I’m a nontechnical founder working with a technical friend. We’re writing a social app that basically depends on the goodness of the user. We had this sort of optimism that people, given a choice will be nice, rather than vicious. But the closer we are to completing the app, the more I start to doubt the natural goodness of users… What do you guys think? If there is anyone who launched an app that proved whether users tend to be nice or vicious?
Questions
Are users nice or vicious?
9 answers from the community
A· Jan 13, 2016
I think it's absurd to even care if people are nice or vicious. I think you're wasting your time because even if people are honest about how they interact or behave, it doesn't change anything. You can hold a mirror up to people and tell them they are fat. They most likely won't stop binge eating and start working out until they have an IV in them. People are shitty. People are amazing. Big whoopty freaking do. Now if you've found a way to monetize off self help, then stick with it. 90% of people want to improve themselves even if they don't actually do the work.
A· Jan 15, 2016
OP here:
That's an interesting point... but I believe that people, given the opportunity, could be nice (as long as it isn't too inconvenient). I mean, you look at other social apps, and so many things could have gone wrong if it weren't for users generally adhering to some basic form of courtesy, right?
And as for people being who they are, as long as a particular subset of the population is targeted, wouldn't it be enough? Of course not everyone is nice, but if the majority of initial users are nice, wouldn't that be enough to establish an unspoken set of rules to behave?
A· Jan 15, 2016
One reality for you - Donald Trump is leading the GOP nomination and 40% of people claim they will vote for him because he "tells it like it is". Forty freaking percent. The bandwagon gets full fast.
A· Jan 15, 2016
op here...
dayum... that woke me up....
A· Jan 13, 2016
This isn't that app that is trying to be Yelp for People is it? Cause that's TERRIBLE.
A· Jan 15, 2016
Are you talking about that disaster called peeple??
no way dude, I'm just curious about users' behaviors in general.
A· Jan 13, 2016
From my own personal experience, unless you target a very specific subset of the population that you know for a fact doesn't tend to be shitty, expect the average user to be selfish, careless, and asshole generally speaking, with varying degrees of malice.
You may get around you "niceness" requirement if you incentivize it (e.g. reddit has imaginary karma points that rewards contributors of good content) but otherwise don't expect to scale to millions if you require everyone to be nice by default.
A· Jan 14, 2016
Age group and demographic is part of this. If you are targeting a younger crowd, you will encounter endless viciousness. If your app is the type of thing that will appeal more to an older group there will be less "lol, kill yourself!" type of viciousness but if you're creating a tool that has a way to converse or write posts, people will still tend to use whatever it is to grandstand and opine, sometimes rudely and viciously. Compare youtube comments (often teens) to comments on newspapers and nextdoor (more grownups) for examples of how people's bad personalities come out...
A· Feb 1, 2016
Users will follow what they see. For this reason, if you let bad behavior pass, a few others will see it and also behave badly, pushing more of the good users out, and it snowballs. Look up chatroulette as a prime example. It started out as a great community but once the first guy did his thing...then it was ok for the second guy...