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Comment by tedsanders | Hacker News Reader

Honestly curious: Do you feel guilty for wasting the time of 4,000 men? To me, it feels selfish to value your own learning over the time of thousands of other strangers. Of course, you and others may feel differently than me. What's your approach for thinking about where to draw the line?

Edit: To those downvoting, could you explain why? I'd be happy to improve my comment, if I knew how. I am honestly interested in discussing the ethics of bots that pose as humans.

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I was a fairly active real user of Tinder for a while. Though, I noticed that a lot of my matches were from Spam bots who were trying to get me to go to malicious links or promote businesses. I wasn't overly annoyed by them and would report those bots to Tinder as "feels like spam". I felt like this was a known part of the ecosystem and my bots didn't feel too burdensome or evil.

The line that I drew at the time was that, aside from the initial match, the bots were never going to engage in any on-going way with the matches. So the bots could receive messages from matches, but would never send messages or post Moments (which was a feature at the time to effectively message all of your matches with a photo).

If you're a man on Tinder, you play a numbers game and assume a relatively low response rate. It doesn't take to long to send that first message

This argument is fallacious because a real person, upon being sent a message, is not obligated to reply, irrespective of a mutual match having been obtained.

By questioning the bot author over the morality of their methodology, your post appears to suggest that people who don't reply to messages would be equally perceived as having wasted the time of message authors, which is a view that your downvoters find troubling. That may not have been your intention, given your disclaimer and edits, but I can see why it could be construed that way.

Thank you for your reply. To be honest, I still don't see why an obligation to reply makes my argument fallacious. Email spam is universally considered bad, despite the fact that no one is obligated to reply to email spam. Maybe I am misinterpreting what you wrote.

In response to your meta question, I found it weird that you specifically asked if the parent felt bad about the 4000 men but not the 34000 women. Though I didn't downvote.

Whoops, that was entirely unintentional. I think my eyes were drawn to the parallel 1000s on lines (2) and (3). I feel weird about missing the women and I apologize for the omission. Everyone's time is valuable.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

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