
Man Poses as Woman on Online Dating Site; Barely Lasts Two Hours - rodrigocoelho
http://jezebel.com/man-poses-as-woman-on-online-dating-site-barely-lasts-1500707724
======
hpaavola
I was part of the team that rewrote Finland's most popular dating site about
two years ago and this was one of the problems we tried to fix.

We got pretty good results by letting users block messages from users who do
not meet certain criteria. We gave users three different filters: 1\. Allow
messages from users who live in those areas where you are looking company 2\.
The same as 1., but also age and gender must match your "dream partner"
settings 3\. And finally allow messages from users who meet X percent of your
dream partner settings

And of course you could block users after they have messaged you, but that is
already too late if you get 100 harassment messages per day.

~~~
ishener
why not block a user from sending messages to anyone after, say, 3 complaints?
yes, maybe it's a little harsh and not democratic, but it will make men much
more considerate

~~~
hpaavola
Such a system was built for images; if user images got too many complaints,
then those images were hidden and sent to moderation queue where moderators
could decide wheter those complaints were valid or not.

It would have been fairly simple to do same for messages, but problem is that
Finnish law does not permit moderators to read private messages. So it would
have been unfair for some users.

------
wvh
The very first thing I did as a teen when I tried the internet in '95 or '96
was to pretend to be a woman in a chatroom (I realise how weird that must
sound). That brief experience was a valuable lesson and taught me how not to
talk to women.

Still, I'm very much a typical horny male – it often takes no more than about
2 seconds to go from noticing a woman anywhere to mental procreative scenery.
For all the feminist talk about the female libido, I doubt women generally
experience as strong (or perhaps "swift" is a better word here) urges as many
men seem to do. This discongruence is perhaps one of nature's cruelest
jokes... The question is how to avoid demonising (all) men without victimising
women.

However, before this whole discussion turns into another bitter
(anti-)feminist warzone, this particular case has probably at least as much to
do with the medium as it has with issues between men and women. As it stands,
the (unwalled) internet is generally somewhat of a lost cause since the
distance, anonimity and lack of social consequences make it very hard to
compel people to do the right thing – at least according to current societal
norms.

If you prefer the wild west over the walled gardens of strictly regulated
sites (block, ban, ignore, real ID), I'm afraid you better bring a gun to
handle the coyotes... Not many seem to be in favour of policies such as Real
Name or let alone forms of official identification.

------
onion2k
There's a subset of men who enjoy sending sexually explicit messages to
strangers. This is not surprising. Depressing, but not surprising.

What _is_ slightly surprising is that online dating websites, for all their
sophisticated matching algorithms, haven't bothered applying some of the most
basic anti-spam heuristics to the problem. The first dating site that does it,
you'd imagine, would get a very good reputation very quickly.

Dating websites actually want people to stay single and remain on the site
paying their subscription or viewing adverts, but an add-on that filters out
the awful rubbish is _surely_ something women would pay for.

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem is making a filter than works for everyone. A 50 something
conservative christian woman probably has different ideas about what
constitutes as acceptable message to a 20 something liberal woman looking for
a more casual fling.

~~~
kaybe
Well, there's always filter settings.. let everyone rate a few messages into
acceptable or not and go from there. (Maybe go from real inbox messages in
case one wants to minimize additional exposure.)

~~~
jiggy2011
You need a pretty large corpus to train a filter effectively, so probably not
practical to train on a per-user basis.

~~~
loup-vaillant
The filter doesn't need to be accurate right away to be effective. Also, you
could design a training set that gives more information than something made up
of random messages.

Anyway, if the filter weeds out most spam without getting too much false
positives, that's a win. Then, as you mark more messages as "inappropriate",
you get less and less such messages.

~~~
jiggy2011
As anybody who's ever tried to train an email spam filter from scratch can
tell you , the number of messages you need to classify in order to be useful
is _huge_.

With email spam, everyone can more or less agree on what it looks like so you
can reuse other people's training data but by deciding on what is a "bad"
online dating message is much more complicated.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Okay.

------
yummyfajitas
Someone should try a similar experiment: "Unemployed Homebuilder poses as
Software Engineer on Jobs Site, OMFG too many recruiters".

Or "Poor Indian wears Fair&Handsome and poses as Rich Western Tourist, barely
lasts two hours before getting annoyed by beggars".

