Can we talk about the NYT's fairly open anti-tech bias at this point? What feels like every day, they come up with some pre-text to write (or publish, in the case of editorials) an anti-tech article. Two today, the Amazon one, and now this.
Certainly, there are big problems with some aspects of tech and they ought to be reported on. But it seems like there's something a bit more going on here than that, given their willingness to publish silly, conceptually thin articles like this. This entire editorial is essentially content free. The only point it makes is to summarize Facebook's shortcomings, which didn't require the launch of a new dating feature to do, if it had something new to say. But it didn't, so it used FB's announcement as a pretext to publish a set of stock criticisms.
> This entire editorial is essentially content free.
An editorial is not intended to produce new content, e.g. report on new news, only to state opinions about the known state of an issue. To that end, this article cites a great deal of highly detailed content to which it links towards in making its argument. I had no idea there was a newly reported data breach just on wednesday this week, for example. I'm also certain that tens of thousands of people will first learn of FB's new dating initiative via this editorial, and in that regard it is valuable that the NYT will put a much needed cautionary spin on this information. Too many people still have no regard for the harm they do to not just themselves but all of their social contacts who have any digital connection to them whatsoever when they give too much information to companies like Facebook.
it is most certainly valid to point out how inappropriate it would be to begin giving Facebook a whole new class of sensitive, personal content for which they can mishandle and sell to foreign governments for illicit or unethical purposes.
Sure, but the perspective isn't novel either. It isn't presenting a new argument. It isn't presenting an interesting perspective. It's just regurgitating an obvious one. The article exists to bash Facebook and for no other substantive reason.
It’s entirely possible as someone reading hackernews you’re far more inundated with news about the tech sector than the average person.
I’m not sure this is an obvious perspective to most people in America.
I’m very pro public awareness which educates the layman on what information these companies are collecting, how they’re using it, and how long it can affect you for.
Especially for the older generations which seem more susceptible to actual fake news, and may have a lesser understanding of what this tech is and how it works.
And especially for younger generations who may not instinctively realize that every button they click, picture they post, and website they browse is being mined, logged, harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone who asks for it with a couple bucks to spare.
Also, as the parent to your comment stated, I didn’t know there was a data breach Wednesday, and I’m a software engineer.
It’s funny. When the media doesn’t cover something enough, people say “why is CNN talking about the Kardashians?? Climate change is happening!”. Seems the converse occurs too “Why is the NYT covering this again!”
Making sure the public is aware of the past privacy abuses of a large public company with lots of control over their data seems like a substantive reason.
Like most large, reputable news organizations, I would assume the New York Times does its best to maintain a firewall between their journalistic and business teams. By extension, the Times's writers likely have zero involvement in the practices you're complaining about.
Times Editorial could publish articles criticizing Times Corporate, but while I would be very disappointed if Times Corporate was given a free pass, I don't expect them to receive extra scrutiny either.
And if Times Corporate isn't getting extra scrutiny, how much of a story would there be? The Times's data privacy practices, while not ideal, are nowhere near the level of what's going on at Google and Facebook.
There are hundreds of companies trying to solve the problem of monetizing journalism without advertising. What you're saying isn't technically incorrect but it's phrased in this blasé way like there are tons of options that work just fine and they just chose advertising. I have a feeling you're smart enough to know that's not the case and so you're resorting to a just plain bad argument that sounds ok if you don't look at it too hard.
> I have a feeling you're smart enough to know that's not the case and so you're resorting to a just plain bad argument that sounds ok if you don't look at it too hard.
Why are you attributing bad faith to the commenter?
It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues. Blocking privacy mode is an extremely aggressive and intrusive stance, although some other publications followed suit. NYT is especially heavy on tracking [0] The journalist who write for the Times should take personal responsibility and find a different company or profession. I have a feeling the journalists are smart enough that they know they can find employment elsewhere.
> Why are you attributing bad faith to the commenter?
Because people don't like feeling wrong, even if they aren't particularly wrong, and I've seen many otherwise very intelligent people say and do really stupid things when confronted with information that contradicts their beliefs. Just to be clear this does not make said commenter a bad person, it just makes them a human, with a brain that does occasionally really shitty things when it doesn't want to think.
It's less about attributing bad faith and more just acknowledging that we're all imperfect talking chimps here.
> It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues.
I would never say another person needs to quit a job over ethical issues, because anyone of decent moral fiber and an objective mind is probably already wrestling with that problem, and having a disinterested third party dispensing advice from On High with zero skin in the game is not going to improve that situation. Alternatively, they could just not care, which is less likely, but also not going be affected by that same third party. Basically what I'm saying is there are numerous possibilities in that interaction but none lead to change, so I don't discuss it. It's moot.
All I'm saying is that the problem of making money in journalism is something that has no clear solution, and acting like the NYT is being hypocritical for using trackers while railing against trackers is a clear example of the Ad Hominem fallacy.
> If this is the case, why is NYT showing absolutely no innovation in monetizing their platform?
