A Brief Review Of That New Female-Designed Dating App

So the CEO of Siren got tired of seeing the endless floods of abuse that tormented women on OKCupid.  She asked, “If I were going to design a dating app to be friendly to women, how would I do that?”
Her answer was fascinating.  And when I read about it, I said, “Let’s download the app and give it a shot.”
Which was a little weird: it is only an app. The old-school dude in me is like, “…where’s my web page?” and Siren says, “Fuck your web page, man, we all work off of mobile anyway, just love the app.”  Okay, sure, not a big deal, since everything at Siren is designed to work in 140-character snippets.
(Cue the usual foaming rants of Twitter-length writing restrictions. Yet remember, I like Twitter. 140 characters is enough to get precisely one (1) point across, which forces people to be succinct and encourages witty brevity – two things that are good for a dating app where people are browsing heavily.)
The app starts out strong: you create a user account (which is relatively painless – you have to give it a phone number to avoid spam and sock accounts, then email/password), and then you enter a 140-character description of yourself. (I went with “Polyamorous, science-fiction-writin’, nerdy-ass punster.”)
And it asks whether you’re a man, woman, or nonbinary.
And it asks whether you’re trans and/or willing to date trans people.
So hey, SJW credentials: established.
Yet asking for trans and nonbinary stuff is pretty trivial database stuff.  So here’s the first major digression from the norm:
If this was OKCupid or some other dating site, I’d give you a link to my profile.  But on Siren, people’s profiles are not visible to you unless you fit their criteria.  Even if I could link to my page – and remember, this is a mobile app, so I can’t – you would not be able to see me unless you were, in my case, a woman between the ages of 21 and 66 within 250 miles of me.
Which is a protective screening, really: You can’t even know I exist unless I’m specifically looking for someone like you.  Which means that dudes can’t go around looking for every pretty lesbian within 250 miles and spam the shit out of them.
…Well, actually, they couldn’t do that anyway, because you can’t search users.
“So how do you find people, Ferrett?”, you may ask.  And Siren’s organized around one central feature: The Question Of The Day.  They get some pseudo-celebrity to ask something like, “If you could only eat one meal for the rest of eternity, what would it be?” or “Which dead author would you want to take to dinner?” – and you get to see the 140-character answers from people only who match both your criteria and theirs.
Answering these little snippets is reasonably addictive.  It’s fun – well, for me, anyway – seeing how witty you can be in such a small space.
The intent is that you’re trying to start a fun conversation, and you only choose the people who have answers you like. If you enjoy someone’s answers, you ping them and start chatting in private…
Or try to.  Currently, Siren is only marketed to Seattle, so when I selected “Within 50 miles of Cleveland,” there was only one person answering questions – or, to be more precise, only one person answering questions who I was potentially compatible with.  Pushing that out to a thousand-mile radius got me up to about 44 answers, but I suspect most of those people are West Coasters.
Which is the only thing that makes me suspicious of Siren’s success – it’s a numbers game, the same way some towns have a lot of restaurant ratings on Yelp! and so Yelp is super-useful in those towns, and in others nobody does a damn thing and so Yelp is this broken, pitiful tool.  And while Yelp is a place where you can go to be a social media star, where people fawn over your witty reviews, Siren closed-mouthed nature discourages stardom.  You can be popular to a narrow set of people who want to know you, but your audience is always limited.
Which is a good thing for the sorts of conversations they want to start up – I just wonder whether it’ll allow the app to get to the point where it has the critical mass of a usable user base in any given town.
And the QOTD seems to be, like, Twitter, very in the moment – if you’re not answering today, you might as well be forgotten.  That seems to be something by design, though, so people who aren’t actively participating won’t get continually pinged.
That said, I currently have no idea how well the social aspect of it works!  As of this morning, I have no emails – though like I said, the user base is small out in my neck of the woods, and I just got started.
What we have with Siren is a different sort of dating app.  There will be a lot of people who read this experience, doubtlessly, and go “Ugh. That sounds awful.” And great! Let it be awful, for you. But a successful user experience doesn’t have to appeal to everyone, or even a minority of folks – just a large enough swathe of people to gather the right folks together to start smoochin’.
I like the idea of Siren, anyway.  I’ll probably answer some more questions.  And if they ever roll it out in my city, which I presume involves advertisements and a fresh wave of PR, I’ll give it a fresh shot even if I’ve forgotten about it, because it’s all about those user numbers.
In the meanwhile, it’s a solid experiment.  I like the idea.  Let’s see where it goes.

Star Wars: The Ferrett's Three-Tiered Hidden Review!

I can’t show it to you here – and I can’t link to it permanently, because I put three levels of impressions behind LJ cut tags so people could choose their level of involvement.
But for the near future, if you go to the front page of my LiveJournal and scroll down a bit, you’ll find my three levels of review, which has three sections that you have to click to see:

  • A simple thumbs-up or down on what I thought of the movie;
  • A slightly more in-depth discussion of the general things that made The Force Awakens work and/or not work;
  • Three thousand words of me going berserk on every Star Wars nitpick in the ‘verse.

