Facebook Dating
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
If I was facebook, I would very explicitly announce this as a spin out project, under a different name and brand. While HN has a good knowledge of the ultimate parent owners of apps, I meet a lot of people who protest facebook by moving to Instagram/WhatsApp. Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. Just my personal feelings on the matter, though. I'm not trying to call out anyone who likes that way of life (and perhaps has a personality that's well suited for it), just that it should not be imposed on everyone.
I kind of like the old model where you pretend to be conservative at work, and are free to be as weird as you want to in your own time.
Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.
However now I just let it rip. I'm not trying to be weird like I was in my 20s, and I also realize I don't need to self-censor as much as I thought I needed to.
I think this thing has to have some ephemeral nature to it (delete account, create new one if need be later) to avoid harassers and or those who get infatuated or attached; people who just fell out in a bad way, etc.
I mean, you definitely don’t want to expose your friends and your work to new and to you unknown people. They may use your FB friends network and work and whatever other info to harass and follow, etc. also your ex-es can see activity, etc. I don’t see much good in this product.
It makes a ton of sense from their business perspective, which is to sell highly personalized ads. If you have one single internet persona, it is far easier to tailor ads to you.
Letting people show different angles of themselves through differently branded websites makes it much easier for facebook to build complete, thorough profiles of people.
I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions.
This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler.
There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online.
(Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)
Using SV as a synecdoche for "movers and shakers in the information technology / adtech worlds", the statement stands.
Yesterday a colleague had me link a third-party application to a business-related page using my personal account, and it felt like a huge invasion of my personal sphere to have pages for a band I was in ten years ago appear on the list next to the business' pages. (Not to mention giving this third party access to all of my personal information in order to allow it to help manage a few public pages.)
Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? I'm considering creating an alternate account just for business pages, but that seems a bit disingenuous to me.
In China WeChat is synonymous with both your business and personal life.
When networking and meeting business contacts you don’t give out your LinkedIn, you give out your WeChat.
Hell, I already deleted my reddit account last year just because.
I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world.
Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.
I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal.
Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas.
> You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation.
And I think that's kind of unusual.
Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.
FB is acutely aware that "[X] is in a relationship with [Y]" is a strong social signal in today's world. So the implication is that genuine identities ultimately should connect via any dating app.
With a name like "Facebook Dating", it doesn't sound like they're trying to enter the Tinder-esque hookup space. If the product is focused on long-term relationships, the dating profile and the career profile probably won't have that many differences. At least not for most people, and Facebook (the website) is clearly aimed at "most people".
After all, a Tinder-like app would already face huge competition, whereas the market for online dating services that work for older and/or more conservative people has been largely stagnant and is currently fragmented across sites like "FarmersOnly". You don't gain traction by solving a problem someone else already solved. Old people are lonely too.
If I brought my whole self to my job in Houston it would not go smoothly.
You're right, but I don't understand that perspective.
If my company is doing something that I think is morally wrong, I'm going to be finding employment elsewhere and telling them why. I might even speak out about it... after I leave.
If we're doing something that I think it's great but doesn't justify my quitting, then I'm going to be speaking up internally about it. Going public with a grievance against your employer just strikes me as being counter-productive - you're risking being fired, you're damaging your future prospects for advancement there, and you're potentially damaging the entity to which you've tied your financial future.
The way I see it, when I work for a company I'm part of their public face. Even though I may not (certainly don't, actually) represent the company, my actions and statements still influence people's impression of the brand. If I'm upset about something enough that I'm willing to damage the company's brand to speak out about it, then I'm upset enough that I don't want to be providing material support to them by continuing to work there.
This has got to be an over generalisation, surely?
People in Silicon Valley are highly unlikely to be a homogenous whole.
And given what we know about Gell-Mann Amnesia, it seems likely to me the media’s portrayal of the situation is, at best, amiss, and, at worst, intentionally deceptive.
Probably that a vocal minority generate a kerfuffle, and a huge majority keep mum.
Happy to be proven wrong.
Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem:
In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords.
Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person.
This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-history-deat...
That inquiry was sparked by Andy Carvin's infamous Q&A with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names
https://mashable.com/2011/08/28/google-plus-identity-service...
