7 ms·

I tried three apps that claim to make you more likable

71 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

tempodox 11y ago
Just out of curiosity, is this article a payed placement?
- zamalek 11y ago
  They failed to link to any of the apps, so I don't think so. Which brings me to my question, anyone got a link for Crystal? Edit: https://www.crystalknows.com/ https://www.crystalknows.com/
- cooper12 11y ago
  At the bottom of the article it says it evolved from a talk she gave, so I would guess not. The article says she used it herself, and she does mention some of the competition, so I'd just guess she's a happy customer.
- karlb 11y ago
  You can easily spot paid placements; they don't have the “upvote” triangle next to them.
  - rrrrob 11y ago
    Perhaps the question was whether the article on fusion.net itself is a paid placement. It certainly reads like it.
  - JosephRedfern 11y ago
    I don't think they are paid placements, are they? I always just assumed Job Ads from YC companies got free listings?
    - andyfleming 11y ago
      Yeah, there aren't any paid placements on hacker news that I know of. There are job listings for YC companies that start at/near the top and work their way down over time automatically.
      - karlb 11y ago
        Ah, I assumed that the job listings were paid.
- lukethomas 11y ago
  I work at Crystal. We didn't pay for this.
  - pistoriusp 11y ago
    I wanted to check out Crystal, but oddly enough there's no direct link, do you know if they asked for a sponsorship?
    - lukethomas 11y ago
      We're a 4 person company. They definitely didn't ask us to sponsor it (or I would have heard about it).
      - wingerlang 11y ago
        Hey, please don't have a green huge "try now" button and then put me on a page where I have to request an invite, after a queue nontheless.
      - rorykoehler 11y ago
        Hey Luke, Just some points that may help your UX process. I don't want to share on twitter before I know what it is. What if I find out your product is terrible (obviously I'm hoping it's not or I wouldn't have bothered signing up for an invite)? If you're going to get people to request an invite put it as the text on the signup button rather than leading on with false advertising. Chances are I won't checkout your product now that you've made me wait. I'l get an email but it will be one of tens or even hundreds and I'll skip over it as I'm in my inbox to do something else and it will soon be forgotten. Rory
        lukethomas 11y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. Will change. Email luke [at] crystalknows.com w/ the email you signed up with and I'll approve the request.
jfaucett 11y ago
"Us+ creator Lauren McCarthy, an artist and programmer at New York University, told me that the tension her technology creates was part of her intent" what?? So the intent was to create an app that frustrates people and shows them "that there are things the computer can’t do as well as a human". We have this experience I'd argue the majority of time with computers anyway, the whole point is breaking down that barrier. So if her statements are not a joke its just bad software design. Otherwise, the concept of realtime communication aid seems ridiculous IMO. Do we really need a software buffer between us and another human in order to communicate better? I still prefer talking to people on the phone as compared to chat, and face-to-face over the phone, I'd assert you always loose information once you add buffers between two communicating parties.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  It sounds like the intent with Us+ was to be performance art. In other words, if it's baffling or strange and it makes you reconsider how you think about something, it worked.
  - tingol 11y ago
    Sounds more like damage control to me. Something fails -> "That was my intent all along!"
  - allencoin 11y ago
    I think it fits in well with a lot of her other projects, which are seemingly obviously jokey: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/ http://lauren-mccarthy.com/ This one in particular: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/goodbye/ http://lauren-mccarthy.com/goodbye/ >This past fall I left Boston, after spending the past 5 years there. To deal with the emotionally and logistically overwhelming task of giving a goodbye hug to all of the acquaintances and friends I have accumulated over this time, I designed the Hands-Free-Auto-OK/GOOD/GREAT-BYE! Machine.
  - msutherl 11y ago
    Yup, Lauren McCarthy is an artist.
personjerry 11y ago
I've spent a lot of time reading about how to improve myself socially, and the gist of it is this: be honest. If you give a false compliment, people can tell. If you aren't paying attention, people can tell. Even more importantly, YOU can tell. Therefore it's more important to change your attitude to be a receptive, open minded, friendly one. In my opinion, this Crystal app seems to cheat the system. However, if you merely change your behavior to suit people's personalities, you lack a personality yourself, and you'll find it start to haunt you, as other people, no matter how bad they may be at subconsciously picking up signals, will likely catch on to your insincerity over time.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  A great thing that I mastered is when I lie to believe myself. I know it is a lie, but i also know it is truth. Helps a lot.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    Eh. I had a girlfriend like that. We're no longer friends because we'd end up with exchanges like this: Me: Man, I miss camping. I once went to... Her: I love camping! We should go sometime! There's this place... Couple months later Me: Hey, it's getting into fall and the weather's great. We've both got a couple long weekends coming up. Want to go camping on one of them? Her: I hate camping. Me: ... (this is just a sample, the same thing happened on several, far more serious, issues that couples face) Seriously, insincerity and dishonesty, even if you have yourself convinced of your lies in that moment, really fucking sucks.
- lukethomas 11y ago
  You present good points. Our goal at Crystal isn't to game the system when communicating with others, but to help you be more aware of these personality differences (and show them at the right time with tools). For example, my dad is extremely task oriented and logical. I'm the exact opposite. When I listen to him talk about something for an hour in extreme detail, understanding his personality helps me be a little more empathetic, as I know it's naturally something he's going to do.
pistoriusp 11y ago
