The Lie Hollywood Loves to Tell - <AUTHOR> http://jmtame.posthaven.com/the-lie-hollywood-loves-to-tell/ <comment><USER3> It was creepy the moment it wanted to authorize so much information from Facebook. Got creepier the moment the site asked me to start involving my friends without me knowing whether or not they wanted to be involved. Got super frustrating that my ability to even see how this site worked required me to drag my friends into this mess without their consent.

And from what I can see, there's no way for me to specify which genders I'm actually interested in meeting. (Yes, I know if I make profiles from my friends I can filter the people _I'm_ looking for, but do you give me filters to let people know I'm not straight and therefore not interested in _them_?) If you're not straight, this type of thing is really critical. I'm not interested in messages from men and on OKC, I use the wonderful checkbox that makes it so that straight people can't even see my profile. That checkbox alone plays a big role in turning online dating from a lousy situation into a bearable one. Your writeup makes it sound like you only considered the dating patterns of straight people and your site doesn't appear to even bother to think about anything else. You appear to have mostly made a better dating site for you and people like you without realizing that dating is _complicated_ and a bunch of people involved in a good dating ecosystem aren't going to be you, or anything like you.

I'll stick with OKC. (Which, by the way, I think is mostly great.)

<comment><USER4> So...90% of people, give or take, are straight.

Online dating is a clusterfuck of failure for straight people (ask anyone who's tried it, or the OP.)

Online dating mostly works for gays and lesbians (you say so, I've seen the same from others.)

And this guy is an idiot for trying to cater to the straight dating market? Precisely why?

<comment><USER3> > So...90% of people, give or take, are straight.

And a lot of those straight people may one day get involved with, have been involved with or may find themselves interested in someone who isn't straight. Many of whom are bi (or queer or whatever label) and most of whom do very very much care about being on a site that doesn't just serve straight people since they're open to dating both straight and non-straight folks.

So if a site is inclusive, the straight dating pool should be larger too. Even if you decide the only thing you care about is straight people.

> Online dating is a clusterfuck of failure for straight people (ask anyone > who's tried it, or the OP.)

Funny enough, I can just ask myself, since I did use online dating to date plenty of straight people before coming to my senses.

Also, I have a fair number of straight friends, a lot of them appreciate OKC a lot and use it regularly with good results.

The people I hear complaining about it most often are usually people who are just angry about the fact that they can't get dates... online or offline. It turns out there's a lot of frustrated straight people out there, but there's also just a lot of straight people out there. Assuming that online dating works magically well for gay/lesbian folks but doesn't for straight people seems like a really large leap to make and also seems really untrue from what I've heard. (I've known LGBT folks who haven't found online dating to be that great and I should also note that in general offline dating can be harder for LGBT folks (especially in some parts of the world) than for straight folks and online dating looks pretty good by comparison.)

> And this guy is an idiot for trying to cater to the straight dating market? > Precisely why?

Well first off, I never actually said that. What I did say was that the way the site felt it felt like it was designed with a pretty narrow frame of how dating worked and that narrow frame was likely going to be a problem in a bunch of ways. For me, it doesn't work at all for a bunch of reasons. For others, it'll likely be something else.

Look, if he was making a conscious design choice to only care about straight people, that's a thing you could do in a defensible way and you could probably design something pretty cool. But it didn't feel like a conscious decision, it felt like a decision that was made because someone didn't think through their problem well enough to even realize the things they didn't think about. And that's the real problem.

<comment><USER4> > Assuming that online dating works magically well for gay/lesbian folks but > doesn't for straight people seems like a really large leap to make and also > seems really untrue from what I've heard

Of course it isn't perfect for all of them, but it's a much less dysfunctional market than the straight one. Which means there's less of a business model in catering to gays and lesbians there (doubly true given that they're rare.)

And yes, in theory, straight people can date bi people, but again, by not perfectly serving that bi market you cut off a tiny fraction of your clientele. Screw up the straight market and your site is doomed. Which should he focus on?

> What I did say was that the way the site felt it felt like it was designed > with a pretty narrow frame of how dating worked

Yes, that's called "targeting a particular market."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you're right about a lot of the problems with dating websites - <USER2> wrote about this recently too here (<http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/>).

I remember checking your site out when you posted it and it's nice to see someone trying something actually new, but I feel like this concept doesn't solve the common problems and adds some new ones.

Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?

Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites).

I also think women are even less likely to use it considering your own point about them not wanting to involve their own friends. I would think people would also want to play a role in the selection considering it's a pretty subjective/personal thing.

Definitely awesome to see something new though and hopefully you prove me wrong and it works better than I suspect.

<comment><USER6> _Women will still be over messaged and men are still under messaged. People still ignore profiles in favor of photos - what does this change?_

Aren't you more interested in reading what somebody's friend has to say about them rather than what they're saying about themselves? Also, we have Facebook accounts (100+ friends required to join) which are not easy to replicate and we can rate limit. On OkCupid, the worst that happens is they ban you for spamming, and then you come back under a different username. Sure, girls might recognize the same photos, but you're fundamentally a free radical in the system.

 _Now you need your friends to create a profile for you (granted at least it's not of the essay variety) and you need your friends to try and find people for you? I have a hard time seeing anyone doing that considering it's a relatively boring process with little return (the problem with the current sites)._

It relies on reciprocity, and it's actually fun when you try it out. If you're commenting on your friends' profiles, they'll naturally want to comment on yours. All of the comments on my profile happened not because I asked my friends to do that, but because I started out by commenting on theirs.

With the stigma, it's largely an issue skewed by age. More women in their 30s using dating sites socially, the sites just aren't designed to be social.

<comment><USER5> The facebook reputation barrier is a good idea - should set a bar for the low end of quality.

I see your point about the reciprocity, makes sense and I wouldn't worry about the stigma - if your site catches on the stigma will just die faster.

I'm not sure I'd be more receptive to what a friend has to say about someone, but that's generally because what anyone says doesn't matter when the sent/received message ratio is so bad (which is what I tried to fix with the marking idea).

Cool though - will definitely keep following it to see how it goes.

<comment><USER7> >The facebook reputation barrier is a good idea - should set a bar for the low end of quality.

Wait, are people with lots friend "high quality people" or "low quality people"?

<comment><USER5> I meant quality as a reference to spam and spam like accounts. If you can't easily just create a new account or create multiple accounts then that eliminates those kinds of issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it's my social circle (busy pushing-30 professionals) but I think there is almost zero stigma among my friends over online dating. In fact, less so among women than among men. Men for some reason feel they have to play the bar scene even if they don't like it or aren't good at it, but women feel no such need. Indeed, for a lot of my women friends, online dating offers the very real advantage that it's socially acceptable for women to actively choose in an online context, while in meat space the social convention involves their waiting for the loudest, drunkest guy to come up and hit on them.

<comment><USER9> It's highly geographical. Cities with a dating "scene" are _far_ friendlier towards online dating than otherwise.

From your past posts it looks like you're NYC-based. NYC is _by far_ (IMO) the best place to set up an online dating shop, since this city is by a _very_ long shot the most accepting of online dating in the US.

Disclaimer: I work for a NYC-area online dating shop.

In many other cities, and in many subcultures and scenes, online dating is still very much stigmatized. I can't help but think that author would've gotten a _very_ different perspective if he didn't choose to interview people at a bar in the SF Marina of all places (read: notorious area for meathead jocks and their female counterparts).

<comment><USER10> Not only that, but NYC has more single women than men. Which explains the eagerness of women there to do the choosing, and their openness to new dating methods in general.

Silicon Valley is the opposite. Too many single men, not enough women, inevitably means a sucky online dating experience for guys (unless you're in the very top attractiveness percentiles). I don't think any dating site can fix that, unless it matches Silicon Valley men to New York women or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Here's what I'm getting at: if we were all more social about online dating, it'd suck a lot less. A majority of problems go away with online dating sites when you make it social._

Trying to make this sound cool by using the word "social" doesn't stop this from being the classic awkward kid's lament: "If only people were straightforward about mating and romance! If only there wasn't this forest of doublespeak and taboos surrounding sex! If only people stopped being petty and competitive and just openly admitted their desires and insecurities! We'd all be so much better off (me especially.)"

<comment><USER12> You've written the awkward kid character to sound enlightened.

