A typical complaint would be if he had done something wrong, but he send 0 messages, got no likes - so what could he have done wrong?
I had similar experiences with Tinder - I think their support team just bans people when they don't want to deal with them - without checking the account at all.
He didn't post screenshots of his profile so we have no idea what's on there, it's completely possible (likely, even) that his profile text did violate the TOS. Instant perma-ban might be a bit harsh but we have no reason to believe one side over the other and no evidence pointing either way.
Yeah all the insight in this article comes down to the sentence "The big tech does not mind having a few false positives." the next paragraph about people trying to please the algorithm is such drivel since companies rarely mention what their algorithms look for and people rarely go out of their way to please an algorithm (unless they have some level of insight into the algorithm and it affects their income, generally).
Anecdotally, I find myself thinking about what might make my accounts look like I'm up to something, and avoid it. Also anecdotally, I've seen others on HN talk about doing the same. People may not know what the algorithm is, but they can make some reasonable guesses at what it might take into account.
The "big tech bad" complaints seem valid to me. Big tech companies are willing to accept a certain number of false positives, and that sucks for the people who are caught up in them. Algorithm-influenced decision-making is likely to lead people to change their behaviour to please the algorithm—one obvious example is the oceans of shitty content that we all have to wade through to find useful information because Google's algorithm has led to changes in publisher and writer behaviour.
The thing for me is keeping his money. If he signed up, and for whatever reason they decided they didn't want his business so they gave him a refund, I wouldn't love it but it wouldn't upset me much either.
But they can't decide they want the money but don't want to provide a service. I'm surprised to see comments defending this.
If you have to worry about banks banning you, you maybe shouldn't be in a position where you need to take financial advice from HN comments and you're likely better off with cash than an unstable asset that you can't easily eliminate without involving a bank.
Banks ban you for joke comments in bank transfers or anything that alludes to drugs, sex work or gambling. Or for transferring remittances to your parents in a way some algorithm deemed to be "structuring" or "money laundering for terrorists".
PayPal bans you for whatever the fuck their AI decided on a whim.
I've been on HN for over eight and a half years now and help requests or complaint blog posts are routine here. One thing that's common is support staff that is either unreachable (Google) or doesn't have any freedom to reverse AI-caused bans / only is allowed to post canned responses (everyone else). The only way to get issues with big tech resolved these days is to raise a stink here on HN, even Twitter shitstorms seem to fly under the radar more and more.
All you need is an anonymous call to the police in the US to SWAT your house and get all money from your bank account taken away temporarily. There are multiple people who said that the only reason they didn't need to ask money from friends for lawyers is that they had some Bitcoin. It's all about preparing for worst case scenarios in your life, just like wearing a seatbelt.
Not grocery, but lawyer in the cas you want to get access to your money. Have you read about the process that happens when your house is SWAT-ted using an anonymous phone call?
Ya, that makes sense... But then how much should I save. It's so volatile that I would give multiple thoughts before saving anything close to a lawyers fee in bitcoin.
I jest but has anyone used Tinder recently? They have interactive choose your own adventure movies now, and then match you with people that made similar choices, instant ice breaker! But actually a decently fun episodic game with moderately high production value.
I’m surprised because Tinder was like the worst of all the mobile-first dating apps from my recollection.
The author makes that point, but follows up with a more important one: this is what you can expect from "the algorithm", whether it's Tinder, Facebook, your email service, or your bank. A few false positives are acceptable collateral damage, and it can be a serious inconvenience or worse. Tinder, he's out 12 bucks, but we've all heard of people with thousands of dollars in Paypal limbo for years.
That's probably a good idea. If you want social media, go to the local mom and pop social medium in town here. Their artisanal activity feed is the best!
More seriously, at this point the options are:
- ethically-challenged social media full of relatives and friends
- unintuitive federated platform with no family but plenty of otherkin furfriends
- being left out of conversation and events you care about
I can't say to most people that choice 1 is excluded without being written off as unrealistic.
I bet he could get back that $12 and more for his time and effort if he went to small claims court in the US. Or tell their card’s issuer to do a chargeback.
How many Tinders is there? In my country they's pretty much only it, none of the other apps have any users (especially in my age range).
I'm also "kinda" banned on Tinder btw - or rather, my account got in an unusable state due to some bug, or an interaction between multiple bugs. The app literally barely works. How pathetic for a company this size. I feel sorry for anyone who has to work on their code base.
In my area, single people also use Hinge, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel, OKCupid, POF, Match... I'm fugly as hell but even I was able to find someone on a non-Tinder platform.
I don't think the author is claiming to be banned from every dating app, and I don't think Match Group connects the profiles of users across its owned platforms, so it's not really relevant that Tinder is owned by Match Group for the purposes of what happened to the author.
Did you read my last line? I did not suggest they do so now, but I do genuinely wonder how long until they do. It's a big issue that they have been allowed to control this market the way they do. It's somewhat tolerable today because they've avoided taking steps to call nsolidate them
. But also only for that reason.
Tinder doesn't control it, but Match as a whole definitely does in a whole lot of markets.
And yes, it'd be a massive problem if Tinder controlled it in that it'd put an unaccountable company in control of whether or not people get access. And one with a history of refusing to engage people who feel wronged.
If Match expands that to its other properties then it becomes a problem even if Tinder alone doesn't dominate.
If that's the case they should ban half of their users who add their instagram handles in their profiles, and more than half of their very attractive users who do the same but make their app more desirable.
I know "don't use social networks made by evil megacorps that make money by trampling all over your privacy and making you addicted" is the kind of advice everyone sagely nods at but no one heeds. But it especially applies to dating apps. Like the proverbial sausages, once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole.
I've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves?
If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
Curious what the algorithm would be to measure "desireableness". Computer vision on the photos (i.e. measure facial symmetry?) plus the number of other people who have expressed interest in you?
I do not think there is any need for trying to figure out how to calculate objective attractiveness. Just use someone’s likes and the value of those likes based on the likes of the person doing the like-ing to infer their relative popularities. Can use frequency and rapidity of messaging as an additional data point also.
They aren't doing anything that complicated. A popular profile is attractive and chooses a very small percentage of others. The profile that person chooses gets a much greater weighting of desirability by being chosen by the popular profile.
The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something.
Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
It works the same way in old fashioned setups. Barring exceptional knowledge of two peoples’ compatibility, someone looking to introduce two people to each other would propose a setup between two similarly attractive, educated, income/wealth level people.
Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too.
A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
While I agree to an extent, the issue I see is that business partners, friends, etc likely know you far better than a site you enter curated information into in order to reach an end goal ever will.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
It is a poor representation, you then meet in person and start from square one, no different than how online always has been. You just have to get your foot in the door with people you would have never otherwise met at all. Its just an additional venue amongst other venues also available.
Yes, absolutely. But its even worse, its a crowdsourced eugenics program that the crowd doesn't know they are contributing to and I believe they would not consent to if they knew or had the choice (aside from not using the app at all).
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
be discerning like a hot person. even if it slows down how often you get matched at all. make it only possibly for consensus attractive people to match with you.
the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
You have an Elo rating, like in chess (or something like that - it depends on the app and they sometimes tweak it, but the gist is that rating is defined recursively: your rating increases if you get liked by high rated people), and you get matched with people within a given range around your rating. When you lose interest they punctually entice you with out-of-range profiles.
Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down.
(Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.)
The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes.
And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works.
I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
yes, exactly, but do notice that these apps all deny still having an ELO rating, but just know that this is just corporate speak no different than an ISP saying "well unlimited isn't a legal term and the experience is still the same", so just assume something similar is happening and act accordingly. act like an attractive person to get exposure to attractive people as long as possible, how do attractive people act? choosy and discerning. don't swipe on everyone, actually play the superficial game because you know who is attractive by consensus, even if it isn't your personal taste.
There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable.
So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content.
If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
You didn't really give anything particular that you've done except that you just create a new profile when you aren't doing well and try different content - which is about the most basic and well known strategy...
So? Its about keeping that profile useful for longer. Getting more attractive matches for longer, having a greater probability that the attractive profile will even see your profile ever.
Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
What if you aren’t conventionally attractive though or have unsymmetrical facial features and are not photogenic. I think your advice does not apply to a lot of people who never get picked on these types of platforms
No, there isn't. Maybe at the very beginning when people were genuinely entranced by this Internet thing and hadn't figured out the best way to milk loneliness for profit, but now it's all rotten and beyond repair.
If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
Pre-pandemic, my social life made dating platforms unnecessary. Now? No house or dinner parties full of acquaintances, no clubs or festivals, everyone's clustered into inner-circle friend groups, my employer moved out of the enormous shared office we were in, and on like that. The dating platforms are more necessary than ever.
So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.
I have a gut feeling that Americans care more about this than Ukrainians themselves. I am no fan of russia and using the "incorrect" spelling kiev instead of kyiv doesn't imply that IMO.
Gut feeling is not the best thing to rely on in these situations, because there is a chance of jumping into a prejudice. It all depends on a large number of factors which you have to understand before making any conclusions
I will not go proactively into explaining why, but I will be happy to provide you with some resources if you are interested to dive in deeper into this topic
Into what topic? I have no problems using Kyiv if that's what Ukranians want. I do not require any other explanation or further discussion. I am just no that politically correct that I care either way.
A couple of years ago Tinder only hid the profile pics with CSS in their web client so I installed a custom css to get the functionality you had to pay for free.
Unfortunately, as I recently got single again I discovered that this wasn't possible anymore.
To be more on topic, Tinder is a very american company. I haven't had personal issues with the company but I think their new features of weird matching from some shitty interactive videos is a sign of classic over-engineering. It seems like the app is "done". Maybe they should focus on creating something else than add useless features that no one seems to use ( at least where I am from ).
You were already shadowbanned permanently, that's why you had 0 likes. There is no difference between that and having no account at all since you cannot interact with any broads. By removing your account, they did you a favour in a sense.
Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
This is the correct answer. Rotate idents. Use a phone emulator if there is a hardware ban. Occasionally a VOIP phone number might work for account authentication, occasionally not though.
But people really forget that is an option to just walk to the nearest phone store and come out with a $20 sim for the month. Useful for way more than just trying to hook up on a dating app you got banned on.
> Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
People keep saying this without realizing a lot of people practically can’t these days. In an increasing number of countries, getting an SMS/phone-capable SIM can not be done without KYC/ID verification. Where I live, for example, you even need to be a resident; all prepaids are data-only.
And before you tell me to find a homeless drug-addict and make them get one for me, it’s not that easy and no one should have to do that in the first place.
Same restrictions apply for SkypeIn and similar VoIP services (which BtW come in a separate prefix that most of these services blacklist anyway).
There’s a reason why those dodgy “receive anyonymous SMS” sites all only provide the same handful of countries.