Because they don't have ideas? I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take with such a complex problem that so many other companies are having a difficult time solving. Why expend further resources trying to fling more shit at the wall to see what sticks, when your current modal, albeit not ideal, does serve the purpose?
Not everyone has to be, or even should be an innovator. The NYT should be innovating on better and newer techniques of journalism, since that's what they do. It's not like Apple created a new bank for Apple Card to try and make it better, they contracted that part of a product they wanted to offer to a 3rd party that already knew how to do it, and I'd imagine if a revenue model came along that suited them, they'd do the same thing and dump trackers and ad-tech. It's likely they're just waiting for that.
> Insulting and unsubstantiated; how nice.
I mean, it was unsubstantiated, yes, but I think it was also a positive-leaning assumption? I'm not sure why you're insulted by that, but I apologize.
FWIW: It's actually not. They've literally said they are trying to take big tech companies to task before.
They don't actually try to hide their goal.
I'm not sure why you are trying to do it for them.
I'm also unsure why folks think they haven't had specific goals/slants in editorial picking/writing in the past. This is not a new phenomenon, for any newspaper.
I happen to think this kind of thing has been fairly destructive to the credibility of newspapers over the past 20-30 years, but what do i know.
> FWIW: It's actually not. They've literally said they are trying to take big tech companies to task before. They don't actually try to hide their goal.
Is there a source for this? It's pretty bold to claim they've admitted to criticizing tech companies out of spite. Especially when there are justifiable reasons for trying take them to task, such as Facebook's privacy record.
Not at all. I'm a NYT subscriber and so much content is filled with perjorative attacks against tech, tech workers and tech companies. 'Big Tech', 'techbros', etc..
The tipping poing was the Trump victory. Before the election the NYT and other mainstream media outlets were trumpeting how much better/hipper the DNC was at using social platforms to organize voters than the Republican party. If Clinton would have won, this characterization would have remained and anybody complaning about Russian interference in elections would have been branded a McCarthyist.
Indeed, and although it would sound silly to us, a lot of journalists are surprisingly bitter over the 'learn to code' meme-debacle of just several months ago. When the journalism bubble burst the success of tech was used to humiliate journalists. They won't be kinder when our bubble bursts.
(as an aside, "that learn to code" jeer to journalists - without whom democracy can't exist - is disgusting)
Implying that journalism has no value and people should mechanically make.. accounting software apps for a large organisation instead of uncovering and presenting information about those in power is hideous.
It's no surprise that Trump supporters are all over it.
I dunno, like when Facebook tried to launch it's own crypto-coin a bit back, it always help to remind the general public - and 'general public' is the key term here - how horrible and untrustworthy Facebook is.
If it's not in the public's face at least semi-regularly, they'll forget.
I don't see any anti-tech stance in this. The tech giants are quasi monopolists who leverage both their size and information advantage to actively destroy competition. Privacy is a civilian casualty of the attempts to cement that position.
Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
> I don't see any anti-tech stance in this. The tech giants are quasi monopolists who leverage both their size and information advantage to actively destroy competition. Privacy is a civilian casualty of the attempts to cement that position.
I agree with your second sentence entirely. To be clear, criticizing tech is completely fair and important. My point is that the NYT, it seems to me, is pushing this a little too hard. I think the evidence for that is in fairly thin-pretext articles like this one, or the Amazon driver liability "investigation".
> Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
I half agree with you here. I do think these systems being put in place have tremendous social consequences. Unfortunately though, I think the ships have sailed, and I don't really see regulation or anything much else putting them back to port. People have voted with their feet and they simply don't value privacy the way you or I do.
> That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
> In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
the function of journalism is to speak truth to power. Very few things in the modern world are as unregulated, powerful and a walking privacy disaster as big tech companies, so I'd encourage the NYT to quadruple their output until we've reigned them in.
What's more concerning than the NYT fulfilling its primary function is the occasional apologia in the HN comments, by people who (if we want to talk about bias), probably have a stake in perpetuating the state of affairs.
I think one should separate tech and big-tech. Companies like Facebook and Google deal with user data and that has significant consequences on their behavior. Many people don't see the implications of sharing information with these large companies. And they might even be correct with that as long as they themselves or anyone in their circle is not something of a broader public interest.
Having a digital log of your love life and exchanges can have an impact. That is not an "anti-tech"-assessment. Maybe the article is boring to you, but I see dire need of more
NYT is certainly biased and they have have their own mostly economic incentives regarding big-tech. That has nothing to do with technology itself.
> Can we talk about the NYT's fairly open anti-tech bias at this point?
This is an opinion piece. In pretty much every newspaper I skip this section.
Broadly speaking, there are large swaths of the population for whom the New York Times (and, on the other side, Wall Street Journal and Fox News) anti-tech “biases” resonate. Not just emotionally, but because big tech has repeatedly and callously burned those groups.
They are looking to organise. Finding common arguments and common allies is part of the political process the Fourth Estate catalyses.
