Ask HN: Is Bumble (also) as scam site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Bumble (also) as scam site?

1 pointz9znz2 comments

The topic is Bumble and its legitmacy, particularly regarding customer service.

I have plenty of experience with online dating, including Craigslist, Pentlyoffish, OkCupid, Tinder, and more. It is not difficult to recognize when a site is fluffing (to pardon the expression) options.

Most recently, as of just this minute, I have tried Bumble.

Every Bumble request involves a captcha of stylized characters which appear recognizable but seem to result in rejected entries. Imagine what seems to be an obvious "a", but when you enter an 'a' it is deemed invalid.

One might begin to assume that they want to reject all claims regardless of merit.

Has anyone else experienced this?

I discovered this because I sought to flag profiles which were obviously promotional. They pushed Instagram profiles, and they were all cosmetic ... parts ...

That's fine if people want to do that to themselves, but on a dating platform it seems clear that they are trying to gather marks or customers. I assumed (naivel?) that Bumble was intented to be a legit service. So I tried to report a couple of profiles. And I discovered that it is impossible to report anything since the captcha is unwinnable. I'm certain I entered the correct letters or numbers, but Bumble rejected them. It reminds me of the movie wher the insurance company's policy was to reject all claims.

I have no evidence of this but here’s an alternative take based on what you describe.

Perhaps there’s a bug in Bumble’s API or app that is preventing the successful captcha from advancing you through the flow

I think it’s a bit too uncharitable to assume malice here. After all, what’s the incentive for bumble to actively keep a bunch of users who aren’t “legit”? Obviously that degrades the user experience and I assume lead to lower revenue.

But also, who made you the arbiter of what a user can put on their profile?

> what’s the incentive for bumble to actively keep a bunch of users who aren’t “legit”?

This is a well covered topic regarding dating sites, and most sites have struggled with this problem. In fact, some dating sites were caught generating fake profiles themselves. And searching for "Bumble fake profiles", it seems this has been a big issue for a while.

Dating sites historically had more men than women on them, and that presented an obvious problem. The women got too much attention, and the men had few women to browse (and received few replies, perhaps because the women weren't interested or perhaps they were overwhelmed with messages).

Sites that have more members (options) are more attractive to subscribers. So more is better, especially when the pool of potential dates is generally considered to be attractive. But what's a site to do if they don't have many members? As was the case for AdultFriendFinder, they can start creating fake profiles. Or they can allow promoters ("members" who aren't there to date but are instead promoting their onlyfans, instagram, or whatever accounts).

> who made you the arbiter of what a user can put on their profile?

If a member exists only to promote their external accounts and presumably has no intention on actually dating someone from the site, then they do not belong on the site. And if the site is making money from subscribers but allowing large numbers of profiles that are not actual date options (because they exist only for self-promotion), then it is a failure of service on the part of the site.

As for the idea of malice, as in the captcha is intentionally designed to prevent actual customer service requests, I would argue that a paid member should be allowed to open a customer service request without any captcha. The existence of the captcha itself is unreasonable if the user is already a paying member. If the user were to somehow abuse the customer service system, the site could simply ban the user and the user would lose their money.

It's not so difficult to imagine that a site which might intentionally allow fake profiles would also want to prevent people from reporting them. The thinking might be, "maybe this user will give up trying to report and just return to browsing profiles". If a fake profile is reported, based on the terms of service, it has to be investigated. And that costs Bumble money. Of course they would like to avoid that.

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