A platform for LessWrongians and others to bond and share meaningful and emotional experiences, exactly!
Thanks for the feedback. I get your concern about funding. But I have experience building websites and have access to hosting servers up to a reasonable amount of users (500, maybe much more). So, funding is not an issue up to that point. In other words, usage would precede funding. This is important to grasp the distinction. Of course, the “impact” that this project is aiming at is not on the same scale as other LW / EA projects, but so is the cost / required funding. I’d love to get your thoughts on that.
Thanks for pointing that out. I agree that I could have been more explicit. I checked many other apps than I wrote in the market review, which I didn’t include because they mostly followed the same business model as traditional apps. Let me expand on those apps.
First of all, we should clarify definitions of success and failure. For-profit apps, which are most of the apps, receive heavy initial funding, but also heavy development costs and expectations. If they don’t achieve a certain targeted revenue by certain deadlines, they just can’t pay for hosting and development anymore. People, including investors lose trust, and the product juat spirals down toward bankruptcy, at which point they have no other option than shutting it down completely. This is a high risk high profit method. They may success fast, but they if they fail, it would crash unto them fast as well. More importantly, the notion of success is tied to profit and the notion of failure is tied to bankruptcy. If they stay in the green zone, few of them would judge their success based on the number of meaningful connections, minus the heavy mental toll and downsides they have on many people (some might have financial success, but actually be a failure according tto this pro social metric).
When a not for profit product is designed, the notion of success is simply about creating a positive impact on people’s mental health, by forming many fulfilling bonds. Very importantly, there is no notion of time for success. There is no deadline or money to chase before the corner. Such products take a long time to develop and gather usage, as marketing is slow, development is slow, etc. And that’s okay, we have no financial pressure, and people are there for long fulfilling connections. It’s fine to create you profile out there and get connections only a year after when the user base has grown.
Likewise, the notion of failure is very different from most aps that failed: either it goes bankrupt, or it has a negative / negligible impact on people’s well-being. I’ll explain in my opinion why the platform I suggest is much less prone to those two scenarios. The costs will be minimal (maybe I didn’t express it enough, but we are talking about many orders of magnitude less than for-profit apps, which spend a lot of money on development and marketing) and it would require zero funding for low usage (included in within my other hosting resources), going bankrupt would require a lot of usage and no funding for years. Regarding the people’s well-being, it is possible it has a negligible impact on it, for instance if we don’t reach a critical mass of users. But the plus side is that there is no deadline for that critical mass, so there can’t be any timing issue responsible for such a product failure. We can let the platform run for years and reach a critical mass then, and that’s okay. If it never gains enough traction nor collaboration, that’s also oka; I love coding and I derive a lot of satisfaction from just looking at a beautiful thing I partly made.
But again I agree that there should also be a few apps out there that followed a business model closer to what I propose and that also failed. I’d love to get input on those. Please share with me some links to failure write-ups if you find them insightful.