
Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says - mlthoughts2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/match-com-lawsuit-ftc.html
======
shartshooter
Juicy part from the actual complaint.

 _Since at least 2013, Defendant has maintained the following five deceptive
or unfair practices to induce consumers to subscribe to Match.com and to keep
them subscribed.

First, until mid-2018, Defendant sent consumers misleading advertisements that
tout communications from persons Defendant identified as potentially
fraudulent users of Match.com and led consumers to believe that the
communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating
relationship with them.

Second, until mid-2018, Defendant exposed consumers to the risk of fraud by
providing recent subscribers access to communications that Defendant knew were
likely to have been sent by persons engaging in fraud.

Third, until mid-2019, Defendant guaranteed certain consumers a free six-month
subscription renewal if they fail to “meet someone special” but failed to
disclose the requirements of its “guarantee” adequately.

Fourth, Defendant has misled consumers with a confusing and cumbersome
cancellation process that causes consumers to believe they have canceled their
subscriptions when they have not.

Fifth, until mid-2019, when consumers disputed charges relating to any of
these practices and lose the dispute, Defendant denied consumers access to
paid-for services._ [1]

[1][https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-
_com...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-
_complaint.pdf)

~~~
makomk
Wow, apparently they had a stock line they used when customers paid them money
to try and view those messages that were sent by fake accounts, got a message
saying the account was unavailable instead (because it had been deleted for
being fraudulent), and complained to Match.com that they thought they'd been
swindled:

"Please be assured, Match.com does not send members misleading notifications,
e-mails or winks professing romantic interest. We have too much respect for
our members to ever compromise their trust. If you have received
communications from members with profiles that are not immediately available,
the member may have temporarily hidden their profile."

That is impressively scummy.

~~~
inetknght
> _That is impressively scummy._

It's also indistinguishable from every other company doing business.

~~~
marv3lls
CRAPitalism at its finest!

------
LeonM
I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and _all_ of them are
like this.

First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female
balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80%
male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs.

The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and
usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super
attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles),
only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles.

Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on
messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup
lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and
stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to
stand out if you are actually interested in someone.

The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual
drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign
up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of
the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my
subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a
match request but couldn't because my account was closed.

I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and
frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a
terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

~~~
arkh
> I'd say it's about 80% male.

It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the
80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some
model's picture to discover how many women are around.

~~~
kilroy123
This is correct. It’s become a winner takes all situation.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
It probably was that way since the dawn of humanity. In 100 BC it was probably
worse, if anything

------
chongli
I think it's a fatal flaw in the dating site business model, to be honest.
Their incentive is for you to stay on the site for as long as possible. If you
could find a relationship quickly and then they would leave the site quickly.
This would reduce the amount of ad and subscription revenue, in addition to
reducing the size of the pool of "potential matches", discouraging those who
have more trouble finding someone.

~~~
fortran77
It would be nice to have a dating site where potential matches were verified,
including height, weight, and photo. Perhaps have them visit a kiosk in a
participating business to get a photo taken from a standard angle (no
"myspace" angles) along with a verified height and weight (stand on a scale!)

~~~
dhnsmakala
Is people misrepresenting themselves something you encounter frequently? Seems
like a short sighted move.

~~~
lucaspm98
It's completely understandable to put yourself out there as the best version
of yourself, but yes I have frequently seen people exaggerating themselves to
the point of misrepresentation.

You see profiles with only pictures that clearly were taken 5-10 years ago, or
only picture of the face with a filter so heavy they are barely recognizable.
It is certainly short sighted because you can only hide behind a carefully
curated profile for so long. If I was looking for a dating service I would
certainly pay for one with just verified, unedited photos. At some point this
could get creepy but other stats like height, age, and weight could be
optionally verifiable and public.

If this could save me from even one awkward date a year with someone I don't
find even remotely physically compatible it would easily be worth it.

~~~
goatinaboat
_You see profiles with only pictures that clearly were taken 5-10 years ago_

Again my experience is long ago but I would occasionally be matched with
someone I knew IRL and women shaving 5-10 years (e.g. moving into a lower age
bracket) was very common.

------
liquidise
Former CTO of a multi-mllion user dating app. I am certain Match will claim
plausible deniability here, the reality is such an argument would be a total
farce.

While spam prevention is technically not a "solved" problem, simple and clever
techniques in addition to shadow-banning go a long way. Once an account has
sufficient activity, which for spammers takes anywhere from 30s - 4hr, even
modest systems can confidently identify the vast majority.

A company like Match that has conglomerated other upstarts in the space surely
has spammer identification systems far in excess of smaller apps. Yet somehow
those competing apps often cite account authenticity as an advantage over
Match. The Ashley Madison scandal exposed this business tactic. Match clearly
followed suit and has been just-subtle-enough to evade legal action until now.

