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Uhm. I'm pretty sure that user:CharlesColeman was saying that in a sarcastic jest, and not as a open petition for someone to actually do that. I'd hate to see

Uhm. I'm pretty sure that user:CharlesColeman was saying that in a sarcastic jest, and not as a open petition for someone to actually do that. I'd hate to see how you sabotage friendship so you can make money.

com2kid 7y ago
> I'm pretty sure that user:CharlesColeman was saying that in a sarcastic jest, and not as a open petition for someone to actually do that. Right now technology gives us all sorts of easy ways to be entertained. A lot of those forms of entertainment aren't long term psychologically sustainable (social media, binging streaming TV), but give a short term burst of entertainment/happiness. Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy. It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation. > I'd hate to see how you sabotage friendship so you can make money. The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room. Lots of types of businesses lose money if there is a hole in their schedule. From that side of things, we fill those holes up. We also aim to help businesses run local community events on a short notice, as soon as a few days in advance. Events with no money coming to us are the majority of what is on the platform, #1 goal is to help people have fun and socialize more, and the event suggestion algorithm is completely unbiased in what events it selects. (especially since we are pre-launch and don't have any partners!) Technology can be used to help improve people's lives, it doesn't all have to be bad.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation.... > The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room. So, in conclusion, your startup isn't so much about helping people make friends; it's about giving businesses another advertising opportunity and reducing some barriers that keep customers from giving them their money. The friendship stuff is the aspirational, feel-good wrapping paper around the real product. Edit: > Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy. "Going out with other people [and spending money together]" is an optional and frequently minor part of friendship. You claim that you're "working to solve this problem [of loneliness], but this the kind of definitional distortion I was referencing in my other comment. The meaning of friendship is twisted to overemphasize its most economically significant aspects. I feel that ethos of business is a big part of this problem, and it won't be part of the solution.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - crankylinuxuser 7y ago
    And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time. Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? Or encourage the hundreds of free things happening in a city at any one time? Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events? You can't make money on free. I'm sure it'll be given lip service. And there's juicy data there that can be siphoned, correlated, and sold to the highest bidder. What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR? This is how you degrade friendship to tit-for-tat in a business deal. It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door.
    - CharlesColeman 7y ago
      > And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time. My thoughts exactly. Sorry I preempted your point with the edit to my comment. > Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies?... Or to take it even further: taking a walk in a park, stopping by to say hello, meeting to chat. I'd say some of the most important components of friendship aren't even "things to do."
    - com2kid 7y ago
      > Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? ... Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events? #1 goal is to keep people on the platform. Without users, there is nothing. To keep the lights on, only ~10% of what is on the platform needs to be revenue generating. Everything else is about bringing people together. Open house nights are harder, people tend to feel unsafe when an app leads them into someone else's personal space. As I mentioned in another reply, v1 is about externally created events, future features are around what you are describing. But an existing user base with enough critical mass has to exist before it becomes possible to have people successfully create their own events. > What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR? Very high, I am super paranoid about privacy. As an example of this paranoia, when user's join a pre-event chat room, they are all given a unique UID for that chat room. A mapping table is created in the DB, tracking their real user id to the chatroom's user ID. The user's actual user ID is never sent to other users. After 30 days, the entry in the mapping table is deleted. Everything is like that, end to end, when a user taps "delete profile" every trace of their existence is removed. The only thing kept around are the aggregate review scores they contributed, the "+1" ratings on some particular event is fun, which has no connection to the user. > It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door. I'm boot strapping this myself because I believe an alternative to sitting inside on a Saturday night watching streaming pixels fly needs to exist.
- some_furry 7y ago
  This sounds like something useful for the community I'm involved in! :O
molteanu 7y ago
I agree with you. I don't know why you're being down-voted.
dang 7y ago
Come on, there's room to ask questions and be skeptical while still assuming good faith. That's what the site guidelines ask you to do. Please don't break them while posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  "I manufacture and sell product X." "I make painful business process Y easier." "I insert myself in friendships to market targeted products and services to you." One of those has bad faith built in at the core. Taking a friendship and converting it to discrete monetary transactions for some VC/founder cheapens the very thing that friendship is. And it tries to erect a paywall as a default normal for "friend interactions", or at minimum normalizes such behavior. If there was any good faith, it was dismissed like the way this founder did to the root sarcastic comment. We all should have known there would be some entrepreneur to throw friendship in the pit to gain a bit more money/power.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's deeply uncharitable, and therefore you're still violating the site guidelines. It's possible that someone has sincere intentions of developing a startup to help people make friends. Maybe that's naive, but that's no reason to flame them and make them out to be a sinister asshole. Could you please just take the spirit of this site more to heart? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