Related thoughts from the often interesting Scott Alexander:
[http://squid314.livejournal.com/327849.html](http://squid314.livejournal.com/327849.html)
[http://squid314.livejournal.com/327957.html](http://squid314.livejournal.com/327957.html)

(Yes, I'm one of those big jerks who has as much sympathy for the sexually
deprived as the monetarily deprived, which is not a huge amount. Feel free to
make status-lowering comments in response.)

~~~
rjknight
I don't get it. Let's take your software engineer example. Software engineers
often _do_ complain about spam from recruiters, in cases where the recruiters:

a) Plainly have not taken your skills or location or pay grade into
consideration

b) Refuse to take "no" for an answer

c) Turn hostile or somehow imply that you owe them your time or should be
grateful for their attention

And we generally assume that the engineers are correct in their complaints. I
can't say I've ever seen recruiters being abusive, but I have heard voicemail
messages that start with "I know you said not to call you again, but...", and
there's really no question about who is in the wrong there.

Whether it's actually _important_ is a different question. I get a fair few
pointless enquiries via LinkedIn, and I ignore them. I can't say that it
troubles me much. But if the people sending those messages were insulting me,
making sexually explicit statements or generally being persistent beyond all
efforts to make them stop, I would probably feel much more strongly about it.

What puzzles me is that the behaviour of the recruiters does make at least
some sense in a way that the dating site behaviour doesn't. Sure, getting a
job spec for a senior Java developer and then mailing everyone with "senior
[something] developer" in their past job titles on LinkedIn is going to fail
quite often, as you'll hit Senior Python Developers and Senior C++ Developers
and so on, but sooner or later the recruiter has to get lucky. But who the
hell responds positively to the kinds of comments that the OP received? Are
the people sending the messages doing so because they believe that sooner or
later it's going to _work_? Even worse, _does it actually work sometimes?_ I
can't easily believe that it does, but it's hard to understand the behaviour
otherwise.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I complain about recruiters. I also complain about fat girls/gays (note: not
comparing gays to fatties) hitting on me, touching me in ways I dislike, not
taking no for an answer and cockblocking me when I talk to people I find more
attractive.

But I don't adopt the same victimhood that the Jezabel blog post is trying to
imply, i.e. I won't favorably quote people making statements like this: "I
came away thinking that software engineers have it so much harder than buggy-
whip makers do when it comes to that kind of stuff..."

~~~
rjknight
Fair enough, in principle. However, I think the OP is saying that there is a
difference in the _nature_ and the _quantity_ of the comments such that it
crosses the line from mild annoyance to something worse; it's so off-putting
that it prevents the women in question from participating in online dating
sites. And, since the women are an important component of dating sites, it's
probably important to take that into consideration when designing such sites.

If you're happy being a bit more stoical about the problems you've
encountered, that's fine. Perhaps some of the women receiving unwanted
messages on dating sites could be a bit more stoical too. But it does seem to
me that they're being given a bit more to be stoical _about_ , and this is
unfair, to some extent (it is perhaps hardly the greatest injustice in the
world, but it does seem genuinely unfair).

------
adnam
Call me jaded but I suspect OKCThrowaway22221 was in fact a woman, posing as a
man, posing as a woman.

~~~
taspeotis
If you wanted to be more or less confident of this, you could try running some
of what (s)he wrote through that application that guesses your gender from how
you write stuff.

EDIT: I put the paragraphs quoted into
[http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze](http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze)

    
    
        Genre: Informal
          Female = 1683
          Male   = 1466
          Difference = -217; 46.55%
          Verdict: Weak FEMALE
        
        Weak emphasis could indicate European.
    

Site carries this disclaimer: The system generates a simple estimate
(profiling). While Gender Guesser may be 60% - 70% accurate, it is not 100%
accurate. This is better than random guessing (50%), but should not be
interpreted as "fact".

~~~
jules
Wow. I'm stunned by how well that works. I've copy pasted 5 male and 5 female
paragraphs, and it got every single one correct.

~~~
taspeotis
The last time I used it in earnest I did not have anywhere near the results
you are describing. So my own personal perception of it is that it's probably
as accurate as they say it is. More than 50% but less than 60-70%.

~~~
Dewie
Are you American? They say that their training set has an American bias
(reason for the "may indicate European ..." disclaimer).

------
pgsandstrom
I was part of developing a Swedish dating app, and during this time I
discussed online dating with many friends of both genders. While many women
would find the attention a bit tiring, and sometimes had to report someone for
the tone in their messages, no one ever told me anything like this. I would
guess that it heavily depends on which kind of dating site you use. So to
counter this story, I share that I've heard 10-15 stories that was much more
positive.

------
wikiburner
How did Jezebel get unbanned?

Aren't they part of the Gawker/Valleywag hive of scum and villainy?

~~~
philosophus
I don't know but I can tell you I stopped reading at "teh poor menz." Do
people still do that "teh" thing?

------
tmikaeld
☑ Don't show commonly blocked users and prevent them from contacting you.

^ This would be an attractive feature.

~~~
camus2
Even better , ghost them and make them pay for each message they send...
(kidding,as it would be fraudulent).

------
Recoil42
I love the topic, bur god, Jezebel's writing is painfully atrocious.

~~~
JonnieCache
Unbelievable isn't it? It used to be a good source of interesting articles
about gender/sexual politics but at some point they must have worked out that
the excessively conversational "new york" style articles get more traffic, and
now you can almost hear the exposed brickwork in every sentence.

------
swombat
I have some friends who got married via an online dating site, but it was a
paid one. I get that this problem plagues free sites like OKC or POF - is it
also a problem on paid sites?

