The concept reminds me of YikYak which amassed a large user base and was successful. But you should also take a look at why YikYak failed in the end.

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deaux 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The solution here is human moderation and accepting that it's not going to turn into a unicorn, but a sustainable medium-sized business is incredibly possible. There are existing examples of this.

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b_e_n_t_o_n 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not AI moderation? I'd assume the more scalable option is having an LLM parse messages when reported.

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dangus 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which examples? I can’t think of any profitable companies with a profile like that. Free social media sites basically require scale.

Human moderation is going to be a huge hurdle for this. Connecting Internet users by location seems like a massive safety liability.

Making sure users are human and not just gathering locations of uses at an individual non-aggregated level also seems like a horrendous bad time.

On top of that, anonymous mode is going to be removed in the future, so you literally just have to tell other users your seemingly somewhat precise location, tied to your real persona.

Who wants this?

It’s also crazy that this site asks for location before even telling us what it is. On mobile it’s especially bad because the site isn’t even loaded or visible before the OS prompt covers basically the whole screen.

The service does need your location on the marketing page, collect that when users actually start using it.

	▲	deaux 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[1]: Been around for 25 years, apparently employees 20 people and is still popular to this day. Donation-based. [2] Seven paid staff members, $5 for an account, been around at least 22 years. And there are bound to be a dozen outside the US that I don't know of. I've heard of this [3] being a Dutch one that had a good run for decades with multiple full-time employees, but can't confirm as I don't speak Dutch. Supposedly ad and donation sustained (?). Again, has outlived most social networks. Maybe a Dutch HNer who reads this can tell us more. You can mean a thousand things by "profitable" but both achieve what I posited and what most commonly underlies "profitable": sustainable. And they are. They're easily in the top 1% of social networks by longevity. That the former is non-profit doesn't make a material difference, these are effectively medium-sized businesses as I posited. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Porch_Forum [2] https://www.metafilter.com [3] https://www.fok.nl