This is interesting. Hinge pushed out a message to users that was like “studies show that ghosting makes you and the person you’re ghosting feel bad! It’s not a big deal to just say no thanks!”. I don’t know if it made a difference.

One of the things to take into account is some people (often but not always men) are dangerous. Women have told me they’ve ghosted because the man was giving them danger vibes. Encouraging the person to unmatch might be good enough.

One thing I’d like to see, I think, is some way for me to rate people I match with but didn’t keep dating. Like Alex was polite and punctual and respectful, but they hate cats so we can’t be a thing. All that info just goes into the void. Though i wouldn’t have this be free text, and there’s more ways to screw it up than do it right. Information about people ghosting or flaking would go in the same bucket.

I think getting people to pay anything will be a hard sell. But I also think “free” creates bad incentives. This is probably “better” but humans are really bad at understanding things.

I wonder if a tip / pay what you want model would have legs. Probably there’s too many freeloaders, sadly.

I would also feel pretty bad if I paid for the match and it fizzled out. Like we chat but don’t have a date, or realize there’s some deal breaker (eg: they’re moving away in a month, they smoke, they hate bisexuals, etc). Some of that would be covered by the profile, but some won’t, or won’t be noticed.

I might try it, based on what I saw with the first couple free matches. But it would also get expensive really quickly. Cheaper than subscriptions though. I think hinge wants like $50/mo for it’s top tier.

Like, do I pay $100 up front to have 100 likes in flight? Or do I bottleneck it to some smaller number and wait for the duds to expire? Wait for others to make the first move? The optimal strategy is unclear.

Sorry, sort of just rambling a bit.

Is NYC one of your target markets?

Most people don’t care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.

But people are lazy and don’t care. They don’t care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.

The big sites are where the content is, and that’s what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.

Pledge is kind of a weird term for it. Sounds like one of those culty christian “purity pledge” things. Would not recommend using that word. Maybe “like” or “wave” or “wink” or something like that.

Is it 3 free matches per lifetime? Or per some smaller period of time?

That’s good that it doesn’t hide matches. That’s a really irritating behavior on Tinder, Feeld, and others. Just tell me who’s already interested so I can focus on that instead of throwing more into the void.

Now, next questions: What, if anything, are you doing about conversation and profile? In my experience, a lot of people absolutely self sabotage here. They have a blank profile, or one without any hooks, and then they get upset that the only messages they get are “hey”. Or they only send messages that are “hey”, and then are like “i hate small talk why is only small talk happening”

Personally I don’t think you can fix that without like several generations of intense investment in education, but maybe a well thought out app could nudge people in the right direction. Hell, even a thing that scanned a message for a question mark and reminded the user “If you don’t ask them any questions, you’re not going to seem interested in them” would make a difference.

Ok, so I’m told that some things aren’t as effective in real life as they are in fantasy, but I really in my heart wish for this sack of shit to be visited by saint luigi.

I just noticed this has a range of 1 mile

High level wizard can chill in his tower and just nuke that little village down the road.

Unknown Armies will live on forever in my head. It was such a cool setting and the book had such great writing. There’s a third edition, but I only really read 2nd.

Sadly, I could never get anyone to play it. I’ve been cursed with “everyone only wants to play D&D” most of my life. I still remember trying to sell Mage to a college friend and he was like “You can just cast spells whenever? That sounds totally broken”

NYC. I knew one guy who wouldn’t get vaccinated. I told him we wouldn’t hang out anymore until he did. He never did, we’ve never hung out since.

Run this flow by me?

I load up the app. I see an attractive person. I hit “like”. Do I pay now? Or do I only pay if they also like, so there’s an extra step of “you both hit like but didn’t pay”?

Does the other person get notified when I hit like?

I think Tinder started by going to college campuses, finding who was hot and popular, and paying for them to throw parties. Anyone who went was told to install the app.

I’m in NYC. I can get a date a week on the apps, but the quality varies. And like I just got ghosted twice this month. There’s room for improvement.

Interesting. Dating apps are garbage for pretty well understood reasons.

What is your pricing? Do I pay only on mutual like or if I make the first move?

How are you going to get users? Users are notoriously … what’s a nicer word than stupid… about platforms. Look at how many people stick to Twitter and tinder even though they hate them, “but that’s where people are!”

Adapted from one of the best dungeons I’ve ever come up with and run:

The entrance is marked “You will never find what you are looking for”. Ideally, the players believe some macguffin is deep inside.