Exactly. Some places, like the UK you can just order a bunch of SIMs from Amazon. Though who knows if they'll ban you again if you keep signing up from the same wifi and/or if their app fingerprints the same phone. But worst case is throaway cheap phones and pay as you go.
Maybe a slight interest for now but in the future? No one will care. Todays generation is far more sex positive than previous - even if they’re getting laid way less than previous ones due to dating apps.
This is basically the paradigm of any monopolistic or near monopolistic system. You can screw over a small minority without provoking a real response so long as you are appeasing or distracting the majority. Big tech, traditional companies, and even government.
Moreover Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match. The most lucrative customers for matchmaking sites are the most desperate. Even with a lot of competition due to network effects most of the people would always be driven to the most popular sites.
> Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match
An evil data scientist would put almost exclusively users on your screen who you are interested in but they are not interested in you to boost your spendings and would mix a small portion of good bidirectional matches just to make his purpose less obvious. Fortunately evil data scientists does not exist... I mean I definitely wasn't paid to do anything like that. Never.
They don’t even have to be doing that on purpose, if one just optimizes the revenue per user metric he’s effectively doing the same thing even if not on purpose.
This is the paradigm of any system, period. If you work correctly for the most part, the minority which you create negative value for can be offset and establish that system as viable.
This is true for brick and morter/mom and pop businesses. It's true for computer programs. Basically any system. It is not an indicator for a monopoly.
To me this seems to be readily apparent, but I'm getting downvotes without reply. I'm sincerely curious how what I've said can be disagreed with, do you not all use software that gives you a negative value but maybe gives positive value to your managers? Is that tool a monopoly or does my statement just hold true?
Every system that survives, survives because it generates positive value for most people, no? Are you telling me that every business that isn't a monopoly only generates positive value and there's no negative value generated for a minority of customers?
I know it's popular to rail against tech companies, but I don't think there's a world in which we are entitled to access to Tinder or any other company's services.
Tinder does not hold anything even remotely resembling a monopoly (no, Match does not own every dating app, just many of them) on the dating app space, we need to stop throwing that word around so casually. You're diluting the concept by trying to apply it here, which will lessen its impact when a real monopoly comes along and actually tries to control a market (e.g. Microsoft and how it's handling Edge right now).
"or any other company's services" is a bit to wide, the obvious biggest counter example to this would be utilities, everyone is somewhat entitled to access to their power company's services. But going outside utilities, what if I live on an island that is serviced by a single ferry company, shouldn't I be entitled to paying service?
And on the meaning of monopoly, I believe it is fair to describe the "network affect" as a monopoly. The historical example of the US rail comes to mind, the market had several rail companies at the time, but each had monopoly over certain routes, if you wanted to go from place A to place B you maybe only had one choice. The fact that other rail lines existed to places you didn't want to go doesn't mean that it wasn't a monopoly. The same way, those tech companies may have monopoly over the route from person A to person B.
> "or any other company's services" is a bit to wide, the obvious biggest counter example to this would be utilities, everyone is somewhat entitled to access to their power company's services. But going outside utilities, what if I live on an island that is serviced by a single ferry company, shouldn't I be entitled to paying service?
True, your 'island ferry example' is a monopoly. It is also not at all analogous to this situation and Tinder in general.
I'm no expert, but I don't think you understand what the 'network affect (sip)' is, as it does not apply to US Railways at all, and is a relatively new term that only arose in the 1970s. That aside, your example doesn't survive further scrutiny because railways were often the only practical way of moving between two generally public places — cities or towns. With Tinder though, they are providing you access to their own private network of users. Your example is like saying the monorail in disney is a monopoly, but that doesn't make any sense, since it's for transporting you within their own park.
Lastly, Tinder is not the one and only way to meet people. Yes, they have are of the most widely-used companies in the space. But there are others. And, you know, people can still meet in real life — through friends, at work, at activities or interest-based groups. On other social media like Twitter, et al.
How is this an example of monopoly? Are you positing that Tinder is the only way to meet other people? That seems insane. Not only are there are other dating services (yes, I know the parent company of Tinder also owns bumble, but there are still plenty of others), you can also meet people on other social media apps. This is all in addition to something called "real life" –– through friends, your workplace, or getting involved in groups and activities.
FWIW I seldom got any likes on Tinder in USA. I would consider myself in the top 10% of my own country in height and looks but not the same in USA. I realized that US women do not consider me attractive at least based on limited data that a Tinder card shows.
Because Tinder is a woman's menu of fuck buddies and for that they aim at the top fraction of 1%. It's unreal but is where their fantasy is taking them.
I did something different. Moved back to my country, had an 'arranged' marriage and am content now. Work remotely and happy with it too. Funnier issue is that a lot of women of my race in USA did not want to date a first generation immigrant.I do not want to generalize and do social commentary but I hope we hear more comments from many sides of the story. Matchmaking is always going to be Darwinian in the extreme sense but the sense of low confidence it created in me when in USA was quite high.
Where's your Tinder bio in this article? I can't imagine creating a new account and publishing something obscene on any social platform today without being flagged or worse.
That one is the key. Likely some analytics service (Facebook?) has his phone associated with country A (his country of origin), and Tinder sees the registration coming in from country B (new country). That mismatch then triggered some anti-fraud signalling.
People who frequently travel/change residences or have bases in more than one place seem to get banned or blocked by all kinds of services.
Regardless of the intentions of the people designing these systems, I’d argue this is textbook systemic discrimination; you face issues only due to being different enough in the “wrong” way.
I very much doubt a dating service would have this problem, as many people use dating services while traveling even if they wouldn't at home (either because of cheating or just knowing the scene better at home).
While this is true, romance scammers also often try to obscure/spoof their true location - so I can see why it'd be something the Tinder algos would be sensitive to
Just speaking from experience and anecdotes from others. I’m not arguing it makes business-sense. As the OP is arguing, the false positives are probably a small enough percentage of users that companies haven’t found it worthwhile to prioritize. And even if it is, it can be hard to tell from readily available data who’s a false positive in the first place when you don’t have a proper customer support organization.
Or some of the photos he uploaded contained nudity. Or some parts of his profile or some of his photos were considered hate speech under the community guidelines. Or his profile was considered "self-promotional" (e.g. advertising his work or services) or contained addresses or other means of contacting him. We know nothing.
Usually banned users get feedback about being banned. The ones usually not getting feedback are spammers - they are being shadowbanned to avoid spammers being able to deduce their ban cause and circumvent the anti-spam measure.
the tinder app, like pretty much all apps, is constantly calling graph.facebook.com while in use. Because the app doesn't work without Location access, FB gets a lot of rich location data every time the app is in use, but I don't believe the data being sent back can be utilized for fraud detection.
There's also calls out to crash-analytics, firebase, appsflyer and Google Analytics constantly. The app will function if all these services are blocked.
His home country is Ukraine. Financial transactions and those representing Ukraine are considered to be scammers or money launderers by default by many banks and tech.
> Tinder may terminate your account at any time without notice if it believes that you have violated this Agreement. Upon such termination, you will not be entitled to any refund for purchases.
> For residents of the Republic of Korea, except in the case [...], we will without delay notify you of the reason for taking the relevant step.
They openly say in advance that they'll ban users who they think violated their terms, regardless of whether they actually did, keep their money, and never tell them why, except in South Korea where they already know that crap doesn't fly. It's only a matter of time till that gets thrown out by more courts in more countries. Until then, it seems foolish to give them any money.
I would definitely try to file a charge back with my bank, they sometimes exercise their own discretion on egregious cases like this and might be worth a shot.
In this case it's probably billed through the relevant app store, so you'd be starting a fight with either Google or Apple there, which could end up going even more badly than the interaction with Tinder did.
With Paypal and Herz it was quite easy for me: i filed a request, Herz didn't answer, I elevated to paypal to make the decision, Herz didn't care to answer and I got back my money. I guess it's the dame for Tinder, they don't care enough to manually review the chargebacks.
Contacting Apple would likely lead to a refund. No need to go to the trouble of doing a chargeback. This is one of the reasons developers don't like Apple's IAP policies: developers have no control over whether Apple decides to give a refund (or not).
Considering Tinder rather explicitly checks your location to find people around you? I'd assume it wouldn't work, and might even lead to getting banned faster.
I'm not single and haven't been fora long time, but my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps, practically speaking. Even the norms around dating, picking people up in bars, etc. are changing because of these apps, so it's harder to find people in the real world. Not impossible, obviously, but getting banned from Tinder is kind of a big deal. (Also all these apps are owned by the same company, I think it's the Match Group.)
> my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps, practically speaking.
This is definitely not true.
> Even the norms around dating, picking people up in bars, etc. are changing because of these apps
This is true.
> so it's harder to find people in the real world.
This is sort of true.
By not using a dating app, a single person is relegating themselves to how things were pre-app. Some of those pre-app options are less common now, other new ways are more common.
The apps widened the dating door for certain people, specifically for people who are not particularly keen on getting out and meeting people (probably quite a few folks like that on HN) as well as people who are looking to get married asap[1]. That said, for people who get out and do things, meeting people to date is not difficult at all. Getting banned from Tinder for those folks is, at worst, a loss of a time filler activity (swiping).
I will also add that, of the apps, tinder might be one of the worst in terms of quality match ups.
[1] Apps are also good for highly desirable dates since their pool goes from big to biggest, but those folks aren’t really the topic here since they aren’t short on access to dates with or without an app.
Sure. It widened the options for most people. Excellent!
That said, as the post I originally responded to suggested, I don’t think that getting banned from Tinder or any dating app in particular is a “big deal”. Maybe a minor inconvenience for most people, but it’s not like someone who gets banned from Tinder is doomed to a life without dates.
To save someone a click, so there is a study indicating 40% of couples “met online” (so via Twitter, IG, HN, Reddit, gaming, WhatsApp groups, etc., not necessarily dating apps); and then a study specifically about online dating apps where most participants were recruited online (in addition to the usual selection bias) so I didn’t bother checking results. Both are US-centric.
To reiterate, the first paper does not specifically pertain to dating apps, and the methodology of the second article is flawed (you want to know whether people meet online, so you ask people of whom >50% you found online, great technique)—so it might save someone who cares about that kind of stuff a click (a few clicks actually, since the methodology is buried in a separate article). If you don’t fall into that category, feel free to move along.
And I don’t know the author of the second article personally, but if I did of course I would point out an issue with their data.
It's an EXPLICIT footnote! See "Note; Here [is the report's] metholodgy."
> Methodology of the second article is flawed (you want to know whether people meet online, so you ask people online, great technique)
The methodology goes into statistical techniques to control for biases (e.g. language, gender identity, sampling method, etc.) See Methodology > Weighting about what they did with their ~5k responses.
1st click to go to the article, ctrl+f to find methodology, 2nd click to go to methodology. See 6000+ people recruited via web. The rest seem to amount to fewer than that. Am I the one being difficult?