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposal itself: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112hhrg73124/pdf/CHRG-112... (PDF) (p.26)
(Other Trusted Identity providers included ... Equifax: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/14/advanci...)
The project was defunded in 2015.
Alex Howard wrote an excellent O'Reilly Radar piece, "A Manhattan Project for Online Identity"
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/nstic-analysis-identity-pri...
My sense is that the entire social media push had a strong national policy agenda behind it. Which appears to have backfired somewhat.
Disclaimer: I helped organise migration off Google+, under the pseudonymous identity of a space alien cat. Dogs are so passe.
People are human beings before being little money-making machines. (At least outside of HN...)
It's the other way around, in my experience, not a "goal" but a reflection of the people who built it. It made them absurdly rich, and all they know how to do is double down on what makes the numbers go up.
How is that Facebook's goal? Considering the available per-post privacy settings and all, I feel like it facilitates having a different persona to different people.
> To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
I feel like "one persona to everyone" is almost the cultural opposite of Silicon Valley. Like at every birthday party you go to, every person asks "How's your startup going?", it seems that the cultural norm is you're supposed to say "It's going fantastic, how's your startup?" except if they are a close friend, when you say the truth.
There is no relevant "out of work" for many people.
Thing is, workplace colleagues are seldom actually your friends in the true meaning of the term. Many of us lose contact with 99% of the people we worked with when we switch jobs. A friend is someone whom you have an ongoing relationship with independent of where you live or work, I think.
We might recognize that the internet never forgets and just don't put much out there, but that is a bit different than embracing a single persona life.
I understand where you're coming from, but this statement isn't necessarily a truism. You can wear who you are on your sleeve and even be quite extreme, if you're a reasonable person who can build and maintain professional relationships.
I do almost everything online under my real name, and am not optimized for career purposes. It's just me. As a result, I've had my political beliefs and such come up in interviews on multiple occasions. In one case - as I found out a year or so after being laid off - my interview process took a couple of weeks longer than was typical because one of the executives/partners at the company was concerned specifically about my politics. On the other hand, I did in fact get that job (and loved it!) and I've gotten several connections and invitations to apply based upon my discussions. Surprisingly, they seem to be about evenly split between people who agree and who disagree with my stances. I'm passionate about political issues, but I do my best to be accommodating to others and not be aggressive about them.
It would be fair to say that my positions are pretty extreme, too. I'm a political anarchist; Anarcho-Capitalist / Voluntaryist, to be more precise. I am open about that even in professional settings because it has such an influence on how I approach relationships and the world in general. I tend to be a "systems thinker", and see everything as a balance of competing forces. I see the whole world through this lens; everything is influenced by incentives and disincentives. I have exactly one tattoo, a stylized graph of supply and demand.
Reminds me more of DC.
My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook. I don't even think he has an account. They're all on Snapchat and IG. I was talking to him about this last week. They all think of Facebook as for a different generation. As stale.
I feel similarly and know a lot of my circle does too. Except for events and sometimes messaging, nothing happens there.
Being young and LGBTQIA+, I can assure you that I never discuss my dating life at work or with my relatives (none of whom know I'm gay, but thankfully, I don't live with them anymore).
Until there are strict federal anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ folks, I'll never trust an employer to know that side of my life.
I was on Bumble a little late at night... kinda mindlessly swiping... girl looked cute... little familiar... swipe... Instantly realize as it chimes with "boom" that it was my boss. Nope nope nope, delete the whole thing and never return. They all have a problem around showing you co-workers, and it'd be so easy to just be like, "Cool, never show me people who work here, or never show me people I know on Facebook / LinkedIn." Wouldn't catch everything, but it'd catch a lot of it. Ha, and... the bigger problem I guess is that I don't really trust any of these sites to link them to Facebook or LinkedIn. They all seem fundamentally scammy and spammy.
But... I've had some fun with Bumble. Just... yeah I don't even trust it with my Spotify playlists.
they don't mind now. One of the big problems with digital transparency is that this information will be hard to get rid off if they ever wish to in the future.
Is openness about past relationships in the workplace still a good idea if it leads to some sort of office intrigue a year or two down the line?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/10/20/d...
