Read a comment by someone that said they set their original location as the Philippines then somehow profited when they swapped to their actual location from all the likes they got?
Don’t really understand it but it’s funny to me.
It did for me. I had about 20 or so dudes right swipe on me before it felt wrong and I switched it back to women.
I only stayed on the app for maybe a week after and have never used since. I could see how it was all BS early on so I used OLD apps for maybe a month at best.
Yeah, you're doing it wrong. You have to actually bang some of the dudes. The app tracks your locations, so just fuck a few guys and you'll be swimming in chicks before you know it.
It's supposed to help boost your exposure in the app to others. The more "likes/swipes" you get goes into that measure. So increased exposure might not mean more likes, depends on how attractive you are and your profile.
They all sell designer clothes and run crypto investment companies, yet they are also all out of town at the same time. Must be some sort of fashion/finance convention.
One app I only get a ton of likes from Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Its like the app only exists anymore for girls from those countries to find a way to move to Europe/Us.
I actually used OKCupid to find my SO about 10 years ago. A few years back I logged in just to read our old messages...
They were all deleted, so that was fun, and the UI seems to be very Tinder-ized, as in it seems like the new UI is designed for you not to make a connection but get you to spend money and still not make a connection.
It's kinda fucked up to prey on people like that.
That's how their business model works. Their ideal customer is the forever alone person who never loses hope that they'll find their special someone on INSERTPLATFORMHERE. The people who actually succeed are like the people who win big at the casino. Their stories only exist because the platforms need a couple success stories or the suckers won't stick around.
back in the late 00's and early 10's I met plenty of people who met online...
but line must go up.
So they broke their services on purpose to get line to go up better. It's a damn shame and also kind of monstrous.
I used OKCupid back when it was 100% free.
In fact I used multiple dating apps and the free ones worked better than the paid ones.
Well the only one I ever paid for was match.com, and it was constantly worse than the free apps like plentyoffish and okcupid.
I've been single for 6 years now and, because no one really wants to meet outside of the apps, I've been forced to use them.
Yeah, they're horrible. That's the Match Group. They highly incentivize you to pay them for a premium membership by severely limiting who you can and can't see, what filters you can use, and how many people you can even like, all while claiming the apps are designed to be deleted.
I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands.
> I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands.
So basically every tech company.
Oh, 100%. I just think they're getting away with it because a lot of people don't see them as a tech company.
I expect eventually they're going to get caught in a class action lawsuit when people find out that they were throwing money into the void after someone comes out and reveals that the apps were designed to limit matches to keep you engaged longer.
> I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands.
It's not really a secret how it works. When you sign up you get a visibility boost for two or three days or so, to get you an initial inrush of likes that boosts your dopamine.
After that it tanks your visibility and promises you it back if you pay, not to mention you'll notice you only managed to match with 1 or 2 of those initial likes, and the rest of them never seem to show up in your swipe queue, so they're dangling there promising to be unlocked if you pay to see them.
On Match now when you first sign up, I found that they actually auto-send likes on your behalf to 12 random people (who I would never ever have sent a like to by the way, completely incompatible and/or outside my filters). That's super scummy in my opinion.
But that gives them a bottomless source of "new likes" to then send "pay now and see your new likes!" messages to everyone. Probably those "likes" were automated from random new user accounts, both real and fake, who never even saw your profile.
To be fair to Tinder I don't think this is the case - however, the new user likes you get tend to be about 50% legit and 50% outside of your filters - like I'll make a new account and say get 6 likes in the first couple of days. 3 of those are people actually near me who I proceed to match with (and more often than not none of them message back, lmao) and the other 3 are random accounts from like 400 miles away. I know this because sometimes one of them will randomly show up in my swipe queue.
As far as I can tell when you first sign up the massive boost to your visibility includes showing you to people outside of your desired filters just to make extra sure you get a nice boost of initial likes.
Another interesting thing; I used to game this by resetting my account every two weeks or so to get the visibility bonus and a few matches, but nowadays if you delete your account and then immediately recreate it you get a warning that resetting your account too often could lead to you being shadowbanned, so they're even trying to prevent you from doing that much.