<comment><USER11> He is, in a useless kind of way. It's one thing to think this way and another thing to propose that everyone voluntarily adopt social mores that put them at a disadvantage relative to the people who continue to use the same old stratagems. For something like that you need a social movement organized around a moral cause, with constant moral vigilance against cheaters (who would otherwise prosper, and might prosper even in spite of such vigilance.) That's unlikely enough, but it gets worse. Skill at organizing and inspiring a social movement is, by my guess at least, highly correlated with skill at succeeding sexually under the current social conventions. The people who are highly motivated to change current social mores around dating are exactly the people who are least likely to inspire a following.

Take it from someone who wasted his first five years after puberty learning the hard way :-|

<comment><USER13> Being open and honest about my desires and insecurities has worked out very well for me; the trick was learning to present it as confidence in who I am rather than an apologia for what I am not. Attitude is often everything during early stage interactions when you're both rapidly trying to size the other person up.

Then again, my taste in partners' personalities probably selects for people where that -will- work out well for me. Which for me is obviously a feature, but means I in no way am suggesting that it would work well universally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Brian from OkCupid Labs here...

This post contains some really interesting and spot on insights. Some of the data doesn't line up with our (match + okcupid, etc) internal estimates/figures. For example, our estimates are closer to 50% of US have tried online dating, and 50% havent; significantly lower than that in other geographies. The idea of serendipity is definitely a real issue, and a frustrating one, because just the concept in people's minds and expectations alone prevents them from trying solutions that might work for them.

The simple fact is that, for most people finding work is just like anything else: it takes a little bit of attention and work to find the best person for you. That's not romantic, but its real.

I'm not sold that the solution is having your friends help you create a profile, introduce you to their friends, or attest for you. It seems like a lot of work for them, to be honest, with very limited returns. At the labs, our minds are focused on finding the future of dating in mobile, big data, leveraging social networks, and discovering how to create serendipitous connections through the above.

To the OP -- if you want to chat, hit me up; would love to chat. We're in SoMa.

<comment><USER15> > our minds are focused on finding the future of dating in mobile, big data, > leveraging social networks, and discovering how to create serendipitous > connections through the above.

You should make a "Netflix challenge" for online dating.

<comment><USER16> Please don't; the Netflix challenge was a a historically embarrassing privacy catastrophe.

<http://33bits.org/2010/03/15/open-letter-to-netflix/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One theory on why the author might be having a little trouble with OkCupid comes down to this sentence:

"Unless your parents are Jewish and they threaten to disown you for not having a Jewish boyfriend...yea, you may not want to message me in that case."

I mean, I laughed, it's a funny profile, but ultimately it implies bitterness over your last relationship, which, in my experience, is a turn off for both sexes. Don't get me wrong, everyone's bitter after getting dumped, but your next significant other doesn't want to know about it (at least not at first). In fact, they don't want to know anything about your previous relationship, good or bad, period.

EDIT: This actually adds some merit to his idea...his friends would be objective and wouldn't make the same mistake.

I'll second the confusion over people thinking there's a stigma to online dating. I thought that was a 90's thing.

<comment><USER18> OKCupid actually has a question that you could use to filter out non-Jewish people or people who want to date only Jewish people. But unfortunately it sounds like she decided it mattered only when the relationship was underway.

<comment><USER19> Religious differences can sometimes be a convenient excuse to end a relationship, speaking from experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the core problem of a dating site:

1\. Forging connections between pairs of strangers where they will fall in love,

2\. …under conditions of oppressive patriarchy.

Number 1 is a pretty easy numbers game. for each person, a subset of people match them algorithmically. Another subset will be good matches. If your algorithm doesn't suck, some of the first set overlaps the second.

Number 2 is the problem. If you are asking why women are being swamped with textual street harassment such that the noise quite drowns the signal, why women need pseudonymity and ignorable messaging and no-appeal blocklists, why women get shamed for taking an active role in seeking a date (such as OKC) and don't want to admit it, why Mills & Boon nonsense holds so much cultural sway, and why social proof is the most effective way to get dates, the answer to all of the above is patriarchy. Rapey, commoditizing attitudes to sex are patriarchy. Passive, romance-movie, pedestal-putting, shaming, antisexual attitudes to love are patriarchy.

<comment><USER21> I honestly cannot tell if you are being sarcastic with regards to "Number 2", I hope you are.

<comment><USER20> Dead serious. Sarcasm set at 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this may be solving a legitimate problem, but I think you are incorrect that the source of the problem is hollywood.

Online dating follows historically from personals classifieds. Personals ads contained very little information (in part because they had to be so short). This meant you were going on a date with someone you knew nothing about. It was worse than just a blind date... because you didn't even have any common friends to validate the person wasn't a psycho. People (esp. women) who valued their safety tended not to use personals ads, and there was a definite stigma that people who did use it likely had problems.

Though online dating is popular now, I think it was previously viewed as the high-tech version of printed personals ads. So the stigma carried over. It's certainly decreased over time, but I think that history is part of the stigma.

Again, I think you have a potentially viable solution to a problem people care about... even if I disagree on the source of them problem.

<comment><USER23> Hollywood helped to normalize the idea of online dating with _Sleepless in Seattle_ \- if it was good enough for tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, then sure, why not? OP comes off as slightly unhinged and blaming the world for his failure to find love.

<comment><USER24> Huh? The two characters met with Tom Hank's son called into a radio program. How is that online dating?

<comment><USER23> I'm sorry, I meant _You've got mail_. Both films star Hanks and Ryan.

<comment><USER25> It's OK. Most Hanks/Ryan movies are the same story with different set dressing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problem with online dating boils down to: guys have no idea what they are doing. I've helped my friends and the secret is to write a three sentence message: an intro about why the message, a funny sentence, and finally a light question. It's pretty simple.

I used it on OkCupid and got about a 30-50% response rate. Now I'm 6'8" and in shape which skewed the results but my friends copied what I did and their response rates skyrocketed. Then you only send 2-3 more messages before asking her out for drinks. Worked nearly 100% of the time.

I think that it comes down to, people spend way too much time trying to write the perfect message or profile. Be yourself. Think of it as a filter to get rid of the girls that you aren't compatible with.

Then when you're on the date, relax and just have fun. I've heard so many horror stories from my female friends of guys that are super awkward. The group setting is a great idea as it relaxes people and gives them support. That's why wingmen exist.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, just be tall, good looking, confident, and comfortable conversing in contrived situations like bar/cafe meetings with strangers.

Wonder why guys can't figure that out?

<comment><USER26> you can teach yourself to be confident and comfortable around women. I used to HORRIBLE back in the day.

<comment><USER27> Fake it 'til you make it. If you act like you know what you're doing for long enough, that will actually end up building confidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Good luck with the endeavour. Some thoughts:

Requiring 100+ Facebook "friends" to join may serve as decent "this is a real person" filter for college educated urban 20 somethings, but you are likely filtering out lots of potential customers older than 30, people who never left their small town, etc. Is there a better way you can accomplish the same goal?

Also, I'm not sure that one can ascertain that "men don't read profiles" from a study that 21 men in a coffee shop spent half the time looking at picture as 18 women similarly accosted by market researchers. That's a pretty thin read to make a decision on. Have you a/b tested how profiles might work for your users?

I'm wondering how the "I was looking on behalf of a friend, but stumbled across someone really appealing." thing plays out.

Again, good luck.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm honestly really surprised to hear that anybody thinks there is still stigma attached to online dating. I don't know what it's like for straight people, but online dating definitely has zero stigma for gay folks. I mean, compared to Grindr -- where all criteria for meeting somebody have been reduced to "I don't want to have to walk more than a couple of blocks" -- online dating like OKCupid is staid and respectable.

<comment><USER30> well, the stigma is that it outright tells me you don't have friends.

i never had to go out alone to find a significant other. Sure a few days i had to stay home because none of my friends wanted to go out. but that's life.

... you will probably not meet, and be happy with, someone you meet in a dive bar, or online dating. it's just common sense, or you may call it stigma.

<comment><USER31> I picked my girlfriend[1] of four years up at a bar. After a few dates, she broke it off with a guy she'd been dating casually who she met through Match.com.

[1] Ivy-educated, Ph.D.-holding, tenured professor girlfriend.

<comment><USER32> Do you not count that as her cheating on you?

<comment><USER31> No, why would I? He and I both knew that she was going on dates with more than one person. There's no scandal. In fact, I'd be a bit worried about immediate overcommitment otherwise.

<comment><USER33> I wouldn't worry about those comments (I'm sure you aren't). A lot of people don't seem to make a firm distinction between dating and relationships.

