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Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

The 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.

Particularly given various unintended side effects -- I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.

And either way, it's not the core feature that will draw users to the site

If you want to differentiate as an alternative to toxic behemoth platforms, the framing of "Facebook but with chores" isn't it. The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing -- I am not that interested in knowing how to connect with someone on the platform before knowing why I would want to be there in the first place.

See e.g. how Nextdoor doesn't lead with "you'll have to verify that you live in the neighborhood", instead it's "Connect to your neighborhood with Nextdoor"

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I think the tapping phones feature -- for initial friend creation, not upkeep -- is THE killer feature of the app.

Do I want my teens on any social media apps? No.

Would I let them be on Facebook of 2006, when you were just connected to your friends and family, and not influencers and "the algorithm?" Sure! That and early Instagram were great ways to keep up with real-life friends.

If you made this as easy and pleasant to scroll through as 2011 Instagram was, with only-real friends allowed, I might even return to social media myself. It would beat having to WhatsApp my family my vacation photos.

(And heck, if this got big enough that celebrities were bumping phones with fans, heck, at least that's a more intentional connection than Insta forcing the latest wellness guru on my teen girl.)

My thoughts as well, I love this!

Easy to do, easy to implement but hard to bypass. Also it tells me something about the network that is not vying for a slice of the attention economy and isn't going to do everything it can to keep me on the site.

Don't underestimate the stubbornness of "get rich easy" people when it comes down to cheating etc. Even if it's not easy or cost effective, if this was going to be actually viral, they would tap real phones in click-farms to game the system. And do it once a year.

It's true that there are people who pay a premium for thinking they got one up on you, and will waste $1000 of effort to get $100.

But it wouldn't actually work well. It doesn't even need physical invites, keeping track of the invite graph is a great way to kick scammers out. It works. It's been demonstrated to work well since at least 2004.

The reason social media sites don't do it is not that it doesn't work - it's that growth trumps those concerns. Making onboarding as easy as possible is more important than keeping scammers out.

Why "hard to bypass" would be a sufficient thing? It depends on the technology used to connect the two phones. Bypassing this process can range from "easy" to "quite complicated", but it remains possible. Once the security is compromised, the entire network loses its core value since a single interaction is enough to establish a permanent connection.

It also doubles as a way to verify that someone is a real person using their real identity, which is starting to become pretty important these days. If Alice and Bob are both on this platform, the confidence Alice can have in the proposition "the Bob account is really controlled by a guy named Bob who really knows some people I know, as opposed to being AI or an overseas scammer" would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them. That sounds useful.

I’m not convinced that’s the case. A relatively small subset of bad actors can join the network, create new accounts on a second phone, tap (or find a way to fake that process via the API), then eventually use those accounts from bots.

It’s of course more friction, which in itself is good to avoid spam/bots, but over time all of that can very likely be automated

I think this point is crucial:

> [...] would be roughly proportional to the strength of the friend network connecting them.

Bots don't matter if you aren't connected to accounts you haven't tapped phones with though.

There's a German gay social/dating app called Romeo that has a feature where you can show which people you know personally. There's no physical validation though, so it's easy to fake.

100%. The exclusivity of the network is the differentiator here.

I share vacation photos using Polarsteps. It’s quite nice.

As others have mentioned, “Bump!” did it 15 years ago and it was little more than a novelty, despite its Google acquisition. iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) and no one uses it. Curious how that OS-level functionality might conflict with the app-level bumping. That aside, w all respect to the poster, it strikes me that they took that comment and ran with it before doing any research. There’s definitely a better solution to the problem, and I hope they find it.

I have used NameDrop about 4-5 times (in 10-ish years of using iPhone). It's not nothing! But it's also not that much.

Funnily enough, I only use the phone bumping feature when AirDrop is broken and won't detect I'm literally right next to my spouse.

> iOS has also had the tapping-phones-to-connect feature baked in for years (NameDrop) Well that's just because I have no idea how to find it. The "share contact?" prompt when you text a new number accomplishes the same I guess but it would be nice to skip the number part.

> The idea of spending time on the platform itself should be appealing

Optimizing for time spent on the platform is exactly what results in the current social platforms. The idea that the platform itself should be appealing and not a tool to connect with each others is in itself toxic IMHO

I don't see the issue with making a social network that's more focused on real-time, current irl connections. Snapchat has already used a similar model with decaying content to great success.

I think you're likely of a generation that's attached to the Facebook model where a social network is an ever-growing photobook/history of interactions with all your friends. Maybe that has a place, but I think it's worth being open to other ideas. And yes, maybe when someone dies, they're no longer part of this network in the same way they are no longer part of many other things in your life. I don't think that's inherently bad.

You move to dismiss what I have to say by framing me as closed to new ideas because of how you infer my age, in a roundabout way -- what an ugly, uncouth, and mean-spirited rhetorical move.

Either way, you badly mischaracterize generational differences in grieving and digital life. Gen Z and younger millenials are vastly more inclined towards memorialization of deceased loved ones and (physically & digitally) archiving their content than any generation. See also the uptrending of stated preference in burials over cremations in the same generation. There are many reasons for this but at least in part it is probably a reaction to the ephemeralization of both digital and physical life.

Also, my post was largely motivated by how OP brands their product. From their app store page and the blog post, it seems they will support photos, longer form content, and DMs. In such a setting, ephemerality needs to be in your face, otherwise you are setting up users for unpleasant surprises. It's common sense.

Perhaps "remember when you met with your friends?"

But taking a photo (possibly a group photo) is a more natural way to do that. Maybe it should integrate with photo-taking somehow?

