Dating Denial of Service attack

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/evkwy/what_are_some_lifehacks_youd_never_admit_to/c1bb70v

by mcantelon • 16 years ago

390 123 16 years ago

ambirex• 16 years ago

I saw this earlier today and thought, while it was a less than honorable thing to do, it was a pretty clever bit of social engineering.

patio11• 16 years ago

Do you mean the narrative itself or the use of it? ("Haha, jocks, I got the girl because I know computers. Ain't that grand, fellow computer nerds.")

pmorici2• 16 years ago

I didn't read it like that at all. In fact there really weren't any computer skills involved. It seems just good old fashioned ingenuity and elbow grease.

As a commenter further down notes he knew a guy that employed a similar strategy with newspaper personal ads to get people to come to his bands gigs.

rflrob• 16 years ago

As they say, all's fair in love and war. I've been thinking about what part of it, exactly, is dishonorable, and I'm really not sure.

blub8• 16 years ago

I think it's the part where he is hiding the truth about how he seduced her. Or it could be the part where him and his friends lied and led on a bunch of people online.

Or is it ok if those other people were jocks? What if they weren't jocks? What if it was you and you couldn't get a date because of them?

vessenes• 16 years ago

I redirected reddit.com to news.ycombinator.com, so I haven't read the article.

I did however, just spend some time talking with my attractive single sister-in-law about dirty guy tricks in the dating scene. She's pretty broad-minded, so I don't think she represents every woman, but I liked her attitude.

She said something like: "Girls stuff their bras, and play all sorts of mind-games to get guys to like them. I would consider social engineering fair turnabout, man! The guys are way behind in this area!"

JonnieCache4• 16 years ago

>"Girls stuff their bras, and play all sorts of mind-games to get guys to like them. I would consider social engineering fair turnabout, man! The guys are way behind in this area!"

This is only that start of it. If you think date-engineering is something typically done by creepy men, you may want to reconsider.

juiceandjuice• 16 years ago

5 upvotes and nobody has asked for her number yet.

So, how can I get her number?

DarrenLehane• 16 years ago

A visionary, to say the least.

iamdave• 16 years ago

Anyone else slightly reminded of that scene from A Beautiful Mind reading this?

pmorici2• 16 years ago

It's been a long time since I've seen that movie, which scene exactly?

danilocampos2• 16 years ago

John Nash and some guys see a blonde at a bar, which inspires his theory of governing dynamics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5jrNoNNtrE

It's a great scene.

zach• 16 years ago

This scenario will itself soon become a scene in another movie or TV show, mark my words. Stuff like this is gold for screenwriters.

rhizome• 16 years ago

It sounds more like Elijah Wood's character in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

bobf• 16 years ago

This seems like a great answer in response to the YC application's "hack" question.

Timothee• 16 years ago

To be honest, for the past few years, every time I have read about something like that, I have thought about that question.

pharrington• 16 years ago

Survival of the fittest in 2011.

DevX101• 16 years ago

There was another pretty interesting post a while back along similar lines. The guy set up a fake profile with a very attractive guy, a great job, and an exciting persona. Basically every woman's dream guy.

He then used this fake profile to message the girls he was interested in. Pretty much every woman opened up their souls, dreams, and wishes to this fake Cassanova. He then uses this inside information to make his real self more interesting and the conversation more engaging when he messages them and goes on dates.

brandnewlow• 16 years ago

It's the dating hack of the year! http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/empim/myownwingma...

blub8• 16 years ago

I don't see how what amounts to lying can be considered a clever solution. By these standards, the biggest liars are the best hackers.

This is the problem that I have with both of these pseudo-hacks. Both persons are liars and cheaters, which is socially not accepted, except when dating apparently...

jhamburger• 16 years ago

Added bonus that they have bruised egos from not getting a date with the hot guy, probably a rare occurance for an attractive woman on a dating site.

zalew3• 16 years ago

I'm surprised that nowadays this trick is considered so fresh. I've done it back in the day in the 90s on chatrooms. But then I was a stupid teenager, nowadays I wonder why these guys do this nonsense. I'm not into online dating right now, but couldn't they gather the same information by simply talking? Isn't this hack a trick reserved for socially awkward people who can't make up a decent conversation on the spot?

