That was my thought process too.

"This app helps you make friends without algarhythems, or ads, or data tracking"

"Cool! How do I use it?"

"By having friends."

"But I don't have friends anymore! I'm over 30, and as work and responsibilities have taken over my daily life, I no longer have the time required to maintain healthy friendships. I was looking to this app to make new friends. How would I do that here?"

"By having friends".

iOS is 60% of users in the US, where the author is from.

It reminds me of Fetlife.

If you've never heard of Fetlife, it's a fetish social network. At least that's what it markets itself as. In reality, everyone on fetlife knows what it is.

It's a fetish dating site. And also a fetish hookup site.

But the thing is, lets say I'm a male between the ages of 18 and 65. And I want to find a woman, in my city, who is single, and into monogamy......and also a whole list of fucked up fetishes. Don't worry, these women would ALSO list these fetishes as interests so it's consentual.

As a fetlife user you can't do that. You can't search by gender. You can't filter by age. You CAN see who's available by city, but you literally get EVERYBODY in that city. It's more like getting a whole phone book, rather than a filtered search list.

So it just ends up being way harder to use than it should be. They claim it's to "protect women", but that's bullshit. Women are not these defenseless creatures who need you to break your whole search system to shield them from the world. Also, there's an easy fix for that. You add search opt out in your own personal settings. They already have the ability to limit who can message you, it would not be hard to add a checkbox that says "remove my profile from search".

I'd be good with that. I just want to search women in my area, who share my interests, are single and monogamous, and want to be messaged. The system they have makes that SUUUUUUPER hard.

I can remember Hot or Not being before Friendster. I don't know when it started, but I found it around 2000.

For anyone unaware, the idea was simple. Go to the website, and you'd be presented with a random picture. Could be male, could be female. You could adjust these settings to be more specific as to which pictures you'd get.

But basically, you'd see a picture. Then you vote. Hot? Or not? And after you vote, you can see another picture to vote on, as well as the score from the previous voted on picture.

That's it. Thats the whole thing. No messaging. No interacting. Nothing. Just you having an account that you upload a single picture to. Then other people can randomly get the chance to vote on you, and you can also check your own score. The ONLY other thing you could do is share your URL with friends. Usually through AIM or YIM or ICQ or MSN Messanger.

I really think that concept was ahead of its time. I think it would have worked really well as an app in 2016.

was gonna say, i think lunarstorm had like 700k users in 1998. but then again i've never heard about friendster.