People who's businesses have been disrupted by Amazon's "not a monopoly" and "totally legal" business practices. People who've had their person information disseminated across social media platforms. People who've had their financial data taken from companies with sub-standard protections in place. People who had their children's data vacuumed up by Youtube and then sold to advertisers.
Print media itself who has seen platform after platform erode their ability to stay in business. People who feel that providing platforms to groups they feel are fundamentally damaging to society should not be allowed. People who fear that these companies collect and maintain advanced and comprehensive databases of the general population's interests and behaviors "for advertising purposes" but that those databases could be used by bad actors to perform damage to society.
If you are working in tech and can't think of anyone that big tech has spurned, you need to think about how it's changed the lives of most Americans in the past two decades.
Cab drivers: Uber. Small businesses: Amazon. Marketing: Instagram. Hospitality: AirBnB. Restaurateurs: Yelp. Teachers: Moodle/Blackboard. Journalists: Facebook.
Really can't think of anyone who might appreciate an anti-tech message?
These professions have been forced to abide by the new rules that tech has enabled. You can't intervene into people's lives massively and not expect them to push back.
I'm not saying I can't think of anyone that's been harmed by tech -- there's obviously plenty of those just as with any big business or sector of the economy.
I'm taking issue with the idea that there is a large group of people that has unilaterally been harmed by tech that isn't defined as "the people that have been harmed by tech".
A counterexample might be "people harmed by car accidents" -- there are a lot of those too, year after year, yet we don't see a column dedicated to anti-automobile narratives popping up in the nytimes. I'd hazard a guess that it's because car accidents affect only a small portion of all groups (or just very small groups) no matter how you slice them -- unless you slice the entire population into two sets of "people harmed by car accidents" and that set's compliment.
Not only that, but unlike with car accidents we would all have a very difficult time agreeing what constitutes the group of "people harmed by tech". Some pro-privacy advocate might want to include all people on the ad-sponsored internet in that group. You apparently want to include taxi drivers and journalists. These are some very strange bedfellows that can only be cobbled together in the most tenuous way using a narrative that scapegoats tech companies in general.
Addressing push back about specific changes made by specific companies from specific groups? I've got no problem with that. Cover it all day. Grouping all of these issues into one big narrative and pointing a mob of angry pitchfork bearing people at it telling them that these companies are the source of all your problems? Yikes, that seems like it could go really really badly!
> Can we talk about the NYT's fairly open anti-tech bias at this point
Sure. We work in tech, and see that the web has hurt the newspaper business model. Therefore, we protect our ego in the face of any criticism from the traditional press towards tech by rationalizing it away as vindictive rather than ask ourselves if the criticisms are valid and would also be written by a healthier press. And by casting it as a bias, we can avoid contemplating if more tech-savvy reporters would have noticed how morally bankrupt "tech" is sooner and/or provide sharper and more knowledgeable criticism that doesn't rely on poor approximations of goings-on in a domain inscrutable to laypersons.
These are some of the largest companies in the world, make decisions that effect the lives of billions but act like their shit doesn't stink and don't want people looking to closely at the societal ramifications of their business model.
If anything, I'd say the press is too kind and deferential to the half-truths their PR departments pump out.
Maybe Tech should stop being so terrible with our data and privacy.
There are maybe 2 or 3 major companies (Mozilla, Apple?) that have shown any interest in protecting their users privacy and not abusing and mining all the data they collect from their users, who have unsurprisingly not understood the implications of the massive amount of data that can be collected over the past decade or so.
I agree. Disregarding any potential bias from NYT, I find it important that some major publications hammer it home to ordinary people that alas the Tech industry has joined the ranks of big pharma, big finance and arms manufacturers to become just as untrustworthy as the incumbent bad guys.
People still see Tech as benign, but it has been twisted from the early starry-eyed technologists who wanted to change the world for the better, and it has become just another big industry power block that looks after only it's own profits to the exclusion of everything else.
I wouldn't single out FAANG (or Tech) for this particular issue, because it is not idiosyncratic to these sectors. It is a systemic issue with the corporate culture and regulations. Corporations have an obligation to shareholders and they would be open to lawsuits if they did not partake in this morally questionable but legally A-OK process.
If they’re doing it, why not call them out for their actions? That someone else is doing it doesn’t make tech companies doing it somehow OK, or less worthy of condemnation.
Sorry I should've phrased that better. I agree with your point, but we should not target tech specifically for this, rather work on forcing the entire corporate landscape to change.
Any forcing action will realistically occur one sector at a time as the laws and morality catch up to that sections actions. This is simply a morality push against one sector, and its not as if we're not moralizing against other companies for doing this. HN will simply see more of the tech side of things due to the inherent bias of articles posted here.
I disagree, because of what I posted before. This is not an issue idiosyncratic to Tech, and out of all the shenanigans they pull off, this might be one of the most vanilla ones. It's a little bit like (and I try not to strawman your argument) targeting the coal industry because they use this trick too. Yes, to add infamy, they dodge taxes as well, but more to the point, they do far more sinister things that should take priority (for that specific sector).
