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Comment by throwaway34891 | Hacker News Reader

Back in Friendster's hey day, it had the notable "feature" of letting you see who's viewed your profile. Maybe Myspace had something similar, but this seemed thoroughly baked into the UX. I learned later that you could disable "exposing" yourself, at the cost of not seeing who's viewed your own profile.

After a long browsing sesh of flipping through friends and friends of friends profiles, I received a message from a girl who jokingly called me out via DM for viewing her profile and I responded in kind. We've been happily married 13 years now :)

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Facebook's "people you may know" seems to always suggest people who have viewed your profile imo. For actual facebook and for IG.

What a nice story.

Odnoklassniki (classmates), second of the two most-popular Russian social media sites, also has always had this feature. That, and it primarily being used by older generations, are its defining features. You could hide yourself from other people's "profile guests" by paying to show up as anonymous.

This is a beautiful story, thank you for sharing! But also, I am so torn here.

On one hand, I want to say, it's worth making features like this even it sounds annoying to a lot of vocal people, because hey, maybe nudging people to connect more leads to some people connecting more and that was worth it!

On the other hand, maybe this is more a story of humans finding connection in spite of annoying UX, not necessarily because of it. These adventurous folks who were willing to connect on a DM on a whim online likely would have taken similar steps through mediums and find love (not necessarily each other)

LinkedIn had this feature, not sure if they still do.

Sort of.

They’re in the Tinder track of “X people seem interested in you, buy premium to see who they are!”

I tried it and almost all the people who had visited my profile where still hidden.

That's because they are premium members too and chose not to tell you who they were.

You need the Premium Deluxe Voyeur membership tier for that, which necessitates the Premium Confidential Partner membership tier to counteract.

It's Premiums all the way down!

They do. If there are stories of recruiters getting married to engineers who viewed their profile, I would love to hear them.

I've joked that LinkedIn is like a reverse dating site: Instead of attractive women dealing with loads of men whose messages they're uninterested in, it's men dealing with loads of attractive women whose messages they're uninterested in. :D

OkCupid also had this feature (back when they didn’t suck).

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