By far the best part is they didn't automatically cancel his subscription. What a horrible company, if you've banned my account that's fine but cancel the subscription and refund my money.
If y'all haven't looked at it yet, read up on the FCC's filing against Match. They knowingly prompt up tons of fake profiles, to get you engaged. Horrifically this has lead to romance scams being the number one source of fraud in the US. I had one particularly scary experience and after that I don't use any dating apps.
But it's worked out very well, I did have to move to a new city too, but I've been able to meet so many amazing girls in real life. I'm also in a much better place emotionally, if you're staring at your phone constantly waiting for box to message you, that's not good for your mind. Your mind. It makes everything 10 times of stressful, for fraction of the benefit.
When I actually meet someone, It was always someone who is in their mid-20s to 30s without a job. In real life, everyone I've gone out with has had a decent job, due to another scary experience I don't go out with people who aren't working.
I met my wife when she tapped me on the shoulder in a public place and introduced herself. I just smiled and nodded and ended up with a date - I think I might have gotten my name out at some point -- not sure. She calls me by the correct name now, 20+ years later in any case.
Online dating sites/apps seem like they'd be a nightmare.
> Online dating sites/apps seem like they'd be a nightmare.
So right now it's pretty much considered impolite / not socially acceptable to ask someone out except on dating apps. This is definitely a downside.
But the upside is that a match on a dating app is an explicit acknowledgement of mutual interest, so it's clear that you're meeting up to go on a date and not just hanging out.
Don't worry, not caring about social norms is attractive
Just make a move in real life
The problem with dating app is exactly what you mentioned: if you both know you're there to date or fool around there's no uncertainty, no tension.
You're missing out on the feeling on trying to pickup a beautiful girl and succeeding.
Besides, girls, unlike boys, compete mainly on looks. It's natural dating app will break the balance in favor women, and that's exactly what happens. Men have a tenth of the matches and are selected by women according to beauty standards instead of being evaluated by their behaviour, providing a terrible filter for dating.
If in person you had a chance with some jokes and some confidence, you'll never pass the selection with that nose.
> If you're in your mid-20s in most US metro areas (except in the South, perhaps) - this is what it's like
Says who? Have you stepped out during a weekend in a US metro city? To popular nightspots? No app needed to meet and socialise with attractive people - strangers or an extended social circle. In fact some might even say it is like shooting fish in a barrel
I’m pretty sure software ruins things that should occur naturally or by chance. Allowing people to over analyze anything while making money at the same time, through hope, is an evil business model.
For every happy story used for supporting said model, there are literally billions that did it the old fashioned way.
> By far the best part is they didn't automatically cancel his subscription. What a horrible company, if you've banned my account that's fine but cancel the subscription and refund my money.
Could this have something to do with subscribing through the App Store? Maybe there is something in Apple's ToS, or some limitation in their billing API that prevents them from doing this.
I stopped paying for dating apps as soon as I realized tinder, Bumble, and Match constantly try to "lure" me into paying for subscriptions. It happened many times that I would get notifications about new matches/likes just moments after midnight when my subscription plan ended. I found it statistically unlikely that people only liked my profile right after my plan is finished.
Assuming it's not outright foul play, it's prob more likely that the matching services intentionally boost your profile gets better reach/impressions as that's a +EV play, and reduce your profile reach when you're subscribed long-term.
To carry this thought exercise more, someone structuring this system could also treat hot/responsive/engaged profiles as an asset of retention and intentionally matchmake the results to optimize for a system to be engaged (vs to matchmake two people who find love and unsubscribe after).
Sounds like 'outright foul play' to me. Vs. what, bully for them they saved the genuine matches to the time that was most profitable, my custom most at risk? That's not foul play?
(Maybe I should disclaim I've never used any of this, so my standards are high/low/irrelevant, but ...)
Would love to know where you're meeting all these amazing girls. Online dating absolutely sucks for men with the exception of the ones who look like cover models and are over 6 feet tall. Everyone else might as well go die in a ditch.
It's really pleasant that they use Dark UI patterns to try and make that text as ignorable as possible - fading, making it small, putting it in the margin and putting a hard divider between it and the primary announcement. It's sort of a master class in how to use Dark UI patterns - I'm just disappointed they didn't fade it even more, put an ad between the announcement and the context, include a webmaster@ link somewhere in there and italicize the text. If they did all that it'd look entirely like a TOS disclaimer - but they tried their best at least.
We seriously need better consumer protection against Dark UI tactics.
Match.com, okcupid after match bought it, and tinder are all composed entirely of dark patterns propped up by effectively pimping out women via access (it's men who pay for tinder/match/okc), and then exacerbating the whole dating market. All for a profit.
Last I read tinder is like 70% men, and it turns out women only swipe right on the top 5% most attractive.
Not if they shadow ban you which seems to happen quite often. They'll happily accept your money in this instance - it sounds like in the article above this is what happened.
Hmm, say they did shadow ban him but continued to charge him. Wouldn't they be open to fraud in this case? You could make the case that you paid for services that were not rendered.
I think it'd be reasonable to conclude that services weren't rendered - even if I'm totally certain they've got some BS in their TOS somewhere that specifically called out that it would be within the bounds of the service offering to take your money and give you only the fake experience of being a tinder user.
To be fair, shadow banning has a legit use besides just taking people's money. It prevents genuine malicious actors from simply creating new accounts whenever they get banned. However, it becomes way more ethically complex when the service in question is a paid service.
Shadow banning is a legitimate tool when you assume that it is necessary for you to offer your services with the absolute lowest barrier to entry. There are plenty of other very reasonable approaches to prevent malicious actors from simply creating new accounts - the easiest of these is to attach a modest cost to account creation which is a solution that marketers absolutely loathe band thus has been casually discounted. However, it is an exceptionally good solution.
Do you think twitter would be dealing with 10 million twitter bots if they had a five dollar account creation fee? Do you think smurf accounts for harassment would be nearly as widespread if every ban cost the troll $5 of their real money?
Yup - I'm well aware - and the barrier to entry for HN is pretty much non-existent. Some features are locked behind karma accumulation but most of the moderation is done manually and the community is small(ish) enough and of a professional bent - meaning that a lot of people know who other folks are IRL. Removing the anonymous factor for a large portion of commenters makes them follow the rules a lot better.
There still are lots of issues with smurf accounts though, again, there's a sort of barrier to entry in that extremely new and low karma accounts can get their comments [dead]'d very trivially.
If I set up a bazaar theme park where patrons would have the privilege of haggling over the price of items and paying the price - but never actually receive the item (as per expectations). I would be amazed if such a theme park would be considered a breach of contract.
Tinder could argue that the shadow banned user is still paying to have the "Tinder Experience"... though, again, I think the difficulty would be arguing that this aligned with service expectations from the customer.
Contracts can't be completely one-sided - they must provide some sort of consideration to each party - but they can be extremely one-sided. Often times if your company is changing their vacation policy or other key employment benefit all the employees will receive a one or five dollar bonus - that bonus is because you're signing on to a contract where you're literally just giving up benefits so there's a legal requirement to give you something in exchange.
The app knows whether someone is a subscriber or not. The app should show the appropriate UI for subscribers, with detailed instructions on how to cancel their subscription. Additionally, if they have the user's phone number and/or email (they definitely do), text them and email them the cancellation instructions.
> When I actually meet someone, It was always someone who is in their mid-20s to 30s without a job.
I read this article (a long time ago) about a NYC girl who was saying that investing $30/mo on a Match.com account was the best investment she had made, as it meant she'd get treated to top restaurants, etc. by the guys for free.
I am still waiting for it to dawn on people that unaccountable power corrupts, becomes authoritarian and capricious, regardless whether it's wielded by corporations or governments.
I met my current girlfriend on Match.com(US) in 2019. She was unemployed back then and we lived 2h+ hours apart. First 6 months of the relationship, she was unemployed. We are still together and now she has a job. I don't think unemployment should immediately be a no go for the relationship.
Yeah I had just recently had a contract that ended sooner than expected and was unemployed when I started dating the woman I would later marry. A couple of months after we started dating I had a new job and was making far more than anyone she had ever dated in her past (which was still just a modest salary for this crowd).
I can understand someone being hesitant but it's not always a red flag.
Exceptions to every rule right. The rule still sounds solid to me if you’re trying to optimize the quality of your interactions.
My personal one from my days of being single, no “cat people”. I’m a “dog person”. I like cats but the slight personality difference between me identifying as a dog person and the people I’ve known who identify as a “cat person” is enough that it just sounds like a waste of my time.
To take it a step further, throw your phone away. I've been digital overseer/fear machine free for almost 2 years now, and can definitively say it's the best decision a person can make for their mental well being.
> nd can definitively say it's the best decision a person can make for their mental well being.
No, you can only definitively say it's was the best decision you made for your mental well being. With the plausible suggestion that it might be good for some others, also.
for what it is worth it was great being the last person around without a smart phone. I dont know how old you are but people use to be alone with their own thoughts. Amazing things happen if you ponder situations until satisfied with your own conclusions. the delay made for wonderful long form conversations. exchanging text like we are doing here doesnt build relationships either. if i would die in the next 20 min you wouldnt blink an eye.
Versions of this comment were common when radio first was introduced. And television. Etc. It's fine to feel nostalgia for some aspects of past interaction of course, but a mistake to read too much into it. Generally an area to be aware of recency bias.
I’m afraid that’s just a meme. Each of these have tradeoffs. It’s not nostalgia to want to take the other side. You’ve probably encountered the popular movement to not watch television, and terrestrial radio is in decline. Podcasts are a sort of modern radio equivalent and there is plenty written about the downsides of filling too much time with them. Boredom and idle thought are recognized by physiological and psychological experts to have value.
There is certainly value to resiliency and judiciously making the most advantage of each new trend in communication, however.
While I get your point, I am amused you are worried about "building relationships" with an account named throwaway14356 which kind of implies you are ready/happy to drop this account at any moment. :-)
My view, not every relationship in the world is to be deeply meaningful or productive. I am happy if I get a nice thought or new angle from this blobs-of-text site.
Im not trying to stop the world from spinning. The sterile exchanges have their value.
The thing to reflect on is who you are: You are to some extend the way others see or experience you. The way you carry yourself or present yourself depends a lot on that perception.
You've changed into an entirely different creature communicating like this. We all have! All parts of humanity have changed as a rssult with huge implications.
I suppose I wish I wanted to go back. I'm still trying to figure out where we are and where we are going with this. If I wanted to go back it would mean I had that all figured out.
We get to bring non of our expensive cloths or other status symbols to the conversation, no race, sex, age, violence, leverage or accountability.
The diffence is mind blowing.
The HN kangaroo court is already hilarious but the trial by robots is many times more commical. People now build their lives on platforms that may erase them at any moment for no reason at all.
Is everything I wrote here advertiser friendly or constructive for the HN tech crusade to progress? I've never had such constrains on my personality. A new world where being generous, kind and helpfull simply isnt enough?
I could go on for days but im going to have to attend to the push notifications now. haha
The data is pretty clear that the only time social media is beneficial is if it leads to the formation/maintenance of long term relationships. Without that it's just entertainment, and entertainment that is not "happy" making for most.
Ok. But social media use itself has to be placed in context of the larger attention economy.
For example, is it worse than watching TV/cable/netflix/gaming/multiplayer gaming/crafting hobbies/reading books etc etc?
To answer my own question, I think Social Media is worse than the other options mentioned above and so I have long drifted off FB. And most of my friends on FB are continuing longstanding relationships.
But I don't know the studies on that and I am willing to accept that different people do things differently.
For example, on this site, I like the intelligent responses, thought provoking discussions, sometimes amazing recommendations on any number of topics. But I don't feel I need to be friends with any particular individual to benefit from that nor contribute to it.
The difference between liking/enjoying and gaining benefit I think is crucial here. It's akin to the difference between pleasure and happiness. No doubt the vast majority of people (if not everyone) on social media gains some pleasure from it. But as far as increasing happiness, aiding in quality of life and well-being and similar measures, it - in general - does not move the needle and not infrequently pulls in the opposite direction (in the absence of personal bonds).
The other important difference is between using social media sites as "literature" (i.e. not interacting with it but just consuming its thought-provoking and useful content, as you mention) and as a conversational medium. The former - in the absence of obviously harmful content like people showing off and then comparing oneself to them, or outrage porn, ect - is as far as I'm aware harmless and has a similar profile to reading in general.
But the constant one-off interactions, like this? It hits different. We know that consistent interaction with the same person - even if it is light meaningless interaction - has benefit. One study that comes to mind is of the daily interaction between customer and cashier every morning at the coffee shop. Believe it or not that has a statistically significant (though by no means large) positive effect on a person's mental state. Deep personal one-off conversation in person also have a significant benefit, at least in the short term.
But this - whatever this is - generally doesn't. Of course everyone is different, and obviously not everyone uses it exactly the same way, so there are outliers. But also human beings are talented at lying to themselves about the effects of things on them, often in the direction of exaggerating or inventing a benefit (and also failing at the afore-mentioned differentiation between pleasure and happiness). That's one of the big problems that researchers in outcomes studies on any number of things have to deal with. Objective observer and close other ratings of a person's happiness after say therapy or anti-depressants are often wildly less rosy than the person's self-report. We humans are often not good at being honest with ourselves.
But you are right about the "attention economy" context. We - near worldwide it seems - have little perfected the art of leisure. Our institutions have failed us, and we in turn have created little to take the place of the old ways. Our choices are too often between similarly poor options. That's probably why work and over-work have remained as popular as it has - what lies outside of it is too often stupefying. Which is one reason why I'm here now, talking with you, embracing (or stomaching) this momentary pleasure in what is perhaps a trade-off with a bit of my happiness.
I largely agree with you. You make a compelling case for meaningful interactions over the trite. You make good points as to like vs benefit, the possible detriment of a battery of one-off interactions, the failures of humans to recognise their own state/risk.
I feel we could go listing more things around social media and this post could go on forever. But I won't, because of the below.
Every person is acting in their own perceived self interest. Including me.
So for myself, because of many of the reasons you state, I largely gave up on FB. I think I am better off for it due to more meaningful real world interactions.
But then with a social group in the real world space do I need to continue adding friends all the time via HN? Not really. Cue Seinfeld "I'm sure you're a very nice person you seem to have a lot of potential, but we're just not hiring right now." Maybe I am doing myself a disservice by not "socially climbing" but honestly at some point, I can only do so much. I love the people I do, and I am content with that.
But - like the world in general - HN as a site has some amazing people. And what I glean from this site through "literature like" reading I feel benefits me.
And then, like you, I comment occasionally - in the vein of HN trying to make it a positive contribution - so as to try to return to someone else a similar benefit as I feel I have received. I try not to be trite. I try not to worry as to whether a comment is well received as long as I have tried to make a decent contribution. I don't always succeed of course, and maybe that's where the detriment sets in.
But - despite the evidence that social media is only good for pursuing deeper and more meaningful relationships - I don't feel I need to be a particular friend of yours to try add a thoughtful reply. It doesn't mean I love you any less however. Hell, maybe a meaningful relationship will develop of it's own natural accord as we both live on. But it's not my aim.
Have a great day, whether you celebrate Xmas or not.
Google scholar is the easiest source, but I can help by sharing a few (there is no single paper I know of that sums everything up). It's a difficult topic because so few solid studies have been done - but everything we know suggests that its effects are - on average - weak. In other words, online time appears to neither add to nor detract from the lives of most people (at least directly). It's just time filled up with vanilla.
But there are a minority of folks on either end of the spectrum. On the negative side, specific types of personalities, attachment styles, and so on can suffer significantly on the internet and especially on social media. The media loves these studies, there’s a ton and they are easily found so I’ll just refer you to scholar.
Then there are groups of people that gain from the internet. The few studies that have bothered to investigate how people use their time online and in social media in detail have found that talking to internet randos in one-off fashion does not help, but that - and I’ll quote here:
“When people use social media in a truly social manner (i.e., actively interacting with meaningful social relations in a way akin to in-person social interactions) it was positively associated with psychological well-being. We propose this is because truly social usage promotes meaningful social relations, which result in positive psychological consequences such as reinforcing one’s identity, feeling valued, and mitigating stressful situations. Yet, when people use social media in other ways (e.g., passively engaging with weakly connected others, celebrities, brands, companies, or strangers typically for entertainment purposes) it does not influence psychological well-being. Therefore, how and how much people use social media has implications for their psychological health.” (in https://www.msi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MSI_Report_21...)
Another recent study - this time on the 60+ crowd - found “answering questions online were positively related to depressive symptoms” and looking at photos of non-family members on social media was associated with anxiety (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/146144482110543...)