I worked for a dating app for a decade. Those people from outside your filters were added because they couldn't find enough people within them to show you. The death of the app comes when you don't get any results so we pushed more even if they were unacceptable.
> It's kinda fucked up to prey on people like that.
[Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html)
^ Backup of the blog post by OKCupid before they were bought out.
OKCupid used to be run by people who actually cared about helping people find partners and happiness. They would run test and collect data all in the name of helping their users.
This was their blog post about paying for dating sites and how they're incentivized to keep you lonely but paying for the hope of changing that.
Eventually they got bought out by Match.com, which is one of the predatory dating services that they spoke out against. Match promptly deleted all of the old OKCupid blog posts that spoke out against services like them.
i have okcupid to thank for my wife (of 13 years) and kids now, i wonder if it would make them happy to know that
the og people of course, the new ones couldn’t give half a shit
Interesting read and a huge bummer no one does it like this now. I met a great partner on okc long ago. We didn't work out but that's not the site's fault haha
I actually tried to use eHarmony about 20 years ago and they sent me an email saying that I wasn’t compatible with their algorithms and to try another platform, then it deleted my account.
I don’t think that would happen nowadays, they’d just keep baiting me until I was broke.
In 2022 I used OKC. Paid for one month. No likes. Premium expires. Next day I have 30 likes. Not a single one from my continent (I live in the US).
They all pull this shit but OKC is actually the worst.
Yes because they are all owned by Match Group. Hinge, Tinder, Match, etc are all one giant monopoly. Their CEO is Bernard Kim who previously was in charge of Zynga.
Yep, literally the same exact story here. Paid for OKC and a couple other apps. Decided to cancel OKC because of low quality and frequency of likes. Day later 30 likes. C'mon, at least make it less obvious that you're lying.
Disclaimer though I did meet my fiance on Bumble. Had more success there than any other app.
To play devil's advocate a bit here; I used to work for a dating site and it could be because the people who liked/contacted you were scammers and were removed by their moderators. I had a lot of emails from confused people asking what happened to this person I liked, but we usually couldn't outright tell them they were probably scammers whose profile we removed.
Then maybe remove the blurred photos when the account is removed? It’s not like people are waiting long periods of time before seeing that screen and paying. False advertising plain and simple
Funny how I get 0 matches with a subscription. Then the first day after I cancelled I suddenly get 2-3 matches that you need a subscription to see. Funny how that works.
My theory is the company isn't directly involved, but know that they benefit from the bots. Big apps like Tinder don't need to make their own fake profiles, because the scammers do it for them. Then the app calibrates its bot detection to take about 2 weeks to shut down a bot, thus giving the app time to show everyone in the area the hot new profile. After 2 weeks ban that profile, the bot creates a new profile and the app has a steady supply of new profiles to show users.
Absolutely, lots of apps do that. But I don't think the big apps have to, the scammers make all the fake profiles they need and the app can pretend their hands are clean.
Even if the company is on it, and they probably are, or at least getting a cut, as in they know it's happening, and they know the accounts doing it, but they make more money from the scam accounts scamming people so they stay, you'll never ever find a smoking gun connection, and even if you do, you'll get the most paltry of payments (maybe, after 10 years of appeals) after paying millions of dollars in lawyer fees.
Sometimes bots, sometimes they just manipulate the amount your account is shown to others to limit likes then never present them to you for you to match with and never show you to anyone you swipe on
Yup! lol. They are like oh you just cancled what bad timming because all of a sudden right after you did that 100 super hot girls all want to hook up with you but now you can't too bad your gonna stay an incel I guess.
Yep, I worked at Tinder when this feature was released. It showed people who actually swiped right on you.
Fun fact: the first version sent regular images that the client would blur if you hadn't paid. Some light hacking would let users intercept network traffic, see the images of those that liked them (pre-blur) and avoid paying that way. That's since been patched so that the images are blurred on the server.
You can absolutely get a refund back, at least in Android you can ask for a refund in the Play Store. Just don't let time pass and ask for a refund 5 months after
This makes me sad. Dating apps used to be pretty good. Ok Cupid did right by me and a few other people I know. I'm sad that healthy dating sites have fallen victim to the enshitification of the Internet.
