Sex in the Bathroom and the Problem of Offline Data | Hacker News Reader

Sex in the Bathroom and the Problem of Offline Data

blog.joingrouper.com

112 pointswaxman58 comments

Hoping that someone from Grouper happens to be reading this: The unsubscribe link in your emails is broken. I got so tired of unsubscribing unsuccessfully that I've now been marking you as spam every time I get an email.

Obviously, this is bad for your deliverability. You should fix your unsub links.

I just unsubscribed you. Sorry for the hassle.

If anyone else is having problems, we send all of our e-mails from addresses that you can respond to. The one-click unsubscribe links seem to be working fine, but if they're not, you can just respond to the e-mail and we'll take care of it.

Maybe they could partner with Target [1] to see if someone gets pregnant after their meetup.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

You know, back in my day, sharp signs preceded channel names, and at signs let you know who the channel ops were.

The encroachment of Twitterspeak and Twittersigils into everyday English is a bad moon rising.

Okay, either I'm missing something glaring about the article or you posted this comment on the wrong thing. Which is it?

Nothing glaring, but he's probably referencing the (#awkward) comment in the blog.

meh, I enjoy it, I understand it's meaning, and it's crept into emails between my friends and I as well. Just another mannerism creeping into casual electronic communication to convey meaning whilst not face to face isn't a bad thing. Go find someone else to kick off your lawn.

Meh; its; my friends and me.

Three mistakes of grammar in a paragraph about relaxed written communication. A self-evidencing post!

haha touche. I've also noticed I've become completely unable to spell words with more than five letters, as spell checkers have been doing it for me for so long that I forgets my wurdz.

#grammersux

Are you sure 'between my friends and me' is actually incorrect? It is a prepositional phrase, unless I'm mistaken. I admit to having little familiarity with the relevant grammar.

(Boy is this off topic!)

Maybe opinions are changing on this one, but the way I learned it is simple: refer to yourself as if the other person wasn't there. So:

Come to the store with my Dad and I. (no) Come to the the store with I.

Come to the store with my Dad and me. (yes) Come to the the store with me.

Dad and me went to the store. (no) Me went to the store.

Dad and I went to the store. (yes) I went to the store.

Remove the third party and it's immediately obvious which to use.

That rule is usually correct, but has some exceptions. Though 'between me' sounds better to my ear than 'between I'.

Regardless, 'me' is always correct as the object of a prepositional phrase because it's an object pronoun. 'I' is a subject pronoun.

At some point in the past someone said "the encroachment of IRCspeak into everyday English is a bad moon rising" :)

I kinda agree. But then again I do find it has utility; people can use it to express emotion, which previously has been a sticking point for purely textual communications. Consider:

And then they all died! #upset #crying

versus:

And then they call died! #hellyeah

I quite like this sort of hacking.

At some point in the past someone said "the encroachment of IRCspeak into everyday English is a bad moon rising" :)

It was, and for that reason people who say "lol", or use it in blog posts, are difficult for me to take seriously.

I've always read "lol" as a sign that they don't actually want you to take what they're saying too seriously.

I am always disheartened by the notion that anything beyond text is needed to express emotion or sarcasm. That's what writing is. By properly combining words, good writers can express almost anything, and more fully than with emoticons or tags.

However, the example you give is dark humor, so you win me over there.

I like this interview with Nabokov in 1969.

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?

Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

True. On the other hand most people are somewhere in the spectrum between bad and almost-good writers.

And even the best writers, when writing quickly in an immediate medium like the internet, can get it wrong.

I think that is the key; when interacting socially there is no need to make sure your writing is top notch and expresses your emotions adequately. You just stick a smilie on :)

Consider a real-life conversation. You wouldn't pause for several minutes to make sure the next sentence properly conveyed what you wanted to say. But you might smile and wink at the end of a put-down to show it was a joke.

