My wife is in a position (board chair for a co-op) that results in her sending out a lot of invites to events. Evite has kinda been the go-to in her social/co-op group for ages, but man it suuuuuuucks these days. Ads everywhere, annoying patterns, and lacks a bunch of nice features that this seems to have.
Currently Partiful doesn't generate revenue, which is evidence for its quality. As soon as the purse strings get attached, it'll be time to get out. But for now, it's an excellent service.
This tracks so well as an indicator, with many other products. As soon as the company starts making money, their product is going to become awful and it's time to find an alternative. Why can't tech escape this cycle?
Because there’s always someone willing to lose money by offering a free product without the undesirable stuff in the hope that they can acquire customers to mine for cash later
The key here is VC-backed. The enshittification rate of bootstrapped products (especially solo or small team) is magnitudes lower. Ironic thing to say while on YC's message board, but there you have it.
Nowadays when I'm looking for a new software product or service with a good number of options, first thing I do is check how they're funded.
Funny thing is that teams are catching on to this! Very recently I've seen two products have a separate "Are you VC backed?" heading in their landing FAQ (both answered with "no"). I can see this becoming a trend - if I were to create a product, I'd do the same.
imo the most likely scenario is that they never charge and are acquired by Facebook.
In exchange, FB gets access into your offline graph: people you interact IRL but not on social media. They can approximate relationships through Plus 1 invites.
Work in an instagram component for sharing photos / albums / reels from an event. You’re pumping right back into the FOMOmachine.
Because every way, say, the Partiful devs could ask for $3/mo for months you post parties (like Kagi’s new pricing) is gated by payment providers that will either take 30¢ of every dollar, be expensive to implement, or provide a bad experience for users.
It has. Apple escaped this cycle. Their software is great. Instead of you being the product, you buy the product. People then just complain the product is expensive. On this website, I roll my eyes.
Apple stuff has always been expensive, and never once has Apple justified raising the price because they're 'privacy friendly'.
Apple has a multi-billion dollar ads business. You are still the product, even if the execution isn't as brazenly anti-consumer as Google and Facebook.
> never once has Apple justified raising the price because they're 'privacy friendly'.
No, but they have made privacy a key selling point of their platform and communicated that clearly to customers.
Just because they never have formally stated “oh and by the way this increases the price of our products by X/unit”, doesn’t mean that feature isn’t included in the cost.
Agreed - If you want good products, you should support the people who create them. That means paying. If you want a privacy destroying enshitified product, keep using "free" products.
It's pretty easy actually - most open source software fits the bill. Quality software can be pretty cheap to make per user.
The only problem is services where hosting costs need to be paid somehow and network effects mean that for-profit competition will win the market even if the product is inevitably enshittified. Doesn't matter how good your open and community funded event platform is if Apple and Facebook can afford to shove their solution in front of everyone you want to interact with.
What open source software is a "nice thing"? We're talking about high quality user experience here. I don't think it's controversial to say that's vanishingly rare in OSS.
Actually it's proprietary software that's more likely to be full of anti-patterns and flows designed in the interest of the corporation rather than the user while advanced functionality is missing because it might confuse the lowest common denominator user. Looking flashy and retard-safe design does not make a high quality user experience.
I mean it does escape the cycle, lots of products charge money and aren't awful. The ones that are awful are mostly the ones people don't pay for, or things that use the freemium business model.
Most things that just charge a subscription are good and get better.
More like most things that charge a subscription will eventually add ads and other anti-features because that's the only way to satisfy demands for infinite growth once the market has been exhausted.
Sounds like Partiful's time has come before its even had a chance to try to sustain itself. It probably doesn't even have the resources to fight apple on this
> You're paying for Apple Invites whether you realize it or not. There's immense value in making their platform more sticky.
I'm not stuck to Apple's platform, I'm quite happy here. Apple services aren't drenched in ads end to end. Apple's services aren't constantly asking for nickels and dimes; it's one charge, every month, for a buffet of services that are regularly added to and actually improved, making them distinct from... fuck, the rest of the Internet basically, which seems to boil down to a revolving door of stupidly named services backed by VC funding that get popular, quickly, because they don't charge anything and aren't drenched in ads, and then slowly they add the ads, but there's an ad free tier for not much money, oh but now there's ads in that tier, which is also more expensive, and then the service shuts down because they didn't hit 60 billion users before their runway ran out, but there's this new service...
And while I'm certain they do some spying and whatnot to facilitate targeted ads, they at least pay lip service to my privacy, and my experiences developing stuff for their hardware tells me that at least there is a whiff of security to their hardware. There are a lot of things as a developer I'm straight up not allowed to do.
The "insidiousness" of Apple's plan so far seems to be, largely, making damn good products that people want to use, and backing them up with cloud services that work well. I wish more tech firms took that approach to be totally honest.
You're totally missing the point of parent. The cost is in how insidiously this behavior ostracizes Android owners over time, just like they've done for years with blue/green bubbles.
I'm an Apple user, and it serves me well, but it absolutely uses really sinister dark patterns to separate me from contacts in the Android world.
I have never gotten the blue green ostacization. It's a color. It denotes whether you're using iMessage or SMS (now the new standard, RCS I think).
Like I've heard of teenagers giving each other shit for it, I have never ever once in my life, myself or any person I've worked or been friends with, gives it a second thought. And if I actually heard someone attempting to make this into a thing I would judge them incredibly harshly.
