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.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to write off the discussion of the speculative bubble nature of bitcoin as "just one side of a polarized debate" is, to my mind, grossly immature. Speculation and runaway inflation are things that are commonplace with currencies and investments, and for a sound currency there very much needs to be a robust and thorough debate on those topics. It does need to be discussed to death. If the argument of bitcoin proponents on the matter is "shut up" then you're doing a disservice to bitcoin.
While there's some deflation built in as keys get lost and the economy grows, periods of inflation are still possible as bitcoin billionaires start going on shopping sprees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
This is something that needs to exist, and I'm very excited about it. We may build this at CupidWithFriends. I've thought about tags for a while now, the problem is you don't have an identity layer to actually verify whether the tags are true or not. Think LinkedIn endorsements, but for dating. Lying is a huge problem, 81% of all online dating users will lie about some aspect of themselves.
I wrote this comment before I made it to the end of what you wrote about LinkedIn endorsements. The implementation is still up for debate, but the idea is compelling at the very least. I do think that LinkedIn endorsements are worthless because I haven't yet used them, but that idea distills a person down to their core. We're basically trying to solve that problem through the single question that gets more responses than any other on our site: "describe your friend using only three words."
I'm not really in the dating market at all, but if you could figure out how to do this for HR or social/hacking/friendship/etc., I'd be really interested.
Being able to find a set of N people who are into ancap/lib ideas if not politics, blinded tokens, HSMs, and are within a 100 mi radius of X would be interesting.
Who is going to post on a dating site that their friend is really fatter than they're claiming? I imagine most people would consider that unthinkably mean.
Yeah, I'd be afraid of the crowdsourced "endorsements" turning into totally bland stuff as a result. What I specifically want are "facts", i.e. things which are objective and can be verified/falsified. No one will post those about their friends if they are anything but positive.
So the natural consequence is assuming the absence of a verified fact for "is under 300 pounds" is "is over 300 pounds" with equally high certainty, if you have a well structured system which covers everything.
I don't think the overweight tag would be interesting, but just figuring out the basics of a person without having to read through a long essay. School, occupation, personality traits as described by friends, etc.
My theory is the problem of people lying on their profiles will go away when their friends are using the site with them.
Aside from the non-heterosexual market being large, there are two other factors:
1) JDate allegedly has nots of non-Jewish people on the site who are looking to date Jews. I mean, it makes sense -- it's a great place to find them :) Maybe there are non-geeks who are looking to date geeks.
2) My definition of nerd/geek goes beyond programming. A professional (in law or medicine or engineering) is probably way more interesting than a .NET corporate programmer. I could see "career/lifestyle tags" working for this.
Arguably it wouldn't even need to be limited to geeky activities, but general interest interests as well. Maybe someone really likes backpackers, or people who have completed Bioshock Infinite, or corporate M&A lawyers, or people from Surrey. Having verified tags for those things would make searches more interesting.
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.
> 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/) 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.
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.
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.
Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well.
I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.
I think quizzes/etc. on LJ got them early users, but then there was a big decline in LJ around the time MySpace got popular (2005-2006?), which probably hurt OKC. FB becoming popular essentially killed it. The blog, IIRC, was around that time -- so for a while the "dating" site had a bunch of accounts of people who were originally there for quizzes, many of whom were no longer active.
> 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.
First, I used to work on the OkTrends team, but I'm speaking for myself, not on behalf of OkCupid.
OkTrends didn't shut down after the acquisition - in fact, they made two posts afterwards (one several months afterwards). The fact that they haven't posted much recently has more to do with the available staff.
It takes a LOT of work to make those posts. The research for "The Real Stuff White People Like" took me a month and a half of working full-time on that and not much else. (Remember that it's "easy" to solve a problem when you define the problem at the start, but with OkTrends, we weren't always starting with a specific problem - each post began as one idea, and then went through multiple iterations before we hit on the "real" question we wanted to answer.).
Around that time, there were three of us working on OkTrends, two of us full-time and the third more-or-less full-time. Once the two full-timers left (for reasons unrelated to the acquisition - I went back to school to finish my degree), you can see why it became much harder to work on those posts.
And before someone says that they could just hire someone else - yes, perhaps, but that's harder than it looks. Data scientist positions are already one of the most difficult to hire for (from a startup perspective), and OkCupid also sets the bar incredibly high. To date, I think that was probably my most intensive and comprehensive interview experience.