So go check it out, if you’d like.
 

The Force Is Strong In Our Family: Our Family Tattoos, Revealed!

So I’ve mentioned the way my wife and my two daughters all decided to get Star Wars tattoos on the week of the release to commemorate our love of the film. And I promised photos when it was all said and done!
(Tattoos done by Matt Madda.)
Gini and I decided to get New Jedi Order tattoos – the school that Luke founded in the old canon, which no longer technically exists, but we are Rebel through and through.  This is my second tattoo, but it’s my first real tattoo, in a sense – I cover up my tattoo of my goddaughter Rebecca with just a regular shirt, but this big blazing black logo is impossible to hide.
Family Star Wars tattooFamily Star Wars tattoo
Gini, alas, has to be a professional lawyer-type person, and so she could not get hers in the same place. So she got hers on her right thigh. But we are bonded by a tattoo.
Family Star Wars tattoo
Erin had the most work done – an eight-hour sitting, wherein she had a blaster tattooed on her hip with a banner of “Never tell me the odds.”
Family Star Wars tattoo
Amy, well, it was her first tattoo, and she went small but significant – a stylized X-wing flying into view over her ear.
Family Star Wars tattoo
How did we feel about this? Wonderful. We kept high-fiving each other all day.
And then we saw The Film. And later today, after I’ve seen it for the second time, I’ll post my very spoillerriffic thoughts on it in a protected area. I went in not knowing what happened. I think you should, too.
But the film itself doesn’t matter.  What matters is that we love the old films so much we wanted them on our body, and we wanted them together. And now we’ve got a lovely reminder of what surrounds us:
Love.
And big fucking nerdery.

Wanna Hear Me Talk About Polyamory For An Hour?

I recently appeared on the Loving Without Boundaries podcast to discuss the origins of my polyamory, and some of the challenges I face, and how I manage friendships and jealousies.  If you’ve not heard enough of my voice, well, it’s available for all to hear!
(And there’s some great back-and-forth with Kitty Chambliss, the interviewer, so it is fun!)

The Family Star Wars Tattoos: Three Out Of Four Down!

On Monday night, I went over to hold my daughter’s hand as she got a blaster with “Never Tell Me The Odds” tattooed on her right hip.
Despite being tattooed for eight hours, she didn’t really need me to hold her hand.  But she let me, because this?
This was our family bond.
Our family runs on Star Wars. Gini saw the movie the first week it was out; I saw it fifty-seven and a half times in the theater on its first run, because I commandeered every relative I had into taking me on multiple occasions. (Including, on one notable occasion, showing up an hour early to the film because my grandparents misread the movie time, going in to watch the Death Star trench run, and then watching it all again.)
When our eldest daughter Erin brought her boyfriend home for Thanksgiving, on the second year he admitted he hadn’t seen Star Wars.  This was, in fact, the big secret Erin had kept from us all this time.
“Well, we’re watching that,” we told him.
“Hey, I want to see it,” he said.  “Whenever you want!”
“No. We mean now.” And we delayed dessert until he saw Star Wars.  And I think he liked it, though four people pressuring him that ZOMGGREATESTMOVIEEVER may have altered his opinion.
Which might be funny if that was the first time we’d done that to one of our daughter’s partners.  We’d done that to Amy, too.
And when we got our gigantic big-screen television, and Erin came in to watch the premiere with us, of course it was Star Wars.  And I always worry that maybe somehow this was a thing we made our kids do – but Erin was the noisiest out of all of us, jumping up and down in the seat watching the Blu-Ray detail, trotting out the old trivia facts, talking about fine character details.
It was all cemented by all of us watching Clone Wars and Rebels together, whooping and cheering it up.
So on Monday, Erin got her tattoo, and yesterday, Gini and I both broke parts of our nerd virginity; Gini got her first tattoo – the New Jedi Order symbol on her right thigh – and I got my first tattoo that I utterly cannot hide, a matching NJO symbol on my right forearm.
On Thursday, Amy will get her tattoo – a stylized X-Wing – and our family Star Wars Tattoo Project will be fully operational.
And it’s been a helluva bond.  We’ve spent time laughing as a family as the ink goes in, knowing this is a permanent way of cementing our love.  Maybe the new movie sucks, maybe it’s good, we don’t know.  But these three movies are deep in our blood, and on Thursday they’ll be deep in all of our skin.
You don’t get photos yet.  Not until Amy’s done.  But Gini and I have matching marks on our body, and this is the sort of thing we’d think it was crazy getting matching tattoos sixteen weeks into a relationship, but sixteen years in it feels natural and good and somehow eternal.
I’ll tell you how it goes after the movie.  And tell you what I thought.  And I’ll show you how it all looks, but right now, I can tell you:
It’s fucking amazing.