The whole reason "becoming exclusive" is a thing/phrase, is because it's acceptable and expected to "date" multiple people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the lie told is not one of predestined love, but of perfect love. That you'll find the person of your dreams, they will sweep you off your feet, and you'll never have a negative feeling about them. It will all end storybook.

Of course the next 20 chapters are ones of compromise, empathy, regret, and apologies, with happiness and perfection in between.

<comment><USER35> ha! no shit. after almost two decades of marriage i laugh my ass off at this online dating stuff. what a farce. it's a perfect metaphor for the shallow cesspool our culture has become...

<comment><USER36> So you've never actually used any online dating service the past 20 years, but you still think you are qualified to dismiss it all as a farce?

I have several friends who met their significant others online, and are now happily married with children. But you just laugh...?

<comment><USER35> i'm happy for your friends, but as a practical matter they are very likely outliers in the statistical sense.

to put it in the perspective of this forum, all of my VC buddies put online dating plays in the category of domain specific search. that's a fairly sterile way to look at the process of finding a life partner, don't you think?

but beyond that, there is no credible statistical data, i.e. stats not produced by the companies themselves and peer reviewed, that would indicate these services produce anything like a non-niche impact on the occurrence of marriage in the US.

there are however numerous more deliberate commentaries on the topic of technology and its impact on the social fabric of culture. one of my personal favs is "Alone Together" by Sherry Turkle.

The more interesting question in all of this is why exactly online dating functions are even viable. IMHO the fact that people, particularly in the business we are in (i'm assuming you are in the software biz as well) spend so much time chained to a desk that they cannot go out and actually interact physically with other human beings is the point of my original response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My 25+ year marriage is actually the product of "predestined love" and I think most people _could_ end up with a love like that. The reality is that you have to keep your eyes open if you want to notice the person that's right for you ... and you have to meet enough people to find them.

EDIT:

As I thought a bit more about it, I also realized that you have to have some criteria for what you're looking for in a partner too. How will you know if you've found them? If all you can come up with is "a body like a swimsuit model", you deserve what you get. Looks might be one criteria, but maybe you'd be better off picking some other attributes to go with it? And perhaps weighting things like interests, life-goals, etc a bit higher.

I'd also recommend understanding your Myers-Briggs type and the types that are compatible (this is _not_ your sign). Then learn the attributes that make up your compatible types and try to spot them in public.

<comment><USER38> It's not "predestined love" alone - it's also willingness to actually _work_ on that relationship. I've got 23 years so far, and it's been awesome. But it required talking about things, occasionally compromising, being willing to listen, and paying attention to what's going on. And sometimes sticking it out, even when you thought "This really isn't fun right now".

And congrats on 25+ years - you're obviously doing it right :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Recently single, I took the bait.

Funny story, though: everyone above the fold (eight women) is someone I've either dated or wanted to. The first one? My best friend.

I am lucky my screen isn't any bigger though, because the next person on the list is my sister.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nice idea. I've been saying this forever - getting friends involved in matching was the way forward for dating sites. But all glory to the person who executes.

This also removes the stigma of being on the site - you're not there for you, you're just there to help out your friend!

However I find it to be too creepy to sign up friends without their knowledge. You're asking me to reveal personal information about them to a third party site and an unknown audience of people. And there's a lot of potential for abuse, if I want to embarass a "friend".

Even if I find someone I think they'd like, how am I supposed to explain that I was pimping them out? I think there should be invitations first, like "hey, I made a profile for you on CupidWithFriends, check it out." Or ideally, do it with peer pressure, like "your 3 friends made this profile for you on CWF, they want you to accept." Then if the profiled person like it, they click a button to accept and only then does it go public.

EDIT: actually, what if you changed the focus to "stories about friends", where dating was a sort of side effect? I think I'd feel less creepy if I felt I was making a little tribute to a friend, rather than selling them.

This could work for any situation where you want to match people up. Even in matching jobs to people. LinkedIn sort of does this, but they ask for super boring testimonials like "implemented action items with diligence." Stories are so much more interesting, and they are what really sells you on somebody anyway.

</comment><comment><USER41> Relevant discussion of the perfect mate myth, in hilarious song form: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeZMIgheZro>

<comment><USER42> I do wonder if he's still married to her.

<comment><USER41> 20 years, 2 kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another question is, of course, if straight dating can be fixed at all. After short stints on all the major dating websites, and of course trying to date in the real world, I've come to believe that the basic expectations people have can't really be satisfied, mostly by virtue of mathematics.

The following is a male perspective, but I think the observations should be on par for the other side as well:

First, there is supply and demand. There are not a lot of available women around (once you exclude the spam accounts), and that may very well be in large part due to Hollywood expectations. There are, however, a lot of men. That fact alone means that for most men, this won't work out at all. Once you get past a certain age (say 30), this mirrors the situation of the physical world _exactly_. At this point, it's a game of playing musical chairs that a lot of us simply can't win. But it only gets worse.

While most of the female profiles portray fundamentally damaged people, the men are overwhelmingly fit, handsome, and great in general. This could mean that women are just more honest in filling out these profiles, but it could also mean that women only join online dating sites _if they have absolutely no other alternative left_ , whereas men _create profiles as a matter of course_.

So being me, I can't begin to compete with the other guys on attractiveness, or money, or general awesomeness. Not only that, I'm so vastly outnumbered it's not even funny. And the very limited resource we're competing on seems to be mostly reluctant, frustrated women who hate being on the site in the first place.

And in what I can only assume is a typical pattern, I meet exponentially more women AFK than online. Now if it continually isn't working out in meatspace, there is really no reason to assume it's going to be any different if the introduction was through a website. If anything, online-induced meetups are vastly more awkward. At least if you meet organically, it can always be in a friendly non-committal social context. When you meet online dates, it _has to be_ about dating.

I don't think this is fixable. I'm not sure _it should be_ fixable. There are plenty of people who still profit from online dating, but it doesn't really provide any discernable advantages for people who are already at a disadvantage. The perception that there _must_ be someone out there for every single one of us is also a Hollywood myth.

In fact the only reason I can conceive where online dating makes sense is for attractive people who just don't get to meet a lot of potential partners in their daily lives. Now, that's not a small market. It may even be the majority of cases. But it took me a while to figure out that there is not a lot online dating can do for you if you don't belong to that group.

Having friends make your advertising for you doesn't change these mechanics. Of course it might improve the quality of the experience for the above- mentioned privileged group, but at the end of the day I'll have exactly the same odds as on any other dating site. To some degree, all dating sites (even those genuinely interested in making online dating not suck) capitalize on the Hollywood illusion that somewhere out there is my reasonably perfect match. They're playing on the assumption that everyone is dateable, and they in fact have to deceive you into thinking that the world of dating is not as depressing as it actually is.

Online dating works well for people who are already likely to be successful at dating AFK. For these people, online dating could probably be optimized. For others, probably not.

<comment><USER44> It's funny... here in New York City, I hear people saying the exact opposite. That guys are having a great time on a dating site, because there are tons of attractive and interesting women, and all the single girls seem to create profiles! And girls not having a lot of luck on a dating site, because a lot of guys don't create profiles, and sometimes it seems like all the "good" ones are taken.

However, this may also be a function of age -- I'm in my early thirties, as are my friends. And of course, New York City.

I do think you're right about "online dating works well for people who are already likely to be successful at dating" -- in my experience, whether it's online or offline is irrelevant. Online dating isn't any fundamentally different at all -- people are attracted to each other, or not. Online dating just vastly widens the pool of potential people you might meet. You might see 100 people in a bar one night, and 90% are immediately out of your age/gender range, leaving just 10. You could easily browse through 200 filtered candidates on a dating site in an evening.

<comment><USER45> Guys, seriously, spend a few years on the East coast. The girls are nice, down to earth, educated, and plentiful. And the winters will make you tough.

<comment><USER46> I dunno, man. I just wish they all could be Calfornia girls.

<comment><USER45> They are! Where do you think the smart California girls go to school? In Boston.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What's the incentive for my friends to do all this work for me for free? Why would I bother setting up a profile for a friend? It seems like a lot of work for no benefit.

The OkCupid profiles make more sense: you make them so that you look good and you get dates. Work -> reward.

<comment><USER48> The article was tl;dr for me, but is there a gamification angle?

Like can me and my buds set up a fantasy football league and see how our team scores against other teams (or against women teams??)

