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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

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

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I'm imagining OkCupid/Groupon instead.

Cheap dates?

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.

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