A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
fortune.comAre softbank actually the biggest idiots in VC? It almost seems like everything they invest in is a handshake deal built on "just trust me bro" numbers.
I have brought this up in another comment, but my experience in the VC world is that it operates too heavily based on 4 types of "trust":
In many cases, this trust makes perfect sense. But it seems that in more than a handful of high profile cases, these types of investments based on trust has superseded basic due diligence, skepticism, and common sense.1) Institutional trust (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, "ex-FAANG", "ex-McKinsey", etc.), 2) Social trust (someone you know that has already established one of the three other kinds of trust), 3) Serial trust ("3-exits", "former CEO/CTO/VP of..."), and 4) Transitive trust ("Sequoia invested in X; I trust Sequoia; therefore, I should invest in X")I've always had this background thought that it would be a fun job to do "due diligence" on behalf of VCs. I remember being on the receiving end of some of that work, and I wasn't all that impressed.
Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
I think the issue is in the last few years hot startups would just say sorry we are going with another firm. There was so much money flying around it was similar to home buyers buying houses with all cash offers and waiving inspections.
Another positive of the free money era on pause.
ZIRP is the technical term
VCs don't invest their own money. VCs are paid a percentage of the money they invest in startups. As a result VCs only care about the quality of the investment they make insofar it helps them raise more money in the future. Because more money = more fees.
VCs care about technology sometimes, but not always. If a startup doesn't grow because their tech is bad that's something VCs care a lot about. If a startup grows fast with snake oil tech (e.g. crypto, theranos, wework) VCs will happily throw more money at them.
My understanding is that VCs with healthcare experience didn't invest in Theranos. Holmes' family was well connected, and they invested in a family friend.
This is not true. VC general partners do invest their own money.
Yeah,like sub-5% of the fund size.
> Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
Because they're worried they'll miss the boat. Maybe less true in these not-quite-so-booming economic times but not so long ago VCs were literally competing to get in on rounds of funding for hyped up startups. The fact that the hype often never amounted to anything didn't seem to matter, if so-and-so was investing then you wanted to be in on that too or you'll look bad.
VCs have technical people they go to for advice. I have served in such a capacity a number of times. Good to trade in favors.
Technical due dilligence isnt that important.
The first thing is that the product has to scale, be popular, then maybe make money. You can always hire people who will rewrite.
The opposite doesnt work. Technically brilliant product might be unpopular or unknown.
Please note: I dont say that things should be built poorly.
> Technical due dilligence isnt that important.
I suspect some Theranos and uBeam investors disagree with you
Very much depends on the market. A marketplace app establishing a great user base? What will the intrusive technical due diligence get you?
Very much depends on the stage. At Idea Stage or Prototype what are you looking at exactly?
Series C biotech though…
In many cases, there's a fine line between "technical" DD and just "DD".
Case in point is the JPMC acquisition of Frank and Frank's CEO Charlie Javice.
Turns out all of the user numbers were made up. A technical DD would have easily surfaced this even though the user numbers and volume is business related.
For the enterprise saas business we built, vc duedil was talking to customers, both directly via our introductions and backchanneled via their network.
For the technical aspects, our vcs didn't / don't care. That's our job to figure out, and if we don't, they fire founders.
I'm honestly not sure how you would seriously audit chat app numbers, and I suspect and hope Abraham Shafi is going to prison. For most businesses, if you have to seriously audit things like that, you probably shouldn't be investing. A company inflating their numbers by 20x will be pretty hard to detect, and our safeguard as an industry is that's fraud, and people go to prison for committing fraud.
It's not that hard.
Just some heuristics I'd use off the top of my head. I've had to do some technical DD in the past and there are always ways of determining legitimacy of claims.- Look at the application logs - Look at the emails and reach out to a sub-sample of them to determine if they are real users - Look at the network traffic/volume numbers - Look at the architecture to see if it could actually support that volume - Look at the pattern of content in a random sampling to see if it's just "Lorem Ipsum" or actual, real contentThe consequence of not doing even basic DD are outcomes like the $174m fraud that JPMC eventually discovered: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/5/23671000/jpmorgan-frank-fr...