The tax evasion is a very important, but more general and unfortunately pervasive problem of our society. I believe we'll do it a disservice if we try to target it narrowly like that. It will get drowned out by whataboutism and the bigger but specific issues. None of that can derail it when looking at the bigger picture.
Or we could blame Congress for continuing to shepherd a ridiculous tax code instead of fixing it.
Politicians have more to say about chicken sandwiches, library story time, and and NFL pregames when their actual job is exactly this sort of problem, not being professional culture pundits.
We've been saying for awhile that an individual has agency and that the free actions they choose on the free market with their owned money is all on them, fruits, pains, and all.
We allow people to enter into all sorts of arrangements where they compromise their rights, such as by giving up their right to sue in court or not seeking employment in the same industry.
We allow people to enter into onerous credit card agreements, and we all agree that it is voluntary. And we say that when an 18 year old youth purchases cigarettes, that again, they are exercising their intellect in an act of agency.
And then we come to the issue of software licenses, which also begs the question as people trade privacy for services, "Yes, you are an individual of formidable agency, are you not?"
This was cathartic to read, even though it’s short. Big tech has become evil. It’s mostly banal, of course (“You want to sell the fact that I like football and puppies to ad companies? Sure, who cares?”), but it’s still a net negative for society. And it’s not tech’s fault per se, but rather the unfettered and uninhibited pursuit of ever more capital. Tech can be a tool for good, but when driven by the profit machine, the incentives make it a tool for evil.
I think it’s a sign of the times that NYT is willing to hire authors specializing in covering tech with a skeptical perspective. Newspapers would first criticize the government, then during the Industrial revolution they branded the entrepreneurs as ”captains of industry” or ”robber barons” which was a sign of how they wielded huge influence over the population.
Now we’re in a similar place with tech. Tech entrepreneurs have been branded as ”disruptors” saving us from the establishment for the better part of two decades but now there’s a bigger diversity of spins on these tech stories, leaning a bit on the negative side. I think the pendulum will swing back to positive if these companies get their act together and do more to protect users, and especially if the governments bust their monopolies. That would maybe generate a lot of sympathy.
You're dead on, I think. There's a few things to consider:
1) There's a general anti-tech sentiment that is a huge defining part of our zeitgeist. It's only a few years old and I'm already tired of it and articles like this one contribute to the fatigue.
2) The NYT is leaning very hard into this fad for a variety of reasons - good for their bottom line, good for their self-image, etc. There was a very funny one a few weeks ago where the NYT "took down" Google's terrible ToS - until someone (in the comments) pointed out the NYT one was even worse. If you're shouting and pointing at someone else, people won't have time to look at you.
3) Lately, I keep being reminded of the Selfish Gene, which has a few chapters devoted to Evolutionary Stable Strategies. In essence, Tech has gotten so big that being a "tech critic" has become a lucrative (high reward/low cost) position to take, like being a cheater in a monogamous population. Any environment can support a certain percentage of such defectors, though if there are suddenly too many, it stops being lucrative and a new stable equilibrium will be reached. I highly recommend it, it has really helped me make sense of these rapid shifts.
When one thinks about the security breaches, manipulation to share more data or buy more IAPs, addiction-inducing designs, attack tools used against activists and dissidents and the general lack of respect towards people, tech is quite an abusive industry.
The biggest and richest tech companies all abuse the privacy of their so-called customers. The customers don't really own or control the devices they buy any more, nor do they control the software. The companies decide at their discretion which version is used and if someone is allowed to use a piece of software.
Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could instantly cut anyone from their online lives and they are able to disable physical devices and locally downloaded applications.
You might ask why there is an anti-tech sentiment.
Most of the big tech companies are ruthless monopolies which are exploiting people with deeply addictive apps, hoovering up every tiny detail of their lives, and selling it to advertisers while also frequently losing that information to hackers, and being used by autocratic foreign governments to swing elections to candidates that suit their purposes.
So it's right that there's an anti-tech sentiment, and it's right that privacy concerns are reported on.
That's a good point. The linked page even has Opinion prior to the title.
Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
> The linked page even has Opinion prior to the title.
Yes, in a font smaller than and above the title that is very light against the background and reasonably easy to miss.
> Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
Perhaps it's a clickbait title with real substance, or perhaps a great research piece. The only way to know is to read it.
Internet killed the paper star. Before news went online, good, reliable content was paid for with subscriptions.
Going online, paired with the rise of social media changed what it meant for content to be "good" - redefined it to share worthy and click based, monetized mostly by ads. Now, no one, including the famed NYT does good classical journalism - they do what gets them shares and clicks.
On closer examination of social media demographics, you can see why news has pivoted to opinion - because millennials share and click more of it, especially the opinions they approve of.
A demographic shift in HN user base is also likely the reason for more opinion making it to the top of the charts
There was a time when subscriptions had little to no ads, and ads were clearly marked as such. Now we have ads all over the place, videos autoplaying, and "influencers" (read: shady salesmen).
