Vero – An ad-free social network | Hacker News Reader

Vero – An ad-free social network

vero.co

Might be worth a quick look at this before you sign up: https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/03/how-vero-went-from-mos...

Money quote: “a construction company run by his family withheld pay from thousands of immigrant workers, and then abandoned them without food, water or electricity in labour camps.”

Will they allow me to pay for my account?

The devil in the details on all of these systems is that "free" doesn't actually exist. It's part of what killed Twitter (which is now a shell of its former self), and part of why Ello lost a lot of support (when Ello took VC funding).

That said, given how toxic the landscape has become, I'm not really inclined to use any social network unless they can reasonable resolve the abuse problems.

Yeah, you have to pay for your account. However, the first million users are free forever. Due to the demand they've extended the free user period for an indeterminate amount of time.

So you don’t have to pay?

I hear echoes of WhatsApp’s “first year is free, then $1/year, but we’ll keep extending free as long as we can”

...and then a buyout by Facebook?

We built a wish-driven social network that provides social benefits to consumers as well as benefits to companies such that it can be monetized without having to offer advertising and that model works really well. It already works in so many industries from bus companies https://www.stomt.com/rvm to games https://www.stomt.com/pantropy

Really happy that it works out now. It took us many years to figure out the right balance.

We now also have in-game integrations, app integrations and we released a Twitch-Extension last week. :)

Everyone has expectations and feedback impulses. We allow to exchange them easily at anytime and from anywhere (location&touchpoint).

I've been on it for a few days. A surprising amount (that is, around 5) of friends have joined so far, and most of them are not part of the tech crowd. Couldn't do much testing though, no matter what I tried doing it failed with a server error

I downloaded and looked around the app a few days ago, it seems really consumer media focused. Where Twitter allows you to post just text and later added photos, links and videos Vero seems to be taking the opposite and forces you to pick a category for the post.

It also encourages sharing movies and music but that's not what I go to social networks for.

>Like many social apps including WhatsApp, Vero requires an active phone number to create an account.

>(generally speaking, phone numbers are harder to falsify than email addresses).

Well, that's unfortunate. Generally speaking, spam to your mobile phone is harder to filter and block than spam to your email, too. I never give my phone number to websites, my phone is for people.

Google voice :)

Check out https://sudoapp.com

Whoah this is awesome, how have I never heard about this before? Too bad no desktop/android version.

Interesting, shame it's iOS only. I'd pay $30USD per year for their free offering if it had a linux client.

edit: I see they have a web client coming soon. I'll keep it bookmarked, thanks!

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/vero-die-naechste-social-network-...

rough english summary: the vero privacy policy explicitly permits passing your data with 3rd parties. Also: analysis of what data the app transmits to other sites is shown and somewhat revealing

worth reading the translated version: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

To be fair, isn't that required though to operate a website? If you want to use a CDN, you will need to 'pass user data' to a 3rd party. You'll need to state that down in your terms and conditions.

The worst they can be accused of is not being explicit enough about what 3rd parties and why they need to do that.

Here is a thread about why Vero is bad: https://twitter.com/_heyheytyler/status/968301107536523265

Relevant article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/saudis-oger-dismissed...

The irony of someone on Twitter complaining about signing over the rights to your content...

I agree, that particular tweet was not very bright. The same "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license" to "use, display and reproduce" your content is also in the Twitter terms and conditions, and is standard for any website that allows user generated content. (Including the one you're reading right now.)

Yep, that specific point is irrelevant as it appears in almost any social media and communication app. The part about the CEO specifically is more alarming though.

Yeah and he even requested that since he can't join Vero to join him on Instagram instead.

If I switch, it will be to an open, decentralized network.

https://mastodon.social

https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

Thanks for the link. I found some interesting criticism here:

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e...

Still going strong almost a year later.

And the site is down. >>> Due to the large wave of new users joining over the past several days, we have encountered technical issues which have left many experiencing service interruptions. We thank you for your patience and encouragement as we work to make Vero available to everyone.