Because gamification, social media, that's money in the bank right there.

<comment><USER49> At first I thought this had to be a parody comment, but I think you're actually for real. Amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'd find it more than a little creepy if my friends were setting up a dating profile for me without my consent.

</comment><comment><USER51> I remember times when online dating was not broken.

Times where it was not organized by a third party trying to make a profit out of it.

It happened on IRC which was quite different: it happened in real time, it was text based (no pictures until you had proven yourself worthy). Though it already featured the too many messages towards women issue but it was easy enough to put the offenders on ignore and as once disconnected there was no way of messaging you they didn't pile up in your absence.

Online dating sucks but to me the main reason is that online dating is mostly governed by businesses trying to build a profitable business model for them, putting their own interest before those of the people using the service.

First comes the somewhat innovative idea, then the launch of the service with the accompanying marketing in order to gather a comfortable bunch of profiles and it's monetizing time in a stupid way usually by putting artificial barriers effectively killing its usefulness. From there it is inertia for a while, then the cycle starts again.

Hollywood may have some responsibility in shaping some people expectation of love but I don't think this is much related to online dating being broken. Actually I failed to find any link in your article which seemed to be a shameless marketing attempt at driving more people to your dating profile service, as is expected during the launch phase.

Then I would not touch anything facebook related with a 10 foot pole, let alone a dating profiles website where facebook friends, a.k.a. not actual friends, are in control without me knowing about it.

IANAL but I wonder about the legality of this, I'm not sure one is entitled to fill an online profile for someone else, it may be considered a form of identity theft.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't know where the author gets his statistics from, but I am skeptical that 75% of the population in the US uses online dating. It often takes decades for social and sexual mores to change (if you don't believe me, take a look at the ample evidence from history). I suppose I fail to grasp the value proposition of a service such as this, though it is certainly an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER6> <http://www.statisticbrain.com/online-dating-statistics/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> It has a flaw of requiring a person to have friends.

<comment><USER54> There's always mechanical turk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> 100 "friends"? I've been on the facebook for seven years and I don't have that many, because I only fried my actual, uh, friends.

<comment><USER48> I fried my friends too :(

With some fava beans.

<comment><USER56> Don't forget the chianti.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wait, what? My friends might be setting up a profile for me without even knowing it? I sure hope that's qualified by "if I'm signed up", because otherwise I might need to engage in some rage.

<comment><USER57> They can already matchmake you without you knowing it offline; what's the difference if it's online?

Presumably they wouldn't be allowed to use your real name or super-identifying photos or anything, so this "dating persona" they set up from you is divorced from the rest of your identity, and nobody will find it by looking for you.

<comment><USER51> How would you disallow them to use your name or identifying pictures ?

Funny thing is IINM this is probably illegal in several countries around the world, both setting up an online profile for someone else, without his/her knowledge being aggravating, and not providing exact personal information.

If my friends did this to me, it would probably put a definitive end to that friendship.

<comment><USER57> > How would you disallow them to use your name or identifying pictures ?

By making it against the TOS of the site, and banning profiles that do it.

> probably illegal ... not providing exact personal information.

Presumably it's a profile _about_ you, but it's not a profile _impersonating_ you. They don't sign up using your name/birthdate/et al; they have their own account, which they use to fill in the details of your profile.

To be clearer: the concept isn't _really_ that you're filling out someone else's profile. Instead, it's more like (exactly like) a "review" site-- friends giving "product reviews" of friends, talking about how you should "buy" this friend or that. They just _appear_ without attribution, conglomerated into a "consensus profile" of "what others think about this person." I imagine it's very clear that the person themselves didn't make the profile, any more than hockeyfan3392 on Amazon made the Macbook his review is attached to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> So what happens if you don't have a lot of friends, or in my case, if all your friends are engaged or married and have no reason to be on a dating site?

I think what happens is, this model falls flat on its face. It's a good idea though, for a group of single friends.

</comment><comment><USER59> Sign Up is broken.

<http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry> : Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

The same issue with Chrome: The webpage at <http://www.cupidwithfriends.com/sorry> has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

I've tried to sign up under different fb accounts.

<comment><USER6> Do you have >50 Facebook friends when you try to join?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> You're completely right, people are lazy, but online dating is also way more work than it has to be.

Women receive so many messages that it becomes overwhelming and too much work and men try sending earnest messages for a little while and then concede that it's basically a numbers game. These two phenomena are self-reinforcing. The more messages women receive, the less likely they are to respond. The more messages a man doesn't get a response to the more likely they are to put less effort into their messages. If you solve this problem, you effectively solve attrition rate in dating sites.

If you look at an old inbox full of sent of received messages for a man versus a women, you'll notice something interesting. The woman's inbox will be full of avatars next to almost all the messages. Men don't delete or suspend accounts. Now if you look at the inbox of the men on the other hand you'll notice that more and more of the messages have the default avatar next to the name as you move back in time in the inbox. This is because many women become totally overwhelmed by the number of messages, the quantity of them that are vulgar, etc.

I've talked to a bunch of people about this (because I'm one of those few people that has no problem talking about online dating because like you I think it is the future) and the conclusion I've come to that many people agree with is that online dating needs the equivalent of the spam button in many email inboxes. However instead of saying the words "Mark as spam", there should be two buttons, one that says "Mark as did not read my profile" and one that says "Flag as vulgar or offensive". The first button is to be used every time a women (or a man) receives a message where someone sends a one line message with no content specific to the recipient or any message which is obviously cookie cutter (cut & paste job)[0] and the second should be used whenever the sender is overtly sexual or mean.

Every time these buttons are used it should impact a score on both the sender and the recipient. For the sender, they're "doesn't read profiles" score should go up and for the recipient that used the button, their "cares that senders don't read and consider their profile" score should go up. The same goes for vulgarity/offensive content. The balance of these two numbers should determine if the message makes it through to the recipients email inboxes at all in the future. You could even warn senders when their score starts getting too bad, like "This message will not be delivered to this user because you've been flagged as someone who doesn't consider the content of user's profiles when crafting a message" or "This user only receives messages from people who take time to craft a personal message". If the sender then goes back and significantly modifies their message before sending again (verified via a text diff and possibly the passage of time), then send it through. This time however, if that message gets flagged by the recipient, then it counts very negatively towards their score.

If you use an approach like this you should be able to keep the inboxes of females (and desirable males) with a high signal to noise ratio. This will greatly improve their experience and lead them to respond to more messages and not get so fed up with the bullshit messages that they either quit responding or quit the site entirely.

[0] The only counterpoint to this are messages that achieve the Forer Effect[1]. One of my friends has crafted some particularly generic messages (his own admission) that presses all the right buttons just like horoscopes texts do and he gets a pretty solid response rate despite the fact that those messages are just cut and pasted. He's even frustrated that his well thought out personal messages often perform worse than his generic ones that play to a recipients own positive self image. TBH, I'd like to take Forer's original text, and modify it for OkCupid to see how it performs. Besides crafting the message, I'd need to figure out how to produce an acceptably generic profile that still conveys enough authority for the recipient to think the fake profile has the authority to make those statements/judgements.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect>

<comment><USER61> The solution is even easier. There is no need to have messages individually marked, the system knows what is being sent and can handle it automatically.

Auto detect spam messages. If a guy keeps sending out the same copy and paste, after 2 or 3 sends, just forward future copies to /dev/null.

Now this has to be personalized! If a women responds to those types of messages above some certain threshold, then hey, let her receive them, no problem.

<comment><USER62> I was thinking of adapting xkcd's robot9000 to dating sites on the other day. Instead of searching duplicate messages from 1 user, you search for duplicates across the entire database, with exponentially increasing ban periods if your message is not original. It would definitely force men and women to write meaningful messages.

<comment><USER63> I guess I will have to introduce random spelling errors into my messages then.

<comment><USER61> Spam filters can already detect this. :) Sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I always love this article about what it's like to be a woman on an online dating site: <http://www.esquire.com/features/hotwoman0507>

</comment><comment><USER65> My experience is mainly with OKCupid. I presume most other dating websites are variations on the same theme.

The problem is that OKCupid is a geek's worldview distilled. Whether a girl is visible to you is largely based upon algorithmic analysis of a questionnaire, which in turn is based on nothing more than pseudoscience.

So you have a questionnaire written by a team of computer programmers acting as gatekeeper to you contacting someone? Do you see the potential problem here? Who says the questionnaire is relevant?

