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Cue the cynics on HN, but I think this is a very natural step for FB to take and I think the product will do very very well. Even if you're on a separate datin

Cue the cynics on HN, but I think this is a very natural step for FB to take and I think the product will do very very well. Even if you're on a separate dating service like Tinder, you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. FB already plays a large role in dating and the signaling involved. It just makes sense for FB to own the process from start to finish when they have the ability to do it better than any existing dating app today. FYI: Shares of Match Group (they are a public holdings company for many of the popular dating sites out there) plunged after FB announced this.

jbob2000 9y ago
Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family. Kijiji and craigslist are very sketchy, but with FB marketplace, you can see who the person actually is. It makes us feel much more safe when we go to meet the person. I see FB dating as having similar success. I can see you and your connections and validate that you aren't going to kill or rape me when we meet up for coffee (or if you're male; I can see that you are a real person and not a bot).
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family Interesting. In my area, Facebook Marketplace is almost all stolen/burgled/shoplifted goods. People even call it "Fencebook." Want a brand new, unopened PS/4 for $25? Fencebook to the rescue!
  - throwaway613834 9y ago
    ...huh. How do you tell stolen goods from legitimate ones? Obviously the price can't be the only factor since they could just try to sell it closer to a realistic price.
    - reaperducer 9y ago
      It's not hard, once you know what to look for. Basic pawn shop training.
      - throwaway613834 9y ago
        Erm... I wasn't asking if it's difficult, I was asking what do you look for? Why in the world would a set of things to look for be a subject to conceal? Edit: never mind, just realized you're worried I or someone else is trying to sell stolen goods and will abuse such a list that way, sigh...
        cwillu 9y ago
        Because thrift store criminals spend _so_ much time reading deeply nested comment threads on hackernews...
        bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        maybe the response would take 20 minutes to write.
        mseebach 9y ago
        Then spend the 20 minutes, or don't. Writing "the answer to your question exists" isn't a meaningful contribution.
        bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        are you mad at me suggesting that they didn't write it down because they thought it would take them too long to write? At any rate they didn't just say the information exists, they also said it was basic pawn shop training, so I googled "pawn shop detect stolen goods" the top answer was from quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-item-pawned-is-not-stolen https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-ite... and there was something from a blog of somebody called the blog nerd which is a little difficult reading because of all the SEO keyword optimization he seems to have done https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-items/ https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-item... there seemed to be a reasonable number of other informative links.
    - mseebach 9y ago
      If you're buying something expensive, require an original invoice and check that the serial number matches. If someone is apprehensive about that, somehow they lost the invoice for the brand new unopened PS4 they bought last week, or similar, just drop it. If they're selling close to the original price, just get it from a shop instead, that way you'll get warranty etc too (there's generally no warranty on goods with "lost" invoices). In general, look out for suspicious behaviour. Are they willing to meet with you at their home or office? Do they readily share their phone number? Do they have many excuses (one of the most common tells for liers are an excess of over-thought out excuses) for not doing things transparently? If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
      - throwaway613834 9y ago