Now, before "the internet" (read: its commercial, world-wide success), in-depth research was costly, and it could not be copied easily. Newspapers had a reputation to hold up. It was easier to compete on information. Now the competition is much more fierce, and many people make/share news gratis, so it ends up competing with "free" is difficult.
As for NYT, there's some good people working there like Runa Sandvik, but I guess it works like every large news organization...
The background is of course that the NYT and other papers are involved in litigation and competition with Google and other social media giants for who gets the revenue from the informtion economy, particular around links and aggregations like Google News.
This doesn't mean that "big tech" isn't worthy of criticism or scrutity, but it can both be true that there are legitimate complaints about these companies and that traditional media outlets are going overboard with endless attacks on them due to external agendas.
Do you disagree, though? Facebook has shown itself to be an irresponsible and malicious steward of the data it already has — some of which we didn't even consent to giving it. The launch of a new product seems to me a very appropriate time to remind people that hey, Facebook may not be the company you want to trust with this.
I think it more reflects changing opinion of general public.
As much as tech companies try to make them self look up small upstarts fighting uphill battle, they are one of the most influential industry of our time.
In 90s there were oil companies and tobacco companies on the front pages, now it's tech companies time.
> This entire editorial is essentially content free. The only point it makes is to summarize Facebook's shortcomings
Nah. They made the point that dating apps in particular collect a lot of deeply personal info, that Facebook is using it as an opportunity to merge data from your Instagram and Facebook accounts, that dating profiles will be separate from Facebook profiles.
But most importantly, this is an opinion piece.
It logically points out that letting Facebook be your dating app is a bad idea if you value your privacy.
And how could you make that point more effectively than by listing Facebook's record on privacy?
NYT and other legacy newspapers depend on traffic from Facebook and Google to continue existing and are threatened by things like AMP and new media in general. If newspapers demonstrate that they can change public opinion about the tech companies, they have more bargaining power against them.
I totally agree it reminds me apocalypse movies they're almost always the same because people wants to watch it as now in the NY case they tend to write anti-tech all the time.
Facebook and Google are both sources of "free" news these days (the quality and neutrality may vary though.) This represents a major challenge for newspapers which are struggling to monetize their content. Adtech has also impacted their ability to earn from ads. It's easy to see why they might have such a bias.
They publish articles that they think will get views, I don’t think you need to read further into it than that. People like to read articles shitting on big tech companies. You can interpret that they way you want to, but I think it would be dangerous to assume that The NY Times is pushing an agenda that their readers don’t agree with.
Unfortunately the NYT has proven itself totally out of touch these days.
Whether it’s lavishing praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi elite, cheerleading the Iraq war, reporting as if the #MeToo movement was somehow localized entirely in Hollywood and not experienced by normal people, desperately bolstering Hillary with Bernie hit piece after Bernie hit piece, adding constant fuel to the dumpster fire that is the US culture war, or totally clueless tech reporting, it has been become worse and worse with each passing year in my opinion.
I was a subscriber for many years and recently cancelled and it’s been wonderful to distance myself from the clickbait.
Even if it is bad, other options are substantially worse.
First, the main website that took into account preferences (OKCupid) is almost gone, Tinderified. And Tinder itself does not look at preferences at all. If you are a type of person who dates people randomly met on a bus stop or in a bar, it may work for you. If you expect any more, it is a lottery.
Second, only a small fraction of people who are looking for partner(s) are active on any dating apps. At the same time (anecdotally) a lot of people meet at a party organized by a friend, or through some special interest groups (i.e.: common friends, social groups or interests).
Side note: I already had quite a few great dates with people I met on Facebook (first interacting on some groups). Then, with common interests, seeing how one interacts in public, and potentially - common friends, there is a much higher chance to have commonalities. Plus, they are more than a "business card".
The dearth of effective dating platforms is the expected end state of the current "pay per use" model. The popular sites earn more from repeat customers than from single-time customers. That is fine for general goods & services. However it goes against the usual idea for dating: to find a partner & establish a good, lasting relationship in as few "attempts" as possible. Users successfully coupling up are effectively "lost" for the platform that facilitated it.
What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform? First up, it would need to benefit the most from a successful & permanent match, rather from repeated use.
As much as I dislike Facebook for their abysmal handling of privacy, I figure FB Dating suffers less form misaligned incentives than standalone dating platforms. Presumably users will remain on FB proper anyway, whether their dates are successful or not.
Come to think of it, the "traditional" (for lack of better word) society built on nuclear families just might have been geared that way - to benefit the most from people finding partners & becoming long term couples.
>What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform?
Since finding the right person is a numbers game, I'd say the best path is an easy path. Something between speed dating and a normal date, where the goal is to check for chemistry as well as advance past the initial, in-person interaction. Start with having a few like/dislike parameters met, then get you both face to face.
If we simplified and just went for a real-world, slower version of speed dating, where each pair would get 15 minutes with each other, it wouldn't control for like/dislike parameters. IE: I definitely wouldn't date a smoker. Having it start online then move to real-world, asap, helps to match likes and dislikes more closely.
