Crypto’s latest decentralized social media (DeSo) app, Friend.tech, has been met with intense criticism over a choice to punish users who choose to use forks or copycat variations of its tokenized social media platform.
“To make sure loyal users are rewarded fairly during our beta, users moving to forks and copies will automatically opt out of earning Points and forfeit existing points,” wrote the official good friend.tech X account in an Aug. 28 tweet.
We count on @friendtech clones and different sorts of copies will emerge.
To be sure loyal users are rewarded pretty throughout our beta, users transferring to forks and copies will routinely choose out of incomes Points and forfeit present factors. They can be in a position to use the app usually pic.twitter.com/C1rTEQQr17
— good friend.tech (@friendtech) August 28, 2023
While Friend.tech didn’t make point out to any particular rivals, and variety of X users within the reply pointed to a brand new DeSo or “SocialFi” software referred to as Shares that’s scheduled to go reside to public beta on Aug. 31.
Shares #roadmap for the next week.
We’ll be sharing every day dev logs on Medium about updates. We began constructing the $SHARES platform’s backend a few weeks in the past, and began with our frontend this weekend – thus far, it has been an enormous progress! pic.twitter.com/oLEYMlhIcF
— shares.finance (@SharesFinance) August 21, 2023
Friend.tech has been airdropping “reward points” to its beta testers each week, which is able to whole a distribution of 100 million factors over six months.
The staff has not but shared what the factors can be in the end used for, solely mentioning on Aug. 15 it “will have a special purpose when the app enters official release status.”
We simply did our first Friday Points Airdrop to 44k users.
Some reminders:
– 100M factors can be distributed throughout the six month beta interval
– Airdrops occur on Fridays
– Points are recorded off-chain
– Points could have a particular function as soon as the beta interval ends— good friend.tech (@friendtech) August 18, 2023
Some count on it to translate to tokens to good friend.tech governance, whereas others consider it may have some monetary significance for users. Others believe that due to the seed spherical investment from Paradigm, there’ll seemingly be a good friend.tech native token airdrop sooner or later.
Friend.tech’s announcement didn’t go down nicely with members of the crypto group.
Within the primary hour of the announcement being posted, it attracted a whole lot of unfavourable feedback and reposts that derided the app for its anti-competitive transfer.
“Threatening / penalizing users for trialing other platforms is completely against everything this industry stands for,” wrote pseudonymous dealer CryptoKaleo in response to the announcement.
“This is a prime example of how not to handle competition in Web3 lol — excited to read the apology in a few hours,” said one other.
Following the extreme backlash, good friend.techs’ pseudonymous founder “Racer” walked again the sooner determination in an apology assertion issued from the social media apps official X account on Aug. 29.
Racer backtracked on the transfer, saying that it was a “silly assertion” that was made out of worry of potential competitors for good friend.tech app.
— good friend.tech (@friendtech) August 29, 2023
Related: Friend.tech denies report that database of over 100K users was leaked
The announcement comes lower than three weeks after its public launch of Aug. 11. Meanwhile, Friend.tech has seen a drop in key metrics equivalent to exercise, inflows and quantity over the previous few days.
At the time of publication transactions on Friend.tech have declined greater than 90% from its peak of almost 525,000 transactions on Aug. 21, with lower than 50,000 cumulative transactions on Aug. 28, in accordance to data from Dune Analytics.
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Update (4:05am, Aug. 29): This article has been up to date to embody the apology assertion from Racer.
