Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Since at least 2013, Defendant has maintained the following five deceptive or unfair practices to induce consumers to subscribe to Match.com and to keep them subscribed.
First, until mid-2018, Defendant sent consumers misleading advertisements that tout communications from persons Defendant identified as potentially fraudulent users of Match.com and led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them.
Second, until mid-2018, Defendant exposed consumers to the risk of fraud by providing recent subscribers access to communications that Defendant knew were likely to have been sent by persons engaging in fraud.
Third, until mid-2019, Defendant guaranteed certain consumers a free six-month subscription renewal if they fail to “meet someone special” but failed to disclose the requirements of its “guarantee” adequately.
Fourth, Defendant has misled consumers with a confusing and cumbersome cancellation process that causes consumers to believe they have canceled their subscriptions when they have not.
Fifth, until mid-2019, when consumers disputed charges relating to any of these practices and lose the dispute, Defendant denied consumers access to paid-for services. [1]
[1]https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_com...
"Please be assured, Match.com does not send members misleading notifications, e-mails or winks professing romantic interest. We have too much respect for our members to ever compromise their trust. If you have received communications from members with profiles that are not immediately available, the member may have temporarily hidden their profile."
That is impressively scummy.
This aligns our financial incentives with our user's incentives to have amazing experiences with someone they like. We also have a product for couples, so we won't lose 100% of our users.
More info if you're interested: https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin...
It's also indistinguishable from every other company doing business.
reminded about that Ashley Madison actual ratio in their database of something like 3 real girls to ten of millions of men, with the employees&bots producing all those "communications"
First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.
The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.
Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone.
The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed.
I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.
But dating sites that create fake profiles and use all these dark patterns to try to con you into joining should simply be avoided like the plague. Nothing good can come out of those, and there's no point in rewarding bad actors with your money.
Articles exposing these bad dating sites serve a very important purpose here.
This doesn't solve the gender inbalance though. This problem is much more difficult to solve, and requires further homogenization (?) of the male and female gender role.
This should be one of the more important challenges of our time. Lonelyness and sexual frustration have only negative impacts and are two accelerators for radicalization - which is a pressing concern in developed countries.
The reason why women tolerate the current system is that it is less work. You just apply a filter to the incoming requests.
It's much easier than having to produce requests.
That's why women's profiles say "don't just say 'hey'" and they get to respond with...
Hey.
> So where are you from?
> Austin, Texa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
> Uh... the capital of Texarcana
> Hey!
> djdjrntbdjc
A site where women message first means their first message is a limp cold “Hey”, after which you are expected to craft some sort of interesting and thoughtful message for them to grace you with their response, otherwise they’ll just move on to one of the other hundred men available.
Online dating cannot work without the asymmetry in the dating game being resolved.
EDIT: couldn't find original blog post but this article seems to have some of the same math/details in less entertaining form https://blogs.ams.org/mathgradblog/2016/06/08/okcupid-math-o...
When match.com bought them a number of posts about the inner workings, along with any posts that were critical of paid dating sites, were quickly taken down, and they took some effort to chase down exact copies hosted elsewhere and demand they be taken down too.
OKC used to actually be a nice place to meet people (I'm still in contact with a number of friends I met on there) but it's turned into a cesspit. Off topic, but if anyone can suggest a non-awful replacement I'd be all ears. Ideally one where I can talk to people rather than having to make a yes/no decision based entirely on 3 photos.
Tinder disrupted the online dating scene by introducing the feature that you can only write someone after you've liked their profile, AND they've liked yours.
That makes a huge difference, and solves the spam problem.
I got back on Tinder about 6 months ago and bought a premium account after they kept waving the number of potential matches I had, only to discover that the vast majority of them (roughly 18 in 20) were 2,000+ miles away from me and looked like spam.
Photos with spammy gmail addresses and URLs written in them has been on the rise recently too.
"Hey, we know you're both single, or at least looking for other partners. You're literally the only two people on earth that share this fascination, everyone else thinks it's weird and creepy. You should chat. Based on the personality profiles we've created for you both based on your search history, we think you'd make an amazing couple."
