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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'm genuinely surprised that the site was real. I thought it was a scam based on the "these hot horny girls in your area" ads.

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It actually didn't start out as a site for people looking for sex. It was started by a guy (Andrew Conru) who was looking for people to go fishing with, he lamented how hard it is for adults to find friends. Soon after he started the site, people started posting sex pictures, and it pretty quickly became the focus of the site.

That is both sad and very interesting. I have a similar problem with finding people to go running with me around where I live. Meetup groups around here are spread over a 50 mile radius or so, so that's no help. Perhaps I can try the opposite approach and post "hey, looking for a running buddy" on Match.com, OkCupid, AFF, etc.

There is a niche in the market. Some people have tried to fill that niche, and they've posted their sites to HN.

The main problems seem to be:

1) The sites only work once you have enough users to make them work, but you can't get more users until the site works.

2) People use them for sex, which is off-putting to large numbers of users.

OKC should probably set up some kind of meet-friends-in-groups thing.

I wonder if something like this can be piggy backed off Facebook would work. You kill many birds with that stone: you can use the degrees of separation to verify people ("Oh, that's Joe's friend"), you already have an audience, and people are less likely to flood it with casual sex proposals.

Facebook would be great but they're so full of garbage that few meaningful messages get through. I once sent out a query for people interested in a software project and tagged every friend I had who knows something about code (30-40). It didn't even show up in all their feeds. But hey, share a cat video hosted on a big commercial site and everyone gets that...

That's why with FB it's better to private message. When I see myself tagged in a post with 30 other people I can safely ignore it. It's usually someone trying to send out a social message. If someone messages me directly, I know it's important enough and take the time to respond. YMMV.

Meetup.com seems to do this successfully, is that the same type of site that you are referring to?

I've considered going to a computer / technology / entrepreneurship club, but haven't yet. They also have local groups for dog owners, walking/fitness/specialty (ballet, dance), FPV drone flyers, sports groups, and almost anything else I could think of they had a group already started for it in my city.

Some have memberships fees (completely optional when setting up a new group, afaik) and some have more strict requirements when joining (a potential problem but I haven't heard of it being abused).

Meetup seems to be successful because it only handles scheduled, group activities. If your website lets people privately connect with others who live in the same city, some of your user base will start using it to find sex.

> "If your website lets people privately connect with others who live in the same city, some of your user base will start using it to find sex."

This seems like something that would be in a David Letterman "Top 10 list of things to consider for your new website".

OKC at least has a "Looking for friends/Activity partners" option, whether it ever works is questionable. maybe people will message you, if not what have you lost? 10 mins to fill in a profile!

OkCupid needs a lot more than 10 minutes to fill out a profile. Spending a couple hours answering questions is generally recommended for their matching algorithms to work well.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/relationships/11599989/The-ma...

Althought it sounds a bit sparse at the moment.

Bonus points for the Inbetweeners gifs.

I actually went to school to learn to build a site similar to this (2003, not sure how many tutorials there were then, but I didn't know of them anyway). Though my inspiration came from loving to camp and canoe/white water raft and no friends of mine liked that outdoorsy stuff.

I also didn't realize this site was already out there, but if it was dating/sex related by that time, I wouldn't have known it could be used for that.

FWIW, there's another site I think similary created for meeting people nearby as friends (Meetme.com) that has also turned into a sex/hookup app.

Find a running club?

A straight female friend that had just moved into a new city directly messaged other women that she thought would make good friends on OKC.

Her response rate was about 40%. I cried a little.

I don't understand your comment. Are you crying because 40% is high or low?

He's crying because his response rate trying to contact women to date is probably way lower than that.

I have a somewhat unique perspective on this subject, and one of the insights I have gleamed is that gay and lesbian dating sites generally have much higher success rates. The reason is that perceived risk is much lower. Generally, when a man and a woman go out on a semi-blind date, the woman has a lot more to be afraid of. The guy can turn out to be a "creep" for example. Or if she decides at some point to have sex with him, she might get pregnant with little commitment from him. She has a lot to lose from a bad date than he does.

On the other hand, two guys or two girls going out on a date is not as big a deal. The perception is that it's safer. There is of course a lot to worry about, but the playing field is usually a lot more level. This of course is offset by the fact that on most dating sites your pool of gay or lesbian candidates is smaller, but your chances of them responding will generally be higher.

Bingo, but (for the reasons given in the other reply, and probably an imbalance in members) that's expected for response rates to male--->female messages.

Is there a running goods store near where you live? I don't have the time to run as much as I'd care to, but if I were new in town (Washington, DC), I'd start with the group runs that Pacers (1500 block of P St. NW) organizes, or Fleet Feet (? 1800 block of Columbia Road NW).

That's a good point, I haven't checked those out. Mostly been looking through stuff on Meetup.com. I'll do that and see what turns up.

You can see who runs around you via Strava.com, not to mentions its an awesome GPS app for running/biking. App also has features to post pics/comment/like, social network centered around outdoor activities with GPS features, pretty cool.

Never heard of Strava, I'll check it out, thanks.

I actually ended up in my last job because of OkCupid. Someone sent me a message, we ended up talking for a bit, and they invited me to a board game party at their house. Ended up going, then later got nagged into providing a resume.

OkCupid, at least when I signed up 10+ years ago, allowed you to specify that you were interested in platonic activity partners, and would show both a match rating and friend rating.

A (good looking, male) friend was in SF for a conference or something. I'm not sure who initiated contacted, but he got to talking to a (good looking, female) person(/account) on Tinder. They never met, but would talk about the tech industry. Tech gossip type stuff, similar to what you might see here or on Techcrunch, etc.

The female he was talking to may or may not be real... But, if you wanted to get inside information on a bunch of companies, it would be a great way to do it (and i'm sure it's happening as we speak).

I've gotten requests on linkedin from accounts for fake women with stolen photos. I recall one in particular where I did a reverse image search on the profile photo and found that it was of a woman who'd been murdered a few years prior.

Recruiters on OkCupid?

No, they were not a recruiter, and I am pretty sure that recruiting was not the motivation for contacting me.

See if there is a Nextdoor site set up for your neighborhood - nextdoor.com

absolutely hilarious :-) he wants to make peoples live better with a sincere and kind idea. In return gets showered with millions of porn money.

I guess it's the universe rewarding him for his good intentions.

Pretty much the same thing happened to me and I'm still quite conflicted over it.

I'm sure I'm not the only curious one who'd love to hear the rest of the story if you care to elaborate :)

In a nutshell, I built - together with my partners and employees - the first publicly available webcam software (which had a lot of customers from the adult world), and the first webcam community and we found that it turned into a porn site whenever we weren't looking for longer than 30 seconds.

Eventually we gave the adult content its own space on the site and charged for access to that portion and this was the financial cork that kept the whole thing afloat during many years.