4 ms·
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app. Do I want my teens on any social media apps?
by SamBam 5mo ago
I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app.
Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.
Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.
If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.
(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)
- jdyer9 5mo agoMy thoughts as well, I love this! Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.
- darkwater 5mo agoDon't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.
- vintermann 5mo agoIt's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100. But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004. The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.
- Bengalilol 5mo agoWhy "hard to bypass" would be a sufficient thing? It depends on the technology used to connect the two phones. Bypassing this process can range from "easy" to "quite complicated", but it remains possible. Once the security is compromised, the entire network loses its core value since a single interaction is enough to establish a permanent connection.
- coryfklein 5mo ago[dead]
- ineptech 5mo agoIt also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them. That sounds useful.
- dgellow 5mo agoI’m not convinced that’s the case. A relatively small subset of bad actors can join the network, create new accounts on a second phone, tap (or find a way to fake that process via the API), then eventually use those accounts from bots. It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated
- buggymcbugfix 5mo agoI think this point is crucial: > [...] would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them.
- palijer 5mo agoBots don't matter if you aren't connected to accounts you haven't tapped phones with though.
- lopis 5mo agoThere's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.
- schipperai 5mo ago100%. The exclusivity of the network is the differentiator here.
- metabagel 5mo agoI share vacation photos using Polarsteps. It’s quite nice.