That could totally disrupt dating, it would be organic in a way that could actually work for relationship longevity and it would be based on things people are actually interested in rather than what they think they should present as being interested in to signal mates. It has the potential to be far more real than dating sites.
This is why I think this clustering based on interests was always bullshit on dating sites. And this is why people use Tinder now.
- Women and men join.
- Women are immediately dogpiled by creeps, catfished, dick-picked, called names and given death threats for saying no.
- Women turn right the fuck around and leave.
- 80% ratio if you're lucky (and 100% plus bots, employees, and ghost accounts if you aren't).
Most dating apps want you to be addicted (single and swiping) to their screens so that they can keep earning billions of dollars from subscriptions, power-ups, and ads. Even if you aren't paying, they want you addicted to their platform for their paying members. There is a serious conflict of interest.
We are different. We understand users want to find someone, so they get on with their lives-- to have amazing life experiences with someone they like. We give our users exactly that and our main revenue stream is tied to that. Just like Uber and Lyft sell rides because customers want rides-- we sell adventure dates because our users want breathtaking dating experiences.
We also hate screen addiction. We want to be in the background, so people can focus on living in the moment. And every day, we'll sprinkle their lives with like-minded, kind people and travel opportunities.
Would love your feedback on it. Here's more info I wrote about our business model:
https://blog.fairytrail.app/2019/09/reinventing-online-datin...
Also I am happy to share my user data with the community too.
Make a profile with a really hot guy pic and see what happens. You'll find there are way more women on those sites than you thought. Or better yet, don't do that, but look into the people who have. They tend to be crazy people (who invented 'chadfishing'), but their results are fascinating.
That may have an effect, but it is also that women tend to go for the "top" guys while men in general have an more even spread on what they like. This is a more likely scenario.
If you are male and not an alpha male that is very good looking and / or successful, it is unlikely that you will have a good experience on dating apps.
This has been found again and again:
OkCupid (which later deleted the post because the truth is controversial, and they are progressive): http://archive.is/pLAWq
Tinder Study: https://i.redd.it/huqtbknjvoc31.png
(There are many more, just search for it)
All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.
When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator.
So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.
It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway.
This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.
I know one French dating website, AdopteUnMec, where it's free for women and paying for men, the owner are claiming the user split is 50-50 between men and women. But I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works.
At my small office of 10 people, where's 2 people that found matches on e-harmony, resulting in marriage.
It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.
One hypothesis is that it depends on the service you use. E.g., Tinder vs Okupid, where Tinder reinforces decision based on looks while Okupid encourages much more detailed profiles.
The reverse then meant that the bottom 78% of men had to compete for the attention of the bottom 22% of women. They retracted that study after a while, but other dating sites roughly get the same percentages eventually.
edit: here it is https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
In any case, any site where the profile focuses primarily on your photo is probably going to see this going both ways: men going for the hottest women and women going for the hottest men.
If you focus more on people's interests, I'd expect you're going to see a very different pattern.
There are definitely fewer people than e.g. Tinder, but they tend to be a lot more real vs spammers / scammers / engineered profiles designed to keep you in.
Most Tinder matches were bots, most OkC matches were actual people. Of course this is with a sample size of 1, in Germany. Your mileage may vary.
Is that grammatically correct? It appears to be, but wow does it ring strangely in my ear.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190429100515/https://static.iz...
My new hypothesis is that Match acquired OKC just to get Rudder to STFU.
One trick I think that was missed though? :
> eHarmony seems to do quite a bit better than Match, claiming in their ads to marry off 236 people a day
That doesn't mean those people marry people they meet through eHarmony, nor that they people used eHarmony at the time they found their maate etc?
Seems like a good potential revenue source, although it might require a little bit too much honesty for their taste.
I am happily married now (met my wife through a mutual friend, the old fashioned way) so my experience of online dating may be obsolete but women on dating sites tend to be very specific about their partner’s height. And income, and what car he drives and a big shopping list of mainly physical and materialistic traits. If you could verify all of that you might be onto a viable business.
How you attract the men to your platform is up to you...