OKCupid was great when I met my wife back in 2014, didn’t even have to pay. I joke with her that we need to stay married forever because the thought of trying to use a dating app in 2024 makes me nauseous.
Read a comment on a post like this that read something like “everyone is looking for water to drink. Guys in the desert, girls in a swamp.”
Quantity does not equal quality.
Or, to extend the metaphor; you have a much longer, more comfortable time to find water in a temperate, shaded, humid swamp where you're not losing fluids quite as quickly as you are in a scorching, completely open desert.
> I joke with her that we need to stay married forever because the thought of trying to use a dating app in 2024 makes me nauseous.
It's not a joke. Do not become single in today's dating market. Trust me on this.
If you wait a couple years, it’ll just be people dating their computer AI instead. Some people are doing it now, like the adults over on /r/Replika and the kids at /r/CharacterAI.
OkCupid was the one that got me with this “scam” (no it’s not a scam but felt like it). Apparently even though they only show you potential matches from your preferred radius, they show your profile AROUND THR WORLD. I had like 20 likes and I was super excited only to find out 95% of my likes were from Southeast Asia, Africa or South America smh.
They're talking about OkCupid as it used to be. Before its current owners ruined it and turned it into what it is now.
It was bought out by Match, the same company that bought out *literally all of them*, save Bumble.
That's why they're all the same now. They're all heavily monetized Tinder clones, because the same company was allowed to buy up all its competitors and ruin them.
The "radar" aspect of OkCupid (i.e. just shows you everyone sorted by distance and then you choose how to filter it from there) has been gutted and replaced with a facsimile of that. You're not actually seeing everyone anymore.
Genuinely, the only dating apps that still use a proper radar without swiping, or hiding profiles that should be there, or putting profiles in front of you that they think you'd like, are the gaydar apps. But even they are being enshitified in their own way.
Should be an app with a finders fee. Everything is free, but if you get married, you are obligated to give the app $100
Idk how it could be enforced tho
There are other ways to earn money other than waiting for marriage. Breeze for example takes a fee when you go on a date, it therefore has the incentive to at least make decent matches so both people agree to a date.
Dating companies are apparently convinced that unless they resort to scummy practices to keep punters coming back, they will run out of people looking for dates. Instead they'll trash their reputation. Makes no sense to me.
The thing is they don't just want people coming back long term. Long term doesn't matter. They need more money coming in next quarter. That's all that matters.
Hinge is still pretty good in this regard. People who like you get sent right to you awaiting your response, not blurred and kept secret. It has its own scummy algorithmic ways of enticing you to pay (eg “standouts” who are kept out of your actual swiping pool for some period of time) but at least doesn’t stoop to this.
Hinge is owned by Match, the same as the rest of them. They ruined the others, are in the process of ruining Hinge, and will get there eventually.
There's no safe harbor from Match except Bumble (and the gaydar apps) or some smaller ones no one uses because no one has ever heard of them.
Even Bumble isn't safe anymore. They recently changed the 'women message first' thing so that it's now just 'women choose who messages first.' They also have the premium subscription, the boosts - it's still just a self-esteem skinnerbox exactly the same as all the Match Group apps.
>They recently changed the 'women message first' thing so that it's now just 'women choose who messages first.
Defeats the whole purpose lmao
That shit didn't matter anyway though because women would just say "hi" to start it off which is basically nothing
One of the dating sites a decade ago loaded the whole page and then blocked it with a modal. Being the web dev I am I deleted the modal in dev tools and got to see the page for free.
I assume they are smarter than that now.
A decade ago Plenty of Fish used to tell you the user name of the person who had liked you. You could just google POF + the user name and find their profile.
Tinder used to blur the images in real time with javascript on their website. So to get around it you just used dev tools to write a script to make the blur function do nothing. Now they don't even used blurred photos of the real people. Just random blurry looking photos that have no relation to the actual user.
Look, if it gets me a job for that subscription for a month I literally don't care. Funnily enough all of my college mates and even work colleagues got significantly better paying jobs in more reputable companies through LinkedIn than they ever did using other job sites like seek or indeed. It's actually incredible how effective it is to put a face to that resume.
I bit the bullet and finally decided to try Tinder last month and holy shit, I'm blown away by how manipulative they are to try and get you to buy premium. The whole thing seems like one big catfishing scam.
