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Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

Dunno about anyone else but i'm disappointed to hear about this. One of the strongest points of OkCupid was that they were kind of the anti-match.com :(

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I look at it this way: online daters and the Internet generally will probably be worse off for this eventually, but match.com is paying the OKCupid guys and despite all the value they've created over the years (in dating and outside of it -- watching them from afar has been an education in SEO/marketing), nobody else is running forward to put $50 million in their pockets.

Given the culture at OkCupid my dream match [1] for such a purchase was Amazon - that would have been cool & interesting hookup [2].

Match.com is a disappointment, but, yep they do deserve the payout.

I signed up for OKCupid when it launched to have a play - people are more and more using it as a light hearted social network for chatting to random people. I use it quite a lot when bored and fancy chatting to someone new. I did also meet my current gf via them, but that was unintentional; when the actual point of the site is secondary to your use of it I think that is a runaway success...

[1] pun only slightly intended ;)

[2] sorry... :P

Yeah an Amazon matchup would have been pretty interesting. I'm just trying to picture the mechanics of the affiliate program. Would people pay for referrals for good dates?

Indeed. What about pricing? They could have followed the AWS scheme and only charge you for time spent on dates :)

That's actually a very interesting idea.

Imagine a dating site that you book the date through and only pay for that date. Hmmm.

Maybe jump on to the entire group buying bandwagon and find restaurants that may be willing to give you a discount that you can also pass on to the dating couple.

Rings a bell; I remember a similar idea coming up in the past. You could work out affiliate deals with bars and restaurants (or other activities, I hate going on dates to bars).

I think the idea we threw around (it might even have been here on HN) was a sort of clever matched blind date (to avoid the problem of people just bypassing the system :D) rather than a "normal" dating site.

There are privacy/stalker and scale concerns there though.

Certainly worth exploring.

www.howaboutwe.com is an intriguing player in this field. They are built around date proposals. Nice way to introduce local deal and minimize the 'stalker' factor.

Apparently, they have a decent base in NY, but currently their Midwest member-base is limited.

Maybe a system where you get the description of the person as written by their friends (also members of the site)? So you have two types of users: people who want to date and people who want to set their friends up with someone. You could also charge per-date this way: if both people agree that the other sounds attractive and decide to go on a date, they pay a small fee to reveal the match.

There was a similar site in the UK relatively recently, advertised quite heavily on TV I recall. It was named something like My Single Friend. I no longer have a TV so I don't know if they're still advertising.

As hackers we're always coming up with new ideas for dating sites like these. They frequently fail though, mostly due to the inability to pull in a large enough number of users. I've been hired to work on dating sites before, they've all failed due to lack of users. I'm now quite wary of working with anybody who has an idea for the next big dating site. I have ideas of my own, but not confident ones I'd actually risk spending time/money on.

I'm imagining OkCupid/Groupon instead.

Cheap dates?

Sure- I am really happy for them. But, from a "change the world," or "next Big Thing" perspective it's sad to see. We love to think of startups as vehicles for innovation and change. But, a liquidation event can often lead to the mission being hurt. I am sure the OKC team is proud of their work and happy with this result. But, the HN crowd is sad to see them not going all the way so to speak. We wanted a great at SEO/marketing, fun, and free dating site to work.

I'm worried too. I envision popup ads plastering the site, the removal of free accounts, paying to send any messages, and overall removing of anything cool about the site.

On the plus side, there will soon be a hole in the market for someone making another non-match dating site.

In my mind, this is like if Priceline/Orbitz/Travelocity bought Hipmunk. The first thing they'd do is 'fix' the UI, then they'd add a ton more ads, 20 more steps to buying tickets, remind you that you can get a hotel/car/haircut/fries with that and get a cheesy salesman to parade it on TV. Then, I'd stop using it.

Given my experiences using the web over the past couplefew months while everybody's been freaked out about the economy and avoiding layoffs or just being opportunists, I've noticed a huge uptick in the number of popunder ads and autoplay video ads. Not to mention that modal overlays have caused me to stop visiting certain sites (Ramit Sethi's iwillteachyoutoberich.com, for example), we can look forward to an Orwellian advertising future for OKC.

That is, I don't think your complaints (or mine) will ever be resolved. For every person complaining about user-hostile site design, there are three calling it good business sense.

We've just got to hope for the best - there aren't many acquisition stories that end with "at least they didn't fuck it up." But I hope this is one of them. Grats to the OKCupid team. And don't worry, if reddit-post-acquisition is any indication, no one on the team would let hipmunk be sullied with obnoxious advertisements.

Steve was saying that you guys aren't looking for a small exit; is the idea with Hipmunk to stay in it for the long haul? I seem to recall both of you hinting that, while you don't regret selling reddit, you do kind of still wish you owned it. Is the idea with Hipmunk to make it a profitable business and just grow it holistically, without an eye to acquisition?

Thanks Alexis. You're right, major congrats to the OkCupid team, and there are certainly precedents for large companies not screwing up too much with things they've bought. I have confidence that no one at hipmunk would allow such to happen. :)

This is very saddening. I met my wife on okcupid, and I was hopeful okcupid was going to work out for my best friend. I tried a lot of sites, and okcupid was the only one that delivered a satisfying dating experience.

anti-match.com is open. The world is your oyster :-)

Yeah... pretty big let-down.

OKC jumped the shark?

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