Here's Why People Are Backing App.net • Hacker News Board

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#41

Post by k-mcgrady » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 9:02 PM UTC

nicksergeant wrote: post #26

pg_bot wrote: post #20

I don't think this project will work due to several inherent economic factors. If I understand correctly app.net takes a free service (twitter, fb) has removed the best features of those services and then wants to charge money for that product. Dalton has put himself in the position of a reverse browser war which doesn't seem very viable to me.

Well, somebody has to do something, right? He's just trying something.

Why does somebody have to do something? Twitter has made some controversial moves recently but the only people they've really annoyed are developers. Users have had no major problems. Why would tens of millions of people start paying for something they already get free and like? I think that this project is a response to the developer community Twitter has annoyed but there is no real market for it. A quick look at how little backing it's got shows that it isn't really needed.

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#42

Post by k-mcgrady » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 9:07 PM UTC

1as wrote: post #9

I backed this almost immediately, and expected them to be a lot closer to the goal than they are now (still more than $300,000 off with only seven days to go). I'm very surprised with the apparent lack of resonance with the idea from people around here. So what are some of the reasons you aren't backing?

I'm not backing it because there isn't a real need for it. It would be nice to use a twitter like service ad-free as a customer and not as a product but whenever you charge for a service like this attracting people to it is very difficult. A lot of people I know love and user twitter. None of them would pay for this. So, why would I pay for this if none of the people I care about are using it?

To me it seems like Twitter pissed this guy off so he decided to try and build a competitor. It's a nice idea (and something us geeks can get behind) but if he did any market research I bet he would have discovered very quickly it's a lost cause. The vast majority of people aren't going to pay for a product they can get for free and people are the most important aspect of a social network. Without people it's doomed to failure.

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#43

Post by k-mcgrady » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 9:08 PM UTC

timdorr wrote: post #16

kmfrk wrote: post #4

It seems like a weird decision that they don't stick to the 140-character limit.

They're not making a Twitter clone, they're just cloning some of the features of networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The 140 character limit is important though. It's necessary for the service to work over SMS which is hugely important to users in many developing countries. It's also been the key to twitters success in various uprisings in the middle east when internet access was shut down.

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#44

Post by streptomycin » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 11:55 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #33

joebadmo wrote: post #12

App.net strikes me as a half-measure. It's still a centralized system with one company acting ultimately as a gatekeeper. I want a twitter that acts more like email, on open, distributed systems that leave me in full ownership of my own content. I see very little reason for something like Twitter to go through a centralized party this way.

> It's still a centralized system with one company acting ultimately as a gatekeeper. USENET was pretty decentralized. If that could me made to update faster, it could be the basis for a decentralized Twitter-like service.

That already exists, it's called StatusNet. Unfortunately, nobody uses it.

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#45

Post by streptomycin » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 11:57 PM UTC

jonmwords wrote: post #39

smacktoward wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with App.net (as it's currently described, anyway) is that it's halfway between what people who love Twitter want and what people who hate Twitter want, which makes it less than an obvious sale for both. People who love Twitter want... Twitter. App.net doesn't interoperate with Twitter; it's another, separate silo. There's no guarantees that your Twitter friends will move to App.net with you, which limits…

The guarantee that App.net won't kneecap its developers is that its developers are paying customers.

If a service doesn't kneecap its developers, yet those developers have no userbase because nobody uses the service, does it make a sound?

Re: Here's Why People Are Backing App.net

#46

Post by bad_user » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 12:02 PM UTC

joebadmo wrote: post #21

brennannovak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough (and the right kind of) clients a "Centralized" service could be seen as distributor to independent nodes. From there, with the right archiving / sharing features of those "clients" those independent nodes can start to become a decentralized service. The internet itself relies on centralized DNS standards organization & servers. To me, App.net (and their commitment to users being customers instead of a pr…

Maybe, but they haven't even really said anything about it. In contrast, check out http://theopenphotoproject.org/ , which has both a centralized system, but it also an open source project that you can self-host. IMHO, much better idea, implementation, and I had a lot less to be vaguely suspicious about. OpenPhoto basically did everything right that App.net is doing wrong.

OpenPhoto has different constraints though.

When sharing a bunch of photos on OpenPhoto or Flickr or whatever, the social network available to you is not as important as the act of storing that photo somewhere. That's because you can always take that URL and paste it on Facebook or Twitter.

You can then argue that Facebook and Flickr provide value to photo enthusiasts because through them you can see the photos of friends and other people.

But that's not really what OpenPhoto is about and let me quote its description:

     A photo application that lets you store 
     your photos on Dropbox, Amazon S3 or in your garage

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually thinking of using OpenPhoto, but that's only because I want my photos backed-up in the cloud and easily accessible whenever I want, and not much else.