Some degree of separation/anonymity is still something people want even if they are more transparent about the outcomes.
Coworkers and classmates aren't the problem. For young people, facebook is where mom and grandma is. Not that you're gonna match with them, but just sharing the name is a turn off.
For one, I think people will be less willing to lie in a form where one company can see both profiles, but on the other side, it comes down to what Facebook lets you change. Hopefully they won't let your profile specify two different ages, for instance.
Just because I go out on a date with someone doesn't mean I want to be friends with them on Facebook.
That's true for casual dating. By the other hand on older demographics, I think they nailed it: I suspect among older people, casual dating is less relevant, so they are not afraid of adding eachother as friends. And they don't need to install anything else..
It's also important for a dating app to have critical mass. Almost everyone is on FB, only a fraction of those people are on IG.
I certainly wouldn't want my grandma to know I like long walks on the beach!
Facebook's loss of interest amongst Gen Z notwithstanding, your profile is apparently different.
So glad I'm married and not having to date in this online zoo.
1. They want to differentiate their dating product. 2. There's a sector of the population interested in dating but that at the moment is underserved, too shy to try it, or just on the fence about putting the effort to try it out.
What this does is it essentially puts a dating app on everyone's phone, reducing the friction it takes to give online dating a shot.
It also "feels" different and more serious. Anecdotally Facebook seems to be, amongst my circles, a lot about life events or important stuff and less about the casual, funny, edgy, etc persona. By associating that image with their dating platform, they give it a strong identity for the get go as a place for serious relationships.
> Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
Would it? I feel like Instagram is better off being about friends and oneself, and it could be tarnished by involving dating. What dating "identity" would befall upon it? Would it lean on the side of Tinder— superficial, more about hookups than long-lasting relationships, etc? I associate instagram with influencers, young people (as in, teens), etc a lot so branding-wise it doesn't make that much sense to me personally, though of course, this is just my opinion.
its almost like facebook doesn't understand privacy at all...
I am not sure about this, I used to think like that but the older I grow the less I care. I even embrace the fact to show the same persona everywhere.
I haven't been actively using FB for the past few years though but maybe this is something that newer generations have already concluded in.
I do get what you mean, though. As I've gotten older, I've found that maintaining different personas is just exhausting and not really worth it. But I also don't have anything in my life that I'd be embarrassed about depending on audience, and I don't consider myself a member of any underrepresented groups or subcultures that the mainstream would consider "weird" or somehow undesirable. So it's easy for me, which isn't true for everyone else.
We have real numbers about Facebook and they no more jibe with your anecdotal experience than all of the geek rage about Uber, Amazon, or that people care about “openness” and the “right to repair”.
I see. So these people dont like FB the product not FB the company. That feels like a very restrained response. I protested by just moving to Signal (and never using insta) and boy does it suck if other people wont do the same.
HN is a SV or SV-adjacent bubble that takes pride in not having social media profiles and doesn't hesitate in boasting about it in every frigging thread, multiple times a day. In contrast, (b)millions around the world find value in social media every single day and use it for all kinds of applications.
I am confident FB understands this much better than people like us here who can't think of any good use cases of social media without presenting 10 riders to assure the crowd that we hate FB.
For me, I'm surprised it took FB this long to launch a dating feature. Despite their decline in some demographics, they are still uniquely positioned to do a much more comprehensive (I hesitate to say "better") job of connecting people on the romantic side than a random new dating startup, or even possibly one of the giants like Match.
Perhaps they've hesitated for so long because they were afraid FB users would be afraid of mixing their public FB life too closely with their dating life?
For this reason, there is more room for the incentives of FB and those in the dating market to align, and so I welcome this.
I know many people who were clamoring for it at the time. It would have been an obvious addition as dating and relationships were a large part of the reason a lot of people used Facebook. I half suspect this is an attempt to pull college kids back into Facebook.
I think they missed their chance with this by a long shot.
I always thought this was a really cool feature, and I wish they kept it. It felt more personal.
I suspect that's a market potentially more easily attracted by the relative convenience of Facebook Dating compared to other services where you have to do more work to build up a profile and figure out UI, etiquette, etc.
