Hater app for all haters

Social networks like Facebook and Instagram are intended to help users share their lives, but Jake Banks believes the language of "likes" used on these services forces us to be overly positive and restricts our ability to be ourselves. That's why he decided to develop an alternative social networking app called Hater, which is intended for sharing all the things you don't like.

- It's really an answer to everything out there in social media. All you can do is 'like' things. I don't want to be the guy pretending to be someone I'm not. I want to be real and say, 'I'm sitting in traffic and I hate this - Banks told the Mashable web portal.

While you can post a comment like that on Facebook or Twitter, Banks' contention is that providing a dedicated community for dislikes frees up users to re-think the type of posts they share and vent a bit.

Banks spent more than a decade directing commercials and running a New York production company, which also developed apps for clients in recent years. As a result, he got interested in developing apps on the side and started brainstorming a social app that might stand out from the many others on the market. "I was looking at the social world and thinking, What's missing?'" Banks decided the answer to that question was Hater. So six months ago, he sold off his company and devoted himself to working on Hater full time.

The resulting app, which launched on the iPhone Friday and will be available on Android in the next couple months, looks a lot like Instagram. You can take a picture or upload a photo from your phone, share it to the Hater community with a caption, view a feed of other posts from the Hater community and offer feedback. Of course, the intention for Hater is very different than Instagram. With Hater, you might take a picture of yourself waiting in line or stuck in a traffic jam to show how much you dislike it.

Hater's app also gives users the option to pull an image of something they hate from other sites through the app and to post to the service using an alter ego. "It's a little more self-deprecating and a little more fun," Banks says of the app. "You're sitting at work, working a 12-hour shift and you go on Facebook and you see your friend from high school is on his third vacation of the month, and he's taking pictures of his food and all that. Now you can snapshot it and Hate it."