~~~
amelius
Speaking of plausible deniability, those 1000s of illegally downloaded videos
on my harddrive were uploaded to my computer by a botnet.

But come on, if you are a large business then you should know what is going on
in your company.

------
Shaddox
I worked for about 3/4th of a year for a dating website. The market is
...unique, to put it nicely. Employees are constantly poached. When my boss
told me this I couldn't believe it but it actually happened. During lunchtime,
it became an often occurrence for someone to come and talk to me to try and
reveal secrets.

Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on
the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them
was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these
dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1
gal so building a dating platform is hard.

------
yumario
Rewriting one of my earlier comments: I have used Tinder (owned by Match)
before and it was one of the must frustrating experiences ever.

First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I
been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for
months. God knows how many companies now have my data.

Second, they employ dark patterns:

1) Easy account deletion. Why does that matter? Because they own nearly all
dating sites. Including: "BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful,
FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People
Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge" So, they don't care if they lose a
user as long as they can shuffle them around.

2) They will keep a tab of the number of users who have like you. Then
eventually that user will shown to you and you will swipe left or right. In
that case the tab count will decrease. This is a complete scam. They would
withhold these users to push to a pay subscription. Example:
[https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg](https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg) .
Moreover, most of these likes a bots and fake profiles.

3) Fake notifications:
[https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg](https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg)

4) Shadows-bans: I saw that my profile was getting no matches. So I made a new
profile, ban! a match within minutes. Essentially they shadow ban users as a
form of Neg.

~~~
dmoy
To be fair on the last part, shadow ban can be an extremely efficient
moderation tool, though for people caught up as false positive collateral
damage it can really suck.

This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other
place I've moderated before.

~~~
gizmo686
On a free product, I have no problems with shadow bans.

On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.

~~~
yumario
Yep, having used Tinder's paid boots and seeing no results. And then making a
new profile with the same photos and bio! and getting results within minutes
left me feeling rob and manipulated.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
This is an excellent case for a chargeback. It's up to the merchant to prove
they were in the right, and in the meantime you get your money back.

------
oldmanthrowit
A decade or so ago I worked at AdultFriendFinder.com, then the largest dating
site. We had 20 or so different properties, covering every niche from
"jewishfriendfinder" to "alt.com"

On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn
site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter
referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get
extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we
didn't create the fake users.

These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk
is _far_ worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much
of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/

------
1024core
Back when I was single, I was on a dozen dating sites. It was frustrating as
heck to keep getting led on by fake profiles.

eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do
I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email
address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to
nail eHarmony as the culprit.

Someone has already linked to the OKCupid blog post which explained pretty
well why you should not pay for a dating site. Then they were bought out by
Match (how did the anti-trust people let Match accumulate so many sites?), and
any principles they had went down the drain.

Basically, the market is ripe for a _respectful_ dating site. But OKCupid
started this way; and in the end they sold out. What makes you think you won't
sell out when the money is right?

~~~
jdm2212
I do the same thing with a gmail address -- just do
myemail+uniqueid@gmail.com, because gmail drops everything after the + for
routing the email but still tells you which address it was sent to.

~~~
guessmyname
I used to do this, but it is troublesome some times because some websites use
libraries that strip or replace the plus sign and the final email ends up
being an address that you don’t have access to.

Most of the time this is not a problem because you can create the account
again with the correct email, but I have lost a few good usernames in some
popular websites because I pulled this trick on them, Gravatar is one of these
websites and the simplest one to explain.

I wanted a specific username that was available; I signed up with an email
that looks like username+gravatar@gmail.com and the operation went through,
then when I tried to log in, the website kept saying that the email was
incorrect. I tried to reset the account using the username instead, which
would force them to send a reset link to the email associated to this account,
but the emails never arrive. I gave up that and other good usernames in many
websites because of the inappropriate handling of email addresses by some
popular web libraries.

Also, the same way you learnt this “trick” other programmers discovered it too
and implemented a stripping algorithm to remove the unique ID during the
registration process, so it is not very useful nowadays unless the website is
very obscure and their developers either are rookies or do not have time to
prevent this.

