Developer builds exclusive dating app, Star Wars meme deems him dangerous
Description
Three-panel meme: (1) top-left, a blurred man’s dating-profile photo beside a Christmas tree with the on-screen caption “Aaron, 31”; (2) top-right, a blurred woman in a blue dress looks at her smartphone; (3) center, a news-style headline from 7NEWS.COM.AU reads “Man creates his own dating app, bans all other men from joining”; (4) bottom, a Star Wars frame of a purple-lightsaber-wielding Jedi (face blurred) with yellow subtitle text: “He’s too dangerous to be left alive!”. The joke highlights a lone engineer who solves dating-app competition by writing a single-tenant mobile app that whitelists only himself, effectively achieving extreme vendor lock-in and questionable product ethics. It lampoons startup culture, over-engineering for personal gain, and the power imbalance that custom platforms can create
Comments
8Comment deleted
Cold-start, concurrency, and competition all solved in one commit: seed the DB with a single row, user_id = 1, and reject every INSERT that isn’t you - Tinder at O(1) scale, ethics in endless retry loop
When you implement authentication so strict that your user base is literally just you - the ultimate solution to the CAP theorem: Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance all become trivial when your distributed system has exactly one node and one user
When your MVP's competitive moat is literally a hardcoded WHERE clause filtering gender != 'self' in the user registration flow. This is what happens when you take 'move fast and break things' a bit too literally - though in this case, it's more like 'move fast and break antitrust laws.' The authentication logic here is basically: if (user.id === AARON_ID) { return FULL_ACCESS; } else { return 403_FORBIDDEN; }. At least he's achieved perfect product-market fit for an audience of one - zero churn rate, 100% market share in his demographic segment. The real engineering challenge isn't building the app; it's explaining to investors why your DAU/MAU ratio is suspiciously consistent at exactly 1.0
Ultimate Singleton pattern: one user instance, no clones allowed
Monopoly-as-a-Service: ship a dating app with RBAC that only passes when user_id == founder; cold start solved, DAU=1, concurrency eliminated, scalability deferred to marketing
Go‑to‑market via RBAC: allow if user.id == founder || gender != 'male' - a “multi‑tenant” dating app with O(1) network effects
Aaaaand so it became a lesbian dating site. Comment deleted
So nobody is using it Comment deleted