Dating exclusively by apps might be reality for the younger US populations.
There was a thread on Reddit a few months ago where people were asking bad places for men to approach women. It was basically
Work
School
Gym
Church
Any place you go for hobby
Public transport
Shops
Bars
Anywhere outside at night
Parks
The consensus was basically the women on this Reddit thread don't want men approaching them in any way whatsoever that isnt a dating app. All alternative s were creepy. Now Reddit is mostly young and American, so who knows.
I don’t think that is correct. I’m in London and have an American girlfriend. We met and got together the good old fashioned way. Getting pissed at a pub together.
No offense, but bullshit. I've personally never once in my life used a single dating app and have met plenty of dates and love interests the old fashioned way, by interacting with them in the real world after random encounters (bars, events etc) or through circles of friends. Most of the people I know met their own love interests in the same way. I don't live in some backward country with little app use either. What a sad existence it would be to have something as fundamental as one's romantic life depend on a shitty, arbitrary and parasitic data collecting app that feels it has the right to treat its users like cash cattle with no recourse for any unfair ToS decision it makes. Grotesque.
> If over 50% of people (and growing) say their relationship started on OLD, it's easy to say you're limiting your options by not participating
A does not in any way imply B. I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
> I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
You're assuming that a non-trivial number of people who use OLD aren't exclusive to OLD. Who's taking issue with that?
OTOH, saying that one's set of available dates is unchanged by foregoing OLD is deeply flawed. You even mention "physical meatspace" which OLD directly overcomes.
If over 50% of people (and growing) say their relationship started on OLD [...]
I just skimmed the article, but it seems to say that even among the youngest age group only 48% have used dating apps and only 17% were in resulting relationship.
While I'm not a big fan of Tinder, monetizing romantic/sexual interest is nothing new. In fact, it's historically been the norm rather than the exception. The "Monetization & Defenestration" approach may not have been done through a shitty app, but a shitty date can you get kicked out of a bar, a concert, a restaurant, a nightclub, etc. for no reason and with no recourse for your money back even if you've done nothing wrong. I don't say this to justify these acts, but to acknowledge that they exist. While I hope OP fights the charges, $20 is a small sum to lose in comparison to a $200 concert ticket.
You'd be surprised with what's perceived as unaffordable for many "poor" college students and early-career professionals, many of whom are helped by student loan money and the Bank of Mom & Dad. In my experience, bad financial decisions in the pursuit of lust isn't one of them.
if you're in north America, take heart that its not your fault! The American dating market is absolute garbage.
I've been traveling around the world the last few years and have had no problems finding casual hookups and longer term relationships. I'm currently dating a beautiful Colombiana. I would have thought she was out of my league if I was still living in the US.
People can't handle truth and I'd rather not be downvoted to oblivion.
Suffice to say, the american dating market is heavily geared towards attractive white men over 6 ft tall. They better also be a millionaire if you're in the bay area.
I'd suggest traveling like I have to southeast Asia, Europe and latin America for extended periods of time and see for yourself.
> Suffice to say, the american dating market is heavily geared towards attractive white men over 6 ft tall. They better also be a millionaire if you're in the bay area.
haha thats probably very true. I'd say don't give up!. travel as well, it'll enrich your life and make your more interesting to that special someone when you finally meet her. I wouldn't be surprised if you meet her in your travels.
What you're actually saying is that you are unable to compete in the American dating market, and so you're moving to other less competitive dating markets where you might be more highly valued. Obviously since this is HN we can't consider the female perspective, but if we consider the female perspective, the American dating market is probably pretty good because it offers a great number of attractive white men over 6 ft tall.
It's not specific to the USA, in France the situation is the same, most of the young women want the 'alpha male' so if you're not one, you have to wait until you're older..
It made being young much less pleasant than it ought to be, plus it means that we were a bit old when we had children..
That’s interesting. I wonder how much that applies to South Asians though. I think most of the dating advice in these threads is tailored towards white people who have different experiences from other POC.
I am south asian (srilankan american) so my advice is comming from the perspective of a person of color.
The best places for dating for a south asian male would be southeast asia, turkey and latin america. White guys definitely have an advantage when going after women that specifically want a foreigner. We're able to get the ones that would otherwise prefer to date within their own country.
I had some success in europe but it was hit or miss. I'd say it was a pretty neutral experience, I felt like the deck wasn't stacked for or against me on average. latin america on the other hand was where I had my best prospects.
In my experience, latinas in colombia love the way we look. If I asked 10 women on a date, I'd easily get at least 8 to say yes and show up while white foreigners I met in medellin would frequently complain that colombians were flakey and prone to cancel at the last minuite. The exact kind of behavior I'd get from white women in america. These days I have one that I absolutely adore so I'm off the dating market but every day I'm shocked that I have her because living in america drove into my head that someone as smart and beautiful as her was completely out of my league..
From my experience (being a lesbian myself), I found my fiancé on a discord server, and most of our friends also found their partners either through LGBT bars, LGBT online communities, or through art communities, tumblr, deviantart, etc ^^
Yeah, there are some unique wrinkles for me. I do like Discord a lot, actually. (I used to spend a lot of time on IRC so...) Most of the things I like, the Discords tend to skew pretty young for my dating comfort, since one issue I have is women who want therapists/mothers instead of a partner.
The other is that I work in politics plus have a politically-diverse family and so I would need a partner who is comfortable being around and loving people who disagree with them politically. Many LGBT people in queer nerd spaces like Tumblr, fandom spaces, art spaces, etc. prefer to live in a political filter bubble (I'm not judging if it's for mental health reasons; I think people have the right to associate with whomever they want), and that's not compatible with my life direction or values.
Being a statistical minority within a statistical minority is exhausting sometimes. I'm super happy you and your fiancee found each other, though! I hope you have a wonderful wedding and many happy years together.
And no LGBT bars in my area. I am NOT a big city person. I gave it the good old college try. I tried multiple countries and coasts, even, but nope. I'm a small city person. I like my hometown. It's dope and the cost of living is low.
Yeah. I'm off the "market" for 15+ years, but I really worry when I read about normal-seeming 20 year olds (or even younger) who met their partners on Tinder. It's something that's going to affect young people whether they take part in it themselves or not. Ruthless markets in relationships probably aren't going to make them happy.
> my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps
I understand why so many people believe this. But pro tip: if you want to opt out of dating apps, the key is to learn the skill of asking for what you want.
Ask the cute person at the coffee shop if you can have their number. Ask the person who's number you got out for a date. Ask the person you're on a date with if they want to kiss, etc. There is an art to successfully asking for things, and you have to get comfortable with people sometimes saying no, but the key really is that simple: just ask!
It's actually easier in real life to get a date with someone you find interesting, because you're not limited by who the algorithm decides to show your profile to, you're only limited by your willingness to ask.
Picking up dates in real life is not only still completely doable, but probably easier these days due to the sheer lack of competition from men who just have no idea how to do it.
My thoughts exactly. It’s like some of these people have never gone out on weekends or even had a chat with a woman randomly at the gym, supermarket, at cafe, out for a walk. What’s the problem? Just say hi and be normal. If she doesn’t seem interested, smile and move on!
"Take their money and run" is one of those standard operating practices in big tech that I think obviously needs legislation to curb. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere; whether its movies on iTunes, books on Kindle, or costumes in Fortnite. If you break their ToS, they're allowed to cancel your account, without recourse, and take away all the content you purchased. Its especially egregious in gaming, where a false accusation of cheating can cause your account to disappear; and because there's a "guilty until proven guilty" stigma against cheating, by-and-large gaming company support teams will not help. They'll auto-ban accounts, hardware signatures, even IP addresses.
Content providers should have the right to cease service to customers who don't abide by their terms. I don't feel that's unreasonable. But, consumers need recourse for the monetary investment. I'd strongly support a law worded something like: Digital service providers who sell transactional content & goods must either (1) offer the goods in an exportable, unencumbered, similarly accessible & functional format, or (2) at the time of service-provider initiated account termination, for any reason, reimburse the user for the full cost of goods purchased.
Many companies would argue: "we don't have the money anymore, we had to pay rights holders." I'd respond, that sounds like a You problem, and maybe you should consider clause (1). "The rights holders won't go for it"; again, that's a You problem. Work it out, or lose money; that's what consumer protection laws are for. They're not to protect your revenue streams.
Some gaming companies would be especially hurt by this, because of the prevalence of blank-check anticheat enforcement and their general inability to meet clause (1) due to the latest Fortnite cosmetic not really being "equally functional" outside the context of Fortnite. Well, I'd first respond: Your reliance on unjust business operating practices is a You problem. But more critically: maybe this will be the kick in the butt these companies need to invest more heavily into more accurate & functional anti-cheat, better customer support, and even new innovative revenue models. I've long felt that gaming has underutilized subscription services, and preyed too heavily on "free to play, pay $100 for the cool stuff later". Battle passes are kind of like a subscription service, and if the terms & expectations of the purchase are rephrased to be more service-like, rather than transactional-like, its reasonable to me that those should escape the law.
The best argument against a law like this is: consumers can, of course, break a company's terms at any time they wish. Most choose not to. But if they wanted to, the purchases with a content provider become something like a bank account, which they can utilize as they wish for as long as they wish, then get a full refund. Response: First, I think this should drive companies to clause (1). There's an out; you just need to work with the rights holders and accept that piracy will happen whether or not you try to control it. Second, again I think it comes back to mixing metaphors; Fortnite sells Goods, but they're only functional within the context of the Fortnite Service. Maybe they should sell the Service, and include the Goods. Third, this is a gap that insurance feels well-suited to help cover. Fourth, I think this would drive more companies to better KYC, so if anyone pulls this, at least they can only pull it once. That's not a bad thing.
The point should be to align what customers expect with what providers sell. If Netflix cancels your account, it sucks; but you don't feel slighted. It was a service; you understood that if you stopped paying, the service goes away. In comparison, the goods Apple sells (Apps, Movies, Books, etc) feel a lot more like going to the DVD isle in Best Buy; and its not ok that c...
What you don't seem to realize here is that various app stores, etc almost never sell you any content. They sell you a temporary revokable right to access content. It's like a movie theater ticket, with an added bonus of ushers being paranoid assholes that could kick you out any moment without a reason. You don't own the movie, you can just watch it, if you're lucky. If you think that service isn't worth the price - tell them that, loudly, and use other options. But as long as millions of people are ok with it, they're not going to change - they have no reason to. If people treat temporary right to peek at the goods as goods being sold to them - why not enjoy it?
Really? When I buy a steam game, the big green button says “purchase”, not “receive a temporarily revocable right to access”.
It’s the digital age. My digital items are my possessions. This dichotomy in your head between the “real” and the “digital” doesn’t exist for the younger generation. There are few alternatives to these large tech companies. As I’ve gotten older I’ve wisened up and I buy DRM-free digital goods where possible (because of people who think like you, that big corporations need to be protected from the little people and not the other way around)… but before I got wise, I built up quite a large steam, Apple Books, and Kindle library (all of which call what we are doing “purchasing”… heads they win tails we lose).
