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Comment by firephonestival | Hacker News Reader

If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best practices.

Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.

Because of the consolidated nature of the market, and the winner-takes-all nature of the industry, I really believe that it is impossible for a new entry to gain popularity and focus on hard problems like security.

This is fundamentally a problem with capital allocation and incentives. There's not much that a small team can do about it.

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You appear to be arguing that it's better to betray your customers' intimate confidences, than to find a market you can address without doing that.

I'm sure that can't be what you are trying to say - although, if it is, I can certainly understand why you made a throwaway to say it.

I'm pretty sure it's just an observation about the situation that any player in that market would find itself in, so therefore when you look at apps in that market they're shitty about privacy.

It's a comment about dating apps, not about people who decided not to go into dating apps i.e. found "a market you can address without doing that."

I'm not saying it's better, but that it is unavoidable given current market conditions.

We all want our data to be handled securely, and we should try to understand why that does not happen.

There's a difference between understanding why people behave dishonestly, and making excuses for dishonest behavior. You're doing the second one under the color of the first.

No one has to make a dating app. I don't see how "no one else could do it without betraying their users either!" as you argue - and, again, even granting this is true, which you've done nothing thus far to show - excuses the actual betrayal that actually has occurred. If you'd like to make an argument that it does, I'd be interested to hear that.

I think you're shooting the messenger here. OP was explaining the incentives for the behavior we're seeing, not excusing it.

Maybe so. It's easy to get your blood up when you're addressing flagrantly careless behavior that substantially helps make possible the systematization of the same kind of targeted, but back then still by necessity only interpersonal and mostly opportunistic, violence that was a daily feature of your life throughout most of its first couple decades.

So, sure, the one comment to which you've directly responded here, I'll call that out of line on my part. Everything else I've said throughout these comments stands.

He's saying that in the end, all that will be available to customers will be the unscrupulous ones - because if someone tries the other approach, they'll fail.

And there always will be someone trying the unscrupulous approach, no matter how many people decide not to.

I think he’s saying don’t even try, because some other company won’t bother and it’ll crush you.

Fine! Don't try, then. "Someone is going to do this shameful thing, therefore there is no reason why I should not do this shameful thing" isn't quite the logic of a sociopath, but only because a sociopath sees no need in the first place to excuse to himself his own immoral behavior.

If your attitude is "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all", that's fine. But a predictable consequence of that attitude is that, when the cost of "doing it right" is high enough, the only people who do it at all are the people who don't do it right.

The incentives are broken, and telling the people who point out that the incentives are broken that they're just making excuses for bad behavior doesn't actually fix the incentives.

I’m pretty sure no one in this thread is saying that but you?

It’s an observation that market conditions seem to disadvantage anyone who DOESN’T do that, so unless you like spending a bunch of effort and time (and being less competitive overall because of it, and likely go nowhere), maybe spend your effort somewhere else if you don’t like to be that way.

There are a ton of markets like this. If you wanted to open a ‘good’ check cashing place for instance, go right ahead. Just don’t be surprised if you lose your shirt trying it by not being like the other, less scrupulous players.

You appear to be taking a very uncharitable interpretation.

This thread reads to me as there may be perverse incentives due to nature of dating and capital markets that make it nearly impossible to compete while valuing security.

Exactly. If “do think X” is my goal, and there are zero successful moral paths to doing thing X, then the only option is to not do it.

u/firephonestival is stating the obvious and much repeated: any conscientious effort will be buried by the horde of amoral and immoral players. They are not defending, excusing, or in any way minimizing the excreble outcomes of our winner-takes-all economic regime.

Maybe for security (however that being second for any app is a serious issue).

But this is a conscious choice. A small team should not need to make the decision to do something like this.

Also Grindr or Scruff isn't exactly small and have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a relationship.

Users kinda suck and hate to pull out their wallets if they don't have to.

Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can sell the functionality back.

How much of that is because they have been conditioned that things should be free though?

We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing out major tools and functionality for free because of the privacy invasion.

