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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

#571

Post by bartread »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #542
aswegs8 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't strike me as particularly immoral.

Zero added value while getting a money inflow ticks my box for immoral.

Don’t forget parasitic.

A lot of the value of these domains stems from the popularity of sites they may have been attached to in the past, or search terms that relate to them.

So these people are literally making money off of the back of others’ work whilst providing no benefit themselves, probably not that much even to their advertisers.

Such squatting sites are, at best, an annoyance to web users as well.

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

#572

Post by jgeada »

jyscao wrote: post #566
mothballed wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculators provide time-allocation of resources. They're pretty critical part of market dynamics to help resources get sold and developed when they are valued most. That is, they prevent domains from being captured prematurely for lower value use. Society profits immensely from their contribution.

Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics. While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy. Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain nam…

What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.

If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.

The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.

I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

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

#573

Post by echelon »

angoragoats wrote: post #444
viccis wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Early BlueSky was seeded by furries, the trans community, socialist Democrats, and left-wing folks fleeing an overly Republican/MAGA Twitter.

The system was invite-based, meaning these people invited their friends. And those people invited their friends of friends.

The community was seeded by a very political base at its inception. The general feed the average user saw when opening the app was activist-political, furry art, dildos, and outrage. This continued for a year, I think?

This is not very welcoming to a general audience, and it severely knee-capped Bluesky's growth trajectory.

Here's the front page of Bluesky for a new user today:

https://imgur.com/a/QzBdust

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

#574

Post by Rekindle8090 »

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,…

[dead]

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

#575

Post by postalrat »

kube-system wrote: post #541
postalrat wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that change anything? I think its more due to mobile sites acting like this https://www.reddit.com/r/TechNope/comments/urboo6/reddit_app... A user on a app is more valuable since you get a lot more data on them, and can stop their ad blockers.

But people are used to that now being the normal state of things, it's rare that they even try the browser -- I develop an application that is web only and typically used on desktops, and people incessantly ask me for "an app so they can use it on their phone".

They probably want an icon to open your app. They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app. In the past apple as made it difficult for users to know how to do this and users just know about the app store. Great for apple (walled garden) and social media apps (more tracking, unlimited ads) but not great for users.

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

#576

Post by jyscao »

jgeada wrote: post #572
jyscao wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics. While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy. Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain nam…

What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service. If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars. The squatters are just vacuuming up some o…

>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.

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

#577

Post by bjt »

collinmcnulty wrote: post #180
macintux wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> allow Bluetooth I'd have a hard time getting over my aversion to this. I automatically reject any app's attempt to find local devices, etc.

I can't imagine how it would be possible to detect a phone in close proximity without allowing this though

That's what Bump did, like 13 years ago, by sending accelerometer and GPS data up to the cloud and correlating it there.

It works in isolation and fails miserably when trying to do a big demo of it in a conference talk when attempted by dozens of people in the same room.

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

#578

Post by acessoproibido »

cornhole wrote: post #568
Dave0X wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does a practice have to do good for anyone other than the practioner?

“chattel slavery isn’t bad so long as I am the slave owner”

A bit strong to compare domain squatting with slavery don't you think?

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

#579

Post by kube-system »

postalrat wrote: post #575
kube-system wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people are used to that now being the normal state of things, it's rare that they even try the browser -- I develop an application that is web only and typically used on desktops, and people incessantly ask me for "an app so they can use it on their phone".

They probably want an icon to open your app. They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app. In the past apple as made it difficult for users to know how to do this and users just know about the app store. Great for apple (walled garden) and social media apps (more tracking, unlimited ads) but not great for users.

Yes, that's the "workaround" I use but by default people are expecting to find something in the app store.

> They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app.

Absolutely, users do not know or care what technology you are using so long as it meets their expectations of use. Users are going to the app store as a discovery mechanism for "something that gives them an icon on the phone to get to that thing", most have no clue what "native code" means.

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

#580

Post by mogrinz »

cestith wrote: post #543
mogrinz wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a calendaring site (won't mention it here b/c I don't want to be seen as plugging it) that has been generating revenue from ads and subscriptions for 26 years now. At its peak, well over 100k/yr but now more like 15k/yr for the past 5 years. Still a very steady income b/c the site is sticky. The only expense I have is about $3k every 36/mo for VPS hosting. At this point the code base is so mature that I only d…

I would have several questions before negotiating seriously, and I could actually be in the market for such a beast. At what multiple would you be comfortable considering selling? If revenue has dropped 85% from its peak, have you identified the cause of the drop? Has it been steady that past five years? Do you have a record of the time spent on it, or does it just feel minimal? How much of revenue is from ads vs sub…

The site is localendar.com (you can reach me through the Contact Form there and I can share more financials). Short version: I started back in '99. There were no good calendaring engines back then so I had to build my own (with wicked performance btw ;)). The site is Java/SQL Server. It's sticky b/c it targeted webmasters who needed an easy-to-update calendar for their own site.

The original goal was to aggregate all these local events into a single searchable index and serve up local ads alongside. I never really got that part to take off, though I did get a very early patent for local search on the web. Since then, calendaring libs have come along which allowed many site-builder tools to offer a built-in solution.

The primary reasons for declines are 0) Not as many people build raw sites anymore; people migrate to things like Wordpress or Wix) 1) Google showing less profitable ads and 2) Webmasters w/ a popular site can remove ads via a subscription (which are drastically underpriced; some are still on a legacy $9.95/year). Everything is exportable (and importable) via iCal if desired. Buyer gets everything, w/ no residual royalties to me. I'd have to have an active role in the handover since it's all bespoke code. The buyer would need some level of Java+T-SQL since I don't want to teach coding from scratch.

I love my users and many rely heavily on the site - it's meant to be very simple to use and I tend to draw an older demographic that doesn't need a lot of fancy bells and whistles. 26+ years is a lot of time and I don't have the passion for it I used to. I had a recent health issue and my wife is concerned that she wouldn't know how to close this out gracefully if the worst ever happened.

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