
The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love - gumby
https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz
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DyslexicAtheist
I used to work for a German dating site called friendscout24 when it was still
in it's early stages. we worked with a psychologist to help improve the
quality of the match-making logic (now be2.com). I didn't really care too much
about the product back then and was mostly trying to scale the backend which
was my passion. Linux, Java lot of traffic and scaling issues everywhere in
these pre-cloud days.

The whole thing was built with affiliate marketing and also engineering was
increasingly driven by the marketing team and their sometimes outrageous
ideas. I remember the best idea that we had was to move to recurrent billing
(profits went through the roof because people forgot to cancel the service)
and not long after, it was acquired by T-mobile. That's when I left since the
work suddenly was all about internal API's and not really interesting for a
nerd like me.

The craziest place at friendscout was the customer care. We had one student
working there who did a master thesis in psychology and chose sado-masochism
as subject. She was on a roll there with all the people asking crazy questions
to customer care. She was kind of a student of the human condition I think and
I had some very cool conversations in my time there. Friendscout wasn't
targeting this (S/M) niche.

However there were plenty of users that came from all sorts of dark corners
and S/M was by far not the darkest. One guy (he was internally called the
shit-eater because well no need for explanation) kept coming back with
countless new pseudonyms every week ("brownsauce", "smellyjelly",
"sh1tinyourmouth" and other words, very hard to filter out upon registration).
He was an isolated individual no doubt but kept half of engineering and all of
customer care busy for weeks.

Most users were fairly normal though, albeit (looking back) vulnerable in a
way that still makes me sad. At least those who engaged with the customer
care.

They were men (mostly) that hardly ever had a girlfriend whose name hasn't
ended in dot-jpeg or the type of girls that would "power"-date 7 guys in as
many days to find their "perfect love". For many it was like tinder but
without labeling it as a casual dating site. But casual hookups were probably
the main use (at least for guys).

Since it was early days the product wasn't very specialized or settled into a
specific vertical, that's why we had all types of crazy people mingle along
"normies". (what is normal? I have no idea but I knew that place certainly
didn't feel normal)

The shit my colleagues from customer care have seen though was another level.
Once they compiled the craziest stories into a book (verbatim conversations
from users copy pasted for the amusement of staff) and handed it out to all
employees as a Xmas gift. It was funny admitted but hardly ethical to put
these customer-support emails into a book and then laugh about your stupid
users at a company gathering.

Thinking back, my biggest regret about the place was not leaving earlier.

After the acquisition the founders also moved on to other projects. Founders
were relocating their personal assets to Switzerland and learned how to
capture all of the market. They formed various shell companies (e.g. Insparx
in Luxembourg) through which to bootstrap much darker and more sinister
"dating" ventures. They formed a company called c-date (c = casual dating
which was the German front for Insparx). This allowed them to capture the
lower segments of the market while keeping their names clean and also save
some cash by funneling services through the low-tax structure instead of
Germany. They also pushed into the upper segments like match.com (total market
domination seems the point for any company so be careful what you get into
because eventually they'll pivot into new domains and bootstrap it with what
they have) ... but this isn't what I'm talking about here.

According to one of my old colleagues from friendscout who moved on with the
managers to build C-date (again actually Insparx), C-date was using the
affiliate marketing scheme they had at friendscout but applied in this way:
advertise on websites for women (fashion magazines, interior design, basically
all the Grune+Jahr publishing brands - most of Grune+Jahr were also affiliates
with Friendscout). The messages women saw when visiting burda.de would be
something like _" looking for Mr Perfect?"_ or some other drivel that only
fashion magazine readers would be gullible enough to respond. The women would
click on it and sign up in an iframe of the original (girly) site (and not
have a clue that this was c-date). And men would be targeted with a more
honest and different message (on xhamster, redtube, youporn ... you name it)
which read: " _looking for horny sluts in your area that just want to get
f!cked - click here_ <blinky blinky text>". Absolutely fucking degrading.

Both Jan Becker (and his mentor & former friendscout CEO Andreas Etten)
managed to keep their names out of controversy and am sure are well respected
individuals of the Munich & Zurich tech scene. But they're __until today __the
names behind the Luxembourg shell companies and who signed off on these
predatory strategies. They (and others) deserve to be burned at the stake for
tricking these female (and quite frankly male) users with these growth hacking
techniques.

If you have read this from beginning to end you might have noticed that it all
started out with good intentions: Bring people together based on match making
rooted in science. It ended as one of the most disgusting things that I've
ever come across. Meanwhile I've seen countless similar ideas go from best
intention to a dumpster-fire (sharing economy LOL). Whenever somebody claims
that their idea will make the world a better place, run!! Because these are
the worst.

~~~
rhegart
Wow...that’s so wrong. I was al2ays curious how they got women to sign up to
such degrading websites when I see those ads. Now I know...

~~~
yorwba
They don't even need any women to sign up. A bunch of bots with profile
pictures scraped from the web and a large enough catalog of vaguely seductive
messages are enough. Want to reply? Sure, sign up for premium membership here.

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BadassFractal
Speaking of LTV, the power users in online dating can easily be worth several
hundred a month. Super swipes and super likes are about $1 each these days and
in crowded dating markets you have to rely on them heavily if you're hoping to
cut through the noise of everybody else's profiles.