~~~
mikorym
> are rookies or do not have time

Reputable websites don't have an incentive to strip out the ID. It is only
websites like "sold out" dating websites or otherwise nefarious websites that
have that incentive in the first place. So, name+id@domain.com is still useful
for filtering and indexing, and in fact if a website does strip out the ID you
should ask yourself why would they need to do that.

------
echelon
The FTC needs to come down hard on this. Extremely hard.

This isn't just a trick, it's outright fraud. They're playing with people's
emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most
basic need of feeling loved.

Think about how vulnerable people become when they're searching for love. And
then this corporate giant comes in with an army of psychologists, A/B tests,
and analysts to figure out how to best extract their pound of flesh and offer
nothing in return.

Forgive me for saying this, but fuck Match.com. The FTC should evaporate half
their liquid assets / market cap in fines.

~~~
smt88
I agree and will add that all dating apps do things like this. They prey on
lonely people using false hope.

Tinder even introduced paid “boosts” (pay to be shown to users who otherwise
might never see you), which is identical to a slot machine.

~~~
echelon
OkCupid charges more for your membership the older you are. By the time you're
in your 30s the rate is outright highway robbery.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
There used to be a loophole where you could change your age and gender to be
an 18 year old woman, pay the lowest (pretty much token) rate, and then switch
back to your actual age and, if necessary, gender. Now I think it looks at
your history of age and gender changes, finds the combo with the highest rate,
and charges that group's amount.

------
paul7986
All dating apps are filled with fakes and scams mostly perpetrated by those
who own the app to milk you of your money.

Ive used match on and off for awhile and the crap stunt of them sending me a
bunch of likes, messages just as my subscription is expiring has always ticked
me off. Ummm where were these matches the first few weeks and oh wait if i
want to find out if they are fake or not i have to subscribe again. Though
after the first time of realizing I was being hookwinked by match I never re-
up my subscription.

~~~
14
I on occasion would like to browse Tinder if I have time. One time after like
half hour I get a pop up that I have used all my likes for the time being but
if I pay I can continue to swipe right on people I like. Ok not interested in
that so I will wait the 12 hours or whatever it is and not pay anything. We I
forget about it and of course they send me a notification telling me someone
likes me find out now who! So I load up the app and then again hit with the I
have used too many likes and have a few more hours to wait. I felt a little
annoyed and I have no idea if they are measuring some metric or not but like
to believe they are so after I get hit with a like paywall I exit the app and
do not load it for a couple days. I like to think it scares them into thinking
I am leaving which is ultimately what I ended up doing.

------
caseysoftware
Years ago, I briefly consulted for a dating website and fundamentally their
business model is broken and their incentives are completely misaligned with
the users': [https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-
website](https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website)

~~~
foobar_
That was a good read.

> Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product..

Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well?