Back in my day, plus signs preceded channel names. Take your newfangled octothorpe channel names and go have your so-called nineteen-nineties.

Huh? You mean an ampersand? #/& were the original channel prefixes. The plus channel prefix (which means an unmoderated channel) did not come till later. Even then & prefixes have a different connotation from # channel prefix.

Seems like there were + prefixes before - https://www.alien.net.au/irc/chantypes.html

I can't remember exactly where I first encountered the plus prefix (it's been a long time), but I remember # and + more than &.

Huh? That says the + prefix came from RFC2811 which came out in 2000. So after RFC 1459 which only specifies &/# as channel prefixes.

> I don't care if a user says they like a feature; I care if they actually use it

That's a mildly dangerous position for a product owner to take (though I accept in the particular scenario described it makes sense). In a customer's mind, having a facility available - even if never used - may be a key feature of the service.

One example that comes up now and then in the offline world is late-night public transit. If you go by measured ridership, it's a no-brainer to cut most trips, because empirically people rarely actually ride late at night (in most U.S. cities, anyway). But when you do, in most cases ridership at other times of day falls also, because people suddenly are worried about the possibility of getting stranded. Even if 98% of the time they never actually use the 2am bus, they like knowing that it's available just in case.

I was expecting this to be about tapping on your phone's accelerometer to gather the data.

Great hook but then...

"Apply Privately with Facebook"

Instafail. That's never gonna happen. Ever. Please take a read of http://dickbrouwer.com/post/16748664071/facebook-perils

That's not really relevant here because this is a rare site that actually needs facebook data like the friend graph. They're not using it as a lazy login mechanism.

Even so that facebook button is sitting there acting as the gateway to investigating further, with very little information provided so far. To me it's almost like a site that says "Give us your credit card information now. We promise only to do nice things with it. Later we'll tell you what we did"

The process is really simple; and they explain it with a nice graphical flow if you click the "how does it work" link (prior to signing in).

Did you see/click that and still have the same concern? And if you did see it, what sort of assurances/explanations would you want to see?

(I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious :)).

Is it different for real-world meetups though? I think Ridejoy did a great job with this http://ridejoy.com/signup?redirect_url=%2F

Their entire product is based off of taking your facebook data and friends graph and arranging these meetups. It's not some instafail slapped on at the last moment because they thought it was a good idea, its a core peice of how they work. If that doesn't work for you fine, but in this case then their site isn't for you but oh well

"Also, while I can't promise you sex in the bathroom (if that's what you're looking for), I can say that it happens. We just don't know how often."

Haha, nice pitch - wonder if VCs would buy it! ;)

Hilarious story btw. :)

Theres this trendy little bar/lounge in philadelphia's old city section called paradigm which has these unisex bathrooms with doors that are clear when unlocked and fog up as soon as you lock them[1]. Once in a while it makes for a usually not quite desirable show when some one(or two) is drunk enough to shut the door without locking it and not notice the opacity.

[1] http://s3-media3.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/I7ICPsQ45YVbLzKEBiHND... left locked, right unlocked

In downtown Lausanne, Switzerland (in this plaza, if you're in the area: http://g.co/maps/tupbn), there's an outdoor washroom that's enclosed in that sort of glass. When you walk up to it, all the walls are clear. When you lock the door, the walls go opaque.

Not really sure how it works, to be honest...

Edit: This is the stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass

This is such an awesome problem. Have you made any changes based on the FB friends data? Do you feel like the data has been more valuable than personal experience?

You can solve the problem easily if you get hold of the cellphone data of the involved parties. If cellphones get together after date, it was successful. If cellphones spend the night in the same location, I'll call it a 5 star. The cherry on top would be that if you have GPS on both phones you can also get the bathroom moment.

Say hello to the new age of not so much privacy.

ha! a Groupon for bathroom hookups... should have called it...Grope-On

Just put the stress on the O rather than the U in Grouper.