com2kid 7y ago

> I'm pretty sure that user:CharlesColeman was saying that in a sarcastic jest, and not as a open petition for someone to actually do that. Right now technology gives us all sorts of easy ways to be entertained. A lot of those forms of entertainment aren't long term psychologically sustainable (social media, binging streaming TV), but give a short term burst of entertainment/happiness. Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy. It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation. > I'd hate to see how you sabotage friendship so you can make money. The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room. Lots of types of businesses lose money if there is a hole in their schedule. From that side of things, we fill those holes up. We also aim to help businesses run local community events on a short notice, as soon as a few days in advance. Events with no money coming to us are the majority of what is on the platform, #1 goal is to help people have fun and socialize more, and the event suggestion algorithm is completely unbiased in what events it selects. (especially since we are pre-launch and don't have any partners!) Technology can be used to help improve people's lives, it doesn't all have to be bad.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
> It doesn't replace friendships, but if you and a friend want to go to an escape room, we can help you find another 2 people to fill out the reservation.... > The plan is to make money from partner companies, such as the aforementioned escape room. So, in conclusion, your startup isn't so much about helping people make friends; it's about giving businesses another advertising opportunity and reducing some barriers that keep customers from giving them their money. The friendship stuff is the aspirational, feel-good wrapping paper around the real product. Edit: > Thawd makes getting up, leaving the house, and going out with other people, really easy. "Going out with other people [and spending money together]" is an optional and frequently minor part of friendship. You claim that you're "working to solve this problem [of loneliness], but this the kind of definitional distortion I was referencing in my other comment. The meaning of friendship is twisted to overemphasize its most economically significant aspects. I feel that ethos of business is a big part of this problem, and it won't be part of the solution.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time. Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? Or encourage the hundreds of free things happening in a city at any one time? Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events? You can't make money on free. I'm sure it'll be given lip service. And there's juicy data there that can be siphoned, correlated, and sold to the highest bidder. What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR? This is how you degrade friendship to tit-for-tat in a business deal. It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    > And with that idea, lies the grain of "truth": if you want friends, you have to buy them things or time. My thoughts exactly. Sorry I preempted your point with the edit to my comment. > Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies?... Or to take it even further: taking a walk in a park, stopping by to say hello, meeting to chat. I'd say some of the most important components of friendship aren't even "things to do."
  - com2kid 7y ago
    > Is this "service" going to recommend going to the park to watch free movies? Or how about free concerts? Or how about meeting up at hackerspaces on open house nights? ... Or what about someone hosting a house party, and staying away from bars and club style events? #1 goal is to keep people on the platform. Without users, there is nothing. To keep the lights on, only ~10% of what is on the platform needs to be revenue generating. Everything else is about bringing people together. Open house nights are harder, people tend to feel unsafe when an app leads them into someone else's personal space. As I mentioned in another reply, v1 is about externally created events, future features are around what you are describing. But an existing user base with enough critical mass has to exist before it becomes possible to have people successfully create their own events. > What's the chances of this complying with the GDPR? Very high, I am super paranoid about privacy. As an example of this paranoia, when user's join a pre-event chat room, they are all given a unique UID for that chat room. A mapping table is created in the DB, tracking their real user id to the chatroom's user ID. The user's actual user ID is never sent to other users. After 30 days, the entry in the mapping table is deleted. Everything is like that, end to end, when a user taps "delete profile" every trace of their existence is removed. The only thing kept around are the aggregate review scores they contributed, the "+1" ratings on some particular event is fun, which has no connection to the user. > It's just another adtech business that attempts to attack and hijack friend relationships by sneaking in the back door. I'm boot strapping this myself because I believe an alternative to sitting inside on a Saturday night watching streaming pixels fly needs to exist.
some_furry 7y ago
This sounds like something useful for the community I'm involved in! :O

molteanu 7y ago

I agree with you. I don't know why you're being down-voted.

dang 7y ago

Come on, there's room to ask questions and be skeptical while still assuming good faith. That's what the site guidelines ask you to do. Please don't break them while posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
"I manufacture and sell product X." "I make painful business process Y easier." "I insert myself in friendships to market targeted products and services to you." One of those has bad faith built in at the core. Taking a friendship and converting it to discrete monetary transactions for some VC/founder cheapens the very thing that friendship is. And it tries to erect a paywall as a default normal for "friend interactions", or at minimum normalizes such behavior. If there was any good faith, it was dismissed like the way this founder did to the root sarcastic comment. We all should have known there would be some entrepreneur to throw friendship in the pit to gain a bit more money/power.
- dang 7y ago
  That's deeply uncharitable, and therefore you're still violating the site guidelines. It's possible that someone has sincere intentions of developing a startup to help people make friends. Maybe that's naive, but that's no reason to flame them and make them out to be a sinister asshole. Could you please just take the spirit of this site more to heart? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html