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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

#461

Post by lopis »

ineptech wrote: post #356
SamBam wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.

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

#462

Post by codingdave »

jona-f wrote: post #459

[flagged]

Considering how little is actually interesting about the app aside from it using an old domain, my impression is that the entire post is just pseudo-marketing, attempting to encourage people to get back into domain name squatting.

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

#463

Post by codingdave »

readitalready wrote: post #33

I really wish more social networks would have a "fading connections" limit. So many social networks suffer from stale connections and networks, and these connections should expire after a year. Otherwise, it will permanently define a social network's content and editorial direction without algorithmic control. For example, Selena Gomez will always have 400million followers on Instagram, but she's socially irrelevant…

> but she's socially irrelevant now.

I'm pretty sure there was a Black Mirror episode about social scoring dictating peoples value/relevance. That was a good place for such a concept, because letting social media sites dictate someone's relevance is just weird. Relevance is a personal opinion, and should remain that way. People are free to stop following others. It works, and isn't dystopian.

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

#464

Post by sarchertech »

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

S&P 500 average return over the last 5, 10, 50, and 100 years was higher than that.

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

#466

Post by mapt »

aprilnya wrote: post #130
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #55

I tried to search for Friendster in the App Store and didn’t see it among the first few results. Instead, App Store was returning a sponsored ad followed by normal results for all other kinds of similar annd less similar apps. Instagram, Snapchat, Yubo (never heard of), Monopoly Go (mobile game related to the board game Monopoly), BeFriend (never heard of), Tinder, Friendly Social Browser (never heard of), Facebook,…

When a new app is released, it takes a few days for it to get into search, for some reason. Pretty much every single time a new app releases I see a comment like this. Nothing malicious you just have to wait a bit.

I think it's a warranted attitude to take a failure to implement plaintext search as part of your text search algorithm as enemy action. Yesterday I ended up at Bing for some reason and typed in the unique name of the site I was looking for and it didn't even come up in the first page; All their competitors did, as well as a couple random SEO farms. This is enshittification to the point of unusability, for an application space that we solved in the mid 90's.

My workplace does this to our customers too, where you get worse-than-plaintext-search effectiveness, and I guess it must be profitable enough conning the customer to waste our time as well, as we use the same interface for a lot of customer questions.

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

#467

Post by palijer »

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

Bots don't matter if you aren't connected to accounts you haven't tapped phones with though.

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

#468

Post by KolmogorovComp »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #398
spiralcoaster wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not o…

You missed the tongue-in-cheek.

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

#469

Post by lopis »

dgellow wrote: post #419

> the usefulness of the app is limited because it seems to be intended for a small, or niche, set of users. Specifically, the app is intended for invited friends only. Isn’t it insane that Apple refuses for an app to be listed on the App Store if it is intended to be niche? If true that’s pretty shocking

So you can't sideload apps on iOS, installing your own apps in dev mode is unnecessarily hard and restricted, and you can't release an app in the app store that is not open to the general public? So if I want to build an app just for my family, what do I do?

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

#470

Post by hiccuphippo »

TheDong wrote: post #385
aprilnya wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a new app is released, it takes a few days for it to get into search, for some reason. Pretty much every single time a new app releases I see a comment like this. Nothing malicious you just have to wait a bit.

> Nothing malicious The first result is a sponsored result, and even after Friendster is indexed, if they don't pay apple's extortion-rate, the first result will still be for some other social media app. Ads in the app store are malicious. There are people who have searched "Ledger bitcoin wallet", clicked the first link (a malicious app who paid apple enough money to be 'sponsored' for that search), and had all thei…

Well they are domain squatters so they known how this extortion business works.
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