Add to this fact that the quality of women on these sites is low on average, and it doesn't bode well for guys. Lots of guys will of course chime in and say it works for them. My interpretation of this is that given the sheer number of users, there will always be people who "luck out".

Cupid Plc (another online dating company, unrelated to OKCupid) is under heavy suspicion in the UK for faking high quality female profiles. I don't know if OKCupid does this, but the site really has no built-in mechanism to give you much trust in the profiles you see.

Overall, I think the problem with online dating websites is that they are not actually solving any of the difficult problems of dating. Online profiles are useless because they are 90% equivalent. Oh, so you like tall, athletic men? And you enjoy movies and wine, music, art and watching Game of Thrones? You are mainly good, but have a wild side? You are unique?

Given this, why the focus on these profiles? Guys are only interested in the photos (having put the effort into reading through fifty identikit profiles already).

...and then there's the transition to meeting up. This is fraught with difficulty because you have know way of gauging how to approach the issue. For some people "let's meet" will be enough and looked upon positively as decisive and confident. For others it is seen as completely inappropriate. The site gives you, the guy - it will usually be the guy - no way of knowing which strategy to use and so you lose 50% (or more) of the time on the basis of not having enough information to make a good decision. Given already low probability of finding someone who "suits" you on these sites, this is incredibly wasteful and not addressed.

So... good luck to anyone trying to improve things.

</comment><comment><USER49> This post is very, very strange.

<comment><USER66> I didn't find it strange; the fact that you do is surprising, and therefore potentially interesting. Would you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER49> It covers a lot of subject matter, and all of it seems to be from ways of interacting with the world that are alien to me. Public complaining about your ex? Pick up artistry? Inteviewing cliques of women in bars? Bizzare charactures of the idea of romance? Weird superiority/inferiority posturing? Trying to reduce a first impression to one-liners?

It feels more like cable television than real life.

<comment><USER67> The one-liners thing really put me off too. I couldn't tell if they were being sarcastic. Works 10% of the time because 10% have a bar low enough for empty flattery? A friend of mine dated one of the more prolific figures in that realm (don't know his name, it was just a big deal among the group) and she said he was ultimately just making money off of his Narcissistic Personality Disorder and she never wanted to see the guy again.

I think a lot of people on dating sites are going about it the wrong way and making themselves feel worse in the process when they don't have to.

Find a forum or a chatroom about topics that interest you or that you want to know more about (for your benefit, in communities where the gender of your choosing makes up to 30-70% of the userbase). Get invested in the topic, meet people, learn some stuff and see if any connections arise. You meet people in the real world in situations that you have in common, and that's how finding relationships online should be too. Some people may want the instant- gratification of going out to a bar to meet this person or maybe they're just gunning for a one-night-stand, which is fine too. But if my friends are anything to base things off of, distance is no longer an issue for people looking for serious, long-term relationships. I've seen lots of people fly over oceans to be together, many end up staying that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Wait isn't this selling the same lie?

<comment><USER27> The Hollywood angle was a weak lead-in for the post, IMO, but I like the idea. Getting your friends to talk you up has some interesting potential.

That said, it will of course be gamed and manipulated and still have many of the problems of current online dating models, but that's just the nature of marketing; when there are a lot of products out there, the way to sell yours is to make it stand out, and a site that imposes a handicap just gives the cheaters an advantage.

<comment><USER68> Yeah the idea is... no worse than any other dating site I guess but the pitch here is absolutely "stop _looking_ for love. Join our site and love will _happen_ to you" it's just it's supposed "happen to you" because ¡friends! instead of lazy scriptwriters.

<comment><USER69> The difference here is that you're objectively more likely to find it by seeking, rather than passively waiting for it to happen to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I can't help but comment on my experience here. While I do sense the stigma to online dating, I don't personally care. My best interpretation of it though is that it's hard work going out and meeting people. So online dating attempts to make it easier by pre-screening potential candidates. Hearing your friend met someone online makes them sound lazy I guess right?

I've tried online dating but it never works out for me. People put their best face forward online, but are quite different in real life.

Honestly, regardless of Hollywood, the best relationships I've been in have come from friends introducing us at events or just randomly meeting at a bar.

</comment><comment><USER71> There's a site similar to this in the UK called My Single Friend which you might be interested in looking at: <http://www.mysinglefriend.com/>

</comment><comment><USER72> OKC is pretty predictive, due to quality questions such as: "STALE is to STEAL as 89475 is to..."

The depressing thing is jt2005 got it wrong :( It's the single most predictive question I've found on OKC.

</comment><comment><USER73> Hey @joshmattvander, I started Mojo in 2009, (<http://staging.mojo.co>). I agree with many of the points you make in your post. I am now working with groceries self-checkout space but dating remain something that I am now very passionate to solve. Perhaps we could share some insight, shoot me an email firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER74> Have to say while reddit for me has been great for most things, /r/startups is pretty bad. I can relate to the author's frustration

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra It's interesting that I've never seriously encountered "you have zero control over who you end up with in life, and any attempt you make at dating is futile" in the wild where I live.

Online dating is still shunned upon, but for the opposite reason that you're not working hard enough on finding your match if you're "just" tapping buttons in the internet.

</comment><comment><USER75> "That might be partially true, but that's like deciding not to swing for fear of getting a strike."

Hmm, not quite. It is more like not trying to swing for the fence, and trying to hit a double or single. Every once and a while you connect right in the "sweet spot" and the ball flys over the fence.

</comment><comment><USER76> The on-boarding flow needs some work -- I got a "FBCDN image is not allowed in stream" error in both the ask friends to comment and share with <friend> pop- ups.

<http://imgur.com/J1isKcl>

<comment><USER6> Thanks, just fixed this

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Good idea for a site but there is no way Im signing up on Facebook. :)

</comment><comment><USER78> What's up with that Cetaphil and the tissues? Was that on purpose?

</comment><comment><USER56> This lie is OK, so long as this startup takes off. Right?

The stigma of online dating is such rubbish. I am as much of a stranger as the guy on the barstool next to you.

</comment><comment><USER79> Fantastic post. Thanks for the great breakdown :)

</comment><comment><USER80> "Put your money where your mouth is" Paying online dating will always have better results because of this.

Also you take under consideration almost exclusively OkCupid.

OkCupid != Online Dating.

Because of how it works, OkCupid is full of needy girls (and starving guys).

They go there, put three pics, play the dumb-ass matching game (understand answer 30 questions) and then enjoy receiving 4000 messages the first day. Deep down, they feel "woa I'm that good!" and they wine about guys being lame (and their pick up lines).

But here is the cold truth (from what I saw in the silicon valley) 1/ most girls are gold diggers OR what-have-you-done-for-me-lately (Eddie Murphy- style) - including your ex. 2/ most guys just want to hook up.

You can't sort this out with friends or anything. Even if people have a tendency to protect themselves from bad-people by closing their circles that is a negative reflex when trying to do online dating.

And online dating, especially when free, is the perfect fuckable-meat- supermarket. (excuse my french, I am... French) So you can come up with any pickup line, as long as the quality stays the same, it's the looks that matters. With the few exceptions based on luck OR coincidences.

This is also why a lot of people have a negative image of online-dating. There is of course the geeky-desperate, you're-not-capable-otherwise image.

For at least some time, people will still have this image. If you try to educate the world about online-dating, you're screwed. You should try to kick ass at your website, and make it feel like it's _not_ online dating. Take distance from this image.

And it won't work if it is free or if you try to involve friends. It will work by solving the question: "how to raise the quality of the members commitment to the idea".

I think good leads could be: 1/ pure and guaranteed balance in girls/guys (for straight websites) - It can be extremely repulsive. 2/ remove un-active accounts. 3/ Push people to open themselves - more privacy, different layers, many technical ways. 4/ force them out of the website. (you provide the first contact, but try setting up the date, suggestions is a great step already) 5/ limited amount of members (increased by periods, without some elitist bs)

The issue is, it's all about quantity not quality. The big problem I foresee is that might go against a juicy business plan - at least at first, and definitely when raising money. (better have 200M people poking each-others virtual a-holes than 10k people doing something and paying for it).

As for Hollywood's lie, it's always the same bitching. Hollywood's lie is only as valuable as the number of people who believes it. The truth is, people want to believe in Hollywood-dreamy-love but they tend to take everything too seriously to actually catch it. But hopefully, they will one day get tired of it and get down to earth.