A real time "how to win friends and influence people!" I enjoyed the book though, it was honest and generally tried to make you a better person. This seems really gross, and reminds me of this short Sci-Fi film: https://vimeo.com/46304267 https://vimeo.com/46304267
notahacker 11y ago
Whilst I'm sure the underlying technology has amazing potential, the Moodies app sounds almost like it was designed for the type of scenario a satirist might dream up. Person on first date glances at their phone every thirty seconds and wonders why the app seems to be implying the conversation is going downhill...
- wanderfowl 11y ago
  I do speech analysis for a living, and automated emotion detection from speech is fantastically hard. I'm sure Moodies (and their parent company) is frantically dumping money into it, but it's likely an AI-Complete problem to get beyond the absolute simplest of metrics. No shock that it failed here.
crusso 11y ago
How much of the benefit of Crystal was due to just having a positive game plan for dealing with people that bolstered the author's confidence. The comments from Crystal reminded me of horoscopes. They could be correct about lots of different people or perhaps be correct at certain times for most people. Feeling like you know how to deal with people in an interview can be a majority of the challenge.
facepalm 11y ago
Crystal sounds impressive, then again underlying they might just have "universal personality descriptions" that fit everyone - like the astrological star signs.
binarymax 11y ago
So I took a dive and signed up for Crystal, then did a vanity search. I have to say I'm impressed with the analysis: "Max prioritizes achievement, pursues goals aggressively and methodically, and doesn't like when someone makes a decision on his behalf." That last one really does piss me off. The rest of the analysis is quite good as well. Basically I like it when people get to the point. It possibly gleaned that from my short writing style - I don't carry on, and I tend to write short emails and posts. Not sure what I'll be using this for in general now that I am a subscriber, but next time I need to write an ice-breaker I think it would come in handy. --EDIT-- It just occurred to me that this may be of the horoscope variety, where analysis is on the safe side and can apply to almost anyone. I may have been fooled!
- moonchrome 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
- Intermernet 11y ago
  "Stay positive and radiant today, Max. This is a great day for you to take control. Connect with others on group projects and feel free to offer creative input. Let the artist within take the spotlight, and cultivate this talent in any way you can. Take the time to engage in long conversations with people regarding recent events. You have a great deal to share." Paraphrased from http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/free-daily-horoscope-leo.html http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/free-daily-horoscope-leo.h... I'd say your edit sums it up nicely.
- kaffeemitsahne 11y ago
  If it would say "John really likes when someone makes decisions on his behalf", you think John would say "yeah, I love that!" :P
  - midnightmonster 11y ago
    That's really not so weird. In taste decisions (order a drink for me, decide what movie we're going to watch) I'm often glad to get outside my own head and try whatever you're into. In practical but short term or roughly equivalent consumer matters (which hotel are we booking, which rental car) I'm often happy not to have had to expend any executive function in choosing.
hurin 11y ago
> Theoretically, it can guide operators to course-correct during a call to win over an angry customer It's more like I feel like I have to get heated during every customer service call I might make now-a-days (at least when it comes to big companies) since calmly and rationally explaining your problem seems to give much worse results and waste much more of your own time.
jameshart 11y ago
"Crystal has just 64 personality types, and humans rarely fit so neatly into any given box. But when I sent a dozen or so friends and family members their Crystal profiles, most of them were creeped out by how accurate they were" That's not a good confirmation. Astrologers have been creeping people out by arbitrarily assigning them to one of just twelve personality types for centuries, so this seems hardly surprising. The Forer Effect is named after a study where people were all given the same 'personality profile' and yet they rated it as accurate.
- scoot 11y ago
  Agreed. What might have been more informative would be to have instead sent them each other's profiles (or all the same profile) and see if they rated them as accurately when applied to themselves.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Not to step on jameshart's toes, but isn't that exactly the business model of astrology, using astronomical positions as a poor pseudorandom number generator to shuffle the profiles? They seem to do pretty well at convincing people not indoctrinated to make fun of them.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Best proof of this I ever saw was when they did a test with 20 students. Each of them got their own personal horoscope made and was asked to read it. Then they where asked how accurate it was 75% thought they were very accurate. Then they were asked to switch their personal horoscope with the person next to them only to realize they had all been given the same horoscope.
  - nerfhammer 11y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
jccalhoun 11y ago
I'm using noscript and when I went to the page I had the placeholder for a javascript element. I allowed it and it was a header image. Curious, I inspected the element and found they were converting the gif to video which looped. It looks like Fusion have developed a wordpress plugin called gif2html5 to do this: https://github.com/fusioneng/gif2html5-plugin https://github.com/fusioneng/gif2html5-plugin I am wondering why they would do this. I'm not a developer so is there any reason why they would rather play a video instead of a gif (when the source material is a gif to start with)? It doesn't really seem necessary to me but I'm probably missing something.
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  I know why imgur do it - http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ "The above GIF started at a whopping 50MB. After conversion, the final file is 3.4MB and loads at warp speed. Pretty sweet, right?"
  - jccalhoun 11y ago
    interesting. I don't think fusion serves as many images as imgur but I guess every little bit helps?

