[colkassad]

Ask HN: What is BangWithFriends?

Edit: a Facebook app that where you can click on friends you want to sleep with. If they have the app, they are notified. I would think this would be more cool if both of you are only notified if you both signify that you want to sleep with each other. This could also be toned down to just signify romantic interest to get more engagement.

[pawelwentpawel]

It's a new service that has a mission to connect people, increase natural population growth and make the world more open place.

[mnicole]

> increase natural population growth

A booty call app seems like a terrible place to promote parenting.

[mindslight]

Why not? Starting from just $85/mo, http://kidswithout.us/ will raise them until they're 18.

[mnicole]

I was sadly expecting that to work.

[prawn]

YC14.

[Zimahl]

BangWithFriends seems like a new implementation of something I've seen a couple times in the last few decades. This is the first time I've seen it on FB.

I ran into this years ago in it's email incarnation. I think it was something like you'd get an email that said someone had a crush on you and then you are supposed to put in emails of other people and if there was a match you'd be notified. The problem was you didn't know who sent the email so you'd probably put in the emails of all your female contacts (or vice versa, etc) and then all of them would get emails. Logically it was an email ponzi scheme where if you didn't see the inherent problem from the beginning you probably ended up really confusing a bunch of your friends.

[jaredsohn]

My first experience with this concept was in the late nineties called something like Crushmail.

Here are some Hacker News threads about similar implementations:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602033

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2908151

[fatbird]

The fatal flaw in the model is "I'm going to click on all my friends to see who signals interest in me".

[blacksqr]

That's not the fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is that all the men in a social circle will click on every friend to see who signals interest. All the women will click on the same one or two individuals. In other words, the fatal flaw is that it will simply replicate the dynamics and frustrations of high school.

[theorique]

Yes, it gets tiring servicing so many fine ladies

[SkyMarshal]

Fatal flaw or working as intended?

[fatbird]

The premise of the app is that with a contrived double-blind method, you can turbo past the awkward stage of signalling interest in someone.

It's flawed because if I click all my friends just to see who clicked me, then find friends X, Y and Z clicked me, I still don't know if they actually want to have sex with me, or were just doing the same thing I did. We haven't skipped an awkward step at all.

In a way, it's worse than that, because if I sincerely click on friend X, and X clicks me, then I assume that means she wants to fuck me. If she was just seeing who would signal interest in her, we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.

[jimzvz]

Surely an easy way to avoid this is to limit the number of clicks you can have over a period of time or you have a list of 5 people you would like to bang. You can add/remove people from that list. If you you are both on each other's list you are notified but you have to be on the list at the same time. That way you know that you are in the top 5 people that your friend wants to hook up with.

I also think that they should give you the number of people that have you on their lists.

I only have one friend(male) using the app but when I log in, it shows a small subset of my female friends. Any idea how it selects them? I initially thought that they were the only females using the app but this is obviously not the case.

[xbigdanx]

Yeah but if you are clicking on everyone to see who clicks on you, you don't have to pursue anything.

If someone clicks on you and you don't want to sleep with them, you wouldn't reach out to them about it, no? So you don't reach out to anyone, waiting for them to reach out to you to express their interest.

And now you get to the point where both are waiting forever for the other to make the first move to avoid embarrassment.

[fatbird]

Well, exactly. This is why the app fails in its basic model: it doesn't help you past that awkward first step of signalling interest. Even after getting a mutual thumbs up, you still don't know if there's a real hookup there.

[isleyaardvark]

>we now have an excruciatingly awkward situation where I've said out loud "I want to have sex with you", and it's not mutual.

I'm pretty sure people would be aware of that downside beforehand, and would factor that in as a possible risk when comparing it to the benefit of simply satisfying their curiosity. It's not foolproof, but it isn't exactly a crapshoot either.

[AznHisoka]

Why can't the reverse be true also? Maybe you clicked around and wanted to see which girls had interest in you. Maybe you both clicked around, and both of you think you each have interest in each other.

