8 ms·

I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where the mental health problems and mass shootings come from. I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere, it's a dangerous scam.

535188B17C93743 4y ago
Seems like a waste of tax-payer money to me. Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.
- ratww 4y ago
  Well, if the government wants to help people meeting offline, it's gonna cost a helluva lot more than a website... to the point it doesn't sound like a waste anymore. I don't see society going back to offline dating by itself.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  People can meet each other offline like they did 10+ years ago. They (or some large proportion) might prefer to meet online though, as the evidence seems to indicate.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  > Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago. Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect to ignore them. They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much more filled with fish than it truly is. And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective date(s). Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket from seemingly-flawless suitors? Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then they likely know what's available from friends, relatives, etc.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Bowling alone, pfft... why can’t they bowl with somebody?
4gotunameagain 4y ago
Have you seen the state of governments ? They are so incompetent that famine/frost/nuclear apocalypse are serious possibilities..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- twoWhlsGud 4y ago
  If you think they look bad, you should check out some of their constituents. Seriously though, this seems like an area where anti-trust and transparency regulation (service X has a Y rating for producing matches that meet standard Q) could play a useful role.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brightball 4y ago
Why would this need to be government run?
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Because monopolies
- ratww 4y ago
  Businesses want to make money, and dating apps can make heaps of money by retaining users and making it pricier for them to find a relationships. Users that want relationships want to find someone ASAP and delete the app. Those two goals are completely incompatible.
- svnt 4y ago
  It could also be built using the Signal model.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Get funded indirectly by the NSA to undermine effective cryptosystems?
    - svnt 4y ago
      Sorry, what? Source? We’re not still confusing bypassing encryption by compromising device security with “[undermining] effective cryptosystems” like those articles when everyone was leaving WhatsApp?
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  Everything else so far seems to absolutely suck.
ftf7r4y4 4y ago
Yoofie 4y ago
> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money Because its outside the scope & role of the government? > I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere This is a common theme I see in alot of discussions about everything. Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything. And plus, we have the rules. Match group, who basically own the entire western world online dating market, should have not been allowed to buy all their competitors in the first place. This is a failure of the regulating bodies to do anything and now the users end up paying the price.
- googlryas 4y ago
  > Because its outside the scope & role of the government Is it? Governments care very much about what their demographics will be in the future. Governments get involved in trying to modify birth rate. Hooking people up seems like an interesting idea, especially if the government thinks they're going to deal with massively bad demographic shift in the midterm future.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Yeah, tell the government of Japan that they shouldn't have been worried about young people dating for the last three decades.
- mantas 4y ago
  Different governments have widely different scopes & roles. It's up to society to decide what government shall do.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  Future demographics are probably a pretty serious longterm issue..
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  It actually seems much more aligned with scope & role of the government than of any commercial entity.
didactylost 4y ago
At some level, a dating network needs to make recommendations. In Plato's Republic, he proposed his vision for a utopian city-state. Essentially, citizens would be ranked into castes: bronze/iron for laborers and artisans, silver for soldiers, gold for leaders. When people came of age in this utopia, they would be paired off through what they would be told is a random lottery. In reality, however, the city's leaders would decide on the couplings ahead of time, pairing like with like. Plato called this the "noble lie", and it neatly demonstrates what any government-run dating system would probably develop into: a systemic eugenics program.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  You people take it to far. I am not talking about some dystopian government that forces marriages to create some kind of super-citizen. I just want the incentive of making profit removed and provide a decent service that does what it promises. If that service can only be provided at a loss (which seems to be the case) then let the state do it. Nobody would force anyone to use it.
  - didactylost 4y ago
    Sure, but it's a slippery slope, and there are other ways to reduce the profit motive, like grant/donation-based non-profits or public benefit corporations. Well-intentioned government mandates have a nasty habit of being used coercively when authoritarian-minded administrations get their turn at the helm.
    - mantas 4y ago
      As if non-profits wouldn't have any agendas... Publicly-run (= by government) open source script would be most transparent I guess. Otherwise some sort of algorithm would sneak in sooner or later.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Oh wow. This is the first time we’ve heard about Plato’s political thought experiment, didacticos.
antiterra 4y ago
I'm all for a lot of state-sponsored things, but a government run dating site sounds like one of the most dystopian ideas I can imagine. Blaming online dating sites for mental health problems and mass shooting is a new one. I don't discount the feeling of despair that can occur on dating sites for men. However, the experience of a being woman on a dating app is absolutely harrowing, even if you have incredibly low standards and/or are incredibly desirable.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind. To put it differently, I'm reading your argument as equivalent to saying that the existence of the USPS (which will deliver to remote rural areas, despite the fact that doing so isn't profitable) is more dystopian than the existence of UPS and FedEx (which will not).
  - antiterra 4y ago
    The functions of the USPS and a dating site differ substantially. If we were talking about an email or file transfer service then we could at least compare the paradigm.
  - parineum 4y ago
