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Ask HN: What is BangWithFriends? Edit: a Facebook app that where you can click on friends you want to sleep with. If they have the app, they are notified. I wo

Ask HN: What is BangWithFriends? Edit: a Facebook app that where you can click on friends you want to sleep with. If they have the app, they are notified. I would think this would be more cool if both of you are only notified if you both signify that you want to sleep with each other. This could also be toned down to just signify romantic interest to get more engagement.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- colkassad 14y ago
  Ah, ok..regarding my Edit above, the article I read about it didn't say that it only notified users when both showed interest.
pawelwentpawel 14y ago
It's a new service that has a mission to connect people, increase natural population growth and make the world more open place.
- mnicole 14y ago
  > increase natural population growth A booty call app seems like a terrible place to promote parenting.
  - mindslight 14y ago
    Why not? Starting from just $85/mo, http://kidswithout.us/ http://kidswithout.us/ will raise them until they're 18.
    - mnicole 14y ago
      I was sadly expecting that to work.
      - prawn 14y ago
        YC14.
fossuser 14y ago
It does work only work based on mutual notifications. I know it's bad form to link to your own website, but I wrote at length about this here: http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/ http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/
- ynniv 14y ago
  I know it's bad form to link to your own website You must be new here...
  - niels_olson 14y ago
    Thank goodness for new people. Without them, old gets old.
- btilly 14y ago
  You are looking at it from the point of view of the user if the system is working as desired. From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth. It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town. Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice. Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form. And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.
  - fossuser 14y ago
    Interesting points, the chicken/egg issue is a real problem and something I think starting with a targeted community (college is the example in the post) would help alleviate. You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who. Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post. The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious. It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.
fatbird 14y ago
The fatal flaw in the model is "I'm going to click on all my friends to see who signals interest in me".
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  Fatal flaw or working as intended?
  - fatbird 14y ago
    The premise of the app is that with a contrived double-blind method, you can turbo past the awkward stage of signalling interest in someone. It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all. In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.
    - xbigdanx 14y ago
      Yeah but if you are clicking on everyone to see who clicks on you, you don't have to pursue anything. If someone clicks on you and you don't want to sleep with them, you wouldn't reach out to them about it, no? So you don't reach out to anyone, waiting for them to reach out to you to express their interest. And now you get to the point where both are waiting forever for the other to make the first move to avoid embarrassment.
      - fatbird 14y ago
        Well, exactly. This is why the app fails in its basic model: it doesn't help you past that awkward first step of signalling interest. Even after getting a mutual thumbs up, you still don't know if there's a real hookup there.
Zimahl 14y ago
BangWithFriends seems like a new implementation of something I've seen a couple times in the last few decades. This is the first time I've seen it on FB. I ran into this years ago in it's email incarnation. I think it was something like you'd get an email that said someone had a crush on you and then you are supposed to put in emails of other people and if there was a match you'd be notified. The problem was you didn't know who sent the email so you'd probably put in the emails of all your female contacts (or vice versa, etc) and then all of them would get emails. Logically it was an email ponzi scheme where if you didn't see the inherent problem from the beginning you probably ended up really confusing a bunch of your friends.
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  My first experience with this concept was in the late nineties called something like Crushmail. Here are some Hacker News threads about similar implementations: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

colkassad 14y ago
Ah, ok..regarding my Edit above, the article I read about it didn't say that it only notified users when both showed interest.

pawelwentpawel 14y ago

It's a new service that has a mission to connect people, increase natural population growth and make the world more open place.

mnicole 14y ago
> increase natural population growth A booty call app seems like a terrible place to promote parenting.
- mindslight 14y ago
  Why not? Starting from just $85/mo, http://kidswithout.us/ http://kidswithout.us/ will raise them until they're 18.
  - mnicole 14y ago
    I was sadly expecting that to work.
    - prawn 14y ago
      YC14.

fossuser 14y ago

It does work only work based on mutual notifications. I know it's bad form to link to your own website, but I wrote at length about this here: http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/ http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/

ynniv 14y ago
I know it's bad form to link to your own website You must be new here...
- niels_olson 14y ago
  Thank goodness for new people. Without them, old gets old.
btilly 14y ago
You are looking at it from the point of view of the user if the system is working as desired. From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth. It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town. Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice. Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form. And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.
- fossuser 14y ago
  Interesting points, the chicken/egg issue is a real problem and something I think starting with a targeted community (college is the example in the post) would help alleviate. You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who. Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post. The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious. It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.

fatbird 14y ago

The fatal flaw in the model is "I'm going to click on all my friends to see who signals interest in me".

SkyMarshal 14y ago
Fatal flaw or working as intended?
- fatbird 14y ago
  The premise of the app is that with a contrived double-blind method, you can turbo past the awkward stage of signalling interest in someone. It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all. In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.
  - xbigdanx 14y ago
    Yeah but if you are clicking on everyone to see who clicks on you, you don't have to pursue anything. If someone clicks on you and you don't want to sleep with them, you wouldn't reach out to them about it, no? So you don't reach out to anyone, waiting for them to reach out to you to express their interest. And now you get to the point where both are waiting forever for the other to make the first move to avoid embarrassment.
    - fatbird 14y ago
      Well, exactly. This is why the app fails in its basic model: it doesn't help you past that awkward first step of signalling interest. Even after getting a mutual thumbs up, you still don't know if there's a real hookup there.

Zimahl 14y ago

BangWithFriends seems like a new implementation of something I've seen a couple times in the last few decades. This is the first time I've seen it on FB. I ran into this years ago in it's email incarnation. I think it was something like you'd get an email that said someone had a crush on you and then you are supposed to put in emails of other people and if there was a match you'd be notified. The problem was you didn't know who sent the email so you'd probably put in the emails of all your female contacts (or vice versa, etc) and then all of them would get emails. Logically it was an email ponzi scheme where if you didn't see the inherent problem from the beginning you probably ended up really confusing a bunch of your friends.

jaredsohn 14y ago
My first experience with this concept was in the late nineties called something like Crushmail. Here are some Hacker News threads about similar implementations: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151