Then there’s the work of Alexander J. A. M. van Deursen, in which he focuses on who exactly gains from their time on the internet and how - and how this in turn perpetuates inequality. You can find his work here: https://research.utwente.nl/en/persons/alexander-jam-van-deu...
But the foundation of the argument for me lies more in the research on what contributes to happiness and well-being, and which of those variables can be realistically gained from time on the internet and social media. What in the long term will make a difference in a person’s life? And invariably the most impactful outcome is the formation of an offline friendships and so-called "social capital". Which appears to generally be a rare thing - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118080263543... - though it does happen, and it seems self-disclosure is a key to that (among other things) - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/146144481985874....
There’s more research that can be brought to bear on this, but that at least may provide a start for your own inquiry.
Thank you for taking the time to collect and post these, that is indeed an interesting starting point to dig deeper.
From what I gathered from glancing over a few of the links given, my own takeaway right now is “it’s complicated” since the effects on an individual seem to be mostly determined by the type of interaction as well as who you’re interacting with.
This seems like a kind of overfitting. The phone itself isn't a problem, at least as concerns the fear machine. On the other hand, staying linked to Facebook is a problem. I make regular daily use of my phone, but the use is limited to:
* Email
* Select communication channels (Slack/Signal/etc)
* Reading books offline (I download them in advance)
* Bus pass
* Flashcards
* A couple of offline ad-free games
I deny push notifications on all apps without exception. If someone needs to get hold of me, they have my number.
With this approach, I feel like my phone is a value-adding tool rather than feeling like it's tethering me to anything I don't want to be part of.
Flash cards, in the sense of-- things that show you questions you're trying to memorize/learn the answers to. Not like, cards with flash memory on them.
The person uses their phone for contained things that are not likely to cause a faux-social-reward-cycle.
Thank you for the tip, even watching this thread. I'm tempted to argue with people. But I'm not, I left my phone at home and went for a walk. It's very peaceful to not have to argue with the entire world every single second of your existence.
I'm hoping going forward to have phone free weekends where I just shut the thing off and listen to a simple FM radio on my walks.
It's a hard thing to do but it is possible to view the box strictly as a consumption device and refuse to publish content (outside of whatever might be a necessary communication for you phone/text/email/etc...). You have no obligation to engage with and correct the world, you can just do you and you'll probably be happier for it.
I meet in person people I care about, and talk to them. We exchange our recent life experiences, or not, depending on context. I don't care what people I don't care about do.
For documenting my experiences, I have photo album on my phone. Can show it to someone physically, or send pictures on Whatsapp for example.
I don't think this is practical. Say you need to get home at night. Without a phone, you can't call an Uber, you can't see if there's public transit still running (schedules have changed a lot over the past 1-2 years), you can't take pictures or videos of anything you witness, etc.
In theory with a basic phone you have some inferior options (like calling a cab company and praying until the cab arrives), but in practice the world has moved on.
You're right about the world moving on. It's not practical for most people. I'm 51 and don't use it for much except texting and the hotspot, but I still take it with me if I'm expecting a call while I'm outside the house.
When you grow up without a phone, you prepare more than you have to now. You just learn the streets so you don't need a map app. Bring a jacket in case you break down and have to walk. Carry a can of 'fix-a-flat' in the car or a plug kit to take care of flat tires.
There is a difference, between going online conscious, when you turn on the computer - or a stressful always being half online with the phone in hand or pocket.
I have a smartphone, but I regulary have it off for longer periods. That helps.
I feel like I achieved this by using a degoogled Android OS + never listening to news. My life is certainly a lot more pleasant being more or less entirely detached from mainstream social media and media in general.
> When I actually meet someone, It was always someone who is in their mid-20s to 30s without a job. In real life, everyone I've gone out with has had a decent job, due to another scary experience I don't go out with people who aren't working.
Overfitting is a modeling error in statistics that occurs when a function is too closely aligned to a limited set of data points. ... Thus, attempting to make the model conform too closely to slightly inaccurate data can infect the model with substantial errors and reduce its predictive power.
And yet forming priors based on experience gained in a classic multi arm bandit thompson sampling approach with appropriate exploitation exploration tradeoff is generally the dominant strategy in any static unfamiliar space.
Alternatively, contextualizing things into niche stats frameworks doesn't make you correct, or sound intelligent.
The point was to say it without saying it, to provoke introspection in their arbitrary associations.
The "it" being that the issue wasn't that they - and the future potential partners - didn't have a day job. And yet, this person chose that specific aspect of the relationship and elevated that to relevance for other relationships. Even further, they are applying this to people in other cities and geographies, amplifying the absurdity.
> The "it" being that the issue wasn't that they - and the future potential partners - didn't have a day job.
Maybe not. However,
- If they haven't been able to identify what the real issue _is_, AND
- Avoiding dating people that don't have a day job limits (or completely prevents) dating people that do have the real issue, AND
- Avoiding said people doesn't limit the number of available people to date below a reasonable threshold, THEN
- Using "doesn't have a day job" as a filter seems to be a reasonable compromise for them.
Sure, it may prevent them from finding the "best" match, since there could be a person without a job that doesn't exhibit the real problem. But it's possible that removing that filter would cause so much wasted time (on dates with bad matches) that the odds of meeting a good match, nonetheless the best match, as significantly diminished (as is QoL).
There are a few excellent reasons to never get involved with someone who doesn't have a job.
The first one is the vast majority of divorces are due to financial issues, my last partner left both of her husbands because they weren't making enough money. Her first husband didn't really want to work and they ended up moving in with her parents. A close family member had to break up with her husband since he wasn't working and kept overdrafting the joint account
The second reason, is this person who doesn't work is probably being supported by someone else.
Their sugar daddy's going to want to hurt you. I made the mistake once when I was younger of going out with a girl who didn't have a job, and this is basically what happened.
Finally, people with jobs tend to be much more straightforward.
You have a right to whatever dating criteria you choose. Some people won't date someone whose below a certain height. It's easier to fill out a job application than to become taller.
Says the person vilifying someone for stating their requirement for romantic consideration is that the other person has the basic requisite for a stable lifestyle.
*No I don't want to hear edge cases about what constitutes a job; the context here was clear enough.
I think they didn't say unemployed for a reason, which is why I didn't say unemployed for a reason. Not having a job is different than needing a job for food and shelter and any flexibility, the former is "not having a job" the latter is "unemployed". I don’t consider that an edge case.
What I got out of it is that they had a bad experience with someone not occupying their time with something.
I "vilify", or more-so call out, their overfitting. You’re assuming they didnt have a basic stable lifestyle AND that they became a burden to OP. I’m assuming they could have had any level of stability and became a burden to OP for any reason, that at least removes the predictive capability for determining if the other potential partners would become a burden to OP.
They didn't "overfit" though. They shared their experience - they didn't say that their experience is normative (although I expect it is). People are allowed to share anecdotes.
I don't know what happened in this situation, but generally refunding money for TOS violations is a bad idea. Let me explain why.
Imagine that Alice runs a service where you can send people greeting cards.
Bob decides he's going to use this service to cause trouble and instead of normal greeting cards, he sends people messages with hate speech, such as their race, their religion, says he hoped they get cancer, and so on.
Alice sees Bob is doing this and it violates her TOS on the service, so she cancels his account.
Should Bob get a refund?
If he does, then Bob will have used Alice's system to do bad things in a way that actually costs him nothing. He's costing Alice administrative fees and regular costs.
That's why ToS violations should generally not trigger a refund.
Yes - Bob should be returned a pro-rated amount based on the amount time he originally paid to use the service for and the day his account was terminated.
EX: If Bob paid for a month, and Alice cancels him on day 5, Bob should be refunded approx: (30 - 5)/30 * (Cost of subscription).
You do not get to charge people for a service you are no longer providing them.
You're NOT refunding him, you're terminating the contract that allowed you to charge him in the first place. So you bill for time used and return the rest.
Generally refunding money for TOS violations should be mandatory, and failing to do so should have a default assumption of fraud on the part of the provider. Let me explain why.
Imagine that Alice purports to run a service where you can send people greeting cards. Bob decides that he's going to use this service to send greeting cards. Alice takes Bob's money, and never sends any greeting cards. When Bob asks why the greeting cards weren't sent, Alice claims a TOS violation and cancels Bob's account. In some cases, Alice may not even provide sufficient information to dispute a claim, such as when Alice's own proprietary anti-fraud or anti-cheat algorithms have a false positive.
Should Bob get a refund? If he doesn't, Alice has no incentive to provide the actual service or to avoid false-positives. She's costing Bob the subscription fees, but can unilaterally decide whether or not to provide the agreed-upon service.
That's why TOS violations should always trigger a refund.
That's not how cancellations for subscriptions or refunds for services work though. If Bob has paid Alice to send cards, and she has sent them, then obviously no refund is necessary. Alice just needs to ban Bob from using the service again.
In the case of Tinder banning someone, they should automatically cancel the subscription because the customer no longer have access to what they're paying for, and if there's a part of a month left they should refund the value of that. Companies should not be allowed to issue 'punishment' to customers. That's what the criminal justice system is for.
This is not a hard problem. Companies should only charge for the service they provide, and if they choose to withdraw that service they shouldn't take any money for what the user can't use.
> Companies should not be allowed to issue 'punishment' to customers.
Why not? Contracts with penalties are very common.
Subscriptions should be cancelled when an account is banned but it's not obvious to me why there should be a refund. Subscription services usually don't allow for partial refunds when you cancel. If you force companies to refund in case of a ban, you need to force them to allow cancellation at any time with the same refund.
It goes both ways-- do we think a contract with a fixed guaranteed term can be canceled with refund simply because the consumer decided to violate the terms of service?
This is what courts are for, and the fact they aren't involved here is the basic problem.
There is a chance that Bob might be on the hook for hate crimes or harassment - but that isn't Alice's call. Alice should prorate the cost of service usage to the terms of use[1]. If Alice believes Bob might have violated a law during his usage of her service she is absolutely free to report that violation to relevant authorities. Alice has the right to refuse service to Bob for a wide variety of reasons - but it isn't Alice's place to serve punishment to Bob based on a moral judgement of his usage once he ceases to be a client.
1. If Alice expected users to send 2 cards a day and charges a per day rate appropriate to that usage and Bob floods her with 1000 requests a day for a week then that mistake is wholly on her. If you have a per use cost and you charge per day you need to add some kind of rate limiting.
> I don't know what happened in this situation, but generally refunding money for TOS violations is a bad idea.
You can learn the article and learn what happened. We are not talking about things in general, but about this particular situation. Basically, it's pure theft. But since the amount is so low, nobody will sue them. In this way they can scam thousands of people and go unpunished.
There's nothing in the article indicating why he was banned. They say he violated the ToS. He says he didn't. Maybe it was a false positive, but we don't have enough information to know what happened.
The right to remain silent is a vital right in criminal court cases, but certainly doesn't apply to our own conclusions. Consider that only Tinder has records indicating whether there was a ToS violation, and what that violation was. Tinder is not releasing those records. Tinder has a financial incentive to claim that there is a ToS violation. Putting those three items together isn't proof that Tinder is lying, but is evidence in that direction.
How do you know the blog author doesn't have evidence of a ToS violation (that they're not sharing)? Similar incentives to shade the story exist on both sides, I think.
The blog author isn't the one who stated a tos occured. The company would need to provide proof. The author could refute that with their own data afterwards.
If someone says you stole something should we ask you for proof that you did and if you fail to provide proof should we say you are being shady by not answering?
I can imagine a scenario where you need to login to cancel your subscription, but can't login because your banned. A while back Tinder was trying to bypass the Google Play subscription system so this is very possible.
And file a chargeback request with the credit card company - service paid for but not received. The "customer is always right" in this scenario (speaking as someone who has an Internet based business that accepts credit card payments). As long as you don't make a habit of doing it, you'll get your money back.
They did if he signed up from Tinder.com. Not cancelling is if he subscribed via Play/App Store which presumably they have no control of on their side?
You're not wrong, but you'd better not have false positives.
In particular, it seems likely the author in this case got caught by an algorithmic badness detector or may have violated the TOS in some minor technical way rather than being abusive. I'm counting the latter as a false positive in this case; that's no way to treat a paying customer. People who know what they did don't usually blog about getting banned and post it to HN.
Chargebacks are an effective way to punish companies for this behavior.
Bob should certainly get a refund, prorated with reasonable costs for the actual services. In case service costs are spread over time and many users (i.e. you sell subscriptions to a service that costs $TONS_OF_MONEY to set up but almost nothing to maintain) some reasonable part can be charged - e.g. a monthly subscription cost - but charging beyond that, or maintaining subscription indefinitely, certainly would not be reasonable. Bob being an asshole and doing bad things is not relevant here - you can't legally rob assholes. You can refuse to do business with them, but that's it, otherwise the assholes have the same rights as everybody else.
> Tinder may terminate your account at any time without notice if it believes that you have violated this Agreement. Upon such termination, you will not be entitled to any refund for purchases.
> For residents of the Republic of Korea, except in the case [...], we will without delay notify you of the reason for taking the relevant step.
They openly say in advance that they'll ban users who they think violated their terms, regardless of whether they actually did, keep their money, and never tell them why, except in South Korea where they already know that crap doesn't fly. It's only a matter of time till that gets thrown out by more courts in more countries. Until then, it seems foolish to give them any money.
I'm not single and haven't been fora long time, but my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps, practically speaking. Even the norms around dating, picking people up in bars, etc. are changing because of these apps, so it's harder to find people in the real world. Not impossible, obviously, but getting banned from Tinder is kind of a big deal. (Also all these apps are owned by the same company, I think it's the Match Group.)
No offense, but bullshit. I've personally never once in my life used a single dating app and have met plenty of dates and love interests the old fashioned way, by interacting with them in the real world after random encounters (bars, events etc) or through circles of friends. Most of the people I know met their own love interests in the same way. I don't live in some backward country with little app use either. What a sad existence it would be to have something as fundamental as one's romantic life depend on a shitty, arbitrary and parasitic data collecting app that feels it has the right to treat its users like cash cattle with no recourse for any unfair ToS decision it makes. Grotesque.
If over 50% of people (and growing) say their relationship started on OLD [...]
I just skimmed the article, but it seems to say that even among the youngest age group only 48% have used dating apps and only 17% were in resulting relationship.
> If over 50% of people (and growing) say their relationship started on OLD, it's easy to say you're limiting your options by not participating
A does not in any way imply B. I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
> I strongly doubt that a non-negligible number of OLD users restrict themselves to using only OLD and automatically reject in-person advances. OP's "options" are still the same as before: all the singles in his physical meatspace.
You're assuming that a non-trivial number of people who use OLD aren't exclusive to OLD. Who's taking issue with that?
OTOH, saying that one's set of available dates is unchanged by foregoing OLD is deeply flawed. You even mention "physical meatspace" which OLD directly overcomes.
While I'm not a big fan of Tinder, monetizing romantic/sexual interest is nothing new. In fact, it's historically been the norm rather than the exception. The "Monetization & Defenestration" approach may not have been done through a shitty app, but a shitty date can you get kicked out of a bar, a concert, a restaurant, a nightclub, etc. for no reason and with no recourse for your money back even if you've done nothing wrong. I don't say this to justify these acts, but to acknowledge that they exist. While I hope OP fights the charges, $20 is a small sum to lose in comparison to a $200 concert ticket.
You'd be surprised with what's perceived as unaffordable for many "poor" college students and early-career professionals, many of whom are helped by student loan money and the Bank of Mom & Dad. In my experience, bad financial decisions in the pursuit of lust isn't one of them.
> my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps, practically speaking.
This is definitely not true.
> Even the norms around dating, picking people up in bars, etc. are changing because of these apps
This is true.
> so it's harder to find people in the real world.
This is sort of true.
By not using a dating app, a single person is relegating themselves to how things were pre-app. Some of those pre-app options are less common now, other new ways are more common.
The apps widened the dating door for certain people, specifically for people who are not particularly keen on getting out and meeting people (probably quite a few folks like that on HN) as well as people who are looking to get married asap[1]. That said, for people who get out and do things, meeting people to date is not difficult at all. Getting banned from Tinder for those folks is, at worst, a loss of a time filler activity (swiping).
I will also add that, of the apps, tinder might be one of the worst in terms of quality match ups.
[1] Apps are also good for highly desirable dates since their pool goes from big to biggest, but those folks aren’t really the topic here since they aren’t short on access to dates with or without an app.
Dating exclusively by apps might be reality for the younger US populations.