Do you know how hard it is to meet new people after the age of 25? The statistics, historically, are not in your favor!
Dating and social apps have made it far easier for busy people, who lack 8 hours a day to socialize with others on a campus/forum, to organize dinner, dates, etc.
Facebook's massive user base might make this a success. Depending on whether or not there's a fee involved.
The UI is just bad. You cannot browse profiles, you must say "yes" or "no" and the decision is final. If you scroll down to read a profile more, when you pass, it leaves you in the same scroll spot in the next profile. This is User Interface 101 level stuff. The list of problems goes on from there.
Everything about it says "throwaway add-on" that they haven't spent any real time on optimizing.
When originally announced, Match stock dropped 25% on the news, only to bounce back. I don't see this product really making a big dent in the Match bottom line.
So Tinder?
Maybe this is a little unfair considering it was only a beta. Isn't a cornerstone of agile to get an MVP in front of users and iterate on user feedback? It doesn't seem right to judge any software based on a beta experience alone.
I don't think anyone even looked based on what I see. It's clearly inferior to Tinder, Bumble and OKCupid's mobile apps just on basic usability.
If you're going to enter a space, shouldn't you try to do better than the market leaders?
Yeah that doesn't sound like something that'll end up on Pastebin.
If they are able to provide a differentiated feature set from other apps because they can better leverage FB interest data, I don't see why this couldn't work.
Is anyone else on this thread even in the dating scene right now? I really don't see how this is a plainly bad idea.
Facebook gave me a notification to try FB Dating the other week. I clicked it, chose my pics, and was on the meat market immediately, receiving phone notifications like "Karen liked you" just like any other dating app. I click it, view their profile, and start messaging them. Being linked to Facebook profiles, I also have more trust in the other party which is how Tinder started out.
HN rants so consistently about dating apps that I think it's mostly just ranting about dating in general.
Facebook is ubiquitous in Mexico where I live. And when I go back to the States and meet people 20-35 downtown, I have yet to find people who aren't on Facebook. I think HNers vastly overestimate the exodus from Facebook, if there is one, just because we like to cover FB's privacy issues here on HN.
In reality, you nailed my experience with dating apps (self + friends on them). Every single person I know uses multiple since the source of a date does not matter to them. They just want what they're looking for. The cost to use an app is so low and context switching is easy enough. And everyone hates on some or all of them...and continues to use all of them.
Many of the non-tech people I meet in real life don't even know the difference between an app and the mobile web. They know interfaces well enough to get the things they need done, done.
FB already has the social layer and lots of other data, so I don't foresee this as a terrible idea. Seems more like a small bet.
Only thing I actively use FB for these days is messenger and fantasy football shit talking groups, which are all "private".
wasn't the first feature on mobile dating apps to take in your facebook social graph?
Tinder had this 6 years ago? It would show you if you had mutual friends via your facebook social graph
maybe people didn't know that was because of their facebook connect?
I'm looking forward to watching the shitstorm when that info gets leaked or an exploit is found that allows you to see whose lists you're on.
Relationship Status, Interested In. This is what drives life at college. Are you having sex or aren’t you. It’s why people take certain classes, and sit where they sit, and do what they do, and at its, um, center, you know, that’s what the Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually gonna, (get laid), meet a girl. Yes.
Definitely a bit nerve-wracking on who can see if you're using it, potentially, since you know, I'd never want people on Facebook to know I'm using a "dating app", but other than that, I actually really like the implementation here.
"Just like your 2FA phone number won't be used for anything except 2FA." - Facebook /s
Add all your friends to Secret Crush. Watch who matched you.
"Sorry buddy, I wasn't really using the thing, I just added everyone, but thanks for letting me know you like me!"
Idiots. And this is why the shared identity is a terrible idea for dating sites. You want dating profiles to be throwaway, and you want it to be hard for your friends to find your dating persona for this reason!
But of course Facebook doesn't understand the need to keep secrets from (some of) your friends.
It’s not “privacy is a concern”, it’s “this thing is significantly worse for my privacy than this other thing”. Not caring about privacy because it’s “always a concern” falls to take into account that there are varying levels of privacy that services provide.
