Show HN: LaughMatch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LaughMatch

laughmatch.com

159 pointshaon9950 comments

OT: Get out of the habit of saying "I built this in 3 days". Most of the time, people say that because they're nervous about being judged. Ironically, "I built this in 3 days" probably exclusively attracts the kind of attention that benchmarks and judges what you built; either way, it's hard to see how it constructively promotes anything you're doing or planning to do.

Get used to people tearing you down. HN is full of people --- most of whom have never built anything --- who tear new products down for sport. But the world is also full of people who will be dismissive in more insidious ways. If you're going to launch products, build up your thick skin now. The industry is full of people who launched less impressive things than this, promoted their work ruthlessly and without neurotic humility, and later went on to run the table on their competitors.

That's why he said MVP.

tptacek you rock. Thank you for the comment here.

Sometimes you can have that inspirational drive to do things fast. Most of the time you have to think about it, go through "writers block" and then bam.

Somewhat ironically, your comment doesn't have anything at all to do with what he actually built -- a really cool new take on personality matching.

There. Fixed it for you.

I think that's wrong philosphy to have. If I've built something (especially a 3 day project when I haven't invested too much time yet), I want all the criticism I can get. Comments like "that seems cool" are just noise. On the ohter hand, someone pointing out a legitimate showstopper can save you 6 months of time working on a dead end idea that could be spent working on something else.

Who's saying anything about what we're supposed to be saying? All I'm saying is "stop saying you built this in 3 days".

If I've gleaned your logic correctly, saying "I built this in three days" attracts the most critique. As such, if you're looking for critique (insensitive or otherwise), that seems like exactly the sort of preface to attach to the title of your submission.

I agree that nobody should be impressed... with all the Rails Rumbles, Django-dashes and StartupWeekend projects I've seen in the past, it takes quite a bit to wow me with a 76 hour project, but I don't know know why that should bother the creator either way.

Edit: Sorry, my eyes are glazed over, and I just realized that's basically exactly what the GP said. Apologies for being repetitive.

Perhaps the title has been edited. How do you know this was built in three days?

If I built something decent in three days, I would mention the time frame to boast, not as an excuse. That's also how I imagine most people mean it.

The title was edited.

Not by me. All comments/criticism appreciated. Original title read "Show HN: LaughMatch (MVP built in ~3 days)"

I don't much like HN feature allowing editing title and comments.

Another point, days don't translate to effort or even time.

I had to bring up a php site in 3 days. I charged 55 hours in 3 days.

Another time, life was slow and we were benchmarking long runs. I worked less then 40 hours in those 7 days.

Days!=time_spent

I like this. One thing I would add, is the ability for users to submit a YouTube URL (add a new video).

For example, Mitch Hedberg[1] is my favorite comedian. I'd like to submit a clip of his in hopes you'll match me with women who like it.

Plus, your job is easier when people are submitting content (you'll need some vetting process probably).

Plus, you can show people stats on the videos they upload. And "here are all the women who liked the video you uploaded," which is kind of awesome. I could write them and be like "Hey.. I'm glad you liked that video I uploaded..." nice ice-breaker.

Good work.

[1] Here's some Mitch. Enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7auvTMm47uM

This sounds like a great added feature. Added feature opportunities like this seem important to make this app just that...more than a feature.

I'd hate to see existing Match sites run with your idea as-is. Seems like added depth created by a more tailored experience (this above feature as an excellent example) would help you differentiate significantly enough to be significant on a standalone basis.

tl;dr Steal this^ feature idea before Match, etc., steal yours.

I like the idea. It has the clever advantage of offering something of value before anyone else has signed up - funny videos. Maybe you should offer more videos before the signup page. Maybe even split the sign up fields between videos. Obviously this is a good candidate for testing.

One major thing I don't like though are the highly restrictive options for gender and orientation. In the case of a dating site, classifying gender does seem like a neccesary evil, but the options could at least allow more people to sign up. I would suggest, as one possibility, adding more options, such as none and other, and also making this a check box selection for people with more than one gender.

Additionally, why do you ask for orientation? You don't need to know this, and you fail to ask the necessary question of "which genders would you like to be matched with". These things are not the same. This section could also allow check box selection of desired matches.

This is one of those ideas that seem so obvious to me that I wonder, "Why didn't I think of that." It needs some work, but it's got great potential. Good luck.

I really like the idea (as many others here seem to!) but there's an inherent problem with going beyond the US: some of the funny content is not available to the rest of us.

I was voting on some dog against a door stop, which was nice, but the following video was a clip from Portlandia, which I was not allowed to watch (in Canada.)

There were only the choices to not enjoy, or enjoy the video. There was no "skip this please" option.

Otherwise, keep working on this, it definitely has potential!

Interesting idea, but I find myself bored watching the videos, hoping they get funny (in some cases ... at all), and it's souring my experience of the service itself as a result :(

I like the idea of using sense of humor as compatibility test. Has this been done before or did you come up with this idea?

