Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since at least 2013, Defendant has maintained the following five deceptive or unfair practices to induce consumers to subscribe to Match.com and to keep them subscribed.
First, until mid-2018, Defendant sent consumers misleading advertisements that tout communications from persons Defendant identified as potentially fraudulent users of Match.com and led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them.
Second, until mid-2018, Defendant exposed consumers to the risk of fraud by providing recent subscribers access to communications that Defendant knew were likely to have been sent by persons engaging in fraud.
Third, until mid-2019, Defendant guaranteed certain consumers a free six-month subscription renewal if they fail to “meet someone special” but failed to disclose the requirements of its “guarantee” adequately.
Fourth, Defendant has misled consumers with a confusing and cumbersome cancellation process that causes consumers to believe they have canceled their subscriptions when they have not.
Fifth, until mid-2019, when consumers disputed charges relating to any of these practices and lose the dispute, Defendant denied consumers access to paid-for services. [1]
[1]https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_com...
reminded about that Ashley Madison actual ratio in their database of something like 3 real girls to ten of millions of men, with the employees&bots producing all those "communications"
"Please be assured, Match.com does not send members misleading notifications, e-mails or winks professing romantic interest. We have too much respect for our members to ever compromise their trust. If you have received communications from members with profiles that are not immediately available, the member may have temporarily hidden their profile."
That is impressively scummy.
It's also indistinguishable from every other company doing business.
This aligns our financial incentives with our user's incentives to have amazing experiences with someone they like. We also have a product for couples, so we won't lose 100% of our users.
More info if you're interested: https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin...
First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.
The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.
Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone.
The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed.
I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.
It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.
In any case, any site where the profile focuses primarily on your photo is probably going to see this going both ways: men going for the hottest women and women going for the hottest men.
If you focus more on people's interests, I'd expect you're going to see a very different pattern.
edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
One hypothesis is that it depends on the service you use. E.g., Tinder vs Okupid, where Tinder reinforces decision based on looks while Okupid encourages much more detailed profiles.
The reverse then meant that the bottom 78% of men had to compete for the attention of the bottom 22% of women. They retracted that study after a while, but other dating sites roughly get the same percentages eventually.
There is no way to achieve monogamous one-to-one pairing for everyone in place that is 80% male. Of course only minority of men succeeds. And while here it is not exactly 1-to-1, it is not actually all that much far off.
Tinder disrupted the online dating scene by introducing the feature that you can only write someone after you've liked their profile, AND they've liked yours.
That makes a huge difference, and solves the spam problem.
I got back on Tinder about 6 months ago and bought a premium account after they kept waving the number of potential matches I had, only to discover that the vast majority of them (roughly 18 in 20) were 2,000+ miles away from me and looked like spam.
Ban anyone who swipes right on it.
Or limit the amount of right swipes allowed per day.
It's been a while since I've used Tinder, but they were rate-limiting swipes - unless you paid up for premium features.
Photos with spammy gmail addresses and URLs written in them has been on the rise recently too.
There are definitely fewer people than e.g. Tinder, but they tend to be a lot more real vs spammers / scammers / engineered profiles designed to keep you in.
Most Tinder matches were bots, most OkC matches were actual people. Of course this is with a sample size of 1, in Germany. Your mileage may vary.
Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.
Maybe it is a bit ambiguous, although from the context it should be reasonably clear that I was with my (now-ex) girlfriend for that period of time, and not with OkC itself :)
I don't think what you said is technically correct. "With whom I was" calls for something (a verb or phrase) to be tacked onto the end, but it would still be awkward. For example, "with whom I was dating for three years."
Actually, I'm pretty certain you're supposed to use "whom" there, not "who".
But dating sites that create fake profiles and use all these dark patterns to try to con you into joining should simply be avoided like the plague. Nothing good can come out of those, and there's no point in rewarding bad actors with your money.
Articles exposing these bad dating sites serve a very important purpose here.
This doesn't solve the gender inbalance though. This problem is much more difficult to solve, and requires further homogenization (?) of the male and female gender role.
This should be one of the more important challenges of our time. Lonelyness and sexual frustration have only negative impacts and are two accelerators for radicalization - which is a pressing concern in developed countries.
I met my wife on a dating site 13 years ago (a small, cheap one focused specifically on Christians), and although I probably had a profile with a whole supposedly-witty story about myself, the thing I remember is the photo; I used a photo from a recent vacation to Africa, with me selfie-style in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. Her first message to me included some reference to Ouagadougou, and that got the ball rolling. (Her photo was her on a sailing boat; also effective.)
Don't use a photo where you look average, use a photo where you do something interesting. That says more about you than a chiseled jaw line.
Women aren't as looks-focused as a lot of frustrated men present them. Average is just fine, as long as your picture suggests somebody that they can engage with. "Below average" can also go a long way if you've chosen a picture that makes you look like what she wants, which might be "fun" or "family" or "kind". The men who think it's all about their looks are most likely the ones who only judge women by theirs. And while some women do that, the vast majority don't.
Edit: essentially I don't understand how men are getting hurt by Bumble, I know a lot of people that prefer it to something like Tinder so maybe that skews my perspective.
However when observing the real world, it is clear that people are not treated equally based on gender (i.e. Bumble, restrooms, changing rooms, dating). And I am fine with that to a certain extent which is another rabbit hole/discussion. What I find interesting, is that the generation using Bumble tend to be more progressive and aligned with the "all people are equal regardless of gender" ideology yet this is not consistent with how the Bumble app works. This is where I find inconsistency in terms of thinking but I recognize that I'm making wide generalizations which is not ideal.
Edit: you are talking about a whole generation but the people who are vocal about things like Bumble are a very very small minority and not really indicative of the movement at large in my experience.
I find it an interesting thought exercise to understand why society apply rules differently in certain situations. Context certainly plays an important role here and I feel like you made a good point around harm.
EDIT I feel like sometimes this is a sensitive topic to discuss broadly within Western society. From my end, I want to break things down to first principals and have a frank discussion. However I feel like certain elements within society would shoot down these kind of discussions since it threatens their ideology which is akin to a religion which cannot be questioned. I feel like I am going to get downvoted for saying this and I'm already negative on my karma for my other comments today...
The fact that you thought that I said Bumble was harming men and the way you identified my thoughts as a 'philosophy' as opposed to an observation to me speaks directly to point I was making in my previous post albeit you come across as someone who listens and is reasonable.
Society is fully willing to dispose of the scripts if you dispose of the gender identity. Just call yourself nonbinary and cultivate an androgynous appearance, and most of (the more cosmopolitan parts of) Western society—including the dating parts!—will literally stop caring about your gender.
(Come to think, I’ve never seen a 100% enby dating app. You could make one where—like France with religion—having a legible gender-presentation would be against the rules!)
Why is disposing of said "scripts" a good thing, especially to the extent that they are at least in part shaped by biological pre-dispositions?