Women. Period. If you have women, then men will come. And they'll jump through absolutely every hoop and hurdle to do so.
but its so bad now because women are competing for the top 5% of men who are like models and everyone else gets no response
You see profiles with only pictures that clearly were taken 5-10 years ago, or only picture of the face with a filter so heavy they are barely recognizable. It is certainly short sighted because you can only hide behind a carefully curated profile for so long. If I was looking for a dating service I would certainly pay for one with just verified, unedited photos. At some point this could get creepy but other stats like height, age, and weight could be optionally verifiable and public.
If this could save me from even one awkward date a year with someone I don't find even remotely physically compatible it would easily be worth it.
If someone asked me if I want to date an overweight woman. I'd say no. But if I met a great person, and she happened to be overweight, it wouldn't really matter to me that much. So, within limits, I could accept being 'lied to' on a dating website.
Robbery? People just want to enrich themselves. Rape? People just want to pleasure themselves. The nerve of society to criminalize these behaviors, we should all get the fuck off our collective high horses.
I think it is just one exhibit of the fatal flaw of the idea that shareholder value maximization is the correct objective of a corporation. The very original raison d'etre of limited libility was to enhance wellbeing of public, not shareholders. And for some reason that has been forgotten.
(No, I have no good solutions for proper corporate governance, but I still think acknowledging we have a problem is the first step.)
Only if people never recommend driving instructors to friends and family. If they do, a driving instructor who consistently has people passing their test quickly is much more likely to make more money long term
Now, I'm not sure if these are of any worth (I never got anything useful out of LinkedIn... either people trying to sell me something, or colleagues I know already).
I've heard of people (of gold digger kind) using LinkedIn as a dating site.
While spam prevention is technically not a "solved" problem, simple and clever techniques in addition to shadow-banning go a long way. Once an account has sufficient activity, which for spammers takes anywhere from 30s - 4hr, even modest systems can confidently identify the vast majority.
A company like Match that has conglomerated other upstarts in the space surely has spammer identification systems far in excess of smaller apps. Yet somehow those competing apps often cite account authenticity as an advantage over Match. The Ashley Madison scandal exposed this business tactic. Match clearly followed suit and has been just-subtle-enough to evade legal action until now.
But come on, if you are a large business then you should know what is going on in your company.
Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1 gal so building a dating platform is hard.
First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for months. God knows how many companies now have my data.
Second, they employ dark patterns:
1) Easy account deletion. Why does that matter? Because they own nearly all dating sites. Including: "BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful, FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge" So, they don't care if they lose a user as long as they can shuffle them around.
2) They will keep a tab of the number of users who have like you. Then eventually that user will shown to you and you will swipe left or right. In that case the tab count will decrease. This is a complete scam. They would withhold these users to push to a pay subscription. Example: https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg . Moreover, most of these likes a bots and fake profiles.
3) Fake notifications: https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg
4) Shadows-bans: I saw that my profile was getting no matches. So I made a new profile, ban! a match within minutes. Essentially they shadow ban users as a form of Neg.
They changed it so swiping left on someone who liked you no longer decreases the like counter
Also before that if you were out traveling the likes you got while on the road will not show up in your stack when you leave the area where you got them
Also if you swipe left on someone and you’re in their stack and they swipe right on you, they’ll show up in the count
The rest is still super scummy, but the “rules” of the like counter are at least somewhat logical
Do you happen to know if that was a valid strategy, and if it still is?
I always wondered if it was/is actually possible to completely reset your data, considering they have pretty strong links to you like payment information.
I imagine you risk being shadowbanned if you do it too often, but it’s pretty natural to do it once every couple of months
Current time to shadowban seems to be around 3 months
Glad to see the FTC curbstomping it
Lots of people are told they have no problem with their profile and that they should just recreate their account to get around their shadow ban.
The house of cards that Tinder built is falling down
This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other place I've moderated before.
You routinely shadowban people you disagree with. Or post-limit them. You don't get to act innocent here when I guarantee you're just as guilty of these dark patterns as every other site.
On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.
This sounds like something the CCPA was trying to change.
On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we didn't create the fake users.
These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk is far worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/
eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit.
Someone has already linked to the OKCupid blog post which explained pretty well why you should not pay for a dating site. Then they were bought out by Match (how did the anti-trust people let Match accumulate so many sites?), and any principles they had went down the drain.
