Hacker News Reader

Comment by NilsIRL | Hacker News Reader

I might have misunderstand the blog post but it seems to me that everything that was tried used a "2-chain" which works on the assumption that the same type of people enjoy talking together.

From my personal experience although this can often be true it can also often be completely wrong. Concretely the friends I have are not a copy of myself and I am not necessarily friends with those that are very similar to me.

Another way to put it is to put people's personality as a binary, they're either of type I or type II.

In the example given, person A and C both had a non-trivial conversation with person B. So person B is type I and person A and C type II. In this case type II can be interpreted as "has non-trivial conversations with type I". There is no reason for person A and C which are both type II to have a non-trivial conversation.

View on HN

Specifically, type I and II are probably male and female. Isn't it immediately obvious that model doesn't make sense if people are talking to the opposite sex? No, Bob and Carlie don't want to have a "meaningful chat" because they both chatted with Alice.

s/Carlie/Charlie/, I assume?

(Carlie, where I grew up, is a woman's name so this threw me for a bit).

Yes, Charlie, sorry.

With this in mind, the conclusion of the blog post is hilarious.

Quotes from the blog post:

> [The] rough idea is that if, say, Alice spoke to Bob for a long time and then Alice also spoke to Carol for a long time, then Bob and Carol are more likely than not to speak for a long time too.

> [...]

> The data have clearly shown us that, despite proving a successful technique for many other products across a range of contexts, collaborative filtering simply wasn’t a match for Chatroulette.

Basically:

1) make an arbitrary assumption about your data,

2) apply a widely-used recommendation algorithm,

3) notice that the results are really bad,

4) reject the algorithm... rather than the assumption.

Admittedly, I don't know whether the algorithm requires this assumption, or whether a slightly different one could be used. For instance, if Alice spoke to Bob and Charlie, then Bob and Charlie don't want to talk together. Or, if Alice spoke to Bob and Charlie, and Carol spoke to Bob, then Carol should be recommended to Charlie, etc.

I came here to say this very thing. This was the first thing that popped into my mind when I started reading. I hope the people responsible understand the motivations behind their customers using their product. It's a very superficial, and obvious observation to make that a large number of people use this product for romantic interactions.

You are so right.

The last person I want to chat with is someone like me.

(I do think Chatroulette should kindly ask men to refrain from the dick picks though. Then again, it seems like their users only go their to expose themselfs? I remember when it first started, and it was a great idea. Then the penis appeared.)

>I remember when it first started, and it was a great idea. Then the penis appeared.

Thus said EVERY WOMAN who has been married

I know a few women that are into penis.

Comments like this are frowned upon I guess but I can't not bring up a great quote from 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy:

"Wigco.com? Sheinhardt Wig's user-generated content site. All that anybody ever posted on it were penises."

Wouldn’t that imply that there wouldn’t be groups of conversational friends larger than 2 people? Or are you suggesting that many people might be fine with conversations with people of either type?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com