There was a thread on Reddit a few months ago where people were asking bad places for men to approach women. It was basically
Work
School
Gym
Church
Any place you go for hobby
Public transport
Shops
Bars
Anywhere outside at night
Parks
The consensus was basically the women on this Reddit thread don't want men approaching them in any way whatsoever that isnt a dating app. All alternative s were creepy. Now Reddit is mostly young and American, so who knows.
Sure. It widened the options for most people. Excellent!
That said, as the post I originally responded to suggested, I don’t think that getting banned from Tinder or any dating app in particular is a “big deal”. Maybe a minor inconvenience for most people, but it’s not like someone who gets banned from Tinder is doomed to a life without dates.
To save someone a click, so there is a study indicating 40% of couples “met online” (so via Twitter, IG, HN, Reddit, gaming, WhatsApp groups, etc., not necessarily dating apps); and then a study specifically about online dating apps where most participants were recruited online (in addition to the usual selection bias) so I didn’t bother checking results. Both are US-centric.
To reiterate, the first paper does not specifically pertain to dating apps, and the methodology of the second article is flawed (you want to know whether people meet online, so you ask people of whom >50% you found online, great technique)—so it might save someone who cares about that kind of stuff a click (a few clicks actually, since the methodology is buried in a separate article). If you don’t fall into that category, feel free to move along.
And I don’t know the author of the second article personally, but if I did of course I would point out an issue with their data.
It's an EXPLICIT footnote! See "Note; Here [is the report's] metholodgy."
> Methodology of the second article is flawed (you want to know whether people meet online, so you ask people online, great technique)
The methodology goes into statistical techniques to control for biases (e.g. language, gender identity, sampling method, etc.) See Methodology > Weighting about what they did with their ~5k responses.
1st click to go to the article, ctrl+f to find methodology, 2nd click to go to methodology. See 6000+ people recruited via web. The rest seem to amount to fewer than that. Am I the one being difficult?
if you're in north America, take heart that its not your fault! The American dating market is absolute garbage.
I've been traveling around the world the last few years and have had no problems finding casual hookups and longer term relationships. I'm currently dating a beautiful Colombiana. I would have thought she was out of my league if I was still living in the US.
People can't handle truth and I'd rather not be downvoted to oblivion.
Suffice to say, the american dating market is heavily geared towards attractive white men over 6 ft tall. They better also be a millionaire if you're in the bay area.
I'd suggest traveling like I have to southeast Asia, Europe and latin America for extended periods of time and see for yourself.
> Suffice to say, the american dating market is heavily geared towards attractive white men over 6 ft tall. They better also be a millionaire if you're in the bay area.
haha thats probably very true. I'd say don't give up!. travel as well, it'll enrich your life and make your more interesting to that special someone when you finally meet her. I wouldn't be surprised if you meet her in your travels.
What you're actually saying is that you are unable to compete in the American dating market, and so you're moving to other less competitive dating markets where you might be more highly valued. Obviously since this is HN we can't consider the female perspective, but if we consider the female perspective, the American dating market is probably pretty good because it offers a great number of attractive white men over 6 ft tall.
It's not specific to the USA, in France the situation is the same, most of the young women want the 'alpha male' so if you're not one, you have to wait until you're older..
It made being young much less pleasant than it ought to be, plus it means that we were a bit old when we had children..
That’s interesting. I wonder how much that applies to South Asians though. I think most of the dating advice in these threads is tailored towards white people who have different experiences from other POC.
I am south asian (srilankan american) so my advice is comming from the perspective of a person of color.
The best places for dating for a south asian male would be southeast asia, turkey and latin america. White guys definitely have an advantage when going after women that specifically want a foreigner. We're able to get the ones that would otherwise prefer to date within their own country.
I had some success in europe but it was hit or miss. I'd say it was a pretty neutral experience, I felt like the deck wasn't stacked for or against me on average. latin america on the other hand was where I had my best prospects.
In my experience, latinas in colombia love the way we look. If I asked 10 women on a date, I'd easily get at least 8 to say yes and show up while white foreigners I met in medellin would frequently complain that colombians were flakey and prone to cancel at the last minuite. The exact kind of behavior I'd get from white women in america. These days I have one that I absolutely adore so I'm off the dating market but every day I'm shocked that I have her because living in america drove into my head that someone as smart and beautiful as her was completely out of my league..
From my experience (being a lesbian myself), I found my fiancé on a discord server, and most of our friends also found their partners either through LGBT bars, LGBT online communities, or through art communities, tumblr, deviantart, etc ^^
Yeah, there are some unique wrinkles for me. I do like Discord a lot, actually. (I used to spend a lot of time on IRC so...) Most of the things I like, the Discords tend to skew pretty young for my dating comfort, since one issue I have is women who want therapists/mothers instead of a partner.
The other is that I work in politics plus have a politically-diverse family and so I would need a partner who is comfortable being around and loving people who disagree with them politically. Many LGBT people in queer nerd spaces like Tumblr, fandom spaces, art spaces, etc. prefer to live in a political filter bubble (I'm not judging if it's for mental health reasons; I think people have the right to associate with whomever they want), and that's not compatible with my life direction or values.
Being a statistical minority within a statistical minority is exhausting sometimes. I'm super happy you and your fiancee found each other, though! I hope you have a wonderful wedding and many happy years together.
And no LGBT bars in my area. I am NOT a big city person. I gave it the good old college try. I tried multiple countries and coasts, even, but nope. I'm a small city person. I like my hometown. It's dope and the cost of living is low.
> my understanding is that if you're single you can't really opt out of these apps
I understand why so many people believe this. But pro tip: if you want to opt out of dating apps, the key is to learn the skill of asking for what you want.
Ask the cute person at the coffee shop if you can have their number. Ask the person who's number you got out for a date. Ask the person you're on a date with if they want to kiss, etc. There is an art to successfully asking for things, and you have to get comfortable with people sometimes saying no, but the key really is that simple: just ask!
It's actually easier in real life to get a date with someone you find interesting, because you're not limited by who the algorithm decides to show your profile to, you're only limited by your willingness to ask.
Yeah. I'm off the "market" for 15+ years, but I really worry when I read about normal-seeming 20 year olds (or even younger) who met their partners on Tinder. It's something that's going to affect young people whether they take part in it themselves or not. Ruthless markets in relationships probably aren't going to make them happy.
I don’t think that is correct. I’m in London and have an American girlfriend. We met and got together the good old fashioned way. Getting pissed at a pub together.
Picking up dates in real life is not only still completely doable, but probably easier these days due to the sheer lack of competition from men who just have no idea how to do it.
My thoughts exactly. It’s like some of these people have never gone out on weekends or even had a chat with a woman randomly at the gym, supermarket, at cafe, out for a walk. What’s the problem? Just say hi and be normal. If she doesn’t seem interested, smile and move on!
if [Tinder] *believes* that you have violated this Agreement
Belief and 'thinking' are funny things. They imply human judgement was involved in the process. Instead what most people seem to be complaining about are the egregious use of heuristics to do large scale account maintenance without retaining staff (humans) to make judgements on the particulars of each case.
Until AIs win person-hood, there is no 'thinking' involved in this process. But I wonder if there is any case history on challenging the terminology used to describe these situations.
I feel that these systems should be using something more akin to applitools, which flags discrepancies between real and expected, and then a human rejects or accepts the report on a line item basis. You can still screw up and click yes when you meant no, but at least you have a chance at getting a human involved before doing anything dire.
I would definitely try to file a charge back with my bank, they sometimes exercise their own discretion on egregious cases like this and might be worth a shot.
In this case it's probably billed through the relevant app store, so you'd be starting a fight with either Google or Apple there, which could end up going even more badly than the interaction with Tinder did.
With Paypal and Herz it was quite easy for me: i filed a request, Herz didn't answer, I elevated to paypal to make the decision, Herz didn't care to answer and I got back my money. I guess it's the dame for Tinder, they don't care enough to manually review the chargebacks.
Contacting Apple would likely lead to a refund. No need to go to the trouble of doing a chargeback. This is one of the reasons developers don't like Apple's IAP policies: developers have no control over whether Apple decides to give a refund (or not).
"Take their money and run" is one of those standard operating practices in big tech that I think obviously needs legislation to curb. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere; whether its movies on iTunes, books on Kindle, or costumes in Fortnite. If you break their ToS, they're allowed to cancel your account, without recourse, and take away all the content you purchased. Its especially egregious in gaming, where a false accusation of cheating can cause your account to disappear; and because there's a "guilty until proven guilty" stigma against cheating, by-and-large gaming company support teams will not help. They'll auto-ban accounts, hardware signatures, even IP addresses.
Content providers should have the right to cease service to customers who don't abide by their terms. I don't feel that's unreasonable. But, consumers need recourse for the monetary investment. I'd strongly support a law worded something like: Digital service providers who sell transactional content & goods must either (1) offer the goods in an exportable, unencumbered, similarly accessible & functional format, or (2) at the time of service-provider initiated account termination, for any reason, reimburse the user for the full cost of goods purchased.
Many companies would argue: "we don't have the money anymore, we had to pay rights holders." I'd respond, that sounds like a You problem, and maybe you should consider clause (1). "The rights holders won't go for it"; again, that's a You problem. Work it out, or lose money; that's what consumer protection laws are for. They're not to protect your revenue streams.
Some gaming companies would be especially hurt by this, because of the prevalence of blank-check anticheat enforcement and their general inability to meet clause (1) due to the latest Fortnite cosmetic not really being "equally functional" outside the context of Fortnite. Well, I'd first respond: Your reliance on unjust business operating practices is a You problem. But more critically: maybe this will be the kick in the butt these companies need to invest more heavily into more accurate & functional anti-cheat, better customer support, and even new innovative revenue models. I've long felt that gaming has underutilized subscription services, and preyed too heavily on "free to play, pay $100 for the cool stuff later". Battle passes are kind of like a subscription service, and if the terms & expectations of the purchase are rephrased to be more service-like, rather than transactional-like, its reasonable to me that those should escape the law.
The best argument against a law like this is: consumers can, of course, break a company's terms at any time they wish. Most choose not to. But if they wanted to, the purchases with a content provider become something like a bank account, which they can utilize as they wish for as long as they wish, then get a full refund. Response: First, I think this should drive companies to clause (1). There's an out; you just need to work with the rights holders and accept that piracy will happen whether or not you try to control it. Second, again I think it comes back to mixing metaphors; Fortnite sells Goods, but they're only functional within the context of the Fortnite Service. Maybe they should sell the Service, and include the Goods. Third, this is a gap that insurance feels well-suited to help cover. Fourth, I think this would drive more companies to better KYC, so if anyone pulls this, at least they can only pull it once. That's not a bad thing.
The point should be to align what customers expect with what providers sell. If Netflix cancels your account, it sucks; but you don't feel slighted. It was a service; you understood that if you stopped paying, the service goes away. In comparison, the goods Apple sells (Apps, Movies, Books, etc) feel a lot more like going to the DVD isle in Best Buy; and its not ok that companies are allowed to slight customers like they do.
What you don't seem to realize here is that various app stores, etc almost never sell you any content. They sell you a temporary revokable right to access content. It's like a movie theater ticket, with an added bonus of ushers being paranoid assholes that could kick you out any moment without a reason. You don't own the movie, you can just watch it, if you're lucky. If you think that service isn't worth the price - tell them that, loudly, and use other options. But as long as millions of people are ok with it, they're not going to change - they have no reason to. If people treat temporary right to peek at the goods as goods being sold to them - why not enjoy it?
Really? When I buy a steam game, the big green button says “purchase”, not “receive a temporarily revocable right to access”.
It’s the digital age. My digital items are my possessions. This dichotomy in your head between the “real” and the “digital” doesn’t exist for the younger generation. There are few alternatives to these large tech companies. As I’ve gotten older I’ve wisened up and I buy DRM-free digital goods where possible (because of people who think like you, that big corporations need to be protected from the little people and not the other way around)… but before I got wise, I built up quite a large steam, Apple Books, and Kindle library (all of which call what we are doing “purchasing”… heads they win tails we lose).
The big green button lies. They are trying to bend the language to mean things that it legally doesn't mean. Just as they call unauthorized distribution of content "piracy" or "theft" (it's neither), they call a temporary revokable permission to access their content "purchase". And if you click that button, you agree with it knowingly. When it bites you in the nether regions, they'll remind you that was exactly what you paid the money for. Nobody forced you to pay money for that, you did it voluntarily. You are the one that gave them all the money to build this system.
I understand that you may value digital goods. I have some I value too. You just need to understand that just as with physical goods, even more with digital ones - if you don't control it, you haven't bought it. If somebody could just come and take your car, any time for any reason, you haven't bought a car. If somebody can just come and take your game anytime for any reason - you haven't bought a game. You bought a ticket to play it, maybe, but that's wholly other business.
I understand this well enough to at least keep offline backups of my paid content libraries (because I’m older and can afford the expense). Yeah, because of DRM it may be troublesome to access the content if my account was banned… but it gives me more ground to stand on (with our current unjust laws, both in court and in the court of public opinion) if I only claim that the content I already downloaded should still be accessible.
Your car analogy is interesting… If your car was paid off but got repossessed later because you said something nasty about the dealership on a forum, that would be a gross miscarriage of justice, even if they buried a clause deep in their sale terms granting themselves such an unconscionable right.
"It’s the digital age. My digital items are my possessions. This dichotomy in your head between the “real” and the “digital” doesn’t exist for the younger generation."
That's a weird way to put it. It may not exist "for" someone, but as you seem to acknowledge, it exists "for" numerous corporations and legal systems which even those someones are subject to. I thought this was the primary purpose of NFTs. An NFT physically cannot be revoked without the permission (coerced or otherwise) of the holder, or a fundamental problem in encryption.
And just so other people don't get confused by this pretty misleading hyperbole:
" The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services. "
No judge is going to weigh what the "buy" button omits over what the EULA actually states. If anyone has an example of a digital content service with an EULA that DOESN'T contain this kind of verbiage I would be fascinated to see it.
> No judge is going to weigh what the "buy" button omits over what the EULA actually states.
Right, but that's my point (as the original poster). 100%, a judge should say "terms are terms, company is in the right"; we need new laws to protect consumers. By and large, consumers don't understand how digital is different; that it isn't ownership (in fact, arguably, consumers don't even understand that when they buy a bluray, that also isn't ownership in a legal sense; but it is ownership in common parlance). Whether these service providers would still see such success, if they did, is an unknown quantity; they probably would, but it can't be known. What is known is that consumers are (rarely) being shafted, with no recourse, because they agreed to something they didn't understand; it doesn't occur to most people that Apple even has the power to ban accounts, and take all their content with it.
Counter-argument: "Well, people should read the EULAs and understand it". Oof. First: the EULA may say "we have the right to revoke access" but that means nothing without the context of how, why, and how often it happens. These companies have not demonstrated even the BASIC DECENCY to EXPLAIN THEMSELVES when they ban users, let alone publish reasonable information about how often it happens. The statements in the EULA are useless without this context, because it enables savvy consumers to compare their statements with their own risk profile to make informed decisions. But, second: arguing this point is basically saying "dumb people deserve to be preyed on by international gigacorporations". Most people don't understand what this language means; in many cases, it seems to be written specifically so it can't be understood without a law degree.
Counter-argument: "Account termination & content revocation is rare, so whatever." Well, this point defeats itself, but think about it this way: If its so rare, then why not protect consumers? Companies will oppose it, of course, but they're arguing from the ground that its so rare that enforcement of this law wouldn't hurt them. If they hurt consumers, it'll hurt them. If they don't, it won't.
The narrative is getting twisted here; its not that consumers should have "irrevocable ownership" over a digital good you buy on, for example, Steam. Well, the NFT crowd would say you should, but let's ignore them. The assertion is: there should be fair and equitable recourse for when a service provider decides to revoke your access to the service which distributes the content you purchased. That recourse would ideally be met by simply unshackling the content from the service provider; the ability to play Steam games without being connected to Steam, for example. However, short of that, reimbursement is fair. It would absolutely hurt companies in this day and age of "terminate accounts for any reason, sometimes no reason, whatever the system decides" but THAT'S THE POINT. Companies only speak money. The point is to make termination hurt them, so they're forced to think more critically about how & why they terminate.
It doesn't matter if you receive a license and not ownership of a physical good or copyright, it still comes down to contract law. If the company you are buying the license from revokes it, and doesn't uphold their side of the contract you can sue them for breach of contract. A contract term that says they can revoke the license at any time for no reason, without refund is unconscionable and unenforceable. Basically they need to show a judge that you acted maliciously or otherwise violated the contract, or they need to provide a refund.
