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Comment by laurenkay | Hacker News Reader

Ha, we definitely get that that's a dealbreaker for a lot of people. Most top dating sites are populated by a ton of fake profiles, so while logging in with Facebook isn't ideal, it helps us as a small startup to prevent spammers. We don't post to members' walls / we basically just ask for birthdate and photos.

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I totally understand where you're coming from. However, consider that there are more fake Facebook profiles on the Internet than fake online dating profiles. Facebook itself does not to any sort of identity verification, so the benefits of relying on it to filter spam are dubious.

Additionally, our matchmakers review each profile before approving a member. So Facebook definitely isn't perfect, but it helps to prevent some spam, as well as multiple signups from the same person. It also makes the signup flow a lot faster for members.

Considering that this is the biggest complaint we've heard, we're also considering adding a way to sign up without Facebook.

This is a bit rich considering that further up you're defending yourself against criticism of spam?

OkCupid has fake profiles but it's not THAT bad (maybe Tinder has spam problems, or so I've heard, but they're spammed because they are at scale). Nothing a reverse-image search on Google can't usually solve.

I used to work there. Fraud/fake profiles are one of the hardest & most important problems to solve, and one of OKC's main competitive advantages is doing so in a scalable way. It's not a problem from the user perspective, but that's a testament to a lot of intelligent effort, not a reason why fake profiles aren't an issue.

I've always been fascinated by that aspect of dating sites. Could you share some of the technical specifics as to what the hardest challenges are that still remain to be solved and how the cat-and-mouse game has evolved?

Then I should make a fake facebook so I can make a fake profile? One more layer of indirection doesn't necessarily add more security.

Facebook can afford to have dozens of smart people working full-time on eliminating fake profiles. A small startup can't.

And.... there are tons of fake Facebook profiles. So how does that prevent spam?

It just has to make it harder. The idea behind everything is just to make it harder. Captchas aren't 100%, they just make it harder.

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