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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The scene in The Social Network about adding relationship status to users' profile sums it up perfectly. Facebook was a large catalog of your friends, friends' friends, classmates, coworkers etc., and showed you their profiles, pictures, if they were dating, who they were dating, their interests and more. Facebook was the largest dating site in the world the moment it got popular.

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I don't agree. Allowing someone to list their relationship status on their otherwise-non-dating-site profile is a far far cry from providing tools and UX to help people match with others they might be interested in.

Certainly people have found romantic partners on FB in the past 15 years, but I would view that as in spite of the lack of dating-related features. Up until now, FB has not been geared toward or especially useful as a dating platform, especially given the availability of dating apps that actually fill that niche.

I think FB Dating has the potential to be way more successful to a mainstream audience than nearly any dating app built to date, though.

I can't believe you guys are arguing over whether or not Facebook used to be a dating site and nobody has mentioned the "poke" button.

When I was in high school, back before the news feed, Facebook was the best way to flirt! Go to someone’s page and post a comment — it was was so casual. Too bad Facebook killed it when they started broadcasting everything you post.

This is why people defaulted to Snapchat shortly after. Having temporary messages/pictures was ideal when after seeing evidence of failed relationships, people wanted the evidence of early flirting to be gone from the record.

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