Never did I ever imply that Pakistan isn't civilized. But since that's what you got from my comment it's safe to say that you're most likely a racist piece of shit and that HN should probably block you instead.
Maybe the commenter edited his comment, but as it is now, it doesn't mention or imply that Pakistan is uncivilized (which wouldn't be hate speech, anyway).
People regularly say damn near the same thing the GP said (that the "civilized world" or something along those lines should reduce or cut ties with) but they say it about a country of ~320 million people or (more rarely because we don't discuss it as much here) a country of ~1.4 billion.
People have a traditional way of building family. The American way, i.e. via casual dating, often enhanced by apps, is experimental (barely a generation in) and not looking good for society's long-term stability.
You know, people make jokes about, for example, Indian arranged marriages, but they have one significant upside: you get to know not only your future partner, but also their family, their past, the environment that they were raised in, etc. It's basically a full background check.
With casual dating via Tinder you might as well end up dating a serial killer, and even if you don't you still have much harder time really getting to know the person if you don't have any common friends, come from different cities, etc.
I mean that is absolute rubbish. There are plenty of arranged marriages that fail because e.g one partner was gay and hid it from their family. No 'background' checks prevent it and there is plenty of fallout.
Nobody claimed that background checks are foolproof. They check for "background" e.g. is the family known in the neighbourhood for bad conduct - they are not likely to reveal stuff one may be hiding from everyone else.
I got to know my in laws before I married my wife. I didn't have an Indian arranged marriage.
A wise man once said "in-laws are never a reason to get married or to not got married"
Also I know of many Pakistani arranged marriages between 1st cousins, it leads to a lot of premature babies. So as with everything there are pros and cons. I am pretty sure that a serial killer, as with most of them, would seem normal and respectable during any family gatherings. It's not like they would be like "ah welcome to my home future life partner, do you want to see my collection of severed hookers heads?"
This is correct. There are scientific reasons why app dating is destroying the nuclear American family, hand-in-hand with hypergamy, hence the men's Red Pill philosophy.
If you're a high-income male working in the US and want to avoid getting divorce-fleeced:
- do not get married in California (or divorce before 5 years)
- try to avoid having children in the USA. If your kids live outside the USA, don't reside in California (because of the foreign child support law, which by default awards them the same amount as residents)
The divorce rate was going up long before online dating, and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating. Though I'm skeptical they're directly related.
> and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating.
I'm not blaming online dating (which I think is just a reflection of other cultural changes) but it's kind of hard to get divorced if you're not married and we know where marriage rates are going...
I don't know. I have a couple of friends who met there wife online. They all seems to have very stable releationships now and all have more than one child. Some had very wild times before, some almost nothing before.
> not looking good for society's long-term stability
That's funny, I met my current long term partner on Tinder. Is there any indication that Tinder and related apps are anything other than an expression of an existing societal shift and not on the causal side of the relationship?
There is. Just look at the studies of interaction dynamics of people on Tinder vs the physical world. It's very much a rich get richer dynamic. IMO we're going to look back on this generation of social apps as dangerously uncontrolled experiments in social engineering.
It did and I appreciate reading the views of people that I don't usually see on HN. I hope future articles will also bring out people with different views, and no one tries to make such people feel unwelcome.
Agreed. I'm about on the far end of laissez-faire when it comes to sexuality and dating, and fully in favor of apps like Tinder as a 'thing', but I think it's definitely valuable to hear other points of view. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that I believed sex before marriage was to be frowned upon.
What? Long-term relationships typically require two experienced partners who communicate well. Tinder is a super easy way to learn to get along with another person. Not to mention knowing one's sexual preferences make it much easier to find a long term partner.
Casual dating has been like this for a long time, not sure how Tinder makes it worse
It is in some places already. In the UK for instance a bank has to open a basic checking account for you when asked, to avoid situations where people without jobs or homeless cannot have a bank account(which is required for nearly everything else). There can be many restrictions placed on such account later on(no debit cards, no overdraft, no mobile banking etc), but it's practically impossible for a bank to close a basic checking account for someone.
I think in the EU, one bank has let you to open a basic account and give you a debit card. But as far I know, this is just for people, not companys. And in they ask you for a fee to use the account and in theorie there is no upper limit for the fee.
Banks decide the color of dildos in webshops? I want to know more about this, I am not even doubting this seeing as banks and credit card companies are basically driving political censorship online these days.
Western people are usually surprised to find out that people actually have freedoms outside of America and Europe. They just often choose to sacrifice more egregious ones for communal good than not.