Basically, the market is ripe for a respectful dating site. But OKCupid started this way; and in the end they sold out. What makes you think you won't sell out when the money is right?
My wife and I had been separated for a while and in the divorce process. (We were and remain on friendly terms, but it was definitely over.) I thought I would check out some dating services, and eHarmony sounded like one that wasn't sleazy or weird.
So I filled out their lengthy multipage onboarding form, with all kinds of personal questions where they ask you to write heartfelt essays about various things.
At the beginning they asked my marital status and went on from there through the whole questionnaire. After I entered all of my information and wrote my personal essays, they got to the last page and said:
"Sorry! We don't serve your kind. You are separated! Come back when your divorce is final."
Those weren't the exact words, but that was the message.
Now if a dating site wants to serve only a certain market, and if they don't want to serve people who are separated but not yet fully divorced, I totally respect that! But they need to say it up front after asking your marital status.
Instead, they led me through the entire questionnaire, asking all sorts of personal questions, without even a hint that the very first question about my marital status was going to disqualify me.
And then they offered no way for me to recover any of the information I had just entered into their site: all the essays, personal questions and answers, all gone.
No online service of any type, dating or whatever, should ever do this to anyone.
Luckily, I'd had the sense to copy and paste all my little essays into a text file and not trust them to give them back to me. That just seemed like common sense. But in the case of eHarmony, it was necessary!
What's worse is that they probably saved it and profited from that data.
We both quit EH. Many months later, I found them still using her (quite attractive) photo in their advertising.
Most of the time this is not a problem because you can create the account again with the correct email, but I have lost a few good usernames in some popular websites because I pulled this trick on them, Gravatar is one of these websites and the simplest one to explain.
I wanted a specific username that was available; I signed up with an email that looks like username+gravatar@gmail.com and the operation went through, then when I tried to log in, the website kept saying that the email was incorrect. I tried to reset the account using the username instead, which would force them to send a reset link to the email associated to this account, but the emails never arrive. I gave up that and other good usernames in many websites because of the inappropriate handling of email addresses by some popular web libraries.
Also, the same way you learnt this “trick” other programmers discovered it too and implemented a stripping algorithm to remove the unique ID during the registration process, so it is not very useful nowadays unless the website is very obscure and their developers either are rookies or do not have time to prevent this.
It's more effective to have an entire domain at your disposal and just invent $vendor-specific-thing@mydomain.com whenever an email address is needed. On the server end all you need is a catchall to handle it, and you can blackhole whatever addresses become spam magnets (while also knowing which vendor's responsible).
I wrote about this here: https://idbloc.co/blog/background/2019/04/14/keep-your-addre... and it’s one of the main reasons https://idbloc.co exists
I used to use unique email address per site too, and at least one was clearly hacked rather than sold.
I contend that no such thing can possibly exist. The reality of online dating is that it is garbage, and generally the only way to sell people garbage is to lie to them and convince them it isn't garbage. Dating is a gigantic pain in the real world for a lot of reasons that just can't be fixed by a fucking website.
Seems like it's a problem that can't really be solved by a profit seeking company, and has to be left to a non-profit foundation or something like that.
Image hosting has a similar problem. Imgur used to be the "good" image hoster, but they have been slipping immensly. In the case of something like image hosting I could see publicly funded infrastructure solving the problem. Not sure how comfortable I'd be with this in the case of dating.
I remember when PoF was run out of some guy's basement. He was the only one (well, aside from a part-time systems support guy) running it, and he was banking $1M/month (he posted a photo of his check once) from ads.
This isn't just a trick, it's outright fraud. They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved.
Think about how vulnerable people become when they're searching for love. And then this corporate giant comes in with an army of psychologists, A/B tests, and analysts to figure out how to best extract their pound of flesh and offer nothing in return.
Forgive me for saying this, but fuck Match.com. The FTC should evaporate half their liquid assets / market cap in fines.
The fake accounts were rather obvious, extremely attractive women that would message, or send a like without having looked at profile. Many of the fake accounts were obviously not suitable matches. For example, the profile (if filled out) is seeking someone in country X, but they've contacted my in country Y.