Good luck in your adventure.

</comment><comment><USER81> Two years and counting. I hope it lasts :)

</comment><comment><USER82> did you hear about mycutefriend.com? it was recently "unveiled" at Launch2013.

</comment><comment><USER83> How about you lie to us too buddy?

      The problem is men don't read online dating profiles,
      they only look at the pictures. It's not just a difficult
      and repetitive task, but it's wasted time.

I am a man, and I read every word of ~90% of the profiles I'm interested in enough to visit, and 100% of the profiles I send a message to. So what does that say about your statement? The study you linked to didn't even use OKC, it used two other sites that are structurally very different.

I really like OKC. I thought it was way better than any other dating site I looked at. I also found a wonderful woman on it whom I love dearly and who loves me, so I'm perfectly happy.

From your post, it sounds to me like you have a rather narrow viewpoint of what people think about online dating. There are many points of view, and if you want to focus on a niche of people who believe what you believe, that's perfectly fine. But don't go making objective statements like "men don't read online dating profiles" when that's simply not true. "A study that used X number of men and Y number women, looked at eHarmony and match.com and found that ... blah blah blah" is way better and way closer to the truth.

(I'm not a shill for OKC btw, I don't work for them, or know anyone who works for them. I'm just really really happy with their site and the results.)

<comment><USER84> More like use a generality than lie. I know, while I read some profiles, I don't read any until I am physically attracted to the person.

<comment><USER83> If he knew he was making a generality (and, for his sake, I hope so), and yet still made that statement, then that's lying (at least, using boolean, and not fuzzy logic) because his statement was absolute and unqualified. Absolute, unqualified statements are not generalities.

"People are dumb" (absolute, unqualified) vs "Most people are dumb" (absolute, qualified) vs "Most people I've met are dumb" (relative, qualified).

A comment like "people are dumb" is usually assumed not to be taken literally, but when you quote a study and say something like "men don't read online dating profiles", you're now in a very different territory, and the misuse of language could give the impression of a deliberate false statement (i.e., a lie).

<comment><USER84> You do make a good argument. When I read blog posts and they make a statement like that I tend to just read it as "Most X do Y" instead of "All X do Y." It's like the word literally. Everyone that uses the word literally use it instead of figuratively, even though they mean the latter (jokes I make are bad).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I can't imagine that anyone's friends are as invested as they themselves are (or would put an equivalent amount of energy) in their dating success, but maybe I just have lousy friends. It's an experiment worth conducting.

</comment><comment><USER86> I don't know how you figured "most of us use it". Most of us have probably created a dummy account and quickly said "to hell with this." I won't go near those things, not because of "predestined love" but because 90% of the girls on there aren't attractive and the ones who are I assume are screwed up in some way. And if it makes you uncomfortable reading something so cold and dismissive as what I just said it's just as uncomfortable thinking it, so to hell with it.

I can go up to the bar, have a beer, see a live band, talk to a pretty girl and know in 30 seconds if I like her and if she thinks I'm grotesque. Mother Nature is very efficient. No need to over-complicate things.

</comment><comment><USER35> here's a novel idea dude. go interact with real people. in person.

<comment><USER87> I'm in my 50s. Online dating is the ONLY way I'll meet eligible men. And trust me, the pool of eligible men is much smaller than when you're young. That said, the innovation I'd most like to see is crowdsourcing of the online dater's social signals. Not only would that prove they're real humans, but what better way to capture who they really are personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Well... the destined love trope came from a lot heavier, and older forms of literature than Hollywood. It's just one of the things that people have fantasized, experienced, and encouraged for ages.

Really, the article didn't convince me a bit. The stigma comes because the idea is quite distinct from what we've all been doing for several thousand years...

<comment><USER69> "the idea is quite distinct from what we've all been doing for several thousand years..."

Lonely hearts adverts are hardly new, though.</comment></comment>


Ways Founders Sabotage Themselves - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/07/dear-clients-please-stop-ten-ways-founders-sabotage-themselves/ <comment><USER2> These 10 things are never going to change. Why? Because pedantic, well-paced software engineering isn't sexy. You know what's sexy and exciting to a startup exec (especially one with an ego)? Tight deadlines, going viral, going head-to-head with the biggest companies on earth, and dreaming big. The worst part is, all of these things actually work in Sales.

I've read this same advice in one form or another many times. This is all well-known stuff and "clients" still aren't learning as far as I can tell. I don't think they'll ever learn because proper software engineering practice is counterintuitive and the attitude of management will not lend itself to these practices.

Instead of talking about the problems, I think we need to arm engineers with techniques for defending proper software engineering practices. Lean and Agile methodologies have helped considerably, but I think more work is needed to truly ease many of these frustrations. I'll let you know once I've figured it out...

</comment><comment><USER3> This post contains so many true statements. As beeing a freelance consultant for the past 9 years, I can comprehend every single point of the posting.

Especially the premature scaling combined with technical debts is a very common pattern. Companies tend to use the latest technology but also ignoring every common pattern of sustainable software engineering (e.g. tests, code style). Usually the involved developers are quite new to the technology and will make a lot of mistakes. Some will learn from their own mistakes over time and fix it, some will never learn and continue providing a negative value to a team.

I've seen this anti-pattern in various web-related companies and startups. The technology never was the __primary __reason of the failure but people problems (lack of skills, lack of proper management, lack of social skills — both of the developers and the business owners) was the #1 reason.

I've seen this with Perl, PHP, Java, Ruby, JavaScript/Node and all different types of NoSQL DBs when people use them "for the wrong thing" or didn't understand what's the trade-off.

Looks like even today everyone is believing in new and true silver bullets for each technical venture instead of combining the best practices with as little trade-offs as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, a lot of this rings true. I've witnessed #5 directly, and it's maddeningly frustrating. Once the execs get this idea that viral is this magical path to user growth, the idea can't be killed. This is the plan:

1\. Start with our product that has nothing to do with social networking

2\. Spoon in some "social" and "sharing", and mix.

3\. ROCKETSHIP VIRAL GROWTH OMFG!

...and when you don't get to step three, just keep adding MORE SOCIAL!

Force people to log in using Facebook! Put share buttons everywhere! Harvest the user's address book and spam it! Harvest their Facebook friends! Add Twitter! Add Google+!

What's worse is when you're resource constrained and you stop working on the core features of your product: the features that actually bring real users to your product to.

</comment><comment><USER5> Shameless (relevant) hijack: I want HN's advice on a book I'm considering doing.

Backstory: somebody on Quora asked about common startup misconceptions: [http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-common- misconceptions...](http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-common- misconceptions-about-startups?share=1)

Off the top of my head I named a bunch and it turned out to be a popular post. Somebody said, "Hey, that's a good outline for a book!" I thought, "Hm, let's give that a try."

So I could get feedback, I put together three sample chapters and a landing page:

[http://williampietri.com/book/](http://williampietri.com/book/)

Now I'm trying to decide: If I do the (substantial) work of writing it, will enough people read it to make it worthwhile? (Worthwhile is defined here in terms of impact. I'm sure it won't be as profitable as doing something technical, but there's an audience of first-time entrepreneurs I'd like to help.)

In particular, I'm wondering:

* Will new entrepreneurs bother to buy and read a book about problems?

* Will people who deal with entrepreneurs find a book like this handy enough that they'll make new entrepreneurs buy and read it?

<comment><USER6> Had a similar idea while reading this article: I was thinking of a website "How to do things", crowdsourced like Wikipedia where anyone could contribute. So examples could be: How to launch a ecommerce marketplace, or How to launch a Saas, etc. And you could read the manuals, edited by people that learned the hard way. And useful for some that didn't go through incubators. Plus we can extend out of startups/businesses. I like this idea of your book, but if you get a particular point wrong you can't change it, whereas by doing a crowdsourced website anyone can improve. Just my midnight 2cents :-)

<comment><USER5> I think both would be useful.

If I do the book, I'll do it through some medium like Leanpub so I can put out drafts to many people and get feedback. And after 18 months or so, I'll put the posts up on a blog so people can comment forever. But the nice thing about a book is that it's done; I don't want to be forever updating the material.

The how-to website would be cool. There's a lot of info out there that isn't well captured.

