Why the "Tsu" social network may not be a good idea at all

People on social media are usually pretty quick to jump on the "latest new thing", often without doing any real research. That's why when invited to join "tsu", I declined. Now I feel even more strongly about my decision. Mark Traphagen has an excellent review here  http://goo.gl/SIYzT8

His main points:

"If Tsu succeeds in attracting a large number of users, the pie slices of daily royalties will get ever smaller. That may discourage people who are there in hopes of making real money, and they may give up producing new content.
Paying in proportion to views means users will likely learn quickly to produce the kind of "lowest common denominator," mindless-but-fun content that sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy churn out like machines. It's a lot harder to attract views with more thoughtful content. Therefore I predict Tsu will quickly become what many consider the bottom feed of Facebook: silly cat memes, vapid quote graphics, and videos of people doing stupid stuff. But of course, many people like that stuff, as Facebook has proven. Not what I'm looking for out of a social network.
But if you're incentivizing engagement with content, you're also incentivizing people to form big private networks to create tons of artificial "engagement," or to pay people on sites like Fiverr to create accounts just to "engage" with your content.
The fact that no content on the network can be seen makes Tsu more of a walled garden than even Facebook."

Eli Fennell also has a good review and is even more cautionary: http://goo.gl/dxpsmg He talks about the overjustification effect:

"With their monetization model, Tsu is tangibly rewarding a previously unrewarded activity, i.e. using a social network.  This is, for some, a dream come true to those people who feel themselves to be “content creators”, “marketers”, etc… and who WANT to be rewarded for everything they do online.

For the average person, however, a social network is about BEING SOCIAL (which should, admittedly, be a truism).  They don’t care that the network itself makes money from their using it, though they may be concerned by exactly HOW it makes its money (violating privacy, targeting ads, etc"

Finally, we learn that the site may have serious security issues as it does not use SSL (Facebook, Google+ and Twitter all DO use it):

Security issues: http://goo.gl/9mFGmZ

"Take a look when you’re registering, notice how there’s no SSL? Haha you guessed it, all of their information throughout the entire site is completely unencrypted. That means all passwords, emails, user addresses, etc. are unencrypted and visible to anyone and everyone.

You don’t need to be a security expert to know this, it’s almost text book knowledge for anyone who has ever interfaced with the web on a technical level. Soooooo my fellow reddit friends, enjoy this new found information."

Thanks folks, I'm happy with Facebook and Google+, and I still have lots of friends on Twitter. I'll take a pass.

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