
Creepy guys inspire Seattle women to make a new dating app - jcomis
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024665918_sirendatingappxml.html
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ahelwer
Siren is great! I got in pretty early (friend is friends with the people who
founded it) and it's been nice to use. Answering questions of the day usually
works for matching with people, and the community also puts on some excellent
events. One of them had an architect present on the history of erotic spaces,
and another presentation on the influence of Leigh Bowery[0] on costume design
(seriously, you start to see stuff inspired by him everywhere). It was a step
outside the techie bubble which I haven't seen often.

In general I think the sex-positive nature of Siren will help it in the dating
apps scene. Recognition of the asymmetry of experience between women and men
on straight dating apps is implemented well, including a recommendation system
between women. Fills a void between OkCupid and Tinder.

[0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Bowery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Bowery)

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mflkemlkfew
What an awful decade this is to be a single man. Men have been so vilified
that now mere acts of courtship (not the strawman examples in the article),
are considered misogyny.

With rising trends of authoritarianism in the western world, it's almost like
we're getting our own anti-sex league a la 1984.

This isn't progress: it's repression.

~~~
omegaworks
>Men have been so vilified that now mere acts of courtship

Please provide examples.

 _Strawman:_ a person compared to a straw image; a sham. a sham argument set
up to be defeated.

How exactly are the examples in the article, which the app author states she
experienced in her own life, shams or arguments set up to be defeated?

~~~
thrownquiteaway
When talking about vilification, I think the poster is referring to articles
like this:

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-
wavefunction...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-
wavefunction/2014/07/11/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions-of-a-
scientific-icon/)

that say things like

>What startled me the most was the fact that when he was a young, boyish
looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he
could ask undergraduate women out. I suspect that this kind of behavior on the
part of a contemporary professor would almost certainly lead to harsh
disciplinary action, as it should. The behavior was clearly, egregiously wrong
and when I read about it my view of Feynman definitely went down a notch, and
a large notch at that.

Oh no! He was attracted to and dated women! How terrible!

~~~
dneronique
>> Oh no! He was attracted to and dated women! How terrible!

No one is taking him down a notch for being attracted to/dating women. It's
his chosen techniques in doing so.

I'm going to say on a whole, most females enjoy being considered attractive
and enjoy being dated. There just happens to be quite a few ways you can fuck
up going about it. Deception is one.

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javert
> Lee hopes to change the nature of the messages and put women in the driver’s
> seat, which is what Siren was originally going to be called.

What a </ expletive> joke. Women are already completely in the driver's seat,
as evidenced by the statistics presented in the article.

> Lee said: “In 2014, it’s very hard for a woman to be both professional and
> sexual.”

Funny because in 2014, it's very hard for men to have sex at all if they have
standards.

Let's be clear: Women have insane leverage over dating and this site is merely
an attempt to better capitalize on this leverage. "Let's make men jump through
a bunch of hoops, because they are at such a disadvantage that they will have
to."

I'm not saying that any of that is the explicit intention of the site creator,
but only that it is the "invisible hand" of the dating market at work. No pun
intended.

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ObviousScience
> [Siren] allows women to peruse men’s pictures and their answers to the
> “Question of the Day” (“You found a magic lamp and get three wishes. What
> are they?”) and view their Video Challenges (“Show us a hidden gem in
> Seattle”). If a woman is suitably impressed by a man’s answers, she can make
> herself visible to him. Only then can he see what she looks like.

So they fixed the use case where the woman's photo is exposed, but leave the
same problem for guys?

I've had a couple creepy female stalkers, and honestly, would prefer the same
protection they're offering women. It's certainly the case that dating sites
are dominated by creepy men, but a high ratio doesn't necessarily translate to
a lack of problematic female actors. As a side issue, the fundamental gender
imbalance of the website actually legitimizes the problematic world view that
creates many of these problematic guys in the first place - namely that
relations are a game in which women hold the power and they just need to play
a numbers game if they want to win, with perhaps adjusting their wording to
slip by filters.

Further, I don't think this app actually solves the problem it attempts to: it
actually lowers the effort on the part of bad actors, since they only need to
maintain one profile rather than messaging many women. I'm not sure how
they're proposing to have women sort through a large number of profiles that
are made by bad actors any more than they could sort through a large number of
messages made by bad actors, nor do I think that filtering the profiles is a
fundamentally easier task than filtering the messages would have been.
(Actually, I think the opposite: that it's easier to make a misleading profile
than a misleading message.)

Glad to see another sexist project pitched as a solution to social problems.

Ed:

I actually want to tone down my comment a bit, but will leave the original
wording as is. I don't mean to condemn the authors, because they're addressing
a complicated and sensitive issue without any known solutions. That being
said, while I think their hearts were in the right place, their execution
seems to focus primarily on /their/ issues, while completely ignoring the
issues faced by the other side of the equation. Programming things that solve
your problems and not other peoples is hardly unique to this case or a new
development (heck, it might be the hallmark of software), but it's
disappointing in this case, because they clearly have many well thought out
features, that unfortunately, I'm completely unable to take advantage of to
solve my problems or my issues with online dating.

Let me say that again: the inherent sexism of the app is particularly
disappointing, because while it does many of the things I'd want in a dating
app, it refuses to let me use them and instead frames me as enemy-until-
proven-otherwise.

I just don't understand, at a fundamental level, why both sides don't have
their pictures hidden and only be allowed to interact via their
video/question/etc interface until both sides approve. (Well, I have one
conjecture, but I'm reluctant to ascribe it as true: that they're tacitly
admitting women want eye candy, not just personality, and that their app isn't
meant to serve the interests of men.)

~~~
frontline
the term sexism is reduced to meaninglessness when you're applying it to men
not being allowed to see womens' pictures without permission

~~~
ObviousScience
My apologies, I probably should've used the phrase "gender discrimination" or
"discriminating based on gender", since there is no large scale institution
discrimination accompanying it, though this particular app is
institutionalizing different roles based on gender.

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rfeather
Has no site tried to apply the standard techniques used by email providers to
deal with spam? Ex. Spam filter trained to recognize spammers and harrasers.

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carsongross
Slutty girls inspire Seattle men to make a new hookup app.

Problem?

