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“I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

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Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#221

Post by diminoten »

justathrow2k wrote: post #149
briholt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned about this today. This is the greatest marketing concept since "million dollar homepage." My life is a failure for not having thought of this.

By greatest marketing concept you mean a quick and easy way to make money, yeah? I wouldn't be so hard on yourself for not having thought of it. Personally, I believe humanity would be at a net gain had no one thought of or executed on this idea.

You realize this has real and tangible value to lots of folks, right?

Despite spending the vast majority of my life on the Internet, every single day I am disappointed by how judgmental and incapable of empathy folks are who say things to other people online.

Jesus, put yourself in someone else's shoes just this once. I wouldn't use this service, and I don't know anyone who would, but to say that Invisible Boyfriend is a net loss to humanity requires a level of hubris that, even today, is stunning to find on the Internet.

This is a life/death thing to some LGBT folks, who if outed face physical harm from their own families and friends. Helping someone like that stay in the closet until they can get to safety is a service Invisible Boyfriend adds to this world. Who the fuck are you to say that's not a value-add?

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#223

Post by cbhl »

diminoten wrote: post #221
justathrow2k wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By greatest marketing concept you mean a quick and easy way to make money, yeah? I wouldn't be so hard on yourself for not having thought of it. Personally, I believe humanity would be at a net gain had no one thought of or executed on this idea.

You realize this has real and tangible value to lots of folks, right? Despite spending the vast majority of my life on the Internet, every single day I am disappointed by how judgmental and incapable of empathy folks are who say things to other people online. Jesus, put yourself in someone else's shoes just this once . I wouldn't use this service, and I don't know anyone who would, but to say that Invisible Boyfriend…

I can't help but think that the LGBT folks most at risk aren't necessarily going to be over 18 and have ready access to a credit card.

Is there a way to buy an Invisible Boyfriend/Girlfriend as a gift for a friend?

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#224

Post by discardorama »

ghshephard wrote: post #209
ajays wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would need to send 200 texts/hour (which is pretty easy/trivial if you are doing this full time). Context switching would take a while. You can't just reply with random phrases a-la Eliza[1] . In the article, the "boyfriend" responds to a specific question about Downton Abbey. Sure, in this instance the responder may be a fan of DA; but in the general case, it'll require more than 18 seconds (@200/hr) to just…

It turns out they watched Downton Abbey, in which case it's a 15 second response. If they hadn't watched Downton Abbey - also 15 second response. And, from reading the script - it's apparently the case that the same CSA will get scheduled in for short periods of time with the same customer - able to maintain a thread, and presumably, all the CSAs have the thread available to respond.

> all the CSAs have the thread available to respond.

That's the catch: they have to read the full thread and then respond... in 18 seconds on average! That is a lot. I can barely read a decent-sized paragraph in 18 seconds; and the average typing speed of a professional is 50 - 80 wpm; which means even a 10-word response will take around 10 seconds to type. So you have 8 seconds left to grok the entire context and form a coherent response! And do this for hours at an end.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#225

Post by Camillo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #117
iopq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She doesn't want the unattractive guys to hit on her, so she texts her fake significant other. The fantasy of an attractive guy being her boyfriend is better than a real boyfriend being just a regular guy.

Or maybe it's just a polite way of turning down a guy you're not interested in. Maybe having that instant out is more convenient than having to fight off advances for an hour.

It still seems completely unnecessary. The standard way of turning people down nowadays seems to be to smile and say "sure, we should get lunch one of these days, you can contact me at my email/IM/Facebook/whatever", and then never reply when they contact you. What could be simpler and safer?

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#226

Post by thret »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183
SloopJon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter how deeply we trust our logical conclusions, our emotional response remains the same. We can't help but feel worthier when we're being praised (even by computers ...), hurt when we're being insulted, and connected when we're being connected with. I just started playing The Walking Dead. In one scene, after another character saved Clementine from a zombie before I could, the game said, "Clementine remember…

I had a lot of similar feelings with Mass Effect series. In this game all the decisions you make permanently reshape the game world, which carries through the first game to second and third. Major and minor characters in the last game may be missing or doing different things based on your actions in the first game. While playing I felt the impact of my steps in even tiny details. This, + general storyline and executi…

I haven't played this game, but after I posted OP on my facebook feed I went out to a party and one of my friends confessed that it made him think of Mass Effect also. Apparently he put quite a lot of time into trying to build a relationship with a hot NPC only to find out she was gay. In his words 'I was shattered. I put all this time into building the relationship and she wasn't even into guys'.

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#227

Post by thret »

Karunamon wrote: post #204
aetherson wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cold reading is certainly not the only kind of fake psychic scam. For example, hot reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_reading However, a skilled cold reader will in fact get specifics (though they'll also have bad guesses), by making further general guesses based on the information you've already confirmed for them. For example, military service is very common for men in a certain age range, who were drafted t…

I'm not going to get into the over-arching point on a board inhabited by subscribers to scientism, but don't you think the jig is is kind of up if you're told someone has a scar through their right eye and they actually didn't, or that someone had a favorite shirt that has a tear in a certain place (that both of those things didn't exist, etc). In other words, a level of specificity that is not so easily dismissed as…

This is about the future, but I think can be applied equally derisively to talking to the dead. Also My Dinner With Andre is a great movie so why not share it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vGpBYJ5_6E&t=91m00s

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#228

Post by vehementi »

enjo wrote: post #203
discardorama wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My life is a failure for not having thought of this. Actually, I did think of this, many times. But my biggest bottleneck was: how will I scale up the replies? I could handle being a "boyfriend" for, say, 10 women. But any bigger, and I'd need help. I considered MTurk, but thought that quality control would be an issue. (What if the MTurk guy really starts hitting on the woman, they exchange numbers and then he sta…

Anyways: after considering all the messiness, I gave it a pass. There is a lesson here. "Computer people" have a real aversion to simply scaling up a business by using humans to do things. Sometimes that simple answer (hire a bunch of people to do stuff) is the right answer, provided the economics of the business work.

What? discardorama was merely wrong - the real service DOES use the approach they considered!!

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#229

Post by recursive »

lrei wrote: post #101
CyberShadow wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the field you're referring to, but I'll try to answer with a best guess anyway. Most web spam bots fall into two categories: 1. They target a certain web software package (such as WordPress), for which they know the HTML layout and the range of possible CAPTCHA challenges. 2. They try to fill out every HTML form they find blindly, using heuristics based on the names of form input elements. To defeat both,…

Thanks. But that challenge is so trivial to defeat by simple pattern matching with zero cost that the cost of adding code to a bot to break this type of challenge seems negligible. PS: it's a the bottom of the landing page (not signup)

If a negligible cost is a high enough cost, then why do more?

Re: “I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love”

#230

Post by Terr_ »

hyp0 wrote: post #220
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia Sweeney on astrology - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjturKoFsg (The background is she just found out she was actually born 3 months after her parents told her she was born - they lied to get her to start school a year earlier.)

Astrology is obviously nonsense, but it seems plausible that the season of birth could have a personality effect: the cold dead of winter, with little fresh food vs spring etc, also from the attitudes of surrounding adults. Of course, different near the equator, and phase-shifted in the southern hemisphere, and... much less pronounced in modern times, with supermarkets, refrigeration, air-conditioning/heating, import…

The socially-constructed age-cohort you go into is huge too. Want better grades and performance at sports? Be months older than your classmates.
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