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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

#441

Post by zakki »

pintxo wrote: post #440
TheDong wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see there are a lot of T&C for their claim on "Apple makes great software."

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

#442

Post by bell-cot »

wileydragonfly wrote: post #256
wongarsu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had a steady investment opportunity with 10% return (about in line with long-terms stock market returns), $9000 per year indefinitely is worth the same as $99000 now (in an idealized finance world. In the real world you can't invest $99000 and withdraw $9000 per year because withdrawals during downturns will take out too much. But it's a quick way to calculate equivalent values). That's obviously an upper boun…

Nobody gets 10% a year

...unless there's considerable uncertainty about future payments. Happily for the sellers of dubious assets, the world never seems to run out of people who can't resist a deal that's too good to be true.

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

#443

Post by Someone »

saghm wrote: post #29

> He said he would sell it to me for $40k. I offered $20k, which he refused but he said if I had any domain names generating ad revenue, we could do a deal of domains and cash. He said he would accept a lower amount if I paid in Bitcoin. > So we worked out a deal where I gave him $20k in Bitcoin and a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue, and he gave me the domain friendster.com. Now I was the owner of…

They said “a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue”, not “a domain that was making about $9k/year in profits”.

Also, even if it were making about $9k/year in profits, if that comes with large costs (be it labor or dollars), it still might not be worth it. Let’s say it costs $100k a year to keep that site making $9k in profits. That would be 9% return on investment. Good but not spectacular. Add in uncertainty about whether that site will keep doing that, and I can see such a domain not being worth much.

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

#444

Post by angoragoats »

viccis wrote: post #318
angoragoats wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does having a really tightly controlled and/or lengthy invite period translate into the user base being of one particular political viewpoint? I'm not seeing the causal link. Even if I take at face value your claim that "only really tight knit subgroups and subcultures found their way in," I still don't see how these subgroups or subcultures would necessarily have the same political views.

Well it self selected for left wing ones. My point is normal people who aren't extremely online and part of 10 Discord servers with an internet friend network who can hook them up with an invite didn't get into Bluesky. Instead the people who, well, did, got the invites. Obviously the extremely online right didn't because they had other places to go and weren't welcomed by the bsky admins.

“Well it self selected for left wing ones” didn’t answer my question in the least, so I’ll just assume your claim is false.

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

#445

Post by schipperai »

SamBam wrote: post #250
vector_spaces wrote: post #126

The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site If you want to differen…

I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app. Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No. Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends. If you made this as easy and pleasa…

100%. The exclusivity of the network is the differentiator here.

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

#446

Post by angoragoats »

viccis wrote: post #323
angoragoats wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Twitter is a haven for people who are fans of generating non-consensual porn of others, white supremacy/white nationalism, murder of innocent civilians, and other reprehensible things. It's really not. It's where everyone is right now. The Trots and Maoists. The demsoc local politicians. The vegan militant organizers. Etc. You can also include whatever shitty group you want to cherry pick to make your disingenuous a…

Based on this reply and others, it seems Twitter is frying your brain and you should probably stop using it.

Care to actually refute my point instead of saying “nuh uh” and lobbing some childish insults my way?

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

#447

Post by m-i-l »

incompatible wrote: post #263
vector_spaces wrote: post #126

The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of. Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network. And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site If you want to differen…

How does it work? Bluetooth?

I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:

- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.

- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].

Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.

[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...

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

#448

Post by psychoslave »

tomhow wrote: post #414
psychoslave wrote: post #382

[flagged]

Please don't post generic ideological sermons on HN. Sure, any money anyone ever spends or invests could arguably be put to better use. It’s a jerk move to bring it up in a tangential context like this. We have no idea what kind of charitable/benevolent work or giving this person does, or what they may plan to do in the future with any gains they make from this or other investments. It's not fair to post this kind of…

>Please don't post ideological sermons on HN.

Promoting auto-censure is also falling in ideological sermons, so this is going nowhere consistent. Only in illusion can one think to stand on apolitical and ideological-less point of view.

There is a rating system, and it’s fine some posts goes down to oblivion if it doesn’t fit the majority mindset of voting users.

It’s true what’s this person is doing on charitable/benevolent work is unknown, and the post anticipated this scenario and did express appreciation if that was the case.

Plus, calling for a step back to think about one own actions on their own terms, that’s not what we could categorize a harsh condemnation.

Favoring closed information bubbles, void of any critical thought is doing no one a favor.

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

JimDabell wrote: post #400
chr15m wrote: post #98

Here's what I would do. 1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA. 2. Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good). 3. Save yourself a lot of money by building it on top of the Nostr protocol. Run a relay yourself if…

> Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good). I’ve worked on a platform for social media apps. When the social network had a native iOS app, a native Android app, and a PWA, users chose iOS about two thirds of the time, Android about a qu…

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