Trust me, I give the OkCupid folks crap about this every time I see them (particularly my old boss), because I'd love to see more posts too. But don't think the timing of the hiatus has anything to do with the acquisition; it's truly coincidental. Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks for the detailed comment. It's interesting to hear from someone who worked on the OkTrends team. I'm still unconvinced that the reason they didn't start OKT back up is because they can't find some people like Chris Rudder or Chris Coyne to help. I found this excerpt interesting from a Quora article:
We had Christian Rudder writing the blog. Yes, he studied math at Harvard, but the math on OkTrends was high school level. And with a lot of statistical hand-waving and over-simplification. His posts were great because he's such an amazing writer, not because he's awesome at math. (He's certainly the best writer I know.)
Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Can you elaborate on this? What innovation have they done since they were acquired by IAC, discounting Crazy Blind Date? I've used better mobile apps for dating than CBD, that app didn't work for me.
To be fair, from what I recall while I was there, the blog was also instead of paying for a PR firm and having Sam going on morning talk shows that didn't really hit our demographic or help our growth much. So once we got bought the need for it did decrease a lot.
I heard there is a book containing a lot of similar information coming out though.
Perhaps, instead of bringing someone in to crunch their numbers and look for interesting correlations--they might rather be willing to license their data out to some think-tank or newspaper/magazine or something, who would do that analysis for its own (readership's) sake?
There was a site, I can't find it now, that had the anonymized question data for sale but I think it was $20K or in that ballpark. Also I think they do license the data to universities upon request. E.g. siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/shared/Piskorski-SIEPR.pdf
Comments
This seems like a great idea, since people who are into BitCoin are likely to use online dating services.
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.
Is "uses an online dating service" still an ad hominem? It seems to be a pretty widely used way to meet people these days.
In this case it was obviously intended to be a criticism of Bitcoin enthusiasts. I personally don't see a problem with online dating.
Yes. You'd expect a community such as hacker news to be above the usual nerd-shaming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to write off the discussion of the speculative bubble nature of bitcoin as "just one side of a polarized debate" is, to my mind, grossly immature. Speculation and runaway inflation are things that are commonplace with currencies and investments, and for a sound currency there very much needs to be a robust and thorough debate on those topics. It does need to be discussed to death. If the argument of bitcoin proponents on the matter is "shut up" then you're doing a disservice to bitcoin.
I think that we can all be pretty certain that inflation is not, and will never be, a problem with bit coin.
While there's some deflation built in as keys get lost and the economy grows, periods of inflation are still possible as bitcoin billionaires start going on shopping sprees.
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.
Don't overthink the joke.
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.
Original comment doesn't state that online dating is used mainly by nerds, but that nerds mainly use online dating.
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.
I wish there were a dating site mainly for nerds, really. I don't know how you could maintain that.
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.
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.)
This is something that needs to exist, and I'm very excited about it. We may build this at CupidWithFriends. I've thought about tags for a while now, the problem is you don't have an identity layer to actually verify whether the tags are true or not. Think LinkedIn endorsements, but for dating. Lying is a huge problem, 81% of all online dating users will lie about some aspect of themselves.
I wrote this comment before I made it to the end of what you wrote about LinkedIn endorsements. The implementation is still up for debate, but the idea is compelling at the very least. I do think that LinkedIn endorsements are worthless because I haven't yet used them, but that idea distills a person down to their core. We're basically trying to solve that problem through the single question that gets more responses than any other on our site: "describe your friend using only three words."
I'm not really in the dating market at all, but if you could figure out how to do this for HR or social/hacking/friendship/etc., I'd be really interested.
Being able to find a set of N people who are into ancap/lib ideas if not politics, blinded tokens, HSMs, and are within a 100 mi radius of X would be interesting.
Who is going to post on a dating site that their friend is really fatter than they're claiming? I imagine most people would consider that unthinkably mean.
Yeah, I'd be afraid of the crowdsourced "endorsements" turning into totally bland stuff as a result. What I specifically want are "facts", i.e. things which are objective and can be verified/falsified. No one will post those about their friends if they are anything but positive.
So the natural consequence is assuming the absence of a verified fact for "is under 300 pounds" is "is over 300 pounds" with equally high certainty, if you have a well structured system which covers everything.
I don't think the overweight tag would be interesting, but just figuring out the basics of a person without having to read through a long essay. School, occupation, personality traits as described by friends, etc.