The freedom to harm others(i.e women) or restrict other people's freedoms(i.e what to install on my device, what books to read etc) is not really freedom
I think your opinion is irrelevant and based in ignorance of Islam and the values that a predominately Islamic society holds for its citizens. These are not easy or often flippant decisions made and/or accepted by people. But part of listening means accepting where you have a right to form opinions, to have them heard, and to feel entitled to them being relevant. This is not listening. This is you asserting a colonialist's supremacy on a culture that does not agree with your ethic. This same line of thinking is what led to the British invasions of Central Asia and Africa, that Indians were barbaric and Brits would bring the education and civil discipline to their land and improve their lives. Well, what good have yours and their Napoleon complexes left?
Huh? By the same token, India and rest of the world was invaded by Muslims in order to free them of pagan practices and bring them into Islam. This includes Pakistan.
Muslims(like most of the religions) are not foreign in asserting a colonialist's supremacy on cultures that do not agree with their ethics. Muslims(like all the religions)think they alone are right and the others are wrong...(i.e pagan, unbelivers etc) and seem to be willing to forcefully impose their fairy tales/doctrine.
>> I think your opinion is irrelevant
Even you seem to be a good representation of this kind attitude
Different cultures have different views of acceptability. I am sure there are things in western culture that seem absolutely abhorrent to other cultures (one that comes to mind is killing infants after they are born, selling baby parts for money, and abortion in general). Having a view of moral superiority while perpetrating what other cultures consider atrocities, is, at best, the pot calling the kettle black. And at worst, being completely wrong. It is good to have a bit of leniency, civility, and trying to understand others when they disagree, even on subjects in which we are personally invested.
"Feticidal injection of digoxin or potassium chloride may be administered at the beginning of the procedure to allow for softening of the fetal bones or to comply with relevant laws in the physician's jurisdiction and the U.S. federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.[4] Umbilical cord transection can also be used to induce fetal demise prior to removal.[7]"
Intact D&E of a fetus with a heartbeat was outlawed in most cases by the 2003 federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart.
Correct. That's why you have to cause death before removal in order to work around the ban. Weather this counts as infanticide is left as an exercise for the reader.
Killing infants is illegal pretty much anywhere in the civilized world. The culture that you are talking about is really more about some religious doctrines often twiested rather than morality. The same "culture" likes to discriminate against women.
We should not conflate sexual freedom in general with the very specific kind promoted by Tinder. There are many different ways you could design the UX of a dating app and in my opinion the Tinder approach has some very serious downsides. Dating online doesn't necessarily have to be about promoting a lot of shallow and superficial interactions.
I’m not advocating banning the app but I do think some of the criticisms of it are entirely justified. We’ve seen in the last few years how we all can be affected by technologies that we don’t personally use ourselves so we’re entitled to an opinion.
Also I'm not saying Tinder is immoral. People can hook up all they want as far as I'm concerned. It's more the kind of interaction that the UX encourages that I think could be improved.
As I said...make your own app that encourages a different kind of interactions. Have you considered that people use Tinder because of the kind of interactions it encourages? It's not like there are not other apps with different goals/ux. I believe it's a tirany to use your own morality to restrict other people's behaviour. As long as nobody gets hurt people should be free to spend their time/live as they see fit.
I don't know about "immoral", but based on my younger acquaintances' experiences on Tinder, I believe that in the long-term it and its peer services will be seen as equally destructive to Facebook -- what Facebook did to interpersonal relationships/friendships Tinder will do to romantic/sexual relationships.
I think that the world will basically have to have a reckoning with "freedom," i.e. that technology has created the ability to build digital technologies that basically destroy the things we typically value. The companies in charge are too hyperoptimized and the average human is too underoptimized for this to be a fair fight... in the name of "engagement" Facebook can easily destroy the basic subfloor of politics in a representative democracy, and Tinder can destroy the basic subfloor of couplehood and family life.
Implicit here is the idea that couplehood and family life were more stable and somehow more resistent to damage before technology came along and made it easier for humans to interact.
An alternate theory is that Tinder actually reenforces the "basic subfloor of couplehood and family life" by enabling and normalising ephemeral sexual and romantic interaction, instead of requiring the individual to succumb to social pressure and enter marriage for reasons other than personal. This would be supported by the fact that divorce rates have been decreasing in the USA since the 90s.[1]
I agree that more attention needs to be directed towards the ill effects that technology can have on societal values, but the technology exposes and works upon impulses already within us. The things we value are incredibly relative and the ideas + images of friendship and family life we have now are drastically different from even 40 years ago.
