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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

List of people surprised by Tinder selling data to advertisers:

Jokes aside, I don’t think the people using Tinder care at all, or can be convinced why they should care. I’m curious, because it never comes up on HN, but are there serious competitors to things like Tinder that are more transparent about how they operate? I feel like all the money is in hiding the details of your “love algorithm” because it’s complete BS, makes it easier to sell as magic if you can’t see the man behind the curtain.

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Some people care, but what's the alternative? There's no GNU Tinder.

You can always do it like Stallman:

https://stallman.org/extra/personal.html

how does he advertise this?

Apparently rms has a "pleasure card" he gives out to people:

https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/2vkeze...

He used some advertising on his door

https://miro.medium.com/max/2100/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jp...

>You can always do it like Stallman:

Yikes, no thanks

GNU Tinder isn’t a bad idea? Come to think of it. Good tech + aggressively self-selected user base.

Gotta be a CLI though

lmao a CLI dating app now you’re thinking!

Don't knock it, it works! I met my first real girlfriend through IRC when I was 13.

> Good tech + aggressively self-selected user base.

So a sausage fest?

Does not look like a place that will offer good matches to the majority of people (and for those where that would work, they wouldn't probably need it)

> So a sausage fest?

So a dating app?

Stock photos plus GPT-3 could probably keep the illusion going for quite some time.

Why not StyleGAN2 and GPT-3?

Bug 0 would have to be this:

> GitHub, the world's leading repository of open-source code, surveyed 5,500 open source users and developers from around the world on a range of topics. It also asked for demographic information. And it was informative. Of that randomly selected cohort, a full 95 percent of respondents were male. Only three percent identified as female and one percent as non-binary.

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...

Though really it might not be as bad as all that, if you did it Sadie Hawkins style.

Let ordinary women know of a place they can have their pick of eligible men making above-median incomes and probably enough of them would show up to justify the men in creating a profile on the thing.

So, we should go GNU Grindr. Gotcha.

> ...a full 95 percent of respondents were male

Well, that’s exactly the problem I see with surveys in general: people read the above statement and automatically parse it as „95 percent of GitHub users are male“.

No, they aren’t. Or maybe they are. We don’t know. What we know is the percentage of respondents who identified as male. We know nothing - not. one. thing. - about how many % of GitHub users are male. What if 80% of female users simply didn’t bother to respond to the survey?

> We don’t know. What we know is the percentage of respondents who identified as male. We know nothing - not. one. thing. - about how many % of GitHub users are male.

Ridiculous. We know the survey has error bars. Maybe they're large. But it's still information.

> What if 80% of female users simply didn’t bother to respond to the survey?

Then Github users would still be at least 84% male.

I look forward to the ASCII art profile pictures

Real life works pretty well if there’s no pandemic currently going on

For a large number of people, it obviously doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't be a market for dating apps. Tinder and Grindr each have a user base in the millions. Many people pay for dating websites like OKCupid. This was true before the pandemic, and continue to be true.

Do dating apps "work" for those people any better than real life though? I'd argue that if you are male, you need to be in the top X (20?) percent to get any success on these apps, and if you are there then you'd get just as much success in real life.

The market exists because swiping is the easy route. But that does not necessarily imply a higher rate of success.

As a long-time long-distance dater, I must acknowledge "real life" has some killer features:

1. You both must be local, which means you have opportunities to hang out and see each other in a wider context than long-distance makes possible.

2. Assuming you pick from within your social circle and not random bar hookups, you probably have at least a few friends in common who can vet the match.

3. Corollary to 2, if you're single and lucky, sometimes friends might play matchmaker, and mutual friends are the best "love algorithm" because they actually know you and give a shit.

This is of course on top of avoiding all the dark patterns the dating monopoly inflicts upon its users.

I can only imagine what this would be like - (he/him/vim) in profiles?

That's part of the pandemic that surprised me. Remote work tools have gotten a lot better, which was to be expected. But remote dating tools have not.

We'll need a more specialist site for people who are into BSDSM.

Don't use tinder.

There's multiple upsides: you don't become another slab of beef in the meat market. You don't get profiled and that profile sold. You can't be a target for mockery on Reddit/FB/etc.

I mean, I get it, sex is fun. But it's never required an app.

There is mostly no competitor to Tinder, as the Match group (who owns Tinder) is trying to buy any dating app that gain significant usage. The only big one resisting is Bumble, which is owned by Badoo.

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