Cross-Country Love: Help Fly NYC Women to SF | Hacker News Reader

Cross-Country Love: Help Fly NYC Women to SF

crowdtilt.com

24 pointslaurenkay22 comments

Yea, this is a joke, right? Am i missing something? This seems like on of the silliest idea i've heard in a long time. Once you start offering free flights, wouldn't the incentive system immediately switch from finding love to free vacation?

What? There's no free flights here. This is the option of very expensive flight+date, or a $20 lotto ticket to a chance of a flight. It's basically a trap for the less sharp. Good luck to them, I guess.

Maybe this appeals to the man or woman that thinks NYC/SF is a magical world full of only people of the opposite sex. I just moved from NYC to SF, and it's really not that exceptional of a difference.

Fair enough, let's play this out. Women are going to pay $500 (without accommodations), to go on 3 dates, and fly back. Guys pay $100 for a cocktail party with a plane full of ladies from New York. Then what happens? You pick up and move your life across the continent for your love at first date, or do you keep going on $500 first dates?

At some point someone has to move across the country. It'd make more sense to me that, if you think NYC is some oasis overflowing with women... just move there. It's not so hard. There is a tech sector, and it's really a fun place to live. Just make sure you live by Carroll Gardens, because that's where i noticed all the girls in Brooklyn seem to live. Women who want to move to SF... Yea, um, good luck finding an apartment. See you in Oakland!

Alternatively, they could probably make all the dates happen at home by offering NYC men some of the money that would otherwise go towards the flight.

There is a long and amusing history of trying to balance gender ratios with incentives. A fantastic story I read recently was a scheme by two brothers in early 20th century Colorado attempted to entice women by building a school in their remote mountainous areas. Two came to teach, one stayed. Not bad odds? I grew up in the 80s were the only difficulty was getting the boys to dance with you at the local disco when you were 14.

Why not send males over to NYC instead? (rhetorical question) The job market can better support them. Not sure if San Francisco's job market can handle more workers as easily.

I was born and raised in NYC and all I have to say is that I am glad that I moved to California as a married man. The two cities are not in the same league when it comes to both the quality and quantity of women (with the definition of quality not specified).

It's not like flights are that expensive, is it? It's the "actually moving across the country" part that people don't follow through on. So either this is a crowd-funded one night stand festival, or it's a failure.

It's really easy to mis-interpret this at a glance. I thought it was literally asking people for money to fly random people to a different city for a date.

Instead, they're actually selling tickets - the cost includes flight, hotel, and some sort of dating event. (You can also toss in $20 and maybe win a free flight.)

I thought that Crowdtilt was more like Kickstarter, but it seems that it's just a way to gather money for any arbitrary cause.

I thought it was literally asking people for money to fly random people to a different city for a date

That's one of the options. You can 'donate' to send 'additional' women. A good few of the recent contributors have been men.

I thought, at first, it was the only option. I wonder how many other people did.

This is a smart marketing stunt. It's a mutual win because it will generate press for both the platform (CrowdTilt) and the user (The Dating Ring).

My hunch is The Dating Ring got the okay from CrowdTilt before launching this campaign, and have an informal agreement in place to delete the campaign after a few days, which will generate further press.

Maybe I'm a bit childish, but I totally misread the little text that says "Tilts at $10,000".

Yep, I'm sorry.

Are gender ratios really a problem in SF? I visited SF, and women there said that if one excludes gay men, the ratio of women to men in san francisco tends to be heavier on the women's side.

Anyone have their own experiences?

Much like the micro climates it seems pretty regional in SF [1]. Although this Forbes article seems to suggest that single women should look in the Tenderloin for single men. ;)

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2013/02/11/americas-best-...

San Francisco is one of the most, if not the most, gay-progressive cities in the world, but it's not like gays dominate the demographics, except possibly in Castro and adjacent neighborhoods. I thought I read that at best it's something like 10-15% of the population, whereas the average percentage is 3-5%.

My single female friends complain that although the male:female ratio is really high, the quality male: quality female ratio is very low. They complain that many of the available males have personality defects and all the quality males are snapped up relatively quickly.

It's almost like they read this (satire piece) and decided to try to validate the idea... http://www.leveragedsellout.com/2014/01/the-founder-hounder/

I'm sure there is some practical reasons (company based in SF, suitable venues, flight schedules, etc) but would it not be better to fly women to SF and men to NY and in equal measure?

The "plane full of women" makes me think of "The Bachelor: Silicon Valley."

Wow, this is just... really guys? Are women now a commodity we can ship from the other side of the country? What happens when we realize the dating problem in SF is actually more of an issue of misaligned priorities and unmatched interests? Next step, import cheaper, hotter, more malleable women from some poor country?

For the record, I'm a male and I'm offended. I can't even think what any of the many great independent, free-thinking women I've met in San Francisco would think about this.

wouldn't a sugar daddy dating site be better suited for that?

https://www.seekingarrangement.com

I'll just quote Julia, the founder of Zidisha.

"My objection to most handout programs is based on the negative psychological effects I experienced time and again while working with development assistance grants in Africa and Asia. The resources we distributed would certainly result in an economic boost, but they also fundamentally changed the way the recipients saw themselves, and the way we saw them. Handouts caused the recipients to view themselves as dependents whose fortunes were subject to the whims of luck and on pleasing donors, rather than on themselves as drivers of their own lives. When repeated enough, this psychological side effect can be devastating not only for the individual recipient, but for the broader community that has come to depend on the handouts."

I'm curious whether research backs up the claim that handout-type assistance invokes this sort of self-perception, on an individual or group level. Do you know of anything?

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