

Ask YC news: What happened to socialmoth? - rkabir

From some of my recent posts there - seems like the site died. I know there's the facebook app, and I know they're working on overhear.us<p>But where did the users go??
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socmoth
hey guys this is paul from socialmoth.

we had about 20k more users come in and use socialmoth than we expected the
other day. that is MORE, not total. up until that point, the dot-com and the
fb app were working on the same server and using the same database.

my focus has been entirely following the users, and the users are on facebook.
also i should follow the money, and that is also facebook. i moved the fb app
to a new set of servers sunday, but i haven't moved the dot com to the same
servers yet.

i plan an relinking them soon, but i've been scaling again since then. and
learning about proxy balancers (nginx vs mod proxy balancer vs haproxy - if
anyone wants to give advice)

rkabir, if you ask a specific question about flow, i can tell you want i know
and can make public. the sites popularity was due to the facebook users.
nothing i made scaled well enough for the new popularity and i haven't gone
back and redone all of the dot com code to match the facebook scaled/optimized
code.

omouse, do you use socialmoth? new features are on the way. they are done, but
not publicly shown yet. also, my facebook users are dying for new features and
suggesting them, but they realize there is a lot of scaling work to do. (i
love how nice my users are) sometimes you just need to take a break and make
new stuff though.

~~~
brett
I haven't used it, but you might look into this as well:
<http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/index.html>

with mongrel: <http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/mongrel.html>

~~~
zach
I am using swiftiply's evented mongrel + nginx for my site. I am tremendously
happy with it and would be happy to spread the love (and config files). Email
is in my profile.

~~~
socmoth
how many boxes do you have?

~~~
zach
Just one 4-core box.

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rkabir
paul - thanks for answering. I was concerned that an awesome site like
socialmoth had lost its userbase - glad to see my worry was unfounded.

(disclaimer: i totally miss the old school socialmoth.com and the community
without any facebook - but if fb is where it's at, then fb is where it's at. i
was the one who posted a couple times that i was glad you put ads on sm - i
REALLY like the site / concept)

it seems (at first glance) that the facebook app has less comments /
conversations based on posts than the main domain - is this something you've
seen from an aggregate perspective?

otherwise, it seemed (from a user's perspective) that sm had this core set of
users in the beginning - i read about it on techcrunch, etc. and then when the
facebook app came out - all hell broke loose (not to mention "love
inflation"). I'm guessing facebook caused a near-exponential spike in users?

also - props on overhear.us - looking forward to enjoying it as well.

~~~
socmoth
i miss it too. the original crew was hilarious and smart. i'm working towards
more personalization and localization, but it is a couple steps away, and lot
of those steps are scaling, speed, and caching/invalidation.

the fb app has a different feel because of the high volume of posts. it is
almost impossible to refind a post. we have notifications, but just not
enough, and nothing as good as the old socialmoth.com. working towards it
though.

the first week socialmoth on facebook was out, it doubled every 29 hours.

the most common feature request is "negative hearts" whatever that means.

~~~
rkabir
oh i know what negative hearts are... haha

depending on your (my) mood - sometimes there's a post that needs to be
unloved. but i think if you implemented that - most posts would be in the
negative hearts.

unsolicited feature ideas to keep things relevant(knowing that scaling, etc
are way more important):

let me subscribe to people, while still keeping things anonymous. some posts i
really like, etc - that can be used to mix in a higher number of their other
posts with my main consumption (if you're not already doing this).

similarly - let me ignore people. you could have some algorithm-fu to keep
track if i hit ignore on the same person multiple times - for a real ignore,
rather than just a bad post.

i also imagine an overhear.us facebook app is in the works? :)

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palish
Odd, after I posted the exact same question about shoutfit, I saw this. Must
be something in the air..

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rkabir
herdrick: I posted "is the site dead? i made a post yesterday morning and it's
still on the front page." on socialmoth about 12 hours ago - and it's still on
there. I stopped going when the site became too popular - and now - my posts
stay on the frontpage for 12-72 hours... I wondered if the mass of
[contributing] users had left...

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herdrick
The main site is still growing, I think and the Facebook app is really
successful. I'm not sure what you mean.

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rkabir
(not to mention - what can be learned from the flow of the users to / away
from the site over time)

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omouse
I think it's the lack of momentum and hype. Lack of momentum means that they
possibly couldn't decide what else to add. Lack of hype because they don't
seem to have done much marketing or they couldn't get people to spread word
about their site.