~~~
masklinn
> I have some friends who got married via an online dating site, but it was a
> paid one.

Note that it's not a post against online dating sites, commenters on both 2x
and jezebel note that they've met significant others on dating sites.

> I get that this problem plagues free sites like OKC or POF - is it also a
> problem on paid sites?

Creepy messagers have as much money to spend as others (if not more) I'd
guess, unless the site finds out they make people leave (and stop paying) I'd
expect little difference. But you'd have to ask women using or staff of these
sites to know/get a comparison really.

------
mnw21cam
My wife and I met on an online dating site. Mainly because we were chatting on
the open forum about how weird everyone was, and how fed up with it we were.

------
kfk
Matching couples looks like an easy problem to solve, here, you have my little
algo to find the optimum match for n couples:
[https://github.com/kfk/scripts/blob/master/match-
date.py](https://github.com/kfk/scripts/blob/master/match-date.py)

Ok, joking a bit, but there is a point to this. If you have a finite set of
people (and I bet in a short time frame you can make that assumption), then in
the WORST case you have to do n*(n+1)/2 matches. Let's say it takes 1 hr to
run a date, then we can match 10 people in 55 hrs in the worst case.

Now, try matching 10 people using these websites. Enter the texting game and
no proper filtering (by looks, age, location, etc.). It will take X time my
worst case scenario to maybe match half of the population.

Point is: somebody should make a system that clusters people and randomly
assigns them to dates. Without any prior texting that is. Which, by the way,
would simulate the way people met until 20 years ago more or less.

------
infruset
Reading this is interesting both from the content it describes (a guy passing
for a girl on a dating site and being horrified by the messages he gets) and
from the tone, that all this is self-evident and why don't guys just know
this? Well, they don't. But when they learn it, they are as horrified as it
deserves.

------
cynusx
sounds like a good opportunity for dating sites to do pre-moderation of
inbound messages. I am sure some of it can be caught with a relatively simple
classifier (machine learning) and the rest can be handled with mechanical
turk.

Another approach would be to have a karma system that over time will filter
out the bad actors.

~~~
nodata
You want to send private messages to mechanical turk?

Not a good idea. Karma would work (but could be abused).

~~~
cynusx
yea, good point about Mechanical turk. Moderators would get expensive quite
quickly but if it is such a royal pain I suppose it can be a paid-for feature
which is sustainable.

------
Fuxy
Well I don't know about you guys but that isn't surprising to me at all.

It's amazing how big the mountain of stupid is out there and it's not easy
when their all trying to talk to you.

That's why us guys have it hard in general. When she has to sift through so
many emails to find just a half decent guy.

Lesson 1: You need to stand out if your just like the other 20 guys she's
talked to these past hours you're doomed to fail. Be yourself but be your best
self and don't be afraid to be unique or weird as long as its not in a creepy
way.

Lesson 2: Don't be a wuss or needy let her reply in her own damn time and if
you're writing a follow up be funny and bust her balls a bit for not replying
in a timely manner. If she still doesn't reply ...oh well there's plenty of
other fish in the sea.

~~~
masklinn
I'm impressed by your skills at completely missing the point, victimisation
reversal and turning a discovery/report of many women's day-to-day creepy and
harassy experiences (on dating websites specifically, but the 2X comments make
it clear this extends to online and off-) into "yeah mates it's hard for a guy
to get noticed, here's one weird trick to be picked"

~~~
Fuxy
If you discovered a cure for guys being horny and stupid go ahead I'm
listening.

This is not something new women have been dealing with this since the birth of
the internet and there's nothing you can do about that.

All you can change is yourself and learn from other guys stupidity.

------
belorn
In online dating, and human interaction in general, you need 2 basic things.

#1: People to talk to.

#2: The person need to a person you want to talk to, ie not a "predator", scam
artist, bot, creepy, and so on.

The question the person had was if women had a easier time on dating services
than men. By experiment, he concluded that the mass of men wanting to talk to
a female profile and the over predatory attitude quickly overwhelmed the
person who made the fake profile. By this, he concluded that women has a worse
time than men.

Just me who do not think he actually answered his question?

------
hamoid
Why not limit the amount of messages people can send per day? 3 for instance?
Wouldn't that make you think before sending a message? Maybe users could
choose to only receive messages from people who send less than N messages per
day.

It would be funny if messages from users who are reported as annoying get
redirected to a horny bot which keeps them "entertained" :)

------
yaix
Why didn't he just click "block" and wait for normal people to contact him?
There are probably some idiots who jump onto every new profile that pops up.
Once blocked, it will become much easier.

~~~
DanBC
Do you remember when spam filters didn't work?

------
MarkMc
What about a dating website that allows each guy to send only one message per
day?

------
Dewie
Link to Reddit thread:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1uqym6/as_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1uqym6/as_a_guy_i_wanted_to_know_what_it_was_like_to_be/)