> cultivate an androgynous appearance, and most of... Wester society... will literally stop caring about your gender
First, why would I need or want to "cultivate" an androgynous appearance? I'm not necessarily that handsome, but I am very distinguishably masculine. Why would I need or want to obscure natural characteristics? You are also greatly over-estimating the number of people, even in "cosmopolitan" parts of society, which would ignore gender. The population of transsexuals, homosexuals, etc. is still very small in relation to the broader population, and most people have definite ideas of who they are romantically interested in. They will not simply "stop caring".
> like france with religion
France does not allow religion on dating apps? That seems like a very silly rule, as it is an excellent predictor of shared values.
I was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_law_on_secularity_and_c... (though I didn't realize until looking it up just now that it was only "in schools"; I was under the impression that it was in all public spaces.)
Gender-equality has been coming into religion (i.e. women bishops in the Church of England) and dating (i.e. splitting checks). Given the way things are trending, it feels like this will continue to the point that it will impact things such as ballroom dancing and weddings.
But... Women collectively stopped short of picking up an equal responsibility for initiating romantic or casual interest. As a guy, you are absolutely expected to make the first moves. That doesn't sound very fair to me.
(Don't say it's because women aren't as interested as men. We're all pretty horny on average, and we all want to make connections. Equality, remember?)
However...imagine an app where only men could contact women. I feel like certain groups would be outraged....what do you think?
So it doesn't confirm the sexism, it addresses and counters it.
If at some point in the future, it becomes expected that men take a passive role while women always take initiative, then your imagined app would be better because it would subvert that sexist expectation. It's all about context.
Ideally of course we should end up somewhere in the middle, where men and women are equal partners in the dating arena.
Though I would say, since a lot of the reason women don’t seem to hit on men comes down to inculcated social anxiety from being raised to view strangers as unpredictable scary people who can only mean harm (a view which sticks around even in adulthood, long after it’s “helpful”; a view that boys seem to get along just fine never being burdened with), maybe the real responsibility here is on parents to... not do that. If that’s the case, I don’t know what to suggest for the generations of women that exist right now and have already been screwed up by being raised this way. (What do you do for the adults who were victims of foot-binding as children? Their feet just are that way now. And these women’s brains just are this way now, too.)
>Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Remind yourself the demographics who overwhelmingly commit violent crimes, especially domestic abuse, when considering relationship dynamics. Eliminating violent domestic abuse by men would help bring equity this situation.
If fear of romantic socializing were something correctly calibrated by knowledge of violent tendencies of your potential partners, then gay men would be just as afraid of asking other men out as women are—because, of course, there's the same probability of a male stranger to turn out to be a homicidal maniac, whether you're a man or a woman asking out that male stranger.
But gay men are not afraid of approaching other men—in fact, they approach one-another quite successfully, usually very quickly after first deciding they're attracted to someone. And gay men aren't all suddenly dying in ditches from all the homicidal maniacs they run into.
Meanwhile, lesbian women are just as socially-anxious about approaching other women, as straight women are about approaching men. One of the "universal experiences" of lesbian culture is feeling mutual attraction with someone, but neither of you working up the nerve to ask the other out, sometimes for years.
Seems less like this is any rational reaction to any properties of the romantic target, and more just a property of the subject.
That assumption might be correct for some men, but certainly not for all, and I would expect not even for most.
In any case, requiring men to swipe right first doesn't hurt the process in any way. And requiring both sides to agree to contact makes a lot of sense.
(But, to be clear, this assumption isn’t that men are okay with dating any woman interested in them; allowing-to-message doesn’t imply interest. The real assumption here is that, while the average woman sees a spammed message of interest as an annoying bit of desperation, the average man will see that same message as an esteem-boost (“hey, someone actually contacted me on this website!”) even if they are just as unlikely to engage with it. In other words, the assumption is that men are more okay with receiving spam from women, than women are okay with receiving spam from men; and so that a site that favours men receiving spam from women will have less churn than a website that favours women receiving spam.)
> requiring men to swipe right first doesn’t hurt the process in any way
I see you’ve never actually tried to enact a “swipe right 100% of the time” policy: it’s tiring, and also, apps have daily limits on how many likes you can give, precisely because this forces this rote “engagement” with the app to turn into a daily return to the app to continue swiping.
There are actually other apps, built to directly submit batched “like” API calls to these app’s backends, in order to avoid doing what is basically “work” every day (just in order to allow people who have already expressed interest in you to send an initial message to you!) And these services do everything they can to kill these auto-like apps, because they want to make men go through this pointless work, because it “fosters engagement” (i.e. makes their DAUs look better, and increases the chances someone will get fed up with running out of likes—because it turned out nobody in this batch had already seen+swiped right on them—and so pay for Gold to be able to continue swiping right.)
I guess, if you’re speaking in a game-theoretic sense, then yes, the same equilibrium state is achieved either way, because men are willing to go through a lot of pointless “work” to meet women. (You could probably build a Tinder-like app where men have to solve a CAPTCHA every time they swipe right, and use this to power a botnet.) But in an economic sense, you’re introducing a lot of inefficiency; these men could be doing other stuff with their time. (And women would prefer they do; what’s less interesting than a guy who spends all his time trying to hook up?)
> Requiring both sides to agree to contact makes a lot of sense.
No, allowing either side a choice to first have to verify the other side before they can make contact, makes a lot of sense. Requiring it is just a dark pattern. Even Facebook has the option to allow others to “reach out to you” with a message when you haven’t added them yet. It’s an option; you can disable it; but it’s on by default, and not that many people disable it.
Isn’t it weird that the current popular model for online dating is more paternalistic (“you can’t have a default-allow policy even if you want it”) than our current model for regular social networking?
That may be a good thing. Different people prefer different ways of dating, so expecting one way to suit everybody may be unreasonable.
> "The real assumption here is that, while the average woman sees a spammed message of interest as an annoying bit of desperation, the average man will see that same message as an esteem-boost (“hey, someone actually contacted me on this website!”) even if they are just as unlikely to engage with it. In other words, the assumption is that men are more okay with receiving spam from women, than women are okay with receiving spam from men; and so that a site that favours men receiving spam from women will have less churn than a website that favours women receiving spam."
I would expect that's strongly influenced by how new that spam is to you. For plenty of women, the first time a man expresses interest may also be a self-esteem boost. It's just that after 50 times, it gets a bit tired. A system that turns this around so men get all the spam may be interesting and new to men, but I would expect that when they get that kind of spam as much as women do on other systems, many men may also get tired of it eventually.
> "No, allowing either side a choice to first have to verify the other side before they can make contact, makes a lot of sense."
I agree that making this configurable probably makes more sense than enforcing one specific type of behaviour. It's certainly something I'd generally prefer.
On the other hand, men who just want to contact everybody who expresses an interest in them and only start considering whether they are actually interested in the other party after that contact has been established, may still end up wasting a lot of people's time. So in that sense I can still understand if a site doesn't allow it. Which dating site you choose to use will always be a user option.