Hey there. Few things that I think could be improved:

1. The slider could have a wider (in height) clickable area, I find it hard to click. Make it fatter a bit.

2. When I decide whether I find a video funny or not, I then click vote and the video changes to a new one. I did that a couple of time and I was still in the middle of a video, I would have preferred if the vote was registered but that I could keep watching the video, and then click an arrow or something when I want to watch the next one.

3. I put a bogus postal code, so I can't use the "Meet people" feature. Would be nice if I could see my "laugh profile" and see people with a similar profile, without having to be geographically within 20 miles. Or let the search use different conditions, as 20 miles is kind of random.

4. Also, it's nothing major but, the rest of the world doesn't use imperial units.

I'll update as I find more.

Excuse my ignorance, what does MVP stand for?

Minimum Viable Product. They generally exist to validate an idea before investing time and money into it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

Pretty cool. Couple of ideas:

1. Ability to skip voting on a video (looks like you can click "watch videos" at the top to skip, but then it might come back)

2. Ability to suggest funny videos, since it seems the selection is limited (or the random generator is skewed!)

Great idea. My first impression is: "wait, I'm being judged after only two videos?" You probably want to increase that number to five or so. Good luck!

I would like to see more about the metric used, for example, an explanation of the model or formula you're using to weigh the dimensions of my sense of humor for classifying or clustering.

Cool idea.

One nitpick is: you're asking me to vote on whether a set of 30 or so jokes in a three and a half minute clip were funny. It's hard to do that, because some were funny, and some were not. Maybe with time addressing of the clips (possible with Youtube URLs I believe) you could offer up shorter segments and the idea would be more convincing, and probably work better as well.

Interesting take on behavioral target marketing. Good start. Have you considered adding a stronger call to action for the sign up process (upper right).

Also I noticed a blue button. Have you considered split testing red and yellow buttons? Those colors consistently work. Check out the color of Paypal or Amazon's CTA buttons - you'll see what I mean.

Good luck.

Nice idea,

btw you should make the Facebook Page a 'Community Page' not a person so I can like it not have to friend it.

I think it's an alluring idea for match making. But what's to stop OKCupid from releasing this same feature for their audience in less than 3 days. I assure you that their engineers also read Hacker News. That aside, really innovative use of youtube, better than Feross Aboukhadijeh's creation of Youtube Instant.

Great idea! However, when I signed up, the first clip I found was 7 minutes long. Based on that it would take quite a while to build up any sort of useful profile. Some sort of screening questions might be helpful, e.g. do you have a morbid sense of humor? Do you generally like these comedians? Etc.

I am curious of clustering and categorization of sense of humor which they used while choosing the videos.

I don't like the slider. I'd prefer a boolean :) or :(. Other than that, this is great.

Make the smilies clickable.

Unless you expect your users to make an in-between choice (in that case, making the smilies clickable will go against what you want)

I'm loving this idea, except I'd be afraid to date anyone who does share my sense of humor :)

You're onto something here -- keep us posted.

Have you also considered doing a browser extension that will display an interface for voting when you're on Youtube?

love the stark contrasting colors in your design. wonder how the login/vote buttons would look if they were flat like the rest of the design. too bad i already have an awesome gf (with a very similar sense of humor), i would definitely use this.

The top photo looks kind of silly on resolutions above 1440, but otherwise it's very nice.

Brilliant! This would be the dating site of my choice had I needed one. Great job guys!

dood this has potential to crush it and I rarely see stuff like this. Please keep working on it and innovate some more.

This is a truly awesome idea.

Nice but time consuming idea.

This is an amazing idea.

Love this idea!

Wow...good job!

I would be shocked if you've used a dating site before. Not to critize your product (the site looks pretty nice), but it's solving a problem that doesn't exist.

For what it's worth, there was a new yorker article from around the middle of 2011 where the feature is online dating. One of the researchers they interviewed concluded that guys are basically looking for girls that laugh at their jokes, and girls are basically looking for guys to make them laugh (to the point that they joked their next dating service would be called girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com)

I worked on something similar to the MVP shown (not about jokes specifically, but a "gimic" dating site). The real problems have to do with gender imbalance, men shotgunning messages, and the fundamental issue with these gimic sites: attractivness is all that matters online. It really doesn't matter how witty you can make yourself appear (which, I'm not sure this site allows for that? seems to just see if 2 users have the same sense of humor, not how funny someone is), if you're not attractive. Where in the real world, personality and confidence can have a much larger effect. The unspoken assumption is not that people want girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com, It's hotgirlsthatlaughtatmyjokes.com and hotguysthatmakemelaugh.com.

I strongly disagree. 'sense of humor' consistently ranks near the top of 'what people desire in a mate' surveys of both men and women. I'm not going to go off digging up citations for this on a Saturday evening, but I think it's a very important aspect of human relations. Different people find different sorts of things funny, and those preferences are deeply held.

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