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I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It (ca98am79.medium.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 31 points 4 months ago (8 children)

It's clearly a passion project but even his goal of it paying for itself is highly unlikely. More importantly, making sure those homebound, living in rural areas, using an android phone etc. are persona non-grata is just such a douchecanoe move. There's a lot of ways he could have incentivized IRL contact without telling everyone not able to do that that or running an android phone that they're not welcome on the platform.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    It reminds me of Fetlife.

    If you've never heard of Fetlife, it's a fetish social network. At least that's what it markets itself as. In reality, everyone on fetlife knows what it is.

    It's a fetish dating site. And also a fetish hookup site.

    But the thing is, lets say I'm a male between the ages of 18 and 65. And I want to find a woman, in my city, who is single, and into monogamy......and also a whole list of fucked up fetishes. Don't worry, these women would ALSO list these fetishes as interests so it's consentual.

    As a fetlife user you can't do that. You can't search by gender. You can't filter by age. You CAN see who's available by city, but you literally get EVERYBODY in that city. It's more like getting a whole phone book, rather than a filtered search list.

    So it just ends up being way harder to use than it should be. They claim it's to "protect women", but that's bullshit. Women are not these defenseless creatures who need you to break your whole search system to shield them from the world. Also, there's an easy fix for that. You add search opt out in your own personal settings. They already have the ability to limit who can message you, it would not be hard to add a checkbox that says "remove my profile from search".

    I'd be good with that. I just want to search women in my area, who share my interests, are single and monogamous, and want to be messaged. The system they have makes that SUUUUUUPER hard.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Sounds like they are incentivizing people to make external search sites from scraped data, which means the users wouldn't be able to opt out. From your description I'd be pretty surprised if that doesn't already exist

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    About 10 years ago there was an ASL search greasemonkey script as a browser extention.

    Funny thing about that is, it was made by a gay guy who disabled the ability to search for women. And when people asked him about it, he said some things that I will not repeat here, but just know it was like if toxic masculenity also took on the form of abusive and hateful commentary.

    Within a week somebody released an alternate version of that script with modified code that let you search for anyone. And as Fetlife is a very all inclusive site, the revised script also had options for numerous variations of trans. Basically every gender identity you can think of was included in the updated script.

    Fetlife couldn't control use of the script, but they could detect it. Which they then banned users for using it. Since that time the script no longer works. Fetlife did something behind the scenes to disable it.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Fetlife isn't a dating site. Sure, you can try using it like one. Just like you could try using Facebook like one. Or Lemmy. But just because it's sex positive doesn't mean it is for hookups. Like you noticed they are deliberately limiting people's ability to use it like a dating site.

    Dating sites (especially the fetish ones) attract creeps and bots and Fetlife already has plenty of those. Managing it like a dating site would just make that so much worse.

    If you are desperate to meet someone go to the events listed in your area. But again, if you go there with the intention of immediately hooking up you're going to be severely disappointed.

    If you want to be derogatory towards Fetlife call it a porn site. Because that is the main reason people pay for it. To get access to videos.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Fetlife is ass, and not the good kind. You can't do any meaningful searches. I want to find people with a boot fetish in my area. You can search for boot fetish, you can search for city, but you can't do an AND search which combines them. You can scroll endlessly. After 5 min of worthless searching I give up.

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