The reason why women tolerate the current system is that it is less work. You just apply a filter to the incoming requests.
It's much easier than having to produce requests.
That's why women's profiles say "don't just say 'hey'" and they get to respond with...
Hey.
Yeah, I got a few "hey"s, which just put the ball back in my court, and I'd decide whether I wanted to put for the effort of opening the conversation. It's actually a really good skill for showing that you're interested in her, by picking up on some detail of her profile. It shows that you're perceptive and have some common interest. And conversely, if she can't do better than "hey", that tells me something about her.
I like it better than the assumption that I was required to do it, as on most other dating sites/apps. That assumption is sexist, though less annoying than being bombarded with dick pics and "DTF?" openers as so many women are. Dating sites are hard for them, too.
> Hey!
> djdjrntbdjc
> So where are you from?
> Austin, Texa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
> Uh... the capital of Texarcana
I like the idea.
A site where women message first means their first message is a limp cold “Hey”, after which you are expected to craft some sort of interesting and thoughtful message for them to grace you with their response, otherwise they’ll just move on to one of the other hundred men available.
Online dating cannot work without the asymmetry in the dating game being resolved.
Bumble is also (or was) loaded with fake profiles too. I had a friend see my own profile on there, with a city that I wasn't in (but had been) and there's no indication that I wasn't an active user - I had deleted the Bumble app 6 months before. I did finally go and delete the whole account after their anti-gun stance.
All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.
When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator.
So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.
It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway.
This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.
That may have an effect, but it is also that women tend to go for the "top" guys while men in general have an more even spread on what they like. This is a more likely scenario.
If you are male and not an alpha male that is very good looking and / or successful, it is unlikely that you will have a good experience on dating apps.
This has been found again and again:
OkCupid (which later deleted the post because the truth is controversial, and they are progressive): http://archive.is/pLAWq
Tinder Study: https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png
(There are many more, just search for it)
- Women and men join.
- Women are immediately dogpiled by creeps, catfished, dick-picked, called names and given death threats for saying no.
- Women turn right the fuck around and leave.
- 80% ratio if you're lucky (and 100% plus bots, employees, and ghost accounts if you aren't).
EDIT: couldn't find original blog post but this article seems to have some of the same math/details in less entertaining form https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-o...
When match.com bought them a number of posts about the inner workings, along with any posts that were critical of paid dating sites, were quickly taken down, and they took some effort to chase down exact copies hosted elsewhere and demand they be taken down too.
OKC used to actually be a nice place to meet people (I'm still in contact with a number of friends I met on there) but it's turned into a cesspit. Off topic, but if anyone can suggest a non-awful replacement I'd be all ears. Ideally one where I can talk to people rather than having to make a yes/no decision based entirely on 3 photos.
I know one French dating website, AdopteUnMec, where it's free for women and paying for men, the owner are claiming the user split is 50-50 between men and women. But I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.
At my small office of 10 people, where's 2 people that found matches on e-harmony, resulting in marriage.
"Hey, we know you're both single, or at least looking for other partners. You're literally the only two people on earth that share this fascination, everyone else thinks it's weird and creepy. You should chat. Based on the personality profiles we've created for you both based on your search history, we think you'd make an amazing couple."
That could totally disrupt dating, it would be organic in a way that could actually work for relationship longevity and it would be based on things people are actually interested in rather than what they think they should present as being interested in to signal mates. It has the potential to be far more real than dating sites.
This is why I think this clustering based on interests was always bullshit on dating sites. And this is why people use Tinder now.
Most dating apps want you to be addicted (single and swiping) to their screens so that they can keep earning billions of dollars from subscriptions, power-ups, and ads. Even if you aren't paying, they want you addicted to their platform for their paying members. There is a serious conflict of interest.
We are different. We understand users want to find someone, so they get on with their lives-- to have amazing life experiences with someone they like. We give our users exactly that and our main revenue stream is tied to that. Just like Uber and Lyft sell rides because customers want rides-- we sell adventure dates because our users want breathtaking dating experiences.
We also hate screen addiction. We want to be in the background, so people can focus on living in the moment. And every day, we'll sprinkle their lives with like-minded, kind people and travel opportunities.
Would love your feedback on it. Here's more info I wrote about our business model:
https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin...
Also I am happy to share my user data with the community too.
Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.
Also there's a difference between specialist consultancies and contract labour hire. I'd say most government contractors fall into the latter camp.
Only if people never recommend driving instructors to friends and family. If they do, a driving instructor who consistently has people passing their test quickly is much more likely to make more money long term
https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100515/https://static.iz...
My new hypothesis is that Match acquired OKC just to get Rudder to STFU.
One trick I think that was missed though? :
> eHarmony seems to do quite a bit better than Match, claiming in their ads to marry off 236 people a day
That doesn't mean those people marry people they meet through eHarmony, nor that they people used eHarmony at the time they found their maate etc?
Seems like a good potential revenue source, although it might require a little bit too much honesty for their taste.
Robbery? People just want to enrich themselves. Rape? People just want to pleasure themselves. The nerve of society to criminalize these behaviors, we should all get the fuck off our collective high horses.
As far as I know, vetting potential mates’ physical characteristics has happened for thousands of years, whenever families/friends/coworkers propose a match.
I might even think this is a superior system as people are bad at perceiving their own price in the mating market, and an outside appraisal is frequently more accurate.
If someone asked me if I want to date an overweight woman. I'd say no. But if I met a great person, and she happened to be overweight, it wouldn't really matter to me that much. So, within limits, I could accept being 'lied to' on a dating website.
https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...
You see profiles with only pictures that clearly were taken 5-10 years ago, or only picture of the face with a filter so heavy they are barely recognizable. It is certainly short sighted because you can only hide behind a carefully curated profile for so long. If I was looking for a dating service I would certainly pay for one with just verified, unedited photos. At some point this could get creepy but other stats like height, age, and weight could be optionally verifiable and public.
If this could save me from even one awkward date a year with someone I don't find even remotely physically compatible it would easily be worth it.
Again my experience is long ago but I would occasionally be matched with someone I knew IRL and women shaving 5-10 years (e.g. moving into a lower age bracket) was very common.
What's funny is I didn't make any value judgements when I proposed a verified physical characteristics site. I never said that it's better to like fat or thin, or tall or short, or blonde or redhead, or bald or hairy, black or white. There's someone for everyone and that's great!
But it's not OK to lie about it, and hope the other person will overlook the fact that you are a liar or that you'll change your mind "once you get to know him/her"
I am happily married now (met my wife through a mutual friend, the old fashioned way) so my experience of online dating may be obsolete but women on dating sites tend to be very specific about their partner’s height. And income, and what car he drives and a big shopping list of mainly physical and materialistic traits. If you could verify all of that you might be onto a viable business.
How you attract the men to your platform is up to you...
but its so bad now because women are competing for the top 5% of men who are like models and everyone else gets no response
My understanding is that women are more picky than men about who they find attractive, but less picky about who they will message and respond to.
