Submitted via IRC for takyon
Squad, the 'anti-bro startup,' is creating a safe space for teenage girls online – TechCrunch
Squad, an app that allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real time, has tapped into a demographic clamoring for a safe space to gather online. Without any marketing, the startup has collected 450,000 registered users in eight months, 70% of which are teenage girls. So far this year, users have clocked in 1 million hours inside Squad calls.
“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford tells TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudi Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”
“We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out,” – Squad co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford.
Crawford describes Squad, which she’s built alongside her co-founder and chief technology officer Ethan Sutin, as the “anti-bro startup.” Not only because it’s led by a woman and boasts a cap table that’s 30% women and 30% people of color, but because she’s completely rewriting the consumer social startup playbook.
“We are trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit,” Crawford said, referring to Snap, WhatsApp, Twitch and others. Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, has become a social gathering place for Gen Z, she explains, but like many other communities on the internet, it’s failed its female users.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @06:48PM (30 children)
This kind of stuff is annoying. I did the DNC caucus in my state last presidential election cycle, and there was always someone announcing something like "OK, now we need two delagates who are female, two delegates who are POCs, two delegates who are furries, three LBGWPKSDFMLSL:FGGGG, and whatever is left over can be divided up between you undesireables."
I'm a life long liberal but this identity stuff is a step backwards and I honestly feel it is going to cause more problems than it solves. People should be chosen on qualifications and enthusiasm. Skin color is a stupid and divisive reason.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:03PM (1 child)
70% male and 70% white? It's just more patriarchy.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @08:42AM
At best they got a racially representative sample of the general population (I doubt it, how many of the "people of color" are asians, jews, arabs, etc. vs. black or hispanic?) and can't even get the relatively easier gender balance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:07PM (5 children)
It is merely the next cultural step. People are tired of the old white males that have, as a group, not changed a whole lot while increasing corruption to the stupid levels we see today.
Due to politics being a big pony show you are seeing women and minorities get massive support.
Maybe we should return to the 50's when people actually cared about a politician's policy positions? /s
As a life long conservative I'm tired of seeing my political allies raise the banner of racism and hate. It seems to never be about conservative policies, just how to make people scared.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:00PM
No, only people with mental condition are tired, and thet are just so goshdarn loud you continue to inflate their numbers by refering to them collectively as "people".
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:35AM (1 child)
and the remaining 30% of which are guys hovering around the rich supply of teenage girls.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:31AM
Well, Epstein is dead, so you can remove one of those names.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:46AM (1 child)
If you're going to single out an individual group, then all of the our problems are the result of women. They're greater than 50% of the population thus they have the majority vote in every election. You can blame every corrupt official who stays or gets elected on them. White males aren't the majority.
The backstabbing a group of females do to each oher is far more cruel than the dick measuing contests males put themselves through.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @07:00PM
Here is an example from my state: https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/pdf/2018/general/statestats.pdf [iowa.gov]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:11PM (11 children)
This "identity stuff" is the backlash of centuries of racism, misogyny, tyranny, oppression of women, slavery, and various other forms of barbarism.
Is it preferred ? No. Extremism is not a solution to extremism. Is it unexpected ? Hardly.
Cause more problems than it solves ? I'm not sure about that. Movements like abolitionism, feminism, civil rights movement, helped solve, or at least mitigate, some freaking big problems that have existed since the dawn of humanity. But I agree it does create problems, not the least being the creation of fertile grounds for regressive barbarians wanting to drag humanity back to the dark ages and finding a lot of angry and frustrated youth to enlarge their ranks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:30PM (5 children)
It's largely a reaction to what they perceived things were like for the majority group. It was never actually true, apart from a subset that were well off, but people just keep telling themselves that the reason their community has issues is because of the evil white men.
I was just reading a story about driving while Black and even as the number of cops in that area became increasingly diverse, the Black drivers continued to get just as many tickets as they had. It's almost as if the police can't actually see the color of the driver until after they've already pulled them over. Especially when the windows are tinted.
