John McAfee Developed One of the First Social Networks | Hacker News Reader

John McAfee Developed One of the First Social Networks

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115 pointsnotRobot30 comments

I created a social network in 2000. You could friend people, send messages, posts, follow and so on. Unfortunately I didn't have money to expand the capacity and when I added crowdfunding feature, some people were threatening me with reporting it everywhere and sending me nasty messages. Unfortunately I didn't have strength to go through this and I closed it. At peak I had over 50000 active users, but I didn't know how to deal with all threats.

ok sorry to hear - good job on spotting the potential for that market. What was the gist of those threats?

That userbase level is about when you start getting early - usually non-serious - threats and your privacy as a founder starts to erode. Anybody that builds something successful on the Internet will have to disregard the early threats and push forward (or fold up the tent and go home).

When you have 50k or 100k users and you start removing a few dozen abusive users per day, the odds are some of them will be actual lunatics, and some percentage of those will flip their lids and start targeting you with abuse in a surprisingly obsessive way (because they're actually mentally ill). If you can hide behind a faceless corporation with lots of venture capital, that makes it a lot easier as a founder, as the corporate nameplate and lawyers can perform shield duty. If you're a solo founder or equivalent, you take the full exposed hit.

I remember a few - for example someone would introduce themselves as a lawyer and then point out that some clauses in t&c are illegal and that he will report it "to authorities" (and sometimes they would offer "help" if I pay), or someone would upload their nude pictures and then report this to hosting provider that the website is showing these pictures without their consent. Some people would demand that I give them access to private messages of their "partners" and would threaten me that they will find me and "sort me out". Sometimes I had technical issues where the server would go down for a couple of hours - so there was a profile of a local band, something like a Facebook pages are now, and they made a post about the concert they are going to have, but the server was down on that day and they blamed me they lost money because just a few people came to the concert. I also had someone claiming to be a partner of one of the users demanding that I delete his partner account as she ignores him and only spends time on the website and sent me my home address. Very stressful.

edit: I remember one more. One guy would post his nude pictures typically exposing his face and his bottom and then he would write his name and address and add messages like "beat this guy up", "come find me" he would register other accounts and then post degrading comments under these pictures of himself. I initially thought that this is some kind of revenge and I was promptly deleting this and removing these accounts. Eventually that person would write that this is turning them on and was very upset that it gets deleted. It's when I added IP blocking and blocked all addresses he used.

jeez, how horrifying and kind of interesting at the same time.

I wonder how much psychological insight about humanity Zuckerberg has garnered first hand, by peeking behind the curtain.

I actually remember that software, used it to chat with a few people. Never knew John McAfee founded it.

The screen shots may look garish now but in the early web that wasn't unusual at all. People looked more at what you could do and less at how it looked. Course it was a pretty hardcore group of tech people in the early days of the net.

My 10 year old self spent many many hours chatting with "internet friends" using PowWow..

It's the only chat that I can think of that communicated in a continuous stream of characters... your messages were sent letter by letter as you typed them, not all at once after you hit 'enter'. It made slow typers painfully obvious.

I remember being able to play audio clips in the chat that others could hear as well.. This was also around the same time that MP3s started to be used and passed around. What a magical time.

> It's the only chat that I can think of that communicated in a continuous stream of characters...

Plain old unix "talk" does this

ICQ did too, IIRC, before it was integrated into AIM.

It did not when I used it, which was before it was integrated into AIM.

Was heavy ICQ user with low UID, rather sure it didn't.

Icq's chat feature definitely did around 97/98/99. I remember it being different from the IM feature in that way.

I used ICQ in it's original form and i don't think it did

That was a setting and not on by default iirc. I had a 6-digit UID (edit: UIN, dammit), and I clearly remember activating it because I found it cool.

Edit: googling it I found someone else that remembered it: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/2w4evp/comme...

Edit2: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/10-reasons-to-switch-forwa... number 4

wow, I had forgotten all about UIDs completely, and as soon as you said that, my 6-digit UID came right back to me like yesterday (260388). bizarre!

It also didn't work for people who were behind NAT, I think, and leaked the remote parties IP... so there may have been many people who used ICQ at that time but never saw that functionality.

I like it, and to this day there are some friends that I talk to using talk by sshing into a common host, just because the realtime typing is nicer.

I remember speaking on there to Americans on Christmas Day. PowWow was brilliant. There was a phrase or series of letters one could type to play a song or make a beat or something too. It had text to speech even back then.

Anyone remember uTOK? http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~orit/utok.html

You could annotate web pages and chat with other uTOK users who happened to visit that same web page. I found it a clever idea (IIRC it acted as a proxy server and added its HTML/JS on top of the pages). I wonder if there's a modern implmentation using browser extensions.

But anyway since this is 2020, imagine a news website's front page with this installed.

I remember the MS Comic Chat days too :-)

Was this the same as MSN Messenger? Got a lot of nostalgia from the PowWow UI. In Europe we used MSN Messenger pretty exclusively in the late 90s, early 2000's while ICQ and AOL were more popular in the US.

Not at all. MS Comic Chat was an IRC client that presented the entire chat as a comic book.

I think it's also where the Comic Sans font originated.

# Appears as XENO.

I thought Comic Sans came from Microsoft Bob but according to Wikipedia, Microsoft Bob was the intended use but the typeface wasn't ready in time so it was first release in Microsoft 3D Movie Maker and then went on to other uses like Comic Chat and the Large Hadron Collider.

Not true for entire Europe. ICQ was de facto standard in Czech Republic and Slovakia. No MSN Messanger at all.

Anyone remember "LOL Chat" from the same era?

https://web.archive.org/web/19971211123130/http://www.lolcha...

> Each person you chat with has their own window, and you see each character as it's typed, rather than line-by-line.

You could even argue that digital social networks predated modern computing by 100 years: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/so-you-think-online-con...

Thanks to WebArchive, we can still preview Tribal's PowWow https://web.archive.org/web/19961206133119/http://tribal.com...

http://www.dickshovel.com/tv.html

First online chats based around a theme or game I'd guess was the Plato system. Look it up. Somehow I got to use the Plato system in rural Maine one day.

Plato out of Urbana and so was Mosaic. I wonder if that was or was not a coincidence.

Define "social network".

The Internet itself. (en.wikipedia.org: The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s. )

I remember using Bolt.com in the late 90s. Some folks have described it along the lines of "10 years ahead of its time so that's why it failed". Think a 1990s version of Facebook. I liked it.

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