AgentConundrum• 16 years ago

You only get one chance to make a first impression. With this hack, you get two.

ZoFreX2• 16 years ago

I'm completely with you. Never had problems swiftly identifying common ground and starting a conversation - isn't that what profiles and messages are for?

Seems some people just aren't happy with the poor response rates on dating sites, but that's just how it goes... not everyone you find attractive will find you attractive. I imagine that the "cheating" method wouldn't produce better long term results, as not cheating means those you talk to genuinely want to connect with you.

rbanffy5• 16 years ago

> I've done it back in the day in the 90s on chatrooms

In the late 80's I did something similar with a Minitel-based chat system. It required a bunch of computers and a couple phone lines.

rimantas• 16 years ago

Groundhog day, anyone?

metageek• 16 years ago

Six more weeks of datelessness!

shadowmatter• 16 years ago

This is similar to the Sybil attack in peer-to-peer networking. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack: "A Sybil attack is one in which an attacker subverts the reputation system of a peer-to-peer network by creating a large number of pseudonymous entities, using them to gain a disproportionately large influence."

gridspy• 16 years ago

Only when the fake female accounts upvote his real account in some way.

eneveu• 16 years ago

He should use his female accounts to message his real account, and only "reply" to a few of those. OkCupid would then inform other girls that he "replies very selectively" when they message him, and would thus see him as hard to get!

ck22• 16 years ago

Guys, if you do this, just remember that when they use their best friend to hit on you to see if you'll cheat, and how upset that makes you when you find out.

Turn-about is fair play if you aren't going to be straight-up about things.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

Uh,

If that happened to you, it's one woman who did it, not "they".

endtime2• 16 years ago

It's a pretty common stereotype - I don't know if I've ever seen it happen IRL but I've seen it happen a lot in movies/TV. I think ck can be forgiven the generalization.

ck22• 16 years ago

lol, couldn't happen to me but maybe I said that badly. I've seen guys complain about that type of behavior and I am just saying no-one should be playing these kinds of games if you want honesty from a relationship.

Now that I think about it, maybe relationships aren't the goal of this kind of behavior in the first place, so maybe this whole thread is a really bad idea for HN.

JoshCole• 16 years ago

At first I thought you were trying to say that 'they' couldn't be singular. To save others some time, it can. I double checked and made a post to correct you.

Than I realized what you really meant.

Raphael• 16 years ago

But surely it's two.

pyre3• 16 years ago

I think that 'not being straight-up about things' is breaking things down waaay too generally. This guy basically found a way to 'cut in line' so that the woman could evaluate whether or not she liked him. She still got to choose whether she liked him or not based on the qualities that he possesses. He just made sure that he actually got a chance to be evaluated.

Another analogy would be like finding a way to make sure that your resume isn't one of the ones that is immediately thrown out by some HR person before being forwarded to the hiring manager. The hiring manager still gets to evaluate you based on your skills, but you just made sure that he/she even looked at your skills (vs being cut from the list for some arbitrary reason).

On the other hand, a girl having her best friend hit on you to see if you'll cheat demonstrates a fundamental lack of trust in the relationship. Regardless of the outcome, she's already demonstrated that she doesn't feel that she can trust you. This is a far deeper cut than convincing all of the extremely 'hunky' guys at a bar to leave (for some reason or another; maybe spread a rumor that the bar next door is giving away power tools or hair gel or something) so that you even have a chance with some of the attractive women there.

