Ask HN: Tinder is full of fake profiles, posted by Tinder. How to prove?

[bloniac]

Tinder is full of gorgeous women and well, the profiles just don’t seem right somehow.

Compared to genuine profiles which have ordinary looking women, with profiles that have narrative text, real locations, it’s easy to see which are the fakes and which are real.

Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

But I wonder is there any way to prove that Tinder is cat fishing it’s own users?

[mh0pe]

Prior eng from Tinder/Match Group here. Opinions are my own, not my previous or current employers'. I haven't worked there for a few years but I can tell you with strong confidence that doing something like this would throw public metrics out of whack, and would cause massive brand damage across the Match Group family. They take security pretty seriously and this kind of initiative is very unlikely.

What's far more likely as a source of random bot traffic is that a click farm is using real devices (it can take a bit to get abuse banhammered), and I'm guessing you're in a major metro area where a few bots are more likely to sneak under the radar. Elo[1] is deprecated these days, but much of ranking leans on 2nd- and 3rd-degree evaluation of both yourself and the other person, implying those users are generally evaluated as real and not reported much. Bouncer[2] helps the engine take this kind of data into account.

All this is to say if someone seems suspicious, leverage that Safety Toolkit. But Tinder seeding in fake users themselves would be quite visible externally after a quarter, cause a big spike in reports over time, damage user retention, daily sessions, and stickiness massively, all of which negatively impact ARPPU and paid conversion rates. Throwing tons of standard KPIs isn't worth a fractional boost in sales with the kind of revenue and growth factors[3] they're driving.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/15/18267772/tinder-elo-score...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/tinder-tests-limited-right...

[3] https://ir.mtch.com/overview/default.aspx

[pepemysurprised]

> Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

I have used Tinder a lot, but not in the US. Where I am it's obvious that 95%+ of profiles are fake. However, I don't believe they are created by Tinder themselves. It's a combination of scams/bots, people looking for followers, prostitutes, fake profiles to try Tinder, and other stuff.

On Tinder's side, a few things happening:

- Tinder actively surfaces old/abandoned profiles to make you waste your swipes and super swipes. It's safe to assume that the vast majority of profiles you swipe on are no longer active or signed up once but never used Tinder.

- Tinder picks a subset of profiles (again, mostly abandoned ones) as "upsells" to make you buy likes. They are even labeled "upsell" in their API and it's the same profiles over and over again when you sign up.

- Most people that you swipe on will never see your profile.

While Tinder themselves does probably not create profiles, they are doing absolutely everything they can to make you spend money and give you the minimum amount of real matches they can get away with. Their goal is to give you the minimum to keep you on the app as long as possible, nothing more.

The system is completely broken and Tinder is extremely malicious. It's almost a scam. Less than ~1% of what you see are actually real people actively looking for matches. I am still using it because even 1% is better than nothing, but I hate the company with a passion.

Also, it has gotten significantly worse in the past ~5 years.

[amin]

"the profiles just don’t seem right somehow"

Is any evidence for your belief? Not having a bio text doesn't indicate a fake profile.

Alternatively, you could try setting up a fake profile of a really handsome guy. I think you will see that the girls you thought were fake, are not only real, but happy to text, engage, and even call or meet up with you.

[Leparamour → amin]

>Is any evidence for your belief? Not having a bio text doesn't indicate a fake profile.

Not the OP but in my European country a number of the pictures of women appear oddly "American" in style. Especially when there are indicators like foreign products or foreign electrical sockets in the background. Although those might be in fact catfishing profiles. For me personally, Tinder has been hardly more than an exercise in frustration and disappointment in my fellow humans.

[ixacto → amin]

Set up a fake okcupid profile a couple years ago. Set “Woman interested in Women”. The inbox was still overflowing with messages from men.

[FreakyT]

> Obviously it’s Tinder posting the fake profiles because they want men using their software.

How is this at all obvious? I mean, even if we assume they're definitely fake profiles, wouldn't the more likely explanation be that they're individuals engaged in catfishing?

[ctack]

I like the premise. I got this impression from the 10 minutes spent skimming the results from my rural area. Some of them just t looked so fake. But maybe setting up the handsome Stan account and testing is the way to go.

[xchip]

FTC Sues Owner of Online Dating Service Match.com for Using Fake Love Interest Ads To Trick Consumers into Paying for a Match.com Subscription

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2019/09/ftc-s...

[throwawaysea]

I got this feeling on other websites too, like Match. It seemed like there were lots of inactive non paying profiles and very few real ones. When you send a message to a non paying user, they can’t see it or respond to it. Match instead sends them a notification to subscribe because they have a new message waiting. It basically turns users into their sales reps.

Online dating dynamics are very broken, particularly for men who are reduced to blindly swiping on all profiles. The only well designed dating app I’ve seen is The League, where its founder took a systematic approach to incentivizing interactions between users. This has the effect of making the app less of a time sink and chore, and more of a productive way to meet new people. See this past talk from their CEO, where she explains some of their design choices: https://youtu.be/_MUOpgS6TTg

[sneak]

Prove it to whom? For what purpose?

It seems like it would simply be easier to stop using Tinder if you don't like the service.

[Trias11 → sneak]

It's like saying "... it would simply be easier to stop using Amazon if you don't like fake reviews".

No, it would be better to make any fraudulent and scammy practices public so people and even government be aware of growing scams against citizens.

[o_m]

Also a lot of fake profiles put an URL on their images, to scam sites. I don't get why Tinder can't use OCR to detect this. Some profiles also put the URL in a video, which makes it slightly harder to detect, because not all of the URL is in the first frames.

[saradhi → o_m]

Regarding OCR detection, "Sometimes it's not that can't, they don't (may not) want to."

[phonethrowaway]

most companies have perverse incentives not to clean up fake profiles... just like SoundCloud.

[rishikeshs]

While backpacking I met a guy who works at one of the dating apps like Tinder. He used to handle strategy and confirmed me that the company itself puts fake profiles so that their is more engagement and premium purchases.

[muzani → rishikeshs]

This is quite common with many seed stage startups. They'll call it hustling and say stuff about doing things that don't scale. I say this as a person who has been working and freelancing at various startups.

But it's harder than actual user acquisition. I don't think Tinder or any company with PMF actually does it. One of the definitions of PMF is when you're overwhelmed with trying to meet actual demand. There's little reason to make fake demand. If you've acquired 1k active users with 300 fake profiles, are you going to maintain 300k fake profiles to maintain 3m active users?

I can see why someone would do it to raise seed funding, though.

[HWR_14 → muzani]

> If you've acquired 1k active users with 300 fake profiles, are you going to maintain 300k fake profiles to maintain 3m active users?

No. Nor would you have to. Fake profiles scale well.

[f0xytr0xy]

A lifetime ago I worked at FriendFinder.com. We boasted of our 30 million customers, but in reality we had less than a milliom active customers in a given year.the other 29 million were either fraudulent affiliate sign ups or created by a team in china who were also paid to flirt two hours per day.

70% of our actual users were men. About 1/3 of our active female users were prostitutes.

[sesuximo]

Is this really worth your time?

[doggodaddo78]

It's the women who are shallow because of the premise and captology of Tinder. It's working as intended. If you're not a super attractive man (a model), then you're wasting your time on Tinder.