I also noted some accounts would initiate contact and then account would disappear. I am not sure, but I suspect the host website is taking some efforts to combat problems.
I'm delighted the FTC is taking action, but I think the people that fall for these scams will always fall for the scams. It's hard to protect the vulnerable.
Lastly, if anyone is looking at online dating. Do your research, there is plenty of available information that explain the majority of the scams and detail what to look out for.
Tinder even introduced paid “boosts” (pay to be shown to users who otherwise might never see you), which is identical to a slot machine.
Maybe you get a match during your boost. A random reward! And only Tinder knows whether your boost caused it or not.
There's very unilateral information in every transaction with dating apps, and that's the problem.
However, if you've ever used any of these sites with a profile in a sparsely populated rural zip code, it's a pretty grim situation and I can see how fake profiles could arguably make people feel better than having absolutely nothing to even swipe on.
If the fake profiles don't go beyond just filler status, i.e. they don't reply to messages and lead people on, it doesn't strike me as that big of a deal. It's just more like entertainment and time wasting than anything actually helping you find a mate. But if you live somewhere literally devoid of eligible candidates, it's not like the dating web site (or anything other than moving) can fix that.
Ive used match on and off for awhile and the crap stunt of them sending me a bunch of likes, messages just as my subscription is expiring has always ticked me off. Ummm where were these matches the first few weeks and oh wait if i want to find out if they are fake or not i have to subscribe again. Though after the first time of realizing I was being hookwinked by match I never re-up my subscription.
> Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product..
Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well?
From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time customers.
In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their site, where there weren't actually very many women on the site at all.
Alternatively, a dating site can be rife with scammers who have themselves created fake profiles on the site and are messaging potential victims. For example, I read that Tinder used to be particularly rife with bot accounts that would message obviously bot-y greetings to attempt to get a user to click an external link (to what end, I'm not sure).
In the second case, dating sites may have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the scammers, who create appealing looking profiles and make the site seem to have more activity than it really does. But the real users are potentially being targeted for fraud / scams, so this is just as--if not even more--egregious than the false marketing fake account scam, because at least the company bots aren't trying to convince you to share your bank account number.
It's not entirely clear to me if this is a case of #1 or #2, but it seems like it's #2. And because Match wouldn't even let potential users read the message (or see who it was from?) before signing up, the bot accounts would provide a significant signup boost to users thinking they had a potential match waiting for them on the site.
If it is #2, then the immediate question is how prevalent was this, and did Match take action to close bot accounts that were reported / flagged as such. Any social network will have at least some bad actors, and the platform should be judged on how they respond and defend against those actors, not whether they existed at all. I think TFA does not provide enough information to reach a conclusion.
When I shared my rejection of that particular idea with my fellow Match participant, there were no further messages. So I have no idea if maybe this was some sort of cult-front come-on or there was actually an attempt to fill some small venue with paying attendees for a legitimate entertainment, based on keywords in my profile that indicated a likelihood of interest perhaps? The latter of course is the most charitable guess. It was clearly not my sparkling personality they were interested in.
It was "in the middle" of my time on Match so I don't think there was any link with getting me to renew. Also the process passed the Turing test, so the term bot seems misapplied. But scammer in a gentle sense does apply in the sense that apparently romance was not the goal, but was a lure.
Fraud is such an interesting problem. Are the incentives ever truly aligned such that businesses should rigorously stamp out bad actors? Or, in a toxic twist, should they do the bare minimum to satisfy some regulatory body/their brand perception?
Treacherous times indeed.
For women, online dating just doesn't make sense. Even on Tinder, where the ratio is kinda okay, women are bombarded with messages and likes. To the point that they can't even respond to everyone even if they wanted to.
This means men are left with unresponsive women and just start to send cheaper pick up lines to more women faster. Thus continuing the cycle of women getting bombarded...
There was a blog post I read once where some employee used statistics from the dating site to show what the relationship between male and female profiles where, who had good chance of getting dates etc... Conclusion: it really doesn't work for 90% of men.