    >Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind. I once was a part of making a Facebook clone for the US military so service men and women wouldn't be on Facebook giving away secrets. It was garbage and nobody used it but nobody cared because we weren't being paid to get people to use it.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  It's always weird to read how government-run XYZ is somehow "dystopian" when we currently already have MassiveUnaccountableCorporation-run XYZ. I'd rather not have either of them run things, but if I had a choice, I'd much rather it be an institution that at least in theory answers to voters, than a meagcorporation that answers only to a set of rich shareholders. Talk about dystopian!
langitbiru 4y ago
Singapore gov does that (to some extent): https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Partner.aspx https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...
INTPenis 4y ago
Well how about we start a non-profit dating app? I was just wondering how much it could cost to run the backend with todays cloud services. With what Tinder is charging for boosts and subscriptions I feel like they're raking it in. But I've never developed and deployed a fully cloud based app, just used a bunch of their services off and on.
- slyfocks 4y ago
  I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.
- svnt 4y ago
  It’s not non-profit afaik but doesn’t plenty of fish [0] essentially provide this service? The problem is the population has already been divided and Match exists using predatory practices. You could maybe dethrone it using regulations or an organic campaign. 0 [ https://www.pof.com https://www.pof.com ]
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I've actually detailed an idea like this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424
- alfnor 4y ago
  https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    Nice effort but I'm thinking more of a cloud-native app. Simply because if it's to be non-profit, it should be as cheap as possible. And RDS with MariaDB does not fit. Alovoa seems more aimed at self-hosting.
danielvf 4y ago
The government of Singapore has been active in this area since the 80's. Not only having run a dating site, but also subsidizing singles cruises, hosting mixer events, and grants to college programs to get people together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
- jesterson 4y ago
  I am living in Singapore and never heard of anything like that. Would you mind giving some links besides another (purely declarative) initiative of ministry of youth?
  - danielvf 4y ago
    One link is here (thanks to a poster downthread): https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Partner.aspx https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...
tiborsaas 4y ago
Sharing your desires, sexual preference and all intimate conversions with the government doesn't seem like a good idea. You could say they can tap into that currently, and that's probably true, but deliberately broadcasting it to them would probably be out of question for many people. Also, consider what government run IT projects look like. Now mix that with a dating app, perfect recipe for a disaster.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  You would always be able to switch to whatever service you like for further messaging, a non-profit the wouldn't care about keeping you on their app. Why would you have intimate conversations on a dating site anyway.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
The Singapore government does some matchmaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network From what I heard it's mostly speed-dating stuff. EDIT: Aand I got ninja'ed. Twice.
exhilaration 4y ago
I kind of love this idea, take the skills of 18F https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ and put them into making the ultimate dating site! An awesome application of data science. Let's take it further -- Government-funded matchmakers! They can hire all the Korean and Indian aunties that are already doing this for free.
- flyingfences 4y ago
  What an unfortunate name, though... 18/F/USA totes legit
3dprintscanner 4y ago
Interestingly the Chinese government does something similar: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-launches-state-sponsored-dating-event/9821498584045/ https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-meet-cupid--young-communists-play-matchmaker-for-chinas-millennials/2018/01/11/3da12de4-f2c4-11e7-90ed-77167c6861f2_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...
makeitdouble 4y ago
Some places do. Not gov. level, and probably not in the US, but your hunch has been followed-up in some european and asian towns where they’ll organize matching pools of local singles. It’s beneficial to everyone: the town keeps their working age tax payers, willing to build a family there, and the people get to find partners with high chance they share many values alredy.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches. https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/funding-nsa https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...
- ABraidotti 4y ago
  Ha. The NSA or Amazon. Just log in through Amazon SSO and it matches your purchase history against a variety of candidates. Medical purchases excluded for a fee.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  If you have more trust in a shady private company than your own government it's time to move to another country.
onetimeusename 4y ago
I don't know about the mass shootings being linked to dating apps but I thought about this too. I think the fundamental problem is that more men always sign up on these apps than women. That would be true of a government app also. It seems like this ruins the experience for both men and women alike. I am speculating here because we don't really know much about how these apps work since no one releases their user data. But women I have talked to complain about married men, copy-pasted pickup lines, and men treating women like prostitutes. With my own experience men complain about fake accounts, having to do all the effort and getting nothing for it, and for both, meeting people, going on dates, and then after you've become attracted to each other you find out how deeply damaged and incompatible the other person is because they hid all their baggage. A lot of this just seems like it's exacerbated by the use of an app. I think the apps drive decent people away. This is all speculation. I somewhat think the whole proposition of online dating was doomed to fail. I don't know if a non profit/government office could fix this leaving aside how politics could affect it.
tzs 4y ago
> I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? California kind of accidentally did so a few years. They thought they were simply running a public sex offender registry, but it occurred to some sex offenders it was also a state run directory of people that would be less likely to be put off by their own record and might even have at least one important shared interest to bond over. The state was not pleased with this.
- codeduck 4y ago
  this is both awful and hilarious
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  Wouldn't it have the same problem as dating sites of being male-dominated, except x100?
AdrianB1 4y ago
> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? Popular does not mean effective. Online dating is the most toxic way of dating invented, so why would the governments contribute?
maerF0x0 4y ago
> undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money Your first mistake was thinking that culture actually cares about this.
watwut 4y ago
ISIS kinda did that, minus app. But the whole process was absurdly abusive and exploitative.
avgcorrection 4y ago
It’s very toxic to casually claim that something causes mass shootings without evidence.