For some reason, it's just the 'pretending to be someone that you are not on the internet' that makes people throw up the 'creepy' flag. If I was to pretend to be someone that I'm not in real life, people would not immediately think that I was creepy. Hell, society seems to celebrate guys that lie about how successful they are in order to impress women.

khafra3• 16 years ago

One redditor, a few weeks ago, related the story of his fiancee using her best friend to test him like that.

However, I have a feeling that the intersection of the sets "Guys who meet girls through large-scale subterfuge" and "guys who get deceptively set up by their fiancees" is not large enough to be worth addressing in a comment like that.

keiferski• 16 years ago

So they created fake accounts and pretended to be attractive women, just to get with a random girl? If that's not the definition of creepy, I don't know what is. The fact that he doesn't want the girl to find out should make this obvious -- any woman who found out you were doing this would be put off immediately, as they should be.

Instead of spending so much time with some weird scheme in an attempt to put down the "hunks," how about just becoming a more attractive and more interesting person on your own? Newsflash, guys: women are attracted to confidence and a sense of self-worth, among other things, not complex mechanisms to distract the other guys.

There are two ways to be the biggest building. One is to tear down the other buildings. Or two, just build the biggest building. - Gary V

Sorry, but this is just really strange, and the lack of ANY negative feedback on here or Reddit is even more disconcerting.

rue• 16 years ago

Understanding people is hard sometimes. If you yourself have managed to improve yourself in some way, it's particularly hard to understand why someone else couldn't do it too.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

So you've done this online? It worked well for you?

So you know the three sentence opener that is going to compensate for a less than attractive picture?

Let's hear it.

Or is your answer just a stand-in to let you morally condemn these others?

In person, one can project confidence, intelligence, humor etc. Online, being unique is bit harder, not just because someone can copy your words but also because you get to use far fewer of them before a decision is made.

I'm not condemning or condoning the original post. But it's telling that a lot of condemnations for "gaming the dating system" that I hear are prefaced by "it's easy, just become more confident/relax/be yourself". Supply-and-demand says that the common measure of "success" in dating aren't inherently easy. They might not be desirable either but that's a different story.

I think online dating with photo does create a real quandary because it gives one very little time and thus makes the likely winners more based on immediate visual factors.

Gizzle• 16 years ago

...but online dating.. ha ha, go out into the real life, so you don't need to hide behind or show off your online profile..

blub8• 16 years ago

Perhaps you would like to explain what is wrong with morally condemning others when what they did is in fact morally wrong?

It's very simple and clear cut: he distorted the truth in order for him to get an advantage and put others at a disadvantage. There is no greater good behind the lie, it's just self-interest.

ZoFreX2• 16 years ago

> So you've done this online? It worked well for you?

So we can't condemn this unless we have an alternate suggestion for those that can't get any? "I'm not getting any, so immoral hacks are OK"? You could use the same argument to justify rape.

pyre3• 16 years ago

If the woman was not attracted to him, then he wouldn't have made it past the first (or second date). He obviously has qualities that she desires.

blub8• 16 years ago

So if a woman that is into you would lie and deceive others in order to be with you, you would want a relationship with that woman?

If someone were to do that, it would destroy my confidence in them. The whole relationship has started with a lie, no matter if I like them or not.

JoeAltmaier4• 16 years ago

He has an available penis. That's the conclusion I got - deprived of better hunks, she settled.

Maybe she deserved it, being shallow and horny. But that doesn't speak to the morality of it at all.

dalore4• 16 years ago

It could very well be that because after he created all the fake accounts he felt the confidence he needed.

DuncanIdaho• 16 years ago

Dude... were talking online here.

Everybody is 7 foot high jock on teh internetz[1]. Everybody is lying and people discount for that. So unless you lie a bit you started loosing your ground even if you are otherwise the tallest building. Take your moralism somewhere else - cuz. this is teh internetz (and its serious business too!)

You remind me of people who keep whining about cheezy tactics in games - they are there so use them. Have you ever heard that winners are those who are willing to do stuff, losers won't?

[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-biggest-lies-in-online...

