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I know "don't use social networks made by evil megacorps that make money by trampling all over your privacy and making you addicted" is the kind of advice every

I know "don't use social networks made by evil megacorps that make money by trampling all over your privacy and making you addicted" is the kind of advice everyone sagely nods at but no one heeds. But it especially applies to dating apps. Like the proverbial sausages, once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole.

vmception 5y ago
> once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole. I love gaming the algorithm to meet hotter* people than I would meet using the apps the most intuitive way. *It's not subjective, there are profiles that attract way more attention and would either: never be shown to you, or you never shown to them.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves? If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
  - tata71 5y ago
    Yes, Tinder swiping is bracketed by implied desirable ness of the profile. They even tell you when you're "doing well".
    - decafninja 5y ago
      Curious what the algorithm would be to measure "desireableness". Computer vision on the photos (i.e. measure facial symmetry?) plus the number of other people who have expressed interest in you?
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I do not think there is any need for trying to figure out how to calculate objective attractiveness. Just use someone’s likes and the value of those likes based on the likes of the person doing the like-ing to infer their relative popularities. Can use frequency and rapidity of messaging as an additional data point also.
      - vmception 5y ago
        They aren't doing anything that complicated. A popular profile is attractive and chooses a very small percentage of others. The profile that person chooses gets a much greater weighting of desirability by being chosen by the popular profile. The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something. Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    It works the same way in old fashioned setups. Barring exceptional knowledge of two peoples’ compatibility, someone looking to introduce two people to each other would propose a setup between two similarly attractive, educated, income/wealth level people. Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too. A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
    - alias_neo 5y ago
      While I agree to an extent, the issue I see is that business partners, friends, etc likely know you far better than a site you enter curated information into in order to reach an end goal ever will. The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
      - vmception 5y ago
        It is a poor representation, you then meet in person and start from square one, no different than how online always has been. You just have to get your foot in the door with people you would have never otherwise met at all. Its just an additional venue amongst other venues also available.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Yes, absolutely. But its even worse, its a crowdsourced eugenics program that the crowd doesn't know they are contributing to and I believe they would not consent to if they knew or had the choice (aside from not using the app at all). Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other. Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs. Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too). I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it How?
      - vmception 5y ago
        be discerning like a hot person. even if it slows down how often you get matched at all. make it only possibly for consensus attractive people to match with you. the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
  - throwaway90090 5y ago
    You have an Elo rating, like in chess (or something like that - it depends on the app and they sometimes tweak it, but the gist is that rating is defined recursively: your rating increases if you get liked by high rated people), and you get matched with people within a given range around your rating. When you lose interest they punctually entice you with out-of-range profiles. Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down. (Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.) The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes. And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works. I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
    - vmception 5y ago
      yes, exactly, but do notice that these apps all deny still having an ELO rating, but just know that this is just corporate speak no different than an ISP saying "well unlimited isn't a legal term and the experience is still the same", so just assume something similar is happening and act accordingly. act like an attractive person to get exposure to attractive people as long as possible, how do attractive people act? choosy and discerning. don't swipe on everyone, actually play the superficial game because you know who is attractive by consensus, even if it isn't your personal taste.
- bradlys 5y ago
  How does one even game it unless you’re putting up fake photos? And at that point - what’s the point…? That person won’t date the actual you.
  - vmception 5y ago
    You still got to figure that part out. There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable. So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content. If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
    - bradlys 5y ago
      You didn't really give anything particular that you've done except that you just create a new profile when you aren't doing well and try different content - which is about the most basic and well known strategy...
      - vmception 5y ago
        So? Its about keeping that profile useful for longer. Getting more attractive matches for longer, having a greater probability that the attractive profile will even see your profile ever. Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
    - sizzle 5y ago
      What if you aren’t conventionally attractive though or have unsymmetrical facial features and are not photogenic. I think your advice does not apply to a lot of people who never get picked on these types of platforms
dudyehcyc 5y ago
dablweb 5y ago
It's not just privacy we need to be worried about. It's the manipulation of public consciousness which I believe is the most alarming.
gentleman11 5y ago
Is there a single dating app that doesn’t do that?
- throwaway90090 5y ago
  No, there isn't. Maybe at the very beginning when people were genuinely entranced by this Internet thing and hadn't figured out the best way to milk loneliness for profit, but now it's all rotten and beyond repair. If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    Only a small proportion of people are available. On a dating site it's basically 100%.
  - m_fayer 5y ago
    Pre-pandemic, my social life made dating platforms unnecessary. Now? No house or dinner parties full of acquaintances, no clubs or festivals, everyone's clustered into inner-circle friend groups, my employer moved out of the enormous shared office we were in, and on like that. The dating platforms are more necessary than ever. So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.