71 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

tempodox 11y ago

Just out of curiosity, is this article a payed placement?

zamalek 11y ago
They failed to link to any of the apps, so I don't think so. Which brings me to my question, anyone got a link for Crystal? Edit: https://www.crystalknows.com/ https://www.crystalknows.com/
cooper12 11y ago
At the bottom of the article it says it evolved from a talk she gave, so I would guess not. The article says she used it herself, and she does mention some of the competition, so I'd just guess she's a happy customer.
karlb 11y ago
You can easily spot paid placements; they don't have the “upvote” triangle next to them.
- rrrrob 11y ago
  Perhaps the question was whether the article on fusion.net itself is a paid placement. It certainly reads like it.
- JosephRedfern 11y ago
  I don't think they are paid placements, are they? I always just assumed Job Ads from YC companies got free listings?
  - andyfleming 11y ago
    Yeah, there aren't any paid placements on hacker news that I know of. There are job listings for YC companies that start at/near the top and work their way down over time automatically.
    - karlb 11y ago
      Ah, I assumed that the job listings were paid.
lukethomas 11y ago
I work at Crystal. We didn't pay for this.
- pistoriusp 11y ago
  I wanted to check out Crystal, but oddly enough there's no direct link, do you know if they asked for a sponsorship?
  - lukethomas 11y ago
    We're a 4 person company. They definitely didn't ask us to sponsor it (or I would have heard about it).
    - wingerlang 11y ago
      Hey, please don't have a green huge "try now" button and then put me on a page where I have to request an invite, after a queue nontheless.
    - rorykoehler 11y ago
      Hey Luke, Just some points that may help your UX process. I don't want to share on twitter before I know what it is. What if I find out your product is terrible (obviously I'm hoping it's not or I wouldn't have bothered signing up for an invite)? If you're going to get people to request an invite put it as the text on the signup button rather than leading on with false advertising. Chances are I won't checkout your product now that you've made me wait. I'l get an email but it will be one of tens or even hundreds and I'll skip over it as I'm in my inbox to do something else and it will soon be forgotten. Rory
      - lukethomas 11y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. Will change. Email luke [at] crystalknows.com w/ the email you signed up with and I'll approve the request.

