15 ms·

This seems like a great idea, since people who are into BitCoin are likely to use online dating services.

by lbarrow 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jmtame 14y ago
Honestly, I would be surprised if more than 1% of OkCupid's user base switched to BitCoin. Back in the 90s, the nerds dominated online dating. Same story with the Bulletin Board Systems of the 70s (The Matchmaker) and the punch cards at Stanford in the 60s (Happy Families Planning Services, used on the IBM 650) for the purposes of online dating. Today, it's much more pervasive with 75% of singles in the U.S. having tried online dating. Most of the women I've talked to on OkCupid are not technical, and when I setup a fake account to see what types of messages girls would receive, none of the people who initiated contact were hackers. I still don't think the mainstream understands what BitCoin is, or why it's valuable. They hear things like "anonymous" and then wonder what they'd need that for, not seeing that the earliest users of BitCoin were hobbyists, hackers, and Silk Road members. If anything, hopefully this will push people to become BitCoin users, assuming the sign up process is easy enough and the price difference is enough to make them switch.
- sneak 14y ago
  Don't overthink the joke.
  - jmtame 14y ago
    I must have missed the sarcasm. Plenty of people mistakenly believe that online dating is still used mainly by nerds. It was true at one point in time. Edit: I find it strange that you deleted your previous comment after you wrote a reply to my comment, which said you've enjoyed using OkCupid for 8 years. That comment was part of what prompted me to respond initially, and why I didn't think it was sarcasm.
    - jobigoud 14y ago
      Original comment doesn't state that online dating is used mainly by nerds, but that nerds mainly use online dating.
      - jmtame 14y ago
        It's so pervasive now that you could make the statement true by replacing nerd with any other group of people. The only exception would be people in relationships or marriages. Unfortunately, even that is becoming questionable: look at Ashley Madison and its nearly 2 million uniques per month.
        rdl 14y ago
        I wish there were a dating site mainly for nerds, really. I don't know how you could maintain that.
        jmtame 14y ago
        It has the classic chicken and egg problem that you'll face when you start any type of online dating startup. Niche dating startups are even harder to start because you have an implicit filter to start off with, and the problem with all filters is they reduce the pool. If you have a small pool of users to choose from, you'll have an even smaller pool of users with other filters applied. So you can search for keywords on OkCupid, such as "nerd" or "programmer." You won't find many results, but you can try. The other way to go about it is working exclusively with software companies, such as Google or Facebook (similar to how Facebook required an .edu address to join, you must check for a company e-mail to join). You still have a chicken and egg problem though, so you must solve that in order to make the niche nerd dating startup work.
        rdl 14y ago
        It would be interesting to have a site (dating or HR or commentary) where you could have specific facts/tags in a profile and some serious checking of those specific facts. e.g. for a dating site you'd have "less than 300 pounds", "graduated from Stanford", "not married", "hivfree" for an HR site you'd have "not a CISSP", "graduated from Caltech in 2000 in CS", "US Citizen", "worked for Google 2000-2004", etc. Individual tags would be searchable, high confidence, and ideally structured (so "College Graduate", "CS", "MIT", "MIT SB", "MIT 2000", "MIT SB 2000", "MIT SB 6 2000" would all be known. (The stupid way LinkedIn does Endorsements isn't it, I think. What my friends click just to get a stupid box to go away isn't high assurance information. I'm not sure if crowdsourcing has any place, but the ideal is to get actual validation from the data owner.)
krichman 14y ago
I thought this was funny, but downvoted because it was also rude and unproductive. I wish we could talk about Bitcoin without saying either 1. that its expected value is negative infinity dollars and pyramid tulip 2. that its expected value is infinity dollars and oppression fiat. I think both sides are well aware of the counter arguments. But even though that will never happen, I think we can stop short of allowing ad hominems to be acceptable posts.
- wladimir 14y ago
  Yes. You'd expect a community such as hacker news to be above the usual nerd-shaming.
  - tachion 14y ago
    You'd expect that from any community, but unfortunately, as much as you'd expect that, that much its not the case, regardless of the community type. Simply put, people are everywhere.
  - sneak 14y ago
    It's called tongue-in-cheek self-referential humor. Naturally, you'd expect a community such as Hacker News to be below such subtlety. :D PS: I am a fat nerd wearing a black t-shirt, love bitcoin, and have used OKCupid to get dozens of successful dates over the last 8 years.
    - wladimir 14y ago
      Fair enough. I agree it can be funny, just somewhat immature. The line between bullying and "self referential in-group humor" is pretty thin sometimes. I guess it's a bit like sexist jokes, in that some things that are meant as funny can be interpreted wrongly and hurt.
      - hnriot 14y ago
        Seriously? You're getting bent out of shape over this??? Despite being very likely true, the statement was funny and targeting just the right people for it to be funny.
vidarh 14y ago
OkCupid is "special". It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. It might not get a massive amount of use, but it will get them some PR (well, it already has) within communities that are already more likely to sign up with them than the mainstream that are more appreciative in general of stuff like this even if they won't use it.
- derefr 14y ago
  > It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. I really wish they would start OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/) back up; it was really fascinating reading, the kind of analysis that's impossible to come by unless you have free-rein map-reduce access to some company's Big Data. Given their userbase I'm surprised they don't think it was a bigger PR source; I think every article from it has been hot on HN.
  - jmtame 14y ago
    Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace. Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
    - rdl 14y ago
      The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among <25 year olds online dating was still something nerdy losers did (or old people who were desperate to get married, using sites like eHarm and Match). So, it brought a lot of girls. I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.