Contract law allows very wide variety of contracts, and Apple/Google/whatevs have enough expensive lawyers to write the contract that means "you have rights to whatever we allow you and we can revoke it any time we want without any recourse to you". As for the judge - the economics of going to the judge - which would cost you four figures just to start, five to six if you want any real results - is not exactly in your favor. They have lawyers on retainer, you have a day job which pays way less than any single one of those lawyers costs.
Just because they are a big company doesn't mean everything they do is legal. The legal system exists exactly to stop this kind of behavior. You can go to small claims for under $100 out of pocket, and you generally get these fees reimbursed if you win. In many cases just filing a lawsuit is enough to get them to settle and provide a refund, because they would spend more money sending someone to court(and probably lose anyways).
What part do you see as bullshit? Theater tickets and premium video channels like HBO are long-standing examples of the model. There are some services that act more like purchases, with Amazon video being a big example. But it seems to me that the vast majority of video and music content today is being sold on the access model, not the purchase model.
As someone with an enormous personal paid content library, I absolutely agree legislation is needed here.
Also randomized lootboxes should be subject to gambling laws, or at least regulated such that you can’t get duplicates or something reasonable like that.
On further thought, banning duplicates is just begging for trouble. It's a loophole you can drive a truck through. Just append a random throwaway property to every item and bam, "unique".
So yeah, regulate it as gambling. Don't let them advertise to minors. Don't allow them to knowingly let minors participate.
Considering Tinder rather explicitly checks your location to find people around you? I'd assume it wouldn't work, and might even lead to getting banned faster.
IMO, if your market share is bigger than ${some number}, you shouldn't be able to deny service without a documented reason, it should have some sort of time-to-live (i.e 1 year), and there should be an appeals process. In a functioning marketplace, companies would be naturally incentivized to care about customers but that stops working in uncompetitive industries (which currently describes most of the economy).
Unfortunately there are scenarios where providing a documented reason or appeal is a vulnerability, illegal or both.
A too-clear disclosure gives bad actors information on how to circumvent controls around safety, abuse, and fraud.
If the reason an account is deleted includes some sort of KYC/Money Laundering issue, OFAC style sanction or child porn, then there can be legal obligation, with severe penalty, to both report and not tip off the user.
Any and all of these possibilities (vulnerability, illegal, or both) must be legalized or otherwise reframed as a cost of doing business. Every human deserves to be informed, whoever they are, regardless of status, wherever they are in the world. That we've allowed blackbox proceedings to take over these small quadrants of human society is a societal failure. The burden to secure such systems shall always fall upon the makers of those systems.
Let me be very clear that any excuse made under the veil of security including the enshrining of such in our books of law is incompatible with a society that respects the dignity to live free. It is a vicious abuse of power by those with knowledge over those robbed of it.
A good compromise might be to require explanations or shadow bans to be revealed say, 30 days after the action, in the case of bans because of suspected crimes. In the case of CP or terrorism this gives reasonable time for the Feds to find and arrest you and your conspirators. This is how the Patriot Act worked with publishing warrants, for better or worse.
It would be legal if there was a law making it so, just as GP suggested.
This is trivially solvable if creating an account required an in-person verification, like when you go into a bank to open an account. Since it's not mandatory, anybody who does so is beaten by anyone who doesn't (worse is better). So we should make it mandatory.
KYC blacklists are generally publicly available. Can you provide documentation about your claims?
The only cases where I've seen service providers ordered to not tip off the user were actually associated with order of continuation of the service, to ... not tip off the user.
Inverted totalitarianism symptoms may include shutting an individual out of a large portion of their life for no real reason, for a misunderstanding, or for daring to challenge corporate power. Often this occurs with minimal or no human intervention, and lack of due process becomes normalized. Welcome to Dystopian Hell, population: everyone not digitally cancelled.
There's something to that, and I skew towards democratic socialist. Doing nothing because it appears to target a perceived "foe" attribute or other demonstrates a lack of integrity in the bystander. Fair is fair, while selective impact games build resentment. One love and so on.
We have to get past putting people in boxes for arbitrary disagreement/animosity. Formalized politics must be made obsolete.
>There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind, alongside an out-group that the law binds but does not protect.
That is why conservatives are so prickly about being regulated: to be bound by the rules is "proof" that they are no longer the in-group.
Your very assertion that the law can be applied fairly (to the point group membership is irrelevant) is a denial of the fundamental thesis of conservatism.
I agree that we should aspire to fairness and equality-before-the-rules, but there are too many people who do deeply believe that fundamental theorem to just deny and ignore.
I'm agreeing with you, to be clear, and I'm not a conservative. It's disappointing that that seems to be the inference people have made, if I understand correctly the message that was intended to be sent by the smattering of downvotes. It's disturbing that these things are being done to anyone, and that we don't understand the ramifications or the subtleties just because our tribe forbids us to empathise with the people involved.
If it were left-wingers being banned, or centrist Biden supporters, I have absolutely no doubt in the world that there would be a slew of New York Times thinkpieces about 'the complexity of our political liberties in a world where the public square is digital', or whatever nauseating way they would invariably phrase it.
(You can see this from the other reply saying "conservatives hate morals and that's why we can ignore morals in dealing with them", the exact same thing conservatives say about liberals, and eventually they're both justified. But apparently none of us has the necessary higher-order thinking skills to avoid a moral slide into bedlam. This case is perfectly illustrative: no amount of political-tribalist tosh should be able to persuade you that the other side doesn't deserve to be treated morally.)
It is left wingers being banned. Essentially what happens is that conservatives will get banned for violence and bigotry, then companies will ban random rule abiding left wing groups just to appease angry conservatives.
Who decides which “markets” a company is in and measures their market share in those markets? How is market share measured?
Is Tinder a dating service or social media company? If Facebook starts offering a dating feature in app and becomes the biggest player in the dating space, which market is facebook in? Both? If both, does all of facebook's market cap/DAU/whatever metric we settle on to measure market share get fully applied to both markets or split in some way?
Basically, I think implementing "if $market_share > n" is not a trivial problem that will be litigated to death. The companies with the best lawyers will win.
Look, there is no such thing as a "natural market" that can keep the power of the actors in it in check. The internet was the closest thing to a perfect market that has ever existed and all it has produced is overpowered monopoly after overpowered monopoly.
If we want a free society, we don't get that by handing power over to the markets. We get that by building the most responsive democracy we can, and then using that to keep power (in all its forms, including business) in check.
So who decides which businesses are too powerful? People, elected and held accountable by citizenry at large.
In the US, "People, elected and held accountable by citizenry at large" found that banks were "too big to fail." They did not restrain "the power of the actors in [the market] in check." What makes you think it'll be different this time?
The US is not a good example of a functioning democracy. Our federal representatives have to represent 700,000 people. The state legislatures get to shape the federal districts, which means the representatives effictively get to pick their voters instead of the other way around. Our senate is grossly undemocratic, giving each state two representatives regardless of population, leading to minority rule. And our presidential election system is expressly anti-democratic.
There are lots of good examples of better functioning democracies and a fair amount of theory on reforms that could improve even those (things like ranked choice voting).
That's why I said "Build the most responsive democracy we can".
Plenty of people will argue that the US is not a great example of a functioning democracy where government is held accountable by the citizenry at large.
So your example is valid but maybe not for the point you're trying to make?
Sure, I am not a libertarian or anything like that.
I'm all for good regulation and strong government. However, making good laws and regulations is not easy! The details of these things is incredibly important and can't be solved by some sort of generic market vs government debate.
And while I do think government has a role to play, most of our regulations are poorly designed and have been captured by corporate interests.
I don't see how the proposed rule could be implemented in a way that would have the desired outcome.
Regulations are like code - buggy and iterative. That's why you need a responsive democracy (which the US decidedly does not have). So when a regulation has bugs, the people can get their representatives to update it.
We don't avoid writing code just because it's inevitably buggy and has unintended side effects. Indeed, there's a whole mentality of "move fast and break things" - essentially damn the side effects and full speed ahead - because we, as a sector, recognize that you have to take risks to make the world a better place. Yet, we forget that when it comes to using government power (our collective power) to make laws that shape our world.
Now, I'm not a proponent of "move fast and break things" - more, move steadily and make the best decision you can in a reasonable time frame. But "move steadily" is still moving. We can take our time writing legislation and regulations and do our best to get it right, and still also work to build responsive systems so that when it's inevitably buggy we can fix the bugs.
As I said in the second sentence, the problem with the US right now is that it was intentionally constructed to be the opposite of a responsive democracy.
Fair enough, I'm generalizing that US regulations are poorly designed, based mostly on my experience with municipal building codes and few niches of finance regulation.
But about the issue at hand, I've been specific in my critique: market share is an amorphous concept and thus ill-suited to legislation and a prime opportunity for regulatory capture.
Nah, I’ll pass. Markets are made up of people, they’re not just some abstraction. Governments have good uses, but determining who is participating in what market and how much market share they have or are allowed to have isn’t one of them.
Doesn’t the government already do that all the time? Copyright, trademarks, spectrum auctions, right of ways, public run utilities, private government projects bid out to single entities, eminent domain, licensing etc etc are all tools the government uses to mess with the market. It is not free and hasn’t been for awhile and I’m not sure any of it has to do with what’s best for the people.
The government does a lot of things that fall into a few categories: tax authority, police powers, market participation for its own activities, and even granting (or reserving) monopoly powers. Also missing from your list: USPS has a monopoly on First-class mail in the United States.
Some of these are just, useful, bad, abhorrent, unnecessary, necessary, or outmoded.
None of that falls into commanding the economy. We’re not even strangers to command economies: the wartime powers of the Federal government are vast, and were most powerfully executed in World War II.
I would argue that exactly what the parent suggested, in respond to the GP falls exactly into that bucket of ideas for commanding the economy. It’s not a just nor good use of Government, no matter how Democratic.
Well not granting monopolies is a start, but governments grant monopolies all the time in the form of patents, copyright and trademarks.
Proving a monopoly exists or are forming could be another way to do so, but so far they have recently made lackluster arguments in Courts of Law on that front.
If you then prove a monopoly, can you also then prove that it’s activities are harmful to the people in the marketplace by denying them choices they would otherwise have? Maybe, but probably not very often and certainly not easily.
Monopolies are generally not granted, except in exceptional circumstances. The US government didn't grant Microsoft a monopoly in PC operating systems.
> Proving a monopoly exists or are forming could be another way to do so, but so far they have recently made lackluster arguments in Courts of Law on that front.
Yes, yes they do. I listed three examples of what a government granted monopoly looks like. Copyright, trademark and patents don’t exist naturally, and they’re unenforceable without the Rule of Law.
> What are you referring to?
Most recently (that I can think of): the suit the Feds filed against Facebook that was tossed out of court.
That’s not a useful distinction. Market monopolies, if they exist, where they exist, are usually tied into those same government granted monopolies. Facebook the bare bones public domain Technology stack is a lot less valuable to investors than Facebook the service on the Facebook servers presented to Facebook account holders on Facebook’s private servers at Facebook.com paid for with Ad revenue generated by Facebook’s copyrighted (and maybe partially patented?) adtech and backed by Sales Reps on Facebook’s payroll.
And despite all of that, they’re probably still not a monopoly for anything (haven’t heard a convincing argument on this one yet!), at least anywhere the DoJ and FTC have jurisdiction.
I very much doubt that if someone could setup another service named Facebook, they could compete with them or do much beyond annoy customers and phish.
Let’s not get into hypotheticals. You know as well as I do that a large bit of Facebook’s early growth story was their brand and their reputation. That name may have been dragged through the mud in the past few years, but it still means something, and its not without value despite the recent rebranding on the parent company front.
Meta retains the exclusive right to do business using the Facebook mark and they’ll continue to enforce it. It’s the same story for any other company, and it’s a form of monopoly that the government grants, not something that would be enforceable otherwise.
There are many ways to accomplish the same things. Tech companies have large patent portfolios, yet there is plenty of competition. Perhaps the biggest obstacles to competition are the network effect for social media, and brand power - people use Amazon and Google despite many equally good alternatives.
The problem is that even if there are alternative ways, it's not always profitable to find them. One clear example is drug prices. The price to manufacture a drug is tiny compared to the cost to develop a new one, so of someone has a patent on a drug that cures a disease, it's not worth anyone else's time to develop a different drug. Getting your drug approved will take years (for good reason), and at the end, you have a product that competes with another company, where instead you could just develop a different drug and get your own monopoly. As such, there are product monopolies on pretty much all drugs to treat rare diseases.
Sure, but market share and company size are two fundamentally different problems.
Measuring the size of a company is a lot easier: you pick some metric (employees, revenue, profit, customers, etc...) and apply it to all companies.
Measuring market share requires that you categorize all companies into "markets," which think is pretty subjective. Is Jet Brains an IDE company? A software company? How about Apple? If multiple, are metrics split?
Whatever rules you pick, they're going to be biased towards some companies (including some big ones not popular on HN) and against other companies (including some companies HN loves).
Partition it geographically. If they want to compete in certain cities/regions/countries where the user base exceeds a certain number, they must spin off subsidiaries for that area. I can't imagine people looking for a date on the other end of the country outside of very specific circumstances.
Isn't this how we just end up in the same situation we have with ISPs? It doesn't matter that we have Comcast, Cox, and Charter if any given area only has one of them.
Building an ISP requires investing in infrastructure. A dating app needs a UX designer and a few cloud instances. There's a world of difference in the required outlay when building a competitor.
Geographic partition is what we did to Bell, and that really doesn't seem to have helped much. If the only way to choose a competitor is to move, there's still really no competition. No one spent thousands of dollars moving across the country because the telephone company there was better.
Weirdly enough that's what the US is doing with government on a state level. With people claiming that each state is an "experiment" even though the people there likely don't have a choice in the matter.
The difference is that state policies are so impactful in everyday life that people very much do choose where they're going to live based at least in part on state government decisions. The same cannot be said for most corporations you could conceivably split along the same lines.
Eh? Subsidiaries aren't usually what people mean when they speak of breaking up companies. Subsidiaries are aligned with the parent company in terms of incentives, so it doesn't really change the landscape at all, besides worsening the user experience if you require the subsidiary to maintain its own isolated silo of users and data.
broken up how and to what end? if you review definitions of antitrust and monopoly, you'll find they really do not apply to the dynamics at play with consumer internet services that displace existing decentralized norms and enjoy majority market share due to network effects.
not saying there isn't a problem, but maybe trying to shoehorn 19th century solutions onto 21st century problems isn't the answer.
Instead of regulation, I'd like to see the government offer a free service. A digital commons. In this case the public library version of Tinder, with strict rules of who can be banned and where everyone is treated equally.
You want the government to be that involved in pair-selection in the population??? I am disturbed. Eugenics aside: you know that a direct result of this is that border services, local police, etc will have access to a database of dick pics, don't you?
the government has them anyway, it's just that in addition to having them, the tax payer also has to pay clearview AI or whoever else for providing that service privately. That's actually exactly how the US government acquires license plate and vehicle data in states where collecting that information directly is prohibited, they just use your money to buy that from the private surveillance industry. [1]
By believing in some sort of mythical distinction between private and public business you've created the worst world of all, in which a government can superficially claim its hands are clean, buy unlimited surveillance data from unregulated private firms, without any democratic accountability. You now have the privilege of filling up Peter Thiel's bank account, while Palantir runs a precrime division that your city council has never even heard of[2]
If they used and published a fair algorithm for matching, they wouldn't really be involved in the matching they would just be providing a venue. Similar to a city providing public space for people to meet, like a fair.
Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?
NSA match? Based on your porn search habits, google search history, amazon order history, geographic location, and a social graph based on phone record metadata we recommend you the best possible match.
Even if true, "have access to" is doing a lot of work here. If I had a Borges-style Library of Babel with all the possible books in the world, all configurations of the letters of the alphabet, I would technically "have access to" all human knowledge. But that's very different from having a curated collection which includes specifically only those things, filtered perfectly for you.
I agree, internet biggies are de facto monopolies due to the extreme network effects they enjoy. If you are serving more than X millions of users, you are subject to certain rules that make you behave more like a public space.
This rule would functionally kill small Internet service provision and build the biggest moat around the incumbent providers that has ever been handed to them.
Do you mean because those 'small Internet service providers' would be included in his 'larger than $MARKET_SHARE' group, or because it would mean no one was kicked out of the incumbent services and therefore there would be fewer new customers available?
I mean because a company tends to explode from "smaller than $MARKET_SHARE" to "larger than $MARKET_SHARE" in a discontinuous fashion. So since a company can't really predict when it will happen, every company providing service would need to prep from the ground up to provide the described level of relatively non-automated high-touch support this proposal describes. It'd raise the cost to build a startup.
