
"Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model" - acangiano
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8439495.stm
======
tptacek
Let's give these douchebags all the attention they're asking for! No way did
they think this could cause a media storm that would land them on the front
page of ABCNews.com! Let's make sure we put them there! That'll show 'em!

~~~
bdfh42
You are quite right - this is a carefully managed publicity stunt which
presumably has tickled the BBC's fancy - perhaps it is otherwise a slow news
day?

~~~
andyking
They seem to have studied at the Ryanair school of publicity.

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sosuke
It's rather hard to be mentionable without being very lucky or very
controversial. I'm still working on a way to run an honest site and manage to
get some media attention. I refuse to operate at their level.

Sorry that was more of a rant on the subject of self promotion through shady
means than a commentary on the actual article.

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durbin
An Open Letter to Robert Hintze, founder of BeautifulPeople.com, and its
Members from iChange.com [http://www.ichange.com/blog/2010/01/04/an-open-
letter-to-rob...](http://www.ichange.com/blog/2010/01/04/an-open-letter-to-
robert-hintze-founder-of-beautifulpeople-com-and-members/)

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bediger
Don't easier-to-access porn sites (with not-so-picky models) exist?

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JoeAltmaier
"Shallow people have shallow standards" - what a surprise.

~~~
nfnaaron
Shallow people are also a market.

~~~
gojomo
Shallow people, deep wallets, mass market.

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pwnstigator
This seems oddly relevant:

<http://img39.yfrog.com/img39/6247/h807.png>

On a more serious note, there are a lot of difficult problems in onlne dating
that someone could make a lot of money by solving. The lack of attractive
pictures is not one of them.

~~~
MrFoof
Online dating has two problems.

1\. Limited corpus. This is usually the result of sites going after very
specific verticals (i.e. race, religious, <some-other-facet> specific).

2\. Terrible search. Granted, determining compatibility isn't easy, but you
typically can at best search on dimensions to limit gender, sexual
orientation, proximity and age. After that... then what? If you're using a
site with a large corpus (Match, PoF, etc.) you end up subconsciously
surrendering your standards and resort to "clicking on the hot ones".

I would liken search on dating sites to be similar to web searches before
Google. Actually, before AltaVista. It really is that bad.

If compatibility could be determined quickly and reasonably accurately, on a
large number of dimensions, one company could crush every other dating site
like an ant. Especially if that score is used all over... for instance, your
mail could be sorted by potential compatibility - so you don't waste your time
looking at messages from individuals that aren't remotely relevant.

The problem is that sort of quantitative analysis is very computationally
expensive in a high-dimensional space, especially for a large corpus (say, 5
to 10 million users).

~~~
pwnstigator
Agree fully with point #2. Have you used OkCupid? I think it's better than
most in that regard, but the people on the site tend to be a bit full of
themselves. Also, compatibility has a lot more to do with what people do than
with what they say, which is why surveys and "shared values" questionnaires
fall flat.

~~~
MrFoof
>Have you used OkCupid? Yes. I'd consider it more of a machine-gun approach
than a sawed-off shotgun. Potentially more accurate, but by and large you're
still using more ammo than should be necessary.

>which is why surveys and "shared values" questionnaires fall flat Bingo.

Surveys actually provide a way of gaming the scoring system as well, since you
can make a reasonable assumption of what _your_ ideal partner would want you
to say.

That's the biggest flaw with dating sites, is that you can only trust so much
user input - everything needs to be taken in context. Even simple things such
as "interests" should be evaluated in their own context, because you can't
rely on exact matches or even fuzzy matches - you have to infer what else
their might be interested in. Granted, you also get the problem where you
don't get enough user input, therefore being able to infer other information
becomes ridiculously valuable.

I agree that you can't perform N^2 searches in real-time. A lazy match is fine
until a more accurate index is generated. However we still lack a reasonably
accurate index. We also have to do all the searching ourselves, instead of the
system working harder to provide far greater relevancy than it does now. I
think the best analogue is Netflix - I want recommendations based on my
interests and behavior. Again, the issue is dating has far more dimensions
than movie recommendations.