From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time
customers.

~~~
w84it
Television

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah Cable TV wasn't like that, but what's better, money or more money??

------
zaroth
TFA is a bit imprecise with the wording, so it's not exactly clear to me, but
from what I understand, there's two different things that could be happening.

In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or
operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential
users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their
site, where there weren't actually very many women on the site at all.

Alternatively, a dating site can be rife with scammers who have themselves
created fake profiles on the site and are messaging potential victims. For
example, I read that Tinder used to be particularly rife with bot accounts
that would message obviously bot-y greetings to attempt to get a user to click
an external link (to what end, I'm not sure).

In the second case, dating sites may have a somewhat symbiotic relationship
with the scammers, who create appealing looking profiles and make the site
seem to have more activity than it really does. But the real users are
potentially being targeted for fraud / scams, so this is just as--if not even
more--egregious than the false marketing fake account scam, because at least
the company bots aren't trying to convince you to share your bank account
number.

It's not entirely clear to me if this is a case of #1 or #2, but it seems like
it's #2. And because Match wouldn't even let potential users read the message
(or see who it was from?) before signing up, the bot accounts would provide a
significant signup boost to users thinking they had a potential match waiting
for them on the site.

If it is #2, then the immediate question is how prevalent was this, and did
Match take action to close bot accounts that were reported / flagged as such.
Any social network will have at least _some_ bad actors, and the platform
should be judged on how they respond and defend against those actors, not
whether they existed at all. I think TFA does not provide enough information
to reach a conclusion.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
One time on Match I got a wink from someone who passed me a web URL that was
for an event, a performance of performance art IIRC. My entertainment tastes
range all over the place, but at the same time I can only be in one place at
any given time so I have to reject ideas.

When I shared my rejection of that particular idea with my fellow Match
participant, there were no further messages. So I have no idea if maybe this
was some sort of cult-front come-on or there was actually an attempt to fill
some small venue with paying attendees for a legitimate entertainment, based
on keywords in my profile that indicated a likelihood of interest perhaps? The
latter of course is the most charitable guess. It was clearly not my sparkling
personality they were interested in.

It was "in the middle" of my time on Match so I don't think there was any link
with getting me to renew. Also the process passed the Turing test, so the term
bot seems misapplied. But scammer in a gentle sense does apply in the sense
that apparently romance was not the goal, but was a lure.

------
apexalpha
There is only one universal law that applies to online dating, and that is:
women don't need it as much as men.

For women, online dating just doesn't make sense. Even on Tinder, where the
ratio is kinda okay, women are bombarded with messages and likes. To the point
that they can't even respond to everyone even if they wanted to.

This means men are left with unresponsive women and just start to send cheaper
pick up lines to more women faster. Thus continuing the cycle of women getting
bombarded...

There was a blog post I read once where some employee used statistics from the
dating site to show what the relationship between male and female profiles
where, who had good chance of getting dates etc... Conclusion: it really
doesn't work for 90% of men.

~~~
AdrianB1
I know a few women that use Tinder: they are alone, late thirties and never
got anything serious out of Tinder, but they use it to reassure their
attractiveness by the continuous flow of likes they get. It is a morale
booster, nothing more.

~~~
stochastic_monk
I know plenty of straight couples who are married or in committed long term
relationships and met on tinder.

~~~
LeonM
I think there is a big early adopter advantage of any dating platform. After a
while, the platform just deteriorates and starts attracting opportunists.

I also know a bunch of couples that met on tinder, but it's all from 3 years
ago. I haven't heard of someone else who has been successful in finding a long
term relationship on Tinder since.

~~~
magduf
That's because quality people have all moved on to something else. Tinder is
mainly for hookups now: people who are traveling and want something casual,
people who are married and want a 3some, people who are cheating, etc.

Everyone else has moved on to a better dating site, like Bumble, CMB, OKC,
etc.

------
Impossible
This happened to me when I tried subscribing to match years ago. Near the end
of my 6 month period I got the first introduction from a woman after months of
rarely getting responses. This email never resulted in anything. Paid dating
sites all ended up being worthless to me and the only dates and reasonable
correspondence I got on was from OKCupid (where I met my wife).

------
joering2
If its proven then its obviously criminal in its nature as it clearly a scam
to enrich owners. If FTC prevails, does anyone have any idea what sort of
consequences are we looking at? Company? Owners?

------
lone_haxx0r
Do you think that an open source dating app or a decentralized dating protocol
would be a good idea?

~~~
jimmaswell
Dating apps are a failed idea. If you're a man and have any imperfections
appearance-wise you'll go on these sites and get no responses. In college I
did hundreds of swipes and sent a bunch of messages on OKC and got nothing
because I wasn't a human Ken doll. I could've spent all day in the gym and
gotten plastic surgery and spent hundreds on whatever wardrobe was in style
but why do all that for people who can't appreciate you for anything else but
how likely you are to be in a Calvin Klein ad? I've seen experiments where
they put male model pictures on tinder profiles that say stuff like being
nazis and convicted rapists and surprise, they got more matches (a ton) than
me (0) with my well-thought-out profile/pictures but not literally Brad Pitt.

~~~
CuriouslyC
The people on dating apps aren't really bad. The problem is the male-female
asymmetry. On most dating sites men outnumber women five to tenfold.
Additionally, most guys will spam likes and messages to hundreds of women. The
hyper selectivity of women on these sites is mostly the result of trying to
keep their heads above water.

You should be aware that the "experiments" people have posted online aren't
necessarily unbiased either. There are a lot of bitter, loveless men writing
content on the internet.

