41–50 of 109 posts
I wonder how does this business scale. $15 a month is not much for paying salary.
A single person can obviously maintain multiple profiles. Sending some text messages to a fake partner isn't exactly a full time job.
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"Moderated dating" is an interesting idea by itself. Where both sides have to conform to a very strict etiquette (platform rules), until they both decide to move their relationship to next level anyway. I can see how it can appeal to some people.
That is what a chaperone was in thethe past, many cultures still have that set of rules thing until a certain point.
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That's romantic comedy stuff. Both sides believe they've hired a bot but have been secretly matched and are just talking to each other, to save costs. They are really happy with the "relationship" they have with the "bot". When they find out, they are outraged and sue the company...
There was a Swedish summer hit song with basically this premisse a few years ago. "Anna, the bot".
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I used to work in the phone industry. If you're allowing users to message each other you need human moderators, otherwise you'll get death threats and bizarre fantasies carefully worded to get around any automated filter. If you're going to pay a human to read every message you might as well pay them to write them, it takes a similar amount of time and usually means better service.
"Moderated dating" is an interesting idea by itself. Where both sides have to conform to a very strict etiquette (platform rules), until they both decide to move their relationship to next level anyway. I can see how it can appeal to some people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work in the phone industry. If you're allowing users to message each other you need human moderators, otherwise you'll get death threats and bizarre fantasies carefully worded to get around any automated filter. If you're going to pay a human to read every message you might as well pay them to write them, it takes a similar amount of time and usually means better service.
> If you're allowing users to message each other you need human moderators Sooo Tinder reviews every message? or did I misunderstand your point
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These aren't bots. These are people, pretending to be other people.
Either way, it would be very hard to generate significant chaff that the surveillance guys would go after.
Anyway, this would cost real money, for sure. But the labor supply for fake friends is huge, especially if you don't care about proficiency in English.
Edit: For example, one could generate numerous fake Russian acquaintances of Edward Snowden, and have each buy a few fake friends. Maybe the fake friends would be impressed ;)
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That's romantic comedy stuff. Both sides believe they've hired a bot but have been secretly matched and are just talking to each other, to save costs. They are really happy with the "relationship" they have with the "bot". When they find out, they are outraged and sue the company...
There was a Swedish summer hit song with basically this premisse a few years ago. "Anna, the bot".
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Either way, it would be very hard to generate significant chaff that the surveillance guys would go after.
Maybe. But the thing is that they're going after everything. Add some hot key words. Back in the day, we used sigs for our Usenet posts that were loaded with hot keywords. Anyway, this would cost real money, for sure. But the labor supply for fake friends is huge, especially if you don't care about proficiency in English. Edit: For example, one could generate numerous fake Russian acquaintances of Edward Snowden, and…
We need the same for these "wheat / chaff" steganographic noise generation schemes. Steganography is probably secure, but people tend to vastly underestimate the amount of cover material needed.
Considerable money and time has been devoted to "finding the real signal".
The Usenet keyword triggers were trivially easy to filter. Mostly because people just put a list, in all caps, at the end of their post.
We know these are trivially easy to filter because putting a list like [ECHELON CIA NSA GCHQ IRA BOMB inurl:groups.google.com] returns loads. Here's one example, with the handy words "anti echelon block" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.media/KqhWP1rLF9U/G...
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"Moderated dating" is an interesting idea by itself. Where both sides have to conform to a very strict etiquette (platform rules), until they both decide to move their relationship to next level anyway. I can see how it can appeal to some people.
Seems a bit counterproductive to me! Why would you choose to not have information about the other party, when you are trying to evaluate them?
OA quote: ""lower league English football" wasn't available" Possibly explains the recurring need for a fake one. Serious contribution: bots faking it with other bots generating large numbers of apparently real social profiles. Not just gf/bf whatever but other forms of relationship (fake boss asking for more work this weekend as a cover for...). Ideal chaff for the surveillance society.
EDIT: I should add that I wasn't made fully aware of the depth of the scamminess of the whole thing until I accidentally tried cleaning up some "offers" and found it was all scummy offers to scummy counterparties.