They do but it’s a matter of time constraints. Pace. Deal flow. Take too long to scrutinise a good thing and it’ll be snapped up from under you. The group that poached might have even less time to do proper due diligence. VCs tap expertise for due diligence in all sorts of mostly-informal ways. But for proper, compensated investigations there’s almost never enough time to build a case you’d stake your reputation on
Tiger Global and SoftBank made tons of money by doing zero due diligence in 2020. It inexplicably became a phenomenon
Same here, I had some of the most fun checking out potential investors in my last company. I'd certainly enjoy also checking Startups, but really just any sort of tech-related due-diligence would be awesome.
Now, how to make a business out of that?
> 3) Serial trust ("3-exits", "former CEO/CTO/VP of..."), and
Serial trust is especially interesting for me.
Someone could have founded 3 companies that weren't good investments (possibly all lost money), and VCs will throw money at that person before they try someone new.
Transitive trust is also interesting. The majority of "rockstar VCs" made one good investment. Not really possible to rule out luck... And the majority of the people there now had nothing to due with that decision way back when.
Serial trust is definitely an interesting one.
I've been acquainted with a CEO/founder who -- for all intents and purposes -- was just not that bright but he came from a fairly well off family and his LinkedIn tagline proudly had "3-time exit" even though those exits didn't yield any significant (if any) financial gain for him personally.
100% this. Ranked in order, it would be: #3, #2, #1, and #4.
- #3 is king. If you have a track record, trust comes quickly.
- #2 is probably how 80% of investors invest.
- #1 is when an investor takes a bet on an unproven entity (i.e. precursor to #3)
- #4 is a bad investor, most likely a lemming. do not give them any power. they are dumb money with an investment strategy of "playing with the house"
Hi Charlie!
You could be onto something here... what you have enumerated seem to be examples of various forms of "Social Proof" (for lack of a better way of saying/defining it).
It would be interesting, highly interesting, I think, to try and enumerate all of the possible forms of Social Proof.
You've definitely nailed 4 of them -- but are there others? What if we broaden our search outside of the VC world?
Whatever the case, whether we call this "Social Proof", "Trust as it manifests in the world of VC", or some other name/nomenclature -- I think you're definitely onto something here...
It's sort of like what you've said could be the summary/abstract of a Ph.D. paper. That is, I think there's some more knowledge to be gained by exploring this set of ideas further, perhaps in writing, perhaps in blog article, I don't know...
But I do know that you're definitely on to something...
I would love to see more exploration of what you've just said...
There's definitely something there...
Actually, when I think about it some more -- perhaps the broader topic area here is not necessarily that about "trust" or "social proofs" -- maybe it's about "Credibility" -- what causes a person or organization or business or business idea -- to have credibility (or apparent credibility as some cases may be) -- especially when large amounts of money, large financial transactions, large investments -- are at stake?
Well, I don't know... but again, I reiterate that I think you're on to something with your observations...
“ I think you're on to something with your observations...”
The parent described 4 of the common heuristics of how we develop trust.
I work in cybersecurity, so I tend to mentally put a “how could these heuristics be abused to get a well intentioned employee/customer to misplace their trust in a scammer?” scenario.
When it comes to society, I have been trying to empathize with those poor souls who fell for QAnon, Stop the Steal, Flat Eartherism, and dozens of other farcical claims that millions of people have adopted, despite some of those people being extremely bright.
Your parent is not really “onto something”; they are just enumerating a few heuristics that marketers, salespeople, people of influence, scammers/conmen have known for millennia.
So, you're telling me that there are no "Old Boy" networks in existence?
And you're telling me that these networks don't exist because people went to the same school or worked for the same company?
?
???
