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.
Forming and maintaining close connections is fundamental for most people’s mental health—and hence overall well-being. However, currently available meeting platforms, lacking transparency and searchability, are deeply failing to bring together thoughtful people. This article lays the path for a platform designed to foster close friendships and relationships for people who prioritize learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. The directory of users will be fully transparent and each profile will contain extensive information, allowing searches over all users through powerful filtering and sorting methods. To prevent any value drift from this pro-social mission, the platform will always be free, ad-free, not for profit, donation-supported, open source, and democratically governed. The goal of this article... (read 6520 more words →)
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... (read 429 more words →)