Their revenue is 100 MM/year. [1]
You may not (like me) like their pivot then, or business focus, but they do run a successful business.
I think there is a _lot_ to be done in the field. As with anything these days it would most likely require a large effort with sizable investment, but I think it's an area that's grossly overlooked.
Making the coins utterly useless irritates me, though, and I'm kind of surprised they dropped the whole notion of partnering with businesses to offer specials to regular customers they had in the pre-Swarm days. While I presume they pivoted into selling location data because the partnerships just didn't make them enough money, I'd hope the partnerships weren't losing them money, and I think they really drove usage.
This is kinda the deep down reason I still use it. I sort of passively compete with the friends that use it, especially when I'm traveling, since I get to check into a ton of new stuff. The list of friends that use it is _very_ static. It's been the same group for _years_ now, w/o a single new person (and I don't think anyone's dropped). We're not close friends either. All in all, it's a fascinating experience in that regard.
A dozen or so members of my family use Swarm just as a casual "look where I am"/"look what I'm eating" thing, but I just cannot fathom what they were thinking with the evolution of the coins thing. Currently, the only thing you can do with coins is buy multipliers that... get you more coins? Wait, what's the point again?
I've had the same thought. I'm a software engineer in my 30s and I still use it religiously. I have a few friends who still use it, too. They are a high school teacher in his 30s, a project manager in her 30s, an attorney in her 40s, and an audio engineer in his 30s.
This, exactly this, is one of the reasons I founded VC3 (https://vc3.club). If you're interested in discussing these topics in a purely intellectual way, we would love to have you join us.
I did submit an application but I'm confused now. Did you found VC3 to discuss how to build fun and profitable social media sites or is VC3 the fun and profitable social media site. Because it says on the site that it's free and not for profit?
The community on HN is awesome for getting really nitpicky, but the audience for discussing these sorts of problems is only a small slice of the larger HN audience. I started VC3 as a community formed around a specific purpose (discussing "building meaningful community") specifically to try to build more engaging and valuable discussion, and I personally think that a smaller, closed forum of enthusiastic individuals is a better way to do that than a public general-topic forum.
There's a question in our FAQ [0] that goes into this in even more detail. Look for the header "Why is VC3 its own site?"
I think Twitter gets pretty close. Sure they have ads (which are unobtrusive for the most part), a bot problem, a bullying problem, an anachronism problem - but that doesn't change the fact that an average user always finds some fun and interesting content on their feed if they're following a curated list of people.
I'm impressed they've been able to keep the experience light on "features" and have kept their core user experience consistent since their perception.
But I'm curious if another path was ever available. My gut feeling is that many (not all) of these products probably had perfectly serviceable business models available to them if they were content to just be a fairly unsexy utility with low margins. But the focus on establishing a platform monopoly and/or being a billion dollar unicorn has pushed them all towards these societally maladaptive ways approaches that kind of put people off the whole thing.
I don't have the numbers to back any of that up, though, and I'm not sure anyone does aside from the VC people. But they, understandably, have no incentive to let someone stay in the 7 or 8-figure revenue range when they can push them to add an extra comma instead.
But alas, Foursquare simply had no way of making money. The often quoted 'How Not to Die' by pg seems especially relevant to foursquare. Compare the company they started out as, to the company they are now. They may not have 'died', but they sure as hell aren't the same company, product, or userbase. They figured how to not die by pulling a Ship of Theseus, replacing fun with features, features with ads, replacing ads with 'tools'.
Is there a way for social media to stay fun and profitable? I guess Instagram is probably the closest thing to staying fun, though for some reason I never latched on to Instagram. Perhaps it's focus on vanity never really resonated with me. When I think of goofy fun, I don't think of Instagram - Instagram is for the beautiful and that's not what I think of myself as.
Reading the line 'Foursquare is No. 1 when it comes to attribution and ad effectiveness, when it comes to app developer tools' is so the opposite of what I considered Foursquare to be when I used it.