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
I have seen that @medium link before; this is an informal survey done by a single person so there’s probably a lot of methodological issues with the survey. The third link is just a screenshot from that same article, so it is just as dubious.
The second link is quoting the actual article out of context.
Here is the entire article: https://archive.is/yse2
To wit: “Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women [...] women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable.”
Point being, it’s men who only want the most attractive girls, and it’s women who are more willing to give a homely guy a chance.
okcupid was from 2009, its way different now after ten years. women control the scene and they only go for the top. thats what the tweets i linked from 2019 show
Women. Period. If you have women, then men will come. And they'll jump through absolutely every hoop and hurdle to do so.
Now, I'm not sure if these are of any worth (I never got anything useful out of LinkedIn... either people trying to sell me something, or colleagues I know already).
I've heard of people (of gold digger kind) using LinkedIn as a dating site.
I think it is just one exhibit of the fatal flaw of the idea that shareholder value maximization is the correct objective of a corporation. The very original raison d'etre of limited libility was to enhance wellbeing of public, not shareholders. And for some reason that has been forgotten.
(No, I have no good solutions for proper corporate governance, but I still think acknowledging we have a problem is the first step.)
While spam prevention is technically not a "solved" problem, simple and clever techniques in addition to shadow-banning go a long way. Once an account has sufficient activity, which for spammers takes anywhere from 30s - 4hr, even modest systems can confidently identify the vast majority.
A company like Match that has conglomerated other upstarts in the space surely has spammer identification systems far in excess of smaller apps. Yet somehow those competing apps often cite account authenticity as an advantage over Match. The Ashley Madison scandal exposed this business tactic. Match clearly followed suit and has been just-subtle-enough to evade legal action until now.
But come on, if you are a large business then you should know what is going on in your company.
Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1 gal so building a dating platform is hard.
First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for months. God knows how many companies now have my data.
Second, they employ dark patterns:
1) Easy account deletion. Why does that matter? Because they own nearly all dating sites. Including: "BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful, FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge" So, they don't care if they lose a user as long as they can shuffle them around.
2) They will keep a tab of the number of users who have like you. Then eventually that user will shown to you and you will swipe left or right. In that case the tab count will decrease. This is a complete scam. They would withhold these users to push to a pay subscription. Example: https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg . Moreover, most of these likes a bots and fake profiles.
3) Fake notifications: https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg
4) Shadows-bans: I saw that my profile was getting no matches. So I made a new profile, ban! a match within minutes. Essentially they shadow ban users as a form of Neg.
This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other place I've moderated before.
On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.
You routinely shadowban people you disagree with. Or post-limit them. You don't get to act innocent here when I guarantee you're just as guilty of these dark patterns as every other site.
We don't ban people we disagree with. If we did, hardly anyone would be left unbanned.
As for shadowbanning, the practice is as I described it: if the account is established, we tell people we're banning them and why (your account was an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15615092). If an account is new, different rules apply: we (meaning some combo of software and moderators) have to make a guess about whether the account is legit or not. If the guess is that they're spamming or trolling, we shadowban the account. We guess wrong sometimes, but we do what we can to correct those cases. And we're always happy to unban anyone who gives us reason to believe that they'll follow the site guidelines in the future.
Rate limiting is a separate issue. If an account posts too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or gets involved in flamewars, we rate limit how much they can post in the future. It's annoying and crude, but it's one of the few software tools we have to prevent comment quality from degenerating too quickly. Again, people are welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we take the rate limit off if they commit to not repeating that behavior. It's not hard to get an account unbanned or unpenalized if you really want to use HN as intended.
For the most part, I DO use HN as intended, IN SPITE of your shadowbanning. You just refuse to read my posting history to see that much.
This clearly shows I have more integrity than you, as you won't dare unhide any of my decent comments, instead preferring to make yourself look the victim by only unbanning my comments which you can unban to make me look bad. You're the real issue here, not me.
Glad to see the FTC curbstomping it
Lots of people are told they have no problem with their profile and that they should just recreate their account to get around their shadow ban.
The house of cards that Tinder built is falling down
Current time to shadowban seems to be around 3 months
They changed it so swiping left on someone who liked you no longer decreases the like counter
Also before that if you were out traveling the likes you got while on the road will not show up in your stack when you leave the area where you got them
Also if you swipe left on someone and you’re in their stack and they swipe right on you, they’ll show up in the count
The rest is still super scummy, but the “rules” of the like counter are at least somewhat logical
Do you happen to know if that was a valid strategy, and if it still is?
I always wondered if it was/is actually possible to completely reset your data, considering they have pretty strong links to you like payment information.
I imagine you risk being shadowbanned if you do it too often, but it’s pretty natural to do it once every couple of months
This sounds like something the CCPA was trying to change.
On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we didn't create the fake users.
These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk is far worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/
eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit.
Someone has already linked to the OKCupid blog post which explained pretty well why you should not pay for a dating site. Then they were bought out by Match (how did the anti-trust people let Match accumulate so many sites?), and any principles they had went down the drain.
Basically, the market is ripe for a respectful dating site. But OKCupid started this way; and in the end they sold out. What makes you think you won't sell out when the money is right?
Unfortunately, there is a mathematical theorem (greater idiot theorem) that makes it technically impossible to generate a new random string that becomes an inbox that goes to your inbox.
How do I know that it's technically impossible?
Because otherwise Gmail would have done it already, since this takes 20 minutes and fixes a glaring security issue that gives spammers access to your email that you didn't grant.
I can't have an IQ 50 points higher than all Gmail engineers, so it must stand to reason that I'm the greater idiot. Hence there must be something preventing this obvious solution. QED.
so for sure it isn't possible for some reason, even if someone else is doing it.
what other explanation can there be? why would they just have a glaring security hole like that, allowing anyone you try to give a trackable email to with + to just remove it with a regex? It doesn't make sense. there must be some reason it can't work.
The + need not have been intended as a spam filter; I use it for bona fide filtering of separate clients’ projects.
So, instead of doing johndoe+hn@example.com, I can do hn@example.com.
Fastmail has an interesting variation of this that supports multiple users on the same domain: hn@johndoe.example.com. My wife and I both use that feature heavily on our domain.
Most of the time this is not a problem because you can create the account again with the correct email, but I have lost a few good usernames in some popular websites because I pulled this trick on them, Gravatar is one of these websites and the simplest one to explain.
I wanted a specific username that was available; I signed up with an email that looks like username+gravatar@gmail.com and the operation went through, then when I tried to log in, the website kept saying that the email was incorrect. I tried to reset the account using the username instead, which would force them to send a reset link to the email associated to this account, but the emails never arrive. I gave up that and other good usernames in many websites because of the inappropriate handling of email addresses by some popular web libraries.
Also, the same way you learnt this “trick” other programmers discovered it too and implemented a stripping algorithm to remove the unique ID during the registration process, so it is not very useful nowadays unless the website is very obscure and their developers either are rookies or do not have time to prevent this.
