They do it because all the successful social apps need to make contact discovery easy. The ones that don't use this trick - ethical - we don't hear so much about, maybe they don't succeed.
But still, why do they need to steal your addressbook? They can offer you to spam your contacts without demanding. Is the profit contingent on selling the address book data?
To the point where they won't let you invite more people (help them grow!) without it?
The pushback is minimal. A lot of the pushback possibly includes people that are going to be upset by many things. Specific Reddit communities and Hacker News are good examples of that. If these demographics are unlikely to be happy with your social product’s privacy and dark or non dark patterns, catering to them makes no sense.
I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.
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To add on to the whims of the geeky communities. Some companies escape it more than others. Airbnb doesn’t get much shit for spamming Craigslist people in early days. Compared to the negative talk of Uber, Facebook, etc, they also get no where near any criticism for the way they incentivize negative aspects of their platform.
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All of this to say - there’s no real downside if money and power is the primary goal.
>I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.
My experience is completely different from yours. Out of the dozens of people I've spoken with about this stuff, I can't remember a SINGLE PERSON who didn't express dissatisfaction with at least one of: lack of privacy and potential willy-nilly snooping by CompanyX employee; arbitrary blocking and post removal without good cause; bad interface design; low quality of content.
I don't go fishing for it either, it just happens in conversation, although I sometimes am the first to broach the subject of social networks.
Sorry, I was exaggerating and didn't make it clear what I meant. Yes people care. A lot of people will especially say something or another. Most won't actually not connect to Clubhouse with their contacts though.
So I see the same dissatisfaction. I find that to be closer to slacktivism level of caring for most people though. If they stop using an app or don't use it from the get go for X reason, it usually doesn't align with how they're using other apps. So technically they did not use something because of the dissatisfaction you described. However, they aren't actually applying that even remotely consistently.
That because they have a lot of VC money riding on it, they have to do "growth hacking" in order to justify the funds and grow quickly enough to satisfy the investors?
I assumed the OP saying successful social apps as in successful to the point of being known by at least some average people. Metafilter and Hacker News are both very niche and tiny.
Hacker News doesn’t have the same business model as others either. It’s to help the namesake incubator. It succeeds with that. Getting contacts etc wouldn’t benefit Hacker News. Hacker News could lose a decent amount of money yearly without any prospect of breaking even and still be run.
Most other apps of any kind can’t be run that way, including Reddit and Metafilter.
Perhaps it is just a fact that we have to accept that large (1M+? 10M+? 100M+?) social networks cannot remain sustainable without abusing their users. That would mean we can benefit from building smaller, sustainable communities for ourselves and those we care about. I'm surprised it's not happening already, to be honest.
With today's technology, you can spin up a community website for, e.g. your family or your organization for the price of basic Web hosting and have all the perks of connecting without the downsides of e.g. your data being harvested and reviewed by anyone at CompanyX.
Sure, you have to do your own security, but the big social networks aren't impervious either. And you gain the advantage of not having your account randomly disabled or spamfiltered or shadowbanned.
It won't protect you from NSA or FBI, but I don't think most people care about that. On the other hand, people I've spoken with are aware and do care about snooping by CompanyX employees.
The more I think about it, even as writing this comment, the more I can see that we are very close to rapid disruption in the social network space.
Perhaps it is my family being minority immigrants with other caveats. Snooping by employees is rarely done. It most likely isn't going to mess you up too badly either.
On the other hand, the number of people I know who are either deathly afraid or just normally afraid of the government and its agencies like the ones you mentioned is high. This is definitely going to be a minority of people. My family and extended family aren't common cases.
I don't see either as big deals though. Not enough to have people not stick with bigger apps that have network appeal.
I don't believe disruption of anything but more of the same in different clothing happening. I'm a pessimist though.