If you don't mind bit of a downer, I see three major obstacles in your idea:
1. monetization. How do you ensure your platform can at least cover its costs? The users want to know your platform wont go dark one fine day because of an overdue server bill. Better yet, that it won't get yanked like many of Google's cool projects due to insufficient profitability.
2. incentives alignment. How do you ensure the incentives for your platform are to get the users paired up permanently, which usually would mean they stop perusing your platform? Unlike typical services, a dating platform is one such that most people want to be able to ultimately do away with.
3. fulfillment. How do you make users feel they are putting in reasonably hard effort? How do you let them increase the effort if they so desire? People do feel fulfillment from putting in effort; cf. a lot of computer games that grant satisfaction through daily grind.
[edit]
A throw-away thought:
current dating platforms operate in "push" model: the singles make themselves available.
How about you make a "pull" platform - let already established couples find & match up great candidates to join their social circles - as new couples.
Making the already established couples your main users would solve the obstacles 1, 2, and 3. You would take money from the already established couples for finding & matching up new great, interesting, friendly couples for them. You would have the already established couples "grind" (put in the effort) for finding & setting up new ones.
The idea doesn't sound like it would require much monetization. It isn't a site you actively browse, it just makes matches and dolls out notifications. You could probably run the entire operation for a major metropolitan area on a raspberry pi.
> Talk about misaligned incentives!
> [...]
> Users successfully coupling up are effectively "lost" for the platform that facilitated it.
It works the same in healthcare. If we are cured once for good, they charge us once. If there are good prophylactics and we stay healthy - even worse.
Yet, somehow the system works, to a certain degree. (Why? I don't know. Maybe there is more stigma with destroying someone's health for monetary gain.)
...
Maybe there should be a service, for which we pay ONLY during times when we are healthy (or have happy romantic/sexual life)? In that way, the incentives would be aligned.
Any ideas of how to do so?
...
As one remark: a lifelong relationship is not the only goal of dating. Some people look for a short-term, or even an ONS. Also, if a relationship goes bad it is better when it does not stays for a lifetime (in the worst-case scenario, when one's life ends with a murder, or - suicide).
> Yet, somehow the system works, to a certain degree. (Why? I don't know.)
Well for starters, there is still some level of competition in the pharma industry. If you're trying to make a better version of a competitor's product, changing "It makes X go away for 2 weeks" to "It cures X" is a good strategy.
Secondly, it's not as though we can program treatments to act in exact accordance with executive whims. We use what works.
(To be clear, none of this is to say there isn't a problem. I am listing reasons the situations is not as disastrous as it theoretically could be.)
> The popular sites earn more from repeat customers than from single-time customers.
> What would it take to build a sustainable dating platform?
Between "earning more" and "sustainable" there's is a broad spectrum of possibilities. I know from past experience that it's absolutely possible to skip many deliberate ways of "earning more" and still be sustainable (even highly profitable). Perhaps you won't conquer the market without shady tactics nowadays when competition is fierce, but you certainly don't have to screw your customers to be highly successful.
It shouldn't be that hard to set up a dating site with aligned incentives - I had the idea of a site which requires a lot of personal data on signup, and deletes it for a fee at account deactivation . People pay huge premiums for matchmaking agencies, building an algorithm with similar incentives shouldn't be that infeasible...
I'm pretty sure all dating platforms suck because dating itself just kinda sucks and, as hard as it is to believe for the HN crowd, there are some problems you just can't fix with a website.
To be fair, if you genuinely reflect what you care about in your profile text, and only interact with people who do so too, Tinder can work too. Has for me anyway :) . Of course this relies somewhat on you doing some substantial swiping to find those profiles that do.
UX: The interface is pretty much against that (it requires at least 2 more click to see what's behind), and it seems to be intentional.
Filtering - in software engineering terms, there is a difference between search with O(n) (going through all elements) and in O(log(n)) with a binary search.
Let's assume that I would find 1% people good for dating (usually a tweet-length message is not enough). It is a lot of wasted time. Again, if you care more about looks than personality, then Tinder is a perfect tool. (Once I found a relationship on Tinder, and yes, the description stood out, but overall the signal-to-noise ratio is poor.)
On OKC I can preselect for some things that are required.
"Personality over looks" almost sounds like Nice Guy territory to me. It's dating. If you aren't even remotely attracted to the other person, then you're likely to waste both of yall's time with further action. You filter by looks all the time in the wild.
Also, if you're willing to give people-you're-not-attracted-to a chance, how is Tinder any different? Are you saying you are never liked by someone on Tinder that you aren't attracted to? Nothing is stopping you from sticking around for their potentially amazing personality. I bet you just don't because you need some initial attraction like the rest of us whether online or at the bar.
Usually this complaint has to do with men getting no matches. But it's basically men complaining that women with options don't pick them, and online dating sucks because it gives women too many options making it hard for them to compete. It's like country boys complaining about women moving to the city.