I was going to suggest ello (https://ello.co), but it looks like they've pivoted from a general social network to something for artists (which probably makes sense for them).

For those who feel like they might fit with Ello, maybe check it out

In fairness, that was the original plan.

What's sad is that a modest number of features would make Ello a great text/writing platform. Those have not been forthcoming, and there's little sign they ever will be.

I've dialled back activity accordingly.

I get the feeling making something like that a reality would entail getting lots of poets/writers to get on Ello, then basically campaigning to get "awareness" of text based art.

Ello is pretty beautifully designed and the stuff I saw some great art on there, so I'm happy that they're doing what they do best.

Ell had (and still has) a bunch of writers. We've just never had the basics and most have wandered.

Ksenia Anske, a Russian-American fiction author, was on of the last holdouts. Trenton Lee Tiemeyer des great poetry.

Good luck actually finding their work.

I hope their Network effect plan (to get paying users) works - because a non-spying social network (even if it's not end to end encrypted) is really needed.

Are there even any other ways for them to make money? Any viable business models other than ads or subscriptions?

Donations to a foundation, similar to Signal's $50 million donation they received [1]. Run the service more like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap (as a utility), and less like Facebook or Instagram. Requires corporate structuring to prevent acquisition.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/signal-foundation-whatsapp-brian...

I'm rather more inclined to use Akasha to supplant my current social network tools:

https://akasha.world/

The only challenge, really, is convincing my friends to use it.

Pretend I'm one of your friends. Why would I use a social networks like akasha which will cost me money, when there's multiple open source social networking platforms with reliable hosts? Things will get even more interesting as they adopt activitypub, a json-ld based W3C standard for social networking, in order to interoperate. Mastodon and peertube are already there, but I don't expect that anyone would pay to relay activitypub messages through Akasha for anyone but themselves.

I haven't paid a cent to use Akasha.

I looked into it more and it looks kinda slick, but is there anything really describing how it works? Everything I read on their website seems kinda hand wavey to me.

It uses Ethereum for the logic, and IPFS for the storage back-end. That might sound a bit hand-wavy, but I'd honestly just recommend downloading it (after you get into the beta) and seeing for yourself - its very easy to use, you don't have to setup or deal with either Ethereum or IPFS, and the GUI is intuitive enough that you shouldn't have any problem just launching it and using it. The initial startup time is a bit of a usability issue - it takes some minutes to get itself established on the network - but once up and running its kind of refreshing to be able to do all the things, without any of the typical social-media grot to deal with.

if you use ipfs, it is assumed that you are using your computer while it is open .. or simply, minimized to share and transfer files... that is not free. Really.... you are putting your computer.

At the risk of being flippant the first thing Akasha needs to do is tell people what it does.

Would someone who is not familiar with it and visited the site have any idea?

Its a content management system that allows you to easily host and serve content on the IPFS filesystem, which is a decentralized datastore currently deployed and serving millions of documents. You can communicate with your peer network (friends) using blog-style posting techniques, share files (video/audio/html/etc.) and host them seamlessly on IPFS without requiring a centralized authority.

Pretty much anything I'd want to do on Facebook et al., I can do on Akasha - with the difference that I control the content. This is significant for content-creatives because it puts them back in the drivers seat for who and how their material is served.

"powered by Ethereum" -well I aint joining a site whose scalability relies on Ethereum who couldnt even handle few million cryptokitties.

Haven't had any problems with it personally, but I only have about 100 people in my network.

It looks like the "Sign up for Beta" button is disabled.

I'm over anything that claims to be "social". I think time has shown that these networks are almost unsocial and encourage people to post only the best, most boastworthy things. The portal into their perfect life when we all know that no one's life is like that.

Real socialness isn't like that.

Me being the product of the existing Social Networks isn't what's failed as far as I'm concerned.

True social? Fuck that shit.

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