~~~
claudiawerner
Although I don't condone the "experiments" (of which the bias shouldn't be a
concern so long as they're accurately presenting the data - you can't get much
more accurate than screenshots, which out of the principle of charity it makes
some sense to give credence to at first glance) I wouldn't blame men for
feeling bitter and loveless after online dating experience. You'll find
countless men (and women, but for different reasons) feeling utterly hopeless
and defeated after experiences on online dating apps. You've put yourself out
there, people have seen your profile, and people didn't like you. Getting
_zero_ matches (other than bots) after a few months can cripple one's self-
esteem.

If you were to complain about it, you're either hit with advice from the
infamous rules 1 and 2 (1. be attractive; 2. don't be unattractive), or you'll
get some advice which is well-meaning but hardly actionable. The one I see
most frequently is "try and meet people at bars" (it's hard to imagine this
working today, and it almost requires one to be a drinker - and even then it's
harder not to come off as creepy) and "join some activity groups".

The real kicker is that many activities that you already enjoy are biased to
one gender or the other (say, compsci/engineering hobbies and chess tend to be
heavily male-centric in real life meetings), and it's very hard to find the
passion for an activity if you started doing it just to try and find a date
(and people will usually pick up on the fact). It can also leave one feeling
superficial and creepy to do so.

I know many men (and some women) who've decided to give up. Men because they
have lost hope on account of not having a strong enough appearance to persuade
someone to read their bio, which often reeks of desperation anyway (one may be
short, another may be fat, yet another may be ugly, yet another just prefers
Android[0][1]). Women because they only feel valued for their appearance, or
just for being a woman, rather than what makes them who they are.

I expect the problem to get worse, where online, centralized dating platforms
become the norm, and when it's harder to make friends in real life, in which
getting to know someone first outranks any consideration of appearances. If
you're not already friends with someone, it's very easy to accept or reject on
what _is_ immediately visible - one's appearance.

[0] [https://www.cultofmac.com/563567/iphone-vs-android-could-
be-...](https://www.cultofmac.com/563567/iphone-vs-android-could-be-ruining-
your-dating-life/)