EGreg2• 16 years ago

This doesn't rank high on the "cruel" factor. It is more resourceful (and hard work to pull off) than cruel. To me, the second guy who pretended to be the hunk, got inside info and then got the woman on a date seems to have used a much more creepy strategy. Why? Because he lied TO THE PERSON HE IS SEEING. The denial of service wasn't lying to the person he is seeing. It is lying to all the other dudes. Which is just fine. Lots of guys are COMPETING for the same girls, and in a competition like that, you don't necessarily have to play fair. I see this more as using intelligence to get a leg up on the competition, and frankly, the only reason why he wouldn't want to confess this to her -- is NOT that he would seem like a lying creep -- but because it would highlight the fact that he wouldn't be able to get her otherwise.

As if girls never do a "denial of service" attack to guys when they are competing for the same guy. Like not inviting their hotter friend along when they are first meeting each other.

PS: Do you find Hitch (the character in the movie) a creepy liar?

klipt• 16 years ago

> This doesn't rank high on the "cruel" factor

Really? You wouldn't mind messaging a bunch of profiles, receiving no responses, only to later find out that they weren't even real people? That no matter how much time you spent carefully composing your messages, you might as well have directed them to /dev/null?

Seems pretty cruel to me. And once other people start adopting the same strategy, it'll render dating sites useless for everyone. Ultimately the sites will be forced to ask for some kind of proof of identity.

sliverstorm2• 16 years ago

You seem to have the idea that using different channels is somehow the wrong way to go about courtship. Have you ever studied nature? There are tons of animals that abuse and cheat courtship rituals for their own benefit.

Really, the courtship ritual is a game. The women look for traits they desire, but these traits are expensive, so (some) men attempt to fake the traits. The women adapt, the men adapt. It's basically an evolutionary arms race, but about sex, because the reproductive & evolutionary interests of males and females when it comes to mate selection are diametrically opposed.

vaksel• 16 years ago

i don't see how this would work since most guys use the shotgun approach, so none of the women would stop receiving messages.

+ most women get something like 200 messages a week..so even if the numbers went down, they'd still have plenty of messages.

Granted it might work somewhere in the middle of Montana with 20,000 people within 200 miles.

trustfundbaby• 16 years ago

Guys will email the most attractive chicks first then work their way down the ladder (so to speak) ... if any of the chicks at the top of the ladder respond to them, thats where their attention is going to be until the figure out something is up or otherwise lose interest ...

With 50 impossibly (fake) hot chicks on the radar and only 30 real ones who probably fall below the 50 on the scale, that would give our boys more than enough time to seal the deal

Strunk• 16 years ago

Haha! This is f-king awesome! :)

skbohra1232• 16 years ago

Reddit posts are generally useless talks. Cross posting from reddit, solves anything ? This looks out of scope to me.

skbohra1232• 16 years ago

would you please mind, explaining for the down vote?

khafra3• 16 years ago

I did not vote, but I understand:

You commented solely to complain about the main post. Your comment added no more information than a flag would have.

Your comment was completely generic. It made no specific argument against the link except to disparage reddit. The stereotypical HN reader prides himself on being the type of person who'd appreciate clever, insightful material even from /b/, let alone from reddit.

Also, I realize English is not your first language, but it's the lingua franca of this site; and your English was distractingly poor.

AdamGibbins• 16 years ago

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noodle2• 16 years ago

i think that the fact that (1) they perceived this was necessary and (2) this worked, shows that online dating needs a better way of doing things.

dantkz• 16 years ago

Somehow reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbJHkwHZCCM

Will this approach work on the job offers websites?

wallflower• 16 years ago

Highly recommend the Catfish Movie if you have not seen it. A variant of the same technique is employed.

http://www.iamrogue.com/catfish

klbarry• 16 years ago

It seems to me the woman would only be impressed by his resourcefulness, and flattered, if he told her how he got her in a joking way over dinner. I, personally, would be impressed if a woman did it.

Dating Denial of Service attack

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