Tinder will introduce voluntary ID verification to reduce catfishing incidents
neowin.net
neowin.net
I'm not a Tinder user, but the impression I get is that there is an epidemic of bots such that people have to start conversations with silly "Captcha" type tests. Is this impression correct and there is a bot problem? And if so, how has Tinder not fixed that already?! It's not a particularly hard problem to kill off all but the most determined bots. Or are they not motivated to do so due to it inflating user numbers?
It's a feature. All dating apps/websites go through the same 3 part lifecycle. At any given time, there is only one "hip" service that everyone is using and that attracts all of the tier 1 members (i.e. attractive women) to use exclusively. Right now, that app is Hinge. Before Hinge took off, it was Bumble. And before that it was Tinder. The app that occupies this top space is generally able to get there by optimizing for the female experience, to the complete detriment of the male experience because men will always go where the attractive women are, and they will put up with anything because of that.
As a new service comes along and takes all the tier 1 users, the previous front runner drops to the second part of its' lifecycle. This is where there's still a modicum of tier 1 users left, enough to give an impression of vitality to the community and continue pulling in the new users (desperate single men) who will pay for the service's extra features in hopes of finding someone. Bumble currently occupies this space. At this second part of the lifecycle, there becomes a strong incentive to start balancing out the UX optimization between male and female, because you're no longer in the growth stage and need to start extracting revenue.
Finally, once a new service again comes along that displaces the current number one, the original number one drops to the third part of its' lifecycle. This is where Tinder is now. At that point, it has completely lost relevance to all tier 1 users, but it's able to continue along in a zombified state based on its' previous reputation and the purposefully allowed proliferation of bots that create an illusion of vitality. This is honestly where dating apps make the most money, even if the service itself is terrible. You have no mandate to continue innovating or providing good customer service, and you can totally optimize for the male experience (which is far more profitable) because there are no real women left.
source: Worked for $large_dating_app in the mid-2010s
As an aside, I'm curious if there's still any dating websites worth spending time on (no phone app install required).
For the most part no, but it depends on your age. Older people still use Match and OKCupid a bit. But anyone under 40 is on Hinge or Bumble.
Most of bots pay Tinder, which is how they get the "unlimited likes", ability to change location and ability to pull those that "liked" them. Cleaning up bots will wipe out a significant portion of tinder revenue.
On top of you doing the math on how active a bot is verse regular humans, some additional probably related factors are: - Bot accounts use attractive photos - Bot accounts can claim to be anywhere - Bot accounts are often new accounts, and new accounts get boosted - The longer you use the app, you run out of actual people to swipe on, but the new bot accounts continue to pop up at the same rate - making their % of your total swipe pool increase over time. - Bots might just be masking the reality that there isnt many people in your area using the app lately.
All that said, in my region of NY I would not consider it a problem at all. maybe this is not a problem for me because my area is very populated, so there's a lot of actual people on the app.
Whether they're real or not is the user's problem. Worst case scenario, they get fed up and go to OkCupid, which has the same parent company, and the same dehumanizing swipe based UI. Or they could go to Match.com, which I think is the parent company.
Sad to hear that now it's a Tinder clone with swiping, forced real names, short profiles for mobile, and such.
You can write a long profile, but in order to message somebody you have to match tinder-style. The quizzes are gone, the interests are gone, and the journals are gone too.
(There is the ability to send an "intro" message, which shows up to people who haven't matched, but it is hard to discover as a recipient.)
Where I am there are way way way more people on Tinder as a result I think.
Also funny how problematized dating outside of those approved channels has become.
It is, ultimately, monopoly control over human reproduction.
My concern here is that this kind of verification will become mandatory and will then be used to ban people from behaving the "wrong" way from a company perspective - not "engaging" enough with it, avoiding the dark patterns, not giving it the permissions it requests, etc.
But presumably you recommend it to others as a successful place to find a partner?
Tying that to a real ID would mean you'd need a new real identity and/or make fake documents which is illegal in most places.
When has that ever happened?
It works the same in every country.
You can't get people to join if there isn't a lot of people, and there isn't a lot of people because nobody joins.
Faking the participants 'till you make it is cheating, compared to an organic growth that rarely happens at the inception of a new platform.
The amount they are doing about bots, trolls, and outright state-funded dezinformatsiya and active measures warfare being waged on their platforms is only the absolute minimum so that they can claim to be "doing something", and not appear to be fully and actively allied with the assaults on democracy.