... not to imply it's a bad idea; there's no golden rule that says an ecosystem of millions of competing companies is always a superior alternative to a few well-regulated players. It's just important to note the hidden costs.
If you have automated rule enforcement, then you already have a formal specification of your rules, and informing the user of what rule they have broken should be trivial.
If you have humans doing the bans manually, then you already have a human in the loop.
The appeals process mandate is the part that would add a lot of cost that doesn't currently exist. It puts a human in the loop on the back side of the automated process. And once you add an appeals process, you can expect everybody to attempt to go through it... False positives will of course appeal, and bad actors have no disincentive to appeal for the simple sake of gumming up the system for fun.
I think this limitation is an artifact of the fact that the proposal is an idea being tossed out on social media. A real law would have some sort of grace period. That grace period could be chosen arbitrarily, it should be set such that any well-run company would have time to respond.
Actually I think you're right, yeah. I don't know why your original comment is being downvoted. I suppose it testifies to the fact that comments are downvoted either because they're too stupid or too smart for the audience.
Okay, how about instead of coming into effect immediately after reaching some market share level, it comes into effect 1 year after you first reach that level?
That's the thing about being an Internet startup... You never know when you're going to explode and suddenly jump from a ten-thousand-user service to a milliion-user service.
So supporting this would require a company to take all manner of new precautions that companies currently don't (circuit-breaker on the new account creation system? But then your growth stalls and your potential customers go to a competitor instead, and you don't blow up into a YouTube or a Twitter like YouTube and Twitter did).
Grace period - A grace period is a period immediately after the deadline for an obligation during which a late fee, or other action that would have been taken as a result of failing to meet the deadline, is waived provided that the obligation is satisfied during the grace period. In other words, it is a length of time during which rules or penalties are waived or deferred. Grace periods can range from a number of minutes to a number of days or longer, and can apply in situations including arrival at a job, paying a bill, or meeting a government or legal requirement.
In law, a grace period is a time period during which a particular rule exceptionally does not apply, or only partially applies.
How many more years of recurring "got randomly blocked from the App Store/Play Store/Facebook Ads/whatever other mission-critical service" posts on Hacker News do we need before the market corrects itself?
In theory, if this was considered a big enough problem, yes - the market would resolve this. And by "big enough problem" we have to remember that market-driven economies respond to market demand forces.
Plastic in the ocean is definitely a huge problem, but it's not a market problem - not yet. When consumers are willing to pay to get plastics out of the ocean, hundreds of companies will appear eager to solve the problem.
There's a comment above (@pdpi: "At what timescale?") that identifies the issue at hand. In this case (and in a lot of cases) we need regulation because market demand to solve this isn't fast enough (or may never exist)
It has always been like that on Tinder. My phone number can't create a new account for example (never receive the confirmation code). That's called shadowban in the case of OP. Bumble started doing the same practices a year ago (which makes sense as they have the same founder)
But they are not 100% wrong, Tinder is not here to make people meet each other. They are here to make money and people don't pay because they get more matches, they pay because they are frustrated. Tinder needs a way to keep girls active on the platform, and for that to works they have to prevent boys to have a negative behavior. That's why they shadowban guys easily, as soon as they detect non standard behavior they shadowban, people keep seeing profile and keep paying. Girls don't see those profiles and have a better experience overall and stays longer, which makes guys stays longer because FOMO of matching the one.
This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
EDIT: And FYI if you want to exit shadowban on Tinder, it is pretty well documented on r/SwipeHelper, you need to change: phone, phone number, Facebook account, Credit card, pictures and don't login from the same IP
I was saying it is not 100% wrong to ban people. The fact that the banned people are still paying and dont get their money back clearly look like fraud (even if this is more complex, as Tinder is very smart about how they communicate, they never make you pay to get matches, they make you pay to be able to like more).
But yeah Match group is a fraud company, I've wrote some posts on the topic in the past
Banning + refund for the remainder credit, sure. Scummy, but sure. Shadow banning, taking peoples money while they still think they get a service, not even banning at the end of the billing cycle, without giving notice, nah, that’s definitely fraud.
It is if they silo you off without notifying you and make sure no one else can see you and keep taking your money. Now I don't know if tender is doing that provably, but that was the thesis.
Colloquially and technically "ban" and "shadowban" are different things; I have no idea what happened in OP case but "shadowban" means that you leave someone in a system but silently block all of their interactions.
e.g. ban: you try to log into HN and it gives you a message: "You can't log in, you are banned"
shadowban: you log in to HN with your account, you post comments and vote on stories but unknown to you nobody else on HN can see this. Eventually you start to wonder why you never get replies anymore.
It's definitely an ethical issue if you are doing the latter without telling someone, and additionally charging them for the service you aren't providing.
With a dating app it might be hard to tell for a while; how are you to know that you aren't getting any replies/engagement because of the way such sites work, or because the people you contacted never saw the likes/messages/whatever.
>This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder,
As I said in my comment up-post, Tinder has a near-absolute monopoly in my area. If you're not on Tinder you basically don't exist on the local dating market.
OK, I've been married for a long time and never had any luck with any dating service before that, but I don't think that's necessarily as true as you think
You're within 2-3 degrees of separation of dozens or hundreds of single people you can date, so if you just start putting the word out among your friends, family, etc I think they'll start introducing you to people
As a woman, Tinder is fine if you wanna find a fuck buddy and don’t take it seriously. I see a lot of people (men and women) get wrapped up in the swipe game and that’s really not how it works. You can’t take anything that happens on that platform personally.
Unfortunately, rule #1 on tinder is “be physically attractive”. If you want tinder to work for you consistently as a man, get your personal hygiene in order and hit the gym. That’s the main reason I swipe left; well, that and conservative politics.
too true, I once had a conversation with a friend of mine. She was saying to just use tinder. As we were about to get in the car, I told her: I'll do nothing but swipe till we get there. if I get a match, I'll pay for lunch when we arrive, otherwise you pay.
> Women can have just as much of a hard time as men, especially for certain ethnicities.
Can't find the study, but black women are actually having a tougher time than all others women to get matches on dating apps. But this is still nothing compared to the attention guys get
Also below 15% body fat and quite high income will help. Women expectations are completely unrealistic these days. Their desire went to the global sexual market. Their hypergamy and narcissism is stimulated to no end.
It's funny how raw red pill truths get downvoted here. Some seem to prefer to send technical brutal honesty about the current state of sexual market under the rug.
I find your interest in my sexual life as inappropriate as distracting while I'm learning this new shibari binding as my main sub girl is asking me to use it on her this weekend. Oh god, how she loves when I use rope on her. What were you saying?
Maybe thinking about sexuality as a market is your first problem. If you’re not physically attractive, just don’t use Tinder; it’s not the only way to find someone to date.
Shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who blames “women” as a whole for his problems would have a hard time meeting women.
And as a corollary, I’ve dated super hot guys before and frankly a lot of them have a hard time with relationships because it was so easy for them to hook up when they were younger they don’t know how to put the effort in to make someone feel desired.
I'm not asking anyone about my case not seeking advice as I do great already in both online and offline. You seem in a hurry to assume other people's position and problems and providing unrequested advice that only validate your assumptions. Have you ever observed that in yourself?
Regarding to that corollary, you're assuming top guys even want to invest in relationships in the first place. Not the case of many I know. The strategy is more like: enjoy the party until one of the girls is so mindblowing feminine and submissive and good person that is worth giving a chance to some investing.
This is only really true in north america (especially if you're of Indian descent). Women have much more realistic expectations once you get out of that cesspit
Enjoy while it lasts because social media will spread their ambitions. In any case, woman desire for fit men is culturally universal so all should hit the gym and diet for its own good. Hard. Good luck making your game to the next level!
Not the OP, but attraction is a complicated, multi-dimensional beast and the unfortunate thing about Tinder and similar apps is that they reduce all of this to a 2D, possibly doctored, photo of the user.
In real life, people who do not look gorgeous can still sweep you off your feet by their smile, laughter, gestures, tone of voice, scent, the way they move, talk, react, fall into daydream...
Of all my previous lovers, ending with my wife of 16 years, I wouldn't choose a single one based just on a picture. But I was strongly attracted to all of them in real life.
Human magic cannot really be distilled into an algorithmic system. Not yet, anyway.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men
So, this guy set up a fake profile and interviewed women who matched with him, without disclosing he was doing research? Ethics aside, he doesn't discuss his methodology at all. How did these interviews turn into a Gini curve? How could they, without some heroic statistical assumptions?
It's been studied a lot, I just threw that up as example since it was posted here a couple of days ago. Here's one of OKCupid's own studies [1]. You can search for others that confirm the same thing over and over again.
That study shows the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The third figure shows that the vast majority of women's messages go to men they rate as less than 4/5 attractive. The last figure shows that even the least attractive men still got replies to their messages 22% of the time.
There's lots of common 'knowledge' in social psychology including studies done by serious reputable researchers that turns out to not be so. This is a big enough issue that it's termed the "replication crisis". So, yes, maybe. Maybe not.
My original claim is that something like that was true and what someone else was referring to and I gave you a lazy link, and you complained about the guys terrible methodology and replication. I told you that there are dozens of studies and data analyses (some are on huge data sets [1]) out there and your response is that oh no they have to be quality. That's a goalpost move from "this is bad" to "all those (that I haven't even seen) are bad."
> This isn't even close to the best we've got.
If you've got that then show me and I'll have a look. Until then I'm going with that studies I've seen that all seem to say roughly the same thing (despite widely varying sample sizes and quality of methodology)
> Until then I'm going with that studies I've seen that all seem to say roughly the same thing (despite widely varying sample sizes and quality of methodology)
There are none with acceptable sizes. You're just talking.
I guess because in real life, even if you dont look super attractive, you can still charm partners by the way you talk and act. You can be funny, come across as trustworthy etc.
Yes, this. If you’re trying to find a partner on a platform where matches are determined solely by physical attraction, you’re gonna have a hard time if you’re not physically attractive. Know what Tinder is, and be self-aware enough to know if it’s not for you.
The attractive types will also have it difficult. The matches will likely be attractive physically, but that hardly guarantees a true match. I know lots of attractive people that struggle to find a partner (and instead move from one one night stand to another). I think at some point it must get pretty depressing and toxic.
That’s it’s whole own thing; people who are incredibly attractive can move on really quick because they know they can get something else. Then they hit their 30s and that all dries up, and they don’t know how to have a real relationship that lasts longer than a few months.
Obviously not everyone who is hot is this way, but it’s one of the “types” you’ll find if you date around a lot.
I would disagree with this. You don't have to be that attractive. Average will do fine. Just make them laugh. I am from Europe and Tinder works pretty good (at least for me) and I am just an ordinary dude.
Also, don't stop just with Tinder. Use Bumble, happn, OkCupid, Badoo. I've got dates from all of these.
> This has nothing to do with Big tech. If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.
EDIT: It seems I misunderstood this statement. I read it as "If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, [not using twitter] used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now"
I don't understand your reasoning here. You're suggesting that tinder is a vital service for some aspect of life now(I agree, unfortunately), but also saying it's not a problem with big tech? This kind of thing is exactly why big tech needs to be regulated.
Is Bumble big tech ? No, still they have the same tactics than Tinder.
I'm not saying there is no problem (I have wrote several article criticizing Match group and the app dating market), I'm just saying this has nothing to do with big Tech. Any dating app (and some do) can do the same as Tinder
I'm not familiar with Bumble (I've never used Tinder either). My point is if you are controlling access to "the market" then a user being excluded could be a real disadvantage, and should be treated with care.
They stated " If you want to meet people don't use Tinder, that used to work well in the past, it very rarely works now.", which if I understand them correctly means that it's hard to meet people without it. Perhaps you don't need to meet anyone, but for someone who does I don't think it's that absurd.
That’s a deep question about the semantics of “basic need”, and highly subjective. I do not think that reproduction is a basic need of the individual in ordinary language, but it may be deemed a basic, I.e. survival, need of the species or tribe
The founder of Bumble is one of the founders of Tinder. But others founders of Tinder are not founders of Bumble, this is true. Also we could argue that Bumble has two founders, but this is insignificant anyway
Tinder and Bumble are the same form of awful and from the same founder. These apps are designed to exploit men. There are a fewer number of women on them and plenty of men, as a result they design features like boost, super likes, and premium subscriptions that you must pay for every month. There are studies and data that show that even normally attractive men with good profiles will go unswiped while women will get hundreds[1][2]. You then have to deal with a dating scene where you are knowingly competing with other men for a woman's attention while having very little in the form of options. The irony behind a TOS like this is it's designed to prevent bad behavior, but the entire underlying system generates more bad behavior. This is not to even mention the number of OnlyFans, prostitution, and people lying about their sexual orientation that users will need to sift through.
Years ago, when I ran PUA site, I set up a fake female profile on Match to see what the female experience was like. It was truly horrifying. In three days I got ~1000 messages from men, 99% of which were barely intelligible and usually one line, like "dam gurl u nicce" etc.
I did the same thing a long time ago. I was actually going to prank a friend who we knew used the site, but I learnt an important lesson. I started to feel really sorry for men. All these lonely guys who can't help their desire for women. I did use a picture of a girl who would never in a million years need to use online dating, though. I wonder if you did too.
Absolutely. Some poor blonde Dutch girl whose photo I unethically borrowed for the two week experiment. She would be about a "9" on my attractive scale.
What I said doesn't invalidate women's experiences. I was highlighting that men have to pay for said shitty experience, and the system is designed that way intentionally. The heavy TOS is because men and women act out because of that shitty system. It's a cycle.
I didn't take it as fighting, so I'm not sure what the hostility is about. I was making clear that by highlighting men's experiences I am in no way invalidating women's experiences. That and putting some emphasis on the fact that shitty systems result in shitty TOS.
> Maybe it's not all Tinder's fault you're not having much luck.
This is basically the paradigm of any monopolistic or near monopolistic system. You can screw over a small minority without provoking a real response so long as you are appeasing or distracting the majority. Big tech, traditional companies, and even government.
Moreover Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match. The most lucrative customers for matchmaking sites are the most desperate. Even with a lot of competition due to network effects most of the people would always be driven to the most popular sites.
> Tinder has an incentive to keep the paid users paid my making sure it is difficult for them to find a match
An evil data scientist would put almost exclusively users on your screen who you are interested in but they are not interested in you to boost your spendings and would mix a small portion of good bidirectional matches just to make his purpose less obvious. Fortunately evil data scientists does not exist... I mean I definitely wasn't paid to do anything like that. Never.
They don’t even have to be doing that on purpose, if one just optimizes the revenue per user metric he’s effectively doing the same thing even if not on purpose.
I know it's popular to rail against tech companies, but I don't think there's a world in which we are entitled to access to Tinder or any other company's services.
Tinder does not hold anything even remotely resembling a monopoly (no, Match does not own every dating app, just many of them) on the dating app space, we need to stop throwing that word around so casually. You're diluting the concept by trying to apply it here, which will lessen its impact when a real monopoly comes along and actually tries to control a market (e.g. Microsoft and how it's handling Edge right now).
"or any other company's services" is a bit to wide, the obvious biggest counter example to this would be utilities, everyone is somewhat entitled to access to their power company's services. But going outside utilities, what if I live on an island that is serviced by a single ferry company, shouldn't I be entitled to paying service?
And on the meaning of monopoly, I believe it is fair to describe the "network affect" as a monopoly. The historical example of the US rail comes to mind, the market had several rail companies at the time, but each had monopoly over certain routes, if you wanted to go from place A to place B you maybe only had one choice. The fact that other rail lines existed to places you didn't want to go doesn't mean that it wasn't a monopoly. The same way, those tech companies may have monopoly over the route from person A to person B.
> "or any other company's services" is a bit to wide, the obvious biggest counter example to this would be utilities, everyone is somewhat entitled to access to their power company's services. But going outside utilities, what if I live on an island that is serviced by a single ferry company, shouldn't I be entitled to paying service?
True, your 'island ferry example' is a monopoly. It is also not at all analogous to this situation and Tinder in general.
I'm no expert, but I don't think you understand what the 'network affect (sip)' is, as it does not apply to US Railways at all, and is a relatively new term that only arose in the 1970s. That aside, your example doesn't survive further scrutiny because railways were often the only practical way of moving between two generally public places — cities or towns. With Tinder though, they are providing you access to their own private network of users. Your example is like saying the monorail in disney is a monopoly, but that doesn't make any sense, since it's for transporting you within their own park.
Lastly, Tinder is not the one and only way to meet people. Yes, they have are of the most widely-used companies in the space. But there are others. And, you know, people can still meet in real life — through friends, at work, at activities or interest-based groups. On other social media like Twitter, et al.