(that is to say, views are always changing and the idea that "this new thing will destroy what we value" works in the exact same way that fm radio / home taping / digital piracy killed the musician + music industry so many years ago (i.e. it did not))
There's a lot of evidence that we are less satisfied with the choices we make the more options we have. When you can compare your current partner to 1000 other options every day you're very likely to have some buyers remorse.
I certainly can compare my partner to 1000 other options and I don’t need an app to do so. The takeaway isn’t “options are bad while you are on the market.” The take away is “Stop measuring your partner against others while you’re not on the market.” And, of course, you don’t actually know those others so you’re comparing your partner against some combination of others and your own imagination. No partner can compare to your imagination. If you’re doing this you might as well bail out of the relationship because you’re not ready. No amount of banning apps is going to protect someone’s relationship from themselves. A committed relationship takes... commitment; in both thought and deed.
Sure, there are a lot of things that anyone can do. The fact is that the harder you make things, the fewer people will do them, the easier you make things, the more people will do them. You can avoid processed junk food and stay healthy but the availability of cheap junk food is what causes rampant obesity and its societal costs.
> Implicit here is the idea that couplehood and family life were more stable
It doesn't necessarily imply that. What I took from the GP is that people are giving away control of their dating behaviour to large commercial entities with unknown implications.
It's not about technology making it easier for humans to interact, but about changing the nature of the interaction.
In a way it's similar to advertising. If you glance at an advertisement online now, it looks very much the same as looking at an advertisement in a magazine in the 90s, but to everyone on here it should be clear that behind an online ad today, there is a gigantic empire of data-collection and analytics that most people aren't even aware of.
An easy example here is that a commercial entity that matches people has no direct interest in people engaging in long-term romantic relationships, since it might prevent them from coming back. It's best to optimise their matching algorithms on other areas.
That might not matter too much if people were aware of these skewed algorithms, but it's also in the best interest of commerce that people are not aware of it.
It's dangerous to equate normal "behaviour X" with "behaviour X, but digital", especially if the difference provides space for a commercial entity to set themselves up as a middle man who has no incentive to be neutral.
I'd support this action. Social media and dating apps are an experiment on the population that they never consented to. We need a reserve of people who are not as much impacted by it for further studies.
Until the day AR glasses come that can show you entire financial, sexual, educational, criminal history etc of a person on the street, dating apps is hurting the majority of the population.
So are the privacy laws that are going to stifle innovation, if people want social media and hyper competitive dating, the free market would also allow the right to violation of privacy by current standards which would allow for AR glasses to show a person history before you even talk to them.
In the past people used to look at the family history or got introduced to potential mates by trusted friends. Dating apps have none of that.
The market is neither free, nor fair.
A new generation of dating apps that monitor your entire life and do background checks and publicize it to the world would change the playing field immensely.
Pakistani here, I gave Tinder a try once and it was awful. The majority of Pakistanis don't date the way Americans do due to the conservative values. When we sign up for a dating app, what we're looking for is someone whom we can connect with and marry soon - possibly within 6-12 months timeframe. Tinder is optimized for American dating and is incompatible with our family values. Therefore, when you signed up for Tinder in Pakistan, you saw that it was a hookup app rather than an app that helps you find a lifelong partner. Most Pakistanis who're serious about finding a partner use Muslim dating apps like Muzmatch and Minder.
Edit: A lot of people have replied below that this does not justify banning the app. I have simply shared my experience and also the experience of many others in Pakistan. Tinder turned into an immoral app (borderline pornography in many cases) and this being an Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it went against the conservative values of the nation to hookup and thus it was banned by the govt. The govt is the democratic representative of the people and does what the majority of the nation expects them to do.
Government bans, even the US one, certain kinds of speech like death threats and such.
In Pakistani people do not consider the American way of dating as acceptable, and consider it a harm to society as a whole. Individual behavior affects society. There's a reason criminals are in jail.
Governments ban things for public interest, and it is in the wider interests of the population that such apps be banned or regulated liked banks so everyone gets a chance like they do in real world. Many governments optimize human happiness, family over money and raw GDP numbers. It might come as a shock to you, but not for the people of Pakistan. They're not for sale under hyper optimized algorithms that suck the soul of the people.
So that's why it's ok to ban an app? Don't you think it is better to let the people choose what they want? If you are right, and that's what people will choose, the app will die on its own because it will have no users.
Short answer from a Scandinavian. No and why should they allow degeneracy when their entire society is against it. I wish we would ban those apps too.
And its not just Pakistanis who are fed up with vapid american "hookup" culture... Humans today are so damn shallow. Its all about SoMe appearance and using other humans like they were some kind of expendable trash.