"It’s the digital age. My digital items are my possessions. This dichotomy in your head between the “real” and the “digital” doesn’t exist for the younger generation."
That's a weird way to put it. It may not exist "for" someone, but as you seem to acknowledge, it exists "for" numerous corporations and legal systems which even those someones are subject to. I thought this was the primary purpose of NFTs. An NFT physically cannot be revoked without the permission (coerced or otherwise) of the holder, or a fundamental problem in encryption.
And just so other people don't get confused by this pretty misleading hyperbole:
" The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. "
No judge is going to weigh what the "buy" button omits over what the EULA actually states. If anyone has an example of a digital content service with an EULA that DOESN'T contain this kind of verbiage I would be fascinated to see it.
> No judge is going to weigh what the "buy" button omits over what the EULA actually states.
Right, but that's my point (as the original poster). 100%, a judge should say "terms are terms, company is in the right"; we need new laws to protect consumers. By and large, consumers don't understand how digital is different; that it isn't ownership (in fact, arguably, consumers don't even understand that when they buy a bluray, that also isn't ownership in a legal sense; but it is ownership in common parlance). Whether these service providers would still see such success, if they did, is an unknown quantity; they probably would, but it can't be known. What is known is that consumers are (rarely) being shafted, with no recourse, because they agreed to something they didn't understand; it doesn't occur to most people that Apple even has the power to ban accounts, and take all their content with it.
Counter-argument: "Well, people should read the EULAs and understand it". Oof. First: the EULA may say "we have the right to revoke access" but that means nothing without the context of how, why, and how often it happens. These companies have not demonstrated even the BASIC DECENCY to EXPLAIN THEMSELVES when they ban users, let alone publish reasonable information about how often it happens. The statements in the EULA are useless without this context, because it enables savvy consumers to compare their statements with their own risk profile to make informed decisions. But, second: arguing this point is basically saying "dumb people deserve to be preyed on by international gigacorporations". Most people don't understand what this language means; in many cases, it seems to be written specifically so it can't be understood without a law degree.
Counter-argument: "Account termination & content revocation is rare, so whatever." Well, this point defeats itself, but think about it this way: If its so rare, then why not protect consumers? Companies will oppose it, of course, but they're arguing from the ground that its so rare that enforcement of this law wouldn't hurt them. If they hurt consumers, it'll hurt them. If they don't, it won't.
The narrative is getting twisted here; its not that consumers should have "irrevocable ownership" over a digital good you buy on, for example, Steam. Well, the NFT crowd would say you should, but let's ignore them. The assertion is: there should be fair and equitable recourse for when a service provider decides to revoke your access to the service which distributes the content you purchased. That recourse would ideally be met by simply unshackling the content from the service provider; the ability to play Steam games without being connected to Steam, for example. However, short of that, reimbursement is fair. It would absolutely hurt companies in this day and age of "terminate accounts for any reason, sometimes no reason, whatever the system decides" but THAT'S THE POINT. Companies only speak money. The point is to make termination hurt them, so they're forced to think more critically about how & why they terminate.
The big green button lies. They are trying to bend the language to mean things that it legally doesn't mean. Just as they call unauthorized distribution of content "piracy" or "theft" (it's neither), they call a temporary revokable permission to access their content "purchase". And if you click that button, you agree with it knowingly. When it bites you in the nether regions, they'll remind you that was exactly what you paid the money for. Nobody forced you to pay money for that, you did it voluntarily. You are the one that gave them all the money to build this system.
I understand that you may value digital goods. I have some I value too. You just need to understand that just as with physical goods, even more with digital ones - if you don't control it, you haven't bought it. If somebody could just come and take your car, any time for any reason, you haven't bought a car. If somebody can just come and take your game anytime for any reason - you haven't bought a game. You bought a ticket to play it, maybe, but that's wholly other business.
I understand this well enough to at least keep offline backups of my paid content libraries (because I’m older and can afford the expense). Yeah, because of DRM it may be troublesome to access the content if my account was banned… but it gives me more ground to stand on (with our current unjust laws, both in court and in the court of public opinion) if I only claim that the content I already downloaded should still be accessible.
Your car analogy is interesting… If your car was paid off but got repossessed later because you said something nasty about the dealership on a forum, that would be a gross miscarriage of justice, even if they buried a clause deep in their sale terms granting themselves such an unconscionable right.
What part do you see as bullshit? Theater tickets and premium video channels like HBO are long-standing examples of the model. There are some services that act more like purchases, with Amazon video being a big example. But it seems to me that the vast majority of video and music content today is being sold on the access model, not the purchase model.
It doesn't matter if you receive a license and not ownership of a physical good or copyright, it still comes down to contract law. If the company you are buying the license from revokes it, and doesn't uphold their side of the contract you can sue them for breach of contract. A contract term that says they can revoke the license at any time for no reason, without refund is unconscionable and unenforceable. Basically they need to show a judge that you acted maliciously or otherwise violated the contract, or they need to provide a refund.
Contract law allows very wide variety of contracts, and Apple/Google/whatevs have enough expensive lawyers to write the contract that means "you have rights to whatever we allow you and we can revoke it any time we want without any recourse to you". As for the judge - the economics of going to the judge - which would cost you four figures just to start, five to six if you want any real results - is not exactly in your favor. They have lawyers on retainer, you have a day job which pays way less than any single one of those lawyers costs.
Just because they are a big company doesn't mean everything they do is legal. The legal system exists exactly to stop this kind of behavior. You can go to small claims for under $100 out of pocket, and you generally get these fees reimbursed if you win. In many cases just filing a lawsuit is enough to get them to settle and provide a refund, because they would spend more money sending someone to court(and probably lose anyways).
As someone with an enormous personal paid content library, I absolutely agree legislation is needed here.
Also randomized lootboxes should be subject to gambling laws, or at least regulated such that you can’t get duplicates or something reasonable like that.
On further thought, banning duplicates is just begging for trouble. It's a loophole you can drive a truck through. Just append a random throwaway property to every item and bam, "unique".
So yeah, regulate it as gambling. Don't let them advertise to minors. Don't allow them to knowingly let minors participate.
if [Tinder] *believes* that you have violated this Agreement
Belief and 'thinking' are funny things. They imply human judgement was involved in the process. Instead what most people seem to be complaining about are the egregious use of heuristics to do large scale account maintenance without retaining staff (humans) to make judgements on the particulars of each case.
Until AIs win person-hood, there is no 'thinking' involved in this process. But I wonder if there is any case history on challenging the terminology used to describe these situations.
I feel that these systems should be using something more akin to applitools, which flags discrepancies between real and expected, and then a human rejects or accepts the report on a line item basis. You can still screw up and click yes when you meant no, but at least you have a chance at getting a human involved before doing anything dire.
Given the constant commodization of data science, I wonder how long it will take till there is a dating app that really knows you well, while keeping privacy in tact. And matches people with the goal to actually match properly.
Tinder, and every dating app I know out there, is directly incentivized to _not_ match properly, but rather to keep you on the app as long as possible.
As long as the bottom line is directly influenced by the amount of unmatched users, the dating app will not work with you, but rather against you.
I think you've answered your own question: probably never. Because whatever company would apply said commoditized data science would have the same incentives as Tinder and the rest.
So except for some "open source" or otherwise "community-driven" effort, I don't think we'll ever see it.
The issue with setting this up in your garage is that for such an app to work, you need to have many users. And to have many users, you have to spend cash on marketing, etc. So you have to be able to get that cash back somehow, and then some, for your efforts.
Imagine if a company had this business idea: If you get married to someone we introduce to you, you pay us 10000 USD. Else you pay us nothing. Would not that raise the bar?
It would really encourage people not looking for marriage to use the app for dating, since their use would be free. It would, of course, also result in the site taking steps to eliminate them, maybe even tolerating false positives. In the end would it produce good results? Dunno.
(Also would add legal complications most dating sites, regardless of model, don't deal with because of the Statute of Frauds in relation to contracts in consideration of marriage.)
Some of the modern Indian dating apps seem to follow this approach and do quite well. It’s likely more accepted there because of the tradition of arranged marriages. Western audiences might find it strange.
Yep. And Tinder seemed so useful just a few years ago. More recently, perhaps some management there has got together and changed to exactly the sort of strategy you speak of. I barely use it anymore.
But back in the golden days of Tinder... (say 7-8 years ago or so-- 2014ish) Tinder worked really well to deliver many matches. These days... very few matches compared to Bumble or Hinge for example.
I believe that is the only way indeed. Though another commenter noted that these kinds of apps are heavily dependent on a network to work.
Perhaps it can be an extension on Mastodon somewhere in the future.
Matchmaking is such a generic problem anyway. Friends, Business relations, Vacancies, Partners, Sex buddies. We'll get there, I believe.
It has always been like that on Tinder. My phone number can't create a new account for example (never receive the confirmation code). That's called shadowban in the case of OP. Bumble started doing the same practices a year ago (which makes sense as they have the same founder)
But they are not 100% wrong, Tinder is not here to make people meet each other. They are here to make money and people don't pay because they get more matches, they pay because they are frustrated. Tinder needs a way to keep girls active on the platform, and for that to works they have to prevent boys to have a negative behavior. That's why they shadowban guys easily, as soon as they detect non standard behavior they shadowban, people keep seeing profile and keep paying. Girls don't see those profiles and have a better experience overall and stays longer, which makes guys stays longer because FOMO of matching the one.
This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
EDIT: And FYI if you want to exit shadowban on Tinder, it is pretty well documented on r/SwipeHelper, you need to change: phone, phone number, Facebook account, Credit card, pictures and don't login from the same IP
The founder of Bumble is one of the founders of Tinder. But others founders of Tinder are not founders of Bumble, this is true. Also we could argue that Bumble has two founders, but this is insignificant anyway
As a woman, Tinder is fine if you wanna find a fuck buddy and don’t take it seriously. I see a lot of people (men and women) get wrapped up in the swipe game and that’s really not how it works. You can’t take anything that happens on that platform personally.
Unfortunately, rule #1 on tinder is “be physically attractive”. If you want tinder to work for you consistently as a man, get your personal hygiene in order and hit the gym. That’s the main reason I swipe left; well, that and conservative politics.
> Women can have just as much of a hard time as men, especially for certain ethnicities.
Can't find the study, but black women are actually having a tougher time than all others women to get matches on dating apps. But this is still nothing compared to the attention guys get
Also below 15% body fat and quite high income will help. Women expectations are completely unrealistic these days. Their desire went to the global sexual market. Their hypergamy and narcissism is stimulated to no end.
It's funny how raw red pill truths get downvoted here. Some seem to prefer to send technical brutal honesty about the current state of sexual market under the rug.