Inside the entrance, the walls are unadorned, solid, black. There are no lights. It is pitch black inside, and whatever lights the players bring don’t seem to illuminate as much as they should. It’s also freezing cold. It quickly becomes a maze of hallways, rooms, stairways, and intersections of all the same cold, black. They may find the frozen remains of previous adventurers that entered. They don’t look like they died from violence. Just exposure to the cold, and maybe starvation.

Have the players map it themselves, and slowly make the layout make less sense. Have hallways loop back into what should be another room. Turn around to go back to the big room, and they find a small round room instead. And always the freezing cold gnaws at them.

The mechanic is

The players had a blast with it. I was so proud of them that they figured it out.

Oh my gosh the conspiracy theories would be so much if Trump died because a Tesla caught fire with him inside.

i was going to post this, too.

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

That sounds like more work than just writing the email to me

Seems like a recipe for subtle bugs and unmaintainable systems. Also those Eloi from the time machine, where they don’t know how anything works anymore.

Management is probably salivating at the idea of firing all those expensive engineers that tell them stuff like “you can’t draw three red lines all perpendicular in yellow ink”

I’m also reminded of that ai-for-music guy that was like “No one likes making art!”. Soulless husk.

A date. We weren’t a good match for romance etc, but she was fun to talk to. Also she gave me like the most thoughtful rejection text I’ve ever received. Absolutely refreshing compared to the usual ghosting or vague “not what i’m looking for”. It was weird to feel better about myself after a rejection, but that’s what happened.

my favorite graffiti i’ve seen i think was “the wrong amazon is burning”

…yeah so if you’re the kind of player who argues and fights at the table. Maybe stick to structured games with clearly defined rules.

You ignored the “or play a game I don’t like” part. That is what this process is extremely likely to create. Go look at the blog post again. Go look at those rules.

Furthermore, the process described in the blog post is

When a rule is needed, everyone at the table quickly discusses what the gameplay should feel like and what rule(s) would support that. If a majority of players agree on the rule (voting is necessary only if there is dissent)

Arguing is built right into the process! Someone proposes a rule, and you talk about it. And you know what I don’t want to do? Discuss the merits of rules mid-session. Especially large systems like “how does magic work?” or “can you change someone’s mind?”. That sounds awful. It’s one thing to do a quick “Do you think Alex can climb a ladder with this ‘Broken Arm’ consequence?” discussion in Fate. It’s a whole other thing to invent aspects whole cloth, and then try to integrate them with whatever else people came up with this week.

Or, if I pass on discussing why (for example) dropping your sword on a low roll is going to have weird effects, then I end up playing a game with rules I don’t like. Why would I want that? What don’t you get about this? Do I need to make you a flow chart?

System doesnt know how to handle something
|
|-- Propose a new rule
    |- is the rule good?  --> yes --> oh that is surprising. carry on
         | no
         |
      discuss  <-- the void of wasted time
         |
         | - were they convinced? --> yes --> go back to 'propose a new rule'
                      |
                      |-- no --> keep discussing? -- yes --> well this sucks
                                             |-- no --> give up --------^

Ironically, the game I mentioned as an example of what I do like (Fate) is very light weight. But not so light weight that it doesn’t exist, and I have to deal with Brian trying to introduce hit locations mid session, again.

You seem to be imagining this like perfectly spherical frictionless group of players that are all super chill, on the same page about everything, and happy to just do whatever. I’m imagining what has been more typical in my experience, which is not that.

Again…this isn’t your scenario. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re conflating taking game systems and adding other mechanics to it and just goofing around and making it up as you go.

The blog post is about building a game system! Look at all the weird rules they made up! This whole blog post is about taking game systems (ie: rules people know from other games) and smushing them together! Anyone doing this process is going to start with some baseline system(s) in their head. Even if it’s just “let’s rock paper scissors for it” or “flip a coin”. It is in fact taking game game systems and adding other mechanics to it.

They certainly had fun, but as I said that sounds like my personal hell.

It’s okay to say “I need a game with explicit structure and rules”. That’s fine too, but maybe don’t argue with your players though.

Arguing is built into the process described into the blog post. Unless you’re splitting hairs and saying “argue” isn’t the same as “discuss”.

Not the person you’re responding to, but I think we should have open borders*. The whole “you were born here so you’re cool” thing is archaic and cruel.

We could use some of the immense wealth of the ultra wealthy to build more housing and infrastructure. (This is a US-centric visualization, but in case you forgot how much wealth is concentrated in so few humans: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ )

*I would mandate vaccinations and similar for entry, but would provide them free of charge. So not quite “unconditional” but I think “no measles, please” is a pretty understandable condition. Unless you’re some parts of the US right now, I guess.