Imagine never having to see yet another picture of your friend’s new cat pop up on your news feed ever again, by teaching your social networks what it is that you love and hate. That’s the premise behind the brilliantly-monikered new Berlin startup fck, we love it!.
Silicon Allee spoke to CEO and Founder Drita Parduzi to hear more about fck’s metal horns, middle fingers, and how fun it is to be the bad guy.
Currently in closed alpha testing, fck, we love it! is a photo-sharing platform which currently sources content from Tumblr and automatically creates a personalized feed by connecting (and disconnecting) users with people who share similar interests. Unlike Facebook, which is based on pre-existing relationships with people, FWLI links users to each other based on their posts, and most importantly, their loves and hates. This in turn creates a content feed tailored to the individual user, consisting solely of what they love or are inspired by.
Images are filtered via topics and tags, and are then sorted by rankings, which range from green (highly relevant) to light blue (not relevant). Ranking is determined from how much love (the metal horns hand symbol) or hate (the middle finger hand symbol) each image receives.
This means that, unlike many imaging-blogging sites, you can essentially down-vote content you dislike, preventing similar images from entering your feed. Drita explained that from these image ratings users also develop their own rank, and the more a person loves and hates items, the more the system understands what appeals to them, therefore the better their experience becomes.
From hating pictures, you can also become what Drita calls a ‘hate-maven’: “You can collect points from hating street art if you think that it’s ‘so 90’s’, and you can become notorious for being the most street-art hating person on the platform. We think it’s kind of boring when you can only like and heart everything. People like being the bad guy!”
Horns or the finger? Users decide what they like
But how is FWLI different from the many other image-blogging sites flooding the market? Drita admits that while some of the functions of the platform are similar to that of Pintrest or Tumblr, the beauty of fck, we love it! lies in its ability to change automatically according to your interests, eliminating the need to need to think about who to friend and follow (or unfollow).
She explained: “Being someone’s friend doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll like their content. Fck, we love it! can integrate and find friends from Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but you don’t follow them just because you know them. The platform is all based on similar interests.”
The other major difference between FWLI and other blogging services is how the platform promotes its users. Drita said: “Bloggers get sponsored, and there’s a whole process of how a blogger suddenly starts posting paid articles or how certain users get promoted over others. But I think it’s still a bit of a mystery to most people how to make that jump.” Unlike Tumblr, where people’s statistics and followers aren’t available publicly, FWLI has a transparent rating system, with the idea being that in the future brands will be able to target single people who have a high user rating for specific promotions related to their loves.
In turn, fck, we love it! will take a percentage of these promotions, as well as earning money from brand advertising and marketing on the platform. There are also plans to provide affiliated links on products that will gain the purchaser (and potentially the original poster) a proportion of each sale.
FWLI is set to officially launch in May, with plans to add options for users to post videos and songs to their profiles. And, just in case you were wondering, yes, the name is pronounced exactly like you think it is.