jblok

"What does it represent? Does it mean, given the opportunity, I'd lean low, and they'd lean high, in an effort to pull the numbers in a selfish direction? Maybe."

Not maybe. Obviously. Obviously, no matter how close knit the team is, and how well you know everybody, people still love the almighty dollar, and if they can will get more of them for doing the same amount of work. The boss on the other hand, as much as he loves transparency and communication and won't admit to it, also loves the almighty dollar, and subconsciously leant low.

This whole debate centers on the fact that the website is at fault, and that is something everyone has pretty much already decided. The father of the victim has claimed the owners of ask.fm should be charged with murder, which is just ridiculous.

Any website which promotes, glorifies, or encourages bullying should be punished (definitely not with a charge of murder), but it would be fair game for a boycott or loss of advertising revenue. Ask.fm does in fairness provide a fairly easy platform for people to bully you, since it is all anonymous, but then so does any other social media site. The website has a duty to do as much as they can to stop abuse, but then so do the users themselves. No one is forcing you to have an ask.fm profile, or indeed engage with it.

If we look to Lawrence Lessig's four modalities of regulation, up until this point, ask.fm has relied on the social norm of users not making hurtful comments to other users. Advertisers pulling out is a form of regulation by the market, but it will hurt the site, not the offending users, and I believe the site does as much as it can to stop bullying. Removing some of their revenue won't stop the problem unless they shut the whole site down because they run out of money.

Well ideally, you'd buy it because it's something you can't live without, so you'd bring it with you, and leave some extra space in your bag for such things, or jettison something which you deem less valuable.

Agreed. Take as little as possible and if you really feel you need something, you can buy it locally (often for much cheaper). It makes you realise how few things you need in life, and how much crap you end up buying back home.

Bethnal Green isn't exactly a lovely place to live. It's saving grace is it's proximity to central London/Shoreditch, but there's nothing stand-out about it at all. It seems like no one respects it - every day I walk home from the station past at least 1 drunk/crackhead and rubbish all over the street.

Agreed.

I'm from UK and the same is true here. People make friends by doing things together, and spending time together doing similar activities, e.g. working in an office, playing football, going to school/uni together. Finding someone random to be friends with online is just plain wierd. I feel like this kind of 'hook-up' friendship is more acceptable in the US, especially SV.

In British culture we are only just getting over the social stigma of internet dating, and it is starting to become more widespread for people to be proud of meeting their spouses online, but meeting friends online is still a social hurdle, and arguably, less efficient than just turning up to a local football club.

Interesting idea, but it requires quite a major lifestyle change for the user. It is the type of service that takes time for people to adjust to. I wouldn't be surprised if it took you (or a competitor) a couple of years to get a decent amount of regular users.

Everyone, please stop. Seriously, stop. How many more of these things do we need?

"Find people nearby with similar interests", sounded like a semi-decent premise 3 or 4 years ago, but no one did it well enough to reach a critical mass, and nor did the 100 or so clones that followed. I cringe every time I hear about a startup like this now.

People (maybe just me) don't generally make friends in this way. How many times have you honestly been walking down the street and thought, "I must find someone who shares my love of handball as well as Star Wars!" You don't. You go join a handball club, or you find some nerds that are into sci-fi, and maybe there might be an overlap. And if not, who gives a shit - there's much more to liking a person than what their interests are. They might be really unkind or talk about you behind your back. I'd rather not be friends with them in that case, even if they love handball and Star Wars more than they love breathing.

Offering control over your users privacy can not be claimed as a selling point, as I see so often in social media startups. It is a minimum user requirement and in some territories, a legal requirement.

I hate to tell anyone that you can't do something, but I think there are so many more valuable unsolved problems out there.

I like the term "minimum desirable product". Minimum viable product suggests something that barely works, while minimum desirable product alludes to something people actually want.

I think the poster wanted to show the contrast between a series of coordinated attacks across Iraq which have killed many and 2 explosions in Boston killing 3. Both are obviously terrible events, but one got more attention by a factor of at least 1000. It's just good to keep in perspective things that are going on elsewhere in the world.