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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

They're making purchase decisions on 5-star ratings for eg consumer goods, objects. You're talking about trading people virtually. It's going to be extraordinarily offensive and maybe worse.

Prepare for an incredible wave of never-ending lawsuits from the large number of people who don't like 1) being traded at all or 2) don't like how they're trading / being represented. And the service will lose those lawsuits: it'll be demonstrated to cause reputational harm, and the service dies right there.

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I remember an acquaintance of mine, Siqi Chen, built Friends for Sale back in the day on Facebook and that was a great launch pad for his career, where he did a lot more interesting stuff later :)

Out of all the article about FFS, I don't remember ANYONE mentioning it was offensive back then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_for_Sale

There are a lot of things that weren't considered offensive on the Internet 10 or 20 years ago, that are now offensive.

It shouldn't take more than a brief amount of thought to realize what imagery trading humans conjures up, and what happens next in terms of outrage and scandal and what will inevitably plague the service accordingly. Hint: will the trading all be perfectly fair? Without bigotry, without bias, without racism, without any accusations, and so on. Of course not, so it's obvious what will happen.

Expecting fairness in capitalism is like expecting the olympic games to feature random contestants drawn from a pool of the population at large.

There are winners who go on to the next level

And there are losers who drop out

Takes money to make money

In pure Capitalism you aren’t supposed to rebalance things for “fairness”. Bailing out the losers just makes the market competition weaker. It’s survival of the fittest. What exactly is “fairness” in the context of Capitalism? Someone happened to be at the right place and make money. Now they are ahead. And why not?

To be clear, the platform does not support "short selling" of the shares in another member. So, there is no effective way to deliberately drive down the reputation of another member.

Shares are traded in a fixed size of 100. Each BUY transaction increases the share price by 0.01. Each SELL transaction, reduces the share price by 0.01.

When you join the service, shares in your profile become available to trade by every other member. Members discover each other primarily based on services offered/needed. Today, if you like someone on a network, you might choose to "follow" or "like" them. We offer an alternative, whereby you "invest" in them.

A follow or like from you to someone else makes the connection and allows you to view their network activity. An investment on SELLFF does the same "and" allows you to benefit from any upside in the value of that investment. As the person you invest in goes up in value, so do you. Not a bad situation really.

Anytime you like, you can BUY or SELL more shares. The exchange is open for trading 24 x 7.

Sounds pretty complicated. It doesn't seem like something I would want to participate in. I don't participate on most social networks, though.

I don't mean to boast, but make a point that such a service seemingly won't add any value to folk like me. Just from past work connections alone, I get 1 or 2 phone calls a year from direct acquaintances wondering if I want to join a serious startup from the start. I also get a handful of linkedin messages a week from recruiters despite not having even looked at my own profile in 5+ years. It literally requires no effort on my part. All I've done through my career is find projects I'm inherently interested in, focus on the technical work with heart and conviction, and always try to be a friendly and helpful coworker.

Likewise, if somebody's resume primarily featured a social credit score like this above hands-on domain relevant experience, it probably wouldn't stack up too well against other resumes, unless their high score was specifically due to them cleverly gaming the algorithms and documenting it or something. That would make them an interesting candidate!

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