahkiin »

xp84 wrote: post #358
spiralcoaster wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.

Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#436

Post by moffkalast »

gpm wrote: post #24
moffkalast wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly targeted towards a US only audience I guess?

Even in the US... something like half of people have an android. Starting a network effect product like a social network where you exclude half the social graph seems like... quite a decision.

I think it's more like 70% Apple in the US and Android 30%, whereas most elsewhere it's reversed.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#437

Post by vintermann »

darkwater wrote: post #369
jdyer9 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts as well, I love this! Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.

Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.

It's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100.

But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004.

The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#438

Post by aembleton »

twelvedogs wrote: post #144
giancarlostoro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that was what made Google Plus better and yet because it was Google shoving everything into Google Plus itself to force numbers… it failed. Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen. You can basically group friends under specific labels, so if you want to only share some posts / photos with family, only family will see it, wanna share posts with former and current coworkers? Hav…

i think it was just poorly implemented. i didn't use the circles feature because all my friends would be in one circle and my family were all offline, but i still had to deal with it for no personal benefit opt in probably would have been better, like just default everyone to one circle and make it obvious how to split them up after you're a bit more comfortable with the platform they made a bunch of other obvious bl…

I had a few different circles depending on if friends were interested in running, cycling, hiking or computers and then I could make posts that could be just for specific groups.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#439

Post by aembleton »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #134
giancarlostoro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that was what made Google Plus better and yet because it was Google shoving everything into Google Plus itself to force numbers… it failed. Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen. You can basically group friends under specific labels, so if you want to only share some posts / photos with family, only family will see it, wanna share posts with former and current coworkers? Hav…

Apparently Facebook does/did support posting to certain groups? Maybe the UI isn't great as I never knew it was possible but a workmate told it was.

You can but it's a very cumbersome UX.

Re: I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it

#440

Post by pintxo »

TheDong wrote: post #388
hnav wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nobody has ever claimed that apple makes great cloud software, but all of their walled garden gate-keeping aside, they’re still the last bastion of mainstream local-first computing

Yeah, sure. How do I sync my iCloud photos to my local NAS on linux? A: use a third-party app, they don't build their own. How do I build an app for my iPhone locally and run it without ever connecting to their servers? I can do that for my phone running linux or for my phone running android, but on iOS I have to get signed by their servers to run code I wrote. Linux respects my freedom to have my data exist locally,…

You missed the "mainstream" qualifier from the parent. I am afraid nothing you described here could be considered mainstream, although I'd like to see these things becoming mainstream.
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