I've had success on other apps, but a big fat zero on Tinder.
Isn’t the verification they are already doing sufficient type of voluntary verification?
The biggest problem with tinder, at the moment, seems to be people using the "passport" system. They pretend to be local, but really they're hundreds/thousands of miles away. I wish that was more explicit and obvious.
Yeah tell me about it :p I live in Norway and about the only people I regularly match with are people from South America. And in a way that’s neat, they are nice people and I want to go there some day. But I really wish I’d be shown to more people near me so I can actually meet someone IRL and have it turn into something meaningful. I cannot afford to travel right now and even if I could, COVID-19 is still making it difficult.
All I want is to meet some women, hang out with them and find someone that we both enjoy being around each other.
I’ve had very few matches with people actually from my country in the past year and in every year prior.
I’ve been to a grand total of one date in the past year. And I’ve had proper text conversations with maybe a handful of people from my country at most.
Maybe it’s a sign that I should earn some money that would allow me to leave this country for somewhere else, idk.
One thing is for sure, Tinder is just not my arena in this country. So I’ve uninstalled it for like the 20th time. We’ll see how long it goes before I install it again, so I can continue meaninglessly swiping on people from my country that are not going to even see my profile, just like it always is save for a few people a year.
But it has to be said I've had far more meetups with tinder than anything else. Here in Helsinki it seems to be pretty popular. Maybe I stand out because I'm a foreigner, wearing a kilt, but I guess I've been quite lucky in that I get matches pretty frequently.
(Though I go through phases where I ignore it for a few months, then use it for a few hours every day in a week.)
It's a good feature, you can match with people a few weeks before going to another destination or on holiday etc.
I've certainly matched people who are far away, despite no desire to do so.
Other times, people in poorer countries are trying to match with people in richer countries. Think of Tinder as acting as a broker in a situation that sometimes people call "mail order bride."
> Catfishing is a deceptive activity where a person creates a fictional persona or fake identity on a social networking service, usually targeting a specific victim.
I’ve talked about this before, but the entire culture of dating apps feels like everyone is putting up a facade and you have to too if you want to play.
For anyone who hasn't watched his YT vids, take 30 min and go through some of his shorter clips. It's quite interesting what the expectations out there are.
Once you get to know someone then it's a better time to talk about all the frustrations and disappointments of life.
My experience might be out of date though, from other comments it sounds like online dating has gotten harder in recent years.
Dating apps just feel like I’m looking at the same few people over and over again with the outliers being seen mostly as negative. Nobody looks particularly interesting or like someone I’d get along with, whereas in real life interactions I don’t find myself filtering people this harshly. This is an issue I’ve heard of from people of all genders/sexuality’s. It just feels like a worse version of job hunting. In fact this analogy seems almost too perfect.
You “apply” on an online platform with a low response rate, with a number of the “applicants” effectively treating it as a numbers game just to get something. Many of the responses you do get are rejections. Some may end up eventually getting a positive response and either win, finding a good person for them, or end up in a less ideal situation. Meanwhile everyone tells you that this is the worst way to go about things and that the right way is to have an established network you can reach out to.
The job hunt comparison is perfect though, since I have exactly the feelings about job seeking online that you expressed about dating. I would have never applied to the job I'm at now, which I love, based on the job description online. It was really eye opening, a lot of the best organizations to work for are the worst at recruiting. It may be because they retain people so they don't have to do it as often, I am three years in and still the new guy.
I have since stopped. I dont use the apps anymore. I want to meet someone naturally. It eliminates that pointless friend phase without feeling obligated early on.
Also, dont get me started on Snapchat and snapscores.
My usage ended years ago though, while I connected more on a friendship level with a lot of the people I met they all started as dates. I've heard from a few people that's changed and become more ambiguous.
Maybe there needs to be a new system for more serious daters.
The other problem is that it lays bare your “value” in each interaction, and it could be damaging to one’s ego. Flirting in real life gives both parties a chance to escalate with plausible deniability.
The best system I have seen though is when matchmakers who roughly know both people, and can vouch for both parties’ trustworthiness do the matchmaking. They will have the ability to objectively put two similarly “valued” people together, and possibly not only along one metric (e.g. looks).
Of course, this gets more and more rare as the size of one’s social networks gets smaller or has fewer overlaps.
Why?