535188B17C93743 4y ago

Seems like a waste of tax-payer money to me. Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.

ratww 4y ago
Well, if the government wants to help people meeting offline, it's gonna cost a helluva lot more than a website... to the point it doesn't sound like a waste anymore. I don't see society going back to offline dating by itself.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
People can meet each other offline like they did 10+ years ago. They (or some large proportion) might prefer to meet online though, as the evidence seems to indicate.
acuozzo 4y ago
> Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago. Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect to ignore them. They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much more filled with fish than it truly is. And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective date(s). Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket from seemingly-flawless suitors? Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then they likely know what's available from friends, relatives, etc.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Bowling alone, pfft... why can’t they bowl with somebody?

4gotunameagain 4y ago

Have you seen the state of governments ? They are so incompetent that famine/frost/nuclear apocalypse are serious possibilities..

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twoWhlsGud 4y ago
If you think they look bad, you should check out some of their constituents. Seriously though, this seems like an area where anti-trust and transparency regulation (service X has a Y rating for producing matches that meet standard Q) could play a useful role.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brightball 4y ago

Why would this need to be government run?

rdtwo 4y ago
Because monopolies
ratww 4y ago
Businesses want to make money, and dating apps can make heaps of money by retaining users and making it pricier for them to find a relationships. Users that want relationships want to find someone ASAP and delete the app. Those two goals are completely incompatible.
svnt 4y ago
It could also be built using the Signal model.
- lmm 4y ago
  Get funded indirectly by the NSA to undermine effective cryptosystems?
  - svnt 4y ago
    Sorry, what? Source? We’re not still confusing bypassing encryption by compromising device security with “[undermining] effective cryptosystems” like those articles when everyone was leaving WhatsApp?
Double_a_92 4y ago
Everything else so far seems to absolutely suck.

ftf7r4y4 4y ago

Yoofie 4y ago

> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money Because its outside the scope & role of the government? > I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere This is a common theme I see in alot of discussions about everything. Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything. And plus, we have the rules. Match group, who basically own the entire western world online dating market, should have not been allowed to buy all their competitors in the first place. This is a failure of the regulating bodies to do anything and now the users end up paying the price.

