The Friend.tech platform is currently causing significant commotion due to its recent position on users engaging with copycat applications. The conflict stems from penalizing users who adopt copied versions or forks of their token-based social media network.
On August 28, the “friend.tech X” account tweeted that users transitioning to forks or copies would lose eligibility for earning Points. The aim was to maintain fairness for their dedicated beta users. Friend.tech refrained from explicitly naming competitors; however, several users indicated an upcoming DeSo application, Shares, set for public beta on August 31.
Friend.tech’s Community Reaction Regarding Copycat Applications
During beta, Friend.tech has been weekly rewarding testers with “reward points,” totaling 100 million over six months. The exact purpose of these points hasn’t been revealed by the team. They provided a hint on August 15, mentioning that the points would serve a “special purpose” upon the app’s official release.
Speculation varies from points becoming governance tokens for friend.tech to having financial value for users. Some are even anticipating an airdrop of a native friend.tech token in the future, given the seed round investment from Paradigm.
Unsurprisingly, Friend.tech’s pronouncement was met with widespread disapproval from the cryptocurrency community. After the announcement, negative comments and reposts quickly emerged, criticizing the platform’s anti-competitive stance.
Community Response and Platform Impact
A pseudonymous trader, CryptoKaleo, expressed dissatisfaction, asserting, “Penalizing or intimidating users who try other platforms contradicts the industry’s ethos.” Another person noted, “This situation showcases how not to handle competition in the Web3 domain. I anticipate an apology soon.”
Reacting to the intense criticism, the pseudonymous founder of friend.tech, identified as “Racer,” withdrew the initial statement and issued an apology via the platform’s official X account on August 29. Racer acknowledged the mistake, attributing the ill-advised decision to concerns regarding potential competition.
This incident occurred less than three weeks after Friend.tech’s public launch on August 11. Consequently, the platform has seen a dip in essential metrics like user activity, user influx, and transaction volume recently.
At the time of this publication, transactions on Friend.tech have dropped over 90% from their peak, which was almost 525,000 transactions on August 21. Cumulative transactions on August 28 were less than 50,000, as per data obtained from Dune Analytics.
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