As long as the lies about American history continue, this kind of arrogant belief that the law doesn't apply to them will continue. There are plenty of groups that have succeeded in America despite major ethnic prejudice, but most of those folks are White, so they don't count and neither did what they went through in previous generations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:39PM (4 children)
Your understanding is flawed.
You somehow think that black police are less racist than white police, or at least would pull over with less discrimination.
In fact, black police are known to be roughly as bad, in the USA. This is for a few reasons, including predictive policing that is based on ethnicity and neighbourhoods (in racially divided geographies), and including training and peers who disproportionately treat PoC ... "poorly."
But you don't give a shit about these true facts, probably.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:43AM (2 children)
Or, the problem is imaginary. Or do you really believe that hospitals murder Black people for their organs. It's another conspiracy theory with limited basis in reality.
The failure of some communities to recognize the difference between lawful and unlawful conduct undermines there criticism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:59AM (1 child)
Who modded this insightful? This is garbage that doesn't address GP post and adds a strawman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:47PM
I did.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:04AM
This is where the dysfunctionality of other countries' police forces is actually a good thing. For example if you're a Sotho and you get pulled over by a Xhosa cop then in theory they could shoot you like in the US, but in practice they're more interested in the on-the-spot fine they can collect.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:25AM (1 child)
Can you point to one single person, anywhere in the world, who has endured "Centuries of racism" or centuries of any of "misogyny, tyranny, oppression of women, slavery, and various other forms of barbarism"?
If it happened a century ago, everyone involved is dead. Get over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:18PM
Almost 40 years here. The solution is to end it, together.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:37AM (1 child)
Sorry, but you're WRONG, and demonstrably so.
Brazil had slavery. Brazil got rid of slavery. Brazil is not eaten up with race politics today.
Cuba had slavery. Cuba got rid of slavery. Cuba is not eaten up with race politics today.
Continue that list, and you'll find that just about every member of the "Western World" shares the same bit of history, and the same freedom from race history.
THE PROBLEM HERE IN THE US ARE THE RACE BAITERS. Al Sharpton, Sheila Jackson, Kamala Harris, and on and on it goes. People who profit from stirring the shit, keep the shit stirred. The harder the race baiters work to keep that shit stirred up, the more genuine racism they instill on all sides.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:10AM
Runaway I like you but you're wrong. You've been to Brazil, right? You cannot have missed the fact that indigenous persons are societal second class citizens. Spanish (swarthy southern spaniard!) descendants call themselves white (I am of Irish descent and once had a person who I thought was black say they weren't indigenous, but "white like you" which I did keep a straight face for.)
Saying Brazil isn't consumed by race politics is like saying China isn't. It's only "not a problem" because the people in power don't have ANY motivation to change things.
> Continue that list, and you'll find that just about every member of the "Western World" shares the same bit of history
That's not true? The bit of history that is unique to the US is the cotton slavery period. No other modern nation industrialized slavery to the same extent. And if you continue that list - you want to show me the race-based slavery history for Canada, Ireland, Spain, Greece, etc? Because Canada had none, Ireland I don't believe ever had double-digit black slave population, Spain's slavery was rarely purely by skin, Greece's slavery history is so incredibly different from the US's that using the same word is only appropriate because we dno't have finer grained terms...
I mean, I appreciate what you do and your attempts to honestly engage. Please try to do so honestly on this topic. Saying the problem is persons who believe there's a problem is pretty clearly wrong if you take out "black persons" and replace with "suffragettes." Those "baiters" are calling for peaceful, legal, systemic changes. There is baiting going on, but not by credible parties on either side, and if you attack a strawman you look more foolish than if it were a windmill you were tilting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @12:25AM
Bullshit. It's a typical Jesuit psychological warfare campaign backed by the British (Ronald Mourad Cohen), Saudis (Nawaf Obaid), Pakistanis (Farah Pandith), and other governments that want to capture the United States through information warfare. The Vatican runs its psyops through the Rothschilds and their "Jewish" groups which is why everyone always blames the Jews, which is what they want because it causes more paranoia and division. In this case the funds were laundered through Social Finance Israel under the supervision of Chemi Peres, son of Shimon Peres.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:21AM (7 children)
We can't get that message out, because no one will listen. Morgan Freeman told them to stop talking about race. MLK junior told them that skin color shouldn't matter. But, today's liberals have done a complete about-face on the issue. We're not allowed to just not talk about it.