Maybe thinking about sexuality as a market is your first problem. If you’re not physically attractive, just don’t use Tinder; it’s not the only way to find someone to date.
Shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who blames “women” as a whole for his problems would have a hard time meeting women.
And as a corollary, I’ve dated super hot guys before and frankly a lot of them have a hard time with relationships because it was so easy for them to hook up when they were younger they don’t know how to put the effort in to make someone feel desired.
I'm not asking anyone about my case not seeking advice as I do great already in both online and offline. You seem in a hurry to assume other people's position and problems and providing unrequested advice that only validate your assumptions. Have you ever observed that in yourself?
Regarding to that corollary, you're assuming top guys even want to invest in relationships in the first place. Not the case of many I know. The strategy is more like: enjoy the party until one of the girls is so mindblowing feminine and submissive and good person that is worth giving a chance to some investing.
I find your interest in my sexual life as inappropriate as distracting while I'm learning this new shibari binding as my main sub girl is asking me to use it on her this weekend. Oh god, how she loves when I use rope on her. What were you saying?
This is only really true in north america (especially if you're of Indian descent). Women have much more realistic expectations once you get out of that cesspit
Enjoy while it lasts because social media will spread their ambitions. In any case, woman desire for fit men is culturally universal so all should hit the gym and diet for its own good. Hard. Good luck making your game to the next level!
too true, I once had a conversation with a friend of mine. She was saying to just use tinder. As we were about to get in the car, I told her: I'll do nothing but swipe till we get there. if I get a match, I'll pay for lunch when we arrive, otherwise you pay.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men
There's lots of common 'knowledge' in social psychology including studies done by serious reputable researchers that turns out to not be so. This is a big enough issue that it's termed the "replication crisis". So, yes, maybe. Maybe not.
My original claim is that something like that was true and what someone else was referring to and I gave you a lazy link, and you complained about the guys terrible methodology and replication. I told you that there are dozens of studies and data analyses (some are on huge data sets [1]) out there and your response is that oh no they have to be quality. That's a goalpost move from "this is bad" to "all those (that I haven't even seen) are bad."
> This isn't even close to the best we've got.
If you've got that then show me and I'll have a look. Until then I'm going with that studies I've seen that all seem to say roughly the same thing (despite widely varying sample sizes and quality of methodology)
> Until then I'm going with that studies I've seen that all seem to say roughly the same thing (despite widely varying sample sizes and quality of methodology)
There are none with acceptable sizes. You're just talking.
So, this guy set up a fake profile and interviewed women who matched with him, without disclosing he was doing research? Ethics aside, he doesn't discuss his methodology at all. How did these interviews turn into a Gini curve? How could they, without some heroic statistical assumptions?
It's been studied a lot, I just threw that up as example since it was posted here a couple of days ago. Here's one of OKCupid's own studies [1]. You can search for others that confirm the same thing over and over again.
That study shows the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The third figure shows that the vast majority of women's messages go to men they rate as less than 4/5 attractive. The last figure shows that even the least attractive men still got replies to their messages 22% of the time.
I guess because in real life, even if you dont look super attractive, you can still charm partners by the way you talk and act. You can be funny, come across as trustworthy etc.
Yes, this. If you’re trying to find a partner on a platform where matches are determined solely by physical attraction, you’re gonna have a hard time if you’re not physically attractive. Know what Tinder is, and be self-aware enough to know if it’s not for you.
The attractive types will also have it difficult. The matches will likely be attractive physically, but that hardly guarantees a true match. I know lots of attractive people that struggle to find a partner (and instead move from one one night stand to another). I think at some point it must get pretty depressing and toxic.
That’s it’s whole own thing; people who are incredibly attractive can move on really quick because they know they can get something else. Then they hit their 30s and that all dries up, and they don’t know how to have a real relationship that lasts longer than a few months.
Obviously not everyone who is hot is this way, but it’s one of the “types” you’ll find if you date around a lot.
Not the OP, but attraction is a complicated, multi-dimensional beast and the unfortunate thing about Tinder and similar apps is that they reduce all of this to a 2D, possibly doctored, photo of the user.
In real life, people who do not look gorgeous can still sweep you off your feet by their smile, laughter, gestures, tone of voice, scent, the way they move, talk, react, fall into daydream...
Of all my previous lovers, ending with my wife of 16 years, I wouldn't choose a single one based just on a picture. But I was strongly attracted to all of them in real life.
Human magic cannot really be distilled into an algorithmic system. Not yet, anyway.
I would disagree with this. You don't have to be that attractive. Average will do fine. Just make them laugh. I am from Europe and Tinder works pretty good (at least for me) and I am just an ordinary dude.
Also, don't stop just with Tinder. Use Bumble, happn, OkCupid, Badoo. I've got dates from all of these.
I was saying it is not 100% wrong to ban people. The fact that the banned people are still paying and dont get their money back clearly look like fraud (even if this is more complex, as Tinder is very smart about how they communicate, they never make you pay to get matches, they make you pay to be able to like more).
But yeah Match group is a fraud company, I've wrote some posts on the topic in the past
> This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
EDIT: It seems I misunderstood this statement. I read it as "If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, [not using twitter] used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now"
I don't understand your reasoning here. You're suggesting that tinder is a vital service for some aspect of life now(I agree, unfortunately), but also saying it's not a problem with big tech? This kind of thing is exactly why big tech needs to be regulated.
Is Bumble big tech ? No, still they have the same tactics than Tinder.
I'm not saying there is no problem (I have wrote several article criticizing Match group and the app dating market), I'm just saying this has nothing to do with big Tech. Any dating app (and some do) can do the same as Tinder
I'm not familiar with Bumble (I've never used Tinder either). My point is if you are controlling access to "the market" then a user being excluded could be a real disadvantage, and should be treated with care.
They stated " If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.", which if I understand them correctly means that it's hard to meet people without it. Perhaps you don't need to meet anyone, but for someone who does I don't think it's that absurd.
That’s a deep question about the semantics of “basic need”, and highly subjective. I do not think that reproduction is a basic need of the individual in ordinary language, but it may be deemed a basic, I.e. survival, need of the species or tribe
Banning + refund for the remainder credit, sure. Scummy, but sure. Shadow banning, taking peoples money while they still think they get a service, not even banning at the end of the billing cycle, without giving notice, nah, that’s definitely fraud.
It is if they silo you off without notifying you and make sure no one else can see you and keep taking your money. Now I don't know if tender is doing that provably, but that was the thesis.
Colloquially and technically "ban" and "shadowban" are different things; I have no idea what happened in OP case but "shadowban" means that you leave someone in a system but silently block all of their interactions.
e.g. ban: you try to log into HN and it gives you a message: "You can't log in, you are banned"
shadowban: you log in to HN with your account, you post comments and vote on stories but unknown to you nobody else on HN can see this. Eventually you start to wonder why you never get replies anymore.
It's definitely an ethical issue if you are doing the latter without telling someone, and additionally charging them for the service you aren't providing.
With a dating app it might be hard to tell for a while; how are you to know that you aren't getting any replies/engagement because of the way such sites work, or because the people you contacted never saw the likes/messages/whatever.
>This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder,
As I said in my comment up-post, Tinder has a near-absolute monopoly in my area. If you're not on Tinder you basically don't exist on the local dating market.
OK, I've been married for a long time and never had any luck with any dating service before that, but I don't think that's necessarily as true as you think
You're within 2-3 degrees of separation of dozens or hundreds of single people you can date, so if you just start putting the word out among your friends, family, etc I think they'll start introducing you to people
This is presented as a problem with "big tech", but I don't think most people would consider Tinder (Match Group) to be big tech? Instead, this kind of problem where you get flagged with no explanation or recourse seems to be common to consumer tech of all but the smallest scale. It's just very expensive to provide high quality individual support.
maybe making money with a product that you cannot support ought to be regulated.
i too grew up with oss-licences that tell me i'm on my own and thats kind ok, but i don't want to live in a world were commercial products are labeled "not fit for any purpose. use at your own risk"
Scale/expense is a reasonable excuse when the services are free. Not when you're paying.
It's a "Big Tech" problem. Lots of people have experienced getting randomly banned from services with no obvious cause, and no way to get any resolution. I'm banned from AirBNB for example. No clue why and there was nothing that could have triggered it, because I hadn't used the service for like over six months when the ban happened, there were no disputes or other problems with hosts and my last host review had been glowing. They didn't even tell me it'd occurred, but they had been sending emails thanking me for being a part of the "community" just weeks before. Then I tried to log in, got a verification screen, entered the code and was told the account was terminated. Filed an appeal, got no useful response and that was the end of it.
If it was a free service I'd understand, but I've paid good money to AirBNB over the years. If you pay you expect to be treated like a customer, not an enemy, but SV tech firms have all copied the culture of Facebook/Twitter/Google. They seem to forget that when people give money they expect some sort of customer relationship as a consequence.
My 2¢; OP should do a charge-back. If anything bots don't do chargebacks.
While you have no recourse in free services, you do when you pay with a credit card. Likewise the CC will still charge Tinder the processing fee of 1%-3%, so every chargeback is not only revenue lost but also a cost.
Unfortunately all that advice is void if OP used a debit card.
Card disputes are mediated by the card networks and will absolutely work on debit cards - in this case it’s a clear example of paying for a product and not receiving it so it should be an open & shut case.
Chargebacks on credit cards may have more protection granted by the banks or the law, but the basic level of disputing a transaction is available even to debit cards.
Pretty sure you can still do a chargeback with a debit card if the purchase was made “on credit” as all online purchases are.
But wanted to add another thing, chargebacks are for cases of fraud, so the cc network actually charges the retailer a not insignificant fee for each chargeback, it’s why BigTech will shutdown your account if you do a chargeback, bec 9/10 times if it’s on your account you did mean to spend that money you just forgot about it. If you didn’t you better be ready to prove it and still burn the account that you chargeback on (i.e. lose your gmail account bec someone compromised your account and bought stuff on android)
Maybe don't refer to women as "girls"? Unless you are seeking romance with girls. Either way, I'm suspicious already and can see why a service intended to match adults with other adults (i.e., not girls) would be creeped out by you.
the only time I heard people want 'girls' less infantilized was in professional contexts, this is not a professional context and is an equivalent colloquialism across genders. unit test passed.
Have you heard of "cultural differences"? Author is from Kiev. Now, I'm not Ukrainian, but in Polish refering to "women" as "dziewczyna" not "kobieta" in romantic setting would not be any weird.
That's not particularly unique to Ukrainian culture by any stretch of the imagination. Popular global culture, particularly western culture, typically shares that canard.
It’s common colloquial language. You wouldn’t call your coworkers “girls” in a meeting. But you could reasonably say you’re dating “this girl I met while hiking the Appalachian Trail” and it’s normative.
