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WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

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Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#51

Post by noodle »

yaakov34 wrote: post #41
diziet wrote: post #38

How is this an article so thoroughly under-researched? Why not go a little bit further and investigate if actual people are posting? Hi $name, thank you for messaging me. I'm new to this site, so can you please tell me the process on how you send me that message, where did you have to click, etc? I am still trying to figure this out, so if you could tell me what buttons you had to press to send the message to me, I'd…

Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.

i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story.

are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#52

Post by robinwauters »

noodle wrote: post #51
yaakov34 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.

i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.

It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it, and so on.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#53

Post by bradly »

nicferrier wrote: post #50
dolinsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, sir, sound like a snake oil salesman of the worst kind. Either that or you have no clue how your site operates. edit but apparently 'Jen' does. Screencast here -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtBmqqKVcc (Thanks to my Appsumo purchase of Screenflow which saved me 50%!)

so the thing in the screencast is not a message from a user, nor does it claim to be. It's actually an experiment with a 3rd party to see if an automated response system converts people to our paid service well.

> to our paid service well.

From your website: "it's 100% free"

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#54

Post by yaakov34 »

noodle wrote: post #51
yaakov34 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.

i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.

Your attempt to split the difference kind of reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/690/ . Sorry. What does it matter if only 18 of the 20 messages were fakes intended to make him sign up, and 2 were real? Not that I'd think for a second that any of them were.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#55

Post by nikcub »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

TC / Crunchbase might want to change their WooMe's company profile on their pages as well, in light of this article. Kind of funny that the article calls it "bait-and-switch, from the horrible kind" while linking to an internal-ish overview that says "best of all it’s free". http://www.crunchbase.com/company/woome

150k+ records in Crunchbase so it is difficult to keep it up-to-date. The good news is that anybody can edit any record.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#56

Post by dolinsky »

nicferrier wrote: post #50
dolinsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, sir, sound like a snake oil salesman of the worst kind. Either that or you have no clue how your site operates. edit but apparently 'Jen' does. Screencast here -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtBmqqKVcc (Thanks to my Appsumo purchase of Screenflow which saved me 50%!)

so the thing in the screencast is not a message from a user, nor does it claim to be. It's actually an experiment with a 3rd party to see if an automated response system converts people to our paid service well.

Who are you trying to kid here? It's obvious to those here that it's an automated response system...a.k.a. a bot. Many of the users here could / have written such a bot at one time with far less nefarious reasoning behind doing so. You can't deny that the purpose of that bot is to fool people into thinking that they're talking to 'Jen', a user on your site (whether or not you specifically say so does not discard the intent).

Stop treating the people on this site like we're simply misinformed teenagers crying wolf.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#57

Post by noodle »

robinwauters wrote: post #52
noodle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.

It's not just the messages from users, it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details, pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails, the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it, and so on.

> it's the whole concept of showing nothing unless you hand over your credit details

this is how a lot of dating sites work. no contact unless you pay, no receiving messages unless you pay. its also how classmates.com works, not just dating sites. and one of the reasons they were sued recently is due to business practices similar to this.

> pretending hot women are dying to contact you even though you're obviously not date material (unless they're into horses), the unsolicited emails

again, this is probably true, but there's no proof of it unless the dude signed up and found out for sure. more data required.

> the corny live chat box and pop-up message when you try to close it

shady indeed, but they're not the only place who makes use of this.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#58

Post by noodle »

yaakov34 wrote: post #54
noodle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story. are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.

Your attempt to split the difference kind of reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/690/ . Sorry. What does it matter if only 18 of the 20 messages were fakes intended to make him sign up, and 2 were real? Not that I'd think for a second that any of them were.

i'm not splitting the difference. if any messages were fake, its shady and legally liable. my point is, how can he know this for sure? all he's doing is saying that it is probably true, and not investigating. $30 from TC to sign up for a month and verify his assumption is just good journalism.

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#59

Post by nikcub »

nicferrier wrote: post #16
dolinsky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, sir, sound like a snake oil salesman of the worst kind. Either that or you have no clue how your site operates. edit but apparently 'Jen' does. Screencast here -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtBmqqKVcc (Thanks to my Appsumo purchase of Screenflow which saved me 50%!)

right. I'm the CTO. I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil. I don't sell snake oil. I help people meet each other. If you really WANT snake oil I guess I could find some and get it to you.

> I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil.

1. Delete the fake bot accounts

2. Re-word your homepage so that it is clear to users that you need to pay money to do anything useful

3. Come out and say 'in an effort to ramp up user engagement we went too far and made a mistake. apologies'

I signed up for your site years ago. I have slowly watched it progress from something useful to a totally degenerate spam and bait site.

(Edit: I will add that if it is your affiliates who are doing the spamming, then ban them and put in better controls. I just logged into my account and got 3 messages in less than a second)

Re: WooMe: TechCrunch40 Finalist, $20 Million In Funding – And One Huge Scam

#60

Post by po »

swombat wrote: post #19
nicferrier wrote: post #10

for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading. we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen. Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe.

http://www.woome.com/ "wooMe is the most fun you'll have online for FREE!" "get started now! it's 100% free and takes 30 secs to sign up" Doing a Bayesian update on the claims of automated bot messages, with the fact that the company is willing to make obviously untrue statements on its front page, it seems reasonably likely that they would be willing to lie in other places too. I realise that claiming to be free pro…

Getting started is 100% free. It seem's like it's the actual talking to other people that you have to pay for. If not bait-and-switch, these weasel words are certainly misleading.

I can only imagine what the bounce rate is when you put the payment details after the signup for a nerfed account. You can't do much until you upload a photo of yourself and by then they have already gotten something from you: the appearance of activity and photos they can dangle in front of other users. What do they call that again… bait for the lobster trap?

http://www.woome.com/woome/privacy/

Use of Information Obtained by WooMe

When you register with WooMe, you create your own profile and privacy settings. Your profile information, as well as your name, email and photo, are displayed to people in the networks specified in your privacy settings to enable you to connect with people on WooMe.

...

Profile information is used by WooMe primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings.

You know, it is certainly possible that those messages are all either spam accounts or real people trying to make the money they paid worthwhile by meeting someone. Then again, pyramid schemes are perpetuated by real people trying hard to make their investment worth it too.

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