3 ms·

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

by 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.)

by jmtame 14y ago

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.)