[gizmo686]

How is that a fatal flaw (or a flaw at all). By clicking on all of your friends, you are signalling that you want to have sex with any/all of your friends. At this point, if any of your friends signal a want to have sex with you, the service will see that two people want to have sex with each other and tell them.

If you clicked through all of your friends to see which ones clicked on you (even if you do not want to have sex with them), then you simply lied. People who lie this way will inconvience those who the service paired them with once, after which point none of his friends would click on him again because they do not trust his genuine use of the system. This leaves you with the people using the service as intended.

[leot]

CrushMail (or something like it) circulated among my friends at some point during the late 90s. Perhaps she was fibbing, but the one girl who I think I matched with (??) said she had just clicked on everyone.

So, plausible deniability wins.

On a completely different note: this is basically a non-issue after one's mid-20s, by which point most people seem to have the ability to appropriately inquire after those whom they have an interest in, and have a reasonably good sense for who is eligible and who isn't.

[cje]

That would damage the anonymity but perhaps there are ways to reduce this effect without greatly damaging the benefit to users to other services. For example, you could have a quota so you can only select say 10% of your friends at a time.

[nilkn]

The QuickMatch system on OkCupid has the exact same fatal flaw.

It's a similar sort of thing. If you rate someone highly, they are notified that "somebody" rated them highly, but they don't know who did it. If they rate you highly in turn, then you're both notified. What ends up happening is a lot of people rate everybody highly so that they find out who rated them highly, ultimately defeating the purpose of the system.

[chris123]

Could limit the # of people you could click on to 5 or 10 or whatever. Could be a different number for guys vs. girls. Or could equalize by charging guys per click and girls click free or something.

[codenut]

Exactly. It should also have a search functionality in case you have a thousand friends.

[gonehome]

It does work only work based on mutual notifications.

I know it's bad form to link to your own website, but I wrote at length about this here: http://www.zacharyalberico.net/blog/dating-websites/

[btilly]

You are looking at it from the point of view of the user if the system is working as desired.

From the point of view of the website, you're not driving clicks. You're not making money. You're not driving growth.

It is also bad for users. You do not drive clicks. Cannot pay for marketing. So your site gains no traction. And with no traction, actual users show up, can't find the people that they know, and then leave the virtual ghost town.

Therefore it sounds logical, but fails in practice.

Now add in a single feature. Add notifications to people saying that X people like them. Now people have a reason to come back. A reason to click on others. You get growth. Your website can make money. And you've become a spam site which completely lost the original idea. But you're a profitable spam site. And will probably drive more actual hookups than the pure form.

And this is why dating sites either fail trivially, or go on to suck.

[gonehome]

Interesting points, the chicken/egg issue is a real problem and something I think starting with a targeted community (college is the example in the post) would help alleviate.

You can't tell people that X people like them because it creates a perverse incentive to click on everyone to find out who.

Driving clicks shouldn't be the foundation of the idea, the partnering with local places to meet could help with the value side of things. This is how you also keep people using it (giving them a reason to check in to places) that I talked about toward the end of the post.

The not making money/driving growth part reminded me a little of a meeting Page and Brin had when they were originally trying to sell their algorithm before deciding to start google. They were showing off to a current search engine how page rank returned results that were magnitudes better than the contextual search (which the other site was using). The guy they were showing it to said something along the lines of "This is too good, too fast and the results returned are too relevant. We want people to stay on the engine page as long as possible to click on ads". Sometimes the value of something isn't immediately obvious.

It's more about just solving the problem first and the money would be a means to do that. I think if you can solve a common problem in a better way there is probably a way to create value out of that. For example it'd also probably work well for people meeting each other within a company, but I'd doubt any companies would go for that.

[ynniv]

I know it's bad form to link to your own website

You must be new here...

[niels_olson]

Thank goodness for new people. Without them, old gets old.