jfaucett 11y ago

"Us+ creator Lauren McCarthy, an artist and programmer at New York University, told me that the tension her technology creates was part of her intent" what?? So the intent was to create an app that frustrates people and shows them "that there are things the computer can’t do as well as a human". We have this experience I'd argue the majority of time with computers anyway, the whole point is breaking down that barrier. So if her statements are not a joke its just bad software design. Otherwise, the concept of realtime communication aid seems ridiculous IMO. Do we really need a software buffer between us and another human in order to communicate better? I still prefer talking to people on the phone as compared to chat, and face-to-face over the phone, I'd assert you always loose information once you add buffers between two communicating parties.

jschwartzi 11y ago
It sounds like the intent with Us+ was to be performance art. In other words, if it's baffling or strange and it makes you reconsider how you think about something, it worked.
- tingol 11y ago
  Sounds more like damage control to me. Something fails -> "That was my intent all along!"
- allencoin 11y ago
  I think it fits in well with a lot of her other projects, which are seemingly obviously jokey: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/ http://lauren-mccarthy.com/ This one in particular: http://lauren-mccarthy.com/goodbye/ http://lauren-mccarthy.com/goodbye/ >This past fall I left Boston, after spending the past 5 years there. To deal with the emotionally and logistically overwhelming task of giving a goodbye hug to all of the acquaintances and friends I have accumulated over this time, I designed the Hands-Free-Auto-OK/GOOD/GREAT-BYE! Machine.
- msutherl 11y ago
  Yup, Lauren McCarthy is an artist.

personjerry 11y ago

I've spent a lot of time reading about how to improve myself socially, and the gist of it is this: be honest. If you give a false compliment, people can tell. If you aren't paying attention, people can tell. Even more importantly, YOU can tell. Therefore it's more important to change your attitude to be a receptive, open minded, friendly one. In my opinion, this Crystal app seems to cheat the system. However, if you merely change your behavior to suit people's personalities, you lack a personality yourself, and you'll find it start to haunt you, as other people, no matter how bad they may be at subconsciously picking up signals, will likely catch on to your insincerity over time.

venomsnake 11y ago
A great thing that I mastered is when I lie to believe myself. I know it is a lie, but i also know it is truth. Helps a lot.
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Eh. I had a girlfriend like that. We're no longer friends because we'd end up with exchanges like this: Me: Man, I miss camping. I once went to... Her: I love camping! We should go sometime! There's this place... Couple months later Me: Hey, it's getting into fall and the weather's great. We've both got a couple long weekends coming up. Want to go camping on one of them? Her: I hate camping. Me: ... (this is just a sample, the same thing happened on several, far more serious, issues that couples face) Seriously, insincerity and dishonesty, even if you have yourself convinced of your lies in that moment, really fucking sucks.
lukethomas 11y ago
You present good points. Our goal at Crystal isn't to game the system when communicating with others, but to help you be more aware of these personality differences (and show them at the right time with tools). For example, my dad is extremely task oriented and logical. I'm the exact opposite. When I listen to him talk about something for an hour in extreme detail, understanding his personality helps me be a little more empathetic, as I know it's naturally something he's going to do.

pistoriusp 11y ago

A real time "how to win friends and influence people!" I enjoyed the book though, it was honest and generally tried to make you a better person. This seems really gross, and reminds me of this short Sci-Fi film: https://vimeo.com/46304267 https://vimeo.com/46304267

notahacker 11y ago

Whilst I'm sure the underlying technology has amazing potential, the Moodies app sounds almost like it was designed for the type of scenario a satirist might dream up. Person on first date glances at their phone every thirty seconds and wonders why the app seems to be implying the conversation is going downhill...

wanderfowl 11y ago
I do speech analysis for a living, and automated emotion detection from speech is fantastically hard. I'm sure Moodies (and their parent company) is frantically dumping money into it, but it's likely an AI-Complete problem to get beyond the absolute simplest of metrics. No shock that it failed here.

crusso 11y ago

How much of the benefit of Crystal was due to just having a positive game plan for dealing with people that bolstered the author's confidence. The comments from Crystal reminded me of horoscopes. They could be correct about lots of different people or perhaps be correct at certain times for most people. Feeling like you know how to deal with people in an interview can be a majority of the challenge.

