There are more basic issues with these apps too, which is that they turn dating into a second job. And it is very difficult for men especially, as data has shown that messages / likes mostly center on the most attractive men rather than being well distributed as it is for messages from men to women. So everyone without that attention just ends up swiping right on thousands of profiles and hoping for something to happen. It’s unproductive, depressing, and I would hate to be a single man today with all dating happening online. For that reason alone, we should move on from the online dating experiment.
Because the purpose of Tinder, Hinge, etc. is to slowly destroy the social fabric of society to a point where people are perfectly malleable. More, more, more instant gratification. Less, less, less integrity.
Do we really want corporations enforcing unconfirmed reports? If the legal system can't handle the situation, why should we expect a private corporation to?
I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular.
The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
I've been thinking a lot about building an open source dating app as a non-profit offering.
I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.
Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
Law enforcement should be able to submit reports that carry real weight.
I don't know why people would report this behavior to the app and not the police. But the apps should be telling people to file a police report and have the police contact them.
There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
This is a great example of how large companies are structured so that the organization as a whole is capable of making decisions that would be unthinkable and/or criminal if done by a single individual. As a whole, Match Group:
- Hid credible reports of users being sexually assaulted from the public
- Did not put up any sort of significant barrier for users reported for rape from making new accounts
- Underinvested in safety on their platforms for years, then laid off everyone in their safety org in favor of overseas contractors with little training
- Ignored members of Congress asking about how the company responds to reports of sexual violence
Despite this, I'm sure that everyone in Match Group's leadership who contributed to the organization making these decisions doesn't think they have any sort of responsibility here, and doesn't have any problem sleeping at night.
Tinder responsibility ends with their app, unless they have claimed that they somehow vet the people for safety. Or they provide chaperone service.
Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
Wow what a weird coincidence that there's a monopoly of dating sites, animosity between the sexes is amplified by bots on social media, only a few users get matches and rapes go unreported, and birth rates keep dropping.
This thread is a very clear demonstration of the libertarian bias of HN. The reflex, knee-jerk response to ANY proposal is "how do you enforce it??" regardless of the issue at hand.
You can ALWAYS claim that a policy proposal is futile, or will backfire, or will jeopardize some other freedom. The question is about the tradeoffs, which requires considering the evidence at hand. So many concerns being raised here are easily refuted by sentences in the article.
The thing that gives me pause is the correlation that all the girls I dated or was interested in college either didn't have a facebook or deleted theirs at some point while I knew them, and I'm worried that the most interesting people will be filtered out
Then again, I didn't online date at all in college and am only just considering it now that it's been so long and I just never seem to meet single people anymore. Maybe it's worth a shot, setting up some kind of OLD profile was one of my resolutions for this year
While the story in the article is scary, what's the point of reporting the person to the dating app company? They have no way to check whether there happened a crime or not. Maybe there should be a government-run database which tracks the people reported to police, and the dating apps must warn if the user is in the database or temporarily freeze the account.
Anyway such things should be regulated by laws and run by the government rather than by private companies without any legal responsibility.
> Repeatedly, we found that users, soon after being banned, could create new Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday, and profile photos used on their banned accounts. Users banned from Tinder were also able to sign up for Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish without changing those personal details.
It is really good to see actual investigative journalism still happening out there.
"In September 2024, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires consumers to be notified if they have interacted with a user on a dating app who has been banned for defrauding consumers of money or personal financial information. But the bill stopped short of addressing the issue of sexual assault on the apps, and it died in the Senate."
Freedom to ban a user is freedom of association, but a legal obligation to amplify unsubstantiated accusations subverts due process. This might be unpopular, but I like living in a society with due process.
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”
-John Adams, founding father and father of OG abolitionist John Quincy Adams
20 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] threadIt always been like that. It sucks to be a single man who looks for women. Unless you are rich and handsome.
If dating app doesn't work for you, think of how people connected before apps. Go to group activities, engage with people and build a relationship.
The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
Previously a few comments on the Guardian ver:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035386
I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.
Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
I don't know why people would report this behavior to the app and not the police. But the apps should be telling people to file a police report and have the police contact them.
There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
- Hid credible reports of users being sexually assaulted from the public
- Did not put up any sort of significant barrier for users reported for rape from making new accounts
- Underinvested in safety on their platforms for years, then laid off everyone in their safety org in favor of overseas contractors with little training
- Ignored members of Congress asking about how the company responds to reports of sexual violence
Despite this, I'm sure that everyone in Match Group's leadership who contributed to the organization making these decisions doesn't think they have any sort of responsibility here, and doesn't have any problem sleeping at night.
Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
You can ALWAYS claim that a policy proposal is futile, or will backfire, or will jeopardize some other freedom. The question is about the tradeoffs, which requires considering the evidence at hand. So many concerns being raised here are easily refuted by sentences in the article.
Everyone will ignore it anyway.
For those of you who haven't tried it, it offers far more swipes, generous filtering, and no payments required at all for every feature.
I'm surprised more people haven't taken notice of it.
Then again, I didn't online date at all in college and am only just considering it now that it's been so long and I just never seem to meet single people anymore. Maybe it's worth a shot, setting up some kind of OLD profile was one of my resolutions for this year
Anyway such things should be regulated by laws and run by the government rather than by private companies without any legal responsibility.
It is really good to see actual investigative journalism still happening out there.
Freedom to ban a user is freedom of association, but a legal obligation to amplify unsubstantiated accusations subverts due process. This might be unpopular, but I like living in a society with due process.
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”
-John Adams, founding father and father of OG abolitionist John Quincy Adams