vmception 5y ago

> once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole. I love gaming the algorithm to meet hotter* people than I would meet using the apps the most intuitive way. *It's not subjective, there are profiles that attract way more attention and would either: never be shown to you, or you never shown to them.

alias_neo 5y ago
I've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves? If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
- tata71 5y ago
  Yes, Tinder swiping is bracketed by implied desirable ness of the profile. They even tell you when you're "doing well".
  - decafninja 5y ago
    Curious what the algorithm would be to measure "desireableness". Computer vision on the photos (i.e. measure facial symmetry?) plus the number of other people who have expressed interest in you?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I do not think there is any need for trying to figure out how to calculate objective attractiveness. Just use someone’s likes and the value of those likes based on the likes of the person doing the like-ing to infer their relative popularities. Can use frequency and rapidity of messaging as an additional data point also.
    - vmception 5y ago
      They aren't doing anything that complicated. A popular profile is attractive and chooses a very small percentage of others. The profile that person chooses gets a much greater weighting of desirability by being chosen by the popular profile. The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something. Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It works the same way in old fashioned setups. Barring exceptional knowledge of two peoples’ compatibility, someone looking to introduce two people to each other would propose a setup between two similarly attractive, educated, income/wealth level people. Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too. A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
  - alias_neo 5y ago
    While I agree to an extent, the issue I see is that business partners, friends, etc likely know you far better than a site you enter curated information into in order to reach an end goal ever will. The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
    - vmception 5y ago
      It is a poor representation, you then meet in person and start from square one, no different than how online always has been. You just have to get your foot in the door with people you would have never otherwise met at all. Its just an additional venue amongst other venues also available.
- vmception 5y ago
  Yes, absolutely. But its even worse, its a crowdsourced eugenics program that the crowd doesn't know they are contributing to and I believe they would not consent to if they knew or had the choice (aside from not using the app at all). Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other. Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs. Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too). I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it How?
    - vmception 5y ago
      be discerning like a hot person. even if it slows down how often you get matched at all. make it only possibly for consensus attractive people to match with you. the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
- throwaway90090 5y ago
  You have an Elo rating, like in chess (or something like that - it depends on the app and they sometimes tweak it, but the gist is that rating is defined recursively: your rating increases if you get liked by high rated people), and you get matched with people within a given range around your rating. When you lose interest they punctually entice you with out-of-range profiles. Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down. (Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.) The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes. And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works. I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
  - vmception 5y ago
    yes, exactly, but do notice that these apps all deny still having an ELO rating, but just know that this is just corporate speak no different than an ISP saying "well unlimited isn't a legal term and the experience is still the same", so just assume something similar is happening and act accordingly. act like an attractive person to get exposure to attractive people as long as possible, how do attractive people act? choosy and discerning. don't swipe on everyone, actually play the superficial game because you know who is attractive by consensus, even if it isn't your personal taste.
bradlys 5y ago
How does one even game it unless you’re putting up fake photos? And at that point - what’s the point…? That person won’t date the actual you.
- vmception 5y ago
  You still got to figure that part out. There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable. So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content. If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    You didn't really give anything particular that you've done except that you just create a new profile when you aren't doing well and try different content - which is about the most basic and well known strategy...
    - vmception 5y ago
      So? Its about keeping that profile useful for longer. Getting more attractive matches for longer, having a greater probability that the attractive profile will even see your profile ever. Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
  - sizzle 5y ago
    What if you aren’t conventionally attractive though or have unsymmetrical facial features and are not photogenic. I think your advice does not apply to a lot of people who never get picked on these types of platforms

dudyehcyc 5y ago

dablweb 5y ago

It's not just privacy we need to be worried about. It's the manipulation of public consciousness which I believe is the most alarming.

gentleman11 5y ago

Is there a single dating app that doesn’t do that?

throwaway90090 5y ago
No, there isn't. Maybe at the very beginning when people were genuinely entranced by this Internet thing and hadn't figured out the best way to milk loneliness for profit, but now it's all rotten and beyond repair. If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Only a small proportion of people are available. On a dating site it's basically 100%.
- m_fayer 5y ago
  Pre-pandemic, my social life made dating platforms unnecessary. Now? No house or dinner parties full of acquaintances, no clubs or festivals, everyone's clustered into inner-circle friend groups, my employer moved out of the enormous shared office we were in, and on like that. The dating platforms are more necessary than ever. So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.