When you realize that your coworker is an asshole just because he's an asshole, and not because he's black/jewish/puertorican/german/whatever, you've pretty much defeated racism.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:32AM (4 children)
And the problem is much MUCH worse when you realise that you are not allowed to call the asshole on anything IF the are [insert list of minorities, including women, which is special as they are actually a majority in most countries]
'Equality' now is 'Treating certain identified groups specially' - isnt it ironic?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:24AM (3 children)
punch left
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:50PM (2 children)
The authoritarian left deserves it as much as the authoritarian right. The issue isn't about punching left or right, it's about punching authoritarians all of which, left or right, are dangerous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:18PM (1 child)
then go anarcho-socialist
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @07:24AM
Asking for a friend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:56AM (1 child)
That is why they redefined racism and other "-isms" in their communication. Instead of it being discrimination or prejudice based on some sort of identifiable trait, it is that plus "institutional power" in the strong sense. As originally proposed, that definition does sort of make sense in its proper context, but then they watered it down by changing the conjunct over time to where it is now just reduced to "power" or "privilege." It is hard to claim you are against some -ism when you solution is applying said -ism the other way. So, just change the meaning of the word and you are all set. Now it is easy to claim that when you do it, you are not an "-ist" because you don't have the right sort of privilege.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @07:25PM
Of course. The so-called "left" has transformed these things into bourgeois problems (not even "first world problems," problems that only affect a small minority of well-to-do individuals). They are no longer talking to the vast majority of people who are in the working class except in the capacity of promoting the delusion that anybody can be one of the elites through "hard work."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:25AM
FTFY
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:24PM
Divide and conqueror. Makes you wonder if the leaders are a cabal organized to destroy their own movement, doesn't it? Even more interesting when you look at the identity groups those leaders are from...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by exaeta on Saturday August 10 2019, @06:50PM (3 children)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:21PM
lolololol
soooo you're saying TwitFaceInYouSnap don't have problems? More like whiny dude annoyed at not being in the special gender club. You know they have doctors that can help you with that nowadays?
(Score: 2) by Mer on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:34PM
They said it themselves: they did it accidentally
None of the popular chatting apps have outstanding features on the others. The userbase just polarizes by dumb luck.
This stance taking is just good for business somehow.
Oooh, are they gonna go against the rampant trend of removing basic features?
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:48PM
Doesn't exist? I suspect that there are quite a few teenage girls on Squad who might disagree. Or do their opinions not count in your book? The market is going to decide if there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Until that time you are just going to have to suck it up and deal, Buttercup. In the meantime, I would suggest that you NOT lead off your intro to teenage girls on the internet with a dick pic. Just sayin'.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:24PM (6 children)
If it takes off then wait a year and they'll be admitting Premium Level users that are middle-aged white men seeking Sugar Pals or whatever the Epstein code word is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @08:08PM (1 child)
In the office we - white males - are pushed to join "alternative" communities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @09:34PM
Methinks you don't required much "pushing".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:26PM (3 children)
If there's anything that destroys it, it will be the same thing that destroyed girls and womens' sports -- letting trannies in, and then all those trannies outperform the girls and women and beat them at their own game. The real girls and women will become disillusioned and resentful because their space was invaded and they can't publicly say a goddamn thing about it because muh bigotry.