Just head over to reveddit.com and look at a few controversial subreddits without the shadow-banning. It's truly terrifying to see the true scale of censorship and ghost-banning in big tech right now.
Oh man, I have been banned and shadowbanned from a ton of subs! Outright banned from SandersForPresident, politics, WhitePeopleTwitter, BlackPeopleTwitter, LateStageCapitalism, pics, mildlyinfuriating, and several others.
For some, I was calling out the echo-chamber of the whole place, those are the politics ones. Oh, and calling out a troll account.
I got banned from a number of subs for making comments documenting the bot-like behavior of karma farming accounts. Accounts with millions of karma, reposting low-quality content as if it's organic.
And it looks like I just got banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts for calling out a troll for their behavior.
reddit really is a pathetic place for anything other than hobby subs with about 150k members or less.
---
EDIT: I used reveddit and saw just how much of the posts I make are invisible. Not just by getting shadowbanned by hack mods on popular subs, but by other comments and submissions getting deleted for one reason or another. It's absolutely absurd.
As OP says - "It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application or a messenger that you use on a daily basis"?
How do we know they didn't violate the terms of service or community guidelines? It's entirely possible to do so simply by uploading photos and filling out your profile. Since they provide neither, it's impossible to tell whether the decision is justified or not. There are plenty of things I can think of that they could have done that would have required zero interactions but been in violation of the community guidelines[0].
Also I have no idea who this person is, their about page is empty and Google results are ambiguous at best, so I have no reason to trust their account of what happened.
The point about big tech seems tangential and isn't exactly a novel insight. As for this: "Of course, they cannot name you the reason as this could be later used against them and their proprietary algorithm. How could they?" This is not a problem with "big tech" but with lack of transparency and is a consumer protection issue. The GDPR for example requires automated rulings to offer the option to appeal and have the ruling be reviewed by a human. It would be trivial to change the law so consumers would have the right to be told which part of the ToS they allegedly violated if a contract is terminated over a ToS violation. But there is nothing about this problem that is unique to "big tech".
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadI had similar experiences with Tinder - I think their support team just bans people when they don't want to deal with them - without checking the account at all.
What the problem is is that he got banned without being told why.
* Some user reported his account as "fake" or otherwise "inappropriate"
* The algorithm thought he faked his position
Neither one requires any intentional wrongdoing. It is what it is.
Both of these are, at best, a cause for concern.
But they can't decide they want the money but don't want to provide a service. I'm surprised to see comments defending this.
Regarding banks: get some Bitcoin just in case, as it can be much worse when banks ban you.
Banks ban you for joke comments in bank transfers or anything that alludes to drugs, sex work or gambling. Or for transferring remittances to your parents in a way some algorithm deemed to be "structuring" or "money laundering for terrorists".
PayPal bans you for whatever the fuck their AI decided on a whim.
I've been on HN for over eight and a half years now and help requests or complaint blog posts are routine here. One thing that's common is support staff that is either unreachable (Google) or doesn't have any freedom to reverse AI-caused bans / only is allowed to post canned responses (everyone else). The only way to get issues with big tech resolved these days is to raise a stink here on HN, even Twitter shitstorms seem to fly under the radar more and more.
Surely it must be possible to exercise a wee bit of self control and not be an edgelord in every aspect of one's life?
I jest but has anyone used Tinder recently? They have interactive choose your own adventure movies now, and then match you with people that made similar choices, instant ice breaker! But actually a decently fun episodic game with moderately high production value.
I’m surprised because Tinder was like the worst of all the mobile-first dating apps from my recollection.
Evergreen xkcd: https://xkcd.com/743/
More seriously, at this point the options are:
I can't say to most people that choice 1 is excluded without being written off as unrealistic.I'm also "kinda" banned on Tinder btw - or rather, my account got in an unusable state due to some bug, or an interaction between multiple bugs. The app literally barely works. How pathetic for a company this size. I feel sorry for anyone who has to work on their code base.
In my area, single people also use Hinge, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel, OKCupid, POF, Match... I'm fugly as hell but even I was able to find someone on a non-Tinder platform.
So while they may be options in some market, I'd be curious how long before they share bans between services.
I don't think that's true. Tinder doesn't control the dating app market, nor would it be a problem, per se, if they did.
And yes, it'd be a massive problem if Tinder controlled it in that it'd put an unaccountable company in control of whether or not people get access. And one with a history of refusing to engage people who feel wronged.
If Match expands that to its other properties then it becomes a problem even if Tinder alone doesn't dominate.
-Bumble, OKCupid, POF, Match: 40+ only.
-CoffeeMeetsBagel: ?
All of these are owned by Match Group, the same parent company as Tinder.
Are you suggesting that private companies should have to take their users to court before disabling accounts
I love gaming the algorithm to meet hotter* people than I would meet using the apps the most intuitive way.
*It's not subjective, there are profiles that attract way more attention and would either: never be shown to you, or you never shown to them.
If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
They even tell you when you're "doing well".
The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something.
Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too.
A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
How?
the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down.
(Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.)
The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes.
And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works.
I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable.
So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content.
If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.
From Wikipedia ;)
Unfortunately, as I recently got single again I discovered that this wasn't possible anymore.
To be more on topic, Tinder is a very american company. I haven't had personal issues with the company but I think their new features of weird matching from some shitty interactive videos is a sign of classic over-engineering. It seems like the app is "done". Maybe they should focus on creating something else than add useless features that no one seems to use ( at least where I am from ).
Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
But people really forget that is an option to just walk to the nearest phone store and come out with a $20 sim for the month. Useful for way more than just trying to hook up on a dating app you got banned on.
People keep saying this without realizing a lot of people practically can’t these days. In an increasing number of countries, getting an SMS/phone-capable SIM can not be done without KYC/ID verification. Where I live, for example, you even need to be a resident; all prepaids are data-only.
And before you tell me to find a homeless drug-addict and make them get one for me, it’s not that easy and no one should have to do that in the first place.
Same restrictions apply for SkypeIn and similar VoIP services (which BtW come in a separate prefix that most of these services blacklist anyway).
There’s a reason why those dodgy “receive anyonymous SMS” sites all only provide the same handful of countries.
In the past, intelligence agencies used to devote time and money to get such compromising information. Now people give it out for free.
it's not that of a stigma nowadays, but i could be again, and certainly is if you are becoming a person of interest.
An evil data scientist would put almost exclusively users on your screen who you are interested in but they are not interested in you to boost your spendings and would mix a small portion of good bidirectional matches just to make his purpose less obvious. Fortunately evil data scientists does not exist... I mean I definitely wasn't paid to do anything like that. Never.
This is true for brick and morter/mom and pop businesses. It's true for computer programs. Basically any system. It is not an indicator for a monopoly.
Every system that survives, survives because it generates positive value for most people, no? Are you telling me that every business that isn't a monopoly only generates positive value and there's no negative value generated for a minority of customers?
That sure is a monopoly.
Tinder does not hold anything even remotely resembling a monopoly (no, Match does not own every dating app, just many of them) on the dating app space, we need to stop throwing that word around so casually. You're diluting the concept by trying to apply it here, which will lessen its impact when a real monopoly comes along and actually tries to control a market (e.g. Microsoft and how it's handling Edge right now).
The world you're looking for is China, where without WeChat you may as well not exist.
And on the meaning of monopoly, I believe it is fair to describe the "network affect" as a monopoly. The historical example of the US rail comes to mind, the market had several rail companies at the time, but each had monopoly over certain routes, if you wanted to go from place A to place B you maybe only had one choice. The fact that other rail lines existed to places you didn't want to go doesn't mean that it wasn't a monopoly. The same way, those tech companies may have monopoly over the route from person A to person B.
True, your 'island ferry example' is a monopoly. It is also not at all analogous to this situation and Tinder in general.
I'm no expert, but I don't think you understand what the 'network affect (sip)' is, as it does not apply to US Railways at all, and is a relatively new term that only arose in the 1970s. That aside, your example doesn't survive further scrutiny because railways were often the only practical way of moving between two generally public places — cities or towns. With Tinder though, they are providing you access to their own private network of users. Your example is like saying the monorail in disney is a monopoly, but that doesn't make any sense, since it's for transporting you within their own park.
Lastly, Tinder is not the one and only way to meet people. Yes, they have are of the most widely-used companies in the space. But there are others. And, you know, people can still meet in real life — through friends, at work, at activities or interest-based groups. On other social media like Twitter, et al.
That one is the key. Likely some analytics service (Facebook?) has his phone associated with country A (his country of origin), and Tinder sees the registration coming in from country B (new country). That mismatch then triggered some anti-fraud signalling.
People who frequently travel/change residences or have bases in more than one place seem to get banned or blocked by all kinds of services.
Regardless of the intentions of the people designing these systems, I’d argue this is textbook systemic discrimination; you face issues only due to being different enough in the “wrong” way.
There's also calls out to crash-analytics, firebase, appsflyer and Google Analytics constantly. The app will function if all these services are blocked.
But anyway, creating a new profile is not so hard (given the number of catfish still on the platform)
> Tinder may terminate your account at any time without notice if it believes that you have violated this Agreement. Upon such termination, you will not be entitled to any refund for purchases.
> For residents of the Republic of Korea, except in the case [...], we will without delay notify you of the reason for taking the relevant step.
They openly say in advance that they'll ban users who they think violated their terms, regardless of whether they actually did, keep their money, and never tell them why, except in South Korea where they already know that crap doesn't fly. It's only a matter of time till that gets thrown out by more courts in more countries. Until then, it seems foolish to give them any money.
This is definitely not true.
> Even the norms around dating, picking people up in bars, etc. are changing because of these apps
This is true.
> so it's harder to find people in the real world.
This is sort of true.
By not using a dating app, a single person is relegating themselves to how things were pre-app. Some of those pre-app options are less common now, other new ways are more common.
The apps widened the dating door for certain people, specifically for people who are not particularly keen on getting out and meeting people (probably quite a few folks like that on HN) as well as people who are looking to get married asap[1]. That said, for people who get out and do things, meeting people to date is not difficult at all. Getting banned from Tinder for those folks is, at worst, a loss of a time filler activity (swiping).
I will also add that, of the apps, tinder might be one of the worst in terms of quality match ups.
[1] Apps are also good for highly desirable dates since their pool goes from big to biggest, but those folks aren’t really the topic here since they aren’t short on access to dates with or without an app.
[0] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/06/10-facts-ab...
That said, as the post I originally responded to suggested, I don’t think that getting banned from Tinder or any dating app in particular is a “big deal”. Maybe a minor inconvenience for most people, but it’s not like someone who gets banned from Tinder is doomed to a life without dates.
And yet you admit
>I didn’t bother checking results. Both are US-centric.
...
You need to let the Stanford Professor and Pew Research know they're unqualified to perform research. :S
And I don’t know the author of the second article personally, but if I did of course I would point out an issue with their data.
