[jeffbarr]

Bill Gates and Paul Allen were doing something similar decades ago. According to https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35442969 (but well known before that):

> Paul Allen, who would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, was a couple of years above Gates at school. Together they fixed the school scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls.

[tompetry]

In 2004-2005 one of the most interesting features of Facebook was to see which students were in which classes (lectures), and even which smaller labs or sections of that class. So you could enroll and change your entire schedule if there were openings based on data made available within Facebook... it felt pretty creepy even back then.

[alexpetralia]

Remember, YouTube started as a dating service!

[jerpint]

Source? Genuinely curious

[SinePost]

It's a bit of legend in the YouTube community, but I've never looked into it myself. Thank you for motivating me to. The source in the article is from Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube itself, at SXSW.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/youtube-star...

[reeckoh]

Sergey Brin too, with company massage rooms at early Google.

As others have pointed out, it's also how Facebook was started.

Sometimes I look back at my youth, and think about how I used to view technology: as a democratizing force which could tear down artificial barriers. Then I look around today and wonder what happened.

It makes sense, though, if you look closely at the founding fathers of big tech.

[spiritplumber]

https://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:I_Dated_a_Robot Futurama did it

[judge2020]

And it's still a thing at SpaceX, seemingly.

[filereaper]

Elon Musk very famously didn't go to University of Waterloo and instead went to Queens, despite Waterloo being a higher ranked technical university.

Mainly due to lack of women.

IronWarrior is the Engineering Student Paper at UWaterloo.

https://iwarrior.uwaterloo.ca/2013/09/21/24233/elon-musk-and...

[ada1981]

And Zuckerberg. All sorts of creepy disembodied men do this kind of thing!

[lofatdairy]

Zuckerberg's case is arguably even worse (though I completely agree otherwise). If I recall he created a way for harvard guys to rate their female peers appearances and had some pretty disparaging comments on the site itself.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

that's how it happened in the movie

[zeroonetwothree]

We know movies are always 100% accurate

[lofatdairy]

I haven't seen the movie, I recalled a decent amount of reporting on it back during Cambridge Analytica.