Thanks for that. I recently tried Match.com for a couple of weeks and came to the conclusion that I am some kind of misfit. As it turns out, I may be normal after all?
This is only half the story. The full story goes:
Women can choose who to date, men must compete. Men can choose who to marry, women must compete.
Dating apps exclusively cater to category #1. This dynamic may or may not be creating an entire class of >25yo women who are unable to marry despite the desire to do so.
But online dating is tricky. There may be people who can pull it off but for me the real world is easier. Also many women look good on pics but the pics are old or photoshopped.
I really think that most people who are critical of online dating are only looking at one demographic, being people who are 25 or under.
Yes. There's tons of them because they can't get a husband and the supply/demand curve inverts across the genders. The time to secure a husband was back in their 20s when they were on the favourable side of the curve. Those women are pursuing partners that pursue much younger women.
To cut it short, female overall partner disirability peaks in their 20-30s and then falls off. Male continues rising until their 80s.
Dating apps are amplifying this effect but are also amplifying its downside, across both genders. Is this a net win or lose for society? Idk, you decide.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-cheats-more-the-demographics-...
That's exactly the issue. Women ages 21-28ish are pursued by men ages 21-35ish. So there's more men chasing a smaller number of women.
Also Almost Every guy here is complaining about dating apps not working... I ask them how many women did you say nope to? Meaning we all are too damn picky ..men and women equally.
We're definitely not equally picky, not by a long shot. Online, women are far more pickier than men.[1] They can be picky as they're the bottleneck in the reproductive chain.
But are we saying men don't care at all about looks nor want their children to be attractive/have it easier in life?
I also know a bunch of couples that met on tinder, but it's all from 3 years ago. I haven't heard of someone else who has been successful in finding a long term relationship on Tinder since.
The difference from the US was quite startling. I got literally hundreds of likes and dozens of matches. (my like counter showed 99+ after a week). The matches weren't bots either. They were actual women, and a decent number of them responded to my messages. I've actually ended up meeting four different women in person during a time span of two weeks. We've had some good in person conversations and I still keep in touch with at least one of them. They didn't seem like they just wanted me so that I can bring them to the US, either, as that never came up in conversations and they seemed fairly happy where they currently are. I was honestly quite sad to leave and come home to the USA because it felt like I'm returning to a social wasteland.
Later, I've on a whim set my Tinder location to Philippines one night (might be going there for work this winter), and got a decent number of matches instantly, and the ones I've talked to responded willingly. I've also gotten a ton of matches when I was on vacation in Dominican Republic last winter.
Of course, if I use my actual location (Seattle) I still get basically zero matches. I've had similar low success in Western Europe.
So, your dating app status as a dude is really location dependent.
You should be aware that the "experiments" people have posted online aren't necessarily unbiased either. There are a lot of bitter, loveless men writing content on the internet.
If you were to complain about it, you're either hit with advice from the infamous rules 1 and 2 (1. be attractive; 2. don't be unattractive), or you'll get some advice which is well-meaning but hardly actionable. The one I see most frequently is "try and meet people at bars" (it's hard to imagine this working today, and it almost requires one to be a drinker - and even then it's harder not to come off as creepy) and "join some activity groups".
The real kicker is that many activities that you already enjoy are biased to one gender or the other (say, compsci/engineering hobbies and chess tend to be heavily male-centric in real life meetings), and it's very hard to find the passion for an activity if you started doing it just to try and find a date (and people will usually pick up on the fact). It can also leave one feeling superficial and creepy to do so.
I know many men (and some women) who've decided to give up. Men because they have lost hope on account of not having a strong enough appearance to persuade someone to read their bio, which often reeks of desperation anyway (one may be short, another may be fat, yet another may be ugly, yet another just prefers Android[0][1]). Women because they only feel valued for their appearance, or just for being a woman, rather than what makes them who they are.
I expect the problem to get worse, where online, centralized dating platforms become the norm, and when it's harder to make friends in real life, in which getting to know someone first outranks any consideration of appearances. If you're not already friends with someone, it's very easy to accept or reject on what is immediately visible - one's appearance.
[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/563567/iphone-vs-android-could-be-...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14619158/apple-iphone-goo...