> methodology is buried in a separate article
It's an EXPLICIT footnote! See "Note; Here [is the report's] metholodgy."
> Methodology of the second article is flawed (you want to know whether people meet online, so you ask people online, great technique)
The methodology goes into statistical techniques to control for biases (e.g. language, gender identity, sampling method, etc.) See Methodology > Weighting about what they did with their ~5k responses.
There was a thread on Reddit a few months ago where people were asking bad places for men to approach women. It was basically
Work
School
Gym
Church
Any place you go for hobby
Public transport
Shops
Bars
Anywhere outside at night
Parks
The consensus was basically the women on this Reddit thread don't want men approaching them in any way whatsoever that isnt a dating app. All alternative s were creepy. Now Reddit is mostly young and American, so who knows.
Dating in the US seems crazy.
If over 50% of people (and growing) say their relationship started on OLD, it's easy to say you're limiting your options by not participating [0]
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/06/10-facts-ab...
A does not in any way imply B. I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
Huh? What are [A] and [B] in this situation?
> I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
You're assuming that a non-trivial number of people who use OLD aren't exclusive to OLD. Who's taking issue with that?
OTOH, saying that one's set of available dates is unchanged by foregoing OLD is deeply flawed. You even mention "physical meatspace" which OLD directly overcomes.
I just skimmed the article, but it seems to say that even among the youngest age group only 48% have used dating apps and only 17% were in resulting relationship.
I've just given up on finding a wife/partner. My options are just... bad.
I've been traveling around the world the last few years and have had no problems finding casual hookups and longer term relationships. I'm currently dating a beautiful Colombiana. I would have thought she was out of my league if I was still living in the US.
What do you mean?
I'd suggest traveling like I have to southeast Asia, Europe and latin America for extended periods of time and see for yourself.
The lesbian dating market is a bit different. ;)
My advice is specifically for men because thats my lived experience.
It made being young much less pleasant than it ought to be, plus it means that we were a bit old when we had children..
The best places for dating for a south asian male would be southeast asia, turkey and latin america. White guys definitely have an advantage when going after women that specifically want a foreigner. We're able to get the ones that would otherwise prefer to date within their own country.
I had some success in europe but it was hit or miss. I'd say it was a pretty neutral experience, I felt like the deck wasn't stacked for or against me on average. latin america on the other hand was where I had my best prospects.
In my experience, latinas in colombia love the way we look. If I asked 10 women on a date, I'd easily get at least 8 to say yes and show up while white foreigners I met in medellin would frequently complain that colombians were flakey and prone to cancel at the last minuite. The exact kind of behavior I'd get from white women in america. These days I have one that I absolutely adore so I'm off the dating market but every day I'm shocked that I have her because living in america drove into my head that someone as smart and beautiful as her was completely out of my league..
The other is that I work in politics plus have a politically-diverse family and so I would need a partner who is comfortable being around and loving people who disagree with them politically. Many LGBT people in queer nerd spaces like Tumblr, fandom spaces, art spaces, etc. prefer to live in a political filter bubble (I'm not judging if it's for mental health reasons; I think people have the right to associate with whomever they want), and that's not compatible with my life direction or values.
Being a statistical minority within a statistical minority is exhausting sometimes. I'm super happy you and your fiancee found each other, though! I hope you have a wonderful wedding and many happy years together.
And no LGBT bars in my area. I am NOT a big city person. I gave it the good old college try. I tried multiple countries and coasts, even, but nope. I'm a small city person. I like my hometown. It's dope and the cost of living is low.
I understand why so many people believe this. But pro tip: if you want to opt out of dating apps, the key is to learn the skill of asking for what you want.
Ask the cute person at the coffee shop if you can have their number. Ask the person who's number you got out for a date. Ask the person you're on a date with if they want to kiss, etc. There is an art to successfully asking for things, and you have to get comfortable with people sometimes saying no, but the key really is that simple: just ask!
It's actually easier in real life to get a date with someone you find interesting, because you're not limited by who the algorithm decides to show your profile to, you're only limited by your willingness to ask.
Picking up dates in real life is not only still completely doable, but probably easier these days due to the sheer lack of competition from men who just have no idea how to do it.
Content providers should have the right to cease service to customers who don't abide by their terms. I don't feel that's unreasonable. But, consumers need recourse for the monetary investment. I'd strongly support a law worded something like: Digital service providers who sell transactional content & goods must either (1) offer the goods in an exportable, unencumbered, similarly accessible & functional format, or (2) at the time of service-provider initiated account termination, for any reason, reimburse the user for the full cost of goods purchased.
Many companies would argue: "we don't have the money anymore, we had to pay rights holders." I'd respond, that sounds like a You problem, and maybe you should consider clause (1). "The rights holders won't go for it"; again, that's a You problem. Work it out, or lose money; that's what consumer protection laws are for. They're not to protect your revenue streams.
Some gaming companies would be especially hurt by this, because of the prevalence of blank-check anticheat enforcement and their general inability to meet clause (1) due to the latest Fortnite cosmetic not really being "equally functional" outside the context of Fortnite. Well, I'd first respond: Your reliance on unjust business operating practices is a You problem. But more critically: maybe this will be the kick in the butt these companies need to invest more heavily into more accurate & functional anti-cheat, better customer support, and even new innovative revenue models. I've long felt that gaming has underutilized subscription services, and preyed too heavily on "free to play, pay $100 for the cool stuff later". Battle passes are kind of like a subscription service, and if the terms & expectations of the purchase are rephrased to be more service-like, rather than transactional-like, its reasonable to me that those should escape the law.
The best argument against a law like this is: consumers can, of course, break a company's terms at any time they wish. Most choose not to. But if they wanted to, the purchases with a content provider become something like a bank account, which they can utilize as they wish for as long as they wish, then get a full refund. Response: First, I think this should drive companies to clause (1). There's an out; you just need to work with the rights holders and accept that piracy will happen whether or not you try to control it. Second, again I think it comes back to mixing metaphors; Fortnite sells Goods, but they're only functional within the context of the Fortnite Service. Maybe they should sell the Service, and include the Goods. Third, this is a gap that insurance feels well-suited to help cover. Fourth, I think this would drive more companies to better KYC, so if anyone pulls this, at least they can only pull it once. That's not a bad thing.
The point should be to align what customers expect with what providers sell. If Netflix cancels your account, it sucks; but you don't feel slighted. It was a service; you understood that if you stopped paying, the service goes away. In comparison, the goods Apple sells (Apps, Movies, Books, etc) feel a lot more like going to the DVD isle in Best Buy; and its not ok that c...
It’s the digital age. My digital items are my possessions. This dichotomy in your head between the “real” and the “digital” doesn’t exist for the younger generation. There are few alternatives to these large tech companies. As I’ve gotten older I’ve wisened up and I buy DRM-free digital goods where possible (because of people who think like you, that big corporations need to be protected from the little people and not the other way around)… but before I got wise, I built up quite a large steam, Apple Books, and Kindle library (all of which call what we are doing “purchasing”… heads they win tails we lose).
That's a weird way to put it. It may not exist "for" someone, but as you seem to acknowledge, it exists "for" numerous corporations and legal systems which even those someones are subject to. I thought this was the primary purpose of NFTs. An NFT physically cannot be revoked without the permission (coerced or otherwise) of the holder, or a fundamental problem in encryption.
And just so other people don't get confused by this pretty misleading hyperbole:
" The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. "
source: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
No judge is going to weigh what the "buy" button omits over what the EULA actually states. If anyone has an example of a digital content service with an EULA that DOESN'T contain this kind of verbiage I would be fascinated to see it.
Right, but that's my point (as the original poster). 100%, a judge should say "terms are terms, company is in the right"; we need new laws to protect consumers. By and large, consumers don't understand how digital is different; that it isn't ownership (in fact, arguably, consumers don't even understand that when they buy a bluray, that also isn't ownership in a legal sense; but it is ownership in common parlance). Whether these service providers would still see such success, if they did, is an unknown quantity; they probably would, but it can't be known. What is known is that consumers are (rarely) being shafted, with no recourse, because they agreed to something they didn't understand; it doesn't occur to most people that Apple even has the power to ban accounts, and take all their content with it.
Counter-argument: "Well, people should read the EULAs and understand it". Oof. First: the EULA may say "we have the right to revoke access" but that means nothing without the context of how, why, and how often it happens. These companies have not demonstrated even the BASIC DECENCY to EXPLAIN THEMSELVES when they ban users, let alone publish reasonable information about how often it happens. The statements in the EULA are useless without this context, because it enables savvy consumers to compare their statements with their own risk profile to make informed decisions. But, second: arguing this point is basically saying "dumb people deserve to be preyed on by international gigacorporations". Most people don't understand what this language means; in many cases, it seems to be written specifically so it can't be understood without a law degree.
Counter-argument: "Account termination & content revocation is rare, so whatever." Well, this point defeats itself, but think about it this way: If its so rare, then why not protect consumers? Companies will oppose it, of course, but they're arguing from the ground that its so rare that enforcement of this law wouldn't hurt them. If they hurt consumers, it'll hurt them. If they don't, it won't.
The narrative is getting twisted here; its not that consumers should have "irrevocable ownership" over a digital good you buy on, for example, Steam. Well, the NFT crowd would say you should, but let's ignore them. The assertion is: there should be fair and equitable recourse for when a service provider decides to revoke your access to the service which distributes the content you purchased. That recourse would ideally be met by simply unshackling the content from the service provider; the ability to play Steam games without being connected to Steam, for example. However, short of that, reimbursement is fair. It would absolutely hurt companies in this day and age of "terminate accounts for any reason, sometimes no reason, whatever the system decides" but THAT'S THE POINT. Companies only speak money. The point is to make termination hurt them, so they're forced to think more critically about how & why they terminate.
I understand that you may value digital goods. I have some I value too. You just need to understand that just as with physical goods, even more with digital ones - if you don't control it, you haven't bought it. If somebody could just come and take your car, any time for any reason, you haven't bought a car. If somebody can just come and take your game anytime for any reason - you haven't bought a game. You bought a ticket to play it, maybe, but that's wholly other business.
I understand this well enough to at least keep offline backups of my paid content libraries (because I’m older and can afford the expense). Yeah, because of DRM it may be troublesome to access the content if my account was banned… but it gives me more ground to stand on (with our current unjust laws, both in court and in the court of public opinion) if I only claim that the content I already downloaded should still be accessible.
Your car analogy is interesting… If your car was paid off but got repossessed later because you said something nasty about the dealership on a forum, that would be a gross miscarriage of justice, even if they buried a clause deep in their sale terms granting themselves such an unconscionable right.
Also randomized lootboxes should be subject to gambling laws, or at least regulated such that you can’t get duplicates or something reasonable like that.
So yeah, regulate it as gambling. Don't let them advertise to minors. Don't allow them to knowingly let minors participate.
