

Live Tweets of Girl:Guy Ratios in San Francisco - Shane1
http://www.twitter.com/sfgirlguyratio

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Shane1
We're getting a few disapproving tweets. I'd like to ask for some direct
feedback.

The tweets are mainly that we're objectifying women. Eg. "this is beyond
commodity and into unitless essence. ratio is how we speak of % nitrogen in
the air", "Treating potential partners as a commodity demeans them and
encourages objectification."

Our intention here isn't to objectify women (or men). We've just noticed
pretty skewed ratios here in SF, and were curious about starting to report
them. We even started offering some insight/analysis based on SF Census
numbers.

We asked a few of our friends. Many of them, both m and f, gave us really
positive feedback.

We're not trying to treat people like numbers. But, if you're trying to meet
someone, it might be relevant. Of course, meeting people in real life and
connecting with them on a deeper level is still completely a human endeavor.

What do you think?

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keenahn
This inspired me with a crazy idea for an app:

You download the app. Every night, the app serves up ONE bar or club with a
little description, pictures, reviews etc. The list is curated (and later down
the line, businesses could pay for the privilege of being featured). The
secret trick, though, is that there are actually two bars selected every
night. For one, it gets 60% of the females and 40% of the males, for the other
one, it gets 60% of the males and 40% of the females. There is no way to know
which group you've been selected into every night. For many nights, though,
you will be at the bar where there is a good ratio of people you're interested
in (assuming a largely hetero or bi population), which will encourage you to
open the app every night (variable reward, a la slot machines).

Of course, getting your first downloads will be tough, but that is a separate
problem. Thoughts?

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keenahn
Interesting idea, and one I've seen before, but there's little incentive to
contribute to this system. Reminds me of gasbuddy. In order for this to be
crowdsourced, there would have to be an incentive to input quality data (see
<http://www.factual.com/> a local data API that gives you credits for
uploading quality data).

A better system might be to scrape foursquare, twitter, facebook checkins, and
just measure the ratios. It would be more automatic (no behavior change
required), but would also be skewed (say, for example, women tweet more than
men do).

~~~
Shane1
Very true. Providing incentive for people to contribute here is key. We're
still brainstorming ideas and are looking for suggestions.

The reason we decided against scraping these other sites is that few people
actually check-in. In a full bar, it'd be optimistic for >5 people to check
in. This makes ratios very inaccurate. There actually is a site out there
based on Foursquare check-ins and they suffer from this problem.

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codex
Women probably do not want to hang with the men these tweets will attract. The
incentive for disinformation is large.

~~~
Shane1
Arguable. Also, good number of girls have actually said they're extremely
interested in these ratios too.

I can see the incentive for disinformation, especially for managers/employees
of these venues. This problem can be solved with scale (one reported ratio
completely different from the others is a red flag). Of course until we reach
scale, we can't do that; but also, until we reach scale, there is not really
incentive to misreport.

~~~
codex
There is also a disincentive for patrons to preserve any good thing they have
going on.

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slosh
Reminds me a lot of <http://wheretheladies.at/>

~~~
prodigal_erik
And jwz's rant about scenetap (estimating via camera):
<http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/05/16.html>