Not surprised and the lesson here is actually something very important and common: user surveys aren't always accurate. Ask a bunch of people if they're interested in learning new things and almost every one is going to say yes, but that doesn't mean they'll actually put in the work, however minimal, to do so.

Good way to get new members Grouper. :)

This seems deeply fictional to me: a group of adults appear in a bar. Why would a manager ever contact a matching agency? Maybe the internet has made me too cynical, but the bar for truthiness has fallen rather low.

That seems bizarre, but of course is to imply a certain opportunity and efficacy in the product in a very salacious, shareable fashion.

I don't buy it.

They prepay for their first round of drinks through Grouper. It's on the "how it works" section: https://www.joingrouper.com/

Okay I suppose that makes sense. I've been with groups where some of the more brash have gone off and covorted in the bathrooms, and when the establishment has a problem it has never been a big deal. I still can't envision managers actually calling the parents on them.

That's because if you guys just show up at the establishment, they have no idea who your "parents" are or where to contact them. If, however, your group arrived there through some arrangement (between grouper and the establishment in this case), they do have a place to complain if you do something they don't approve of.

The managers are probably assuming that this 'Grouper' may be a prostitution front, and naturally would prefer it not be using their premises.

also they might be getting repeated business through this "new" client called grouper and then notice some of those people having sec in the bathroom. It's probably more than a one time thing so they realize it's a business and then don't want to get associated with certain kinds of businesses which the law is really hard on. It's illegal to make profit from or take any more from money made from prostitution so it's in their interest to make sure everything ok and they aren't being turned into some poorman's brothel and don't have to worry about the cops shutting them down next week.

Frankly, the first time it happened we didn't believe it either. But you can't make this stuff up :-)

Yes you can.

But he's not.

Boy, both of you have led sheltered lives if you think either that one has to make up stuff like this, or that stuff like this is hard to believe!

I am very much aware that people have sex in bathrooms (in restaurants, in bars, on planes). It is actually not a big deal, and one that most establishments treat as a mere nuisance: One restaurant in my area actually had a promotion that hinted that they were open to this.

Filter down to places where you send adults for drinks and the likelihood that anyone is going to treat it as a big deal falls even lower.

THAT is what is unbelievable, your laughable notion that we are sheltered notwithstanding.

and one that most establishments treat as a mere nuisance

I'm skeptical of this... I'm struggling to think of any reasonable bar in my area (i.e. anything below, say, nightclub level) where, if someone caught you having sex in the bathroom, you wouldn't be asked (politely) to take it elsewhere.

That sounds like the definition of a nuisance.

I don't think he's saying they wouldn't ask you to leave--especially since they probably found out about by way of a customer complaint. I believe he's just saying that they aren't going to make a big deal about it beyond asking you to leave, i.e. they aren't going to call the cops or issue a trespass warning.

Ok, fair enough.

But I still don't get the point being made - which now I re-read it seems to be that complaining to grouper is making a big thing of it.

It seems perfectly logical to me; if you're in a business relationship with someone and they send you a people who go and have sex in the toilet (something you wouldn't necessarily expect to happen) why wouldn't you pass on that they had to be thrown out?

What if the group had gotten drunk and smashed a table?

I spoke to some friends who work in bars about this, out of interest, and their thoughts were that, as an individual, if they caught someone having sex in the toilet they would be quite thrown by it. One guy had actually had it happen to him about 18 months ago and he said that he still tells that story with some regularity.

I think there is quite a margin between complaining "up the chain" and calling the cops (which certainly would be too big a deal).

Since they are startup, I assume they have a pretty close relationship with a lot of the bars they are working with. I wouldn't be surprised if the founders visited the bar and set things up themselves. In this scenario, it's much more likely that word would get back to them about sex in the bathroom.

This is brilliant marketing... subtext "you will get laid if you use our site!"

Put 2 rats of the opposite sex in a cage and chances are they're gonna get it on. Same can be said for for humans. We just animals!

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