Until AIs win person-hood, there is no 'thinking' involved in this process. But I wonder if there is any case history on challenging the terminology used to describe these situations.
I feel that these systems should be using something more akin to applitools, which flags discrepancies between real and expected, and then a human rejects or accepts the report on a line item basis. You can still screw up and click yes when you meant no, but at least you have a chance at getting a human involved before doing anything dire.
Illegal business practices are not made legitimate because they were proscribed by the ToS.
Tinder, and every dating app I know out there, is directly incentivized to _not_ match properly, but rather to keep you on the app as long as possible. As long as the bottom line is directly influenced by the amount of unmatched users, the dating app will not work with you, but rather against you.
So except for some "open source" or otherwise "community-driven" effort, I don't think we'll ever see it.
The issue with setting this up in your garage is that for such an app to work, you need to have many users. And to have many users, you have to spend cash on marketing, etc. So you have to be able to get that cash back somehow, and then some, for your efforts.
(Also would add legal complications most dating sites, regardless of model, don't deal with because of the Statute of Frauds in relation to contracts in consideration of marriage.)
But back in the golden days of Tinder... (say 7-8 years ago or so-- 2014ish) Tinder worked really well to deliver many matches. These days... very few matches compared to Bumble or Hinge for example.
Matchmaking is such a generic problem anyway. Friends, Business relations, Vacancies, Partners, Sex buddies. We'll get there, I believe.
i have heard that traditional matchmakers get paid years after the first date, maybe even after a marriage.
I suspect there's a reason. I suspect someone knows. And I suspect there's bits of this story that's being left off.
But they are not 100% wrong, Tinder is not here to make people meet each other. They are here to make money and people don't pay because they get more matches, they pay because they are frustrated. Tinder needs a way to keep girls active on the platform, and for that to works they have to prevent boys to have a negative behavior. That's why they shadowban guys easily, as soon as they detect non standard behavior they shadowban, people keep seeing profile and keep paying. Girls don't see those profiles and have a better experience overall and stays longer, which makes guys stays longer because FOMO of matching the one.
This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
EDIT: And FYI if you want to exit shadowban on Tinder, it is pretty well documented on r/SwipeHelper, you need to change: phone, phone number, Facebook account, Credit card, pictures and don't login from the same IP
Not arguing with the point you're making, but Bumble and Tinder founders are definitely not the same.
Unfortunately, rule #1 on tinder is “be physically attractive”. If you want tinder to work for you consistently as a man, get your personal hygiene in order and hit the gym. That’s the main reason I swipe left; well, that and conservative politics.
That's just how the dating market is :)
For guys it used to be right, now rule #1 is more "be super attractive" or "be attractive and don't have standard"
For girls rule #1 is "be a girl"
> For girls rule #1 is "be a girl"
Not at all. Women can have just as much of a hard time as men, especially for certain ethnicities.
Basically be a model
> Women can have just as much of a hard time as men, especially for certain ethnicities.
Can't find the study, but black women are actually having a tougher time than all others women to get matches on dating apps. But this is still nothing compared to the attention guys get
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170217052152/https://theblog.o...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/575352051/least-desirable-how...
Shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who blames “women” as a whole for his problems would have a hard time meeting women.
And as a corollary, I’ve dated super hot guys before and frankly a lot of them have a hard time with relationships because it was so easy for them to hook up when they were younger they don’t know how to put the effort in to make someone feel desired.
Regarding to that corollary, you're assuming top guys even want to invest in relationships in the first place. Not the case of many I know. The strategy is more like: enjoy the party until one of the girls is so mindblowing feminine and submissive and good person that is worth giving a chance to some investing.
She said yes.
easiest free meal I ever got
wayoutthere: "If you want tinder to work for you consistently as a man, get your personal hygiene in order and hit the gym."
Did you just blame GP's getting banned on him not having personal hygiene or not being fit?
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men
[1]. https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
There are apple flavored flat earth medicine studies with stronger statistics
some guy dug up a bunch of studies done on abductions by satanists in the 1990s. remember that, from 60 minutes?
the punchline was there had never actually been such an abduction, but there were 30+ studies.
and that's replicated a lot.
the quality of the replication matters.
You shouldn't be swayed by inappropriately small sample sizes. Your response was "well what if I had a lot of them?" My answer was "still no."
.
> In the meantime, I'll go with the best we got.
This isn't even close to the best we've got.
> This isn't even close to the best we've got.
If you've got that then show me and I'll have a look. Until then I'm going with that studies I've seen that all seem to say roughly the same thing (despite widely varying sample sizes and quality of methodology)
1. https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
There are none with acceptable sizes. You're just talking.
1. https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
You can not do that on tinder.
Obviously not everyone who is hot is this way, but it’s one of the “types” you’ll find if you date around a lot.
In real life, people who do not look gorgeous can still sweep you off your feet by their smile, laughter, gestures, tone of voice, scent, the way they move, talk, react, fall into daydream...
Of all my previous lovers, ending with my wife of 16 years, I wouldn't choose a single one based just on a picture. But I was strongly attracted to all of them in real life.
Human magic cannot really be distilled into an algorithmic system. Not yet, anyway.
Also, don't stop just with Tinder. Use Bumble, happn, OkCupid, Badoo. I've got dates from all of these.
That's called "fraud" in most countries. If you believe that fraud is "not 100% wrong" then I don't know what to say to that.
But yeah Match group is a fraud company, I've wrote some posts on the topic in the past
EDIT: It seems I misunderstood this statement. I read it as "If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, [not using twitter] used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now"
I don't understand your reasoning here. You're suggesting that tinder is a vital service for some aspect of life now(I agree, unfortunately), but also saying it's not a problem with big tech? This kind of thing is exactly why big tech needs to be regulated.
I'm not saying there is no problem (I have wrote several article criticizing Match group and the app dating market), I'm just saying this has nothing to do with big Tech. Any dating app (and some do) can do the same as Tinder
Tinder being a "vital service" sounds absurd.
It means it (Tinder) no longer works. I says nothing about difficulty of meeting people outside of Tinder.
If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, [not using twitter] used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
"If you >don't< want to meet people don't use Tinder"
the way it's phrased means (unambiguously) that Tinder sucks, and Tinder doesn't work
I’d call that fraud. If you pay for a service you get to use the service.
e.g. ban: you try to log into HN and it gives you a message: "You can't log in, you are banned"
shadowban: you log in to HN with your account, you post comments and vote on stories but unknown to you nobody else on HN can see this. Eventually you start to wonder why you never get replies anymore.
It's definitely an ethical issue if you are doing the latter without telling someone, and additionally charging them for the service you aren't providing.
With a dating app it might be hard to tell for a while; how are you to know that you aren't getting any replies/engagement because of the way such sites work, or because the people you contacted never saw the likes/messages/whatever.
"Hey Doc, I need a new face."
"Mafia? Witness protection?"
"Tinder."
As I said in my comment up-post, Tinder has a near-absolute monopoly in my area. If you're not on Tinder you basically don't exist on the local dating market.
Yes, the future sucks.
You're within 2-3 degrees of separation of dozens or hundreds of single people you can date, so if you just start putting the word out among your friends, family, etc I think they'll start introducing you to people
Glad my dating days are over.
"big data" is just an excel file, so I think this would qualify
You know that's a joke, right?
I think you don't recognize the scale of Match Group. They make two billion per year, they have 2000 staff, and they own basically every dating site.
i too grew up with oss-licences that tell me i'm on my own and thats kind ok, but i don't want to live in a world were commercial products are labeled "not fit for any purpose. use at your own risk"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_(company)
It's a "Big Tech" problem. Lots of people have experienced getting randomly banned from services with no obvious cause, and no way to get any resolution. I'm banned from AirBNB for example. No clue why and there was nothing that could have triggered it, because I hadn't used the service for like over six months when the ban happened, there were no disputes or other problems with hosts and my last host review had been glowing. They didn't even tell me it'd occurred, but they had been sending emails thanking me for being a part of the "community" just weeks before. Then I tried to log in, got a verification screen, entered the code and was told the account was terminated. Filed an appeal, got no useful response and that was the end of it.
If it was a free service I'd understand, but I've paid good money to AirBNB over the years. If you pay you expect to be treated like a customer, not an enemy, but SV tech firms have all copied the culture of Facebook/Twitter/Google. They seem to forget that when people give money they expect some sort of customer relationship as a consequence.
While you have no recourse in free services, you do when you pay with a credit card. Likewise the CC will still charge Tinder the processing fee of 1%-3%, so every chargeback is not only revenue lost but also a cost.
Unfortunately all that advice is void if OP used a debit card.
Chargebacks on credit cards may have more protection granted by the banks or the law, but the basic level of disputing a transaction is available even to debit cards.
But wanted to add another thing, chargebacks are for cases of fraud, so the cc network actually charges the retailer a not insignificant fee for each chargeback, it’s why BigTech will shutdown your account if you do a chargeback, bec 9/10 times if it’s on your account you did mean to spend that money you just forgot about it. If you didn’t you better be ready to prove it and still burn the account that you chargeback on (i.e. lose your gmail account bec someone compromised your account and bought stuff on android)
"out with the boys"
"guys"
the only time I heard people want 'girls' less infantilized was in professional contexts, this is not a professional context and is an equivalent colloquialism across genders. unit test passed.
Not as terrifying as the number of people who defend it.
but this is supposed to match the incognito browser experience and I can still see all my comments in incognito which means everyone else can
questionable.
For some, I was calling out the echo-chamber of the whole place, those are the politics ones. Oh, and calling out a troll account.
I got banned from a number of subs for making comments documenting the bot-like behavior of karma farming accounts. Accounts with millions of karma, reposting low-quality content as if it's organic.
And it looks like I just got banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts for calling out a troll for their behavior.
reddit really is a pathetic place for anything other than hobby subs with about 150k members or less.
---
EDIT: I used reveddit and saw just how much of the posts I make are invisible. Not just by getting shadowbanned by hack mods on popular subs, but by other comments and submissions getting deleted for one reason or another. It's absolutely absurd.
Also I have no idea who this person is, their about page is empty and Google results are ambiguous at best, so I have no reason to trust their account of what happened.
The point about big tech seems tangential and isn't exactly a novel insight. As for this: "Of course, they cannot name you the reason as this could be later used against them and their proprietary algorithm. How could they?" This is not a problem with "big tech" but with lack of transparency and is a consumer protection issue. The GDPR for example requires automated rulings to offer the option to appeal and have the ruling be reviewed by a human. It would be trivial to change the law so consumers would have the right to be told which part of the ToS they allegedly violated if a contract is terminated over a ToS violation. But there is nothing about this problem that is unique to "big tech".
[0]: https://policies.tinder.com/community-guidelines/intl/en
They might have broken a rule without realizing it, but no one is even willing to say what one.