The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#21

Post by munchbunny » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #20

cbhl wrote: post #2

This page reads normally on mobile, but on desktop it's eight columns wide, scrolls horizontally, with each column being 1/4th the screen width.

I'm having trouble determining what they discovered here. 1) They bought 1 million dating profiles 2) They traced it back to Match.com and Plenty of Fish That's it? That's the news? Where's the meat? What am I missing?

You can buy a large number of completely deanonymized profiles that tie together photos, names, sexual orientation, etc. (those were what stuck out to me) for a couple hundred bucks.

Usually you have to go through the back door to get this stuff. Even advertising companies go further than this to anonymize you. This is a pretty blatant privacy violation.

If the headline was just "Match.com sites are sharing your profile info between them" this would smell bad but wouldn't be a big deal.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#22

Post by thanatropism » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 11:34 PM UTC

BadassFractal wrote: post #12

thanatropism wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit. Online you get to le…

Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well.

There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#23

Post by weavie » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 11:45 PM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #7

cbhl wrote: post #2

This page reads normally on mobile, but on desktop it's eight columns wide, scrolls horizontally, with each column being 1/4th the screen width.

Turning on reader mode has it display the massive GDPR waiver / "partners list" instead of the actual article :)

It seems turning on reader mode displays the gdpr waiver, but then if you refresh the page it shows the article.

I'd be interested to know how they managed to achieve that. The waiver doesn't seem to appear in the html source.. so I'm not sure where it is coming from and it is now too late in the day for me to investigate it further..

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#24

Post by BadassFractal » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

thanatropism wrote: post #22

BadassFractal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit. Online you get to le…

Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well. There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes…

Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#25

Post by magduf » Tue, Dec 18, 2018, 11:54 PM UTC

BadassFractal wrote: post #14

mcrad wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is rampart fraud here unrelated to LTV? Seems quite obvious to me they are intertwined.

That's fair. I think Tinder these days returns your super likes to you if the bot you super liked ended up getting banned, but I might be wrong.

The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#26

Post by empath75 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

thanatropism wrote: post #8

BadassFractal wrote: post #6

Speaking of LTV, the power users in online dating can easily be worth several hundred a month. Super swipes and super likes are about $1 each these days and in crowded dating markets you have to rely on them heavily if you're hoping to cut through the noise of everybody else's profiles. I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid money to have your profile be seen first in your city.…

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I met my wife at a hostel on a volcanic island in the jungle, who turned out to live near me back home. Long way to go for someone I could have met on tinder.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#27

Post by paulie_a » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 12:25 AM UTC

magduf wrote: post #25

BadassFractal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. I think Tinder these days returns your super likes to you if the bot you super liked ended up getting banned, but I might be wrong.

The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.

Bumble has a lot of professionals and will actually want to meet within a few messages back and forth. Tinder is a lot of people that "hate drama", ie they crave it.

I have met quite a few very pleasant people but we just mutually realized "not for me" after a date or two. We wished each other luck and parted ways. In the case of bumble in my experience there is an emotional maturity and interesting people. But apparently you are required to have a photo at Machu Picchu.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#28

Post by jwagenet » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 12:32 AM UTC

magduf wrote: post #25

BadassFractal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. I think Tinder these days returns your super likes to you if the bot you super liked ended up getting banned, but I might be wrong.

The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.

While I agree that the apparent profile quality seems better on Bumble, I get an order of magnitude fewer matches through that service. My bet is Tinder became the de facto dating app (and has taken on the generic name for dating apps), which brings the bots and the abuse. The bots will follow the community if it leaves Tinder.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#29

Post by drewg123 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 12:48 AM UTC

thanatropism wrote: post #8

BadassFractal wrote: post #6

Speaking of LTV, the power users in online dating can easily be worth several hundred a month. Super swipes and super likes are about $1 each these days and in crowded dating markets you have to rely on them heavily if you're hoping to cut through the noise of everybody else's profiles. I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid money to have your profile be seen first in your city.…

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I met my wife when she asked me how to get out of vi.

She was a new PhD student, and I was the departmental sysadmin. To be fair to her, she knew vi just fine, but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC, where ESC was mapped to F11.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#30

Post by ajiang » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC

  We believe that the $0.57 average revenue per user that 
  Match Group reported in their Q2 2018 Investor Presentation 
  is just a fraction of the user profile's real value.

At the risk of taking the wrong thing away from this article...IAC is an undervalued stock?