Anecdotally, the most successful (in terms of turn around, partners, matches, dates, etc.) male I know is overweight, has poor hygiene, and is somewhat misogynistic.
Conversely, I know perfectly handsome men who could be models who strike out all the time.
Sure, good looking people might get more matches, but do they universally convert at a higher rate? No. If anything, they spend more time interacting with these apps in a less productive manner.
Only because their standards are set higher due to needing to filter the incoming stream of matches to a manageable drip of first dates. In the end, their outcome is better. Just like you would interact on LinkedIn 'in a less productive manner' being a rockstar developer @FAANG..
Last time I used Tinder they seemed to make a right move towards video chats. If I were to develop a dating app, I'd incorporate vid chat as the only way to communicate. Ain't streaming video of yourself atm -- you don't exist at all, can't be found or swiped on. Procrastination & waste of time -> 0.
Also real-time video basically renders any account validation unnecessary because all Photoshop guys/gals went to learn neural networks and how to implement DeepFake face replace.
You probably meant to ask how to make a dating app that also makes money in an honest and upfront way. Such services had existed long before the internet, you know them well, and they just honestly recognize the true reasons why men and women want to date. In short: human moderation with the premium to access the high quality dating pool. Obviously, fees there are way higher than what most people can afford.
If you're looking for random sex, many swinger clubs also allow single men (single females are almost universally welcome), either always or at special events. If you're in a relationship and your s/o is interested, I can also recommend visiting swinger clubs for a change.
Long story short, many years ago I was working for a provider that was building algorithms for various dating websites.
The goal was simple: Increase signups.
A Little Bit of Background --------------------------
As a small group of rather "creative" engineers in their early twenties encouraged by large sums of money we came up with the idea of building "Matching Personas" which would be able to have a basic conversation, as well as have similar interests in the target subject.
Keep in mind that some of those dating sites have various "upgrade" (read payment) paths. Some had a "3 private messages" limit so that you can start chatting with someone but to continue the conversation, you needed to upgrade to premium.
The typical path for a user was: 1. Visit the website and search for what they're interested in 2. See a few profiles and decide whether online dating was their thing 3. Invest personal time creating a profile and putting down their interests, photos, etc.
Point #3 is where the magic came in.
I had been working on automating the creation of accounts, and more importantly the creation of what we used to call smart-accounts. After a few months we had increased the conversion rate by about 30% on average (Which is MASSIVE) and our internal funding was getting larger and larger. Our smart accounts ended up being able to recognize certain items in photos, understand the interests of new users, have "similar" interests that are either the same or tangentially related, similar number of kids, etc. etc.
Based on real matches we built an engine that learnt what people look for when they convert. How the conversations go, the type of language used when discussing, the similarities in interests and family, etc. Honestly a really wide set of super interesting machine learning problems from object recognition to natural language processing to recommender systems to LTSM, etc.
It was pretty simple. A user signs up and they put some of their information in. Our engine picks up the latest user's information, creates about 10 different "smart profiles" that the new user is likely to match, and then in the search results display those smart-accounts to the new user who just joined. The new user would see smart accounts, and start chatting with them on their free accounts. Because we knew based on previous real matches and real conversations how people ended up "being together", the unsuspecting free users.
The conversion path was: Signup -> Fill profile -> See someone you like -> Converse -> Upgrade.
The Day my Mother Fell in Love with Me --------------------------------------
Now that you have a little bit of background, the story begins. I had been working for many of the dating companies (most of them competitors) for a few months and our smart-profiles were getting quite clever.
One night after my mother invited me for diner. We started eating and drinking wine and just talking in general. I never talked about the general aspects of my work but she knew I worked with computers and back then statistics now machine learning now everything-is-AI-anyways.
Whilst on the topic of computers, she said: "Oh I haven't told you, I've actually met someone online". I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was quite nice.
Then she proceeded to tell me the following: "He also has 3 kids, he likes a lot of the same stuff I like which is really nice, and we started chatting and he's really nice. He's gone on a business trip now so we haven't talked in a few days but I'm looking forward to talking to him again".