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14619158/apple-iphone-
goo...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14619158/apple-iphone-google-
android-judgemental-dating-study)

~~~
Lewton
> of which the bias shouldn't be a concern so long as they're accurately
> presenting the data - you can't get much more accurate than screenshots,
> which out of the principle of charity it makes some sense to give credence
> to at first glance

You can change profiles after the fact. One of the examples I saw, it was
clear the person had changed their profile to say something much worse than
what it was when the conversations happened

------
mschuster91
To all those ITT complaining about bots... check out the fetish/kink/niche
dating sites. Granted there's still a problem with thirsty dudes if you're
female but at least no bots.

If you're looking for random sex, many swinger clubs also allow single men
(single females are almost universally welcome), either always or at special
events. If you're in a relationship and your s/o is interested, I can also
recommend visiting swinger clubs for a change.

------
rootusrootus
I wonder if I would be successful today, were I looking for someone using an
online service. 11 years ago I met my wife on Match, and I had had dated a few
other people from the site before I met her. I am just average looking for
sure, maybe these days I wouldn't get any responses at all.

------
anonymousmatch
I'm quite hesitant to tell this story and unfortunately, because I'm ashamed
of myself, and for privacy reasons I had to create a new account for this but
I wanted to tell the story of the day my mother fell in love with me.

Long story short, many years ago I was working for a provider that was
building algorithms for various dating websites.

The goal was simple: Increase signups.

A Little Bit of Background \--------------------------

As a small group of rather "creative" engineers in their early twenties
encouraged by large sums of money we came up with the idea of building
"Matching Personas" which would be able to have a basic conversation, as well
as have similar interests in the target subject.

Keep in mind that some of those dating sites have various "upgrade" (read
payment) paths. Some had a "3 private messages" limit so that you can start
chatting with someone but to continue the conversation, you needed to upgrade
to premium.

The typical path for a user was: 1\. Visit the website and search for what
they're interested in 2\. See a few profiles and decide whether online dating
was their thing 3\. Invest personal time creating a profile and putting down
their interests, photos, etc.

Point #3 is where the magic came in.

I had been working on automating the creation of accounts, and more
importantly the creation of what we used to call smart-accounts. After a few
months we had increased the conversion rate by about 30% on average (Which is
MASSIVE) and our internal funding was getting larger and larger. Our smart
accounts ended up being able to recognize certain items in photos, understand
the interests of new users, have "similar" interests that are either the same
or tangentially related, similar number of kids, etc. etc.

Based on real matches we built an engine that learnt what people look for when
they convert. How the conversations go, the type of language used when
discussing, the similarities in interests and family, etc. Honestly a really
wide set of super interesting machine learning problems from object
recognition to natural language processing to recommender systems to LTSM,
etc.

It was pretty simple. A user signs up and they put some of their information
in. Our engine picks up the latest user's information, creates about 10
different "smart profiles" that the new user is likely to match, and then in
the search results display those smart-accounts to the new user who just
joined. The new user would see smart accounts, and start chatting with them on
their free accounts. Because we knew based on previous real matches and real
conversations how people ended up "being together", the unsuspecting free
users.

The conversion path was: Signup -> Fill profile -> See someone you like ->
Converse -> Upgrade.

The Day my Mother Fell in Love with Me \--------------------------------------

Now that you have a little bit of background, the story begins. I had been
working for many of the dating companies (most of them competitors) for a few
months and our smart-profiles were getting quite clever.

One night after my mother invited me for diner. We started eating and drinking
wine and just talking in general. I never talked about the general aspects of
my work but she knew I worked with computers and back then statistics now
machine learning now everything-is-AI-anyways.

Whilst on the topic of computers, she said: "Oh I haven't told you, I've
actually met someone online". I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was
quite nice.

Then she proceeded to tell me the following: "He also has 3 kids, he likes a
lot of the same stuff I like which is really nice, and we started chatting and
he's really nice. He's gone on a business trip now so we haven't talked in a
few days but I'm looking forward to talking to him again".

At that moment I became very suspicious because all the signs pointed to
exactly what we had been aiming at achieving. Get users to like someone,
signup, chat (Which had a limit of 50 free messages at the time for that
particular platform if I remember), and convert (pay) to have more chats. The
trick was when people upgraded, within hours, we had some canned answers like
"I'm going on a business trip won't be able to talk for about 2 weeks".

Either way, I started asking my mother a few more questions and she explained
to me that she had found him after signing up and they chatted a little bit
but she had to upgrade yaddi yadda and it wasn't cheap but she was glad she
didn't end up wasting so much time online dating like all those other people
online dating. Then I asked her about the particular website and it was one we
had been working with.

She had actually fallen in love with my bots. I felt terrible not only for my
mother but for the thousands of other people we had basically scammed, and
only at that moment did it hit me. Up until then it was a fun challenging ML
engineering problem with real-world subjects.

I quit the following day and have never been affiliated or interested in
either working or using online dating since. Even though I do have friends who
got married to people they have met online dating, it made me a cynical.

~~~
anonymousmatch
Apologies for the broken format. I thought HN would let me use newlines rather
liberally but I was obviously wrong.

------
fortran77
You mean there aren't really hot girls in 94027 zip code looking for a date?!

~~~
Scoundreller
I like having an ISP with most of its customers in another region.

It separates the low-end and the high-end geo-targeters.

------
mnm1
They also didn't honor their free extra months for users who didn't find a
match the first six months. The whole site is a scam and shouldn't be
operating.

------
z3t4
What about other fakes ? likes, followers, stars, collaborators, upvotes,
star-reviews, backlinks, and clients. Where do you draw the line between fraud
and Fake it until you make it ? Social proof is game-able and there is a whole
industry dedicated to faking it. Should fakes be punished, or are you too
naive for using these metrics when choosing - for example, what library to
use, who to hire, or what restaurant to go to?

------
simonebrunozzi
Whenever I read stuff like this, I think in my head: names. We want names. We
want these people to never do this again.

~~~
jacquesm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin)

------
greggman2
Japan has "Pairs" with no free tier. Doesn't seem to have fake profiles.
"Dine" also has no free tier for men but seems to be 50% fake profiles just
based on how professional the profile photos look relative to all other sites
.

------
RandomBacon
Unrelated, but I'm thinking about using one or more dating sites. Which ones
do people here use, and what are your thoughts/observations?

~~~
dvt
Short answer? They are all trash and the space is ripe for disruption. The
best of the bunch is probably Hinge, Bumble, and Coffee Meets Bagel.

But like I said, getting a date off these apps is like pulling teeth. I've
reverted to asking girls out in person at coffee shops, social gatherings,
etc. Even if you get rejected, it at least makes for a good story.