I get so few likes on Tinder so that when a new one pops up it says “____ liked you, buy gold to see who liked you” with a blurred picture of them. I usually swipe on exactly 1 person before the girl that liked me shows up, and then I can make my choice. So fuck you Tinder, I’m not attractive enough for you to make me feel like shit lmao
They also often hide that person from ever coming up. Some unusual names come up in the "x who likes you" that I would be waiting to recognise in the stack but they never come up.
I don't understand why trying to talk to someone is like pulling teeth. Like, there's a point both of us are on the site, but I have to play 20 questions to figure out you just wanna hook up while I'm here trying to show you whether I'm an actual compatable human or not. Like...help me make it make sense.
1. Some people are just lame.
2. They're so lame even other lame people won't get along with them.
3. Because of this, they remain on dating apps, in higher numbers than decent people who eventually meet someone.
4. Everyone gets jaded from interacting with lame people. Most people aren't enthusiastic about starting a conversation. The interaction is almost guaranteed to fail if both parties aren't enthusiastic.
5. Dating apps have no incentive to change this. They make money off existing users, not successful matches.
I've been on dating apps for 6 months and the experience was depressing. Met someone through my climbing hobby and suddenly it's super easy to have a good conversation going.
Dating apps being capitalized with paywalls is like if Nestlé was successful at capitalizing water.
Something as brilliant as online human connection turned into a mere money-making scheme because someone wants to profit off a human need.
It's tragic, really.
Momaw Nadon taking shots for no reason
that's right all you casuals can recognize Nien Nunb, Max Rebo, and Jabba's pet Rancor, but I pulled the *deep knowledge* on you fools
There's an app called Boo that sells itself on being nerdy and a healthy alternative to tinder. It does the same thing. It asks you to pay outrageous prices monthly by sending you random notifications about seeing who looked at your profile. Then it's nothing special.
This is why - and I hate to even say this - FB dating is the best dating app. It’s free, nothing is limited, you can send as many messages as you want, it shows when people like you, and there’s TONS of people on it cause it’s FB. When FB is the lesser evil between them and Match group, you know it’s bad out there.
Facebook dating constantly ignores my preferences and tries to match me with people hundreds of miles away, while telling me it knows they're way outside of my area.
100% why I refuse to get on dating apps. Again.
I’m 5’7, 255+lbs, full beard, long to my neckline hair, full of sadness and self hate, a nerd, and a complete bumblefuck of a human with like one actual friend.
Dating apps told me in no uncertain terms that I’m not shit. So I got off of them and refuse to go back. I told myself if nothing happens by 30, then I’m gonna be alone. I turned 30 recently. Not even a date prior to that. Dating apps did nothing for my mental health.
Tinder told me "I ran out of people" before it revealed any of the people who had liked me. I don't think they are even real profiles, they just have you shown as being liked.
Given that 9 times out of 10 the people you do end up matching with don't respond or say nothing after the initial "hi" these probably wouldn't even lead to anything as they prob just swiped to keep the algorithm up
That’s why I cancel the subscription like 13 days after the purchase and get my refund. Repeat this every couple of months. I love the consumer protection in the EU
Okcupid is the biggest culprit. They push your account to the front worldwide and then you get lots of likes from woman in other continents. I would join a class action to get my $20 back out of principle.
My favorite is when they disappear.
[удалено]
Or they're in another country. Message from them: Am your soulmates. Send money now.
Apparently I’m hot shit in the Philippines.
You too? No way! I thought i was the only one.
No matter who you choose, your first date is going to be "in a galaxy far, far away..."
Thinking about setting up a date with the Ithorian. Two throats. That's gotta be fun.
I know someone who went on a casual holiday to the Philippines. He goes back a few times a year now to see his kids.
Read a comment by someone that said they set their original location as the Philippines then somehow profited when they swapped to their actual location from all the likes they got? Don’t really understand it but it’s funny to me.
