[frasertimo]

Employee of the site here. Just want to point out a few things.

1. The submitter of the article to HN has no affiliation with Postmasculine as far as I know, nor did we request them to post it here. We're very grateful for them doing so however!

2. While the author of the site was involved in the pickup industry for a while, he chose to no longer identify with that scene over two years ago, and specifically moved his content away from its perspective, even going so far as to systemically deconstruct the flaws and failures of Pickup theory and the community it created. So we don't feel that 'pickup' really represents what the site has to say about dating. Although we definitely do talk about meeting women. A lot. :)

3. While we're dedicated internet marketing students, we're far from experts on the subject. We're putting a lot of time and effort into improving the site's marketing, but our number one focus will always be on providing high quality content that is as no BS and realistic as possible. Hopefully anyone who came from HN and spends further time reading the site will agree.

I realize your comment wasn't a criticism, but just thought I'd try and give a bit more context to the situation. Thanks for assuming we were so professional!

[badclient]

Fair points, mostly.

I would say that it is a new trend for pick-up instructors to distance themselves from the pick-up industry mostly for marketing purposes. I think it's mostly semantics and at the end of the day, you're just fearing the phrase "pickup industries" focuses too much on the negative and not enough about the positives.

On the otherhand, as someone who's spent fair bit of time observing pickup companies, I will say that your marketing page seems very reasonable and not full of false promises common on most PU sites.

[frasertimo]

Definitely agree that it was and still is a trend. I won't claim we were the first to distance ourselves, but I think we were the best!

Our POV on what defines 'pickup' advice versus regular dating advice is that 'pickup' is the decision to objectify your sex life in order to improve it. We don't believe that this is a healthy or effective mindset, hence we don't define our material as 'pickup'.

Honestly, I think if you read some more of the site, for example http://postmasculine.com/why-its-so-hard or especially http://postmasculine.com/pickup-artist (warning: long) you'd come to the conclusion that we're a far shot from what most people associate pickup with. But it's up to you whether you want to spend the time :)