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.
> I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users
This has been tried many times and proven to fail. You end up with echo chambers like lobsters and cesspools of the deranged like BlueSky. Yes, there are decent people on BS but not enough to offset the mass-reporting ban brigades. If you join there and have been deemed an undesirable you will be banned before you can utter a word.
"Misanthropes of the world... Keep yourselves apart! Because, fuck you."
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?
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?
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.
That they should share with law enforcement when appropriately requested.
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?
That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.
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.
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!
If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder
Previously a few comments on the Guardian ver:
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
SilverElfin•1h ago
nathan_compton•44m ago
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?