How is this an example of monopoly? Are you positing that Tinder is the only way to meet other people? That seems insane. Not only are there are other dating services (yes, I know the parent company of Tinder also owns bumble, but there are still plenty of others), you can also meet people on other social media apps. This is all in addition to something called "real life" –– through friends, your workplace, or getting involved in groups and activities.
This is the paradigm of any system, period. If you work correctly for the most part, the minority which you create negative value for can be offset and establish that system as viable.
This is true for brick and morter/mom and pop businesses. It's true for computer programs. Basically any system. It is not an indicator for a monopoly.
To me this seems to be readily apparent, but I'm getting downvotes without reply. I'm sincerely curious how what I've said can be disagreed with, do you not all use software that gives you a negative value but maybe gives positive value to your managers? Is that tool a monopoly or does my statement just hold true?
Every system that survives, survives because it generates positive value for most people, no? Are you telling me that every business that isn't a monopoly only generates positive value and there's no negative value generated for a minority of customers?
I know "don't use social networks made by evil megacorps that make money by trampling all over your privacy and making you addicted" is the kind of advice everyone sagely nods at but no one heeds. But it especially applies to dating apps. Like the proverbial sausages, once you know what goes on under the hood you won't ever feel like touching one of them with a ten foot pole.
I've never done online dating, met my wife the old-fashioned way, but, it sounds like you're saying the network is making the choice of who should be matched/together, before they get the chance to decide for themselves?
If that's true, how anyone thinks that isn't totally fucked is beyond me. I mean, I'm seriously, deeply concerned by this notion more than the usual privacy, data etc that big tech concerns me with, they're literally shaping future generations according to their "algorithm", by deciding that one person shouldn't even be allowed to know another even exists, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them.
You have an Elo rating, like in chess (or something like that - it depends on the app and they sometimes tweak it, but the gist is that rating is defined recursively: your rating increases if you get liked by high rated people), and you get matched with people within a given range around your rating. When you lose interest they punctually entice you with out-of-range profiles.
Like in chess, they show you very high rated people at first, to ascertain your initial rating and above all to hook you with all the attractive profiles. As your rating becomes more and more accurate as people in your pool swipe you, your range of matchable profiles narrows down.
(Edit: As another user said, you may sometimes lose rating by matching low-rated or too many people, but the exact details may change a lot.)
The main target demographics are the really high rated people (who entice everyone else) and the really low rated people, who pay up for every premium feature in order to get noticed, i.e. artificially boost their rating. (But just because you have a GM's rating doesn't mean you have a GM's skill, so the gains are hollow and you have to keep paying to stay above your original rating range). The equivalent would be chess beginners paying up for an Open Tournament in order to help subsidize the GMs appearance fee and prizes.
And as in chess, an elite of very high rated people has all the fun while everyone else sorts of sucks and flounders. That's not because of evolutionary psychology or some fundamental truth of human nature, that's just how rating (and by extension any kind of skill following a power-law distribution) works.
I agree, it comically sucks that people are letting themselves being paired by a shitty implementation of League of Legends.
yes, exactly, but do notice that these apps all deny still having an ELO rating, but just know that this is just corporate speak no different than an ISP saying "well unlimited isn't a legal term and the experience is still the same", so just assume something similar is happening and act accordingly. act like an attractive person to get exposure to attractive people as long as possible, how do attractive people act? choosy and discerning. don't swipe on everyone, actually play the superficial game because you know who is attractive by consensus, even if it isn't your personal taste.
It works the same way in old fashioned setups. Barring exceptional knowledge of two peoples’ compatibility, someone looking to introduce two people to each other would propose a setup between two similarly attractive, educated, income/wealth level people.
Otherwise, the matchmaker ends up losing reputation and participants trust them less due to higher chances of failure. It works the same way in business relationships too.
A broker’s value is in increasing the probability of transactions closing by restricting the pool of candidates to those likelier to close. Otherwise, they have no value.
While I agree to an extent, the issue I see is that business partners, friends, etc likely know you far better than a site you enter curated information into in order to reach an end goal ever will.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
It is a poor representation, you then meet in person and start from square one, no different than how online always has been. You just have to get your foot in the door with people you would have never otherwise met at all. Its just an additional venue amongst other venues also available.
Yes, absolutely. But its even worse, its a crowdsourced eugenics program that the crowd doesn't know they are contributing to and I believe they would not consent to if they knew or had the choice (aside from not using the app at all).
Basically your selection (match, don't match) isn't just a personal choice. It alters the other person's desirability based on your current desirability. Its a weighted choice that affects how they are bracketed to everyone else, people in the same brackets match each other.
Now of course, this is similar to the outcome in real life. But there is a level of consent to these personal choices, and there are way more inputs before this outcome occurs.
Knowing that some derivative of this is employed allows you to game it, which makes it much less objectionable to me, but I greatly disagree with the idea that other people aren't aware. At this point my biggest issue with dating apps is that nobody moderately attractive has their notifications on, so it's easy to forget to check the app for a conversation (after you matched) but at the same time its still uncouth to ask for a phone number or other way of messaging right away, so a simple conversation could take weeks or months or more likely never occur. (Many people have their instagrams or snapchats written on their profile, but its an additional greater gamble to get a response through those as they are inferior forms of inboxes too).
I know its common for married people to think "omg dating is so nightmarish now, this justifies staying with my spouse through anything because I wouldn't know what to do", its not really that different, think of a dating app like a someone at the pier with 5 fishing rods out in the water. 2 of them are dating apps, 3 of them are other things. Its just an additional option to meet people outside of your network.
be discerning like a hot person. even if it slows down how often you get matched at all. make it only possibly for consensus attractive people to match with you.
the opposite than how I hear other guys use these apps.
Curious what the algorithm would be to measure "desireableness". Computer vision on the photos (i.e. measure facial symmetry?) plus the number of other people who have expressed interest in you?
They aren't doing anything that complicated. A popular profile is attractive and chooses a very small percentage of others. The profile that person chooses gets a much greater weighting of desirability by being chosen by the popular profile.
The popular profile that chooses a high percentage of others is not a real human being and/or is selling sex. A pretty irrelevant signal for desirability. It's quite simple. Just like in the real world in that regard, people want higher signals of why they were chosen and it is accurate to be skeptical of an undiscerning attractive person because it usually is a low signal since they don't actually want you, they want to sell something.
Game the system by being more discerning. This is counterintuitive for people wanting matches by statistical probability as it seems like matching faster and arbitrarily will help, but that behavior ensures being downranked to the doldrums with other actually unattractive people.
I do not think there is any need for trying to figure out how to calculate objective attractiveness. Just use someone’s likes and the value of those likes based on the likes of the person doing the like-ing to infer their relative popularities. Can use frequency and rapidity of messaging as an additional data point also.
There are many people that do decently with attraction in person who wouldn't do as well in a visual app. Attraction in person is weighed by energy, actions, social validation and also looks. This method is more useful for people that can do that, but don't match preconceived visual ideals that the potential mates have, but passable.
So replicating that in an app trying to emulate that with match scores means you have to at least reduce the chance of getting matched by others with a low match score. Leave your pending matches pending forever, dont get desparate to match arbitrarily. If attractive people still don't match (give it a month, per area), nuke the profile and try again with different pictures and content.
If you dont have any of that then you need a different strategy.
You didn't really give anything particular that you've done except that you just create a new profile when you aren't doing well and try different content - which is about the most basic and well known strategy...
So? Its about keeping that profile useful for longer. Getting more attractive matches for longer, having a greater probability that the attractive profile will even see your profile ever.
Many people never get matched because there was never even a chance to get matched. Thats the only observation and mitigation presented.
What if you aren’t conventionally attractive though or have unsymmetrical facial features and are not photogenic. I think your advice does not apply to a lot of people who never get picked on these types of platforms
No, there isn't. Maybe at the very beginning when people were genuinely entranced by this Internet thing and hadn't figured out the best way to milk loneliness for profit, but now it's all rotten and beyond repair.
If you want to meet new people, find yourself new real-life hobbies.
Pre-pandemic, my social life made dating platforms unnecessary. Now? No house or dinner parties full of acquaintances, no clubs or festivals, everyone's clustered into inner-circle friend groups, my employer moved out of the enormous shared office we were in, and on like that. The dating platforms are more necessary than ever.
So, naturally, there's never been a better time than this for some bad-faith behavior and profiteering.
I just lost my IG account after having it for literally a decade. Short story: I thought my engagement was low, so I manually went through my not-very-large follower list (2400 or so) in the IG app, identified about 100 accounts that I thought were bots (accounts that were following 6000+ people), and then went to each one and removed them as a follower. I made it about 40 in when suddenly I got meaningless errors, logged out, and that was it. My account no longer exists.
All of the avenues to contact Instagram are meaningless and don’t lead anywhere. There are no actual humans anywhere that review these things. No one cares when their crap algorithm screws up and deletes your 1000 photos and memories and all the interactions you had with your friends.
The irony is I got kicked out for doing something that should be their job.
>All of the avenues to contact Instagram are meaningless and don’t lead anywhere.
I feel you. I got permabanned from tinder when I emailed their support asking how the verification process worked with couples. They replied with a ban notice and I was confused, turns out couples profiles are against Tinders T&C. I hadn't actually done ANYTHING to violate their T&C in-app yet, just asking their support about it was enough to ban for life.
To top it off, they embedded a secret key in my iOS keychain that synced across all devices. Even wiping the phone would get new numbers banned on sign in. I ended up having to use a fresh device on a fresh iCloud account on a new number to bypass their ban (I'm a dev with 100+ devices at my disposal and multiple VPS VPNs, good luck Tinder).
Tinder can go fuck itself, but they have an absolute monopoly in my area/demographic so I have to put up with them.
I wonder. Standards might have changed for the younger population, necessary flirting skills in person are no longer maintained as widely as they used to. Generally, things that are challenging tend to be taken over by technology.
It is not that different from how people forgot to orient themselves in a city without navigational apps. Or how they no longer know how to, say, make butter (unlike in 1900).
It's not just that, those flirting skills are not safe to use anymore. You can get an harassment charge for touching someone in the arm these days (happened to some lonely autistic kid). Having confirmation of mutual attraction first makes things both easier and safer.
This simply not true, or way blown out of proportion. I'm single, so I go out almost every weekend (West LA): plenty of people flirting, making out, touching, dancing, etc. Dating apps are a complete waste of time when compared to meeting people in real life.
Ah yes, West LA is a representation of the rest of the world, and to people with incredibly busy, corporate lives.
I've heard stories of lesbian women, especially, FLYING ACROSS THE COUNTRY to meet another person they have interest in because it's that hard to find matching personalities.
Search for Jamie Griffiths on google and stop being a knob. This shit is serious. At least for people on the spectrum. Lots of shy guys out there with no experience who can't get it either because stuff like this happens. The girl wasn't in the wrong either.
I think that say what you will about the social media and the ills of it, Tinder is definitely a net positive for society. This is because matching on Tinder removes the ambiguity of attraction from the whole confusing dance of social interaction. So in the long run, when Tinder and its clones take over, there should be much less stories about unwanted sexual attention: either you make it on Tinder or you do not make it at all.
First you'd need consent to actually ask the question, and prior to that, you'd need consent to speak with the person (you'd have to get that in writing).
Not sure where you're getting that from. I would like to assume positive intent and the best interpretation of your position, but it's really difficult to not read this as "If we have to get consent for touching someone, then we have to get consent for all interactions. Therefore touch-consent is non-viable." Please help me understand how you aren't saying that.
This is why the anti-trust movements against FAANG have such a hard time gaining mainstream traction. People start hijacking the word “monopoly” and it becomes incredibly diluted and undermines the credibility of the narrative.
Wow never heard of the embedded secret key on you iOS keychain after you uninstalled the app. Is this legal to fingerprint your AppleID like this?? Can you view your iOS keychain and wipe any fingerprinting bs apps leave behind or feed them poisoned data to dissociate your AppleID?
No, there’s no way for you to view it. Apps can spin up a new keychain that iCloud will sync and you can put arbitrary strings in there. The user has no idea.
Perhaps if Congress ever actually considers regulating these companies, whether or not you can get some legit customer service should be part of determining who is big enough to regulate.
I'm ok with that, if so. I find it's just a weird situation. They are in the middle, moderating what people "want", I suppose. I see a lot of other businesses succeeding there, though.
I think you missed my point, which is that Tinder does seemingly very little to stop it. Even in markets where it is legal, like in the UK where I am, it is actively detrimental to the user experience for most users.
Yes, I was saying Tinder is full of straight up prostitution and people seeking sugar daddies who ge offended if you call it out as prostitution. I have nothing against prostitution (and I'm in the UK where it is legal), but I do find it really annoying when dating apps don't do more to keep it off their apps.
Often patterns of fake profiles that were immediately obvious to me as a user took months for them to block.
I personally don't have a problem with prostitution or sex for money as long as it's two consenting adults and not the result of human trafficking like the traditional pimp/prostitute enslavement version. That's why it should be legal and regulated.
Yup same thing happened to me but it was just because I accessed it with random vpn. No recourse whatsoever, can’t even get a list of all my friend’s accounts I lost access to
And if your town's Walmart bans you... drive to the next town? We should have clear principles over what is a utility and what is not. What principle unites both Tinder and your power company in regulatory conversation?
Why should Instagram, a FREE social networking site where you share pictures and videos be a utility?! There are countless ways to accomplish the same thing, including email and text, both of which are also (thankfully) not utilities.
I have a story to share too:
I talked a considerable time with a girl from another country and was about to travel to visit her. Then, I started having mixed feelings, wasn't sure about everything, decided to stop, told her and she got angry (well, until that moment I understood her quite well).
A while later I tried to use Tinder again, and my account was banned. I don't really remember how I discovered it, if she told me, or a representative told me, but the thing was: She report me as I had verbally abused her, mistreated her and shada shada, because she was angry I dumped her.
So they closed my account without even checking our conversations at least (there was no insults or nothing at all)
My 2¢; OP should do a charge-back. If anything bots don't do chargebacks.
While you have no recourse in free services, you do when you pay with a credit card. Likewise the CC will still charge Tinder the processing fee of 1%-3%, so every chargeback is not only revenue lost but also a cost.
Unfortunately all that advice is void if OP used a debit card.
Pretty sure you can still do a chargeback with a debit card if the purchase was made “on credit” as all online purchases are.
But wanted to add another thing, chargebacks are for cases of fraud, so the cc network actually charges the retailer a not insignificant fee for each chargeback, it’s why BigTech will shutdown your account if you do a chargeback, bec 9/10 times if it’s on your account you did mean to spend that money you just forgot about it. If you didn’t you better be ready to prove it and still burn the account that you chargeback on (i.e. lose your gmail account bec someone compromised your account and bought stuff on android)
Card disputes are mediated by the card networks and will absolutely work on debit cards - in this case it’s a clear example of paying for a product and not receiving it so it should be an open & shut case.
Chargebacks on credit cards may have more protection granted by the banks or the law, but the basic level of disputing a transaction is available even to debit cards.
This exact thing happened to me, one day my long (years) standing account was just banned, and I had recently created a subscription. No repeal, nothing. What I ended up doing, was changing my subscription to a HIGHER tier, which refunds you the difference of the lower tier. Then CANCELLING the now new higher tier, which refunds you the new subscription amount. All through iOS subscription management. Seriously fuck Tinder.
I was just banned by EA/DICE for cheating, hacking or exploiting in Battlefield 2042. I'm not sure which, as I did none of those things (or if I did, I wasn't aware of it - but I expect it's unlikely that you can accidentally break those rules). After asking support for more information, they listed the same reasons that were originally emailed to me - cheating, hacking or exploiting the game. No further information given.
Luckily I bought it on Amazon so I'll be refunding through them, and I expect my Origin account to be banned as a result - however it sucks to deal with these hardline policies with zero transparency when you're on the wrong side of the algorithm.
EDIT: After reading more about false-positive bans, it seems these days having the wrong driver installed (as some hacks pretend to be software that communicates through that "bad" driver) or running peripheral scripts (like mouse macros) can cause a ban. I wasn't using macros and I don't have peripherals capable of running them (eg Logitech G series).
I also learned the hard with PUBG that you need to use a separate steam account for these types of multiplayer games.
They refuse to share with you why you got ban or reverse it and they keep the money. I got my refund through Paypal and the warning Steam support gave me hinted that I'd lose my account if I did that a second time.
regarding your edit, IMO they shouldn't be allowed to permaban your account for a bad driver without first warning you that you need to update it. Even if they use a fake reason for it, turning off windows update shouldn't be a bannable offense.
Once had a bank that decided that I had met a annual limit of foreign exchange swift orders and because of that I couldn’t receive my salary from the foreign company I worked for.
