What I Learned from Creating a High School Social Network

https://medium.com/@jsrmath/what-i-learned-from-creating-a-high-school-social-network-c37fcd0fb4b0#.na6ea4l99

by jsrmath • 11 years ago

132 38 11 years ago

Animats2• 11 years ago

Somebody get this guy a YC appointment. He has the right idea, and needs to scale it up.

blantonl2• 11 years ago

Scaling an anonymous social network targeted to high schoolers... I shudder at the thought of the minefields you would be required to navigate.

* Privacy * Bullying * Under age pornography

Facebook, Instagram, Snapshat etc all struggle with this across their networks.

Something designed for a user base that is almost exclusively under 18.... Shudder.

College students have trouble conducting themselves online in a proper fashion - just look at Yik Yak and the headwinds it is facing.

kedean• 11 years ago

One could avoid privacy issues by not collecting any information outside of email and chats, I would imagine. You don't HAVE to collect lots of user information.

As for porn, why does a social network have to allow embedded images? If it's mainly a chat service, there's no risk. I suppose someone could use your network as transport for links to outside content, but that's pretty unlikely and it's a stretch to say the network is responsible at all. You could also disallow hyperlinking.

Of course, both of those fixes make the system pretty damn hard to monetize, which I think is the biggest issue.

Animats2• 11 years ago

Such negativism. This is YC. Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.[1] Yik Yak has a $400M valuation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZUmAbi0Vm4

nl2• 11 years ago

Minecraft.

The most valuable truths are the ones most people don't believe. They're like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you'll have the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction.

http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html

personjerry• 11 years ago

* Privacy * Bullying * Under age pornography

Although you seem to condemn college students, it seems as though your concerns are all solved by moving the target audience to colleges, because college students are "adult" enough that we don't care about these issues for them for the most part (with respect to laws).

Facebook, Instagram, Snapshat etc all struggle with this across their networks.

Pretty sure they all started by being built on similar user bases, and it's a tremendously appealing audience to start an app with.

rexpop2• 11 years ago

Rad! Throw some sentiment analysis on that corpus and let your classmates know how they feel!

jpochtar• 11 years ago

Where can I join freshStart?

joshmanders• 11 years ago

Enroll in Hunter College High School.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

I made a social network in middle school. Nobody used it, but that taught me how to write terrible PHP applications.

With that same knowledge I made another social network ~2/3 years later for an online community, and it worked better. Eventually I shut it down. In 2012 I revived it and very quickly learned the value of not mixing your business and presentation logic (refactoring the codebase to be maintainable was an absolute chore), and of preventing XSS and XSRF (someone set their avatar to the URL "/logout").

xiaoma• 11 years ago

A lot of people make a lot of money from writing terrible PHP applications that solve a particular business need. Sometimes it's shocking to me to be honest!

e12e2• 11 years ago

A lot of people make a lot of money from writing terrible applications that [some people claim] solve a particular business need. I used to be shocked, now I'm just sad ;-)

See also: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2016/Jan/55 [Full Disclosure: It essentially wins crypto vulnerability bingo! gilfether/phpcrypt]

elorant2• 11 years ago

I guess you've never heard of Sharepoint :)

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

If you were a high school senior and your schoolmates were handing you transcripts of all their juicy gossip on a silver, digital platter, what would you do?

If I was actually handed that info on a silver platter, willingly, then who knows.

But that's not your situation. In your situation, I'd be violating the trust of my entire school. That's neither a good idea ethically nor socially.

Others• 11 years ago

I think you are slightly misrepresenting the author. His sarcastic comment about "bulletproof moral guidelines" seems to indicate that he isn't proud of this particular moral transgression. And while I don't think he was right to read the messages, you have to consider that the people using the service literally had no idea who they were sending messages to. I think that makes it a bit different from reading messages that were intended for one person that the speaker knew well. Not that that excuses the behavior, but I do think it explains some of the rationale. Also, who didn't make stupid immoral decisions in high school?

jsrmath• 11 years ago

This is pretty accurate. tl;dr: What I did wasn't great but it could have been a lot worse (see all the things I made it a point of not doing), and that gives you something to think about when it comes to data and privacy.

rexpop2• 11 years ago

who didn't make stupid immoral decisions in high school?

People running automated social networks, because there were none.

Great power comes cheaper and cheaper, no?

rotw• 11 years ago

You say you're not trying to make excuses, but you literally are making excuses for him. As is he for himself. No matter how curious, it's just not acceptable to run a service to snoop on people. It's a serious ethical transgression, particularly considering you know the people.

Now, if he'd implemented a mechanism to give users keys they could send him should they consent to him reading the log for moderation purposes, he would have been able to do the moderation job and not violate people's privacy. Or made structured data fields that users could consent to make public and also be used for data analysis purposes (like interests, societies, year, etc). But no. He just read their messages. He didn't even have a commercial incentive to analyse data, he just did it out of sheer voyeurism.

atmosx• 11 years ago

For one thing, he and I do not mean the same thing when we say anonymous chat :-) - but for a 18 year old it's impressive.

e12e2• 11 years ago

I wonder if this wouldn't also be illegal? I know the US has terrible regulation of privacy for private entities - but AFAIK plain text email is covered by the assumption of privacy, so listening in/reading it would be considered wire-tapping. I'm also not sure how much of that (if any) someone below 18 is able to legally sign away?

At any rate, an interesting article. It might have been interesting to set up something similar, just bundling an XMPP client and OTR, and having an XMPP-server per school/"cicrle" for pairing (could probably even require school logins for registering on sign-up -- just make sure to throw that information away (beyond possibly keeping age/gender tag).

With the caveat that secure, anonymous communication and "web browser" doesn't really mix -- it could probably be set up as web page/service too (Not sure if eg: Matrix has a web/js-client that does/tries to do client side OTR or equivalent?).

We had IRC, with chat-rooms per town -- as not everyone had Internet in the 90s in Norway. But that did afford some people pseudonymity.

VLM2• 11 years ago

I believe we might be running into cross-cultural issues WRT the linked articles sarcastic description of "transcripts of all their juicy gossip"

When I'm sitting in a bathroom stall I don't ponder the moral and ethical dilemmas of reading or not reading what someone scribbled on the wall. He was not running a cryptographically secure anonymous remailer service here. He was running a virtual bathroom wall to scribble gossip upon.

detaro2• 11 years ago

What percentage of students used it?

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

I accumulated a total of over 500 registered users (out of about 800 9th-12th graders)

detaro2• 11 years ago

ok, apparently I can't read...

Surprisingly high percentage, but I guess in such a relatively large group the negative effect of someone from that group having access to everything isn't as large as it would be in a smaller one. I don't think that would have working in my highschool, at least not without encryption and source code available...

amelius• 11 years ago

#registered users != #active users

Just saying.

VLM2• 11 years ago

Technically its not "out of" because in the linked article:

"Hunter ID number (a number which I could validate but not easily trace to a particular person)"

I'd read that as some minimal formatting and the correct number of digits and you're in.

I suspect there were no small number of school admins, teachers, parents, ex students, middle/grade school students, outright adult pedos, etc.

More like 500 registered users out of a billion internet users.

refrigerator• 11 years ago

Great read! Really well written too. Kudos to you for being so open about everything - I can't imagine many high schoolers would have written with as much candour as you did in the "You ≠ your app" section.

What I Learned from Creating a High School Social Network

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