We've already seen what social media connected to advertising does to election security, do you really think its a good idea to test it on your love life?
I see this being huge for older adults who are divorced or widowed, those are the people still using fb and I think would be happy to use this service.
I'd be curious if you're socializing in some sort of anti-FB bubble or actually have a sample size of like 5 people when you consider the people you actually know this info about.
29 here, I have Facebook and use it almost exclusively for responding to events organised by my girlfriend’s friends. She and her friends use it constantly for group activities.
If I don’t respond to an event I’m not going to they’ll text her to text me because if I don’t respond on FB I might as well be dead??
Within my circle of friends we organise ourselves via text message and I don’t think any of them use Facebook on the regular. As far as I know nobody has deleted their account due to some sort of privacy sentiment. They just don’t use it.
Interesting.
Go to Facebook Marketplace and search for wedding dresses. It'll show you recently divorced females in your area. From there you can filter by size.
Hacker.News.
When I post a photo to Facebook, the 'likes' seem to come almost entirely from over 40 crowd. Lots of retirees.
I don't know how anyone who's read a news article about Facebook in the past year (or browsed the web and glanced at the ads they get) can believe any of this.
There are a lot of people using Facebook as a serious communication platform (think your mum and dad, or your friends from high school). These guys aren’t hiding who they are much on facebook.
They’ll probably get way better matches on Facebook than on traditional dating sites.
This is not a competitor to Tinder, I see this as a serious dating site for shyer or older people.
Facebook as a company has always been chasing after content. This is because content has a direct and clear monetization strategy whereas helping people make use of their network is difficult to make money from. Well, it shows - $40bn in revenue, 80% of it in ads.
Helping people to use their network effectively is basically charity work to Facebook. How are you going to at-scale monetize that out? The answer: you don't.
But with some irony, after chasing content for over a decade, I think Facebook is now in a position to do some charity work. Similar to Google, who saturated their ad team's return on value and has it's employees working on moonshots all day, Facebook can now afford to sit on their content engines and attack problem spaces that are harder to monetize and solve but provide more meaningful value.
Long story short, I think it's the right time for Facebook's hayday to sneak up on us because it can quietly focus on adding real value via our networks without chasing after money from them.
I really like the idea of Facebook Dating, because 1) it already has the network and doesn't need to build it, and 2) it doesn't need to make money.
Most dating apps suffer under the pressure to make money and grow. For a dating app to grow it has to focus on building cohesive user bases that find value in each other and eventually creates its own ecosystems that damages the experience for others (i.e. hookup culture). While Facebook Dating might still have some of that, I could see it ending up as a more serious dating platform because it doesn't need to focus on user growth.
How would you monetize Marketplace? Facebook Dating? The answer is: you don't care that much, throw some ads on it and let it cover costs. 7-8 years ago when people were searching for Facebook's killer money printing machine, these projects would have a lot of pressure to make a lot of money. Nowadays, sheltered by the content engine that Facebook has amassed, these projects can focus on providing immediate and strong value through Facebook's core benefit (it's network) and hold off on how to make money for a couple of years.
Sounds familiar? It sounds a lot like Gmail.
What? You don't want to use then don't use it. That's your choice.
Of course, that means you probably need to have a Facebook profile. And in that regard you have a valid point. Nowadays I'm pretty certain that most of the types of people I'd want to connect with have dropped their FB profile but still maintain an IG profile.
But I suspect we underestimate the number of people who are still quite active on FB and have maybe only heard of IG. The older, less tech savvy social media users out there still want to date too.
Of course, the pool of potential people you can date is "those on Facebook", so that's hilarious and compounds existing problems with echo chambers.
Millennials are almost in their 40s now! The prime dating app market (low to mid 20s) is now Gen Z.
That said, Facebook is already out with 20-somethings. Is this really going to used by that audience? Or is this replacing Yahoo Personals for 40-somethings?
If they can't get them on FB, the features will trickle down towards the family of apps, maybe under a different app name or feature.
It feels like most people post too many fake pictures, news and crap on their profiles and this isn't going to be a good idea. "Look guys, I'm happy on Virgin Islands, like this!" (also on Prozac)
Facebook has a wealth of information on social relationship interactions and also on personal interests. Adding in information on romantic relationship interactions will allow them to (eventually, when the ML models are well-trained) provide amazing matches for users. The downside is that they'll now have a deep understanding of yet another aspect of your persona.