        Thanks! The trouble is all of these can fail for what I would consider legitimate reasons. Requiring a receipt fails if they just open it, maybe even use it a bit (or not), and wait a few months before selling it, since nowadays people seem to genuinely go through some stuff (e.g. phones) pretty quickly and not necessarily keep or have receipts, especially if they themselves bought it second-hand. Meeting at my home or office is not something I would ever feel comfortable doing, and is generally recommended against when purchasing online. Sharing phone numbers is something I'd only do when the decision to purchase has gone through and we're actively trying to meet up (obvious privacy concerns), etc.
        mseebach 9y ago
        It's not an exhaustive, binary checklist, they are signals to watch out for. They are basically surrogates for trust. If you're selling something that looks like it might have been stolen, you have to come up with a compelling reason to trust you. Meeting at your office and sharing a business card might be such a reason. If the only thing you're comfortable with is meeting in a deserted parking lot late at night, and only communicating over a throwaway anonymous email account, the counterpart is right to suspect something is fishy. On the other hand, if you have an original invoice from the Apple store, then it might be OK. Sure, there are legitimate reasons for not getting any of these right, but if they get all of them wrong, be very careful.
  - bruceb 9y ago
    Some of those are not stolen, they are just scams for users to send money someone for say an iphone X and then they get the item sent to them, which of course doesn't happen.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    In my area, Facebook is (and was even before the Marketplace) routinely used to sell clothes very cheaply - usually because the seller is buying wholesale and then selling it without paying taxes. You can get them even cheaper if the seller is a person from a rich family who doesn't care much for a profit, but uses this as their pastime.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Aren't the majority of rapes perpetrated by people the victim knew previously?
  - noobermin 9y ago
    I don't think rape is the only thing people fear when meeting strangers. Unpleasant experiences or stalking creeps might be something to look out for.
- bradlys 9y ago
  Where do you live? I'm curious because I've used Craigslist all across the west coast in the USA and I've never found myself worried. I've used it for bigger ($XXXX) and small purchases ($X). Brand new and very used. Most people I've met are very friendly and decently honest. Flakey is usually my biggest complaint with Craigslist people.
  - joering2 9y ago
    Agree; this comes to mind: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486616/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486616/
  - jbob2000 9y ago
    Toronto, Canada. A somewhat major news item recently was that a guy was killed trying to sell his truck on Craigslist. These stories have popped on and off the news for a while now. Other than that, the pseudo anonymity makes people uncomfortable with craigslist. At least, that’s the sentiment I’ve gotten from a few people who’ve used it. Contrasting that with the feedback I’ve heard about marketplace, people just feel safer when you can creep a buyer’s profile before they show up at your house.
- askafriend 9y ago
  Nextdoor’s new For Sale section is the best of these services imo since everyone is address-verified. I get a lot of spam from FB Marketplace but even with the spam, it’s miles better than Craigslist/OfferUp/etc.
reaperducer 9y ago
> you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test Worst. Sanity test. Evar!
- sjm-lbm 9y ago
  Honestly, it depends on what you mean by 'look up' - Coffee Meets Bagel (another dating app) includes a feature that will show you mutual Facebook friends (if such a thing exists). That's a really interesting indicator how/where a match's social circle overlaps yours, which can say a lot of important things. That totally ignores, of course, the opportunity to get a second opinion from one of those mutual friends as well. Stalking and/or looking up 13 year old college party photos is probabally, shall we say, less sane.
thrillgore 9y ago
It's the most stable and safest direction to go in, when you know you've reached your peak in features and user-generated data.
meow_mix 9y ago
look up matches on fb? dude that's creepy
- always_good 9y ago
  You generally prefer the other person not knowing you "cared" that much, but it's a simple vetting trick. Fear of everything you do in private being creepy is just a self-limiting belief. Digging for bikini pics isn't part of the process here.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  As a woman, it's a basic safety protocol to at least check that a man doesn't appear obviously crazy before going out with him.
