Friendster marketed itself as social augmentation rather than anonymous escape

Evidence

Rather than drop you in a Hobbesian world of antisocial maniacs, Friendster made you a profile and sought to re-create online your actual social world—the people you really knew, friends, co-workers, family, and the like—while providing one place to deal with all of them. Like so many successful tech companies, it was marketing a form of human augmentation, in this case of social capacities. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 990

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘human augmentation’ framing echoes how Wu describes earlier attention technologies like radio and television. — connects to: Identity deception succeeds better amid strangers than friends; Facebook weaponizes social proof by dressing commerce as friendship. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1455; Social media flattening makes the self easier to confuse with someone else’s — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 129

Broader Connections

• Identity deception succeeds better amid strangers than friends #complicates (0.75)
• Social media flattening makes the self easier to confuse with someone else’s #complicates (0.74) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 129
• Facebook weaponizes social proof by dressing commerce as friendship. #complicates (0.73) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1455