What are the dangers? How can they monetize this new relationship knowledge?
* Life insurance companies might want to know if someone is prone to date adrenaline junkies and be easily coerced into participating. * Insurance might want to know if someone "hooks up" frequently, which could indicate that the person is at risk of medical problems OR has issues with impulse control. * Dating profiles often match people by self-reported social activities like doing drugs, drinking, etc. That might be of interest to lots of companies. * Relationship going well? Expect to see a lot of ads related to co-habitation (joint checking accounts, moving services, etc) * If the dating service has a "feedback" component to allow people who go on dates to give information on aspects of the other persons personality, facebook might get information about a person that they don't even realize themselves and thus don't self-report. Such as the other person dresses badly, smells funny, needs dental work, tips well, etc. * If facebook determines that you tend to fall for a certain types of physical traits, ads featuring models with those traits will become a thing. * People don't give facebook every bit of information about themselves, but they do give it to dating services.
Think of all those questionnaires that ask about your opinions on abortion, if you want to have kids, if dating someone with different political beliefs is a hard pass, etc. Dating services use it to match people up who might be compatible, but Facebook will use it help advertisers get even more granular controls over their targeted users.
Even worse, if Facebook wants a certain political party to win, they could match up people who are firmly established in the political party they choose with people who are on the fence in order to let the dominant personality win.
ColOmbia is the cOuntry.
ColUmbia is the shUttle (or University).
Columbia is named after Christopher Columbus
Colombia is named after Cristoforo Colombo
If you can remember which countries traditionally mostly speak English, and which mostly spoke a Romance language, you have a shot at getting it right.
Nobody I know uses Snapchat anymore because of Instagram stories.
Given their history, FB will likely just let this mess fester
..., and if it does, so what?
Some years back a nephew (who was about 18 then), had a public back and forth with his girlfriend while their many friends Liked each post like two teams.
Let's bring the hyperreality to dating. I won't participate but I'll surely be watching the results.
a bit offtopic, but have any HN users successfully used dating websites in the past 2-3 years to find long-term partners or spouses? If so, which did you use and do you feel the site/app helped facilitate that process, or was it more of luck that it worked out?
Dating is always a crap shoot and there's nothing an app can do about it except expose you to volume and ensure you're seeing women who think you're attractive at all. I don't think there's anything I can know about someone that can predict if we'll have chemistry, and that's almost all that matters in the sense that it's not a choice for either person nor can you make it past a meetup without it. For that reason I'm interested in meeting basically any woman I'm attracted to, and that's exactly what an app like Tinder facilitates.
I've had zero chemistry with women everyone thought were perfect for me. And I've had long relationships with complete opposites. The question is simple: wanna grab a drink or not?
Dating isn't an easy problem. And the reality of it feels cold and cruel to begin with. Apps can't fix that part. There are always people out there who won't even give you a shot because of something out of your control, and that's a hard pill for some to swallow.
Unlike other dating platforms, this one is integrated with your supposedly up to date profile. Being able to set up a low risk secret crush with a known friend seems likely to be popular to those interested in doing so.
That is to say, a person who wants to cheat has no problem having a Facebook profile, so there’s not a need for anonymity against being found by known acquaintances like you might expect on other platforms.
Unless someone has an account for personal use and an account for "work" use that they cheat with? And their work friends list are all part of the pool for the Facebook dating protocol? That would get real messy.
I bet few Facebookers don't have the app installed.
Does not specify if they will be data mining my profile for dating-related analytics.
> Your Dating activity, such as people you like or pass on, won’t be shared with anyone outside Dating.
What does 'anyone' mean? Do they refer to other users or do they also close the door to advertisers to show you ads based on who you like?
Also, why is Europe outside of the first launch? Does it have anything to do with GDPR? It's just suspicious.
Each time Facebook comes closer to the Black Mirror version of it...
I mean, I get that such laws may be a complication from a compliance perspective. There's a small chance this is due to their legal processes, not because of product reasons. But FB not being ready for modern privacy law when launching a product in 2019 makes me wonder what shenanigans they need to cover up before a European launch.
