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Comment by zalzane | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the concept of missed connections on craigslist. Honestly, what's the chance of two people meeting each other, forgetting to swap numbers, and then both going onto craigslist to search/post in the missed connections category?

It just seems like such an overwhelming statistical improbability that such a missed connection would ever be fulfilled through craigslist, I don't see why anyone would even bother posting.

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I posted a missed connection once, and about 2 hours later got a reply from a person who was in the exact same circumstances (ie same time, same place, same details about furtive glances) - but she was looking at some other dude who was there and thought I was him. At the same time, I actually wasn't looking at her, but at another girl who was at the same event.

So it fizzled cause we weren't looking for, but looking "past" each other.

Moments of extreme awkwardness after flirting madly mutually verifying locational/timing/happenstance details followed by absolutely wrong physical descriptions of each other. Yah that conversation dried up fast.

I suppose it could have been a romantic start to some kinda relationship, but that ship sunk before it even had a chance.

You absolutely should have gone on a date. Think of it this way, if by some chance it worked out you'd probably have the best "how we met" story of your entire social circle.

I feel that having a good “how we met” story is a big boost for a potential relationship. At least early on, when you have nothing else to go on. It says, “the odds of this meeting were low; this isn't a thing that happens every day, therefore it's more valuable”.

One time my sister-in-law met a guy at a bar and it was one of those movie conversations where they liked the same obscure writers and comedy and whatever. They parted coolly and casually, but the next day they reconnected through Craigslist. So it's happened at least once.

haha, I was just thinking that. Every romance movie where people in a huge city lose track of each other has to ignore the existence of that city's craigslist “missed connections” page. That is, if both parties felt that way about it.

The internet has demolished the basic template for a whole sub-genre of romance movies.

if only romeo and juliet had cell phones.

I don't know about missed connections, but I lost my car/house /bike lock keys in Boston while riding my bike to work (somewhere between the end of the bike path and The Garden)

I didn't realize I had lost my keys until after I locked my bike up, so it was a particularly bad after-work-surprise.

Anyways, after a few days of looking all over my house/work for them, my girlfriend suggested I check CraigsList's Lost+Found ... I told her she was crazy. What are the changes that (a) someone found my keys and then (b) that they would post that they found them on CraigsList and (c) I would be able to identify them from their post.

Well, a nice, older gentleman from Southy found my keys at a bus stop (that wasn't even close to anywhere I rode my bike) and had his daughter post about it on Craigslist.

So I can at least say that CraigsList's Lost+Found worked at least 1 time in the history of the universe... so maybe a Missed Connection has a chance too?

I lost my car keys and found them on Craigslist once too. When I showed up to get them, the guy told me this story about how he started up an affair with the woman in the house next door after returning her lost keys to her. I am a guy, so I am pretty sure he wasn't trying to get fresh with me.

"Missed connections" plays to a romantic mindset that doesn't consider things like probability and statistics in everyday life. I'd say more people have this mindset than the one you're expressing.

Specifically, it's trading away consciousness of probability in favor of a sense of agency. We all do that a little bit from time to time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

I met my husband on craigslist missed connections. Back in 2007.

Spill the beans! Tell us more. This is pretty intriguing.

This finally motivated me to write up about it :)

http://drippurple.com/

Awesome! But did you ever found out why and what came of his "bouquet of flowers" in the original meeting? :)

I did.

The date he had been setup on showed up about 5 minutes after my coworkers and I moved on to the next restaurant (edit: bar, this is Wisconsin after-all), R and his date went inside to eat, which is why S could not find him.

R told me on our first date that you'll never know how difficult it is to go on a date with someone while you're thinking about someone else :)

I had a missed connection happen for me. It was actually my buddy who checked missed connections regularly and realized one of them was in reference to me. It was at a halloween party and my costume and the general location was described in detail, including what we talked about. Pretty crazy.

the concept comes from newspapers in low population areas. it wasn't really invented by the internet.

you should go read the wiki page for 'missed connections' though, it's somewhat enlightening.

I don't see what's so improbable about it. If I found a set of keys or some personal property on the street with no identifying information craigslist is the first place I'd go, and so would most other people in an urban area. Sure, the probability that both parties felt a romantic attraction and still feel it a day later is fairly low, but if that is the case then CL would be the obvious first place to look.

Oddly enough I ended up dating someone through that. A friend saw the post and thought it may have been me they were talking about. I thought I'd shoot a reply and lo and behold, it was. It went fairly well for awhile, had very similar interests and got along great. We had different goals in life though and were at different stages. Still, an interesting experience.

Probably for the same reason people play the lottery. The odds are against you, but the reward is worth that little bit of effort.

>>but the reward is worth that little bit of effort.

Is it? I would guess that in the vast majority of cases where the two people actually re-connected, it led to a date or two and that's it.

How is that not worth it?

Wait. I thought you would be disputing the other thing, i.e., that the lottery is worth playing.

Yeah, jeez you would have to leave your basement and go out with a lady, I agree, HORRIBLE, TERRIBLE

I think the same thing, and yet after asking around - and as you can see from the comments here - it happens far more often than you would expect.

It's amazing to me that this is not a futile exercise. Regardless, even if it were, it serves a healing purpose for the poster. Putting an attachment like this out there in the universe can be a big release, regardless of the outcome. People often write love poems without the intent to send them. Same idea.

It feels like a byproduct of some sort of a Hollywood-manufactured misconception about love at first sight.

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