Creating a safe space for certain demographics is a fools' errand nowadays, because it's about diversity and inclusion. And unfortunately, like in the world of sports, it could backfire spectacularly if it turns out some demographics outperform others. I'm not saying that biological males are necessarily better at coding than biological females, but we already have millennia of culture which have stacked the deck in favor of the idea that males are the dominant sex.
Of course the most elegant way to address the issue is to create a third class for trannies (in addition to men and women) but good luck with that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:39AM (2 children)
Pretty sure the following logic us all we need, and it is simple enough to implement in whatever framework you like.
if user = ethanol-fueled
disable(user)
call_feds
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:48PM (1 child)
LOL fucking Python. Learn a real language, kiddo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2019, @12:46AM
Wow you're a worse coder than you are a human. That is just sad, maybe hire a few monkeys with typewriters?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:57PM (5 children)
Where young girls can have their own safe place... But without money or true privacy... Separate from the men... But equal...
The 2019 Virginia Woolf award for female empowerment winners right there.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:32PM (4 children)
The irony is that women used to have safe spaces where the patriarchy was responsible for ensuring their safety, but previous generations of women were like screw this, we just want to have fun.
Despite what these women claim, men are actually significantly more likely to be assaulted by random strangers than women are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:36AM (2 children)
What an incel.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:28AM (1 child)
No, it's true.
A friend of mine kept making snarky statements about how much better it is being a male.
She would not believe that a male can be attacked on the street by other males at any time.
It's against the law!
They will be jailed!
It's illegal!
Yeah, right. More like if you go to the cops and complain then they will just look at you. Oh, some someone hit you. Right. What's their name? Don't know it? Address? Right. Yeah, sure, we'll get right on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:41PM
Men create their own aggressors by practicing patriarchal masculinity, which in the US involves ritual infant genital mutilation, hazing, and "selective service." This is what is meant by "toxic masculinity" no matter how badly the MSM tries to butcher the idea to prevent a mass movement, especially one that would act in solidarity with proletarian feminism.
It is time to throw off the misguided notions of patriarchy that are entirely dependent on the assumption that women only have value if they are sexually subjugated and men only have value if they are engaging in subjugation (the virgin anti-war protester compared to the Chad the imperialist footsoldier--why not the virgin imperialist footsolider who never gets laid except for rape vs. Chad the anti-war protester).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:33PM
My point was that isolating from the rest of the world while waving the empowerment flag is laughable. This "social" service encourage women to stay in their (literal) comfort zones and never challenge themselves in the real world. When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own she was talking in the pragmatic context of what it took for her personally to write: A zero distractions working space and financial security. How is a social networking service supposed to achieve that when it only networks young girls with each other and keep them taking selfies with their brand new shoes 24/7?
The subject been studied to exhaustion directly in the context of all-girls boarding school. Gender segregation doesn't empower women to better prepare them "without distractions". It leaves them vulnerable and delusional while even hurting the grade averages.
Seriously, where's the 2nd and 3rd gen feminists when you need them?
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @10:35PM (13 children)
What is going on with all of you? Is no-AC on /. today doing something to your BRAINS?
Did ANY of you read this article?
I come to SN hoping to find geeks and FOSS nerds and privacy advocates and hardcore-smart scientists in all domains. This startup is trying to provide a privacy-respecting service, and is going super wild, and you are INSULTING it?
"Squad has made sure users could easily block and report inappropriate behaviors and users, a feature that was an afterthought on many other social tools. They also made users unsearchable unless another user knows their exact username. By prioritizing the security of its (...) audience, Squad is betting (users) will continue coming back to the app and telling their friends about it."
This is the fucking mindset and respect for users we NEED in tech. And soylentils are mocking it because the uptake is high among teen girls? Did you watch Hackers, the movie? Have you ever known a competent female hacker? I have! Expecting women to be stupid is part of the problem and dear lentils you are making me angry, because you all often claim to want to base it on merit, and here there is a merit-worthy idea and an audience taking them up on it, and you are shitting on them due to YOUR identity politics. If this a male neckbeard project like Mastodon this would not be your reception of it.