I don’t mind it at all, nor would I care, but it others people that don’t have an iPhone (especially teenagers), and they also suggest this in their explanation (that a green bubble means the chat is no longer encrypted, even though WhatsApp and RCS exist).
It’s a dark pattern that they’ve rightly been criticized for, but no-one has thus far cared enough to do something about it.
I don’t want the uncool Android kids at my parties. Because then I have to listen to them droning on about the kids of things Android people drone on about.
Evite was hot for awhile - totally gone downhill. Same as meetups. Tough to make those things as paid businesses which is probably necessary to keep them operating well (or at least take VC money and try and make a return).
Meetup has become the worst service I use, bar none. They pretty much doubled our group fees from $200 a year to $400 a year, then started putting giant banner ads at the top of all of our member emails, then started locking essential features (like seeing RSVP lists) behind a member-level membership and started begging our members to give them money directly.
I think Apple's right about at least part of this - something like Evite isn't an app (or worth paying for), it's a feature that needs to be stuck onside another app that gets paid for.
Luma drives me nuts at conferences, I often end up invited to events without an address because they expect you to subscribe to their calendar feed rather than letting me put an entry in my own calendar.
I see very little use of either Evite or Meetup at this point though I imagine if I sought them out I'd see some continued use. (I do run into an Evite signup from time to time for a paid event.)
For a short period of time back in 2013 or so, we had AnyVite, which was so much better than Evite in all ways. I wonder what happened to them. I think they basically disappeared.
I've used it for so much community organizing. It's such a simple tool and nobody has to make an account. You put in your name and an (optional) password. The optional password feature has served as a source of inspiration in my own projects. It pushed me to consider "does this really need an account? Can it be done without one?"
This Apple thing is going to turn into a "green text" social signalling thing all over again. If you have an Android, you won't be invited.
More scummy Apple social engineering bullshit. Kids that already hate on those having Android colored text bubbles are going to bully each other even more. And of course kids need the latest iPhone, too.
Apple is playing into this brilliantly and it's disgusting.
Apple/iOS has market dominance in several places outside the US, including Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, and several other European nations. It has a slight majority in the UK.
Android has worldwide dominance overall, but people tend to communicate locally.
Nobody uses iMessage in Europe. It's an american phenomenon like beepers, caused by different market conditions.
In Europe the kids use Snapchat. Adults use WhatsApp for most calls, messages and rich media, and maybe Signal/Telegram for select groups or grey activities. The elderly use Facebook messenger and WhatsApp.
Japan and most of Europe do not really use iMessage (Japan uses LINE, Europe generally uses WhatsApp), so I'm not sure exactly how iPhone market dominance is relevant to the previous commenter's point.
iMessage is nowhere near as popular outside the US, mostly because consumers do not expect to default themselves into some kind of single-manufacturer proprietary "ecosystem" that rivals Sony in how anti-consumer it is.
Thanks to the EU, you can just charge newer model iPhones with any USB-C cable now instead of having to pad Apple's profits further with proprietary dongles and cables that offer no additional value.
Your depiction of iMessage (which is essentially SMS+encrypted communication with enhancements to people who also have Apple devices) seems disingenuous, as does your explanation of why people use alternatives outside the US. Outside the HN bubble, most people don‘t care about things like proprietary vs open (and if they did, why the heck would they opt for propietary alternatives).
> Lina Khan was going to put a stop to it, but tragically that didn't reach its culmination.
Lets not kid ourselves she was going to keep focusing on minimum impact, likely to fail cases with good optics, and inventing more obtuse interpretations of anti-trust law while continuing to ignore any real monopolies she could.
It does. If you try to send a photo in an inferior green bubble chat, you get an error. Face time calls don’t work.
The text is harder to read for me because it’s low contrast and can’t be configured.
It’s significantly less secure, and a government agent required I use blue bubble imessage to submit an important document for security, and wouldn’t accept it by sms or email since both were not secure enough
Tbh Apple's RCS implementation is so buggy it almost has me on the "they added bugs to keep people off of it" conspiracy train.
As in, during a conversation my phone would send RCS and the iPhone would reply with SMS only. This has happened multiple times with multiple people, and some where RCS won't let us communicate - the messages just disappear into the void, but only when sent from the iPhone.
If you're in the U.S. and a "government agent" told you to use iMessage, you are 100% being scammed. No way they would accept anything less secure than a fax message or a document portal that looks like it was set up in the 90's.
Sending a message should just default to MMS, which I agree is lower quality especially for videos, but shouldn't get an error. I'm in multiple group chats with Android users and it's fine other than videos, which are from 2005.
I think SMS/MMS should just go away entirely though.
What are you talking about? Photos have worked in MSS group chats for 10+ years now. They send as shit quality but they work. And now mixed group chats are RCS which has all the important features of iMessage.
Got it, I'll move to a country that supports RCS at my earliest convenience, and also not message anyone while I'm roaming to another carrier on vacation.
My carrier should support MMS, but I haven't yet had it work (and inbound messages to my number, like the picture of a family-member's wedding invite sent to my phone number, just silently vanish into the void)... I just kinda assumed it was working as expected since I'd heard so much about the green bubble issues.
i read this take a lot but have never heard of it in practice (from my high school nieces)
what is overwhelmingly prevalent is political bullying; eg "make the dems cry again" was all over the school in various forms (t shirts, device backgrounds, etc)
green bubble hysteria really isn't a thing beyond nerds.
I could see it being really useful for that, my only hesitation would be that here in Europe it would need to support Android due to how ubiquitous that is here.
Very happy to see this