(Photo: App.net wordcloud by Diego Basch)

App.net, the private social network spearheaded by Valleyite Dalton Caldwell, recently raised $600,000 from the tech community in order to build an "ad-free Twitter alternative." To keep out the riffraff, App.net charges $50 for subscribers and $100 for developers in order to join the elite handful of people active on the site.

Yesterday, developer Diego Basch published some stats scraped from his first month on App.net. A lot of the findings are unsurprising, given App.net's origins, but interesting nonetheless:

There are about 20k users, and a little over 300k posts so far. For those who haven’t checked out the service, a post is similar to a tweet only up to 256 characters in length instead of 140....

250 users have generated half of the posts. This is the core group of early fans/evangelists. I’m one of them, at #62 the last time I checked....

A high percentage of appnet’s users are developers.

If 250 of the 20,000 users are generating half the posts, that means half the posts are only generated by 1.25 percent of people. Talk about power users.

Mr. Basch also created a word cloud that aggregates App.net's most used words every hour. When we clicked to check it out, the biggest word on the cloud was "TWITTER." Turns out the people on the anti-Twitter still really love talking about Twitter. The difference? The people on App.net have $50.

Mr. Basch (Photo: LinkedIn)

If anyone is familiar with the Valley's success method du jour, it's Diego Basch. Mr. Basch founded IndexTank, a hosted search tool that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2009. Today, he hit the front page of Hacker News with a post about how to exploit Silicon Valley "for profit (and maybe fun)."

Mr. Basch's parable is a familiar one: An average Joe goes to Silicon Valley, raises money even though he doesn't really agree with the VC's philosophies, builds a company with the express intent of getting acquired by a larger company, sells the company and makes bank. Only then does he finally have enough money of his own to build something he actually cares about.

Mr. Basch's tale of Joe Founder exposes some key flaws in the Valley's current culture. Aside from the founders just looking to spit out a one-off product, sell it and retire at 25, there are people out there who want to build something meaningful but can't corral the capital or resources to actually do so without first engaging with this cycle.

The discussion on Hacker News is pretty spirited, though the following comment did make us almost spit out our coffee: "$6m really isn't that much these days. Might get you a nice house in the Silly Valley and a few years of living expenses, but that's not "set for life" money if you're in your 20s." Ugh.

Anyway, at least we're not alone in our jadedness here at Betabeat. "Here's to cynicism and hustling," Mr. Basch closes. Indeed.