Reputable websites don't have an incentive to strip out the ID. It is only websites like "sold out" dating websites or otherwise nefarious websites that have that incentive in the first place. So, name+id@domain.com is still useful for filtering and indexing, and in fact if a website does strip out the ID you should ask yourself why would they need to do that.
At first I believed it was some scam but it soon got clear that my account was accidentally siphoning mail from someone using this supposedly clever scheme...
It's more effective to have an entire domain at your disposal and just invent $vendor-specific-thing@mydomain.com whenever an email address is needed. On the server end all you need is a catchall to handle it, and you can blackhole whatever addresses become spam magnets (while also knowing which vendor's responsible).
This rfc merely acknowledges that some systems do this. It doesn't say the must or even should.
I wrote about this here: https://idbloc.co/blog/background/2019/04/14/keep-your-addre... and it’s one of the main reasons https://idbloc.co exists
I used to use unique email address per site too, and at least one was clearly hacked rather than sold.
I remember when PoF was run out of some guy's basement. He was the only one (well, aside from a part-time systems support guy) running it, and he was banking $1M/month (he posted a photo of his check once) from ads.
My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird.
So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of personal questions where they ask you to write heartfelt essays about various things.
At the beginning they asked my marital status and went on from there through the whole questionnaire. After I entered all of my information and wrote my personal essays, they got to the last page and said:
"Sorry! We don't serve your kind. You are separated! Come back when your divorce is final."
Those weren't the exact words, but that was the message.
Now if a dating site wants to serve only a certain market, and if they don't want to serve people who are separated but not yet fully divorced, I totally respect that! But they need to say it up front after asking your marital status.
Instead, they led me through the entire questionnaire, asking all sorts of personal questions, without even a hint that the very first question about my marital status was going to disqualify me.
And then they offered no way for me to recover any of the information I had just entered into their site: all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone.
No online service of any type, dating or whatever, should ever do this to anyone.
Luckily, I'd had the sense to copy and paste all my little essays into a text file and not trust them to give them back to me. That just seemed like common sense. But in the case of eHarmony, it was necessary!
What's worse is that they probably saved it and profited from that data.
If they had only been honest and up front about it, and as soon as I said I was "separated" they said "sorry, we're not the dating service for you", it would have been fine! I would have respected that and moved on.
But when they actively lied to me by leading me through the entire onboarding process - when they knew from the beginning that they would reject me - that was beyond the pale.
But I suspect incompetence rather than malice. They simply didn't care enough - or weren't self-aware enough - to do a basic sanity check on status before onboarding. Or perhaps decided to add the check later and didn't have the spare braincells required to rearrange the onboarding sequence.
And point well taken about suspecting incompetence rather than malice. Or not even incompetence. I can easily imagine some poor overworked web developer (maybe someone like me!) trying to meet their deadlines and business requirements and not even realizing that the "funnel" should have had a filter at the very top instead of waiting until the end to note the error.
This is why I try to put myself in the shoes of whoever is using my app and hopefully look at it from their perspective. I try not to just to ask myself if the interaction I'm building meets the technical requirements, but how will the person feel who is using my app?
It doesn't sound like an "active lie," but more like a badly designed on-boarding form (a.k.a. a potentially innocent mistake). They should have presented the dealbreaker questions first, but they didn't.
We both quit EH. Many months later, I found them still using her (quite attractive) photo in their advertising.
Seems like it's a problem that can't really be solved by a profit seeking company, and has to be left to a non-profit foundation or something like that.
Image hosting has a similar problem. Imgur used to be the "good" image hoster, but they have been slipping immensly. In the case of something like image hosting I could see publicly funded infrastructure solving the problem. Not sure how comfortable I'd be with this in the case of dating.
I contend that no such thing can possibly exist. The reality of online dating is that it is garbage, and generally the only way to sell people garbage is to lie to them and convince them it isn't garbage. Dating is a gigantic pain in the real world for a lot of reasons that just can't be fixed by a fucking website.
This isn't just a trick, it's outright fraud. They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved.
Think about how vulnerable people become when they're searching for love. And then this corporate giant comes in with an army of psychologists, A/B tests, and analysts to figure out how to best extract their pound of flesh and offer nothing in return.
Forgive me for saying this, but fuck Match.com. The FTC should evaporate half their liquid assets / market cap in fines.
Tinder even introduced paid “boosts” (pay to be shown to users who otherwise might never see you), which is identical to a slot machine.
Maybe you get a match during your boost. A random reward! And only Tinder knows whether your boost caused it or not.
There's very unilateral information in every transaction with dating apps, and that's the problem.
The fake accounts were rather obvious, extremely attractive women that would message, or send a like without having looked at profile. Many of the fake accounts were obviously not suitable matches. For example, the profile (if filled out) is seeking someone in country X, but they've contacted my in country Y.
I also noted some accounts would initiate contact and then account would disappear. I am not sure, but I suspect the host website is taking some efforts to combat problems.
I'm delighted the FTC is taking action, but I think the people that fall for these scams will always fall for the scams. It's hard to protect the vulnerable.
Lastly, if anyone is looking at online dating. Do your research, there is plenty of available information that explain the majority of the scams and detail what to look out for.
However, if you've ever used any of these sites with a profile in a sparsely populated rural zip code, it's a pretty grim situation and I can see how fake profiles could arguably make people feel better than having absolutely nothing to even swipe on.
If the fake profiles don't go beyond just filler status, i.e. they don't reply to messages and lead people on, it doesn't strike me as that big of a deal. It's just more like entertainment and time wasting than anything actually helping you find a mate. But if you live somewhere literally devoid of eligible candidates, it's not like the dating web site (or anything other than moving) can fix that.
Ive used match on and off for awhile and the crap stunt of them sending me a bunch of likes, messages just as my subscription is expiring has always ticked me off. Ummm where were these matches the first few weeks and oh wait if i want to find out if they are fake or not i have to subscribe again. Though after the first time of realizing I was being hookwinked by match I never re-up my subscription.
> Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product..
Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well?
From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time customers.
In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their site, where there weren't actually very many women on the site at all.
Alternatively, a dating site can be rife with scammers who have themselves created fake profiles on the site and are messaging potential victims. For example, I read that Tinder used to be particularly rife with bot accounts that would message obviously bot-y greetings to attempt to get a user to click an external link (to what end, I'm not sure).
In the second case, dating sites may have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the scammers, who create appealing looking profiles and make the site seem to have more activity than it really does. But the real users are potentially being targeted for fraud / scams, so this is just as--if not even more--egregious than the false marketing fake account scam, because at least the company bots aren't trying to convince you to share your bank account number.
It's not entirely clear to me if this is a case of #1 or #2, but it seems like it's #2. And because Match wouldn't even let potential users read the message (or see who it was from?) before signing up, the bot accounts would provide a significant signup boost to users thinking they had a potential match waiting for them on the site.