Sent then my contract, links to my face and name on the company’s about page and they simply decided I was probably some kind of terrorist or drug trafficker or whatever.
Thankfully was able to transfer the order to another bank and later sue the first bank and win
> "In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do."
This is literally the day-to-day of anyone trying to leverage their profile on any social media account. Endlessly chasing after the algorithm, trying to" hack it" by keeping up to date on its moods and preferences. As someone who used to roll that way, I can attest. The future has been around for years now.
Any time someone else has control of your content or you need them, they can get rid of you. It's not limited to Big Tech; I was 12 when COPPA went into effect and I lost everything online because I hadn't lied when I signed up (because it was perfectly legal for an elementary school kid to have things like an email address and web hosting). All my contacts/friends, all my work that wasn't stored locally (which was a fair amount), etc. Similarly to things like Tinder bans, there WAS an option in law for me to keep my accounts, but it would have required effort on behalf of the companies, so they just deleted everything.
Any centralization, policy, or algorithms that work based on an assumption of default/normal behavior will punish outliers (unless this is accounted for). This guy obviously was one such outlier for Tinder.
> In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do.
Assuming people understand the algorithms; there's an incentive on the part of companies to keep them opaque. It will be more akin to a religion where people GUESS which actions anger the algorithm and companies and get very mad when others don't agree. Which is worse.
This reminds me of my ban from Gumtree. I had issues making a post because I was using uMatrix which blocks (the malicious) reCAPTCHA that they use to block spam posts. With no errors about the missing reCAPTCHA script on the screen and just redirecting me to the submission after what seemed like a sever error, I just tried to resubmit my listing 3 times in a row. I got banned. I emailed them along the lines of "hey, I'm not a bot and I looked into it and it seems there's an issue with reCAPTCHA and error reporting". I got a response that for asking about ban and asking about reCAPTCHA, I was going to have my account, email address, and IP banned. What a joke.
So, basically, a reverse discrimination against people who know what's going on?
The same thing happens with corporate VPNs. I guess it only makes sense that Apartment.com doesn't want your business if you're making a bank at one of the larger companies who are big enough to require a VPN service!
Maybe a slight interest for now but in the future? No one will care. Todays generation is far more sex positive than previous - even if they’re getting laid way less than previous ones due to dating apps.
If that's the case they should ban half of their users who add their instagram handles in their profiles, and more than half of their very attractive users who do the same but make their app more desirable.
Something to do with where he'd travelled I would guess.
I lost an account a few years ago at the same time I was geospoofing on my phone for something totally unrelated. I guess it flagged on Tinder's side and that was that account gone. Fortunately I didn't think there was any soulmate lost as a result but I could see that being painful if I'd been talking to someone for a while.
On the other hand Tinder is going to be a huge target for romance scammers and other dodgy types and people on it are vulnerable so they've got to have a robust defence mechanism.
It's the lack of recourse to fair adjudication that is the problem - online dating is one of the most common ways of meeting a partner these days and the many platforms are owned by a couple of companies so getting blacklisted by Tinder could also see you barred from Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and PlentyOfFish - quite serious stuff if you're looking for a partner especially in the current climate.
Given the constant commodization of data science, I wonder how long it will take till there is a dating app that really knows you well, while keeping privacy in tact. And matches people with the goal to actually match properly.
Tinder, and every dating app I know out there, is directly incentivized to _not_ match properly, but rather to keep you on the app as long as possible.
As long as the bottom line is directly influenced by the amount of unmatched users, the dating app will not work with you, but rather against you.
I think you've answered your own question: probably never. Because whatever company would apply said commoditized data science would have the same incentives as Tinder and the rest.
So except for some "open source" or otherwise "community-driven" effort, I don't think we'll ever see it.
The issue with setting this up in your garage is that for such an app to work, you need to have many users. And to have many users, you have to spend cash on marketing, etc. So you have to be able to get that cash back somehow, and then some, for your efforts.
Imagine if a company had this business idea: If you get married to someone we introduce to you, you pay us 10000 USD. Else you pay us nothing. Would not that raise the bar?
It would really encourage people not looking for marriage to use the app for dating, since their use would be free. It would, of course, also result in the site taking steps to eliminate them, maybe even tolerating false positives. In the end would it produce good results? Dunno.
(Also would add legal complications most dating sites, regardless of model, don't deal with because of the Statute of Frauds in relation to contracts in consideration of marriage.)
Some of the modern Indian dating apps seem to follow this approach and do quite well. It’s likely more accepted there because of the tradition of arranged marriages. Western audiences might find it strange.
I believe that is the only way indeed. Though another commenter noted that these kinds of apps are heavily dependent on a network to work.
Perhaps it can be an extension on Mastodon somewhere in the future.
Matchmaking is such a generic problem anyway. Friends, Business relations, Vacancies, Partners, Sex buddies. We'll get there, I believe.
Yep. And Tinder seemed so useful just a few years ago. More recently, perhaps some management there has got together and changed to exactly the sort of strategy you speak of. I barely use it anymore.
But back in the golden days of Tinder... (say 7-8 years ago or so-- 2014ish) Tinder worked really well to deliver many matches. These days... very few matches compared to Bumble or Hinge for example.
Just head over to reveddit.com and look at a few controversial subreddits without the shadow-banning. It's truly terrifying to see the true scale of censorship and ghost-banning in big tech right now.
Oh man, I have been banned and shadowbanned from a ton of subs! Outright banned from SandersForPresident, politics, WhitePeopleTwitter, BlackPeopleTwitter, LateStageCapitalism, pics, mildlyinfuriating, and several others.
For some, I was calling out the echo-chamber of the whole place, those are the politics ones. Oh, and calling out a troll account.
I got banned from a number of subs for making comments documenting the bot-like behavior of karma farming accounts. Accounts with millions of karma, reposting low-quality content as if it's organic.
And it looks like I just got banned from /r/ActualPublicFreakouts for calling out a troll for their behavior.
reddit really is a pathetic place for anything other than hobby subs with about 150k members or less.
---
EDIT: I used reveddit and saw just how much of the posts I make are invisible. Not just by getting shadowbanned by hack mods on popular subs, but by other comments and submissions getting deleted for one reason or another. It's absolutely absurd.
The author makes that point, but follows up with a more important one: this is what you can expect from "the algorithm", whether it's Tinder, Facebook, your email service, or your bank. A few false positives are acceptable collateral damage, and it can be a serious inconvenience or worse. Tinder, he's out 12 bucks, but we've all heard of people with thousands of dollars in Paypal limbo for years.
I bet he could get back that $12 and more for his time and effort if he went to small claims court in the US. Or tell their card’s issuer to do a chargeback.
That's probably a good idea. If you want social media, go to the local mom and pop social medium in town here. Their artisanal activity feed is the best!
More seriously, at this point the options are:
- ethically-challenged social media full of relatives and friends
- unintuitive federated platform with no family but plenty of otherkin furfriends
- being left out of conversation and events you care about
I can't say to most people that choice 1 is excluded without being written off as unrealistic.
I jest but has anyone used Tinder recently? They have interactive choose your own adventure movies now, and then match you with people that made similar choices, instant ice breaker! But actually a decently fun episodic game with moderately high production value.
I’m surprised because Tinder was like the worst of all the mobile-first dating apps from my recollection.
How many Tinders is there? In my country they's pretty much only it, none of the other apps have any users (especially in my age range).
I'm also "kinda" banned on Tinder btw - or rather, my account got in an unusable state due to some bug, or an interaction between multiple bugs. The app literally barely works. How pathetic for a company this size. I feel sorry for anyone who has to work on their code base.
In my area, single people also use Hinge, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel, OKCupid, POF, Match... I'm fugly as hell but even I was able to find someone on a non-Tinder platform.
I don't think the author is claiming to be banned from every dating app, and I don't think Match Group connects the profiles of users across its owned platforms, so it's not really relevant that Tinder is owned by Match Group for the purposes of what happened to the author.
Did you read my last line? I did not suggest they do so now, but I do genuinely wonder how long until they do. It's a big issue that they have been allowed to control this market the way they do. It's somewhat tolerable today because they've avoided taking steps to call nsolidate them
. But also only for that reason.
Tinder doesn't control it, but Match as a whole definitely does in a whole lot of markets.
And yes, it'd be a massive problem if Tinder controlled it in that it'd put an unaccountable company in control of whether or not people get access. And one with a history of refusing to engage people who feel wronged.
If Match expands that to its other properties then it becomes a problem even if Tinder alone doesn't dominate.
This is presented as a problem with "big tech", but I don't think most people would consider Tinder (Match Group) to be big tech? Instead, this kind of problem where you get flagged with no explanation or recourse seems to be common to consumer tech of all but the smallest scale. It's just very expensive to provide high quality individual support.
Scale/expense is a reasonable excuse when the services are free. Not when you're paying.
It's a "Big Tech" problem. Lots of people have experienced getting randomly banned from services with no obvious cause, and no way to get any resolution. I'm banned from AirBNB for example. No clue why and there was nothing that could have triggered it, because I hadn't used the service for like over six months when the ban happened, there were no disputes or other problems with hosts and my last host review had been glowing. They didn't even tell me it'd occurred, but they had been sending emails thanking me for being a part of the "community" just weeks before. Then I tried to log in, got a verification screen, entered the code and was told the account was terminated. Filed an appeal, got no useful response and that was the end of it.
If it was a free service I'd understand, but I've paid good money to AirBNB over the years. If you pay you expect to be treated like a customer, not an enemy, but SV tech firms have all copied the culture of Facebook/Twitter/Google. They seem to forget that when people give money they expect some sort of customer relationship as a consequence.
maybe making money with a product that you cannot support ought to be regulated.
i too grew up with oss-licences that tell me i'm on my own and thats kind ok, but i don't want to live in a world were commercial products are labeled "not fit for any purpose. use at your own risk"
A couple of years ago Tinder only hid the profile pics with CSS in their web client so I installed a custom css to get the functionality you had to pay for free.
Unfortunately, as I recently got single again I discovered that this wasn't possible anymore.
To be more on topic, Tinder is a very american company. I haven't had personal issues with the company but I think their new features of weird matching from some shitty interactive videos is a sign of classic over-engineering. It seems like the app is "done". Maybe they should focus on creating something else than add useless features that no one seems to use ( at least where I am from ).
Where's your Tinder bio in this article? I can't imagine creating a new account and publishing something obscene on any social platform today without being flagged or worse.
That one is the key. Likely some analytics service (Facebook?) has his phone associated with country A (his country of origin), and Tinder sees the registration coming in from country B (new country). That mismatch then triggered some anti-fraud signalling.
People who frequently travel/change residences or have bases in more than one place seem to get banned or blocked by all kinds of services.
Regardless of the intentions of the people designing these systems, I’d argue this is textbook systemic discrimination; you face issues only due to being different enough in the “wrong” way.
I very much doubt a dating service would have this problem, as many people use dating services while traveling even if they wouldn't at home (either because of cheating or just knowing the scene better at home).
While this is true, romance scammers also often try to obscure/spoof their true location - so I can see why it'd be something the Tinder algos would be sensitive to
Just speaking from experience and anecdotes from others. I’m not arguing it makes business-sense. As the OP is arguing, the false positives are probably a small enough percentage of users that companies haven’t found it worthwhile to prioritize. And even if it is, it can be hard to tell from readily available data who’s a false positive in the first place when you don’t have a proper customer support organization.
His home country is Ukraine. Financial transactions and those representing Ukraine are considered to be scammers or money launderers by default by many banks and tech.
the tinder app, like pretty much all apps, is constantly calling graph.facebook.com while in use. Because the app doesn't work without Location access, FB gets a lot of rich location data every time the app is in use, but I don't believe the data being sent back can be utilized for fraud detection.
There's also calls out to crash-analytics, firebase, appsflyer and Google Analytics constantly. The app will function if all these services are blocked.
Or some of the photos he uploaded contained nudity. Or some parts of his profile or some of his photos were considered hate speech under the community guidelines. Or his profile was considered "self-promotional" (e.g. advertising his work or services) or contained addresses or other means of contacting him. We know nothing.
Usually banned users get feedback about being banned. The ones usually not getting feedback are spammers - they are being shadowbanned to avoid spammers being able to deduce their ban cause and circumvent the anti-spam measure.
You were already shadowbanned permanently, that's why you had 0 likes. There is no difference between that and having no account at all since you cannot interact with any broads. By removing your account, they did you a favour in a sense.
Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
> Get a burner SIM card with a new number and create another profile. Easy as that.
People keep saying this without realizing a lot of people practically can’t these days. In an increasing number of countries, getting an SMS/phone-capable SIM can not be done without KYC/ID verification. Where I live, for example, you even need to be a resident; all prepaids are data-only.
And before you tell me to find a homeless drug-addict and make them get one for me, it’s not that easy and no one should have to do that in the first place.
Same restrictions apply for SkypeIn and similar VoIP services (which BtW come in a separate prefix that most of these services blacklist anyway).
There’s a reason why those dodgy “receive anyonymous SMS” sites all only provide the same handful of countries.
Exactly. Some places, like the UK you can just order a bunch of SIMs from Amazon. Though who knows if they'll ban you again if you keep signing up from the same wifi and/or if their app fingerprints the same phone. But worst case is throaway cheap phones and pay as you go.
This is the correct answer. Rotate idents. Use a phone emulator if there is a hardware ban. Occasionally a VOIP phone number might work for account authentication, occasionally not though.
But people really forget that is an option to just walk to the nearest phone store and come out with a $20 sim for the month. Useful for way more than just trying to hook up on a dating app you got banned on.
This happened to me because I uploaded a picture holding a pepper from my garden that Tinder's AI flagged as phallic. To a human being, it was no more phallic than any other pepper and definitely not sexualized. Tinder refused to manually review the photo so I was banned with no recourse.
"Big tech permabanned me and doesn't mind false positives"
Isn't this often the case with humans minus the algorithm making the decision? Many times of the few times I've been in trouble, with HR, the law, or whatever authority you realize doing things that seem bad but aren't actually bad is almost as dangerous as doing something actually harmful because turns out humans aren't very good judges of ambiguous cases in low information environments.
Even when not ambiguous humans by and large don't have a good grasp of what is or isn't moral. And they typically show a large lack of empathic ability for how their actions will effect others.
Yeah, I'd say "whether humans are involved" isn't actually a good metric for whether abuse detection is fair / avoids screwing you over.
A better proxy would be "how much the company spends per user to detect false positives". Whether it's human oversight for each case, or engineering time spent fine-tuning algorithms to exclude known false positives, the more the company spends, the less it's going to screw you over.
(In practice, companies want to spend very little, which is why you get underpaid Mechanical-Turk workers and slapped-together detection systems.)
> It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application
That's literally how loan applications work now: banks compute all the information they can glean on you to determine a risk index.
Do something the algorithm has considered risky and you get charged more for the same amount of money another person can get. And the algorithm considers it "risky" to not use banks; if you have no history of having owned a credit card, for instance, the bank trusts you less than a person who has carried all manner of debt for years (but paid it down consistently).
Once a tech company has greater than, say, 60% market share, it probably makes sense for society to give the company an ‘I won’ sticker and start treating them some what like a utility.
Well, well, well. Let's recap some popular HN opinions that have surfaced lately:
What Problem Blockchains Solve
mrjin: centralized organizations are there for reasons, and block chain resolved none of them
The Web3 Fraud
endisneigh: In fact in the history of the internet I cannot find a single example of any technology working better in a decentralized fashion compared to centralized for the end user
The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger
Stephen Diehl: Any application that could be done on a blockchain could be better done on a centralized database. Except crime.
I have a gut feeling that Americans care more about this than Ukrainians themselves. I am no fan of russia and using the "incorrect" spelling kiev instead of kyiv doesn't imply that IMO.
Gut feeling is not the best thing to rely on in these situations, because there is a chance of jumping into a prejudice. It all depends on a large number of factors which you have to understand before making any conclusions
I will not go proactively into explaining why, but I will be happy to provide you with some resources if you are interested to dive in deeper into this topic
Into what topic? I have no problems using Kyiv if that's what Ukranians want. I do not require any other explanation or further discussion. I am just no that politically correct that I care either way.
