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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

When we launched FindDate (https://finddate.co) - a chat app network dating platform, I chose to keep it interracial by default; even though geo fencing is just a click away. Some felt it might not work.

I firmly believe that,

We cannot address racism, by hiding races. We need to give a chance to the people to mingle with people of different races to show that they are equal.

We cannot address body shaming, by hiding people of different body sizes.

This was our base principle in FindDate and from the feedback we're receiving; it looks like people are loving it.

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Devil's advocate here, but how are skin color and body size any different from eye color or height preference?

The only way to do it truly fairly is to disallow any physical characteristics. By only blocking some you just change the criteria/groups who are discriminated against. But who would use a dating site where you have no idea what the other person looks like?

Better to use statistics to level the playing field by, for example, showing people with less % likes more often. This is pretty much how affirmative action works. Give people biased against by other humans more opportunity to make up for it. Lot easier than trying to fix the bias in the humans.

If you think you can make humans ignore their sexual preferences by hiding certain identifiers you're a lot more optimistic about humanity than I am. I expect the most popular openers on the site to be "r u fat?" for men and "r u at least 5' 10"?" for women. Isn't it just better if those people never talk to each other in the first place at that point?

Good question. Scientifically speaking, yes the same melanin pigment which causes skin coloration does cause the skin colouration in eye; but my context is more on social aspect of it.

People with particular eye colour aren't oppressed as much as people of particular skin color. By grouping users by location often denies them a chance to see and mingle with people of other races and that's what we would like to avoid with FindDate.

Different racial and cultural groups live in different places because people self-select for it. If you're going to build something that breaks down racial barriers you'll need to actively counter against existing bias IMO.

Less politically charged example with food.... If your service simply shows all the different kinds of food available, users will generally stick with whats familiar. If the algorithm is designed to show them mostly food they've never tried before you can counter that bias and increase the likelihood the user will try new foods.

With the context of your example,

In our case we show all kinds of food by default. The user has the choice of choosing familiar food types. If it's available it will be shown first, if not it again goes back to default mode. User preference still get's priority, but given a chance to try something new; we don't see much hesitation.

> We cannot address body shaming, by hiding people of different body sizes.

I just want to make sure that I understand you. You're saying that in your dating app, you prevent people from searching/filtering based on body size and that the reason you designed your app this way was to "address body shaming"

No, sorry. You have misunderstood. We don't prevent or contain anything. We give the option to see people not confined by locality and other parameters. It's upto the user to choose what they want.

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