"No bans" mentioned in a little animation at the bottom of the page, and in the FAQ as a "suppression list"
You will ban people. People will post horrible things. Things you are legally required to not host. The "radically free speech" social media site trope misses the fact that social media is only valuable when it's interesting. Screaming into the void, among others that also want to scream into the void because they can't elsewhere, is not fun.
Being completely removed from a platform and being penalized by the community/society for bad-acting are entirely different things. We (staff) generally won't be banning anyone (except where law may require) - penalty systems like suppression lists are entirely governed by policy enacted by the community (which can change if the community wants it to change). A suppression list itself could even be completely removed if that's what the community ultimately decides.
Yes, companies are often required by law/local jurisdictions to remove content violating the law, report to authorities as needed, etc - but as far as we've been advised so far there's presently no laws in our jurisdiction requiring us to completely ban someone for posting such content. If that is or becomes untrue in any given jurisdiction then we'll adjust and all such proceedings will be as public/transparent as possible. Wherever possible, though, violations to community policy are automated and based on requirements set in place by the community itself (and can change as community wants change). As staff, we intend to be as laissez-faire as possible in this regard.
I have a hard time believing their transparency promises if I can't even easily figure out who is in charge of the company behind their social product. adieuu.com doesn't work.
> Your individual data is never sold, and all of your created content can be removed or exported at any time.
Oh nice, so they're just selling aggregated data.
> While we are registered as a for-profit company, we intend to operate closer to a "B-Corp": our goal is to encourage positive social change and be accountable to all stakeholders (our users), not just shareholders, and set an example for radical transparency in our business operations.
So they're not a non-profit but you will attempt to be somewhat non-profit while being for-profit. Sounds... dubious at best.
Hi, Jason - I'm Andrew, one of Adieuu's cofounders. Totally valid point re:transparency. We've been in stealth for a bit and just launched our waitlist a couple days ago, shared it with a few friends, etc. We weren't expecting to start blasting things out for a few weeks, we're still setting up our company's site, LI, etc. Was definitely not expecting it to end up on HN this quick before we had our stuff up, this is a total surprise to me. What you said about transparency is exactly what I was thinking when we published the waitlist (horrible irony in preaching tranparency and not having a web presence yet), but figured we had a bit more time to get things up before people started seeing it. Lesson learned.
I'm adding some info about Adieuu below in the meantime - happy to answer other questions you might have. There's a couple things we're still a little quiet on til we get close to launch, but as much as possible I'm happy to be an open book.
re: selling data: We worded it this way because we haven't run the copy by any attorneys and I wasn't sure what all fell under "selling data". To be clear on the spirit/intent of the wording - we have no intention of selling any user data, period.
Non-Profit/For-Profit:
Our founding team has never run non-profits before, so for-profit is more of our wheelhouse. It seems to us (naive as we are about Non-Profits) like handling monetization and what we can do, sell, etc (payments vs donations, etc) is more straightforward in for-profit. Strong opinions loosely held - it's on our list of todos to research this more; this isn't something any of our current mentors know much about, so if you happen to know anyone you think might be open to educating me I'm all ears. We're early enough we can certainly swap our structure around to whatever is best.
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Sorry for the long post, hope the above is helpful - if not, please say so and I'm happy to discuss more. Until we get more about Adieuu live on the web, LI, etc, here's some quick details (ask away if you have specific q's, I'm happy to answer):
Thanks for the friendly reply, mate! I wasn't trying to be rude, it all just seemed a bit odd. I've got a better impression of that project now and I wish you and your team all the best.
Interesting that there doesn't seem to be any information about the actual platform itself, just its governance. What is the product? My assumption is it will be a twitter clone, but I don't see anything about that.
While the idea is nice in theory, I don't see any way that this could expand beyond a highly niche platform. But it doesn't seem like a very monetizable niche, so as a for-profit endeavor the prospects don't seem great.
Regardless, it is nice to see people working on people-focused software.