  - kingkongjaffa 9y ago
    Same goes for men too...
    - magic_beans 9y ago
      A man is not usually at risk of any physical danger, though.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    I'm pretty crazy but you'd never know it by looking at me.
    - booleandilemma 9y ago
      I specifically say I’m not crazy on my profile.
  - drewmate 9y ago
    Is having a facebook account an important place to start when trying to establish the appearance of sanity? Asking for a friend...
amelius 9y ago
Other dating services already use data from one's Facebook account. E.g. "Happn" requires you to login with Facebook credentials, and then uses photos from Facebook.
- keerthiko 9y ago
  Let's not kid anyone there's a pretty sizeable difference in how much of and how well the data facebook has on individuals can be leveraged by a first-party dating app. Happn and others like are hardly better than a stranger stalking two people's public facebook profiles and trying to make guesses as to whether they could match. Facebook knows what you/I really care about outside of what we may publicly list on our profiles, whether we like that or not, and thus if executed well can use that so much more effectively towards dating optimization.
  - pryce 9y ago
    Would Facebook's dating service conceivably match me with someone who shares my moral objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour? This seems like a joke question, of course. But consider: Ten years or fifteen years from now, supposing nearly everyone is using Facebook's dating service, could Facebook Inc adjust their matching algorithm to give shittier / less promising results to those people for whom it identifies as having a dislike for Facebook Inc's behaviour? Conceivably, what about matching them with someone who is likely to be sterile? Could those who express objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour be gradually phased out of the population (not completely, obviously), by a motivated director, over a few generations? Possessing objections to domineering corporate behaviour does not have to be genetic, nor does it even have to be overwhelmingly heritable -just mostly so- for Facebook Inc's incentives and capacities to align towards considering this sort of dystopian strategy. I don't raise this because I imagine it to be true at all; I raise it because we are reluctant to spend time actually considering these kind of hypotheticals for how massively-dominent social platforms might affect our society and way of life, and often as a society we only consider them in retrospect. For example, Cambridge Analytica's unethical actions are a fairly predictable outcome of Facebook's business model and have (already) now lead to significant negative effects on a worldwide scale.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
joering2 9y ago
> you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. You lookup people from Tinder on Facebook? For what? I would say its not a sanity test; you just simply a creep.
- Retra 9y ago
  Curiosity is a virtue some places.
Gudin 9y ago
I wonder if Facebook is going to end up as a dating site because Tinder is mostly hook-up site.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  Based on my few months experience of Tinder, girls here only want long term stuff. I guess it depends on the country as well.
  - golergka 9y ago
    People's intended and real intentions are two different things. In many cultures, women are, unfortunately, shamed if they pursue one-time sexual encounters, so they often adjust their signalling accordingly. Doesn't mean they're not up for hookups though.
swiley 9y ago
Ehhh I used tinder a lot and you don’t need to look people up on facebook until after the first date, crazy people pretty much always show they’re crazy before then.
- stctgion 9y ago
  I've checked dates before for a friend. Finding out before a date that they are fb friends with an ex is really useful
tokyodude 9y ago
So at least in my experience in Tokyo, Facebook is not shared by daters until after they've met. A dating service might use facebook to sign in and gather a few pieces of data but actually letting someone look at all your photos and your posts is not something I think most Japanese women would do if they haven't met you in person already. If fb shared more data I'm not sure how well that would go over, at least here.

