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Comment by koellewe | Hacker News Reader

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder.

It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Terms of Service. A few months later at their F8 developer conference they announced they'll be launching their own matchmaking service which will work pretty the same way I built my app.

Moral of the story: never trust big tech.

P.S. I open sourced the app a few years ago: https://bitbucket.org/stonepillarstudios/workspace/projects/... Feel free to fork & revive.

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I've heard that it's a good rule of thumb to not develop something that is just an extra feature of an existing behemoth (e.g. Atlassian plugins etc., but also the thing you built). If you're failure, then you've wasted time and money and if you're a success, the behemoth will just reimplement your work as a part of their platform.

Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, which makes reimplementation not worth it for the giant (but potentially worth it for you). I suspect a lot of Unity and Unreal plugins and authoring tools reside in that niche.

Wordpress/Automattic bought up successful plugins like WooCommerce and just integrated them.

Automattic is not in the same league as FAANG, it doesn't really apply.

Couldn't one expect at least a job offer?

Maybe, but working hard for months/years a chance at a job offer doesn't sound that amazing anyway.

BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

I think that was the owner being shortsighted. If the plugin was something that a reasonable fraction of your users would like to have, then very shortsighted.

Not only you had a person that already knew much more about your product than the average potential hire, but a person that probably was interested in your product (and maybe knew what users wanted) too.

"Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

Because you do not want him to abandon the project if it is useful to you?

Marginal revenue is relative though. For the developer, if it makes $500k over the product's lifetime, it can be worthwhile. For Facebook, if it only makes $500k, it's a waste of resources.

"I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes"

This is what most dating apps do, except Tinder (trying to do a clustering in an n-dimensional space). That Tinder outclasses most other dating apps is proof that your approach wont work. We don't look for people with similar interests for dating. Unfortunately we don't chose who or what we like in a partner.

This like the case of Amazon antitrust

current Tech giants are need to be replaced

> current Tech giants are need to be replaced

There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.

Should the tech giants really be punished for being too successful? I don't think so. They got to their size by being better. Nobody thought yahoo would ever be unseated. Yawho?

Antitrust laws have been around for a long time. Competition is essential for a free market to function optimally. You can disagree, but that's why they exist. Its not to punish anyone.

Wow that really sucks! Sorry to hear that. I suppose you would've needed patents on the idea to stop them from stealing it.

Or they were already working on it and hadn't announced, and he would have spent all the time and more money working on the patent only to see Facebook launch the same thing before he even filed it. Assuming there wasn't already a patent out there that covered this.

If you had patent, you could go after FB and have some out of court settlement.

In reality you can't. The upfront cost of defending a patent is huge, like hundreds of thousands.

Patents are fundamentally broken and really don't work like most think or want them to.

Sounds like you should be taking this case to the Congress.

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