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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, Facebook already has Fading Connections You can be married to each other and your posts won't show up on the other person's feed (there's a post on HN about this)

Xitter was kind of doing the same thing: I can’t see anything my mom posts, but I definitely have to see everything Elon’s mom does.

> Xitter

Is this an alternate front-end (Nitter) or shorthand for X/Twitter?

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

#92
Probably being pedantic, but this is not buying Friendster to be precise, usually what is meant by that is that the company was bought.

In this case the domain Friendster.com was bought, and a trademark was conceded (a new different trademark), I don't know precisely the implications of the trademark though, I think it's a different trademark and you still cannot imply that you are a continuation of the previous trademark holder, it's just that you are given monopoly over that word as a trademark.

Now, is that different than buying "Friendster"? A really interesting legal question, I think it is, and I think it has relevant implications, I don't think you can for example restore the website as it was and pretend a continuation as you would if you bought the company.

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

#93
judging from what i hear people say. all you have to do is be able to display who's online from your friends list, and a chronologically ordered list of their posts. thats it. the major platforms are optimising for ads so much they cant even achieve this level of basic functionality

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

#94
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that was what made Google Plus better and yet because it was Google shoving everything into Google Plus itself to force numbers… it failed. Circles in Google Plus is the most underrated thing I have ever seen. You can basically group friends under specific labels, so if you want to only share some posts / photos with family, only family will see it, wanna share posts with former and current coworkers? Hav…

What killed Google+ is the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good. They had a brief window where everyone wanted to use it, and they kept it locked behind a hard to get invite system for months and months.

Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.

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

#95

Nice. Quick hypoyhetical. Meta offers $1bn in 5 years time when you have 2m users. Will you sell? If so this is a meta-or-dead social network. Making it federated etc. would make me trust it more.

Anyone will sell any project for $1bn, absurd take.

Craigslist never sold afaik, theres loads of other example companies worth more than a billion now that never sold. Depends how you define "project" of course, but you gotta make sure you don't define it such that this would no longer be a "project" when it's worth 1bn. Also everything that sells for more than 1bn is something that presumably nobody would sell for 1bn.

The idea that anyone would sell any project for 1bn is kinda nonsense, if a project looks worth buying for 1bn to someone, it may look to be worth keeping to the people who made it or are in control of it.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great idea in principle, but it requires some manual work, which most users aren't gonna bother with.

> it requires some manual work, which most users aren't gonna bother with Dowsing a user's circles from their public information and Gmail inbox seems like a perfect task for AI.

Exactly.

Self-defining all of the semantic grouping metadata was too much onus on the user.

Not everybody has the patience to curate and groom their social circle labels and memberships. That feels like a full time job.

I spent way too much time stressing over how to define my "circles". It was not a good experience.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that was the most out of touch HN comment I’ve seen in a long, long time. Persistent irrelevant celebrities are a real thing, but those two wouldn’t crack the top 500.

I mean Kim & Selena will always have a certain level of celebrity status but people like Sydney Sweeney are currently a lot more popular. This is in terms of "are they the most popular people right now" as their instagram count states. They are literally in the top 10 on instagram right now.

i think you're talking about trending vs popular.

The signals are working as intended. More people will know Kim K than Sweeney because Kim K is more popular and has had more time to be more popular.

why am i talking about kim k on hn lol

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

#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 you want guaranteed reliability. Run a Blossom server for media. Use email for auth and store people's keys for them if you want a traditional UX. Don't worry about what's on Nostr already, just build your own thing on the protocol.

Let people come and go as they please and don't lock them in. They will love you for it later.

Cool project. Have fun!

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

#99
What does "a domain that was making about $9k/year in ad revenue" look like? Is this domain one where people randomly stumble upon it and give ad views to a parking page? A website with regular use or other content that people visit for some purpose that is now under different ownership?

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

#100
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd probably sell any project of mine for $1m, I'm very cheap.

$1B is life changing money. More than you can reasonably spend, unless you start an airline or something like that. $1m is like two Ferraris. If you buy the second one used. Of course it's also life-changing amounts of money to many. It's enough to retire in a cheap country. But only if you are very careful about your money There are a lot of projects I would sell for $1m, but it is little enough that I would careful…

I dunno, if I spent even a couple years building something and could sell it for a million relatively quickly I probably would too unless it's something I'm really passionate about. I've sold side projects for waaaay less.
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