If it is #2, then the immediate question is how prevalent was this, and did Match take action to close bot accounts that were reported / flagged as such. Any social network will have at least some bad actors, and the platform should be judged on how they respond and defend against those actors, not whether they existed at all. I think TFA does not provide enough information to reach a conclusion.
Fraud is such an interesting problem. Are the incentives ever truly aligned such that businesses should rigorously stamp out bad actors? Or, in a toxic twist, should they do the bare minimum to satisfy some regulatory body/their brand perception?
Treacherous times indeed.
When I shared my rejection of that particular idea with my fellow Match participant, there were no further messages. So I have no idea if maybe this was some sort of cult-front come-on or there was actually an attempt to fill some small venue with paying attendees for a legitimate entertainment, based on keywords in my profile that indicated a likelihood of interest perhaps? The latter of course is the most charitable guess. It was clearly not my sparkling personality they were interested in.
It was "in the middle" of my time on Match so I don't think there was any link with getting me to renew. Also the process passed the Turing test, so the term bot seems misapplied. But scammer in a gentle sense does apply in the sense that apparently romance was not the goal, but was a lure.
For women, online dating just doesn't make sense. Even on Tinder, where the ratio is kinda okay, women are bombarded with messages and likes. To the point that they can't even respond to everyone even if they wanted to.
This means men are left with unresponsive women and just start to send cheaper pick up lines to more women faster. Thus continuing the cycle of women getting bombarded...
There was a blog post I read once where some employee used statistics from the dating site to show what the relationship between male and female profiles where, who had good chance of getting dates etc... Conclusion: it really doesn't work for 90% of men.
I also know a bunch of couples that met on tinder, but it's all from 3 years ago. I haven't heard of someone else who has been successful in finding a long term relationship on Tinder since.
Everyone else has moved on to a better dating site, like Bumble, CMB, OKC, etc.
Thanks for that. I recently tried Match.com for a couple of weeks and came to the conclusion that I am some kind of misfit. As it turns out, I may be normal after all?
This is only half the story. The full story goes:
Women can choose who to date, men must compete. Men can choose who to marry, women must compete.
Dating apps exclusively cater to category #1. This dynamic may or may not be creating an entire class of >25yo women who are unable to marry despite the desire to do so.
I really think that most people who are critical of online dating are only looking at one demographic, being people who are 25 or under.
Yes. There's tons of them because they can't get a husband and the supply/demand curve inverts across the genders. The time to secure a husband was back in their 20s when they were on the favourable side of the curve. Those women are pursuing partners that pursue much younger women.
To cut it short, female overall partner disirability peaks in their 20-30s and then falls off. Male continues rising until their 80s.
Dating apps are amplifying this effect but are also amplifying its downside, across both genders. Is this a net win or lose for society? Idk, you decide.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-...
There's a downside to this. Sure, as a man, you'll have a somewhat easier time as you get older because the male population is decreasing faster than the female population, but you have to be realistic: if you're 65, you're probably not going to be dating any pretty 30yo women, but you might have plenty of 55+ women to pick from. But if you only want to date physically attractive women, this imbalance in your favor isn't going to help you much, because at that age the women aren't looking too hot any more (especially in America, where obesity among women is rampant). So you might have tons of women chasing you, but you have no interest in any of them. And sure, you can proclaim that people shouldn't be motivated by looks, but men generally are, and that's usually how life-long relationships work out: the couple meets when they're young and there's physical attraction helping to bring them together, then they marry and age together, so when they're older their relationship is already established, so they don't need physical attraction too much. But for people looking for a new relationship, it's more important, and makes it harder to find a new relationship.
That's exactly the issue. Women ages 21-28ish are pursued by men ages 21-35ish. So there's more men chasing a smaller number of women.
But online dating is tricky. There may be people who can pull it off but for me the real world is easier. Also many women look good on pics but the pics are old or photoshopped.
Also Almost Every guy here is complaining about dating apps not working... I ask them how many women did you say nope to? Meaning we all are too damn picky ..men and women equally.
We're definitely not equally picky, not by a long shot. Online, women are far more pickier than men.[1] They can be picky as they're the bottleneck in the reproductive chain.
But are we saying men don't care at all about looks nor want their children to be attractive/have it easier in life?
The difference from the US was quite startling. I got literally hundreds of likes and dozens of matches. (my like counter showed 99+ after a week). The matches weren't bots either. They were actual women, and a decent number of them responded to my messages. I've actually ended up meeting four different women in person during a time span of two weeks. We've had some good in person conversations and I still keep in touch with at least one of them. They didn't seem like they just wanted me so that I can bring them to the US, either, as that never came up in conversations and they seemed fairly happy where they currently are. I was honestly quite sad to leave and come home to the USA because it felt like I'm returning to a social wasteland.
Later, I've on a whim set my Tinder location to Philippines one night (might be going there for work this winter), and got a decent number of matches instantly, and the ones I've talked to responded willingly. I've also gotten a ton of matches when I was on vacation in Dominican Republic last winter.
Of course, if I use my actual location (Seattle) I still get basically zero matches. I've had similar low success in Western Europe.
So, your dating app status as a dude is really location dependent.
Anecdotally, the most successful (in terms of turn around, partners, matches, dates, etc.) male I know is overweight, has poor hygiene, and is somewhat misogynistic.
Conversely, I know perfectly handsome men who could be models who strike out all the time.
Sure, good looking people might get more matches, but do they universally convert at a higher rate? No. If anything, they spend more time interacting with these apps in a less productive manner.
Only because their standards are set higher due to needing to filter the incoming stream of matches to a manageable drip of first dates. In the end, their outcome is better. Just like you would interact on LinkedIn 'in a less productive manner' being a rockstar developer @FAANG..
You should be aware that the "experiments" people have posted online aren't necessarily unbiased either. There are a lot of bitter, loveless men writing content on the internet.
If you were to complain about it, you're either hit with advice from the infamous rules 1 and 2 (1. be attractive; 2. don't be unattractive), or you'll get some advice which is well-meaning but hardly actionable. The one I see most frequently is "try and meet people at bars" (it's hard to imagine this working today, and it almost requires one to be a drinker - and even then it's harder not to come off as creepy) and "join some activity groups".
The real kicker is that many activities that you already enjoy are biased to one gender or the other (say, compsci/engineering hobbies and chess tend to be heavily male-centric in real life meetings), and it's very hard to find the passion for an activity if you started doing it just to try and find a date (and people will usually pick up on the fact). It can also leave one feeling superficial and creepy to do so.
I know many men (and some women) who've decided to give up. Men because they have lost hope on account of not having a strong enough appearance to persuade someone to read their bio, which often reeks of desperation anyway (one may be short, another may be fat, yet another may be ugly, yet another just prefers Android[0][1]). Women because they only feel valued for their appearance, or just for being a woman, rather than what makes them who they are.
I expect the problem to get worse, where online, centralized dating platforms become the norm, and when it's harder to make friends in real life, in which getting to know someone first outranks any consideration of appearances. If you're not already friends with someone, it's very easy to accept or reject on what is immediately visible - one's appearance.