"Secret Crush lets you match with people you already know on Facebook and/or Instagram."
Because what people have been clamoring for is to know which of their friends like them more than is mutual, so they can feel weird.
"You can choose to see other people who are using Facebook Dating that fit your preferences within the groups you are part of and the events you have attended or will be attending."
'Oh look, this person at this upcoming event is looking for a date! I'll go hit on them in person without messaging them.'
I haven't read the article, but I'm guessing this is probably a typical 2-way match algorithm, or else it really doesn't make sense. i.e., both friends have to put the other in their "secret crush" list for it to inform them that they have a crush on each other.
What they really need is a "secret crush for FWB only" list: what if I have a friend that I'd be happy to be FWB with, but have zero interest in a serious relationship, but don't want to broach that topic with her for fear that it would mess up our friendship? This would be a perfect use for FB.
Now there's an idea!
They're the largest social network in the world, and this site is a filter bubble of privacy advocates and relatively anti-social people. Do you truly believe there isn't a market on Facebook for dating? Do you really think Facebook brand is universally tarnished in some way that this isn't a good move for a company with such power and money on hand?
Come on.
I'm angry at myself for not predicting this. Although back in the day, it was allowable to search for people by a lot more filters, such as town, interest, school, etc. to find people. Now it's doing it for you.
I agree. The majority of HN users are 0.0001% of FB users and it clearly isn't built for them.
As a response to the quote, FB can do this not only "because they can", but also they are taking on the Match Group family of apps (Tinder, OKC, etc.)
This was inevitable whether the tech crowd or the privacy parade likes it or not.
Depending on your perspective, this site is outside the filter bubble created by anti-privacy advocates.
> ..and relatively anti-social people
False.
I can only report on what I see, and my non-tech friends seem even more anti-Facebook than my tech friends. I'm sure there are plenty of users in the world who still love Facebook, but the company has definitely gone past the tipping point of "only techies hate it, and for obscure reasons".
Facebook has been known (and are starting to) take over their family of apps. Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are already used by the 20 somethings and all the founders are gone so they have full control over them.
I wouldn't be surprised that they would shower features into it's family of apps that already exist on FB. (See Stories)
anti-social networking maybe, but hardly anti-social.
I still can't believe that in the era of Machine Learning, Big Data, etc. Tinder insists on presenting me with people with certain characteristics that I almost always pass up on.
Companies know with scarily accuracy which things I want to buy but can't present me with someone I'd like to meet and which will potentially want to meet me as well? (Or maybe there's no such person, heh).
Or maybe this is just so that I spend all my "Passes" and I buy Tinder Gold or whatever their premium service is called...
I don't like Facebook... No dating for me!
Seriously, Facebook seems to be a tool for self-advertising (look at my wonderful holiday photos), while dating is more personal/intimate/truthful (in theory at least). How long can a relationship last that's not based on truth?
Kind of an interesting precedent though that FB decided to build this in-house rather than buy Tinder as well.
I couldn't disagree more - Tinder shows you pretty much random people apart from some incredibly basic criteria (age, gender, proximity) whereas FB has the potential to be massively more effective at matching you given that it has a huge wealth of information (e.g. liked posts, pages, etc) to draw upon to select candidate matches to show you. It may naively assume that similarity is always good and that isn't necessarily true so hopefully their algorithm isn't so naive.
Either way, so FB's dating experience could completely destroy Tinder unless they get their ass in gear quickly and deliver a more more success-focused user experience, right now Tinder doesn't seem to care at all about match quality, nor eliminating fake & dormant profiles.
Back in the mid 2000's, I was on Hi5. So were a lot of people where I lived. Although a social network, everyone I knew was using it solely for dating. I got dozens of good dates from Hi5. It was pretty awesome.
So this is mobile-only? Exclusive of WhatsApp/Instagram, isn't that a first for FB?
In any case, I'm not sure if I would be inclined actually meet someone from the result. Maybe because of my demisexual nature, but am I the only one feel reluctant to meet up with someone from dating sites?
> It will be in Europe by early 2020.