Tell HN: The problem with BangWithFriends - it's not anonymous Facebook Graph search allows you to search everyone who uses this app. Be it your friends, people who aren't your friends, just about anyone. Example criteria: "Single women I am not friends with who use BangWithFriends" "My friends who use BangWithFriends" |
I ask this because I frequently signup with Facebook on some apps, and purposely put it to "Only me" privacy, to keep my activity hidden from my Facebook friends. I would hope that doing so, would keep me out of those types of Open Graph searches. Can anyone confirm/deny this (I don't have Open Graph Search, yet)?
Edit: a Facebook app that where you can click on friends you want to sleep with. If they have the app, they are notified. I would think this would be more cool if both of you are only notified if you both signify that you want to sleep with each other. This could also be toned down to just signify romantic interest to get more engagement.
A booty call app seems like a terrible place to promote parenting.
I ran into this years ago in it's email incarnation. I think it was something like you'd get an email that said someone had a crush on you and then you are supposed to put in emails of other people and if there was a match you'd be notified. The problem was you didn't know who sent the email so you'd probably put in the emails of all your female contacts (or vice versa, etc) and then all of them would get emails. Logically it was an email ponzi scheme where if you didn't see the inherent problem from the beginning you probably ended up really confusing a bunch of your friends.
Here are some Hacker News threads about similar implementations:
If you clicked through all of your friends to see which ones clicked on you (even if you do not want to have sex with them), then you simply lied. People who lie this way will inconvience those who the service paired them with once, after which point none of his friends would click on him again because they do not trust his genuine use of the system. This leaves you with the people using the service as intended.
It's a similar sort of thing. If you rate someone highly, they are notified that "somebody" rated them highly, but they don't know who did it. If they rate you highly in turn, then you're both notified. What ends up happening is a lot of people rate everybody highly so that they find out who rated them highly, ultimately defeating the purpose of the system.
I know it's bad form to link to your own website, but I wrote at length about this here: http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/
From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth.
It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town.
Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice.
Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form.
And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.
You must be new here...
https://www.facebook.com/browse/friends_using_app/?app_id=17...
Replace the app_id with the id of any facebook app you want to use.
If I understand the current user base of BangWithFriends, this will return no results.
"Men who live in Toronto, Ontario and who use BangWithFriends" - 65
"Females who live in Toronto, Ontario and who use BangWithFriends" - 6
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_roommates_problem
"another website, which will be only used by men kind" ... and nobody got banged ever...
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but damn now i want access to the open graph search :D just to play around with it.
That's just a symptom or side-effect of the real problem.
As the idiom goes, if you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
You can't find out who wants to bang who, right?
You only can find out that people want to bang. Which is true since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. (well, humans evolved later, i know)
Wait, what? My employer cares that I have sex?
This topic keeps coming up. If you can see all app's installed by someone then you might have the point.
If you can't then an employer would need to search for this specific app and find your account. I guess it is possible that some employers may have a blacklist of hundreds of app's but I would have thought it would be more trouble to maintain compared to the value of having it. Especially considering how tomorrow I could launch "BangWithBuddies" and this app would need to be found, flagged as not appropriate for employees and added to a search list.
If an employer is going to this much trouble to scan for what they believe is moral correctness then they probably aren't worth working for.
So yes, this seems to be true.
I can imagine Version 2.0 being even more general (a craigslist of discreet hypothetical matching) for more than just sexual arrangements. But continuing the sexual theme, obviously the next logical step is N-way group hookups.
It occurs to me that something similar could also be implemented in a distributed manner (for use offline or with decentralized P2P networks, etc...) using asymmetric encryption and split keys.
I kid, but I'd wait to see if this 'crazy idea' is successful (top tip: it won't be) before planning the second iteration.
You seriously think so? Casual sex has been a major use of Facebook for quite a long time. This particular approach may not catch on, but I guarantee you that some variation of this idea eventually will work.
That just sounds painful.
Not sure if facebook has a privacy setting to prevent others from knowing the apps I use but if they do then the developers of this app should inform this to their users.
If facebook does not have a way for me to hide from my friends the apps I use then IMO, facebook should have this option.
It was called Rubbed Out and the point was to list all of your friends you had thought about while masterbating.
With bad permissions, or a small sample size, it gets really scary.
This kind of app is completely fucked from the start bc of the gender disparity.
Using FB connect killed all the fun in that. You can tell by the disclaimer they're now using on their landing page.
We created a version that is more suitable for Facebook - for people looking for serious relationships instead of casual encounters.
We have got some good support in our beta launch.
When I have the chance, I'll break open my crypto book and see if this problem is less impossible to solve than it seems.
You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who.
Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post.
The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious.
It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.
More info: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/appcenter/#autho...
I think something like BangWithFriends is doomed to fail simply because of the visibility. People can see if you use the app, which would embarrass many. And like almost every single online dating/sexual site out there, the number of men dramatically outnumbers the number of women.
Perhaps if it was more subtle and used less targeted/classless language.
So, plausible deniability wins.
On a completely different note: this is basically a non-issue after one's mid-20s, by which point most people seem to have the ability to appropriately inquire after those whom they have an interest in, and have a reasonably good sense for who is eligible and who isn't.
It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all.
In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.
I also think that they should give you the number of people that have you on their lists.
I only have one friend(male) using the app but when I log in, it shows a small subset of my female friends. Any idea how it selects them? I initially thought that they were the only females using the app but this is obviously not the case.
If someone clicks on you and you don't want to sleep with them, you wouldn't reach out to them about it, no? So you don't reach out to anyone, waiting for them to reach out to you to express their interest.
And now you get to the point where both are waiting forever for the other to make the first move to avoid embarrassment.
I'm pretty sure people would be aware of that downside beforehand, and would factor that in as a possible risk when comparing it to the benefit of simply satisfying their curiosity. It's not foolproof, but it isn't exactly a crapshoot either.