If you're excited to jump in on a related effort, there's the Lean Startup Circle wiki: [http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/w/page/15765221/FrontPage](http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/w/page/15765221/FrontPage)

Sean Murphy in particular has done a ton of great work on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Yes, your app/site/service needs to be built within a technical architecture that can scale…

This is where many teams drop the ball. They start building their app/service with persistence technology that really can't make it to web scale. Their plan is to "build a team to solve the big-data challenge when we hit that level of scale".

Many of these shops that decide to worry about big-data challenges later on do end up solving the problem in time so from the outside they look like a success. What you're not seeing is how the founder's equity gets eroded as he is forced to borrow money in order to build out the team to rearchitect the app in order to deal with the scale. Many VCs want for us to accept this as a normal part of building apps because it ensures that they get a major piece of the pie. It doesn't have to be this way though, we can start thinking about data access patterns in the large from the very beginning.

</comment><comment><USER8> Much of this advice is already well-known to these founders, but they do it anyway. And why? A big part is motivation. To do a startup, you have to motivate yourself and often part of this is falling in love with your product or your technology and dreaming big. So as an example some technical founders love figuring the scaling out and this motivates them to create a proper, clever product, even if it never reaches 10 users in the end. Without such motivation, no product.

<comment><USER5> Personally, I try to keep the dream and the motivation, but be choosier about action. That is, even if I want to build a giant system, I start small. Because avoiding the premature scaling is part of how I raise my odds that I'll have enough users to justify scaling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is just so true... been working with startups for about 4 years now. A lot of my time goes into educating them about not making this sort of mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like viral the old-fashioned way, by word of mouth. Simple short memorable; problem you solve; positioned among alternatives; intriguing/funny/elegant.

People pass it on for its own sake... and if that problem comes up in conversation, "oh I heard about this thing for that".

</comment><comment><USER11> Most of these are things that some successful founders get right, particularly scaling. Scaling needn't be a huge timesink. A couple of products I just started using are Slack and Circle CI, and I think each of them built for scale early on.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, to design for some initial growth is good, but you don't need to go for "Google scale" and "how are we going to do if we have 100Mi users tomorrow"

So basically don't worry about how to shard your DB to hundreds of instances and split loads across EC2s on different continents on day 1

<comment><USER11> When they do that, they are usually putting the cart before the horse in how they're scaling it. They have some things that would theoretically work on a massive scale but not a solid setup for a hundred thousand users.</comment></comment></comment>


Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature15725.html <comment><AUTHOR> "If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change."

This is pretty bad.</comment>


Something, Something, Something, Detroit - <AUTHOR> http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n8/htdocs/something-something-something-detroit-994.php <comment><USER2> Well, the contrarian view is a nice reality check, but... despite the fact the Packard plant may have shut down in 1956, it's still relevant today. Despite the fact that there may be a bustling factory across the street from half a square mile of abandoned prairie, the prairie is still relevant. Because in a healthy city, you don't have mile-long abandoned plants or half a square mile of prairie land, because the land is too valuable to be left that fallow.

It's a gallant try at some sort of defense, but no sale. Find me half a square mile of abandoned grassland in the Austin city limits, or some other healthy city.

<comment><USER3> I think the author's message is that, yes, Detroit is definitely hurting, but that isn't an excuse for journalists to be lazy or distort the truth. His "make sure you crop out the office park from the photo" comment is hilarious.

I can think of at least two within a few miles of downtown Miami. And they've been that way for years. Both are government owned properties that they're dragging their feet with, like the prairie in the article.

I haven't lived anywhere else so I don't have any other examples. I guess I'll just have to take the "Miami real estate implosion hurRRrr" everyone is about to reply with.

<comment><USER2> And I guess my point is that I'm not convinced it's a distortion of the truth at all. Frankly, the photos you see are not merely processed photos sliced and diced to distort the point, they are really a fairly accurate representation of the city. It is not as if you have to go hunting these things out. You sit in Comerica Park and you are looking out at empty skyscrapers. You drive to Comerica park and take even a brief detour from the highway and you are immediately in parts of the city so desolate that you're not even afraid for your safety anymore, like you would be in a bad part of town, because anybody trying to carjack you would have to sprint across a hundred feet of open field. You take a cruise up the river and the contrast between the Canadian side and the American side is stark.

Yeah, there's spots of life, certainly, but _those_ are what you have to go hunting for. Everyone is writing the same story because it's a true story.

I am a big believer in making sure you know the problem before you go looking for the solution, and informing the public can be a slow process. That's where we are right now, learning about the problem. I actually think that trying to paint the city in some sort of false good light would harm the recovery attempts, both by underselling the problems, and wrecking up the recovery narrative that will be a critical problem of getting things back on track.

(If such a thing is even possible, which frankly I'm pessimistic about. Something that you may not know if you don't live around here is that while Detroit is dead, the greater metropolitan Detroit area is alive, and bits of it are even thriving. I think within my lifetime it may no longer be the "greater metropolitan Detroit area" but merely southeast michigan, or perhaps named after one of the formerly-suburbs. Bringing Detroit back to the former glory is very hard because even if for some reason you might consider moving there, there's somewhere else in Southeast Michigan within an hour's drive that is a better choice for you, for almost every purpose. _That's_ Detroit's real problem at this point; the factories aren't coming back, and all the other possible things it could become were crowded out into the suburbs or Ann Arbor, so there's just absolutely nothing left for Detroit. Really, Detroit is _already_ dead, the question now is whether the location is so prime that a new city will plant itself on the same ground.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I wondered about this too while watching the excellent BBC documentary _Requiem for Detroit_ last night... it would seem to me from my family still living in the burbs of Detroit that a lot of those cities are doing fine, with some thriving. With so many people leaving Michigan, which burb is likely to grow/become the new detroit though?

<comment><USER4> There is a growing population of urban farmer's moving to Detroit, precisely because of the abundance of abandoned cheap land. Perhaps most significant is Hantz Farm: [http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit...](http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm) Although Hantz Farm isn't' without some criticism: <http://markmaynard.com/?p=7243>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of that; however that won't result in the kind of population growth that parts of the suburbs are experiencing and those same areas haven't had mass exodus' either.

As Detroit transforms into something other than 'the largest city in Michigan' (which I guess it probably already has), I'm just wondering which if the little toes so to speak is in the strongest position to challenge for the new #1 spot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I drove through Detroit 10 years ago knowing nothing more about the place than being the home of the American car industry. I was shocked at what I found, crumbling buildings, empty lots, streets in total disrepair. I took photos and showed them to friends and family, who couldn't believe their eyes and wanted to see more.

It's true that much of the decay isn't recent. It's also true that real people are living and suffering in the city.

But it's a fact of life that people are voyeurs, and the more grisly the topic, the more they like to gawp. To many, Detroit is a living cautionary tale, a city with problems, someone to gossip about and resure themselves that at least where they live isn't as bad as that.

<comment><USER6> I was in Detroit a few weeks ago during the jazz festival, the first American city to be visited under my US visa (I'm permanent resident in Canada). It was beautiful and shocking in a very post-apocalyptic way every Fallout fan has dreamt of: at noon on a Saturday the streets were completely abandoned. We rode the People Mover with 2 other people, looking at gorgeous art-deco monuments to capitalism. At the shoreline we met visitors of the festival, most of whom were tourists.

The only busy areas of the city were the casinos where we almost suffocated from the ubiquitous fog of cigarette smoke. Overall it was very interesting but largely as abandoned as what you described.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the problems with Journalism (capital J) as it's practiced is that the stories are created at the editor's desk and a reporter is simply dispatched to the scene to provide supporting evidence. There is room for a certain level of conflicting reports but for the most part everything will plug in to a predefined narrative.

Lazy journalism, as lazy writing, as most lazy expressions of an idea is called a cliché. The same tired shots of Detroit (and other rust-belt cities) is now a cliché for the decline of American industry. What is happening today is not the same as what happened 30 years ago, maybe they should be photographing the empty strip-malls that liter this country.

And the west coast may have their streets paved with gold, but I've never seen so many people from an area complain about not being able to get laid.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a recent grad, got a software engineer job, and just recently rented a beautiful loft in Downtown Detroit, and I LOVE it. There's a lot of decay in the city, but there's also a lot going on that gets overshadowed. TEDx Detroit just occurred last night and touched on all of these things much better than I could. They should have videos posted soon: <http://tedxdetroit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> I keep saying to my family that we need to buy up Detroit properties while it's cheap, because Las Vegas is going to relocate there.

Seriously, think about it. The water problem in Las Vegas is going to be so severe within the next 10 years that they will have to either dig a freaking 1000 mile long canal to bring the stuff in. The inlets of the Hoover damn will be above water level, meaning no power.

