Tinder, Hinge, and their corporate owner keep rape under wraps
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.
And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.
And no, I haven’t seen any ads in it.
That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.
Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?
I married one of them and 2 of them are still close friends.
That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.
I even tried to verify this by looking through old registries available online (where marriages and births were recorded), some of which are digitized and OCR'd by Yandex, but it seems that they do not have a list of unmarried people. Although the birth records typically mention whether a child is "legally born" (within a marriage) or not.
> I doubt it is true
GP is correct. Human history spans hundreds of thousands of years. You are talking about the most recent ca. 5000 years of enforced monogamy through the social/cultural institution of marriage, but this era has come to an end and we are reverting to the natural state of affairs (polygyny) again.
Sadly not very active or funded, right now.
What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.
The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.
What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific.
It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives.
Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.
In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today. Everything is consolidating, and there seems to be zero momentum in the opposite direction. So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
Did you miss the part where the parent said "I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating"?
It sounds nice to make "dark patterns" illegal, but what that means is that its arbitrary since you can't define it. Discretion is fine, but you have to be fine with [bad politician] appointing his minions to oversee the process.
For something simple like "pick up my garbage in a regular cadence", I wouldn't really care if it's Biden, Trump, Obama, Clinton or any reasonable politician so I'm fine with ceding that authority to the state. But when it comes to something like social media regulation, I don't trust politicians.
I'm sure this will draw immediate reactions that in a heavily lobbied (i.e., bribed) environment, it's a pipe dream to hope for antitrust action to occur, but I would point out that the very same environment isn't any more likely to impose meaningful regulation, either.
Some peeps met online in games or hobby specific platforms, that works, but never on dating platforms. I think the barrier for entry to dating apps is having a special relationship to intimacy in the first place.
I consider us more of the exception than the norm. I also went on at least 100 dates over 18 months mostly to realize what I wanted and didn't want in a relationship. It did work out for us, but I don't recommend that approach to everyone.
A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in:
1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time)
2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio.
4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example.
5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert)
6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc.
7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy.
None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!
Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about.
* Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game
* Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game
* Getting ghosted? Numbers game
* That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game
* Burn out? Numbers game
* Situationships? Numbers game
* Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game
Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.
If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder
Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.
I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users. This is actively happening, and for some content and jurisdictions it is legally required to happen. If you get a strong signal that someone is a bad actor in your community you should remove them.
However surely you could agree that there is a reasonable line somewhere.
If, over the course of several months, multiple people with seemingly no connection to each other report the same problematic person, then is there ANY reason to not issue a ban?
That leaves, what, asking a private company to do facial recognition scans on all new users? Requiring them to present official government ID ala the recent EU laws?
Honestly I’d prefer a dating app that checks identity and prohibits duplicate accounts
The only reasonable line is - act on the first report (and every single other report), and work closely with the police. But if the victim doesn't want to involve the police then what can you even do?
A cardiologist life is not usually falling apart. so I wonder why this sort of madness would be a thing. Are they thinking nobody would believe the women?
This is clearly worse than false positives. They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.
Why doesn't law enforcement have this data? Presumably these crimes are being reported to the police?
If the crime wasn't worth reporting to the police, I'm not convinced why a private company would have some obligation to act.
If you think the legal process is too slow, presumably the focus should be on fixing that, so that rapists face actual consequences?
Why do you presume that? And even in the best case scenario, it takes years between a report and someone being sent to prison.
That they should share with law enforcement when appropriately requested.
I don't know why people would report this behavior to the app and not the police. But the apps should be telling people to file a police report and have the police contact them.
There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
Rape is underreported because this attitude is so prevalent. Reporting a rape is incredibly difficult and traumatizing and rarely leads to a conviction. It also exposes you to violence and harassment to the person who raped you in the first place.
- Hid credible reports of users being sexually assaulted from the public
- Did not put up any sort of significant barrier for users reported for rape from making new accounts
- Underinvested in safety on their platforms for years, then laid off everyone in their safety org in favor of overseas contractors with little training
- Ignored members of Congress asking about how the company responds to reports of sexual violence
Despite this, I'm sure that everyone in Match Group's leadership who contributed to the organization making these decisions doesn't think they have any sort of responsibility here, and doesn't have any problem sleeping at night.
But in the end all the successful relationships I ever had were people I met in real life. Is it really that hard to meet people in real life these days? I mean, in fairness, I was on a campus most of that time, and so mingling is sort of built in. But surely there are other contexts where people mingle?
Yes. *especially if you don’t drink*.
The loss of a third space and common community center (Churches, in the US past) has cascading effects.
My personal experience, the boring sexual harassment training, and talking to the AI, suggests that asking out a coworker at the same level of the org chart with whom you don't closely work is not considered really problematic, especially among young people.
You can't ask out someone you supervise and its considered a little socially risky to get involved with someone who you work with really closely, but nothing seems to prevent coworkers from asking each-other out, as far as I can tell.
Well, what are they?
They're exhausted from work, commutes, everything costing more money, being advertised/pitched/upsold to at every chance, crypto bros, noise, constant calls to their attention, being the target or witness of unsavory interactions, etc.
There are a bunch of reasons to hate it "outside", in increasing numbers, with at best no increase in reasons to enjoy it.
That's the always-online contingent, though. In real life, a lot of people still go out and would be glad to be chatted up in person. By someone they find attractive, of course, but that's always been the case. If you do it today, one advantage is that you stand out, since so many are afraid to do it.
It always been like that. It sucks to be a single man who looks for women. Unless you are rich and handsome.
If dating app doesn't work for you, think of how people connected before apps. Go to group activities, engage with people and build a relationship.
I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.
Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
Perhaps positive reinforcement after people have met? Or just having social links?
But yeah, i dont have it all figured out yet
There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.
I kinda feel the same way about Facebook. Groups, events, marketplace are amazing for community building. But it's just so hard to compete with Meta.
For those of you who haven't tried it, it offers far more swipes, generous filtering, and no payments required at all for every feature.
I'm surprised more people haven't taken notice of it.
- Didn't even know fb dating was a thing.
- people still use fb?
Maybe people over still 40 use the social media site in large numbers. I just have a fake profile to access marketplace & dating.
That just doesn't sound right, lol.
Then again, I didn't online date at all in college and am only just considering it now that it's been so long and I just never seem to meet single people anymore. Maybe it's worth a shot, setting up some kind of OLD profile was one of my resolutions for this year
Freedom to ban a user is freedom of association, but a legal obligation to amplify unsubstantiated accusations subverts due process. This might be unpopular, but I like living in a society with due process.
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”
-John Adams, founding father and father of OG abolitionist John Quincy Adams
Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
Anyway such things should be regulated by laws and run by the government rather than by private companies without any legal responsibility.
It is really good to see actual investigative journalism still happening out there.
Palantir board member.
CEO of match.
maybe he's nice to his alsatian?
... they're all part of the same shitpile.
You can't have it both ways.
Our anthropology is confused and it shows.
Previously a few comments on the Guardian ver:
You can ALWAYS claim that a policy proposal is futile, or will backfire, or will jeopardize some other freedom. The question is about the tradeoffs, which requires considering the evidence at hand. So many concerns being raised here are easily refuted by sentences in the article.
Everyone will ignore it anyway.