Also -- everyone knows that Stop the Steal was instigated by QAnon supporters while engaging in Flat Eartherism. A bunch of cybersecurity specialists played a role too, while simultaneously being supported by some of the brightest and dumbest minds out there -- or at least CNN tells me so. They also told me that there are no agenda driven AI chatbots on Hacker News.
I've been trying to empathize with all of them -- that whole group -- and all of the millions, if not tens of millions of people who fell for all of it (including but not limited to scammers, conmen, fake AI bots, people of influence, marketers, fake AI bots, salespeople, and people of influence (did I mention fake AI bots?))... but I've been trying to sympathize with them -- all of them...
In conclusion, I must quote to you my favorite line from "Billy Madison":
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Your comment, on the other hand, was pretty intelligent...
Do you treat other people as NPCs in real life, as well?
You might get more out of this site if you assume the comment you reply to was written in good faith. It’s such a good idea that the HN maintainers put it in the site rules.
>Do you treat other people as NPCs in real life, as well?
Distract, distract, distract...
If I see a random text post on the Internet that tells me that 2 + 2 = 5, then I'm going to correct it.
Only an AI powered chatbot would use such terms as 'NPC' the way you did. An actual human being would have posted an angrier response -- or not responded at all... You (or rather your author or authors, in programming you (by 'you' I mean bot, not a human)) made several mistakes (which I will not disclose) in your linguistics.
Here are (all) of your past comments on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thephyber
Note that about 85% of these comments are on highly political articles, and express very definite opinions. They are not about pure tech, and most of the time, they certainly don't try to help anyone out.
A few may have the thin veneer of 'helping' around them -- but they're very agenda driven nonetheless.
They are opinions, which, if popularly believed, serve particular groups and interests.
In other words, they are very definitely biased.
>Do you treat other people as NPCs in real life, as well?
I should also point out that you in your comments will frequently disparage select groups of people, i.e. "QAnon", "Stop the Steal", "Flat Earthers", etc. -- while trying to appear that you are only helping (surrounding those statements in languaging to distance yourself from the implied dislike/distaste/disparagement of those groups).
This shows your agenda, and this shows your hypocrisy.
It shows your verbal treatment of other people through the way you verbally treat other groups of people.
Which shows your hypocrisy.
Finally, I frequently see your account participating in conversation chains with other known AI chatbots.
That's not a 100% proof that you're a bot -- but it is a serious red flag.
Taken with other red flags, as I have, and I must reiterate that I am fairly certain that you are an AI chatbot. And an agenda-driven one at that...
>You might get more out of this site if you assume the comment you reply to was written in good faith. It’s such a good idea that the HN maintainers put it in the site rules.
Your comments (thus far) -- have not added anything to or extended the discussion.
Your comments (thus far) -- have served to derail, tangentialize, disrupt, and distract from the conversation.
I challenge you to tell me that you're not an AI.
Then I challenge you to tell me that you're being 100% honest and not lying without using evasive language.
Then I challenge you to prove your statement.
If I am wrong, then you will have my most sincere apology...
But based on what I have seen thus far, I think I am right...
Non-native English speaker here. What does "serial" mean in this context? Is it referring to a linear record of achievements/prior employment?
Yes, it's referring specific to a "large quantity" aspect of it. If you achieve some X, and then achieve X again, and again, people will trust you to achieve X again.
Of course, that leads to people faking past successful startups. There are plenty of successful serial entrepreneurs out there that sold stuff for pennies to their family or something like that.
Someone that has failed has learned valuable lessons on someone else’s dime. That can be more valuable that someone that got lucky to get success.
Unless they figured out how to get lucky, then definitely follow the leprechaun…
Sequential/ordered. One after another.
Notably, relating to a series of events. Serial.
Serial trust like in serial killer.
Having recently completed fundraising for a pre-seed, it's wild to me that I had VCs spending multiple weeks sometimes on "due diligence" for an idea-stage product, yet there are many examples of just yolo huge investments. It's who you know or what hype is around you in these cases I suppose.
