[funnystories]

Two stories:

1. Once I was working at a mobile app shop. We basically had 3 or 4 models of apps and would customize for clients: a clickable map with information for convention center, a menu for restaurants, a service ordering template for hotels and so on. It was the beginning of the tinder fever in Brazil and me and my coworkers were all single male college students. We wanted to hack tinder to maximize matches. In a few hours we were able to "sniff" the requests, understand the payloads and make a rough api in a python script. We noticed that the swipe limit was only on the client. So we basically swiped right all the girls in our city and selected the ones that didn't interested us. We were having burgers when we noticed that the automatic approach isn't always the preferred one: There were acquaintances there that we matched but never had the intention to, which led to many apologies or at least embarrassment. One of the boys actually got very "successful" with this method (sexually) and even started a shade business selling guaranteed matches to lonely guys. He marketed on facebook with very depressing slogans "you are always being rejected? People avoid you? Send me a message" and people actually paid him blindly hundreds of reais before receiving any concrete product or result. Loneliness is indeed a kind of hunger.

2. I have a friend that is a phd in biology (neurobiology and cognitive diseases) and started to make videos on tiktok etc during the pandemic to explain diseases, infection rates etc. She started to get more and more audience, for 3 reasons (we could identify by the comment section): the scientific content, the "lifestyle" content (how to clean your hands, how to use a mask properly etc) in which she added some fashion and organization opinions, and obviously the pervert ones (she is actually very beautiful, is always with makeup on videos etc). Then she started to make lives to answer questions of the chat. Then these lives became routine. Then the lives became more lifestyle-based with her going to the mall or getting her hair done. In a few months she already had some followers that would pay her monthly to just talk to her. Nowadays she is making 6 figures of dollar basically by talking with followers all day, without nudity or anything like that. She continues to do her research but the grants and publishing became irrelevant financially to her. She seems very happy, but concerned when this "season" is going to end. Loneliness is indeed a kind of farm.

[funnystories]

another story that i just remembered:

I met a guy, at the time the boyfriend of a friend of mine. We hanged out a few times, mostly in his place. He lived in a giant house with a big garden around it. His family was italian and most of them lived in italy. He didn't work or anything and lived a very lavish lifestyle, going to fancy restaurants and driving sport cars. His older sister (she was like 30 something) came to Brazil for some vacations and was always trying to find a guy in parties or bars or any social situation, in an almost embarrassing way. Not a guy for a 1 night stand but for a serious relationship. She met a guy in a bar and started dating him. She started to pay him meals, go on trips with him etc that was responsible for draining all her money in about 2 months. He even sold her an apartment (he told her that it was an incredible investment opportunity). The guy disappeared with the money shortly after (around 100k dollars). There was a little bit of drama but soon after she went back to italy.