Fame and the Giant Peach — How To Become Peach Famous Overnight
I wrote an article the other day about the Curated Self and Peach. My intention wasn’t to bash Peach. I just think we should be building more meaningful apps and the VC money in the tech industry should be working towards a greater cause, not silly fads. Peach claims to be the “fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.” I’m assuming Peach’s intention is for users to add their friends and acquaintances they know in real life, so they keep in touch with their daily lives. A common use of social media for today’s generation is to gain exposure for themselves. This isn’t a generalization of what the sole use of social media for Millennials has come to, but through a “social experiment” I conducted on Peach, I proved my own hypothesis that a vast number of users care more about gaining as many likes and followers as possible.
I noticed that a lot of people were talking about wanting to get “Peach Famous”. I decided to test my theory by sending friend requests to as many people as I could, seeing if they would accept, without even knowing me personally. Peach allows users to see a list of your friends’ friends. Instead of wasting time and adding everyone one by one, I decided to automate the task by writing a quick script. By doing some network sniffing and obtaining some base URLs for Peach’s internal API, I had all I needed to begin my codin’.
// drinks gallon of coffee, turns on EDM, and mashes keyboard
The script parses the list of friends from the API response. I created a class to model the user. After iterating through each friend, I ping the API to fetch that friend’s friends, and loop through that list and add each user. The user object contains a boolean indicating whether or not you’re friends with them, so to make the script more efficient, I skip users I’m already friends with. Also, the API response contains an array of friend requests that have been sent, so I skip users I’ve already sent a friend request to. Almost instantly, I was gaining new friends as I was requesting more. People were very quick to accept my friend requests. My phone’s notifications blew up all day and into the night. People were even sending me friend requests, and using the “poke” feature to wave and blow kisses at me. It seems as if some of the users on Peach don’t want a small community of close friends, but rather as many friends as possible, becoming 🍑 famous.
I also experimented with an exploit I mentioned in my previous article. With no malicious intent intended, I decided to post an image, modifying the height in the request to be a ridiculously large number, which crashes the phone of a user who tries to load it. I just wanted to see people’s reactions to having their phones crashed by their new stranger-friend. As I expected, people weren’t happy. After I saw people’s reactions, I concluded my experiment and deleted the photo.
Another thing that intrigued me is the fact that one user didn’t even remember adding me as a friend on Peach. It seemed like I was just a number to increase a friend count, not a person.
At the time of writing this article, I have 3100 friends and around 2000 friend requests they haven’t been accepted… yet. I guess since everyone was “poking” me and talking about me, I achieved my goal of becoming Peach Famous. 😎