Opinions are formed not out of merit or logic, but simply what will appease social media the most. Problem is when Social media becomes heavily moderated and controlled, so does the opinions of the SoMeZombies, BLM is a perfect example of this, you don't want to be raycis right? So you basically have to support an american black supremacy group, that isn't really officially fighting police brutality nor racism, but the "Western prescribed nuclear family ideal". I am not even kidding, look it up on BLMs own website...
When dating apps gives you popups that encourages race politics, you can't help but wonder wether they also algorithmically try to act out their ideals... Like PoCs getting higher scores in algos etc while "white cis men" gets put in the bottom of the list, there is no way to check wether this is the case or not, but I can't help but be suspicious about this considering how mad silicon valley is for Blacks or rather how much they seemingly despise europeans...
Good friend of mine from Pakistan got married last year (via matchmaking) and I wish them happiest days. Besides small set of culture differences their values (family etc) are almost no different from other friends say from catholic countries in Europe. Of course I didn't want to generalise but that's how I feel.
I'd welcome these applications being banned worldwide. Dating should be brought back to the real world: through friends, communities, family recommendations, and events.
The emphasis should be on finding a compatible mate, marriage, co-financing and procreation. Dating apps encourage endless hookups and destabilisation - this is their business model.
When your moral views are such that they require banning free apps (or free speech etc) and enforcing your views on other people, that's stops being a morality and starts being a tyranny.
So if I view murder as bad and I ban MRDR, a hot new SV startup that helps murderers plan their murders, I'm a tyrant? The rest of the world isn't obligated to import every social engineering system SV comes up with.
Sex, Russian trolls, Chinese nationalism, US foreign interventions and Javascript in the browser. Plus a few other topics where everybody is an expert, too.
99 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadIf that flies so should this.
With casual dating via Tinder you might as well end up dating a serial killer, and even if you don't you still have much harder time really getting to know the person if you don't have any common friends, come from different cities, etc.
A wise man once said "in-laws are never a reason to get married or to not got married"
Also I know of many Pakistani arranged marriages between 1st cousins, it leads to a lot of premature babies. So as with everything there are pros and cons. I am pretty sure that a serial killer, as with most of them, would seem normal and respectable during any family gatherings. It's not like they would be like "ah welcome to my home future life partner, do you want to see my collection of severed hookers heads?"
If you're a high-income male working in the US and want to avoid getting divorce-fleeced:
- do not get married in California (or divorce before 5 years)
- try to avoid having children in the USA. If your kids live outside the USA, don't reside in California (because of the foreign child support law, which by default awards them the same amount as residents)
The saddest thing is that children are the main casualty in divorces.
Single-parent raised children are known to have more issues/anxiety/etc... than children raised in a normal family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...
I'm not blaming online dating (which I think is just a reflection of other cultural changes) but it's kind of hard to get divorced if you're not married and we know where marriage rates are going...
That's funny, I met my current long term partner on Tinder. Is there any indication that Tinder and related apps are anything other than an expression of an existing societal shift and not on the causal side of the relationship?
Casual dating has been like this for a long time, not sure how Tinder makes it worse
My viewpoint is that people should have freedom of religious conscience, and with that a large degree of moral relativism with certain bounds.
Given that, is it appropriate that a country interferes with the expressed sexuality of freely consenting adults? I don’t think so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Pakistan
Isn't this the history of Islam (colonization and expansion)? Were the people in those places who got conquered not forced to comply with Islamic law?
I live in former Ottoman Empire territory where slave trade of women and young boys was rampant until the Russian Empire put an end to it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Me...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery#Ottoman_slave_...
>> I think your opinion is irrelevant
Even you seem to be a good representation of this kind attitude
"Feticidal injection of digoxin or potassium chloride may be administered at the beginning of the procedure to allow for softening of the fetal bones or to comply with relevant laws in the physician's jurisdiction and the U.S. federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.[4] Umbilical cord transection can also be used to induce fetal demise prior to removal.[7]"
https://www.dw.com/en/pakistan-women-tinder/a-54509792
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2261873/online-dating-catches-o...
I think that the world will basically have to have a reckoning with "freedom," i.e. that technology has created the ability to build digital technologies that basically destroy the things we typically value. The companies in charge are too hyperoptimized and the average human is too underoptimized for this to be a fair fight... in the name of "engagement" Facebook can easily destroy the basic subfloor of politics in a representative democracy, and Tinder can destroy the basic subfloor of couplehood and family life.