My theory is the problem of people lying on their profiles will go away when their friends are using the site with them.
The gender imbalance would be massive, as it used to be.
Not a problem for 5-10% (or more?) of the potential audience.
gk2gk is not a huge success because straight males usually prefer females, even if they are not geeks.
Your potential audience is not tiny but it isn't massive either.
Aside from the non-heterosexual market being large, there are two other factors:
1) JDate allegedly has nots of non-Jewish people on the site who are looking to date Jews. I mean, it makes sense -- it's a great place to find them :) Maybe there are non-geeks who are looking to date geeks.
2) My definition of nerd/geek goes beyond programming. A professional (in law or medicine or engineering) is probably way more interesting than a .NET corporate programmer. I could see "career/lifestyle tags" working for this.
Arguably it wouldn't even need to be limited to geeky activities, but general interest interests as well. Maybe someone really likes backpackers, or people who have completed Bioshock Infinite, or corporate M&A lawyers, or people from Surrey. Having verified tags for those things would make searches more interesting.
It's called World of Warcraft.
gk2gk.com
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.
> 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/) 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.
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.
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.
Very interesting. I recall watching an interview with Sam Yagan and he said they were about to give up, but that blog was the one thing that saved the company. The guy writing the blogs had a math background, and it worked tremendously well.
I wish I had that link, but I'll have to look it up.
I think quizzes/etc. on LJ got them early users, but then there was a big decline in LJ around the time MySpace got popular (2005-2006?), which probably hurt OKC. FB becoming popular essentially killed it. The blog, IIRC, was around that time -- so for a while the "dating" site had a bunch of accounts of people who were originally there for quizzes, many of whom were no longer active.
> 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.
First, I used to work on the OkTrends team, but I'm speaking for myself, not on behalf of OkCupid.
OkTrends didn't shut down after the acquisition - in fact, they made two posts afterwards (one several months afterwards). The fact that they haven't posted much recently has more to do with the available staff.
It takes a LOT of work to make those posts. The research for "The Real Stuff White People Like" took me a month and a half of working full-time on that and not much else. (Remember that it's "easy" to solve a problem when you define the problem at the start, but with OkTrends, we weren't always starting with a specific problem - each post began as one idea, and then went through multiple iterations before we hit on the "real" question we wanted to answer.).
Around that time, there were three of us working on OkTrends, two of us full-time and the third more-or-less full-time. Once the two full-timers left (for reasons unrelated to the acquisition - I went back to school to finish my degree), you can see why it became much harder to work on those posts.
And before someone says that they could just hire someone else - yes, perhaps, but that's harder than it looks. Data scientist positions are already one of the most difficult to hire for (from a startup perspective), and OkCupid also sets the bar incredibly high. To date, I think that was probably my most intensive and comprehensive interview experience.
Trust me, I give the OkCupid folks crap about this every time I see them (particularly my old boss), because I'd love to see more posts too. But don't think the timing of the hiatus has anything to do with the acquisition; it's truly coincidental. Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks for the detailed comment. It's interesting to hear from someone who worked on the OkTrends team. I'm still unconvinced that the reason they didn't start OKT back up is because they can't find some people like Chris Rudder or Chris Coyne to help. I found this excerpt interesting from a Quora article:
We had Christian Rudder writing the blog. Yes, he studied math at Harvard, but the math on OkTrends was high school level. And with a lot of statistical hand-waving and over-simplification. His posts were great because he's such an amazing writer, not because he's awesome at math. (He's certainly the best writer I know.)
Many startups stop innovating after they're acquired - OkCupid is definitely not one of them.
Can you elaborate on this? What innovation have they done since they were acquired by IAC, discounting Crazy Blind Date? I've used better mobile apps for dating than CBD, that app didn't work for me.
To be fair, from what I recall while I was there, the blog was also instead of paying for a PR firm and having Sam going on morning talk shows that didn't really hit our demographic or help our growth much. So once we got bought the need for it did decrease a lot.
I heard there is a book containing a lot of similar information coming out though.
Perhaps, instead of bringing someone in to crunch their numbers and look for interesting correlations--they might rather be willing to license their data out to some think-tank or newspaper/magazine or something, who would do that analysis for its own (readership's) sake?
There was a site, I can't find it now, that had the anonymized question data for sale but I think it was $20K or in that ballpark. Also I think they do license the data to universities upon request. E.g. siepr.stanford.edu/system/files/shared/Piskorski-SIEPR.pdf