Hey there Product Hunt!
I’m one of the builders at October. Super excited to have you on!
We’re a social network built by experienced economists, security researchers and mathematicians. Our goal is to create 1) a safe environment for good discussion, and 2) a place that increases in quality as more people join.
Our name “October” comes from our approach to solving the “Eternal September Problem”, that is the problem of social networks getting worse as more people join.
We’ll be addressing this issue as we grow by splitting channels (think subreddits) and reorganizing who follows who based on voting behavior. We’ve got pretty cool mathematical models for this.
Till we’re big enough to face these issues we’re offering a very visual design language, a coin system to encourage good behavior, and pseudonymous posts to allow for honest discussion.
Give it a try and Let me know if you have anymore questions or comments!
@paulsbohm Fantastic app, it's a time for an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, excellent work Paul and October team! Can't wait to see what's next.
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@paulsbohm Is privacy of users a concern for October? How do you secure user data? Are there plans to make the social network accessible from the desktop.
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@paulsbohm Nice one Paul! Stoked to see what you have been working on. All I see are good things.
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@paulsbohm any plans for the iOS plans to be available on international stores, it feels like an app that I would not be using often on desktop as I would on mobile
I've been beta testing October for some months now. A lot of people are nervous about anonymous/pseudonymous social networks as abuse and harassment often become serious issues, but the underlying motivation of October (and others like it) are notable – to create a place where people can share their thoughts honestly without risk of losing their job or even worse, being put in prison in some areas of the world.
@paulsbohm, once you hit massive scale, the above will be incredibly challenging. How are you planning to scale October while avoiding turning into another Secret?
@rrhoover Hey! So glad to have you as an early user Ryan! I think there's a lot of room for playing with different social network dynamics still, including making it easier for people to play with identity.
The big problem anonymous sites get is abuse, and the problem everyone deals with is groupthink. E.g. subreddits and speciality sites get more groupthink as they get bigger.
We think the solution to both is figuring out who sees what. We're learning from the voting behavior of users, and can learn who should see what from that. This means that people who troll too much do see consequences. They might see other people who enjoy troll posts.. but their targets will not see them.
This also helps with political polarization in that everyone sees content that they might not agree with (and thus expands their horizon), but not necessarily stuff that they are completely opposed to (which would just lead to super tribal highly polarized fights).
So we think the key is in managing attention well and building an economy around it, that allows users to help us curate at scale.
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The early community on this platform reminds me a lot of the early community of Google+ ... vibrant, intelligent conversation, with lots of clever humour. UI is simple in a pleasing way. Here's hoping October will fare better that G+ in the long run 😄
@dorota_parad Did you have any more questions? Had a chance to try it?
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@paulsbohm I didn't try it, as I still don't know what it is and how it would be useful. I value my time 😉 I'm probably not your target audience though.
Where can I find information about your company? What about privacy? You mention "security researchers", do you support end-to-end encryption? Are you funded by VC? Any plans to make your app funded by your own users?
EDIT: I just realized it's more focused on public conversation, so encryption is probably not as relevant, are all posts/conversations public? In which way did security researchers contribute to the project?
@teapot
I have a computer security background (specializing on exploit design and banking security), so I know from experience how hard of a problem the security of our platform is. We have hardened security on the platform, but there are ways in which we can still improve. Security isn't a feature that's ever done, so this will be an ongoing process that never stops for us.
Our most important data is the identity of our anonymous posters, and we're protecting these identities as securely as we can.
We will automatically unlink identities from posts after a few months, so that after this period we won't be able to recover the identities ourselves anymore.
It's important to point out here that we are not good for whistleblowers: We have to comply with law enforcement subpoenas, and we'll know people's anonymous identities for up to a year and have to hand those over if our lawyers can't fight the subpoenas off.
We're VC and angel funded and we will continue to require money to sustain ourselves until we get our economy working. I do think there will be potential for the users to own part of October, and we have negotiated a lot of control with our investors to be able to do things like that in the future.
Thanks for giving us a try! Your feedback is super welcome
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Very interesting, and goodness I hope you can save us all. 😉
So what's the revenue model here? What's the product? Cuz if it's me, I fear a repeat of futures past.
@cozysd We're building an attention economy where coins flow between content producers, hunters, curators, moderators and admins, and consumers, and we'll take a cut of that. It's an alternate model to advertising.
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We are in the midst of some very contentious times, politically and socially. I like that October allows for frank conversations in an anonymous way. I also like that I get tokens, even when I’m posting anonymously. The layout is clean and intuitive. Even though it’s a new site, my posts get interaction from the growing community. I highly recommend.
Pros:
The ability to post content under an Anonomysous handle and have controversial discussions that I may not be apt to have otherwise.
Cons:
Like any new site there are some bugs here and there but the dev team is quick to respond and remedy.
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True! I like that you can post anonymously! Also the invite button is a good idea! Might borrow that idea for my platform, ElfShare ;) :D
October
Crumbs App
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October
We are in the midst of some very contentious times, politically and socially. I like that October allows for frank conversations in an anonymous way. I also like that I get tokens, even when I’m posting anonymously. The layout is clean and intuitive. Even though it’s a new site, my posts get interaction from the growing community. I highly recommend.
Pros:The ability to post content under an Anonomysous handle and have controversial discussions that I may not be apt to have otherwise.
Cons:Like any new site there are some bugs here and there but the dev team is quick to respond and remedy.