Fling

~ the last words ~

Being dropped in front of strangers was not a 2014 invention. Anyone who was on IRC in 1999 already knew what happens when you open a room to whoever is nearby, and the answer has been roughly the same in every decade since. What Fling added was a camera and a number.

The number was fifty. You took a photo or a short video inside the app, and it went to fifty random people somewhere on the planet, who could reply or send something back. That was the entire product. It launched in july 2014 out of a London company Marco Nardone had started that march, and it grew fast enough to look like the next thing, reaching four million registered users with the company claiming fifty billion messages sent between them.

The growth was bought. A large share of that spending went into social media advertising, and the user count moved in step with it. Underneath, the loop that everybody actually used was not the one on the pitch deck. Within weeks of launch people were sending nudes, because that is what an unfiltered channel to fifty strangers is for, and the company had built no way to see it happening.

Apple pulled the app in june 2015, citing the resemblance to Chatroulette and the sexual content. The engineers rewrote it almost from scratch in nineteen days and it came back without the random broadcast at all, as a messenger that looked like Snapchat. Everyone who had arrived for the first thing had no reason to stay for the second. It ran another year and closed in august 2016.

In 2014 I was thirty and a decade into writing software for a living. An app whose whole loop is firing your own face at fifty unknown phones was not built with anyone my age in mind, and I would have gotten stuck on the question that eventually closed it, which is who exactly is looking at the pictures.

~ the record ~

~ fifty strangers ~

Fifty is a well chosen number and it is worth saying why. One stranger is a slow conversation, and everyone at once is a broadcast into an empty room. Fifty is small enough that a reply feels aimed at you and large enough that something always comes back, so the app never had the dead-room problem that kills most chat products in their first month.

The cost of that design is that it removed consent from the receiving end. You did not choose who reached you and you could not build up a circle over time, which is the mechanism every durable social product uses to make people behave. Fling had a global audience and no local reputation, and the behavior followed from the architecture.

~ what the moderation cost ~

The response to the nudes was a team of around ten people in the Philippines looking at the flow, at something like twenty thousand dollars a month. For a service moving the volume Fling claimed, ten pairs of eyes is not a moderation system. It is a gesture at one.

When the money ran low that team was among the things that could not be paid for, and the content problem came straight back. This is the part worth taking away. Moderation on a stranger network is not a feature you add after launch, it is the operating cost of the product, and a company with no revenue cannot carry it. Apple was not making an aesthetic judgment in june 2015. It was noticing that nobody was minding the store.

~ the money and the burn ~

Twenty one million dollars went in, from backers across Europe and Asia, with about five million of it from Nardone's father. Nothing came out. In two years of operation the company recorded no revenue whatsoever, and the staff count reached fifty.

There was a company before this one. Unii, launched in 2012, was a social network for UK university students and had picked up a hundred thousand of them within six months, and the engineers who built Fling were pulled off it in early 2014. Both went into the same administration filings. The former employees who talked to the press afterward described a spending pattern that had lost contact with the fact that no money was arriving, which by 2016 was not a rare story, only an unusually well documented one.

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