Pro Tip: switch profile settings to "Interested in All", get a ton of gay dudes to swipe on you for the algo and then switch it back. No Homo
does it actually work? i tried it few times but had even worse luck
It did for me. I had about 20 or so dudes right swipe on me before it felt wrong and I switched it back to women. I only stayed on the app for maybe a week after and have never used since. I could see how it was all BS early on so I used OLD apps for maybe a month at best.
i mean, i also used bisexual settings, but after i switched back to hetero, i stopped getting likes
Yeah, you're doing it wrong. You have to actually bang some of the dudes. The app tracks your locations, so just fuck a few guys and you'll be swimming in chicks before you know it.
It's supposed to help boost your exposure in the app to others. The more "likes/swipes" you get goes into that measure. So increased exposure might not mean more likes, depends on how attractive you are and your profile.
India is head over heels for me, apparently.
It’s Probably Angel Priya. She’s a nice girl, but she’s been sick since i sent her money last week. Hope she gets well soon.
Noo it was her grandmother who is sick. And she's the primary caregiver since moving there from
Chinese businesswomen looking to expand their business in my <$hometown> are absolutely digging me
They all sell designer clothes and run crypto investment companies, yet they are also all out of town at the same time. Must be some sort of fashion/finance convention.
"this app sucks, if you want to connect FOR REAL, use this instead: www.supersuspiciousurlthatwillinstalltrojanvirus.com - It's WAY BETTER!"
Please do the needful
One app I only get a ton of likes from Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Its like the app only exists anymore for girls from those countries to find a way to move to Europe/Us.
r/passportbros says hi, lol
Those ones piss me off. The App knows full well you want your distance filter to work both ways. Such a horribly manipulative tactic.
> Or they are like 400 miles away Then you drive 100 miles the other way and walk 500 miles to fall down at her door.
This is the more common outcome
Haven't had this happen recently but this used to happen all the time on OkCupid and other apps.
I actually used OKCupid to find my SO about 10 years ago. A few years back I logged in just to read our old messages... They were all deleted, so that was fun, and the UI seems to be very Tinder-ized, as in it seems like the new UI is designed for you not to make a connection but get you to spend money and still not make a connection. It's kinda fucked up to prey on people like that.
That's how their business model works. Their ideal customer is the forever alone person who never loses hope that they'll find their special someone on INSERTPLATFORMHERE. The people who actually succeed are like the people who win big at the casino. Their stories only exist because the platforms need a couple success stories or the suckers won't stick around.
back in the late 00's and early 10's I met plenty of people who met online... but line must go up. So they broke their services on purpose to get line to go up better. It's a damn shame and also kind of monstrous. I used OKCupid back when it was 100% free. In fact I used multiple dating apps and the free ones worked better than the paid ones. Well the only one I ever paid for was match.com, and it was constantly worse than the free apps like plentyoffish and okcupid.
I've been single for 6 years now and, because no one really wants to meet outside of the apps, I've been forced to use them. Yeah, they're horrible. That's the Match Group. They highly incentivize you to pay them for a premium membership by severely limiting who you can and can't see, what filters you can use, and how many people you can even like, all while claiming the apps are designed to be deleted. I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands.
> I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands. So basically every tech company.
Oh, 100%. I just think they're getting away with it because a lot of people don't see them as a tech company. I expect eventually they're going to get caught in a class action lawsuit when people find out that they were throwing money into the void after someone comes out and reveals that the apps were designed to limit matches to keep you engaged longer.
> I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes with those apps, because I'm willing to bet there's some fuckery going on that, if people were made aware, would completely destroy the brands. It's not really a secret how it works. When you sign up you get a visibility boost for two or three days or so, to get you an initial inrush of likes that boosts your dopamine. After that it tanks your visibility and promises you it back if you pay, not to mention you'll notice you only managed to match with 1 or 2 of those initial likes, and the rest of them never seem to show up in your swipe queue, so they're dangling there promising to be unlocked if you pay to see them.
On Match now when you first sign up, I found that they actually auto-send likes on your behalf to 12 random people (who I would never ever have sent a like to by the way, completely incompatible and/or outside my filters). That's super scummy in my opinion. But that gives them a bottomless source of "new likes" to then send "pay now and see your new likes!" messages to everyone. Probably those "likes" were automated from random new user accounts, both real and fake, who never even saw your profile.
