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Comment by fatbird | Hacker News Reader

The fatal flaw in the model is "I'm going to click on all my friends to see who signals interest in me".

That's not the fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is that all the men in a social circle will click on every friend to see who signals interest. All the women will click on the same one or two individuals. In other words, the fatal flaw is that it will simply replicate the dynamics and frustrations of high school.

Yes, it gets tiring servicing so many fine ladies

Fatal flaw or working as intended?

The premise of the app is that with a contrived double-blind method, you can turbo past the awkward stage of signalling interest in someone.

It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all.

In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.

Surely an easy way to avoid this is to limit the number of clicks you can have over a period of time or you have a list of 5 people you would like to bang. You can add/remove people from that list. If you you are both on each other's list you are notified but you have to be on the list at the same time. That way you know that you are in the top 5 people that your friend wants to hook up with.

I also think that they should give you the number of people that have you on their lists.

I only have one friend(male) using the app but when I log in, it shows a small subset of my female friends. Any idea how it selects them? I initially thought that they were the only females using the app but this is obviously not the case.

Yeah but if you are clicking on everyone to see who clicks on you, you don't have to pursue anything.

If someone clicks on you and you don't want to sleep with them, you wouldn't reach out to them about it, no? So you don't reach out to anyone, waiting for them to reach out to you to express their interest.

And now you get to the point where both are waiting forever for the other to make the first move to avoid embarrassment.

Well, exactly. This is why the app fails in its basic model: it doesn't help you past that awkward first step of signalling interest. Even after getting a mutual thumbs up, you still don't know if there's a real hookup there.

>we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.

I'm pretty sure people would be aware of that downside beforehand, and would factor that in as a possible risk when comparing it to the benefit of simply satisfying their curiosity. It's not foolproof, but it isn't exactly a crapshoot either.

Why can't the reverse be true also? Maybe you clicked around and wanted to see which girls had interest in you. Maybe you both clicked around, and both of you think you each have interest in each other.

How is that a fatal flaw (or a flaw at all). By clicking on all of your friends, you are signalling that you want to have sex with any/all of your friends. At this point, if any of your friends signal a want to have sex with you, the service will see that two people want to have sex with each other and tell them.

If you clicked through all of your friends to see which ones clicked on you (even if you do not want to have sex with them), then you simply lied. People who lie this way will inconvience those who the service paired them with once, after which point none of his friends would click on him again because they do not trust his genuine use of the system. This leaves you with the people using the service as intended.

CrushMail (or something like it) circulated among my friends at some point during the late 90s. Perhaps she was fibbing, but the one girl who I think I matched with (??) said she had just clicked on everyone.

So, plausible deniability wins.

On a completely different note: this is basically a non-issue after one's mid-20s, by which point most people seem to have the ability to appropriately inquire after those whom they have an interest in, and have a reasonably good sense for who is eligible and who isn't.

That would damage the anonymity but perhaps there are ways to reduce this effect without greatly damaging the benefit to users to other services. For example, you could have a quota so you can only select say 10% of your friends at a time.

The QuickMatch system on OkCupid has the exact same fatal flaw.

It's a similar sort of thing. If you rate someone highly, they are notified that "somebody" rated them highly, but they don't know who did it. If they rate you highly in turn, then you're both notified. What ends up happening is a lot of people rate everybody highly so that they find out who rated them highly, ultimately defeating the purpose of the system.

Could limit the # of people you could click on to 5 or 10 or whatever. Could be a different number for guys vs. girls. Or could equalize by charging guys per click and girls click free or something.

Exactly. It should also have a search functionality in case you have a thousand friends.

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