It would be annoying if you met up, forgot to do the ritual in person, and had no way to fix it.

While this probably could only be done with the cooperation of Apple/Google, something like what they did for contact tracing during the pandemic would be ideal. Picking up that you were in the proximity of various friends without any active effort.

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

That sounds creepy to me. Taking a photo together doesn't seem like friction to be removed?

Doing it via a photo implies facial recognition, which can potentially be more creepy for people. Is it happening on device or in the cloud? Do I need to register my face when joining the service? What happens to that data if the service is sold at some point in the future?

I wouldn't use facial recognition. The idea would be that you take the group photo and share it with everyone using the phone-bumping ritual, and it shows up in your profiles.

But that only works if the social network has enough privacy safeguards that sharing personal photos on it makes sense. Maybe the network just shares the photos encrypted?

And if you can't share photos with your friends on it, it seems kind of limited as social networks go?

I don't really like the idea of an app telling me how to manage my friendships, my view is that people can handle their relationships without intervention. I'm not sure what problem it is trying to solve.

It gives you one way to experience your friendship. It’s not telling you how you should manage them. You can use it for just a few friends. Or ignore it completely

How about "friend-request-by-mail" where you pay Friendster a token amount to send a postcard with a unique QR code?

I have a heap of family and friends who live in a different country to me. I'd love an old school Friendster / early Facebook-style social medium where we could share posts, but the tapping mechanic makes this impractical for me.

Maybe pay them a visit.

I shouldn't require international travel - over an ocean - to talk to my siblings on the internet on a social app.

Visits are great and all, but they require money and planning with more than one person. And I'm lucky - I can travel. Some folks can't go home - war sucks, poverty sucks, sickness sucks, busy work times suck, etc. If I were still in the US, I might not even get a chunk of time off work.

Travel is probably getting a little less likely considering the current situation with jet fuel as well.

Maybe "get up and travel to a different country" is not as simple as it sounds.

Feature request: friend-request-by-mail: Pay Friendster $1 to send a postcard with a unique QR code. I've seen something similar for user/address verification on a local community website (but it's free to send the postcard).

"Hey I'm coming to visit you so we can be friends on Friendster 2.0! The flight was 1k so I hope you don't mind if I crash on your couch!"

If I could afford that I wouldn’t need a social media app.

> 'tapping phones' gimmick strikes me as something that sounds cute but will become an annoying chore

That 'tapping phones' could also be used to facilitate key exchange verification, making that chore technically useful.

Then again, that would be better done in an open-source app and not tied to any particular domain.

It’s interesting to read the comments here. People seem to be either strongly for, or strongly against this tapping feature. I bet the split correlates to whether all your friends live in the same town as you.

For me, I already know what the handful of people who live in my little town are doing. I see them all the time. An app like this is for keeping up for the rest of my friends who live out of town and I might only see in person every few years.

> I personally wouldn't want my connection to my deceased best friend to be subject to some decay feature on a social network.

It seems like a feature could deal with this specific case, such as marking a friend as deceased. Possibly, other friends doing the same thing puts the profile to be in deceased status until the user logs in and changes the status.

Much bullying potential. "You're dead to us" ...

People just shouldn't look to the online digital world for connection with dead loved ones. It's entirely impractical and one day after a bankruptcy or when it's no longer profitable it may just disappear. It can take years or weeks.

Heck no. There was this app "Bump" that exchanged info between 2 bumping phones. Google bought it and immediately buried it forever. There's ZERO reason exchanging info is still a chore. There are currently bumping features baked in to the OSs, so there is value.

I don't think it's an unintended side-effect. The entire point is to mimic the dynamics of in-person interaction.

Actually I met people on Facebook and other websites and after that I met them in real life.

The tapping phones feature wouldn't allow me to do this.

> an annoying chore that one should be able to opt out of.

You could say the same thing about leaving the house.

Maybe we should have a little more of this annoying but ultimately healthy kind of friction in our lives.

How does it work? Bluetooth?

I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:

- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.

- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].

Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.

[0] https://w3c-cg.github.io/web-nfc/

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corenfc/cardsessio...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/support/nfc-se-platform/

[3] https://developer.apple.com/support/hce-transactions-in-apps...

There's a comment below, "I just signed up and it’s super fast. Download the app, put in your name, allow Bluetooth. No email, no password, nothing."

I suppose getting special "NFC card" permissions when they already struggled to get the app in the store would have been a bit much.

Interesting. Android has a Nearby Connections API[0] which "uses a combination of Bluetooth, BLE, and Wi-Fi technologies" and appears to allow interoperability between Android and Apple devices, and Apple has a Nearby Interaction[1] which "use[s] the high-frequency capabilities of the UWB chip" but is restricted to Apple devices, so I guess it could be one of those rather than NFC.

[0] https://developers.google.com/nearby/connections/overview

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/nearbyinteraction

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If that happens, just steal their phone and keep tapping it monthly. It's what they would have wanted.

Once this is actually needed, they can add a feature for marking someone as deceased. It could freeze the relationships, disallow new ones, disallow any new content, mark person as dead.

You are saying you would kill yourself if you could not see you dead friend on some app? On the contrary it should be easy for a relative to remove a deceased individual from social media, especially so that they are not captured to be zombie-bots liking some far-right posts years they have been gone. Meta doesn’t give a shit about this, but tapping phones would actually solve this problem by itself. If you are not online nor tap phones with anyone for say a year, your account dissappears.

You missed the tongue-in-cheek.

I think you meant this snark for reddit?

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