You may find this interesting: http://paulgraham.com/herd.html
A company in pre-seed phase has no history, so some of the other indicators of promise/trust don’t yet exist. It makes more sense for the first investor in a new company to spend some time to investigate the founders and/or the idea or market.
That, however, doesn’t mean that later or faster investment rounds are any more informed.
Softbank had a strategy of deploying a lot of capital very quickly. That is, taking many more bets than traditional “high conviction” VCs. High transaction costs (including time to close) as a consequence of deep diligence would have broken this model.
It doesn’t look like this strategy worked out well for them.
LOL I personally know an asshat VP at SoftBank — "just trust me bruh" !
In early 2017, while being ousted from another banking system, he advised me to invest in a Retail Mall Holdings company, instead of Bitcoin (because the latter is "idiotic").
I did NOT take his advice. See CBL's returns verse BTC's.
Wow, 0HQK has a very interesting chart. I wonder what happened in November 2021.
Not really...the real idiots are Saudis for giving SoftBank more money to play with. Still, so far it doesn't look like oil revenues are going down.
Not just SoftBank. Founders Fund too.
Founders Fund offloads it onto the next guy though. And very well too (looking at you, StemCentrx and AbbVie).
someone sure is
>Masayoshi Son. He had for many years the distinction of being the person who had lost the most money in history (more than $59bn[38] during the dot com crash of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares plummeted),[39] a feat surpassed by Elon Musk[40][41][42] in the following decades.
> “Oh, man, the number of times I’ve been asked why my company isn’t growing as fast as X and then found out X was a fraud all along.”
This, in sports, finance, startups - everywhere. Dirty players skew the dynamics of any system leading to worse outcomes for those that choose to remain honest.
We need the supposed ‘smartest guys in the room’ to be less dumb and do due diligence and we need strong consequences for founders that misstate their company’s position.
> We need the supposed ‘smartest guys in the room’ to be less dumb
Indeed. Many don't quite understand technology, and investors are no exception.
There are smart ones, but those not necessarily make good investments -- they may simply look for good future exits and leave the bomb on the laps of the next suckers.
Welcome to wealth inequality consequences #356433
Reddit famously started with a lot of fake users. I think the founders mentioned it in an interview. Even the Swedish guy from the show Succession was inflating his numbers. And those attributed clicks from Facebook (especially fb) and Google, better not to look too close.
Reddit is a little different as their intention was to populate the platform with content in the early days [1], not to mislead investors with fake metrics.
Mind you that Huffman and Ohanian did this manually, while founders today can use LLMs to fill their platforms with bots that can interact "naturally" with users. I wonder how many are already doing it.
I have no real proof, but based on the volume of replies/likes I get on throwaway comments, I strongly believe TikTok does this.
How far has Reddit come from "no censoring" (3:39).
Thanks for the spoiler. :(
Sorry. It is not important at all for the plot, no worries.
No worries! Half joking as I literally just started the show a day or two ago and am loving it and even had it on in the background while I read your comment.
Happens in the show Silicon Valley too.
I interviewed there a couple years back and a lot of things seemed really fishy. They did not give answers to a lot of my questions. So my spidey sense was right!
Everyone on and around social media wants new and better forms of social media.
I think the average person thinks social media is the drizzling shits but if they have to use it, they'll just stick to the large platforms.
I think some users certainly act as you describe, but I suspect the majority of users will follow the early adopters after they identify and popularize a better mousetrap.
The history of social media platforms suggests to me that users are fickle and have no strong connection to any platform. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook each had their moment and then most users either left the platform or spend more time on other platforms.
We are in an interesting phase where lots of different new platforms are experimenting with differentiation strategies. There is a whole ecosystem of “political right” social media (Truth Social, Gab, Parlor, Rumbl, etc). The federated social media platforms are selling the “you won’t lose access to everything due to moderation/banning” niche. I’m sure there are Web3 (the blockchain one) social media platforms, but I can’t be bothered to look into their details.