The realities of dating were already brutal before online dating.
> "Personality over looks" almost sounds like Nice Guy territory to me. It's dating. If you aren't even remotely attracted to the other person, then you're likely to waste both of yall's time with further action. You filter by looks all the time in the wild.
Somewhat true, but in the real world you can grow attracted to someone who's appearance you initially did not have a positive reaction to. I know this from experience. This does not occur in online dating, which encourages treating people as commodities.
Oh, dear. Just because it works for you that way (and it's fine!) it does not mean it works for everyone that way.
Sure, looks matter. But for me (given a similar age), I am 2-3 orders of magnitude (!) pickier in personality/goals/etc.
You may say that for casual sex personality does not matter, but even then I want someone fun to talk to, safe, and drama-free.
And for your record, I don't have a problem with getting matches. (Now in Asia, and as a European I get tons.)
Also, it is maybe why I don't approach random strangers at a bar. Unless a science conference, rarely "fun to talk to".
This is a pretty bad article imo. I don't trust Facebook with anything and they make a fair point that they are not monetizing the service which probably means they are collecting data from it to use in some way that is not yet clear for the general population.
But this is basically what Facebook already does, so if you already have a Facebook account and trust Facebook with that data I don't see a reason to trust them further.
> they are not monetizing the service which probably means they are collecting data from it to use in some way
You're not wrong. I feel it's worth pointing out, however, that the opposite (paid/monetised -> not collecting data) is frequently assumed when it really doesn't hold.
Stay tuned for ads in the main part of Facebook for users of Facebook Dating... Are you lonely? Use product ABC it will brighten your teeth and your love life.
Although I agree with the general sentiment here: the article being a shoddy hit piece by NYT, it is Facebook we are talking about. Considering FB aren’t monetizing this feature, do we know what kind of data they are gathering as part of the dating feature, how they are incentivizing it on a per user basis and does the user have a say in this or an option to opt-out?
Also I’m curious as to how this feature make sense in the scenario where you have users creating an FB account just for the sake of using FB Dating and how effective would this be in finding a compatible match?
Facebook is getting into the dating game because of data. Look at all the data you give all of these dating websites from Tinder to OkCupid. If you really wanna know what someone thinks, get the analysis of the dating website. Then you can sell that to companies, insurance companies, the government, anyone.
Even better, would you rather market to the Hot Blonde girl with 1000s of suitors or the proverbial "Kip Drordy" from south park? Now you can figure out who's word of mouth really matters and that is the beginning of a dark society where only the elite and beautiful have power.
It’s so painfully obvious the facebook Apps listen for key words to advertise to you. If facebook didn't buy instagram they would already be my-spaced.
I think there was, but I’m not sure if I think it was any real consolation. I mean, what’s worse? Being listened to or them having so much data on us that they can somewhat accurately predict our behaviour before we’ve even decided for ourselves?
> somewhat accurately predict our behavior before we’ve even decided for ourselves?
The brain is still a formidable computing device not easily emulated or understood. AI Engines of today are limited because they don't have intuition like the human Brain. They can't feel like something is off or a situation doesn't smell right. We are learning to master the rational decision-making process, but the emotional processes of the mind are what make us more than just drones. It's the X factor that makes life interesting.
anec-data here but I'll add it anyway. The "getting ads delivered based on the exact obscure thing you happened to be talking about just half an hour previously" trope was happenening to me with what was becoming laughable predictability and led me to uninstall the app from my phone permanently. It was just the final straw alongside a sudden massive uptick in notification spam [somebody you don't know in a group you're in liked a thread - NOTIFICATION... A friend of a friend of a friend you've never met and only have a tenuous connection with shared a thing... NOTIFICATION] whilst also erstwhile hiding things I was genuinely interesteded in because algorithm led me to change to first the mobile web version and then the "tinfoil" wrapped version and guess what... the strangely co-incidental ads for things related to conversations pretty much stopped overnight.
Anec-data for sure but the co-incidences were uncanny.
This is exactly my experience. I'm not a paranoid person by any means but it was becoming laughable how much it was happening. The final straw was when my buddy came over to my apt after a work where he was explaining that he had to trim some trees and 30 minutes later I'm getting ads for tree trimmers even though I live in an apt and have never even remotely searched for anything on the topic. It happens too often and to too many people for me to believe they don't. Especially because if I owned facebook I would do the same thing because there's little pushback and the data is invaluable.
No, because nobody has scanned the binaries of every release facebook has done and deployed to its users on various platforms. It’s sure easy to say its debunked though, especially if you have a big PR budget
If it's proprietary than you have to assume it's doing everything it is able to do to track you, and even if it isn't, it could be at any time in the future and you will have no way to know.
One unexpected effect that could arise from this for Facebook, is that people using this feature could start displaying negative emotions towards the main app.
All it takes is a bad date, some awkward rejection, or a stalker experience to start feeling ill about using Facebook dating, and by extension, Facebook.