~~~
busymom0
What would you change if you were to build a new dating app to disrupt the
market?

~~~
dvt
I have a lot of thoughts on this, so excuse the long post (maybe I'll write a
blog post on it at some point):

First, there's a clear (and artificial) skewing of supply-demand curves. There
are probably like 30 (active) guys for every 1 (active) girl on these apps
(looking at you, Tinder). This creates an imbalance where women are
_incredibly_ selective while men end up being incredibly _non-selective_ (e.g.
swipe right on everything). Clearly, this needs to be addressed -- this
"marketplace" is a sham.

Second of all, a lot of women (but also men) use dating apps to increase their
social following (be it Snapchat or Instagram). This probably only pertains to
people in their 20s or 30s, but it's a huge problem when trying to seriously
find someone to date.

Third -- the botpocalypse. About 70% of my matches on Tinder this past year (I
actually quit all dating apps around 4 months ago) have been bots. Not sure if
this is a tractable problem, but after a while, it just gets old. At this
point, matching with bots is a meme on /r/Tinder, for example.

Fourth, there needs to be an in-app incentive to meet in real life. I feel
that my generation (millennials) are kind of broken. I blow people's minds
when I tell them that I work remotely at a coffee shop and started making
friends with people there, hanging out, etc. In other words, we absolutely
suck at real-life social interaction. So we need these apps to "nudge" in the
right direction. A potential solution would be a cross between a meetup and a
date.

Fifth, I think hookup culture really is starting to show its dark side. Tinder
was very popular as a hookup app a few years ago, but nowadays it's more or
less abandoned. People actually want deep and long-lasting connections. None
of the apps out there really attempt to solve this. It's a tough problem to
solve because building a relationship (like building a friendship) takes time.

Anyway, these are some issues I have with dating apps off the top of my head.
I will say that it also probably doesn't help that I live in LA, which is a
pretty superficial city to begin with. But the women are gorgeous, so I
probably shouldn't complain :)

~~~
cameronbrown
> First, there's a clear (and artificial) skewing of supply-demand curves.

What makes it artificial?

Also, there's strong evidence that roughly twice as many women have reproduced
than men across human history [0], so if we're reducing it to a number game
women have _always_ had the ability to be more picky than guys.

What's different today is Tinder/OLD let's them access a much larger area,
whereas in the past they would have to find a partner within their local
community. Dating apps may look unfair on paper but they're just a more
efficient dating market than in times past.

So to sum up my point, I'm struggling to see a solution here. Human nature
can't be rewritten, no matter how hard we try.

[0] [https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/the-
missing-...](https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/the-missing-men-
in-your-family-tree/)

~~~
jorvi
> So to sum up my point, I'm struggling to see a solution here. Human nature
> can't be rewritten, no matter how hard we try.

You could write an algorithm that subtly punishes women for being too picky
and at the same time punishes men for being unselective (only swiping right,
then filtering later). Of course, as soon as it comes out that you are
rebalancing the market that way no one will use your app anymore, but it would
be a theoretical way to bring the numbers closer together.

~~~
cameronbrown
Ah yes, social engineering for the modern age. I'm not sure which path is
worse, your suggestion or the status quo.

~~~
jorvi
Something will have to give at some point.

I remember someone at HN posting a graph that showed that for something like
40 years the amount of singles reporting 'no sex within the last year' had
been relatively equal (both men and women around 18%), but since the rise of
Tinder et al men had shot up to 30% whereas women were still at 18%.

On an individual level I won't pass judgment on women for doing whatever they
want, but on a societal level such a sea change in behavior and it's attached
consequences does not seem healthy or stable.

~~~
cameronbrown
> Something will have to give at some point.

Care to place any bets on what will happen?