An alternate theory is that Tinder actually reenforces the "basic subfloor of couplehood and family life" by enabling and normalising ephemeral sexual and romantic interaction, instead of requiring the individual to succumb to social pressure and enter marriage for reasons other than personal. This would be supported by the fact that divorce rates have been decreasing in the USA since the 90s.[1]
I agree that more attention needs to be directed towards the ill effects that technology can have on societal values, but the technology exposes and works upon impulses already within us. The things we value are incredibly relative and the ideas + images of friendship and family life we have now are drastically different from even 40 years ago.
(that is to say, views are always changing and the idea that "this new thing will destroy what we value" works in the exact same way that fm radio / home taping / digital piracy killed the musician + music industry so many years ago (i.e. it did not))
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/divorce-united-states...
Divorce rates are decreasing because marriage rates are decreasing. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#/...
It doesn't necessarily imply that. What I took from the GP is that people are giving away control of their dating behaviour to large commercial entities with unknown implications.
It's not about technology making it easier for humans to interact, but about changing the nature of the interaction.
In a way it's similar to advertising. If you glance at an advertisement online now, it looks very much the same as looking at an advertisement in a magazine in the 90s, but to everyone on here it should be clear that behind an online ad today, there is a gigantic empire of data-collection and analytics that most people aren't even aware of.
An easy example here is that a commercial entity that matches people has no direct interest in people engaging in long-term romantic relationships, since it might prevent them from coming back. It's best to optimise their matching algorithms on other areas.
That might not matter too much if people were aware of these skewed algorithms, but it's also in the best interest of commerce that people are not aware of it.
It's dangerous to equate normal "behaviour X" with "behaviour X, but digital", especially if the difference provides space for a commercial entity to set themselves up as a middle man who has no incentive to be neutral.
Thnings that YOU value - if supply of apps like Tinder exists is just because there is demand.
Until the day AR glasses come that can show you entire financial, sexual, educational, criminal history etc of a person on the street, dating apps is hurting the majority of the population.
So are the privacy laws that are going to stifle innovation, if people want social media and hyper competitive dating, the free market would also allow the right to violation of privacy by current standards which would allow for AR glasses to show a person history before you even talk to them.
In the past people used to look at the family history or got introduced to potential mates by trusted friends. Dating apps have none of that.
The market is neither free, nor fair.
A new generation of dating apps that monitor your entire life and do background checks and publicize it to the world would change the playing field immensely.
Lol, no they didn't. They got drunk and hooked up at bars.
Edit: A lot of people have replied below that this does not justify banning the app. I have simply shared my experience and also the experience of many others in Pakistan. Tinder turned into an immoral app (borderline pornography in many cases) and this being an Islamic Republic of Pakistan, it went against the conservative values of the nation to hookup and thus it was banned by the govt. The govt is the democratic representative of the people and does what the majority of the nation expects them to do.
In Pakistani people do not consider the American way of dating as acceptable, and consider it a harm to society as a whole. Individual behavior affects society. There's a reason criminals are in jail.
Governments ban things for public interest, and it is in the wider interests of the population that such apps be banned or regulated liked banks so everyone gets a chance like they do in real world. Many governments optimize human happiness, family over money and raw GDP numbers. It might come as a shock to you, but not for the people of Pakistan. They're not for sale under hyper optimized algorithms that suck the soul of the people.
What was awful about it? It seems to me that it was a difference of expectations?
And its not just Pakistanis who are fed up with vapid american "hookup" culture... Humans today are so damn shallow. Its all about SoMe appearance and using other humans like they were some kind of expendable trash. Opinions are formed not out of merit or logic, but simply what will appease social media the most. Problem is when Social media becomes heavily moderated and controlled, so does the opinions of the SoMeZombies, BLM is a perfect example of this, you don't want to be raycis right? So you basically have to support an american black supremacy group, that isn't really officially fighting police brutality nor racism, but the "Western prescribed nuclear family ideal". I am not even kidding, look it up on BLMs own website...
When dating apps gives you popups that encourages race politics, you can't help but wonder wether they also algorithmically try to act out their ideals... Like PoCs getting higher scores in algos etc while "white cis men" gets put in the bottom of the list, there is no way to check wether this is the case or not, but I can't help but be suspicious about this considering how mad silicon valley is for Blacks or rather how much they seemingly despise europeans...
A democracy must not be a tyranny of the majority. What if part of the Pakistani population enjoy these apps? Why ban them if they don't harm anybody?
It's the same line of reasoning that leads to prohibition on drugs, guns and booze.
The emphasis should be on finding a compatible mate, marriage, co-financing and procreation. Dating apps encourage endless hookups and destabilisation - this is their business model.
Why?
It's almost like those who question Tinder's moral neutrality and innocence in its impact on society have a point...