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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

The offering will support text-only conversations between matches in an effort to minimize "casual encounters" by building long-term relationships instead

What's to prevent two people from having similar interests and deciding they actually only want a casual encounter? Would that be against terms of using the feature?

I'm sure fb is probably just trying to absolve themselves of the chances someone will hook up with a child on the platform but there's probably better ways, already built into the site, no?

I guess I'm just wondering why Facebook cares if someone just wants a non committed hookup partner or not. Why do they want even want the burden of adjudicating completely normal dating and sexual choices?

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"Dating" tends to be an asymmetrical market where you cannot be successful (as a service) unless you can get the heterosexual women to opt in (in sufficiently large numbers to make the thing make sense). Guys tend to be openly looking for hookups. Women who are amenable to hookups tend to have zero problem arranging that. So the people you need to appeal to are the women looking for a relationship, not a hookup, and who want assurances this will be wholesome and not another means for total strangers to sexually harass them with dick pics and the like.

Though I have read a few things that indicate that dating sites have helped increase the number of interracial marriages and made it much easier for gays to find a mate. If you are gay and not out to your family or whatever, you can go on a dating site and admit that you are gay there and it vastly simplifies navigating a complex situation like that. Some gays still pretend they are straight and their lover is just a roommate to help make life in the big city affordable or whatever.

This is why I love Bumble. Women have to reach out first, so its much less hassle (as a male) of messaging over and over and over again into a black hole with no response.

> So the people you need to appeal to are the women looking for a relationship, not a hookup, and who want assurances this will be wholesome and not another means for total strangers to

Not in the casual case. You simply say, "Only looking for hook ups, something casual, etc". No one's time is wasted. When my Bumble push notification comes in, I know it's someone who finds me attractive based on my honest photos and okay with something casual. It's the perfect filter for all involved.

Disclaimer: Still have a Facebook account, but rarely log in.

Dating is an imprecise word that covers both more casual relationships and the process more rightly called courtship. I am not familiar with any sites that list themselves as courtship sites. (Sites offering that service are typically listed as dating sites, though some dating sites explicitly cater to either/both.) Courtship is the process of sorting out who is a good match for a long term relationship and forming that bond and so forth.

Courtship typically requires one to also sort out how you fit into the larger social fabric of each other's lives. In contrast, hookups or casual flings typically are looking to cut you out of the fabric of their social lives. People generally don't want to introduce casual sexual relationships to important people in their lives, thus expressions like "The kind you don't take home to mother."

Facebook is a social network. Their value position naturally readily aligns with the idea of courtship and they are apparently going with that.

I don't use either dating sites or hookup sites. I'm not the target market. I'm just making observations based on reading up on how asymmetrical markets work and this is a standard thing that you run across. I have read that it is why you see "Ladies night" at bars. The guys are going to be there anyway. You need to find some means to entice the women to show up.

(Disclaimer: I also don't drink, so this is just stuff I have read about working with asymmetrical markets and developing a service when you have a chicken-and-egg problem.)

Agree entirely. If I had to do it all over again, I'd want a co-parenting website, to find a partner of sufficient character and grit to have kids with, but we'd both be free to date other people while raising our kids together. Who I want to have kids with, have a casual relationship with, or enjoy activities together with might not be the same person.

Social networks are part of the problem, but people not knowing what they want is also part of the problem. People are hard, and cannot be solved with engineering.

People are hard, and cannot be solved with engineering.

I just realized this was the force behind it the whole time, when I read the line about casual versus long-term relationships that made an eyebrow arch up, what you just said is what made me so skeptical.

Reading everyone else's thoughtful responses: of course Facebook doesn't want to adjudicate dating choices, Facebook employs engineers who need $stuff to work on. 'Dating' is another feature for a tech company that sells ads.

That sounds nice in theory, but why do you think your coparent would be interested in such an arrangement? Dating your spouse is far easier logisitically than dating anyone else, once you have kids eating up your time.

