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Comment by blairbeckwith | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually not bothered by stuff like this, but let's play some role-reversal.

"Dating services know what men want (who doesn’t) and seed the network with photos of Latin American models with eclectic interests (not that the latter matters)."

In to...

"Dating services know what women want (who doesn't) and seed the network with wealthy-looking men with genuine personalities (not that the latter matters)."

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Dating services are shady... Friend Finder Networks (AdultFriendFinder, etc) actually hires people to sit there and pretend to be interested people in order to bait users into becoming paid members because the only way you can message someone is by being premium. I think that's really shady. I'd understand just starting out, but AFF has been around for 10+ years.

I'd prefer Italian models myself but I mean they already know apparently...

On a serious note, it probably worked. This might come across as sexist, but aren't we as men more easily "gamed" when it comes to dating? We are very visually oriented...more so than females.

Counterpoint: https://www.google.com/search?q=romance+novel+covers&safe=of...

How is that a counterpoint? It only shows covers of romance novels where the men look muscular and the women pretty. If men paid less attention to looks than female why are there so many arguably good looking women with so many arguably plain looking (but possibly wealthy) men?

I remember there was an article about a guy becoming millionaire with a dating site and it was all about matching young girls and wealthy men. I had to do a quick search on Google, the man is called Brandon Wade: http://www.businessinsider.com/brandon-wade-mit-nerd-built-a...

The claim is sexist and it would be stronger without the wealthy-looking bit, but when building a dating site it's definitely the women that will matter. I think the OP's point (by analogy) is knowing which side of the market is constraining you and focusing on that.

For dating sites, men go where the women are and it's women who have more optionality, including not joining a dating site altogether. So if you're building one you have to think about what your women customers want first and foremost.

There's a difference between saying that because you are a man/woman, you must desire x, and saying that x will attract more men/women than anything else. One is sexist, one is an observation of fact that can be borne out by experimentation.

I'd argue that the author let men off the hook, considering that a major contributor to Reddit's initial success was a large community of pedophiles, misogynists, and incest apologists given a safe haven under the premise of free speech. For a long time, violentacrez, the mod of many of those communities, had celebrity status on Reddit and had close connections to the administrators of the time.

Those communities only grew a long time after reddit's initial success. Remember reddit didn't even have subreddits when it started.

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