Obviously I can't prove this but I'd bet the inability to get into an
emotionally stable (or any) relationship is one of the contributing factors to
soaring youth crime across the world. It's not the only one (economy,
political divide) but it's a biggie.

~~~
jorvi
> Obviously I can't prove this but I'd bet the inability to get into an
> emotionally stable (or any) relationship is one of the contributing factors
> to soaring youth crime across the world.

I can do you one better: if you look at history, whenever a society had large
contingents of single, young men with little chance of entering into a
relationship, that society invariably eventually went to war. Since most big
players in the world have become so economically intertwined this is not
really viable anymore, so yes, I'd say it is very possibly a factor.

> Care to place any bets on what will happen?

On the short-to-mid term? Nothing. Tech is vastly outpacing our ability as
society to adapt. You see this with issues of privacy as well.

Long term? The pendulum probably swings in the other direction _hard_. Maybe
men everywhere decide to adopt the Japanese way: with the insane pressure on
young men there to perform in all aspects of life, a lot of them simply opt
out of dating (which ultimately leaves women without relationships). Or maybe
realistic, AI-driven sexbots become a thing: if you don't want kids and don't
need a relationship, why deal with all the extraneous stuff? This again leaves
women out in the cold.

To be clear: I wouldn't celebrate such a thing. We'd lose something very
essential about ourselves if our whole dance of courtship and sex is
permanently reduced to dating apps and sexbots.

But to continue, we're in a weird state of flux vis-à-vis male/female
interaction. For example, most women prefer to date 'up' (having a good job on
your dating profile leads to something like 85% more right swipes), but at the
same time most universities are 40/60 men/women, plus women below 30 outearn
their male peers. Obviously those two things are fairly at odds with each
other.

You can also ask questions like: why are high schools still plastered in
posters encouraging women to attend university when the numbers are already
skewed? Surely, if back in the 90s 60/40 men/women was bad, the reverse should
also be bad? Where is the promotional material to get more men into
universities? Where are the special men-only scholarships? Or the effort to
combat the male pay gap below 30?

Apologies for the long response- the overarching subject is something I take
quite to heart.

~~~
cameronbrown
> For example, most women prefer to date 'up'.

So my hunch was sorta correct? We've gone from most people marrying somebody
they meet organically to "here's a list of candidates within N and their job
title" which has massively magnified that particular behaviour.

> Apologies for the long response- the overarching subject is something I take
> quite to heart.

No problem! I was hoping for a response this interesting.

------
gerardnll
How weird, yesterday, someone signed up using my email on match.com and
firstmet.com, what a coincidence...

------
jrnichols
I have no doubt that Tinder is also loaded with fake profiles to encourage
user engagement as well.

~~~
chrift
I am also of the mind that all the social media platforms do this. I hardly
ever use Instagram, but whenever I get a notification from someone I know is
obviously fake I always get caught in the rabbit hole of my feed.

------
xenospn
"How to lose all your users in 30 days"

------
tibbydudeza
I dunno how you can possibly quantify human emotions based on metrics and
algorithms.

Level 5 self driving cars is a more realistic goal to achieve than this one.

~~~
buboard
psychologists have done it for centuries

------
oldmanthrowit
OKCupid and Tinder, I think, are the only honest dating sites, and they've
gotten far less so the past few years.

~~~
SaturateDK
Not surprising... the new owners of both OKCupid and Tinder is Match Group.

~~~
oldmanthrowit
OKCupid held onto their integrity as long as they could. After the HotOrNot-
derived dating apps popped up, and the Match purchase, they definitely lost
their way. If I had to date again, I would just meet people at bars, without
OKCupid's rather effective personality matches (engaged to one person I met
there, married another, slept with dozens), dating apps mostly seem pointless.

------
meerita
If authorities dig a little bit more they will find all these dating websites
break the GDPR laws a lot.

~~~
w84it
Dont need no cookies if i can just
[https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2](https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2)
you

------
namanaggarwal
Unrelated to the post, but I am just wondering how come NYTimes still able to
detect the incognito mode or if you are using private browser like Firefox
focus

~~~
tyingq
It's an arms race. [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-
chrome-i...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-
incognito-mode-can-still-be-detected-by-these-methods/)

~~~
stickfigure
I wouldn't use the term 'arms race' because that implies each side can
continue to escalate.

A better way of looking at it is that there are bugs that leak information in
browsers, and sites like the NYT are spending developer effort to discover
those bugs and publish them (in the form of javascript) so that browser
developers can fix them. The browser developers will eventually win this one.

~~~
onemoresoop
Whats the incentive to publish them? Isnt it in NYT’s best interest to be able
to detect incognito mode?

~~~
Deimorz
They're not _intentionally_ publishing them, but they effectively have to
because the detection uses Javascript, and you can view that JS and figure out
what it's checking for.

