A good concept, but not great on onboarding & personal data
I decided to try Anoox as I'm interested in alternative social media systems. I think more people-centric social media is a good thing, and so on a basic level I wish sites like Anoox well.
Unfortunately, Anoox is not a very intuitive system: even after logging in one can't really see what's happening in the rest of the network easily or find conversations to look at. I have spent quite a bit of time on the website and have zero clue how active it is or what the user base looks like at all. The feature list is long, but it's hard to see how one gets most of the features into use, and there seems to be a focus on over-the-top advertising of certain features as e.g. "insanely great" when I'd rather have a more limited but robust feature range.
The other problems are with the profile, which I've still not filled out. There's no gender option other than male or female (not a problem for me personally but I consider it a negative to have a social network that friends of mine couldn't sign up to). More problematically there are a long list of required fields which do not necessarily apply to everyone - "My Company" for example assumes people a) work and b) work for a single company, which often isn't how things work. I think a people-powered engine needs a better balance between privacy and trust than Anoox offers, and dislike the first name/last name requirements (which also expect a western-norms name structure) and the fact location is a required field. I also cannot see the rationale behind the profile photo being required to be a passport-style face photograph, which feels somewhat privacy invasive.
I'd like things like Anoox to be more successful, but to do so I think they'd need to take a less hardline approach on personal data and make getting set up with some of their core features easier. As it is, the site didn't feel very welcoming, friendly or useable for me.