jbob2000 9y ago

Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family. Kijiji and craigslist are very sketchy, but with FB marketplace, you can see who the person actually is. It makes us feel much more safe when we go to meet the person. I see FB dating as having similar success. I can see you and your connections and validate that you aren't going to kill or rape me when we meet up for coffee (or if you're male; I can see that you are a real person and not a bot).

reaperducer 9y ago
> Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family Interesting. In my area, Facebook Marketplace is almost all stolen/burgled/shoplifted goods. People even call it "Fencebook." Want a brand new, unopened PS/4 for $25? Fencebook to the rescue!
- throwaway613834 9y ago
  ...huh. How do you tell stolen goods from legitimate ones? Obviously the price can't be the only factor since they could just try to sell it closer to a realistic price.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    It's not hard, once you know what to look for. Basic pawn shop training.
    - throwaway613834 9y ago
      Erm... I wasn't asking if it's difficult, I was asking what do you look for? Why in the world would a set of things to look for be a subject to conceal? Edit: never mind, just realized you're worried I or someone else is trying to sell stolen goods and will abuse such a list that way, sigh...
      - cwillu 9y ago
        Because thrift store criminals spend _so_ much time reading deeply nested comment threads on hackernews...
      - bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        maybe the response would take 20 minutes to write.
        mseebach 9y ago
        Then spend the 20 minutes, or don't. Writing "the answer to your question exists" isn't a meaningful contribution.
        bryanrasmussen 9y ago
        are you mad at me suggesting that they didn't write it down because they thought it would take them too long to write? At any rate they didn't just say the information exists, they also said it was basic pawn shop training, so I googled "pawn shop detect stolen goods" the top answer was from quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-item-pawned-is-not-stolen https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-ite... and there was something from a blog of somebody called the blog nerd which is a little difficult reading because of all the SEO keyword optimization he seems to have done https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-items/ https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-item... there seemed to be a reasonable number of other informative links.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    If you're buying something expensive, require an original invoice and check that the serial number matches. If someone is apprehensive about that, somehow they lost the invoice for the brand new unopened PS4 they bought last week, or similar, just drop it. If they're selling close to the original price, just get it from a shop instead, that way you'll get warranty etc too (there's generally no warranty on goods with "lost" invoices). In general, look out for suspicious behaviour. Are they willing to meet with you at their home or office? Do they readily share their phone number? Do they have many excuses (one of the most common tells for liers are an excess of over-thought out excuses) for not doing things transparently? If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
    - throwaway613834 9y ago
      Thanks! The trouble is all of these can fail for what I would consider legitimate reasons. Requiring a receipt fails if they just open it, maybe even use it a bit (or not), and wait a few months before selling it, since nowadays people seem to genuinely go through some stuff (e.g. phones) pretty quickly and not necessarily keep or have receipts, especially if they themselves bought it second-hand. Meeting at my home or office is not something I would ever feel comfortable doing, and is generally recommended against when purchasing online. Sharing phone numbers is something I'd only do when the decision to purchase has gone through and we're actively trying to meet up (obvious privacy concerns), etc.
      - mseebach 9y ago
        It's not an exhaustive, binary checklist, they are signals to watch out for. They are basically surrogates for trust. If you're selling something that looks like it might have been stolen, you have to come up with a compelling reason to trust you. Meeting at your office and sharing a business card might be such a reason. If the only thing you're comfortable with is meeting in a deserted parking lot late at night, and only communicating over a throwaway anonymous email account, the counterpart is right to suspect something is fishy. On the other hand, if you have an original invoice from the Apple store, then it might be OK. Sure, there are legitimate reasons for not getting any of these right, but if they get all of them wrong, be very careful.
- bruceb 9y ago
  Some of those are not stolen, they are just scams for users to send money someone for say an iphone X and then they get the item sent to them, which of course doesn't happen.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  In my area, Facebook is (and was even before the Marketplace) routinely used to sell clothes very cheaply - usually because the seller is buying wholesale and then selling it without paying taxes. You can get them even cheaper if the seller is a person from a rich family who doesn't care much for a profit, but uses this as their pastime.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ben_jones 9y ago
Aren't the majority of rapes perpetrated by people the victim knew previously?
- noobermin 9y ago
  I don't think rape is the only thing people fear when meeting strangers. Unpleasant experiences or stalking creeps might be something to look out for.
bradlys 9y ago
Where do you live? I'm curious because I've used Craigslist all across the west coast in the USA and I've never found myself worried. I've used it for bigger ($XXXX) and small purchases ($X). Brand new and very used. Most people I've met are very friendly and decently honest. Flakey is usually my biggest complaint with Craigslist people.
- joering2 9y ago
  Agree; this comes to mind: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486616/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486616/
- jbob2000 9y ago
  Toronto, Canada. A somewhat major news item recently was that a guy was killed trying to sell his truck on Craigslist. These stories have popped on and off the news for a while now. Other than that, the pseudo anonymity makes people uncomfortable with craigslist. At least, that’s the sentiment I’ve gotten from a few people who’ve used it. Contrasting that with the feedback I’ve heard about marketplace, people just feel safer when you can creep a buyer’s profile before they show up at your house.
askafriend 9y ago
Nextdoor’s new For Sale section is the best of these services imo since everyone is address-verified. I get a lot of spam from FB Marketplace but even with the spam, it’s miles better than Craigslist/OfferUp/etc.

reaperducer 9y ago

> you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test Worst. Sanity test. Evar!

sjm-lbm 9y ago
Honestly, it depends on what you mean by 'look up' - Coffee Meets Bagel (another dating app) includes a feature that will show you mutual Facebook friends (if such a thing exists). That's a really interesting indicator how/where a match's social circle overlaps yours, which can say a lot of important things. That totally ignores, of course, the opportunity to get a second opinion from one of those mutual friends as well. Stalking and/or looking up 13 year old college party photos is probabally, shall we say, less sane.