Curious what OP may have done "wrong", I read a bit of the Tinder TOS and found this juicy nugget:
> YOU UNDERSTAND THAT TINDER DOES NOT CONDUCT CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS ON ITS MEMBERS OR OTHERWISE INQUIRE INTO THE BACKGROUND OF ITS MEMBERS. TINDER MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE CONDUCT OR COMPATIBILITY OF MEMBERS. TINDER RESERVES THE RIGHT TO CONDUCT – AND YOU AUTHORIZE TINDER TO CONDUCT – ANY CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK OR OTHER SCREENINGS (SUCH AS SEX OFFENDER REGISTER SEARCHES) AT ANY TIME USING AVAILABLE PUBLIC RECORDS OBTAINED BY IT OR WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF A CONSUMER REPORTING AGENCY, AND YOU AGREE THAT ANY INFORMATION YOU PROVIDE MAY BE USED FOR THAT PURPOSE.
1. You understand that Tinder does not perform background checks.
2. Everything you provide to Tinder and everything Tinder can find out about you may be used to perform a background check at Tinder's whim.
Classic.
But, my guess is that he was ruled to be "spamming" because he sent evidence of liking a (probably fake) user more than once in an attempt to test if the app was working.
That combination seems not unreasonable - basically saying that you should have no expectation that they've performed a background check [and incurred costs] but that they reserve the right to perform them on any user at their own discretion should they decide to incur those costs.
Big Tech has nothing to do with it, as the tech is spreading everywhere, and to the governments as well.
I was filling out a government form for a relative of mine to get on a plane (Covid-19 regulations). After filling out all the relevant details, I got the negative answer "BOARDING DENIED" because "You are not in compliance with all the regulations".
It never said _which_ regulation of these "all" we weren't in compliance with, exactly.
It took me hours to get to an intelligent person in the ministry hotline, if we skip the "try again" and "try from another PC" and "you've tried too many times and so are banned" guys. After some convincing, they agreed to fill out the form for us. It turned out the system expects TWO vaccination dates, not one, to give its permission, although never says so clearly.
With Tinder, you can move to another platform, but when the government tech decides whether or not you're allowed to board the plane, they usually monopolize that.
The "big tech bad" complaints seem valid to me. Big tech companies are willing to accept a certain number of false positives, and that sucks for the people who are caught up in them. Algorithm-influenced decision-making is likely to lead people to change their behaviour to please the algorithm—one obvious example is the oceans of shitty content that we all have to wade through to find useful information because Google's algorithm has led to changes in publisher and writer behaviour.
The thing for me is keeping his money. If he signed up, and for whatever reason they decided they didn't want his business so they gave him a refund, I wouldn't love it but it wouldn't upset me much either.
But they can't decide they want the money but don't want to provide a service. I'm surprised to see comments defending this.
A typical complaint would be if he had done something wrong, but he send 0 messages, got no likes - so what could he have done wrong?
I had similar experiences with Tinder - I think their support team just bans people when they don't want to deal with them - without checking the account at all.
He didn't post screenshots of his profile so we have no idea what's on there, it's completely possible (likely, even) that his profile text did violate the TOS. Instant perma-ban might be a bit harsh but we have no reason to believe one side over the other and no evidence pointing either way.
Yeah all the insight in this article comes down to the sentence "The big tech does not mind having a few false positives." the next paragraph about people trying to please the algorithm is such drivel since companies rarely mention what their algorithms look for and people rarely go out of their way to please an algorithm (unless they have some level of insight into the algorithm and it affects their income, generally).
Anecdotally, I find myself thinking about what might make my accounts look like I'm up to something, and avoid it. Also anecdotally, I've seen others on HN talk about doing the same. People may not know what the algorithm is, but they can make some reasonable guesses at what it might take into account.
> In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do.
That's the real "Terminator" of today. It's not time-travelling killer robots (yet?). It's letting algorithms deciding the fate of humans. That's especially problematic if the developers of those algorithms don't even understand them (yes, I'm looking at you, neutral networks).
Tinder is one thing, but imagine some algorithm identifies you as a terrorist. E.g., via cameras at every airport. My favorite example is a couple that ordered a steam cooker and a backpack online. Some days later some federal agents knocked at their door. Apparently, these two items raise flags in their algorithms.
This sounds very behooving of a dating app: it preemptively gives 0 chances to the "iffy guy" and rejects them so the dating person doesn't have to. I am still not sure to what extent the problem is with this social norm vs. with how it is being "reflected" by Tinder.
This is pretty disturbing considering how necessary dating apps are today.
Let's say you get banned from Tinder and consequently Bumble. What do you do now? You can create fake accounts, but they'll eventually find you. Coffee Meets Bagel? Plenty of Fish? Match.com? Don't make me laugh.
It's already bad enough that women find it strange that a guy doesn't have an Instagram account (this has been my experience 90% of the time), but at least as someone who is dating you can work your way around that. But if you get shut out of even 1 of the few main dating apps, you've lost a massive pool of dates and potential life partners. Unless something has changed since my foray into that scene, these days those apps are pretty much a requirement for getting any meaning amount of dates.
I can't help but feel bad for the younger generations of today. I was fortunate to come of age during the tail end of where it was still largely acceptable to meet and approach women IRL while online dating was kind of a sideshow. Today, what were once the best places to meet other young single people, are not only where it's become unacceptable to meet new people at bars and clubs or meetups but they also are the places with the most COVID-masking (yes, this DOES affect attraction and being able to read the other person). For most young guys and girls, you're probably stuck with Tinder and Bumble unless you are a 9 or above.
The other day I got permabanned from Nextdoor, not because I did anything wrong, but because I didn't use my real name. Of course the name that I used is the name that I use in real life and as a professional. I logged in one day to find that I had absolutely no access to my account. There was no read-only access to my messages, my activity, settings, or anything. Just a page that said I'd been banned for not using my real name but that I could contact their customer service or whatever. Imagine if that happens to you on Tinder right as you're about to ask someone on a date, or to your Wells Fargo account as you just got a paycheck and are ready to make that big purchase.
Is this what dating is really like?? It sounds completely alien and scary to me; I met my now-wife when we were in college, by talking and having meals together and stuff like that. And we're not ancient, we're in our 30s. There must still be ways to form meaningful relationships without being entirely at the mercy of the app gods,
Just a side note - Instagram accounts are nice because they offer social proof. A lot of people feel more comfortable meeting a stranger one-on-one if they have some idea that the person has a life, friends, etc.
As for the rest, it sounds like speculative nonsense. I date and know a lot of people who actively date. There are more and better options today to meet more and better people - not less. Not by a longshot.
I think everyone knows that. Personally, I don't spend any time taking countless photographs of myself and my buddies eating and traveling. That's not me, and I think it's a little sad that people can't have any trust in strangers to the extent that they must look up a curated PR profile of them and believe that. Yes, the world has changed. That doesn't mean that everyone is better off that way just because 80+% will go in whatever direction the wind blows. Even if the inevtability of being strange for not being active on Instagram is something people should accept, it shouldn't be the deal breaker that it often seems to be.
> As for the rest, it sounds like speculative nonsense.
That's not particularly respectful.
> I date and know a lot of people who actively date. There are more and better options today to meet more and better people - not less. Not by a longshot.
"I think it's a little sad that people can't have any trust in strangers"
For women, dating is a process of meeting a larger, stronger person who is a member of a demographic responsible for nearly all sexual violence. If they want a little social proof before meeting a strange man alone, I fully understand. Obviously this goes both (all) ways, but is a bigger concern for women (at least the many women I have discussed this with over the years).
Sorry to be disrespectful. I was specifically talking about the idea that it is no longer possible/acceptable to meet people in person. Do you truly believe this? As I said, I know a lot of people who date actively, and they do still meet people when out and about. Sometimes it's a friend of a friend, sometimes a random person at a bar. One of my last serious relationships started when we met at a wedding. A good friend of mine seems to find dates by just stepping out the door! She's cute, but it's not like men are constantly fawning over her - she just tends to chat with strangers and sometimes that leads to dates! So I see this so much in my everyday life I find it strange when people (especially people who admit they are not dating in the current era) make claims about how dating does and does not work these days.
I got permabanned when I tried logging in from my phone with oss android installed. In Tinder's defense I imagine my phone's system might have looked similar to that of spammers leading to a false-positive, so I don't mind the ban itself.
What I do mind was that their official stance is that they don't reverse bans for any reason. Creating a new account is against their terms of service, so
in theory I am locked out of one of the primary ways my generation finds partners.
In the country I live, the competitors don't have user bases nearly large enough to compete so Tinder is effectively a monopoly. With Tinder's enormous market-power comes great responsibility, and they have in my eyes failed to live up to it.
It was not difficult to get around the ban, but I wanted to point out that doing so is not allowed. Having broken no terms-of-service, I can be banned with no means of recourse. That is extremely problematic even if it is possible to cheat the system.
> It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application...
It's happened with people's banks (or "banks"). Earlier this year the fintech middleman Chime began closing accounts without notice or giving customers whose accounts they closed access to their funds.[0]
>Big tech would be if your ban from tinder causes you to lose access to your email, your productivity tools, and your income.
Who you meet can radically change the trajectory of your life though, and if 99% of your demographic meets new people via tinder being banned can absolutely have an outsized impact on your life.
In my case I met someone normal, got married, had a child, and built a house in an area I never would have discovered had I not met them. I sometimes think how different my life would be if either of us hadn't checked our phones that night.
Tech is literally the infrastructure of the 21st century. Of course it matters and has a huge impact, I’m saying that this is true for much of the tech industry and doesn’t require the “big tech” qualifier.
This is the kind of thing you need an ombudsman for. Screwing over a small proportion of people, but still a lot of people, in a way that they can't reasonably pursue by themselves.
It's worth pointing out that there is an explanation for this set of responses from tinder that makes complete sense and is relatively non-dystopian: Someone submitted a complaint about the author from his past usage of tinder, maybe even one specifically designed to get him banned. Tinder would never disclose the cause in that case in order to protect the identity of the complainant, nor should they be expected to. But in either case they should not have continued to charge him...
False positives are indeed a major problem with bigtech. Just got into the situation myself when I was traveling to France and wanted to order some food with Deliveroo. Their antifraud systems banned me without any option to prove my legitimacy. Needless to say I just normally wanted to order something to eat, and I later used Uber Eats without any problems. Permanent ban without procedure to correct antifraud false positive (most likely due to my bank card issued outside of France).
Also, worth mentioning that I was banned after I have contacted the support because my orders were being rejected (this was my initial problem and the reason I contacted the support). It was the support team who banned me. This is a problem of its own: legitimate users should not be discouraged to contact the support.
This is actually wonderful (for him). Tinder is terrible. There's not enough space for a real profile (that nobody reads anyway) so everyone just goes based on pictures and humorous quips, leading to everyone becoming a stereotype. There's definitely no more than 6 different kinds of profiles on Tinder.
Go make friends in person and meet dates through normal social interactions. Sounds crazy but it has an impressive track record.
I am almost certain that Bumble shadow banned me as well (mostly over my past political and public spotlight). Switched to hinge, much better platform. I am very very bearish on Bumble, lots of fake profiles and shenanigans going on at Bumble.
Yup, I wonder if tinder noticed multiple accounts associated with the facebook/phone # he provided. I'd suspect they would proactively prevent you from creating a new account, but I've never used the service so perhaps you put in your facebook after the account is created or something, and that is when they got the multiple account signal? Or if he has a completely different name associated with his facebook account.
This was unique to PayPal in the previous decade since we were one of the few(only) tech platforms dealing with money then. Kinda fun to see other monetized tech platforms failing in spectacular ways. :)
the crazy thing is that most people meet online these days and since tinder and hinge are owned by the same media umbrella company and are the most popular dating apps, if you get banned from
both its like your are nearly banned from the dating pool. stay with me, while i realize this sounds ridiculous, things have drastically changed in the dating world. especially with covid-19 adding that extra layer of caution making "cold approaches" nearly obsolete
There’s a service called DoNotPay that helps file legal requests to unban you. They’re obviously not miracle workers, but I’m curious whether litigation would slow them down.
I know its only 12$ but I hope this guy aggressively tries to get it back. The only way we get support departments is if these fuckups become expensive.
How do we know they didn't violate the terms of service or community guidelines? It's entirely possible to do so simply by uploading photos and filling out your profile. Since they provide neither, it's impossible to tell whether the decision is justified or not. There are plenty of things I can think of that they could have done that would have required zero interactions but been in violation of the community guidelines[0].
Also I have no idea who this person is, their about page is empty and Google results are ambiguous at best, so I have no reason to trust their account of what happened.
The point about big tech seems tangential and isn't exactly a novel insight. As for this: "Of course, they cannot name you the reason as this could be later used against them and their proprietary algorithm. How could they?" This is not a problem with "big tech" but with lack of transparency and is a consumer protection issue. The GDPR for example requires automated rulings to offer the option to appeal and have the ruling be reviewed by a human. It would be trivial to change the law so consumers would have the right to be told which part of the ToS they allegedly violated if a contract is terminated over a ToS violation. But there is nothing about this problem that is unique to "big tech".
Unrelated side note: Friend of mine was about to marry this girl and as soon as she got her green card she dipped. Another friend of mine met some girl on Duo, bringing her to the states like hmm... do I tell him? Oh well.
Tinder is brutal though, not something I did great on.
FWIW I seldom got any likes on Tinder in USA. I would consider myself in the top 10% of my own country in height and looks but not the same in USA. I realized that US women do not consider me attractive at least based on limited data that a Tinder card shows.
Because Tinder is a woman's menu of fuck buddies and for that they aim at the top fraction of 1%. It's unreal but is where their fantasy is taking them.
I did something different. Moved back to my country, had an 'arranged' marriage and am content now. Work remotely and happy with it too. Funnier issue is that a lot of women of my race in USA did not want to date a first generation immigrant.I do not want to generalize and do social commentary but I hope we hear more comments from many sides of the story. Matchmaking is always going to be Darwinian in the extreme sense but the sense of low confidence it created in me when in USA was quite high.
As OP says - "It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application or a messenger that you use on a daily basis"?
This is the better world though. Would you rather have a dating app with no users or so many that they can't possibly fully investigate every false-positive?
If you have to worry about banks banning you, you maybe shouldn't be in a position where you need to take financial advice from HN comments and you're likely better off with cash than an unstable asset that you can't easily eliminate without involving a bank.
Banks ban you for joke comments in bank transfers or anything that alludes to drugs, sex work or gambling. Or for transferring remittances to your parents in a way some algorithm deemed to be "structuring" or "money laundering for terrorists".
PayPal bans you for whatever the fuck their AI decided on a whim.
I've been on HN for over eight and a half years now and help requests or complaint blog posts are routine here. One thing that's common is support staff that is either unreachable (Google) or doesn't have any freedom to reverse AI-caused bans / only is allowed to post canned responses (everyone else). The only way to get issues with big tech resolved these days is to raise a stink here on HN, even Twitter shitstorms seem to fly under the radar more and more.
All you need is an anonymous call to the police in the US to SWAT your house and get all money from your bank account taken away temporarily. There are multiple people who said that the only reason they didn't need to ask money from friends for lawyers is that they had some Bitcoin. It's all about preparing for worst case scenarios in your life, just like wearing a seatbelt.
Not grocery, but lawyer in the cas you want to get access to your money. Have you read about the process that happens when your house is SWAT-ted using an anonymous phone call?
Ya, that makes sense... But then how much should I save. It's so volatile that I would give multiple thoughts before saving anything close to a lawyers fee in bitcoin.
Maybe don't refer to women as "girls"? Unless you are seeking romance with girls. Either way, I'm suspicious already and can see why a service intended to match adults with other adults (i.e., not girls) would be creeped out by you.
the only time I heard people want 'girls' less infantilized was in professional contexts, this is not a professional context and is an equivalent colloquialism across genders. unit test passed.
Have you heard of "cultural differences"? Author is from Kiev. Now, I'm not Ukrainian, but in Polish refering to "women" as "dziewczyna" not "kobieta" in romantic setting would not be any weird.
That's not particularly unique to Ukrainian culture by any stretch of the imagination. Popular global culture, particularly western culture, typically shares that canard.
It’s common colloquial language. You wouldn’t call your coworkers “girls” in a meeting. But you could reasonably say you’re dating “this girl I met while hiking the Appalachian Trail” and it’s normative.
If y'all haven't looked at it yet, read up on the FCC's filing against Match. They knowingly prompt up tons of fake profiles, to get you engaged. Horrifically this has lead to romance scams being the number one source of fraud in the US. I had one particularly scary experience and after that I don't use any dating apps.
But it's worked out very well, I did have to move to a new city too, but I've been able to meet so many amazing girls in real life. I'm also in a much better place emotionally, if you're staring at your phone constantly waiting for box to message you, that's not good for your mind. Your mind. It makes everything 10 times of stressful, for fraction of the benefit.
When I actually meet someone, It was always someone who is in their mid-20s to 30s without a job. In real life, everyone I've gone out with has had a decent job, due to another scary experience I don't go out with people who aren't working.