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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

#631

Post by jospeh554 »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #66
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…

I imagine that $9k ad revenue is a site that had an actual user base. And that the guy taking over the domain is going to just put all ads and no content, like he had on Friendster.com. And if so, the expected ad income is probably much lower.

Exactly, and the fact that friendster failed was because nobody was going onto it anymore, so there's nobody going to be hitting ads, other than bots.

The WayBack machine shows the redirect to the ad page offering the domain for sale.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231018214628/https://friendste...

So doesn't seem like it was serving ads anyway

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

#632

Post by jospeh554 »

sarchertech wrote: post #464
wileydragonfly wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gets 10% a year

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

Last 5 Years: ~12.5% Last 10 Years: ~14.0% Last 50 Years: ~11-12% (reflects performance since the mid-1970s) Last 100 Years: ~10.4%

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

#634

Post by jyscao »

jgeada wrote: post #587
jyscao wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 pre…

Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain) Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any val…

>Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)

Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.

If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.

Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).

If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?

In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.

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

#635

Post by vlod »

ipaddr wrote: post #480
julianeon wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely right and that jumped out at me. I should also point out the obvious: if people were selling online assets making $9k/year for $9k, there would be a line out the door of people lining up to buy them. If anyone here is selling an asset that makes $X a year for $X, I'll buy it! I make my money back in 12 months and everything else is profit. So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a…

There are tons of those offers. Carefull that 9k revenue doesn't come from $9000 of ads.

I'm probably being dim here, but can you elaborate a bit more. Where's the rest of the non-ad revenue coming from?

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

#636

Post by jyscao »

jgeada wrote: post #587
jyscao wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 pre…

Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain) Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any val…

>Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.

And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.

A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.

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

#637

Post by altairprime »

addedGone wrote: post #597
altairprime wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the operators, I expect. If they flip a couple bits in the webserver I think they can lock the API down to require a device attestation, which would inhibit much of the API’s attack surface from being exploitable without a physical device that can afford to be console-banned (but I haven’t done my research to prove that yet, so grain of feasibility salt). Certainly in this day and age there is no desire to be…

there is the fact that you just can't have your friends using it?

My friends would rather not be scraped and harvested and indexed, which tends to make them uninterested in social network websites and offers a certain degree of pressure against Android as well. Yours may differ.

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

#639

Post by dang »

jona-f wrote: post #624
dang wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread by posting much too aggressively and crossing into personal attack. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it on HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I don't see where exactly I broke the site guidelines. Was I too negative? That is a ridiculous guideline. So I'm supposed to talk positive about antisocial behavior or be quiet about it? What kind of a platform is that? Also, I'm not sure about the personal attack and aggression. I only described search engine optimized ad spam pages with strong words. It was OP's decision to build this crap. Nobody, not even he him…

"I know that you are the problem" is obviously a personal attack. Ditto "Your [...] bullshit adds zero value to society". Ditto "Your greed to the detriment of everybody else". We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.

If you'd like a heuristic to assess whether you're doing that or not, I'd say it's the combination of denunciatory language with second-person voicing (i.e. explicitly or implicitly addressing "you").

None of that has to do with making an argument - it's just directing aggression toward the other person. If you'd like to make your argument in a principled, neutral way, that of course is fine.

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

#640

Post by LEDThereBeLight »

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…

What bizarre advice. It completely misses the point.
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