This seems like a great idea, since people who are into BitCoin are likely to use online dating services.

by lbarrow 14y ago

This seems like a great idea, since people who are into BitCoin are likely to use online dating services.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jmtame 14y ago

Honestly, I would be surprised if more than 1% of OkCupid's user base switched to BitCoin. Back in the 90s, the nerds dominated online dating. Same story with the Bulletin Board Systems of the 70s (The Matchmaker) and the punch cards at Stanford in the 60s (Happy Families Planning Services, used on the IBM 650) for the purposes of online dating. Today, it's much more pervasive with 75% of singles in the U.S. having tried online dating. Most of the women I've talked to on OkCupid are not technical, and when I setup a fake account to see what types of messages girls would receive, none of the people who initiated contact were hackers. I still don't think the mainstream understands what BitCoin is, or why it's valuable. They hear things like "anonymous" and then wonder what they'd need that for, not seeing that the earliest users of BitCoin were hobbyists, hackers, and Silk Road members. If anything, hopefully this will push people to become BitCoin users, assuming the sign up process is easy enough and the price difference is enough to make them switch.

sneak 14y ago
Don't overthink the joke.
- jmtame 14y ago
  I must have missed the sarcasm. Plenty of people mistakenly believe that online dating is still used mainly by nerds. It was true at one point in time. Edit: I find it strange that you deleted your previous comment after you wrote a reply to my comment, which said you've enjoyed using OkCupid for 8 years. That comment was part of what prompted me to respond initially, and why I didn't think it was sarcasm.
  - jobigoud 14y ago
    Original comment doesn't state that online dating is used mainly by nerds, but that nerds mainly use online dating.
    - jmtame 14y ago
      It's so pervasive now that you could make the statement true by replacing nerd with any other group of people. The only exception would be people in relationships or marriages. Unfortunately, even that is becoming questionable: look at Ashley Madison and its nearly 2 million uniques per month.
      - rdl 14y ago
        I wish there were a dating site mainly for nerds, really. I don't know how you could maintain that.
        jmtame 14y ago
        It has the classic chicken and egg problem that you'll face when you start any type of online dating startup. Niche dating startups are even harder to start because you have an implicit filter to start off with, and the problem with all filters is they reduce the pool. If you have a small pool of users to choose from, you'll have an even smaller pool of users with other filters applied. So you can search for keywords on OkCupid, such as "nerd" or "programmer." You won't find many results, but you can try. The other way to go about it is working exclusively with software companies, such as Google or Facebook (similar to how Facebook required an .edu address to join, you must check for a company e-mail to join). You still have a chicken and egg problem though, so you must solve that in order to make the niche nerd dating startup work.
        rdl 14y ago
        It would be interesting to have a site (dating or HR or commentary) where you could have specific facts/tags in a profile and some serious checking of those specific facts. e.g. for a dating site you'd have "less than 300 pounds", "graduated from Stanford", "not married", "hivfree" for an HR site you'd have "not a CISSP", "graduated from Caltech in 2000 in CS", "US Citizen", "worked for Google 2000-2004", etc. Individual tags would be searchable, high confidence, and ideally structured (so "College Graduate", "CS", "MIT", "MIT SB", "MIT 2000", "MIT SB 2000", "MIT SB 6 2000" would all be known. (The stupid way LinkedIn does Endorsements isn't it, I think. What my friends click just to get a stupid box to go away isn't high assurance information. I'm not sure if crowdsourcing has any place, but the ideal is to get actual validation from the data owner.)