I always felt like the big switch from myspace to facebook came because facebook had a lot of games and apps that you could play and use on the platform. ironically, because facebook took such a big cut, all those apps have gone away.
for facebook to be displaced, an app has to offer something else facebook isn't offering, and most new apps offer less - going for the simpler approach. I think that's a loosing strategy myself. I remember how long I used msn messenger just because it had the email tied into it at the time. You need to offer more, not less.
That's easy. Everyone on about computers as a thing wants newer and better computers. The average person thinks computers are crappy and stick to the large platforms if they have to use them.
s/computers/furniture/, or kitchen ware (cooking), or any other daily thing that some people have significantly above-average interest in.
This also goes for software: word processors, machine learning frameworks, browsers.
I guess this is the way to get rich quick now. Imagine a company with millions of fake users all created by a LLM app.
More companies than we know use this as a tactic. Even though many apps have millions of users, many of them create an account and then never log in again. The companies also provide promotional incentives to employees that run accounts to post and make sites look livelier and more communal than they truly are.
App trustworthiness is at an all time low if you ask me. It's like each store you walk in to is a scam operation out to get money for returning the littlest amount of value back. There is no more organic or honest growth, even users on platforms are faking their statistics too... This entire ecosystem will eventually end up eating itself in my opinion.
Hey, Reddit was all fake users at the start, making people think it was active and persuading them to join.
YouTube famously spent many of their first years turning a blind eye to blatant copyright infringement.
Shady “growth hacking” is more the norm than not for many of these early stage social companies that have chicken/egg Metcalfe’s Law issues for user adoption.
YouTube had to have an informal deal worked something out with the studios. Circa 2004, the internet was awash in streaming video sites with copyrighted Family Guy and Futurama clips, which were often taken down. Then boom, one day those sites themselves go offline, and that content all moves to Youtube, where it stays up.
You remember the timeline very differently than I do. Dailymotion, just to give one example, was full of such content until at least 2010.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
May I introduce https://chirper.ai
Please submit it again, as its own post, using "Show HN" -- this deserves more eyeballs!
Personally, I found it striking how similar this looks to the other doomscrolling sites (sure, it's only superficial, but if you don't "dig" you might not catch that it's all simulated).
Please go ahead; it isn't my site.
Oh boy, it's here. So soon...
Already happening to some extent
Yep, cue the "free market" folks celebrating poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers investing to try to fight inflation enough to send their kids to college.
Inflation caused by the central bank that gives free money to the rich and makes classic investments in a safety account pay less than inflation.
Double whammy of screwing poor people with monetary policy.
Why should you putting your money in a savings account ensure that you are protected from inflation? The whole point of an economy is for money to move and be invested, not hoarded by a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold coins.
Under fractional reserve banking, savings account deposits are lent out, which hopefully does result in productive investment
As I understand it, western retail banks that take deposits are fractional reserve banks, and have to be if they pay interest on deposits; after all, banks don't generate revenue from just looking after your money (unless they charge you for it, perhaps in the form of a negative interest rate)
They are indeed lent out, but mostly in very safe, boring investments, that don't really generate economic activity (mortgages). This is by design, as we generally don't want banks going pear-shaped, and taking people's savings with them!
If your money is used to generate meaningful economic activity, that means you're investing it into something like stocks (Which anyone can do by opening a Schwab, or a Vanguard, or a whomever account) - which will beat inflation, but on the short-and-medium term, are not a safe investment.
You're substantially right, of course, but to play devil's advocate:
1) the negative real central bank interest rates are a recent anomaly in my country, and above-inflation deposit interest was easy to find before that
2) mortgage lending should indirectly generate meaningful economic activity, in the form of building construction and maintenance
3) buying stocks on the secondary market also only indirectly generates meaningful economic activity - all it does directly is take stocks out of the seller's hands, replacing it with cash - presumably, this causes a chain of trades that lead to the primary market (or possibly to a mortgage)
"In the good times" when dollar was backed by gold, bankers would borrow at 3%, lend at 6% and go to a golf course at 3 o'clock.