googlryas 4y ago
> Because its outside the scope & role of the government Is it? Governments care very much about what their demographics will be in the future. Governments get involved in trying to modify birth rate. Hooking people up seems like an interesting idea, especially if the government thinks they're going to deal with massively bad demographic shift in the midterm future.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Yeah, tell the government of Japan that they shouldn't have been worried about young people dating for the last three decades.
mantas 4y ago
Different governments have widely different scopes & roles. It's up to society to decide what government shall do.
Double_a_92 4y ago
Future demographics are probably a pretty serious longterm issue..
seba_dos1 4y ago
It actually seems much more aligned with scope & role of the government than of any commercial entity.

didactylost 4y ago

At some level, a dating network needs to make recommendations. In Plato's Republic, he proposed his vision for a utopian city-state. Essentially, citizens would be ranked into castes: bronze/iron for laborers and artisans, silver for soldiers, gold for leaders. When people came of age in this utopia, they would be paired off through what they would be told is a random lottery. In reality, however, the city's leaders would decide on the couplings ahead of time, pairing like with like. Plato called this the "noble lie", and it neatly demonstrates what any government-run dating system would probably develop into: a systemic eugenics program.

EmilyHughes 4y ago
You people take it to far. I am not talking about some dystopian government that forces marriages to create some kind of super-citizen. I just want the incentive of making profit removed and provide a decent service that does what it promises. If that service can only be provided at a loss (which seems to be the case) then let the state do it. Nobody would force anyone to use it.
- didactylost 4y ago
  Sure, but it's a slippery slope, and there are other ways to reduce the profit motive, like grant/donation-based non-profits or public benefit corporations. Well-intentioned government mandates have a nasty habit of being used coercively when authoritarian-minded administrations get their turn at the helm.
  - mantas 4y ago
    As if non-profits wouldn't have any agendas... Publicly-run (= by government) open source script would be most transparent I guess. Otherwise some sort of algorithm would sneak in sooner or later.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Oh wow. This is the first time we’ve heard about Plato’s political thought experiment, didacticos.

antiterra 4y ago

I'm all for a lot of state-sponsored things, but a government run dating site sounds like one of the most dystopian ideas I can imagine. Blaming online dating sites for mental health problems and mass shooting is a new one. I don't discount the feeling of despair that can occur on dating sites for men. However, the experience of a being woman on a dating app is absolutely harrowing, even if you have incredibly low standards and/or are incredibly desirable.

LambdaComplex 4y ago
Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind. To put it differently, I'm reading your argument as equivalent to saying that the existence of the USPS (which will deliver to remote rural areas, despite the fact that doing so isn't profitable) is more dystopian than the existence of UPS and FedEx (which will not).
- antiterra 4y ago
  The functions of the USPS and a dating site differ substantially. If we were talking about an email or file transfer service then we could at least compare the paradigm.
- parineum 4y ago
  >Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind. I once was a part of making a Facebook clone for the US military so service men and women wouldn't be on Facebook giving away secrets. It was garbage and nobody used it but nobody cared because we weren't being paid to get people to use it.
ryandrake 4y ago
It's always weird to read how government-run XYZ is somehow "dystopian" when we currently already have MassiveUnaccountableCorporation-run XYZ. I'd rather not have either of them run things, but if I had a choice, I'd much rather it be an institution that at least in theory answers to voters, than a meagcorporation that answers only to a set of rich shareholders. Talk about dystopian!

langitbiru 4y ago

Singapore gov does that (to some extent): https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Partner.aspx https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...

INTPenis 4y ago

Well how about we start a non-profit dating app? I was just wondering how much it could cost to run the backend with todays cloud services. With what Tinder is charging for boosts and subscriptions I feel like they're raking it in. But I've never developed and deployed a fully cloud based app, just used a bunch of their services off and on.

slyfocks 4y ago
I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.
svnt 4y ago
It’s not non-profit afaik but doesn’t plenty of fish [0] essentially provide this service? The problem is the population has already been divided and Match exists using predatory practices. You could maybe dethrone it using regulations or an organic campaign. 0 [ https://www.pof.com https://www.pof.com ]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I've actually detailed an idea like this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424
alfnor 4y ago
https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Nice effort but I'm thinking more of a cloud-native app. Simply because if it's to be non-profit, it should be as cheap as possible. And RDS with MariaDB does not fit. Alovoa seems more aimed at self-hosting.