krichman 14y ago

I thought this was funny, but downvoted because it was also rude and unproductive. I wish we could talk about Bitcoin without saying either 1. that its expected value is negative infinity dollars and pyramid tulip 2. that its expected value is infinity dollars and oppression fiat. I think both sides are well aware of the counter arguments. But even though that will never happen, I think we can stop short of allowing ad hominems to be acceptable posts.

wladimir 14y ago
Yes. You'd expect a community such as hacker news to be above the usual nerd-shaming.
- tachion 14y ago
  You'd expect that from any community, but unfortunately, as much as you'd expect that, that much its not the case, regardless of the community type. Simply put, people are everywhere.
- sneak 14y ago
  It's called tongue-in-cheek self-referential humor. Naturally, you'd expect a community such as Hacker News to be below such subtlety. :D PS: I am a fat nerd wearing a black t-shirt, love bitcoin, and have used OKCupid to get dozens of successful dates over the last 8 years.
  - wladimir 14y ago
    Fair enough. I agree it can be funny, just somewhat immature. The line between bullying and "self referential in-group humor" is pretty thin sometimes. I guess it's a bit like sexist jokes, in that some things that are meant as funny can be interpreted wrongly and hurt.
    - hnriot 14y ago
      Seriously? You're getting bent out of shape over this??? Despite being very likely true, the statement was funny and targeting just the right people for it to be funny.

vidarh 14y ago

OkCupid is "special". It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. It might not get a massive amount of use, but it will get them some PR (well, it already has) within communities that are already more likely to sign up with them than the mainstream that are more appreciative in general of stuff like this even if they won't use it.

derefr 14y ago
> It has an extremely geeky userbase compared to most dating services. Not necessarily overly technical, but certainly geeky. I really wish they would start OkTrends (http://blog.okcupid.com/ http://blog.okcupid.com/) back up; it was really fascinating reading, the kind of analysis that's impossible to come by unless you have free-rein map-reduce access to some company's Big Data. Given their userbase I'm surprised they don't think it was a bigger PR source; I think every article from it has been hot on HN.
- jmtame 14y ago
  Funny things happen when companies get acquired. They stop acting like a startup and they start acting like large, slow companies, which is unfortunate. That blog was single-handedly what drove their traffic more than anything. Everyone I talk to said they found out about OkCupid through that blog. OkCupid knows this. The founders said they almost quit and that blog was their saving grace. Is it any coincidence that the blog stopped around the same time they were acquired? It served its purpose and ran its course. They're done innovating in the space. We'll have to let startups lead the next wave of innovation in online dating.
  - rdl 14y ago
    The quizzes, posted on livejournal, were what actually drove their early users. The blog came way later. Quizzes are non-dating/non-sexual, back in the early 2000s where among <25 year olds online dating was still something nerdy losers did (or old people who were desperate to get married, using sites like eHarm and Match). So, it brought a lot of girls. I honestly had no idea OKC was actually a dating site until I'd had an account for a year or two. I just had it to answer quizzes.