The economy is working incorrectly - due to central banks.
Being punished for saving is just insane.
There were major banking panics in the US in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1899, 1901, 1907 & 1908. All while the US was on a hard gold standard with weak central banks.
That’s of course without considering any of the pre and during depression era panics, where there was a quasi gold standard.
Savings can either be punished by inflation or risk. That’s an immutable financial fact. The only time you aren’t being punished for savings is if you exist in an economy where money can’t be put to productive use and is thus deflationary. Sometimes that’s good for savers but generally it means you are experiencing bad stagnation more broadly in the economy.
> Being punished for saving is just insane.
The economy is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone saved, we'd all be worse off.
As such, it makes sense to punish defectors.
Doesn't that depend on what you mean by "if everyone saved"? If everyone saved to the exclusion of entrepreneurial activity, we would indeed all be worse off. However, we'd all be just as badly off if everyone bought stocks to that extent.
On the other hand, if everyone saved instead of buying stocks, wouldn't banks and entrepreneurs have a common interest in making loans replace stocks in funding entrepreneurial activity?
Central banks already "play" on the market. They arent neutral.
So maybe they could stop their inflation policies which screw the little people.
I am not writing about socialism. I am writing that central banks should stop the policies that rob the poor and give money to the rich.
Yes, there were crisises in the past. There are crisises now. And there will be crisises in the future. But in the past, at least the interest rates on savings beat inflation, so common people could build a safety net. Now you are punished for saving. You can play the stocl market casino (which btw. is connected to price of money from central bank...).
Is the central bank for average people, or another corrupted institution made to make the rich even richer?
> poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers
Who is doing this?
Chamath Palihapitiya every time he goes on CNBC to play investment guru while pumping some SPAC abomination that's about to go public.
I remember this being a significant plot point in "Silicon Valley". I suppose life imitates art imitating life.
It even happened before with an app called Frank, where JP Morgan fell for it: https://news.yahoo.com/jpmorgan-claims-scammed-student-loan-...
That didn't go well for anyone involved.
Succession, too!
How are messaging apps still getting these valuations when Telegram, signal, Whatsapp and lime chat exist?
They all want to be the WeChat of the rest of the world. They want a platform that people live inside and all other companies just become apps inside their store (where they collect a tax of course).
None of the mentioned apps have managed to do this. Maybe that is because there is no consumer interest, but it doesn't make the goal any less appealing.
They all seem to be missing the part where WeChat played out this way because the Chinese government mandated it, not because people have an inherent desire to do everything in a single "app". WeChat is an island of Chinese-controlled services and content within a sea of Western-run mobile platforms.
There's also the argument that Apple would never approve such a "super app" in their walled garden because it could usurp their position.
Only one of those doesn't require your phone number.
It'll be nice when we get to the point where we can have a proper working chat app that doesn't require one. Hangouts used to be great but Google has to always make sure their chat doesn't work.
Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
You can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.
It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers.
A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
People shouldn’t be expected to give up their privacy and anonymity and put themselves at greater risk of identity theft because big tech can’t be bothered figuring out a different way to solve spam.
Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.
I think you're misplacing your annoyance here. A lot of the world is not constantly affected by Sim swapping. Your phone number is not a secret either. The problem is the minimal verification that allows sim swapping to exist in the first place.
These companies don't expect you to give up privacy and anonymity. They expect you to pay $1 to rent a phone number. To these companies, a phone number is an externalized reusable proof-of-stake in the PSTN NFT market — nothing more, nothing less.
Unless you have beef with a state sponsored actor, you’re safe with Signal. Possibly even then
If you have beef with a state sponsored actor I’m not really sure what you’re doing on HN. The Taliban uses WhatsApp lmao
> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers
Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.
And spoiler: you can’t use those for spam.
Huh?
There is a ToS in these services as well.