[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/563567/iphone-vs-android-could-be-...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14619158/apple-iphone-goo...
You can change profiles after the fact. One of the examples I saw, it was clear the person had changed their profile to say something much worse than what it was when the conversations happened
As for attractiveness, people have a lot more control over it than they realize. Lose weight, get fit, get your teeth fixed, find your best hair/beard style and develop a cool look, and you can probably be hot unless you have a face like Sloth from The Goonies.
I will admit though, even as a hot guy with good game, I still have a hard time on Tinder. I get a decent number of likes, but not many matches, as the vast majority of them are from women that don't meet my standards. I can pull 1-2 new dates a week from OkCupid, but I've never met a top tier woman there. Thankfully I'm in a relationship now with a drop-dead gorgeous woman I met due to common interests, so I can put all that behind me now.
Last time I used Tinder they seemed to make a right move towards video chats. If I were to develop a dating app, I'd incorporate vid chat as the only way to communicate. Ain't streaming video of yourself atm -- you don't exist at all, can't be found or swiped on. Procrastination & waste of time -> 0.
Also real-time video basically renders any account validation unnecessary because all Photoshop guys/gals went to learn neural networks and how to implement DeepFake face replace.
You probably meant to ask how to make a dating app that also makes money in an honest and upfront way. Such services had existed long before the internet, you know them well, and they just honestly recognize the true reasons why men and women want to date. In short: human moderation with the premium to access the high quality dating pool. Obviously, fees there are way higher than what most people can afford.
If you're looking for random sex, many swinger clubs also allow single men (single females are almost universally welcome), either always or at special events. If you're in a relationship and your s/o is interested, I can also recommend visiting swinger clubs for a change.
Long story short, many years ago I was working for a provider that was building algorithms for various dating websites.
The goal was simple: Increase signups.
A Little Bit of Background --------------------------
As a small group of rather "creative" engineers in their early twenties encouraged by large sums of money we came up with the idea of building "Matching Personas" which would be able to have a basic conversation, as well as have similar interests in the target subject.
Keep in mind that some of those dating sites have various "upgrade" (read payment) paths. Some had a "3 private messages" limit so that you can start chatting with someone but to continue the conversation, you needed to upgrade to premium.
The typical path for a user was: 1. Visit the website and search for what they're interested in 2. See a few profiles and decide whether online dating was their thing 3. Invest personal time creating a profile and putting down their interests, photos, etc.
Point #3 is where the magic came in.
I had been working on automating the creation of accounts, and more importantly the creation of what we used to call smart-accounts. After a few months we had increased the conversion rate by about 30% on average (Which is MASSIVE) and our internal funding was getting larger and larger. Our smart accounts ended up being able to recognize certain items in photos, understand the interests of new users, have "similar" interests that are either the same or tangentially related, similar number of kids, etc. etc.
Based on real matches we built an engine that learnt what people look for when they convert. How the conversations go, the type of language used when discussing, the similarities in interests and family, etc. Honestly a really wide set of super interesting machine learning problems from object recognition to natural language processing to recommender systems to LTSM, etc.
It was pretty simple. A user signs up and they put some of their information in. Our engine picks up the latest user's information, creates about 10 different "smart profiles" that the new user is likely to match, and then in the search results display those smart-accounts to the new user who just joined. The new user would see smart accounts, and start chatting with them on their free accounts. Because we knew based on previous real matches and real conversations how people ended up "being together", the unsuspecting free users.
The conversion path was: Signup -> Fill profile -> See someone you like -> Converse -> Upgrade.
The Day my Mother Fell in Love with Me --------------------------------------
Now that you have a little bit of background, the story begins. I had been working for many of the dating companies (most of them competitors) for a few months and our smart-profiles were getting quite clever.
One night after my mother invited me for diner. We started eating and drinking wine and just talking in general. I never talked about the general aspects of my work but she knew I worked with computers and back then statistics now machine learning now everything-is-AI-anyways.
Whilst on the topic of computers, she said: "Oh I haven't told you, I've actually met someone online". I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was quite nice.
Then she proceeded to tell me the following: "He also has 3 kids, he likes a lot of the same stuff I like which is really nice, and we started chatting and he's really nice. He's gone on a business trip now so we haven't talked in a few days but I'm looking forward to talking to him again".
At that moment I became very suspicious because all the signs pointed to exactly what we had been aiming at achieving. Get users to like someone, signup, chat (Which had a limit of 50 free messages at the time for that particular platform if I remember), and convert (pay) to have more chats. The trick was when people upgraded, within hours, we had some canned answers like "I'm going on a business trip won't be able to talk for about 2 weeks".
Either way, I started asking my mother a few more questions and she explained to me that she had found him after signing up and they chatted a little bit but she had to upgrade yaddi yadda and it wasn't cheap but she was glad she didn't end up wasting so much time online dating like all those other people online dating. Then I asked her about the particular website and it was one we had been working with.
She had actually fallen in love with my bots. I felt terrible not only for my mother but for the thousands of other people we had basically scammed, and only at that moment did it hit me. Up until then it was a fun challenging ML engineering problem with real-world subjects.
I quit the following day and have never been affiliated or interested in either working or using online dating since. Even though I do have friends who got married to people they have met online dating, it made me a cynical.
It separates the low-end and the high-end geo-targeters.
I mean, just thought it was weird for a complete stranger to recommend to another complete stranger a gay hookup app for men...
But like I said, getting a date off these apps is like pulling teeth. I've reverted to asking girls out in person at coffee shops, social gatherings, etc. Even if you get rejected, it at least makes for a good story.
First, there's a clear (and artificial) skewing of supply-demand curves. There are probably like 30 (active) guys for every 1 (active) girl on these apps (looking at you, Tinder). This creates an imbalance where women are incredibly selective while men end up being incredibly non-selective (e.g. swipe right on everything). Clearly, this needs to be addressed -- this "marketplace" is a sham.
Second of all, a lot of women (but also men) use dating apps to increase their social following (be it Snapchat or Instagram). This probably only pertains to people in their 20s or 30s, but it's a huge problem when trying to seriously find someone to date.
Third -- the botpocalypse. About 70% of my matches on Tinder this past year (I actually quit all dating apps around 4 months ago) have been bots. Not sure if this is a tractable problem, but after a while, it just gets old. At this point, matching with bots is a meme on /r/Tinder, for example.
Fourth, there needs to be an in-app incentive to meet in real life. I feel that my generation (millennials) are kind of broken. I blow people's minds when I tell them that I work remotely at a coffee shop and started making friends with people there, hanging out, etc. In other words, we absolutely suck at real-life social interaction. So we need these apps to "nudge" in the right direction. A potential solution would be a cross between a meetup and a date.
Fifth, I think hookup culture really is starting to show its dark side. Tinder was very popular as a hookup app a few years ago, but nowadays it's more or less abandoned. People actually want deep and long-lasting connections. None of the apps out there really attempt to solve this. It's a tough problem to solve because building a relationship (like building a friendship) takes time.