Good luck with that. Like, do you actually believe you'll block all bots? It's simply ridiculous to claim this. Everything you do to block bots will be circumvented. Hell, no social network wants bots: bots aren't a feature anywhere. You're not going to be more effective than Meta or Twitter.
We can guarantee that all accounts are Humans, actually - it's part of what makes us special :) Also, FB/Tw have a vested interest in allowing bots. When I run an ad on FB (no ads on Equal, btw!) I'm paying for impressions, many of which are bots. FB is making money off of bot and botted content, I'd argue they have a conflict of interest in removing bots. We have no such issues :)
No, you really can't. Whatever verification you ask for can be faked (increasingly trivially with AI). You can't even rely on calling the users on video to verify their identity.
I run a startup hosting podcasts (that is, literally the file hosting). Advertisers with literally nothing to gain because inactive feeds are invalid will sign up for accounts and post spam. They literally have humans overseas sign up for Gmail accounts and go through the full signup and verification and captcha just to post some garbage links.
If they'll go through that much effort for my startup where there's literally zero payoff, they'll do it to yours. I promise you, you're not going to win the war on bots. Maybe for a while until you grow, but mark my words.
Appreciate the spirit of your comment and agree it's a big thing to tackle. We've worked hard on this aspect in particular, before anything else. Our core codebase is built around much of this (releasing more details closer to/at launch) - and we're using methods that have been proven to work in several large countries/industries (particularly in video games where botting & hacking is also a major concern). At the time the user creates an account, we know that they are a human and that they are relatively unique. We don't allow users to create multiple accounts.
> and we're using methods that have been proven to work in several large countries/industries (particularly in video games where botting & hacking is also a major concern).
There are no games that have successfully blocked all bots.
> We don't allow users to create multiple accounts.
Unless you're requiring proof of identity using things like passports or driver's licenses, this is a rule, not a guarantee. You can't possibly know whether someone over the Internet is the same person as someone else. The crypto community has spent the last decade trying to crack this nut.
> that's risky because there's lots of ways to detect that, they'd get penalized, and then would not be able to make a new account.
You're assuming they want an account in the first place. They're not doing this because they want to have an account on your service, they're doing this because someone is paying them a few dollars a day to sit in a room and put on different hats or Photoshop a new name onto their citizenship card or whatever to bypass your verification so they can post a link to a sketchy casino. There's no risk, they'll just keep doing it. The big bosses will just cycle through warm bodies (of which there are many millions) to sign up for your service for pennies and post spam or election propaganda or whatever they care to.
> At the time the user creates an account, we know that they are a human and that they are relatively unique
I really want to underscore how much hubris is wrapped up in this comment. Your business model is predicated on doing something extremely difficult and presently unsolved (and likely unsolvable!) with essentially 100% success. Forever. I worked on this problem at Stripe for half a decade, it's not a small challenge.
Can you start checking people's passports? Yeah of course. But then you're going to fail because nobody wants to upload their passport to the account they're creating to shit post and message their friends. And your user acquisition costs are going to be enormous because you're doing passport scans on every signup.
We'll confirm more details closer to launch, but we have a way of doing what we need to do safely, while respecting user privacy. Our caq at launch is higher than some other networks (depending on whether you're comparing us to all networks or other upstarts), but the ltv of our users are inherently also much higher. Agreed we're making some big claims and we need to refine/add the details (as mentioned in a diff response this wasn't a self-post on HN, didn't find out til this morning, and we don't have all of our messaging ready for a real marketing push yet, lol).
I hear you, though, and while I believe we have the right stuff in place to tackle the issue, I hope when we release more info you continue to keep us honest and call us out if we're wrong :)
You will ban people. People will post horrible things. Things you are legally required to not host. The "radically free speech" social media site trope misses the fact that social media is only valuable when it's interesting. Screaming into the void, among others that also want to scream into the void because they can't elsewhere, is not fun.