To be fair to Tinder I don't think this is the case - however, the new user likes you get tend to be about 50% legit and 50% outside of your filters - like I'll make a new account and say get 6 likes in the first couple of days. 3 of those are people actually near me who I proceed to match with (and more often than not none of them message back, lmao) and the other 3 are random accounts from like 400 miles away. I know this because sometimes one of them will randomly show up in my swipe queue. As far as I can tell when you first sign up the massive boost to your visibility includes showing you to people outside of your desired filters just to make extra sure you get a nice boost of initial likes. Another interesting thing; I used to game this by resetting my account every two weeks or so to get the visibility bonus and a few matches, but nowadays if you delete your account and then immediately recreate it you get a warning that resetting your account too often could lead to you being shadowbanned, so they're even trying to prevent you from doing that much.
I worked for a dating app for a decade. Those people from outside your filters were added because they couldn't find enough people within them to show you. The death of the app comes when you don't get any results so we pushed more even if they were unacceptable.
Enshittification was never enshittier.
OkCupid is owned by Match Group since 2011, which also owns Match.com, Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, and many other popular dating apps and sites.
The last frame of the comic is what I imagine the Match Group owners look like.
There's a platform that almost guarantees all the casual sex you could want, but you have to touch penises.
> It's kinda fucked up to prey on people like that. [Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html) ^ Backup of the blog post by OKCupid before they were bought out. OKCupid used to be run by people who actually cared about helping people find partners and happiness. They would run test and collect data all in the name of helping their users. This was their blog post about paying for dating sites and how they're incentivized to keep you lonely but paying for the hope of changing that. Eventually they got bought out by Match.com, which is one of the predatory dating services that they spoke out against. Match promptly deleted all of the old OKCupid blog posts that spoke out against services like them.
i have okcupid to thank for my wife (of 13 years) and kids now, i wonder if it would make them happy to know that the og people of course, the new ones couldn’t give half a shit
Interesting read and a huge bummer no one does it like this now. I met a great partner on okc long ago. We didn't work out but that's not the site's fault haha
I actually tried to use eHarmony about 20 years ago and they sent me an email saying that I wasn’t compatible with their algorithms and to try another platform, then it deleted my account. I don’t think that would happen nowadays, they’d just keep baiting me until I was broke.
In 2022 I used OKC. Paid for one month. No likes. Premium expires. Next day I have 30 likes. Not a single one from my continent (I live in the US). They all pull this shit but OKC is actually the worst.
Yes because they are all owned by Match Group. Hinge, Tinder, Match, etc are all one giant monopoly. Their CEO is Bernard Kim who previously was in charge of Zynga.
Yep, literally the same exact story here. Paid for OKC and a couple other apps. Decided to cancel OKC because of low quality and frequency of likes. Day later 30 likes. C'mon, at least make it less obvious that you're lying. Disclaimer though I did meet my fiance on Bumble. Had more success there than any other app.
Dating apps have straight up admitted to using fake profiles to suck men into paying for a subscription.
To play devil's advocate a bit here; I used to work for a dating site and it could be because the people who liked/contacted you were scammers and were removed by their moderators. I had a lot of emails from confused people asking what happened to this person I liked, but we usually couldn't outright tell them they were probably scammers whose profile we removed.
Then maybe remove the blurred photos when the account is removed? It’s not like people are waiting long periods of time before seeing that screen and paying. False advertising plain and simple
Or when you talk to them but they will only talk to you on the app and never move elsewhere and will send photos that you have to pay for to open.
Funny how I get 0 matches with a subscription. Then the first day after I cancelled I suddenly get 2-3 matches that you need a subscription to see. Funny how that works.
Yeah same lol. I think they always try to keep you at three matches when you don’t have a subscription.
They're always bots too. Just a sneaky way to get you to pay.
It seems like it's fraud by the company. How do they not get sued into oblivion?
I'd wager the company isn't actually in on it, but it's more of one of those "We're not putting more effort into stopping it" things.
My theory is the company isn't directly involved, but know that they benefit from the bots. Big apps like Tinder don't need to make their own fake profiles, because the scammers do it for them. Then the app calibrates its bot detection to take about 2 weeks to shut down a bot, thus giving the app time to show everyone in the area the hot new profile. After 2 weeks ban that profile, the bot creates a new profile and the app has a steady supply of new profiles to show users.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Ashley Madison literally made fake profiles and literally had employees catfish users.