So, a stalled out city easily accessible from both Canada and anywhere in the United States that is completely decaying and desperately in need of outside capital, and a city that is pushing the limits of resources. All it takes for casinos to relocate to Detroit is a politician with open arms and huge tax breaks.</comment>


Where Do Major Tech Companies Stand on Encryption? - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/where-do-major-tech-companies-stand-encryption <comment><USER2> Check out Dropbox's statement:

" _Governments_ should never install backdoors into online services or compromise infrastructure to obtain user data."

In essence we want companies to state the following:

1) They won't cooperate with governments (or other third parties) _and have never cooperated_ in adding backdoors.

2) They won't create, _and have never created_ their own backdoors. They will not hold keys so that they can't be forced to surrender customer data.

3) They will not grant _and have never granted_ access to their servers.

Even Apple's statements allow for _past_ or _pre-existing_ back doors or cooperation. Given a company may willingly or have been forced to cooperate in the past, or may have had backdoors in the past, it should own up (either specifically or as much as legally possible) and state that this has stopped.

<comment><USER3> Did you miss this in the article?

 _> In addition, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a "back door" in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed any government access to our servers. And we never will._

As for Dropbox, is Condoleezza Rice still on their board? [http://www.drop- dropbox.com](http://www.drop-dropbox.com)

<comment><USER2> Apple's statement is not quite airtight. E.g. they could have implemented a backdoor without government agency involvement; but it's by far the best statement.

Condi Rice's presence on Dropbox's concern was why I went to check their statement first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think words are not meaningful for this issue; the measure is the actions they take to promote legislation securing private data. Consider:

1) A 'backdoor' is only one of an infinite variety of exploits. Forswearing backdoors doesn't mean they don't help government access data otherwise.

2) The companies themselves collect and utilize private data on a massive scale. For most people, they are a much greater risk than government.

3) No matter what they say all of them will help government if the stakes are high enough. Imagine another major war like WWII, with America's future on the line and tens of millions of lives at risk and the whole country behind the war effort. These companies would do whatever they could to support the effort (and probably that would be the right thing to do). That's an extreme example, but my point is that blanket assurances are not meaningful; what matters is how they balance various priorities and respond to pressure.

Finally, talk is cheap; it costs them nothing and they do nothing. Let's see them invest their resources and reputations in standards and legislation protecting private data from everyone, government and business.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's all in how one defines the terms, isn't it?

[https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/606480315842830336](https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/606480315842830336)

Equivocation is a powerful force.

</comment><comment><USER6> Show me some implementations already :P

Also check out mySQL's geo spatial functions.</comment>


[Github] __ simple utility library in PHP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaciejCzyzewski/__ A utility library delivering consistency, customization, performance, & extras. <comment><USER2> Nice seems like you got this idea from underscore.js</comment>


The book Steve Jobs read every year - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Yogi-Paramahansa-Yogananda/dp/0876120834/

<comment><USER2> I started reading this a few weeks ago, and was struck by how much casual magic there seemed to be in India at that time. In the parts describing his childhood, every other page described a mystical experience. It made it a little hard to connect with my life, and by extension, trying to understand how it might have affected Steve Jobs. My only (cynical) explanation is that the magic was a result of a yogi cult of personality, which Jobs was able to use later on.

I'd be interested to hear what other people thought if they've read any of it.

<comment><USER3> For a time I was embarrassed to even admit that I read it. I still am. The book is full of incredible people and events that don't and should not make any sense to a rational person. So I have written off this book as a third class fantasy novel. BUT: what is important to me here more than the book's content is the personality of the people who like it (knowing the fact that the author presents this as true facts). Steve jobs seemed to have a need in supernatural / magic to be able to perform magic. This book (and probably others like it) kept reinforcing his belief and created distorted reality for him like he used to create for his employees.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are so many levels of interpretation when we read a book, and as such, what we get out of it varies depending upon the scope of our view.

prat may have been onto something with his post. I have only read part of this book so far and already I can see the parallels and applications to modern times/thinking. It's funny how zen buddhism seems timeless in it's application.</comment>


4K vs. UHD: What's the difference? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/174221-no-tv-makers-4k-and-uhd-are-not-the-same-thing

<comment><USER2> No difference because 4k has shifted from its _true_ meaning to become just a better marketing term for UHD (3840x2160).</comment>


Ask HN: How much to pay for a domain for a side project? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a domain for a side project and found one that I am particular to.  It is being domain squatted, with a sell price of 350$.  How much does a domain name matter? <comment><USER2> While I'm generally against supporting the domain squatting industry, if I were you I'd sit down and spend an hour making a list of ten other possible names that don't completely suck and actually are available. If you still think that the $350 domain name is worth $350 after that, then go for it.

<comment><USER3> I second this idea, pretty smart and I've done this before with some of my projects

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would suggest against it. It's almost certainly possible to pick another domain name, and just use that. If you're just starting off, and no-one knows about your brand, then you can just as easily switch to another branding.

The only reason you should pay lots for a domain name is if it's hard or impossible to switch. i.e. you're already invested in that brand.

For example, openstreetmap.org is basically "doing to google maps what wikipedia did to encyclopedias". They have been going for years, and have ~ 200,000 users. openstreetmapS.org (not the S) was squatted. They eventually raised funds and bought it. It made sense for them since they had already a lot of brand awareness of "open street map", and it's so easy to add an 's' to the end.

</comment><comment><USER5> For a 'side project' that is at the hobby level it is clearly too expensive, if you plan on eating of it some day you can expect to invest a large multiple of that worth of time and effort anyway, presumably you'll recoup that.

To date I have only bought a single domain ever from someone other than a registrar, usually with a bit of thinking I can come up with one that is not already taken, in your case that might be impossible, hard to judge without more info.

Best of luck with your side project anyway!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it's not a fickle fancy, been looking for others for maybe a few weeks? In the meantime, I'm hacking at it, both in other domains and the side project itself. It's something I like, and while expensive for a side project, not super expensive. I'll see if I change my mind when the code is closer to done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ideal domain name is memorable, easy to spell and pronounceable. I think these 3 factors matter a fair amount.

If that is the exact domain you want, I'd say $350 is a pretty good price as long as you're serious about the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the real question, isn't it, whether I'm serious about the project. I'll give it some thought, thanks.

<comment><USER6> Luckily, you don't need the domain to get started. Keep working on the project and if it continues to excited you, grab the domain.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Powers Firefox Search (by Default) - <AUTHOR>

Stumbled onto this accidentally and was curious how I had missed it.
After much ostentation recently regarding the shift in default search platform of the Firefox browser to Yahoo, I was relieved that there was some semblance of competition in the marketplace [1] (though I do prefer Google). However, back in 2009, Yahoo started serving Bing search results exclusively instead of maintaining its crawling and ranking systems, simply adding advertisements via its ad networks to the results. [2]
I'm most interested in how this plays out considering reports that Google used to pay around $300 mil/year to Mozilla to be the default search service--it must be a lucrative source of leads. [3] I wonder how the event would have been advertised if Firefox defaulted to serving Microsoft's Bing results? This is big business and, with the joining of Bing and Yahoo, Google may have a challenger (eventually), albeit as competition wanes--68% market share for Google, 29% Bing+Yahoo as of early 2014. [4]
Does it matter that nearly approximately 50% of average users (those that don't know they can change their default search engine) will get almost all content served to them as Microsoft sees fit? (A lot of guesstimation, but market share of IE+Firefox+Safari was approximately 49% Nov 2014 according to StatCounter) [5]
What opportunities are there for search engine companies to now highly editorialize/"curate" their results--i.e., pay for submission only, first 20 pages paid listings only, censorship of competitor products, skewing placement for news coverage from certain sources, etc? Seems that there are many interesting opportunities for search engines to monetize their services beyond a few keyword relevant adds on the top and right. <comment><AUTHOR> [1] [http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/technology/firefox- mozilla-g...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/technology/firefox-mozilla- google-yahoo/)

[2] [http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc20090728_826397.htm)

[3] [https://www.yahoo.com/tech/firefox-update-sees-yahoo- replace...](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/firefox-update-sees-yahoo-replace- google-as-104163218809.html)

[4] [http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google- search...](http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search- engine-market-share-nears-68)

[5] [http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-ww- monthly-200807...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-ww- monthly-200807-201411)</comment>