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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I see a large dissonance between this message and the 'hello' presentation.

He laments that "we stay with locals when we travel abroad but we don't even know our neighbours at home", yet the new social network seems to push more in that direction (it talks about connecting people based on their interests, not their proximity). He says "we are afraid of what we don't know [...] we are hateful toward what we don't understand", but hello's "folio" feature seems to dig in on that by carefully filtering out what's not "relevant to your interests".

And then there's the gamification ("leaderboards, milestones & rewards") which to me at least seem prone to encourage empty activities that don't really help with the loneliness mentioned in the message.

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Because guess what, the letter is just a promotion for this new social network that they hope to sell everybody on. It doesn't matter if he really cares about any of those things, only that we think that he cares about those things and then go use his social network and divulge our private lives to yet another foreign entity.

Or the letter was written by one person and the presentation and app were designed by a group, and the latter's type of work rarely is as cohesive.

Gamification... because we know our app isn't interesting enough without it

Being hopeful is asking people to change, or at the very least give a thought to changing, sacrificing, open-minded to people who you don't like, etc. Making money is about keeping people happy which goes against the message.

The social network that forces people to interact with "the other" is one destined for failure.

I've not signed up (yet), but it can be both, right? You could have an overlap in interests in 3 of 5 things, and that means getting together with this person you have three things in common for sure, but also you can each introduce each other to 2 new things.

No, I read it exactly the same way - I guess the problem is that we probably need something paradoxical - we want to connect to things we know, but also to new things, people, places and experiences. But when we want them - otherwise they're an inconvenience.

I think just talking to people you meet at random will probably be a better solution.

(until I get murdered by a stranger!)

> (until I get murdered by a stranger!)

It's much more likely that you'll be murdered by someone you have a close realtion with.

(Apart from being a bit snarky, it's also true, and leads (back) to:)

> I think just talking to people you meet at random will probably be a better solution.

It is. (Speaking from experience)

That said, one also get to know people online - from irc to games. I don't see any reason why a new "meet strangers" social network couldn't work. But if a majority of its users can't motivate themselves to talk to random people they meet - chances are the network will be coopted for some other agenda than "making new friends". Like "have more one night stands". And while sex is a healthy human activity, meeting people with the aim to become friends need a form of level playing field, and mutual intention.

Fighting off one unwelcome sexual advance every now and then is part of the human condition - but having to do it every time you "meet" someone, it gets old really fast.

Which is probably one reason people can meet in games: while people game for many aspects of gaming - most do it to relax and have fun.

I guess the thing is that it can be a bit awkward when you're not expecting to talk to someone randomly.

If there is some way for people to "opt in" for random encounters such as Tinder, couchsurfing Meetup.com, it makes things much smoother.

What other sites are there that facilitate things happening in the real world? The MP3 experiment is perhaps my favorite.

People don't need more connectivity. Excess of anything is bad. Social networks and connectivity is already in the realm of being evil and eating away all the time from people's lives.

Basically yet another one trying to jump on the social network bandwagon.

I would argue he's not really jumping on the bandwagon considering that Orkut was one of the first social networks.

Orkut was produced by him under Google as an employee. Now he's trying to run with it again even though the whole thing is gamified and the letter is an ingenious as it gets. My guess is that he got a kickback to advertise and be the figurehead for someone elses shitty new social network. I would not be surprised if some celebs get paid off to start advertising it.

Jumping back on it, perhaps.

Goodbye http://i.imgur.com/pYkbT3f.jpg

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