Friend.tech Punishes Users for Using Copycat Apps

Friend.tech’s Decision to Punish Users

Friend.tech, the newest decentralized social media (DeSo) app, has been met with intense criticism due to its decision to punish users who opt in to forks or copycat versions of its tokenized social media platform.

“In order to reward loyal users fairly during our beta, those who move to forks and copies will automatically be opted out of earning Points and will lose any existing points,” the official friend.tech X account stated in an Aug. 28 tweet.

Though Friend.tech did not mention any particular competitors, many X users in the replies pointed to Shares, a new DeSo or “SocialFi” application set to go live to public beta on Aug. 31.

Friend.tech has been distributing “reward points” to its beta testers every week, with a total distribution of 100 million points over 6 months.

Crypto Web 3.0

The team has not yet revealed what the points will be used for, just mentioning on Aug. 15 that it “will have a special purpose when the app enters official release status.”

Some anticipate that it will be converted to tokens for friend.tech governance, while others think it could have some financial implications for users. Additionally, due to the seed round investment from Paradigm, there is speculation that there could be a friend.tech native token airdrop in the future.

Friend.tech’s announcement was met with criticism from members of the crypto community.

Within the first hour of the announcement being posted — it attracted hundreds of negative comments and posts that criticized the app for its anti-competitive move.

Crypto Web 3.0 Projects Face Competition

When Friend.tech made their announcement, CryptoKaleo was quick to point out that “threatening or penalizing users for trialing other platforms is completely against everything this industry stands for.” Another user agreed, adding that “this is a prime example of how not to handle competition in Web3 lol — excited to read the apology in a few hours.”

Launched just three weeks ago, the decentralized Web 3.0 platform has seen its metrics, such as activity, inflows, and volume, decline in recent days. Data from Dune Analytics shows that transactions on Friend.tech have dropped by over 90% from its peak of nearly 525,000 transactions on Aug. 21, with less than 50,000 cumulative transactions on Aug. 28.