High Frequency Dating

This is simply brilliant. The escalation from a typical nerd's "I've optimised my social life" post to absurdity had me in stitches.

I&#x27;m torn on this.<p>On the one hand high frequency dating is a good thing because it adds liquidity to the market.<p>On the other, it raises the risk of of increased volatility and flash crashes (when your partner finds out).

This is fantastic satire. Especially, since I&#x27;ve just read The Circle. Judging by the other comments here, a lot of us were going along believing it was true. Until robot.<p>And, why not? The pieces were believable: OpenCV, NLTK, some scripting and API twiddling. The virtual assistant wasn&#x27;t much of a stretch either.<p>Especially if you&#x27;re familiar with modern online dating sites now. Still thinking that online dating is like browsing an organized list of potential dates where an online host helps you with searching is naive. Craigslist personals are still like that, stripped down, no profile, anonymous and no algorithms.<p>OKCupid, like other dating sites, makes money via ad revenue, not by connecting you with a partner, so what&#x27;s their priority? Who knows if your experience is affected by: - how often you visit the site - if you use an adblocker (they know, and they let you know they know) - if you&#x27;re on a free account - message response rate - if you use their features (quickmatch, etc.) - how many questions you&#x27;ve answered (at a tech talk recently, Sam Yagan co-founder said answering more than 10 questions was pointless) - your quantcast&#x2F;cookie&#x2F;tracker profile - sentiment analysis of your profile&#x2F;messages<p>Here&#x27;s a fun anecdote: As a new user of their iPhone app, I was interested in using the Locals feature (to see who was available on short notice for a date). The first day it worked, let me see those in my vicinity. The next day it was completely removed from the app. No warning. Something (I was a new user) must&#x27;ve decided that that feature wasn&#x27;t for me.<p>This goes beyond dark design patterns which attempt to influence your behavior (i.e. on another dating site, you have to pay to send messages, and attractive people send you collect messages, that you have to pay to read.). With dark design, if you&#x27;re aware, you know what the site wants you to do. If your online dating success is controlled by black box methods without feedback, they silently judge.<p>So, how soon before hackers decide they&#x27;re tired of being gamed and start using tools they&#x27;re familiar with defensively? Could this be the start of a new arms race?

This is hilarious and as a bonus it induces the warm, smug feeling I get when reminded I&#x27;m thankfully out of the dating game and happily married to a beautiful, smart woman. Good luck, kids.

I like it!<p>But I think we can take this further, surely she&#x27;s into automation too? So he-bot and she-bot are the ones that actually get together.<p>But then why bother with the physical world if it&#x27;s all software? The entire exchange can be virtualised and simulated at high speed, then you only need to actually bother the meatspace human if the whole thing has been electronically predetermined to be acceptable to all parties.<p>That way you can find the perfect match in seconds. Unless, of course, they were a little creative or devious in their parameter settings, but nobody would ever do that, right?

This article is a joke but I have a mildly sociopathic friend who does the first section of this. Has an app that just replies to everyone on craigslist &#x2F; dating site with a standard greeting that he has statically determined over 5 years as being the most successful. It does filter for undesirable terms to him. It also does one round of banter using a trained data set of responses. He says he gets around 30 actual profiles to look at and personally contacts the ones he&#x27;s interested in.<p>Must work, guy goes on 2-3 dates a week.

<i></i>EDIT<i></i> I&#x27;ll leave my post as two people were kind enough to point out that I was just flat out wrong.<p>I had originally thought that the below post was a parody. I&#x27;m told it wasn&#x27;t, though in my defense it definitely reads like a parody... I mean the perfect cutlery... the most meaningless item in anyone&#x27;s house??<p>This reminds me of another parody post here a while ago about someone who said they&#x27;d bought the perfect cutlery.<p>They went a bit further and beat the joke to death talking about the difference between several cutlery sets. It was bit better because it started out with some good points bout optimizing your life and buying the best and then it jumped into how to buy what is probably the least important thing in anyone life...cutlery<p>I think this hacking your life is starting to jump the shark:)<p>Here is the other parody post:<p><a href="http://dcurt.is/the-best" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dcurt.is&#x2F;the-best</a>

Up to the fourth paragraph I was going to post something patronising about it being a great way to get a fuck buddy but a bad way to form a relationship.<p>However, having finished the post, I now think that a long term relationship leading to marriage and children would be possible. Some tweaking might be required. Ideally, a long and meaningful relationship could develop with 0 physical contact.