I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid
money to have your profile be seen first in your city. Same as any other real
time bidding in advertising. Have users try to outbid each other to be within
first x swipes in the city, instead of "potential match in position 10574"
that nobody will ever swipe to.

I realize it might mess with their products' Aha! Moment of seeing only super
attractive members within your first few minutes of the user journey, but
there's likely a ton of money in it, and a way to strike a healthy balance. I
know I would probably end up using something like that.

On an unrelated note, seeding your app with "fake users" siphoned from your
peer companies sucks if you're charging for the service. You end up having
your users spend hours swiping or paying money to connect with fake profiles.
Can't be ethical.

~~~
thanatropism
I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like
nightclubs but wanted to meet women.

This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

~~~
drewg123
I met my wife when she asked me how to get out of vi.

She was a new PhD student, and I was the departmental sysadmin. To be fair to
her, she knew vi just fine, but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no
ESC, where ESC was mapped to F11.

~~~
acheron
Best comment.

> _but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC_

One of these things?
[https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:LK201AA_top.jpg](https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:LK201AA_top.jpg)

I'd have trouble getting out of vi with that too.

~~~
drewg123
Yes, exactly. We had a combination of DECstation 2100 and 3100s for the grad
students to use.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
So how do you get out of vi with that keyboard?

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ggm
Back before we thought intelligent machines were going to be a thing, (we're
talking 1970s here) I discussed online dating with my brother, who proposed
writing a simple DB to match random men with random women. Neither of us had
considered the possibility. I think we'd got to the idea that if they both
liked tennis, it was plausible to rank them higher. He got pretty quickly to
"its unethical, but simple"

Now we have AI and intelligent machines. I'm sure onine dating does a better
job matching people up. (/s for anyone who is humour impaired)

Actually, what works, is putting sweaty tee shirts in a bag, and letting women
sniff. Turns out that how you smell is a pretty good indication of how likely
it is, you can form an effective match.

So on that score, the first online love broker who manages to capture digital
nose moments, probably wins.

Right now, I'd welcome good stats on how much better online relationship
brokering does than other models. If you rank by income, you probably get more
successful matches for rich people seeking partners for high value service,
but there might be surprises: It wouldn't surprise me if down in the dollar-
shop window, people do well, but better than random?

~~~
julienmarie
I made that mistake when launching my first dating website By trying to be
more efficient. Unfortunately, this market is not about dating, it's a
dopamine delivery market. You want to keep people long, increase your LTV,
show them an ever better possible "match" so you never settle. You don't want
them to actually meet someone. Hence the crappy chat features ( while the rest
of the tech stack is usually pretty solid ).

~~~
mattbierner
Have any companies in the market been successful going the premium route? A
service that costs a lot but is designed for the best user experience and
outcomes? Maybe they interview potential members in person and work to ensure
the “marketplace” has a good balance. Or maybe they take a more active role in
the pairing. Starts sounding like a matchmaker.

For a dating service company not to be overly incentivized to keep users
swiping forever, a membership model like with a country club could also work:
a large upfront fee to join and then maybe a smaller reoccurring fee to
maintain membership.

~~~
IggleSniggle
There was a season of Startup where the startup attempted this approach. The
company was (is?) called Dating Ring.
[https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/origin-story-
season-2-1-...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/origin-story-
season-2-1-2-3-4)

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lifeisstillgood
So, just to get an idea, i can buy 1million profiles including pictures for
130 Euros, which I should be able to match against stolen credit card lists
(do those come with addresses?) and even old stolen passwords.

I mean, yikes.

~~~
BadassFractal
It's a gold mine for social engineering. Age, location, sexual orientation,
relationship status, employment status, interests, aspirations, lots of
information based on their Instagram feed about things like travel
destinations, friends, parents, pets etc. I'm sure the conversations
themselves include a lot of personal information that one wouldn't want
floating around the web.

~~~
air7
How would one go about monetizing this data?

~~~
55555
Make a publicly indexed dating site for people into bestiality and just upload
all of these profiles to it. 'Restore' all of the accounts using their emails
and password hashes. Like Ashley Madison, charge people money to delete their
profiles. Accept only bitcoin.

Thank you for granting me this exercise in creativity... now please don't do
this.

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cbhl
This page reads normally on mobile, but on desktop it's eight columns wide,
scrolls horizontally, with each column being 1/4th the screen width.

~~~
blattimwind
Turning on reader mode has it display the _massive_ GDPR waiver / "partners
list" instead of the actual article :)

~~~
weavie
It seems turning on reader mode displays the gdpr waiver, but then if you
refresh the page it shows the article.

I'd be interested to know how they managed to achieve that. The waiver doesn't
seem to appear in the html source.. so I'm not sure where it is coming from
and it is now too late in the day for me to investigate it further..

~~~
ra__mm
hi, i developed that page. But I don't really understand what you mean

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ajiang

      We believe that the $0.57 average revenue per user that 
      Match Group reported in their Q2 2018 Investor Presentation 
      is just a fraction of the user profile's real value.
    

At the risk of taking the wrong thing away from this article...IAC is an
undervalued stock?

~~~
shard972
Unless you think marrige and long term relationships haven't seen the bottom
yet, I can't imagine why dating website user information should be worth a lot
as people find the person they want to be with and move on.

~~~
jerrre
The information provided for dating, could be interesting for many other
purposes....