It is hard for me to express my anger and unhappiness. Maybe I should leave SN. The quality, right now, is not what I seek.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:08PM (2 children)
Oh, God, how I would love a female who is just as curious about things as I am. A madame Curie.
Seems all I run across is beautiful bodies under the complete control of marketeers.
Seemingly having only one purpose...exploitation of both her along with whoever else she influences.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @11:39PM (1 child)
You say that like it's a bad thing. What's your point?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:40AM
Its as if guys come from Linus, and women came from Microsoft.
Except the updates are both expensive and unavoidable.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 11 2019, @01:26AM (5 children)
What would we ever do if Anonymous Coward were to abandon us?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:42AM (1 child)
Implode under the weight of unopposed stupidity.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:24AM
Thanks for the love and recognition. I do it because I consider it my sacred duty. And you're welcome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:32AM
Resurrect APK to have him / her create a HOSTS file solution?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @10:21AM (1 child)
I mean, based on this article? SN is on the road to getting 8channed minus the publicity. It hurts like having your teenaged kid get arrested for a hate crime. What have I / we done wrong, to raise them like this? Reading this article's comments - and a few others today - I am actually literally wondering if 8chan and /. being down/no-AC is making folks who otherwise might at least pretend to discuss articles instead go apeshit, virtue-signalling to their ingroup whose side (men's! white men's! dun matter who they are as long as they're white - and men!) they're on.
It's like, can you all not see the irony in using identity politics yourselves, here, in the same paragraphs as you decry it? I don't read realDonaldTrump levels of selfawareness in it but maybe you're all playing the intellectual game like, 8 levels beyond me, and you're really hoping to change the world by being so obnoxiously intellectually dishonest that you disgust everyone else into not being similar.
Maybe? Doubtful. So, one sad AC. With /. long gone (fuck beta) and now SN apparently sinking, maybe it's time to try to find some smaller forums.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:26PM
Review: Feminism for the 99% [socialistalternative.org] (CWI):
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:29AM
I doubt that soylentils are mocking it because of who the users are. More likely because it's yet another social startup, and because the headline and TFS are promotional fluff that tell us nothing about their product. You evidently discovered some substantive information by RTFA, but... RTFA is pretty much optional here. Extra credit, if you will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:16AM
There is a reason for such soreness. Where is the attention on the gaslighting assholes in charge who actually do make personnel decisions and the misogynist assholes in advertising driving the capitalist need to make privacy difficult if not impossible?
Target the person driving the luxury car, not the person driving a rusty car that's seen better days. But whatever.
So glad in about a year I'll finally be moving on from tech. (Finally! Praise the gods!) Techs must unite to build a credible profession or be proletarianized... but I guess I don't really give a damn which is chosen....
It's ridiculous that basic privacy features any IRC user enjoys are not built in to other platforms.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @12:37PM
Did you read the summary?
It's not about privacy or technology at all. It's about how awesome this company is because they have the politically approved races and genders in the politically necessary positions. Add in a healthy dose of charged language like "anti-bro" and "safe space" and the lines are drawn - this is an anti-white-man article.
When the summary is all race and gender baiting, just what comments do you expect?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:21PM
Have you ever seen a reality TV show with female cast? They're just going to bully, brigade, and groupthink each other as always, but now using middleware automation tools.
It'll be a bad episode of "The Bachelor" but now with nice html5 buttons to automate taking comments out of context behind each other's backs.
(Score: 5, Funny) by deimtee on Sunday August 11 2019, @05:13AM (1 child)
So that's 315,000 teenage girls. I didn't know there were that many FBI agents.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @09:30AM
The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents
Referring to The Rules of the Internet [tvtropes.org]. Possibly the most important rules of them all. Rule 29 states: In the internet all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents. Rule 30 states: There are no girls on the internet.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 11 2019, @02:14PM
Helpfully in google searches, Squad is also a somewhat realistic simulator-ish alpha version FPS.
Kind of ridiculous.