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Comment by laurenkay | Hacker News Reader

Our employees don't have fake profiles on OkCupid, although the Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles if they find someone that is exceptionally good for one of their clients. This is a pretty common practice overall in the matchmaking industry - do whatever it takes to find a good match for clients who are paying you a good amount of money for the search.

We do our best to not spam and inspire trust by being available 24/7 to answer questions and personally interact with users. At the same time, we're constantly trying to grow so that we can provide the best matches. It's hard! Cut us some slack? No? Because it's HackerNews? Yea, I guess that's okay then.

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> Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles

Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there. The only messages that they could legitimately send on OKC would be to ask someone on a date.

I have a friend in NYC who is a old-school matchmaker (sole proprietor). If she told me that she was doing a search for a client and looking on dating sites for prospects, I wouldn't blink. I guess that I trust she is trying to act in the best interests of the two people in the potential match.

Is this substantially different?

The interests of the clients are irrelevant. If you owned a business and your competitor used your business's facilities to promote his to your detriment, you'd understandably be upset. That's precisely what the poster is being accused of.

I think it depends - would your friend message the prospects on okcupid/POF, or tell her client "here are some great profiles, you should message these people"? Those are very different; I suspect dating sites would have a problem with the former and not the latter.

> Unless they're on OKC to look for dates, they have no business being there.

This isn't true. Some look for companionship on OKC. Why they use OKC for it, I have no idea but 100% of the user base isn't strictly for dates/hooking up.

I think you're arguing semantics here (or trolling). The point is that users shouldn't be sending messages as a proxy.

Some people look for friends on OKC. While I wouldn't say they have no businesses being there - they definitely shouldn't spam users.

Exactly!

The right way to go about helping out their clients without potentially spamming OKC users would be to message their client on their own site that they have found someone for them on OkCupid. They could then ask their client to sign up to OkCupid to view the account and message the user.

> Premium Matchmakers do occasionally use their real profiles if they find someone that is exceptionally good for one of their clients

This is bait and switch and also poaching, same as if a realtor goes to another realtor's web site to find prospects and start soliciting them, plus using false pretenses in your case.

How about you have your employees contact their clients saying that they have found a good match on OKC and send the profile with that message. Then if the client is interested, that client can reach out on OKC personally, making an OKC account if necessary.

How this would go 90% of the time...

"So I went through the effort of making a profile and messaging them and they never replied. Now what?"

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