‘This.’ Has People Clamoring for an Invite

So it's a service where someone tells you what to read to be socially accepted. If I were running an app like this, I would totally seed it with fake users "thising" paid-for content behind the scenes, I would artificially introduce invite scarcity so people don't collectively figure out what I'm doing, and I would plant PR articles like this to generate hype and muddy the waters -- if you've been in this industry for long enough you'll know "clamoring for an invite" is code for "this article indirectly paid for by This".

Christ, it's like these businesses are moving to a braindead consumer singularity where you pay to have someone tell you the optimal thing to buy to increase today's thumbsups. Perhaps the premium version can be they take your credit card and buy it for you while you sit on your couch and watch the number go up.

4500 journalists with a deadline and too little to write about is hardly a clamor.

How about just springing the $5 for Metafilter?

They can post a link, but just one a day; they can follow other people on the network; they can click on the links posted by members they follow (no limit); and they can click “Thanks” to endorse a link they particularly enjoyed.

Yup. Metafilter. Except they let you post as much as you like.

the premise has merit ... but i already get it from Dave Pell at http://nextdraft.com/

I'm trying it out. As you might expect, it's very focused on US-centric journalism and news. Which might be great for some people, but until they add more personalization features or just get a bigger community it's probably not very relevant to my own interests.

Seems fun, maybe. One of the big problems with my Facebook is the decreasing signal to noise ratio.

It isn't about having a great product anymore. It's about creating hype.

I wonder how much the NYT/PR agency/journalist was paid for this fluff piece? 4500 users? Next someone will create an app that just says "Yo!" or a social network that has no ads...

People were clamoring for invites to http://ello.co about four months ago, then the hype died down. Is this. any different?

sometimes its beneficial to cut through all the noise on the net. My only question is, why hasn't anyone else thought about this?

Well damn, now I want an invite.

you mean twitter?