Anyway, these are some issues I have with dating apps off the top of my head. I will say that it also probably doesn't help that I live in LA, which is a pretty superficial city to begin with. But the women are gorgeous, so I probably shouldn't complain :)
What makes it artificial?
Also, there's strong evidence that roughly twice as many women have reproduced than men across human history [0], so if we're reducing it to a number game women have always had the ability to be more picky than guys.
What's different today is Tinder/OLD let's them access a much larger area, whereas in the past they would have to find a partner within their local community. Dating apps may look unfair on paper but they're just a more efficient dating market than in times past.
So to sum up my point, I'm struggling to see a solution here. Human nature can't be rewritten, no matter how hard we try.
[0] https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/the-missing-...
> ... they're just a more efficient dating market than in times past.
This might be true if women were actually going on dates and starting relationships. Except that no one is. We are a lonely bunch[1].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2019/05/03/millennials...
You could write an algorithm that subtly punishes women for being too picky and at the same time punishes men for being unselective (only swiping right, then filtering later). Of course, as soon as it comes out that you are rebalancing the market that way no one will use your app anymore, but it would be a theoretical way to bring the numbers closer together.
Sounds like the dating rules of most Patriarch societies.
Women who aren't married at age X gets a social penalty. Men who marry are rewarded by social rewards.
The USA has thankfully left the shackles of Patriarchy and has enabled the liberation of women and women's desires. In this world of female first, women get to choose freely from the entire pool of men, and can dispose of them by a swipe of their finger. Should the woman like a child, there is plenty of DNA to choose from, even to be pregnant by insemination or IVF if she so desires.
You are experiencing Matriarchy in the 21th century. Welcome to the future.
I remember someone at HN posting a graph that showed that for something like 40 years the amount of singles reporting 'no sex within the last year' had been relatively equal (both men and women around 18%), but since the rise of Tinder et al men had shot up to 30% whereas women were still at 18%.
On an individual level I won't pass judgment on women for doing whatever they want, but on a societal level such a sea change in behavior and it's attached consequences does not seem healthy or stable.
Care to place any bets on what will happen?
Obviously I can't prove this but I'd bet the inability to get into an emotionally stable (or any) relationship is one of the contributing factors to soaring youth crime across the world. It's not the only one (economy, political divide) but it's a biggie.
I can do you one better: if you look at history, whenever a society had large contingents of single, young men with little chance of entering into a relationship, that society invariably eventually went to war. Since most big players in the world have become so economically intertwined this is not really viable anymore, so yes, I'd say it is very possibly a factor.
> Care to place any bets on what will happen?
On the short-to-mid term? Nothing. Tech is vastly outpacing our ability as society to adapt. You see this with issues of privacy as well.
Long term? The pendulum probably swings in the other direction hard. Maybe men everywhere decide to adopt the Japanese way: with the insane pressure on young men there to perform in all aspects of life, a lot of them simply opt out of dating (which ultimately leaves women without relationships). Or maybe realistic, AI-driven sexbots become a thing: if you don't want kids and don't need a relationship, why deal with all the extraneous stuff? This again leaves women out in the cold.
To be clear: I wouldn't celebrate such a thing. We'd lose something very essential about ourselves if our whole dance of courtship and sex is permanently reduced to dating apps and sexbots.
But to continue, we're in a weird state of flux vis-à-vis male/female interaction. For example, most women prefer to date 'up' (having a good job on your dating profile leads to something like 85% more right swipes), but at the same time most universities are 40/60 men/women, plus women below 30 outearn their male peers. Obviously those two things are fairly at odds with each other.
You can also ask questions like: why are high schools still plastered in posters encouraging women to attend university when the numbers are already skewed? Surely, if back in the 90s 60/40 men/women was bad, the reverse should also be bad? Where is the promotional material to get more men into universities? Where are the special men-only scholarships? Or the effort to combat the male pay gap below 30?
Apologies for the long response- the overarching subject is something I take quite to heart.
So my hunch was sorta correct? We've gone from most people marrying somebody they meet organically to "here's a list of candidates within N and their job title" which has massively magnified that particular behaviour.
> Apologies for the long response- the overarching subject is something I take quite to heart.
No problem! I was hoping for a response this interesting.
My idea is that at some point after the initial match, both users put in $5. Doing so gets them a coupon/something worth $15 at an app-chosen local restaurant or bar. If one person does not show up, the other person gets $7.
(The important part is those prices relative to each other rather than those specific values.)
The way this would make money is to make deals with the local restaurant/bar so it doesn't cost the company running the app $15 to send the potential couple to a venue (restaurants might pay to have the customers).
Either way, I've thought many (many) times of making a dating app and running a pilot/MVP on UCLA's campus. But I think dating apps have been (justifiably) getting such a bad rap lately, it'll be too hard to get initial traction.
Amusingly, venues took issue with people shagging in the loos and one wondered if it was actually a front for prostitution.
>"First, there's a clear (and artificial) skewing of supply-demand curves. There are probably like 30 (active) guys for every 1 (active) girl on these apps (looking at you, Tinder)"
Are there sources you could share that support this?
There are a lot more, this is one of the first that popped up on Google. I don't think the article even accounts for account activity, or the numbers would look much worse.
Of course, there's still plenty of potential for abuse or simply misuse, but not really any more than any personal relationship. This strikes me as being basically that meetup/date cross you suggested.
Turn that around completely. Have users put in effort in being found.
I doubt that would get much attention to "disrupt" the market
Thing is, for the beautiful people, all they need is one really good picture, and a pizza emoji as their profile text, and they're all set. Unless you hide profile pictures (which tbf, okcupid tried for a brief second) I don't see a way to change that.
Good on you for talking to girls directly, that really is the way to go. Super hot women don't tend to bother with online dating, and if you can approach confidently you'll be able to land much hotter women in person than online anyhow.
Besides that I found it pretty easy to consistently get a date or two a week with Tinder, but it was a chore in terms of time spent to do so. It also resulted in a lot of not quite right matches that I felt mixed about, like people who were amazing but didn't really have compatible (with me) life directions/goals.
Bumble was the most useless dating site I tried. Everything seemed to be more about image and posturing than actually dating.
At the time okCupid was in the midst of changing from a decent site for people who still used desktops and web browsers and liked longform text to a bad version of tinder, which I assume it is now.
Assume things have changed a bit by now so of course YMMV.
I wouldn't recommend Tinder to anyone though.
If you're looking for dating, OKCupid works well, but you need to work fast. Arrange a meetup/coffee date within 3-4 messages. If you talk to someone for weeks without meeting, it's unlikely you'll get anywhere.
Level 5 self driving cars is a more realistic goal to achieve than this one.
A better way of looking at it is that there are bugs that leak information in browsers, and sites like the NYT are spending developer effort to discover those bugs and publish them (in the form of javascript) so that browser developers can fix them. The browser developers will eventually win this one.