danielvf 4y ago

The government of Singapore has been active in this area since the 80's. Not only having run a dating site, but also subsidizing singles cruises, hosting mixer events, and grants to college programs to get people together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network

jesterson 4y ago
I am living in Singapore and never heard of anything like that. Would you mind giving some links besides another (purely declarative) initiative of ministry of youth?
- danielvf 4y ago
  One link is here (thanks to a poster downthread): https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Partner.aspx https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...

tiborsaas 4y ago

Sharing your desires, sexual preference and all intimate conversions with the government doesn't seem like a good idea. You could say they can tap into that currently, and that's probably true, but deliberately broadcasting it to them would probably be out of question for many people. Also, consider what government run IT projects look like. Now mix that with a dating app, perfect recipe for a disaster.

EmilyHughes 4y ago
You would always be able to switch to whatever service you like for further messaging, a non-profit the wouldn't care about keeping you on their app. Why would you have intimate conversations on a dating site anyway.

PoignardAzur 4y ago

The Singapore government does some matchmaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network From what I heard it's mostly speed-dating stuff. EDIT: Aand I got ninja'ed. Twice.

exhilaration 4y ago

I kind of love this idea, take the skills of 18F https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ and put them into making the ultimate dating site! An awesome application of data science. Let's take it further -- Government-funded matchmakers! They can hire all the Korean and Indian aunties that are already doing this for free.

flyingfences 4y ago
What an unfortunate name, though... 18/F/USA totes legit

3dprintscanner 4y ago

Interestingly the Chinese government does something similar: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-launches-state-sponsored-dating-event/9821498584045/ https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-meet-cupid--young-communists-play-matchmaker-for-chinas-millennials/2018/01/11/3da12de4-f2c4-11e7-90ed-77167c6861f2_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...

makeitdouble 4y ago

Some places do. Not gov. level, and probably not in the US, but your hunch has been followed-up in some european and asian towns where they’ll organize matching pools of local singles. It’s beneficial to everyone: the town keeps their working age tax payers, willing to build a family there, and the people get to find partners with high chance they share many values alredy.

BrainVirus 4y ago

>Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches. https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/funding-nsa https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...

ABraidotti 4y ago
Ha. The NSA or Amazon. Just log in through Amazon SSO and it matches your purchase history against a variety of candidates. Medical purchases excluded for a fee.
EmilyHughes 4y ago
If you have more trust in a shady private company than your own government it's time to move to another country.

onetimeusename 4y ago

I don't know about the mass shootings being linked to dating apps but I thought about this too. I think the fundamental problem is that more men always sign up on these apps than women. That would be true of a government app also. It seems like this ruins the experience for both men and women alike. I am speculating here because we don't really know much about how these apps work since no one releases their user data. But women I have talked to complain about married men, copy-pasted pickup lines, and men treating women like prostitutes. With my own experience men complain about fake accounts, having to do all the effort and getting nothing for it, and for both, meeting people, going on dates, and then after you've become attracted to each other you find out how deeply damaged and incompatible the other person is because they hid all their baggage. A lot of this just seems like it's exacerbated by the use of an app. I think the apps drive decent people away. This is all speculation. I somewhat think the whole proposition of online dating was doomed to fail. I don't know if a non profit/government office could fix this leaving aside how politics could affect it.

tzs 4y ago

> I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? California kind of accidentally did so a few years. They thought they were simply running a public sex offender registry, but it occurred to some sex offenders it was also a state run directory of people that would be less likely to be put off by their own record and might even have at least one important shared interest to bond over. The state was not pleased with this.

codeduck 4y ago
this is both awful and hilarious
PoignardAzur 4y ago
Wouldn't it have the same problem as dating sites of being male-dominated, except x100?

AdrianB1 4y ago

> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? Popular does not mean effective. Online dating is the most toxic way of dating invented, so why would the governments contribute?

maerF0x0 4y ago

> undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money Your first mistake was thinking that culture actually cares about this.

watwut 4y ago

ISIS kinda did that, minus app. But the whole process was absurdly abusive and exploitative.

avgcorrection 4y ago

It’s very toxic to casually claim that something causes mass shootings without evidence.