Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, I would be surprised if more than 1% of OkCupid's user base switched to BitCoin.

Back in the 90s, the nerds dominated online dating. Same story with the Bulletin Board Systems of the 70s (The Matchmaker) and the punch cards at Stanford in the 60s (Happy Families Planning Services, used on the IBM 650) for the purposes of online dating. Today, it's much more pervasive with 75% of singles in the U.S. having tried online dating. Most of the women I've talked to on OkCupid are not technical, and when I setup a fake account to see what types of messages girls would receive, none of the people who initiated contact were hackers.

I still don't think the mainstream understands what BitCoin is, or why it's valuable. They hear things like "anonymous" and then wonder what they'd need that for, not seeing that the earliest users of BitCoin were hobbyists, hackers, and Silk Road members. If anything, hopefully this will push people to become BitCoin users, assuming the sign up process is easy enough and the price difference is enough to make them switch.

Don't overthink the joke.

I must have missed the sarcasm. Plenty of people mistakenly believe that online dating is still used mainly by nerds. It was true at one point in time.

Edit: I find it strange that you deleted your previous comment after you wrote a reply to my comment, which said you've enjoyed using OkCupid for 8 years. That comment was part of what prompted me to respond initially, and why I didn't think it was sarcasm.

Original comment doesn't state that online dating is used mainly by nerds, but that nerds mainly use online dating.

It's so pervasive now that you could make the statement true by replacing nerd with any other group of people.

The only exception would be people in relationships or marriages. Unfortunately, even that is becoming questionable: look at Ashley Madison and its nearly 2 million uniques per month.

I wish there were a dating site mainly for nerds, really. I don't know how you could maintain that.

It has the classic chicken and egg problem that you'll face when you start any type of online dating startup. Niche dating startups are even harder to start because you have an implicit filter to start off with, and the problem with all filters is they reduce the pool. If you have a small pool of users to choose from, you'll have an even smaller pool of users with other filters applied.

So you can search for keywords on OkCupid, such as "nerd" or "programmer." You won't find many results, but you can try. The other way to go about it is working exclusively with software companies, such as Google or Facebook (similar to how Facebook required an .edu address to join, you must check for a company e-mail to join). You still have a chicken and egg problem though, so you must solve that in order to make the niche nerd dating startup work.

It would be interesting to have a site (dating or HR or commentary) where you could have specific facts/tags in a profile and some serious checking of those specific facts.

e.g. for a dating site you'd have "less than 300 pounds", "graduated from Stanford", "not married", "hivfree"

for an HR site you'd have "not a CISSP", "graduated from Caltech in 2000 in CS", "US Citizen", "worked for Google 2000-2004", etc.

Individual tags would be searchable, high confidence, and ideally structured (so "College Graduate", "CS", "MIT", "MIT SB", "MIT 2000", "MIT SB 2000", "MIT SB 6 2000" would all be known.

(The stupid way LinkedIn does Endorsements isn't it, I think. What my friends click just to get a stupid box to go away isn't high assurance information. I'm not sure if crowdsourcing has any place, but the ideal is to get actual validation from the data owner.)

This is something that needs to exist, and I'm very excited about it. We may build this at CupidWithFriends. I've thought about tags for a while now, the problem is you don't have an identity layer to actually verify whether the tags are true or not. Think LinkedIn endorsements, but for dating. Lying is a huge problem, 81% of all online dating users will lie about some aspect of themselves.

I wrote this comment before I made it to the end of what you wrote about LinkedIn endorsements. The implementation is still up for debate, but the idea is compelling at the very least. I do think that LinkedIn endorsements are worthless because I haven't yet used them, but that idea distills a person down to their core. We're basically trying to solve that problem through the single question that gets more responses than any other on our site: "describe your friend using only three words."

I'm not really in the dating market at all, but if you could figure out how to do this for HR or social/hacking/friendship/etc., I'd be really interested.

Being able to find a set of N people who are into ancap/lib ideas if not politics, blinded tokens, HSMs, and are within a 100 mi radius of X would be interesting.

Who is going to post on a dating site that their friend is really fatter than they're claiming? I imagine most people would consider that unthinkably mean.

Yeah, I'd be afraid of the crowdsourced "endorsements" turning into totally bland stuff as a result. What I specifically want are "facts", i.e. things which are objective and can be verified/falsified. No one will post those about their friends if they are anything but positive.

So the natural consequence is assuming the absence of a verified fact for "is under 300 pounds" is "is over 300 pounds" with equally high certainty, if you have a well structured system which covers everything.

I don't think the overweight tag would be interesting, but just figuring out the basics of a person without having to read through a long essay. School, occupation, personality traits as described by friends, etc.

My theory is the problem of people lying on their profiles will go away when their friends are using the site with them.

The gender imbalance would be massive, as it used to be.

Not a problem for 5-10% (or more?) of the potential audience.

gk2gk is not a huge success because straight males usually prefer females, even if they are not geeks.

Your potential audience is not tiny but it isn't massive either.

Aside from the non-heterosexual market being large, there are two other factors:

1) JDate allegedly has nots of non-Jewish people on the site who are looking to date Jews. I mean, it makes sense -- it's a great place to find them :) Maybe there are non-geeks who are looking to date geeks.

2) My definition of nerd/geek goes beyond programming. A professional (in law or medicine or engineering) is probably way more interesting than a .NET corporate programmer. I could see "career/lifestyle tags" working for this.

Arguably it wouldn't even need to be limited to geeky activities, but general interest interests as well. Maybe someone really likes backpackers, or people who have completed Bioshock Infinite, or corporate M&A lawyers, or people from Surrey. Having verified tags for those things would make searches more interesting.

gk2gk.com

It's called World of Warcraft.

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