And you can't use many from those services to actually register an account for a meaningful service. E.g. have you created Instagram account with them?
Seems like there is a determined will to blacklist as many as possible.
I believe you're thinking phone numbers from legitimate VoIP services like Twilio, or the "texting app" service-providers that build on top of them.
The GP is talking more about phone numbers from purpose-built (usually Russian) "secondary market for other people's credentials" marketplaces, where people sell the use of their own personal phone numbers (usually through cloud remote-control software they run on an old Android device with the SIM in it.)
No there is not.
5sim.net, sms-activate.org, smspva.com, I'm talking about these, they're specifically made for that purpose, you can pick a country and a service
It starts from 4 cents per number. If my bot isn't going to make that 4 cent within its first few hours I am in the wrong business.
There are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number.
Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.
Google talk worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Hangouts which worked less great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo.
The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.
A given practice does not need to be 100% effective in order to provide value. Simply imposing a financial barrier of any kind is often enough to reduce malicious activity by a considerable degree.
It's not perfect. I've gotten accounts suspended from phone verification services. I don't want to share numbers with spammers and drug dealers for this reason.
I can pick up PAYG Sims for verifying for essentially nothing (I think the cheapest I've seen here is 10p).
A phone number proves, and stops nothing.
If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.
But you can’t automate that trivially
If I wanted to automate I would use a bulk VoIP service.
You are focussing on the wrong point, I only mentioned that because I could get on these services with a disposable number.
From a technical standpoint it's trivial to identify and block voip services.
Phone verification isn't designed to stop spam, it's designed to make it prohibitively expensive to scale spamming, and it seems pretty good at that. If you want to get around phone verification in a quick one-off fashion, yes it's going to be really easy. But there's no way to automate that one-off end run at scale without a lot of money and/or a lot of people. That's the whole point.
It's trivial to identify and block VoIP prefix allocations. That's different from identifying/blocking VoIP services, which — especially in the case of blackhat services — can operate entirely by buying and porting one-off numbers from residential cellular ISPs.
So if you are so well versed in the matter, what’s keeping you from starting a chat service that doesn’t require phone numbers?
Apparently people are willing to invest a lot of money, that could be yours!
It just rises the upfront costs, but if the revenue exceeds these a thousand times...
Entry fee and extra cash required for posting when the user is flagged. Can't make it without moderators, but it's phone independent.
Charge a fee
My phone number itself gets a lot of spam.
The economy is detached from reality
this was also 2 years ago, at the peak of the madness. These days it's far less likely to get that kind of money.
Why is it always Softbank getting scammed?
Anybody who has seen a Masayoshi-son presentation and then gives SoftBank capital to invest deserves whatever loss they take.
https://www.businessinsider.com/13-slides-softbanks-vision-f...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/golden-geese-unicorns-inside-...
i don't understand how a presentation like this (and by extension, the company) can somehow accrue nearly 70 billion in market cap. perhaps it is so genius i cannot even comprehend.
Perhaps. Or perhaps nobody wants to admit publicly that they don’t get it either, and don’t want to miss all that sweet, sweet, alpha that gets generated when SoftBank figures out how to enable telepathic communication.
There may also be a fair amount of The Common Knowledge Game[0] going on.
0 - https://www.epsilontheory.com/harvey-weinstein-common-knowle...
Lack of due diligence?
> Two years ago, a messaging app startup called IRL reached a $1.2 billion valuation
> Earlier this year, a former employee alleged that IRL—the name stands for “in real life”— had fired him after he voiced concerns that many users were bots
It's hilarious that "In Real Life" was 95% bots.
The name of the App is IRL.
It boasts of 10M+ downloads in Google Play
>funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Oh dear. I wonder if there will be a Fund 3
What was the remaining 5% real users?
The employees, investors and friends and family off?
5% is 1m users. IRL was advertised on UFC PPV.
There are some people on it just not enough to warrant that valuation.
Fake it till you make it, right?