At that moment I became very suspicious because all the signs pointed to exactly what we had been aiming at achieving. Get users to like someone, signup, chat (Which had a limit of 50 free messages at the time for that particular platform if I remember), and convert (pay) to have more chats. The trick was when people upgraded, within hours, we had some canned answers like "I'm going on a business trip won't be able to talk for about 2 weeks".
Either way, I started asking my mother a few more questions and she explained to me that she had found him after signing up and they chatted a little bit but she had to upgrade yaddi yadda and it wasn't cheap but she was glad she didn't end up wasting so much time online dating like all those other people online dating. Then I asked her about the particular website and it was one we had been working with.
She had actually fallen in love with my bots. I felt terrible not only for my mother but for the thousands of other people we had basically scammed, and only at that moment did it hit me. Up until then it was a fun challenging ML engineering problem with real-world subjects.
I quit the following day and have never been affiliated or interested in either working or using online dating since. Even though I do have friends who got married to people they have met online dating, it made me a cynical.
It separates the low-end and the high-end geo-targeters.
But like I said, getting a date off these apps is like pulling teeth. I've reverted to asking girls out in person at coffee shops, social gatherings, etc. Even if you get rejected, it at least makes for a good story.
Good on you for talking to girls directly, that really is the way to go. Super hot women don't tend to bother with online dating, and if you can approach confidently you'll be able to land much hotter women in person than online anyhow.
First, there's a clear (and artificial) skewing of supply-demand curves. There are probably like 30 (active) guys for every 1 (active) girl on these apps (looking at you, Tinder). This creates an imbalance where women are incredibly selective while men end up being incredibly non-selective (e.g. swipe right on everything). Clearly, this needs to be addressed -- this "marketplace" is a sham.
Second of all, a lot of women (but also men) use dating apps to increase their social following (be it Snapchat or Instagram). This probably only pertains to people in their 20s or 30s, but it's a huge problem when trying to seriously find someone to date.
Third -- the botpocalypse. About 70% of my matches on Tinder this past year (I actually quit all dating apps around 4 months ago) have been bots. Not sure if this is a tractable problem, but after a while, it just gets old. At this point, matching with bots is a meme on /r/Tinder, for example.
Fourth, there needs to be an in-app incentive to meet in real life. I feel that my generation (millennials) are kind of broken. I blow people's minds when I tell them that I work remotely at a coffee shop and started making friends with people there, hanging out, etc. In other words, we absolutely suck at real-life social interaction. So we need these apps to "nudge" in the right direction. A potential solution would be a cross between a meetup and a date.
Fifth, I think hookup culture really is starting to show its dark side. Tinder was very popular as a hookup app a few years ago, but nowadays it's more or less abandoned. People actually want deep and long-lasting connections. None of the apps out there really attempt to solve this. It's a tough problem to solve because building a relationship (like building a friendship) takes time.
Anyway, these are some issues I have with dating apps off the top of my head. I will say that it also probably doesn't help that I live in LA, which is a pretty superficial city to begin with. But the women are gorgeous, so I probably shouldn't complain :)
Turn that around completely. Have users put in effort in being found.
I doubt that would get much attention to "disrupt" the market
Besides that I found it pretty easy to consistently get a date or two a week with Tinder, but it was a chore in terms of time spent to do so. It also resulted in a lot of not quite right matches that I felt mixed about, like people who were amazing but didn't really have compatible (with me) life directions/goals.
Bumble was the most useless dating site I tried. Everything seemed to be more about image and posturing than actually dating.
At the time okCupid was in the midst of changing from a decent site for people who still used desktops and web browsers and liked longform text to a bad version of tinder, which I assume it is now.
Assume things have changed a bit by now so of course YMMV.
If you're looking for dating, OKCupid works well, but you need to work fast. Arrange a meetup/coffee date within 3-4 messages. If you talk to someone for weeks without meeting, it's unlikely you'll get anywhere.
I wouldn't recommend Tinder to anyone though.
Level 5 self driving cars is a more realistic goal to achieve than this one.
A better way of looking at it is that there are bugs that leak information in browsers, and sites like the NYT are spending developer effort to discover those bugs and publish them (in the form of javascript) so that browser developers can fix them. The browser developers will eventually win this one.