Facebook Acquires App to Encourage Niceties Among Teenagers

To its growing list of features Facebook has acquired ‘tbh’ an app to cater to the special needs of teenagers online.

The app acquired for an undisclosed fee is intended to encourage teens to be nice to one other.

The positivity-focused polling startup tbh which will be allowed to operate somewhat independently with its own brand had scored 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users in the past nine weeks.

tbh lets people anonymously answer kind-hearted multiple-choice questions about friends who then receive the poll results as compliments. You see questions like “Best to bring to a party?,” “Their perseverance is admirable?” and “Could see becoming a poet?” with your uploaded contacts on the app as answer choices.

It is worth noting that tbh has racked up more than 1 billion poll answers since officially launching in limited states in August, mostly from teens and high school students, and spent weeks topping the free app charts.

According to co-creator Nikita Bier,“If we’re improving the mental health of millions of teens, that’s a success to us.”

Though financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, however, Techcrunch reports the price paid to  be less than $100 million and won’t require any regulatory approval.

As part of the deal, tbh’s four co-creators — Bier, Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza and Nicolas Ducdodon — will join Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters while continuing to grow their app with Facebook’s cash, engineering, anti-spam, moderation and localization resources.

Also, the tbh founders will become formal Facebook employees, with Facebook email addresses, opposed to running more independently like Instagram and WhatsApp, which have their own buildings and emails.

In an announcement post the tbh team wrote “When we met with Facebook, we realized that we shared many of the same core values about connecting people through positive interactions. Most of all, we were compelled by the ways they could help us realize our vision and bring it to more people.”

In a statement to Techcrunch, Facebook wrote: “tbh and Facebook share a common goal — of building community and enabling people to share in ways that bring us closer together. We’re impressed by the way tbh is doing this by using polling and messaging, and with Facebook’s resources tbh can continue to expand and build positive experiences.”

It’s interesting that Facebook opted to acquire tbh rather than clone it, since it has been aggressively copying other hit teen apps like Houseparty recently. While Facebook’s Snapchat clone Instagram Stories has achieved massive popularity, other knock-offs it has made haven’t fared as well.

With tbh’s strong brand name, distinctive design and explosive early traction, Facebook seems to have decided it was better to team-up than face-off.

Recently, an investment bank surveyed 6,100 US teens and it was revealed that Snapchat was the preferred social media platform for teenagers – the average age of participants was 16.

It was reported Facebook had reportedly tried to buy Snapchat in 2013 for $3bn. Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, is today worth $19bn.