The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.
Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site
If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.
See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"
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.)
It 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.
I’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
There'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.
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.
Don'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.
It'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.
Why "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.
As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.
> iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop)
Well that's just because I have no idea how to find it. The "share contact?" prompt when you text a new number accomplishes the same I guess but it would be nice to skip the number part.
> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing
Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO
I don't see the issue with making a social network that's more focused on real-time, current irl connections. Snapchat has already used a similar model with decaying content to great success.
I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.
You move to dismiss what I have to say by framing me as closed to new ideas because of how you infer my age, in a roundabout way -- what an ugly, uncouth, and mean-spirited rhetorical move.
Either way, you badly mischaracterize generational differences in grieving and digital life. Gen Z and younger millenials are vastly more inclined towards memorialization of deceased loved ones and (physically & digitally) archiving their content than any generation. See also the uptrending of stated preference in burials over cremations in the same generation. There are many reasons for this but at least in part it is probably a reaction to the ephemeralization of both digital and physical life.
Also, my post was largely motivated by how OP brands their product. From their app store page and the blog post, it seems they will support photos, longer form content, and DMs. In such a setting, ephemerality needs to be in your face, otherwise you are setting up users for unpleasant surprises. It's common sense.
You're right. I don't think I could continue living if one of my friends died and a I could no longer view their social media profile on a site designed to foster in person connections. I really can't think many things worse than this.
You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.
Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.
I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.
Feature request: friend-request-by-mail: Pay Friendster $1 to send a postcard with a unique QR code. I've seen something similar for user/address verification on a local community website (but it's free to send the postcard).
I shouldn't require international travel - over an ocean - to talk to my siblings on the internet on a social app.
Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work.
Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.
While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort.
Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?
I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles.
But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted?
And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?
I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.
It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely
It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you.
For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.
> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.
People just shouldn't look to the online digital world for connection with dead loved ones. It's entirely impractical and one day after a bankruptcy or when it's no longer profitable it may just disappear. It can take years or weeks.
Heck no. There was this app "Bump" that exchanged info between 2 bumping phones. Google bought it and immediately buried it forever. There's ZERO reason exchanging info is still a chore. There are currently bumping features baked in to the OSs, so there is value.
I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC.
I have a somewhat rarely diagnosed circadian rhythm disorder called delayed sleep phase disorder. It is difficult to get diagnosed, especially as sleep clinics have been targets of private equity firms which convert them to CPAP shops which only diagnose sleep apnea and whose patients never interact with an MD. However it is likely to be underdiagnosed given the stigma around sleep challenges, at least in the sense that if you make any effort to get enough sleep with such a sleep disorder, you tend to be pegged as lazy, irresponsible, unreliable, etc
In any event, I agree with something implicit in the article, namely that most people have a degree of this, but the severity is variable. Mine has been fairly extreme, and while diagnosis enables disability accommodations, it is very fraught navigating most workplaces with this particular disability and you are essentially forced to choose between having any kind of upward mobility and getting enough sleep at night.
Thankfully the past two years or so I've been getting much more sleep since optimizing more for that. But anyway, if you are navigating sleep challenges you should get a sleep study, sure, but also be aware that your local sleep clinic is in all likelihood only nominally a sleep clinic. That is, it does not know how to diagnose and treat more complex sleep issues and probably doesn't want to.
I have DSPD as well, and was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the article discussed DSPD.
That being said, I do think a lot of what the author is saying flies right in the face of traditional advice, esp. the suggestion that we should all just free-sleep and rotate around the clock. I personally find myself happiest when I'm entrained to the 24-hour cycle, but at my own natural offset. Whenever I've been cycling the day it's felt miserable, uncontrollable and exhausting.
To be fair, the author did claim that you can fully solve this by completely cutting out after-dark electronics, but I've tried pretty intensely to do exactly that for extended periods in the past, and didn't see any progress. I do sleep amazingly when camping, though, and the delay is lesser than normal (still definitely there).
I mean, if your atomic unit is a single file and you can tolerate simple consistency models, flat files are perfectly fine. There are many use cases that fit here comfortably where a whole database would be overkill
This comment is obviously true but uninteresting if you don't elaborate further on those causes
What I mean is, the comment you replied to isolated a specific cause and sparked a discussion; your comment, if taken at face value, is thought-terminating. How can we possibly comprehend all causes of complex phenomena before we are allowed to discuss them?
About the universally true thing, I understood it as whether people that's unhappy with life generally have trouble sleeping, not whether everyone that have trouble sleeping is unhappy with life. Still probably not an universal but is more reasonable sounding
The comment I replied to suggested that people who are not fit or suffer from sleep disturbances are willfully unhappy. I don't feel it requires much thought or experience with the subject matter to see that this is false. There are many easy counterexamples which I'm sure you can come up with even if you are only barely determined
No one is disallowing the parent, you, or anyone else from discussing or thinking about complex phenomena. If someone is not putting in the work to engage with the material, others are free to point it out, and they do so at their leisure.
I hold others to a higher standard when the stakes are higher. Specifically, the post I commented on was (likely unintentionally) not only factually wrong, but stigmatizing people with sleep disturbances. This is why my tone was dismissive and condescending. This was intentional.
I don't care to give examples because they are easy to find if you are asking in good faith. I even posted one in direct reply to TFA.