Because they too don’t want a monogamous relationship (ie polyamorous lifestyle). Life is too short to commit to only one person (my opinion, ymmv).

Shared Google calendars solve the logistics issue.

That's just cultural. In India, they are all courtship services, and present themselves and matrimony / marriage sites.

> When my Bumble push notification comes in, I know it's someone who finds me attractive based on my honest photos and okay with something casual. It's the perfect filter for all involved.

I've never used Bumble before but my understanding is that males in the top 20% of physical attractiveness get nearly all of the requests and that males in the bottom 80% get nearly none. Does that sound accurate?

I think one of the things that really hampered me was believing that attractiveness is: 1. always universal/objective 2. one dimensional

I took myself out of dating for a long time because of that set of beliefs combined with stats like the one you've posted. The truth is that different people find different types of people attractive. There are a few people who are just attractive (ironically a good number of those people are rather lonely because their good looks are intimidating) but the vast majority of people are attractive to some and not to others. Also, even how you present yourself matters a lot. Making yourself appear attractive does require some effort but it's not something you're stuck with.

If you're into long term relationships, you really only need a handful of people to find your attractive. The odds are actually in your favor when your sample size is large enough, which on a dating app it usually is.

I can't speak for other users, but I get at least one request per week. Make of that what you will (I'm a solid 6/10 on a good day). Putting yourself out there costs you nothing.

I can think of two things:

1. They don't want underage nudes on their servers, even if they are exchanged between consenting 17 year olds.

2. They got feedback from some focus group who said the worst part about other online dating apps is being given unsolicited pics or being asked for more pics.

This "casual encounter" bit is their chosen marketing-approved euphemism to explain this, or maybe it tested the best. I honestly don't think they care how this gets used, but I'm sure they tested all kinds of language and this did the best.

They already have those underage pictures via fb, whatsapp and instagram messenger...

Made me realize this is a good reason to have end to end encryption on for everything as a chat provider, since it reduces your liability.

Its an implication of the target market, and it goes hand in hand with facebook itself: if you’re looking for casual hookups, you probably dont want to be openly exposed to friends/family. But if you’re doing something far more wholesome, like looking for a full relationship, then its perfectly fine for friends/family to be aware. And facebook hosting a dating app would be totally unnotable if there was no chance to for friends/family to find out: the whole point is that fb can filter onto your friends, and friends of friends, and so on, to naturally limit your possible matches to something far better than “kind of close to you”.

The friend-links allow you to verify the target human yourself (ask your chain how they are), it limits misbehavior (you’re sending dick picks to your friend’s best friend, not a random stranger), you’re naturally liklier to share a social circle or taste or whatever (you’re friends with the intermediate person for some reason).

So it has to be marketed and tuned towards something that is palatable to your broader social circle, because they are, more likely than not, going to find out.

And while you might accept casual dating, and people often don’t care, its still a broadly negative thing to be going around with. The general expectation (at least in the us) is that eventually you’ll stop, and have a serious relationship, and you don’t really go around showing off your casual relationships (at best, you pretend externally that its possibly serious until the day you break it up), and you certainly dont go around telling people you’re currently looking for a fuckbuddy (and your friend might be the one!), at least not directly, and certainly not broadly.

You don’t want to find your teacher on tinder/grindr, and you really don’t want to find your friends on it. (As always, in general, and especially post-teenage, and a US opinion)

>>I guess I'm just wondering why Facebook cares if someone just wants a non committed hookup partner or not. Why do they want that burden?

Probably PR and brand optics given their recent public mis-steps.

This is where I stopped short because it felt too cynical right off the hip. But maybe Facebook deserves the cynicism.

it's pr speak for "there will be no dick pics"

Facebook cares deeply about "family values." We had to remove the ability for people to mark their profiles "married" or "in relationship" before they'd let us advertise on Facebook.

Well, they’re making a product choice to bias to aiming at one direction. That’s just a product choice that’s a useful differentiator when the most recent successful dating apps have been hookup apps.

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