At one point I read somewhere in some pop-psych book that people naturally tend towards symmetric engagements. I think this particular remark was speaking on the point of physical attraction. And from a logical standpoint this makes sense at a baseline (wherein all other things are equal). But say, your photo shows a 3/10 on the highly arbitrary meter of attraction. You're presented with a battery of perceived-people [1], these are accounts, with photos of humans who one trusts has another human at the other end that is accurately represented by the profile details. You're not immediately confronted with the fact that some people are literally only engaging in the system to accumulate matches, bots, advertisers, scammers; one naturally places their trust in the system. This trust allows the user to reasonably assume any matches made are reflective of their value. In reality about 2/3rds (anecdotal) are indiscriminate. This feedback can duly be intuited to move the personal perception of self-assessed attraction from a 3 to say a 5 or greater, and generate unrealistic expectations in the domain of physical attraction. What's more is, I'd conjecture that the external valuations are more impactful than self-assessed attraction, that weighting strongly contributes to the big picture assessment of the mating landscape. The more feedback from indiscriminate sources the greater the pull. Physical attraction is a huge component of mate selection, so this component alone can raise an individual's standards far beyond their standing power.
Then there's the perception of the overall pool in every dimension. If one is given literally thousands of options and even the faintest glimmer of the hope ideal selection, they're left to pick and choose in a loop that likely won't satisfy. And if you apply the idea of hypergamy to the situation it becomes even more perverse, and this stands to destabilize what might actually become tangible by offering unrealistic prospects via the indiscriminate perceived-people. Think of the situation where a 3/10 ends up with a 3/10 but is more or less told they're capable of netting a 5-7/10, will they realistically settle for that? I suspect not, and this distortion makes their actual prospect pool seem far less appealing and creates a perverted and highly disposable form of relationship. And then you can lump in all of the economics, education, lifestyle, practical accessibility, plans and desires, etc... as further complicating the distortions offered up by the infinite choice fallacy.
[1] This should be read as: bots, advertisers, influencers, etc... and facades.
> I'd conjecture that the external valuations are more impactful than self-assessed attraction, that weighting strongly contributes to the big picture assessment of the mating landscape.
This is why I think family/friends matchmakers are so valuable. They are able to ascribe more objective view of the higher probabilities of the type of person you would be able to land, and hence show you only those people (since their credibility is also on the line).
I spent years going on dates and refining a charming persona, but that was the means to the end. Companionship is far more fulfilling than thin ego boosts, but you'll never find a partner unless you're willing to put in effort to become attractive to many potential partners and then attempting relationships. Sure, it's a facade and not who you are in your pure, unrefined, mammalian form, but it's a good version of yourself.
None of this is particularly revolutionary; it's just how courtship and mating works with mammals. Tinder is just the lubricant.
I think there’s a winnowing effect as you age out of the app. So it may not be that they’re all bad or good but rather that you have to seek your audience elsewhere as you age out of the apps. I think this is probably true for anyone looking for a relationship.
I think this is just dating in general. People that are broadly attractive are more likely to not be still dating at 35 compared to people who are not as broadly attractive.
Online dating is just increasing your dating surface area by 10-100x fold.
Yeah, it's called having a mating instinct. People will put up with all sorts of horribleness to satisfy it.
Sure some people are just looking for a fling but I’d be willing to bet money most people who date are looking for a relationship and eventually marriage.
Both men and women.
Those that wanted marriage and kids already have that.
1. Create profile with hot babe pictures
2. Set search proximity to lowest setting
3. Swipe furiously until you find your friend
4. Wait for a match
5. Screencap the ensuing conversation
I did this to a couple guys in my platoon. The results were definitely worth the effort.
Hope there is a special place in hell for people who have cheap laughs at cost of emotional damage of others.
Just for clarity, I'm talking about adult males whose job description is essentially "jump out of planes and kill people." We're not made of quite such fragile stuff as, apparently, you are. It sounds like your life must be very difficult.
The level of well-I-never and pearl-clutching in these comments really speaks volumes about the HN commentariat.
Why don't you go to PTSD meeting for veterans and just tell them to stop being jumpy because they are not suppose to be fragile and its all in their heads.
However, if someone feels an equivalent amount of distress from having a convo with a fake person on a dating app as they would from thinking that some terrible accident happened to their kid at school, I believe they might have some larger personal problems to address first.
It would be like making the class walk through a math problems people did right and wrong.
It could have been a great team building exercise.