

Sacrificing Trust for Virality: Spammy Mobile Apps - aepstein32
https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/86286817b874

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austenallred
Path is a well-enough designed product that I'm certain somewhere along the
line someone had to have said, "Well let's automatically select all of their
contacts and let them deselect if they don't want them," and then someone else
said "let's just keep the 'deselect all' button" the same color as the bar
behind it." I'm pretty sure someone on the Path marketing team was OK with the
idea that they were going to trick you into inviting all of your contacts.

Yet Path claims to be a social network for close friends and family. If they
were really concerned about the overall value of the product and not numbers,
shouldn't it be offering up ways to choose the closest people to you instead
of hoping you accidentally spam all of your friends? They'll get away with it,
but it's a very, very short-sighted move.

I believe they were hoping you would accidentally message every one of your
contacts, and actions such as these warrant uninstall by those who have
already downloaded the app and refusal to download by those who haven't.

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minimaxir
_Yet Path claims to be a social network for its close friends and family.
Shouldn't it be offering up ways to choose the closest people to you instead
of hoping you accidentally spam all of your friends?_

Path originally forced you to a friend limit of 100. Needless to say that
makes exponential growth more difficult, so the limit was removed and
marketing strategies were...changed.

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minimaxir
_It’s my hope that under these conditions, apps that are genuinely growing
will rise to the top, and those attempting to engineering their own virality
will dissipate into irrelevance._

Unfortunately, when the current paradigm is to create and flip startups in the
short-term, it's almost encourage to get rapid growth, long-term health be
damned.

~~~
hayksaakian
Until discoverability improves, gaming the system will succeed.

~~~
Espressosaurus
How do you expect discoverability to improve?

There are thousands of new apps on the market on a daily basis, all of them
overlapping with each other and apps that are already on the market to a
greater or lesser degree. Who is going to reduce that flood to the "best" of a
particular category, worthy of your time and money, and on a regular and
timely basis?

Granted, current app stores could be better, but you'd still have the
discoverability problem simply due to the volume of apps now on the market.

~~~
hayksaakian
See the web.

The way people find websites has advanced far beyond the link directories of
the 90s.

