The NamesDB "surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to submit sensitive information about their friends" claim is kind of weird since fu

The NamesDB "surveillance capitalist service designed to coerce naive users to submit sensitive information about their friends" claim is kind of weird since fundamentally it was less so than Facebook & most other social networks. I'm pretty sure what they're talking about is how you could get paid status by inviting enough people? I've read the code (admittedly from 2-3 years after Weinberg's time) and it was a really generic site, the only thing that made it stand out was that it had class lists for a lot of countries that were being ignored by the big players. The invite function was basically manual or the standard "give us your addressbook" feature I've always hated, there was no tracking off-site or even integration with their parent company (the forever sleazy Classmates.com). At the time I thought it was kind of sketchy, but everything I disliked it did has been done worse & more aggressively since then by the large social networks. One thing they did properly is turn off mail after a single bounce or junk mail marking - the mail loops with the big mail providers and the big mailers tell you exactly who marked your mail as junk and you're supposed to immediately stop mailing them, but that doesn't stop LinkedIn or Facebook.