Given it has a 'date' as well as a 'sleep with' option, it really does seem built around sex positivity principles to me.
I can understand the trads being mad about it because they abhor casual sex in general, but at least from a second wave sex positive liberal feminism POV I really don't see any toxicity to the concept.
I personally don't think sex positivism has done the general population any favors, so I think it's quite toxic to make an app explicitly to facilitate friend hookups. It's just going to create hurt feelings and destroyed friendships when one of the parties wants more and the other doesn't.
I really do not believe that peoples' short-term impulses are at all aligned with what they want in the long term. Frequently they're opposed! Most Big Tech and Internet startups are based on giving people easy access to their short-term impulses and then claiming it's a useful service even when it is bad for the users long-term. An explicit hookup app is no exception.
You can believe that it's bad for people overall, certainly - friends with benefits type things require greater than zero management to avoid running into problems, and as with any type of relationship, not everybody is as good at handling it as one might like.
But I was talking 'toxic' as in the 'toxic masculinity' comment, which is a fairly specific thing and I don't see in evidence here.
Plus, I mean, trying to frame it as an 'evil male' thing (which you didn't but was what I was responding to) seems to me silly given women can enjoy casual sex too - and intending to find somebody suitable for the long term doesn't mean your libido doesn't exist -now- so it's perfectly possible to have short term impulses that are separate from your long term goals without them interfering with each other.
(I -do- think there are people who interpret sex positivity in exceedingly stupid ways that can be actively harmful in application, but I don't think this app is responsible for that since that's a decades old problem and in the end you kinda have to accept that other people are their own person and allowed to make decisions you're sure are a terrible idea ... much though I grumble when it's one of my friends about to blow their own foot off ...)
I've never used my phone for an archive.is link until your comment; I just clicked on the one above your comment on my phone (iPhone 15 Pro Max with yesterday's iOS 17.3 update).
What I got is vertical ads in the upper right and left hand columns and an ad below the article text, each of the three changing on their own to new ads after 15-20 seconds.
As I scrolled down to read the story, new ads appeared; at no time was any of the text obscured.
I never got a CAPTCHA.
Note: I'm not a techie and have NO ad blockers/VPNs/whatever on my phone, it's never been modded or anything.
Thanks for the extra data point! Mine will start as you describe, but every time the ads update, their elements seem to get appended instead of updating the existing ads. Then the browser kinda zooms in but won't let me zoom back out. After 30s I can't see any text lol. It's quite crazy.
A workaround for me was to request the desktop site, which actually looks the same. Then it works just like you described. Probably just a weird responsive web mobile Chrome zoom thingy.
It's been a while since I've been in hardcore web development, but it used to be that all browsers on ios used the same rendering engine. WebKit I think. I believe that's still the case!
>> We lamented that dating sites discouraged people from being upfront about their sexual desire; we decided you could simply say that you want to ‘bang’ someone.
I agree there needs to be an outlet for people to say those things. I was chatting on the phone with a match from FB Dating and asked why she disappeared last year. She said a couple times she just got so disgusted with the men saying stuff (she wasn't explicit) she deleted the profile and left conversations hanging.
Sure, everyone knows sex is part of (or all of) what you want to find in dating apps, but there needs to be some filtering. Maybe DTF and LIKE need to be orthogonal options - either or both. And "like dirty talk" is a filter.
31 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 80.0 ms ] threadI can understand the trads being mad about it because they abhor casual sex in general, but at least from a second wave sex positive liberal feminism POV I really don't see any toxicity to the concept.
I really do not believe that peoples' short-term impulses are at all aligned with what they want in the long term. Frequently they're opposed! Most Big Tech and Internet startups are based on giving people easy access to their short-term impulses and then claiming it's a useful service even when it is bad for the users long-term. An explicit hookup app is no exception.
But I was talking 'toxic' as in the 'toxic masculinity' comment, which is a fairly specific thing and I don't see in evidence here.
Plus, I mean, trying to frame it as an 'evil male' thing (which you didn't but was what I was responding to) seems to me silly given women can enjoy casual sex too - and intending to find somebody suitable for the long term doesn't mean your libido doesn't exist -now- so it's perfectly possible to have short term impulses that are separate from your long term goals without them interfering with each other.
(I -do- think there are people who interpret sex positivity in exceedingly stupid ways that can be actively harmful in application, but I don't think this app is responsible for that since that's a decades old problem and in the end you kinda have to accept that other people are their own person and allowed to make decisions you're sure are a terrible idea ... much though I grumble when it's one of my friends about to blow their own foot off ...)
What I got is vertical ads in the upper right and left hand columns and an ad below the article text, each of the three changing on their own to new ads after 15-20 seconds.
As I scrolled down to read the story, new ads appeared; at no time was any of the text obscured.
I never got a CAPTCHA.
Note: I'm not a techie and have NO ad blockers/VPNs/whatever on my phone, it's never been modded or anything.
A workaround for me was to request the desktop site, which actually looks the same. Then it works just like you described. Probably just a weird responsive web mobile Chrome zoom thingy.
I agree there needs to be an outlet for people to say those things. I was chatting on the phone with a match from FB Dating and asked why she disappeared last year. She said a couple times she just got so disgusted with the men saying stuff (she wasn't explicit) she deleted the profile and left conversations hanging.
Sure, everyone knows sex is part of (or all of) what you want to find in dating apps, but there needs to be some filtering. Maybe DTF and LIKE need to be orthogonal options - either or both. And "like dirty talk" is a filter.
This is why I really liked the idea mentioned in the article where you swipe up to indicate like/date and down to indicate primarily sexual interest.
I strongly suspect many humans would be better off with more clarity up front in such things.
This is my favorite part of the article.
I Built Bang with Friends, “The Evilest App Ever” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35930776 (May 13, 2023 — 38 points, 11 comments)