Mutual

@bryantpeng Personally I don't agree with you on all your points here. 1. I don't necessarily think this message looks creepy. If I haven't heard about the app, I'd be inclined to check it out at the link provided and then find out it's legit. 2. I don't quite understand what you mean. 3. Sometimes its hard asking out people you know, scared of possibly ruining the friendship - it's actually harder than asking someone you don't know. But for a lot of people even asking people you don't know is really hard, which is the reason for why casual dating apps exist and are really popular. Just my thoughts :)

@bryantpeng As far as the "why not just ask" aspect, a lot of people are too shy, like not Japanese Hikkimori SHY, but shy enough that just asking a friend out on a date it a challenge. So I can see the use here. But the problem is that it needs to be done in a way that doesn't creep people out. I think maybe hiding this into a game-ified poll of some sort might work better since it gives some value to the other person. BUT, if done right there is definitely an audience out there who would love it.

@alekplay Yeah, it's hard. That's life though. I'm a CS major and when I saw this I thought, "This is such a CS thing to do", i.e. trying to subsidize social skills with technology. But the reality is that some things actually can't be solved through apps. In my mind, this is in the same ballpark as the middle school prance where you like someone & want to find out if they like you back so you do 1 of the following: - Ask X's friends if s/he likes you back. - Ask your friends to ask X if s/he likes you back. - Ask your friends to ask X's friends if s/he likes you back. The difference is that we're not in middle school anymore. Also - with dating apps, you have to create an account in order to receive creepy messages. Here, it can happen to anyone. I get that it's hard to ask out a friend; I think we've all been there. But the scenario where you tick X's box, X gets a creepy text message saying "Someone likes you", X checks out the link, X downloads the app, X ticks your box, and you & X live happily ever after is way too contrived for me to believe that it will ever happen. You don't have to agree, but ask a few of your girl friends what they think of the intro text and get back to me.

@bryantpeng Hi Bryant, thanks for the feedback. I'm actually pretty impressed by how thorough your analysis is. It's helpful to see it from a different perspective.