Pakistan blocks Tinder, Grindr and other apps

Government bans, even the US one, certain kinds of speech like death threats and such.

In Pakistani people do not consider the American way of dating as acceptable, and consider it a harm to society as a whole. Individual behavior affects society. There's a reason criminals are in jail.

Governments ban things for public interest, and it is in the wider interests of the population that such apps be banned or regulated liked banks so everyone gets a chance like they do in real world. Many governments optimize human happiness, family over money and raw GDP numbers. It might come as a shock to you, but not for the people of Pakistan. They're not for sale under hyper optimized algorithms that suck the soul of the people.

People think these apps are harming people by enabling behavior that harms people.

It's the same line of reasoning that leads to prohibition on drugs, guns and booze.

It is in some places already. In the UK for instance a bank has to open a basic checking account for you when asked, to avoid situations where people without jobs or homeless cannot have a bank account(which is required for nearly everything else). There can be many restrictions placed on such account later on(no debit cards, no overdraft, no mobile banking etc), but it's practically impossible for a bank to close a basic checking account for someone.

Sex, Russian trolls, Chinese nationalism, US foreign interventions and Javascript in the browser. Plus a few other topics where everybody is an expert, too.

Maybe your family did that, but people in my family don't. They preferred the civilized way.

Western people are usually surprised to find out that people actually have freedoms outside of America and Europe. They just often choose to sacrifice more egregious ones for communal good than not.

I think your opinion is irrelevant and based in ignorance of Islam and the values that a predominately Islamic society holds for its citizens. These are not easy or often flippant decisions made and/or accepted by people. But part of listening means accepting where you have a right to form opinions, to have them heard, and to feel entitled to them being relevant. This is not listening. This is you asserting a colonialist's supremacy on a culture that does not agree with your ethic. This same line of thinking is what led to the British invasions of Central Asia and Africa, that Indians were barbaric and Brits would bring the education and civil discipline to their land and improve their lives. Well, what good have yours and their Napoleon complexes left?

Different cultures have different views of acceptability. I am sure there are things in western culture that seem absolutely abhorrent to other cultures (one that comes to mind is killing infants after they are born, selling baby parts for money, and abortion in general). Having a view of moral superiority while perpetrating what other cultures consider atrocities, is, at best, the pot calling the kettle black. And at worst, being completely wrong. It is good to have a bit of leniency, civility, and trying to understand others when they disagree, even on subjects in which we are personally invested.

We should not conflate sexual freedom in general with the very specific kind promoted by Tinder. There are many different ways you could design the UX of a dating app and in my opinion the Tinder approach has some very serious downsides. Dating online doesn't necessarily have to be about promoting a lot of shallow and superficial interactions.

Maybe the commenter edited his comment, but as it is now, it doesn't mention or imply that Pakistan is uncivilized (which wouldn't be hate speech, anyway).

People regularly say damn near the same thing the GP said (that the "civilized world" or something along those lines should reduce or cut ties with) but they say it about a country of ~320 million people or (more rarely because we don't discuss it as much here) a country of ~1.4 billion.

If that flies so should this.

You know, people make jokes about, for example, Indian arranged marriages, but they have one significant upside: you get to know not only your future partner, but also their family, their past, the environment that they were raised in, etc. It's basically a full background check.

With casual dating via Tinder you might as well end up dating a serial killer, and even if you don't you still have much harder time really getting to know the person if you don't have any common friends, come from different cities, etc.

The divorce rate was going up long before online dating, and have actually been going down since the onset of online dating. Though I'm skeptical they're directly related.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/23/144-y...

I don't know. I have a couple of friends who met there wife online. They all seems to have very stable releationships now and all have more than one child. Some had very wild times before, some almost nothing before.

There is. Just look at the studies of interaction dynamics of people on Tinder vs the physical world. It's very much a rich get richer dynamic. IMO we're going to look back on this generation of social apps as dangerously uncontrolled experiments in social engineering.

It did and I appreciate reading the views of people that I don't usually see on HN. I hope future articles will also bring out people with different views, and no one tries to make such people feel unwelcome.

Also clearly brings out the people who don't like to hear opinions that differ from theirs...

So if I view murder as bad and I ban MRDR, a hot new SV startup that helps murderers plan their murders, I'm a tyrant? The rest of the world isn't obligated to import every social engineering system SV comes up with.

> This would be supported by the fact that divorce rates have been decreasing in the USA since the 90s.

Divorce rates are decreasing because marriage rates are decreasing. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_in_the_United_States#/...

There's a lot of evidence that we are less satisfied with the choices we make the more options we have. When you can compare your current partner to 1000 other options every day you're very likely to have some buyers remorse.

> Implicit here is the idea that couplehood and family life were more stable

It doesn't necessarily imply that. What I took from the GP is that people are giving away control of their dating behaviour to large commercial entities with unknown implications.

It's not about technology making it easier for humans to interact, but about changing the nature of the interaction.

In a way it's similar to advertising. If you glance at an advertisement online now, it looks very much the same as looking at an advertisement in a magazine in the 90s, but to everyone on here it should be clear that behind an online ad today, there is a gigantic empire of data-collection and analytics that most people aren't even aware of.

An easy example here is that a commercial entity that matches people has no direct interest in people engaging in long-term romantic relationships, since it might prevent them from coming back. It's best to optimise their matching algorithms on other areas.

That might not matter too much if people were aware of these skewed algorithms, but it's also in the best interest of commerce that people are not aware of it.

It's dangerous to equate normal "behaviour X" with "behaviour X, but digital", especially if the difference provides space for a commercial entity to set themselves up as a middle man who has no incentive to be neutral.