This is a great read. The OpenCV part hit a bit too close to home though: I was stuck for a minute trying to think how he managed to segment faces well enough to compute ratios (not just as a rectangle or a blob) given all of the possible conditions&#x2F;perspectives of the photos.

Beautiful article. Well played sir. I went from &quot;this could work&quot; to &quot;huh&quot; to &quot;W T F&quot; loving every single sweet paragraph. So much win. Thank you :)

The first comment is sort of a buzzkill:<p>&quot;I guess I see what’s supposed to be funny here, Rob, but I don’t think everyone will. As the man behind an awfully high-profile startup, I don’t think this is likely to attract any beneficial attention to you, and may very well attract some negative attention. Even if this is meant in good fun, I’m not sure it’s in your best interests.&quot;

This isn&#x27;t too implausible. I remember a story about a guy who was fooled into dating a chatbot for 2 months.<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.radiolab.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;137466-clever-bots&#x2F;</a>

I think this can work well as a startup. You sign up and create a profile. Then the system matches you up with as many other people as it can and runs several simulated dates based on your profiles. After 3 successful simulated dates, you are both booked a room and given a transcript of your conversation this far, plus a list of fetishes.

Not too far from the truth:<p>Amy Webb: How I hacked online dating<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...</a>

It seems to me that FABIO could be massively improved upon by offloading the computation to a remote (cloud?) server, allowing the date to continue until screams of pleasure are recorded.<p>Additionally, the robot self destruct seems like overkill. It would be better to simply wipe them and start over. After all it, it wasn&#x27;t a hardware failure that resulted in a bad date, but a software problem!

It took me until the Double Robot to realize this was a joke.

LOL! I just got at the robot part that this was a fiction :P

This doesn&#x27;t use MongoDB therefore this is not web scale.

... Oh it&#x27;s a joke.<p>I actually know a few programmers, who are also pick up artists, that do something similar but less complex.. they write scripts that spam msg to girls on dating site and just shot gun approach.<p>I think I&#x27;ve found my next project...

I&#x27;m reminded of a story told by Tim Ferris about outsourcing his dating for a bet:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ</a>

This made me sad, mostly because the base variable is facial attractiveness. Gotta love living in a culture so saturated in image worship that dating sites have nearly boiled off text bios entirely. Have fun chatting with people you have next to nothing in common with!

I&#x27;ve tried high frequency dating once, but had to stop when all of my glassware broke.

First they laugh at the high frequency dating, then they fight it, then it wins.

Automated bot actually makes sense for a first or maybe even second message. Things would become even more interesting if girls would write their own bots too. Someone should build an API for that.

Possibly related:<p><a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ted.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating...</a>

Reminds me of this comment:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5397797" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5397797</a>

After reading the first 2 paragraphs, I started looking for a &quot;download&quot; button to get the source code! You got me!

Tim &quot;4 hour workweek&quot; Ferris actually did something similar using virtual assistants. <a href="http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss-your-love-life.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.timferriss.com&#x2F;1&#x2F;post&#x2F;2009&#x2F;07&#x2F;how-to-tim-ferriss...</a>

I would be left feeling quite sorry and embarrassed for the partner in the case that they were actually a warm body. They would essentially be interviewing to play the submissive within a hegemony.

Then, at some point, the female starts sending her robot too...

Now, the only improvement left is to set up the same system from the perspective of the &quot;female&quot;, and have two robots go on a date, etc.

It may not have been intended, but it came off as a damn fine parody of the idiot &quot;pick up artists&quot;.

A friend of mine set up a micro to repeatedly click on the thumbs up - and I thought <i>that</i> was bad!

Ironically, the tinder app is already completely overrun with chatbots.

Who will be regulating it? Government?

I love the thinly veiled threats from other startup hustlers in the comments. Yeah Rob, you might suffer from some <i>difficulty</i> for deflating our bubble a bit... these people are pathetic excuses for humans, maybe we can replace startup founders with a simple Perl script that uses a simple genetic algorithm to find the best combination of cloud technologies that get investors to part with their money at the highest ratio.

This is an awesome idea!... But I guess this type of dating has its advantages and disadvantages, just saying... (&quot;,)