I don't expect this article to play well with a tech audience who knows that FB's data breaches aren't anything special, every company has data breaches just FB is a bigger target.
Yes. The problem with FB is that it already has a ton of data about you, trusting it for dating means giving it even more.
Additionally FB has a track record of being extremely reckless with your data and being dishonest about what data it actually gathers, how it is being used and who it is being shared with.
I'd prefer to trust separate companies with limited topics, than giving everything to one big company that has proven time and time again that they simply don't care about how they handle your personal data as long as they can make money out of it.
But then again I'm neither on fb, tinder nor anything like that so I'll let people decide for themselves.
Maybe? It's better because you don't allow Facebook to continue to harvest data about you, and add to the plethora of personal information they already have.
But with whatever service you use, your data is still being held by somebody in the end.
So depending on what you're willing to give to who in order to use a service, it might be better or worse.
At this point, you should NOT trust ANY company or startup (especially VC funded) with any data you give to them and you should treat all companies with full suspicion.
Security mishaps, leaks, Data misuse and most importantly spying are the reasons why we should not trust any of them.
It shouldn’t end with Facebook, Google or any other surveillance capitalist company or startup. ALL companies spy on you with analytics and tracking agents and it would be naive to think otherwise.
And you certainly should not trust them with your love life!
You shouldn’t trust any commercial organisation regardless of what sector it’s in.
It’s not that “Business” is inherently bad in some way,it’s that corporations are relatively unthinking optimising entities that move towards what’s profitable.
Without legal frameworks to constrain them they’ll run over you or anything else including the environment to maximise shareholder value.
So on the Hacker News front page at this time we have another article titled: "Psychological Characteristics of Romance Scam Victims". Online dating is rife with romance scams, how does facebook plan on protecting it's members from this fraud?
While the advice is valid and agreeable, many people have already used Facebook successfully for dating, based on many of the same parameters FB plans to use. Only difference being the degrees of separation - without FB's dating app, it was likely to be closer in degrees of separation (friend of a friend)
I hit a paywall halfway through unfortunately but I'm guessing I got the gist. A counterpoint (although just playing devils advocate here, I try to give social media sites as little info as possible while still making them useful for my work) is that Facebook knows a lot about many people, likely including those in your network and probably out of any service with the exception of maybe Google, could make an optimal match for you if it wanted to based on personality, interests, etc.
I've always thought it strange how people marry or get into relationships generally with people in their immediate or secondary circle of friends/colleagues/classmates when it seems incredibly unlikely that the best match for you is in that group out of a few billion people in the world. Personally I'd love a tool that found me the optimal match even if they weren't in my circle and I think FB could probably deliver that with their dating app if they wanted to
I think the problem of finding an "optimal" match is much harder than that. Younger people don't know themselves so well, or know what's best for them. Yet they are very flexible and could adapt themselves to lots of very different people if they happened to end up spending a lot of time with them.
If “tech” keeps doing bad things, and it will until legally constrained or it becomes unprofitable, you can expect its misdeeds to be reported. ...because reporting bad behaviour is profitable too.
A dating app by itself clearly isn't bad behaviour but the "hit piece" you mentioned is about not trusting Facebook.
People don't trust Facebook because of the other things they've done very recently.
i.e. the tax avoidance, the shadow profiles of non-users, the marketing of addictive game purchases to children, manipulation of time lines to alter user mood and everything else in a very long list of negatives that's been in the news in the last few years.
Until some length of time has passed between the way Facebook has historically operated and them acting honourably, each new product they build will be seen through the lens of a bad actor expanding its empire.
This is too blatant of a hit piece from NYtimes, low quality and ... wtf is it doing in HN frontpage (top spot, no less)? I would urge people to upvote quality, not their personal outrages.
Repeating "cambridge analytica scandal" will not make it less of a scandal than "obama campaing scandal". And FB already has all the data they need for their dating offering, if anything, they are withholding people from risking exposing these data to other services. What nonsense.
Ah yes, the classic "Facebook already knows everything about you so why not just use them for every facet of your life to prevent other companies from doing what Facebook does with your data" defense.
1- It's an opinion piece. Opinion pieces are never expected to uphold the same levels of journalistic standard as reporting. It's understood to literally just be, one guys opinion. Some are good. Some are bad. Take with a grain of salt, call me in the morning.
2- Explain to me why Facebook deserves to be trusted and this guy is making mountains out of molehills? Do you genuinely believe FB is a misunderstood good actor here, or are you just annoyed about something else? (the NYT, "anti-tech" journalism in general, the rise of anti-corporation sentiments over the last 10 years?)
Certainly, there are big problems with some aspects of tech and they ought to be reported on. But it seems like there's something a bit more going on here than that, given their willingness to publish silly, conceptually thin articles like this. This entire editorial is essentially content free. The only point it makes is to summarize Facebook's shortcomings, which didn't require the launch of a new dating feature to do, if it had something new to say. But it didn't, so it used FB's announcement as a pretext to publish a set of stock criticisms.