I have to wonder how things would have looked had that not become the norm.

As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year. Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume they are pulling in quite a bit of money.

> have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a relationship.

At least in the US, one might imagine this is more important to users than hiding their sexual preference.

That's quite a claim when, until Grindr's practice of selling PII was disclosed, no one had any reason to imagine that by using the app they would be disclosing their sexual orientation and behavior. In light of that I have no idea what preference you imagine to have been meaningfully revealed here.

My claim is that for a large number of Americans, it's probably worse to be outed for seeking extra-relationship (I'm not sure of the proper term) casual sex than for being gay/bi/queer. Of course, both of those could be revealed at the same time which would be quite the double-whammy to an unsuspecting partner.

Oh, I see what you mean.

I'm not sure I agree, though. In an open relationship it'd be no surprise to my partner if I were using Grindr (he probably would be too, in that case!) and I think therefore that'd be more or less orthogonal to the concern around the risk of forcible outing posed by Grindr's misuse of data. Both are certainly of concern, but I think independently so.

> If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best practices. > Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.

understood. the only practical response to the banal corporate indifference of modern markets is ultraviolence. establish a rival dating app and send ninjas to the bedrooms of match owners to threaten their lives

hn says "there's not much a small team can do about it" but they are clearly considering only a small team of technologists and a few salespeople/growth marketers. hn has drastically discounted the impact a small team of (kunai-wielding, not mid-2010s startup recruiter speak) ninjas can have

>If you are a startup, you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace by being scrupulous about best practices.

>Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.

Match owns almost all of the dating app market because they've acquired who? Startups who created popular apps in a crowded marketplace that they don't already own.

Now, if you want to argue that you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace without accepting a buyout offer from the dominant player, now that's a topic I think is worth quite a bit of discussion.

Dating apps likely face a lot of churn because those customers who succeed cancel permanently. So for young apps burning out trying to compete it may be very hard to resist a big buyout from larger players with deeper pockets and fewer moral constraints.

On the other hand, programmingwise dating apps are simple as heck and require almost no staff (source: Match's presumptive development priorities across their apps). Wasn't Plenty of Fish famously one guy for years and years? Heck, nowadays you can even seed a new app with fake accounts even easier with thispersondoesnotexist.com. Couple that with Facebook's GPT-3'ish release today[1] and you can probably create some pretty convincing activity, including messaging.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31243569

>I really believe that it is impossible for a new entry to gain popularity and focus on hard problems like security.

Well, they can. New entrants to the dating app market always start out this way. They gain loads of initial trust and word of mouth growth by putting users first. But they inevitably fall victim to the same market forces as their competition, and slowly become the same thing. It happened to Tinder, it happened to Bumble, and it will happen to Hinge.

Or they get acquired by the Match company (Tinder, OKC, Match.com, others) and just start poisoning the UX straight away.

> Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.

Sounds like a business opportunity.

Google owns most of the search space, it’s an even bigger business opportunity!

Ok sure but the point nerdjon and GekkePrutser are making (which I agree with 1,000%) is that it's super selfish to prioritize "creating a popular app" at all costs over protecting people's actual lives. Creating a popular app is great but don't risk the lives of your users!! That should go without saying!

That’s bullshit. Being incompetent isn’t a success factor - you’re not gonna beat Match.com by allowing people to steal your customer data.

That’s now what they’re saying . They’re saying if customer data security won’t be a deciding factor, you’ll lose by focusing on that instead of what IS the deciding factor.

People still use Grindr a ton even though these security issues have been well known for years and in most areas users have real concerns for their safety and lives if they’re caught using it, so I can’t say they’re wrong.

Little known fact: Facebook Dating doesn't sell any subscriptions, there are no limitations behind a paywall. They probably have the best security but I guess you could argue that Facbebook sells your data in other ways.

It is actually what I would expect from a dating site. Match group apps look more like a vehicle that only exists to transfer money from your pocket into theirs.

Move fast and break society.

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