Maybe I'm dense, or just viewing the site at an inopportune time, but even with your description comment, I still don't get it?<p>• You bid to place your given message on the front page for all to see, correct?<p>• And it stays up for 1 minute? Or until the next bid comes in?<p>• By "bid", does that mean someone can pay money and potentially lose out on their message being shown?<p>I think this is interesting, but is almost more of a viral online billboard.
Cabyn is based on three simple principles:
1. No Ads: A lot of issues with current social sites stems from one thing: YOU are the product. It all comes down to getting more users and getting those users to click as much as possible. This leads to more radical content as well as online and offline abuse. There’s also a vast treasure trove of personal data that can be leaked at any moment.<p>To combat this, Cabyn is set up as a service. Users must bid to post a message. The number of messages is limited to one per minute. Because of this Cabyn is self-sustaining and more easily moderated.<p>2. No Tracking: Because bids cost money, we don’t need any personal information. We’re not selling ads, so we don’t need to know every move you make online. We don’t use Google Analytics, or any other invasive tracking. IP addresses are not stored, and we don’t ask for emails. Credit card details are securely stored on Stripe servers, not ours. If there ever were a data breach, the only information would be the messages themselves, which are already displayed on the website.<p>3. No Hate: A lot of social media is used to attack, put people down, and generally not be that nice. We want Cabyn to be a positive place. That’s a big part of why only one message per minute gets posted. A maximum of 1,440 messages a day is infinitely easier to moderate than 8,000 tweets per second, or 15,000+ Facebook actions per second.<p>The other hard thing about moderation is that people will always disagree with what should and shouldn’t be moderated. We want to make Cabyn a friendly place, so the current guide-line is anything PG-13 or lower should be fine. To discourage inappropriate material, inappropriate bids will be charged, but not shown on the site. This adds a significant cost to inappropriate posting with no benefit.<p>We’re looking forward to any questions, comments, thoughts, concerns, etc. Thanks!
People come out with all kinds of wired solutions to the facebook problem. But the most important question to ask is not whether the new solution solves facebook problems. More importantly, you need to ask is there a demand of the new solution. 99.99% of the time, the answer is no. Why would anyone pay to post message when they can post for free in other social networks. It will never go mainstream unless there is a real demand and little friction.
It's an interesting experiment, but I wouldn't call it a "social" network. 1 message a minute wouldn't allow you to build communities or have any reasonable discussions.