facepalm 11y ago

Crystal sounds impressive, then again underlying they might just have "universal personality descriptions" that fit everyone - like the astrological star signs.

binarymax 11y ago

So I took a dive and signed up for Crystal, then did a vanity search. I have to say I'm impressed with the analysis: "Max prioritizes achievement, pursues goals aggressively and methodically, and doesn't like when someone makes a decision on his behalf." That last one really does piss me off. The rest of the analysis is quite good as well. Basically I like it when people get to the point. It possibly gleaned that from my short writing style - I don't carry on, and I tend to write short emails and posts. Not sure what I'll be using this for in general now that I am a subscriber, but next time I need to write an ice-breaker I think it would come in handy. --EDIT-- It just occurred to me that this may be of the horoscope variety, where analysis is on the safe side and can apply to almost anyone. I may have been fooled!

moonchrome 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
Intermernet 11y ago
"Stay positive and radiant today, Max. This is a great day for you to take control. Connect with others on group projects and feel free to offer creative input. Let the artist within take the spotlight, and cultivate this talent in any way you can. Take the time to engage in long conversations with people regarding recent events. You have a great deal to share." Paraphrased from http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/free-daily-horoscope-leo.html http://my.horoscope.com/astrology/free-daily-horoscope-leo.h... I'd say your edit sums it up nicely.
kaffeemitsahne 11y ago
If it would say "John really likes when someone makes decisions on his behalf", you think John would say "yeah, I love that!" :P
- midnightmonster 11y ago
  That's really not so weird. In taste decisions (order a drink for me, decide what movie we're going to watch) I'm often glad to get outside my own head and try whatever you're into. In practical but short term or roughly equivalent consumer matters (which hotel are we booking, which rental car) I'm often happy not to have had to expend any executive function in choosing.

hurin 11y ago

> Theoretically, it can guide operators to course-correct during a call to win over an angry customer It's more like I feel like I have to get heated during every customer service call I might make now-a-days (at least when it comes to big companies) since calmly and rationally explaining your problem seems to give much worse results and waste much more of your own time.

jameshart 11y ago

"Crystal has just 64 personality types, and humans rarely fit so neatly into any given box. But when I sent a dozen or so friends and family members their Crystal profiles, most of them were creeped out by how accurate they were" That's not a good confirmation. Astrologers have been creeping people out by arbitrarily assigning them to one of just twelve personality types for centuries, so this seems hardly surprising. The Forer Effect is named after a study where people were all given the same 'personality profile' and yet they rated it as accurate.

scoot 11y ago
Agreed. What might have been more informative would be to have instead sent them each other's profiles (or all the same profile) and see if they rated them as accurately when applied to themselves.
- VLM 11y ago
  Not to step on jameshart's toes, but isn't that exactly the business model of astrology, using astronomical positions as a poor pseudorandom number generator to shuffle the profiles? They seem to do pretty well at convincing people not indoctrinated to make fun of them.
ThomPete 11y ago
Best proof of this I ever saw was when they did a test with 20 students. Each of them got their own personal horoscope made and was asked to read it. Then they where asked how accurate it was 75% thought they were very accurate. Then they were asked to switch their personal horoscope with the person next to them only to realize they had all been given the same horoscope.
- nerfhammer 11y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si2HoscBLIw
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jccalhoun 11y ago

I'm using noscript and when I went to the page I had the placeholder for a javascript element. I allowed it and it was a header image. Curious, I inspected the element and found they were converting the gif to video which looped. It looks like Fusion have developed a wordpress plugin called gif2html5 to do this: https://github.com/fusioneng/gif2html5-plugin https://github.com/fusioneng/gif2html5-plugin I am wondering why they would do this. I'm not a developer so is there any reason why they would rather play a video instead of a gif (when the source material is a gif to start with)? It doesn't really seem necessary to me but I'm probably missing something.

zimpenfish 11y ago
I know why imgur do it - http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ "The above GIF started at a whopping 50MB. After conversion, the final file is 3.4MB and loads at warp speed. Pretty sweet, right?"
- jccalhoun 11y ago
  interesting. I don't think fusion serves as many images as imgur but I guess every little bit helps?