thrillgore 9y ago

It's the most stable and safest direction to go in, when you know you've reached your peak in features and user-generated data.

meow_mix 9y ago

look up matches on fb? dude that's creepy

always_good 9y ago
You generally prefer the other person not knowing you "cared" that much, but it's a simple vetting trick. Fear of everything you do in private being creepy is just a self-limiting belief. Digging for bikini pics isn't part of the process here.
magic_beans 9y ago
As a woman, it's a basic safety protocol to at least check that a man doesn't appear obviously crazy before going out with him.
- kingkongjaffa 9y ago
  Same goes for men too...
  - magic_beans 9y ago
    A man is not usually at risk of any physical danger, though.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  I'm pretty crazy but you'd never know it by looking at me.
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    I specifically say I’m not crazy on my profile.
- drewmate 9y ago
  Is having a facebook account an important place to start when trying to establish the appearance of sanity? Asking for a friend...

amelius 9y ago

Other dating services already use data from one's Facebook account. E.g. "Happn" requires you to login with Facebook credentials, and then uses photos from Facebook.

keerthiko 9y ago
Let's not kid anyone there's a pretty sizeable difference in how much of and how well the data facebook has on individuals can be leveraged by a first-party dating app. Happn and others like are hardly better than a stranger stalking two people's public facebook profiles and trying to make guesses as to whether they could match. Facebook knows what you/I really care about outside of what we may publicly list on our profiles, whether we like that or not, and thus if executed well can use that so much more effectively towards dating optimization.
- pryce 9y ago
  Would Facebook's dating service conceivably match me with someone who shares my moral objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour? This seems like a joke question, of course. But consider: Ten years or fifteen years from now, supposing nearly everyone is using Facebook's dating service, could Facebook Inc adjust their matching algorithm to give shittier / less promising results to those people for whom it identifies as having a dislike for Facebook Inc's behaviour? Conceivably, what about matching them with someone who is likely to be sterile? Could those who express objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour be gradually phased out of the population (not completely, obviously), by a motivated director, over a few generations? Possessing objections to domineering corporate behaviour does not have to be genetic, nor does it even have to be overwhelmingly heritable -just mostly so- for Facebook Inc's incentives and capacities to align towards considering this sort of dystopian strategy. I don't raise this because I imagine it to be true at all; I raise it because we are reluctant to spend time actually considering these kind of hypotheticals for how massively-dominent social platforms might affect our society and way of life, and often as a society we only consider them in retrospect. For example, Cambridge Analytica's unethical actions are a fairly predictable outcome of Facebook's business model and have (already) now lead to significant negative effects on a worldwide scale.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

joering2 9y ago

> you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. You lookup people from Tinder on Facebook? For what? I would say its not a sanity test; you just simply a creep.

Retra 9y ago
Curiosity is a virtue some places.

Gudin 9y ago

I wonder if Facebook is going to end up as a dating site because Tinder is mostly hook-up site.

kowdermeister 9y ago
Based on my few months experience of Tinder, girls here only want long term stuff. I guess it depends on the country as well.
- golergka 9y ago
  People's intended and real intentions are two different things. In many cultures, women are, unfortunately, shamed if they pursue one-time sexual encounters, so they often adjust their signalling accordingly. Doesn't mean they're not up for hookups though.

swiley 9y ago

Ehhh I used tinder a lot and you don’t need to look people up on facebook until after the first date, crazy people pretty much always show they’re crazy before then.

stctgion 9y ago
I've checked dates before for a friend. Finding out before a date that they are fb friends with an ex is really useful

tokyodude 9y ago

So at least in my experience in Tokyo, Facebook is not shared by daters until after they've met. A dating service might use facebook to sign in and gather a few pieces of data but actually letting someone look at all your photos and your posts is not something I think most Japanese women would do if they haven't met you in person already. If fb shared more data I'm not sure how well that would go over, at least here.