I apologize for getting stuck on your parenthetical but while pithiness is a fine aspiration in a North American business setting, pithy reads generally can't exist without more detailed and nuanced long-form analyses, and the latter face a more dire existential threat. You are right that pithy [writing] is an important skill, as are slow and deliberative reading and writing of longer form work
I'm not claiming the original post is detailed or nuanced, to be clear
To give a clearer example of what I was talking about, look at the linked article from my comment above. It is much longer than the original article from this post, but it (a) starts with a TL;DR, so it gives me a summary that lets me know if I want to read it in the first place, (b) combines detailed original research with analysis and opinion, and, IMO (c) continually adds new information/insights so it builds on itself.
Obviously not apples-to-apples comparison to this article as they have different purposes (original research vs. pure opinion), I just point this out because a bunch of comments seem to be stuck on the idea that I was saying "don't write anything that doesn't fit in a tweet", and that wasn't my point at all.
OK, that's fair -- it sounds to me though that it's less about pithiness, or that this word might be too narrow. To me it sounds like you are talking about accessibility, in the sense that you'd like more care from writers in structuring their writing with consideration for legibility to the reader. In that I am with you
I'm sorry to hate but it's extremely rich to write
> Do not send me anything longer than you would send to a crush. Some people email me six-paragraph essays about the time they saved a cat from a tree
...in a rambling piece that is not written with much consideration for the reader. I know this is just a blog post, ostensibly written for the author's younger sister, but if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from, he should make some effort to make his ideas digestible. I would suggest he include some transitions between ideas, bother to do some research to back up his claims instead of e.g. referring vaguely to an experiment he heard of supposedly involving "lucky" and "unlucky" people (truly sounds like science).
And for the love of God don't tell me right off the bat that you assume I'm going to keep reading, let alone read closely enough to "notice" anything about your writing. Yuck
Finally, while I know it's popular in Silicon Valley/coastal tech types to use the language of agency to justify being an uncharitable dick to people around you, the spirit of this particular stanza is helpful to deploy only in a small number of settings, generally low complexity environments where the stakes are low and there's a lack of psychological safety, and you desperately need the paycheck.
In any event the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing his experience working in coastal tech. Do yourself a favor and find other role models
>... if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from...
>... the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing...
The author clearly doesn't want to be someone most people take advice from, and admitted that the piece wouldn't be well written, lack nuance, and largely were just things that worked for them, not anybody else. I don't know how one could possibly take this so seriously when they make it very clear up front:
>I'm not really qualified to give advice.
>Don't read this if you are seeking a nuanced perspective.
>These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.
The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.
But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.
Maybe I'm naive, but my sense is not everyone streaming on Twitch is trying to make a career out of it. Even for those that are -- everyone starts somewhere. Hopefully those that aren't successful on first brush notice and realize that it takes more than simply starting a stream to build a sticky audience.
Also, there are many people out there who lead fulfilling lives without families and partners. Either way, I don't think you should pity people so readily. At best it's somewhat condescending and missing much of the complexity and nuance of what it is to be a human person
Your comment (along with mmarvin's) really just shows you are making grand assumptions about Twitch and streaming on Twitch that are not based on any level of real information. That you would equate viewers to followser is silly at best. (And don't pretend you did, either, as there is NO reason to bring up IG follower counts otherwise)
> I think that way more of them than would ever admit to it - even to themselves - want that, yes.
For many reasons, they aren't what many would consider to be influencers. The ignorant might sugget that streamers are influencers, but that's, well, ignorance. Secondly, most people do it for fun. Not as a full time job. This is a hobby. And it's a fun one.
It's okay to just not comment on things you are ignorant about. It's okay.
Tbf to them, most people equate streamers with individuals having thousands of viewers.. From that perspective, their statements kinda make sense.
While I personally wouldn't be able to perform under such a setting, I'd be lying if the idea isn't kinda charming - it's like wanting to be a rock star, a small part thinks it'd be cool, even if most don't actually want to live the life of a rockstar.
Though the wealth it comes with would be neat to have (I mean most streamers with thousands of non-botted viewers are millionaires at this point, right?)
This strikes me more as a matter of taste, i.e. more art than something which can be provably wrong, or correct for that matter. The concerns you outlined might be concerns the author doesn't have to worry about for whatever reason -- if this fits neatly and seamlessly into their existing workflows then that's great, and I for one appreciate learning about other peoples' approaches like this even if they don't immediately work for me
IMV it's a clever trick, and like you my instinct is that if I attempted to integrate this into my own workflows, I would endure some sort of hardship down the line but it's not immediately obvious when or how. Or maybe for certain things it would be fine and less painful than other options, like other similarly clever tricks I felt uneasy about at first
PyPy is a JIT-compiled implementation of a language called RPython which is a restricted subset of Python. It does not and has never attempted to implement Python or replace your CPython interpreter for most intents and purposes. CPython is the official reference implementation of the Python language and what you probably use if you write Python code and don't understand the difference between a programming language and its implementations (which is fine)
This doesn't sound right. PyPy has always been described as an alternative implementation of Python that could in some cases be a drop-in replacement for CPython (AKA standard Python) that could speed up production workloads. Underneath that is the RPython toolchain, but that's not what most people are talking about when they talk about PyPy.
Exactly correct. PyPy is a replacement for CPython 3.11, which aims to be fully compatible with pure Python code (C extensions are a more complicated story).
Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.
And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site
If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.
See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"
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