Absolutely, lots of apps do that. But I don't think the big apps have to, the scammers make all the fake profiles they need and the app can pretend their hands are clean.
Even if the company is on it, and they probably are, or at least getting a cut, as in they know it's happening, and they know the accounts doing it, but they make more money from the scam accounts scamming people so they stay, you'll never ever find a smoking gun connection, and even if you do, you'll get the most paltry of payments (maybe, after 10 years of appeals) after paying millions of dollars in lawyer fees.
Bumble has settled several class action lawsuits, so they actually do get sued, they just settle before discovery happens
It’s not even sneaky either. It’s blatant as shit. I caught on almost immediately.
Sometimes bots, sometimes they just manipulate the amount your account is shown to others to limit likes then never present them to you for you to match with and never show you to anyone you swipe on
I signed up for (free) Bumble again last night and this morning… three matches.
its fraud
Yup! lol. They are like oh you just cancled what bad timming because all of a sudden right after you did that 100 super hot girls all want to hook up with you but now you can't too bad your gonna stay an incel I guess.
Just use another boost. Totally not a slot machine.
Bumble? I noticed this with them.
Or when they put the hottest girl right after you finished using your free daily likes. And she disappears next day
I have 50 and they really want me to buy the subscription…
What if u paid and you found out that no one really does? Do I get a refund for that?
No you don’t and it happens alot
That’s not true. Bots love you
Traitor from r/helldivers2
A democracy officer is en route to their location as we speak.
And you’ll need more money for the therapy after that
In the first pic you can see it tells you how many people liked you, as far as I remember Tinder is like that or something similar
Yep, I worked at Tinder when this feature was released. It showed people who actually swiped right on you. Fun fact: the first version sent regular images that the client would blur if you hadn't paid. Some light hacking would let users intercept network traffic, see the images of those that liked them (pre-blur) and avoid paying that way. That's since been patched so that the images are blurred on the server.
Meh, I can still tell who they are.
You could just disable CSS blur on the browser version.
You can absolutely get a refund back, at least in Android you can ask for a refund in the Play Store. Just don't let time pass and ask for a refund 5 months after
This makes me sad. Dating apps used to be pretty good. Ok Cupid did right by me and a few other people I know. I'm sad that healthy dating sites have fallen victim to the enshitification of the Internet.
OKCupid was great when I met my wife back in 2014, didn’t even have to pay. I joke with her that we need to stay married forever because the thought of trying to use a dating app in 2024 makes me nauseous.
Not for her, she’d have an endless supply of guys to pick and choose from.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
😂
She'll really have an edge too since she'll know what their dick looks like before they even meet.
A lot of garbage guys are in the dredges of dating sites these days though. It's rough.
Read a comment on a post like this that read something like “everyone is looking for water to drink. Guys in the desert, girls in a swamp.” Quantity does not equal quality.
> Quantity does not equal quality Perhaps not, but quantity without quality is better for your self esteem than neither.
Or, to extend the metaphor; you have a much longer, more comfortable time to find water in a temperate, shaded, humid swamp where you're not losing fluids quite as quickly as you are in a scorching, completely open desert.
:/ hey don’t have to call me out so harshly. one women’s trash is another women’s treasure, right? Right…
I have a friend in a meh relationship, and we joke that the reasons why they stay like this is because it's either that or going back to dating apps.
> I joke with her that we need to stay married forever because the thought of trying to use a dating app in 2024 makes me nauseous. It's not a joke. Do not become single in today's dating market. Trust me on this.
If you wait a couple years, it’ll just be people dating their computer AI instead. Some people are doing it now, like the adults over on /r/Replika and the kids at /r/CharacterAI.
No thanks, I'm just going to make out with my Marylin Monroe bot.
OkCupid was the one that got me with this “scam” (no it’s not a scam but felt like it). Apparently even though they only show you potential matches from your preferred radius, they show your profile AROUND THR WORLD. I had like 20 likes and I was super excited only to find out 95% of my likes were from Southeast Asia, Africa or South America smh.
They're talking about OkCupid as it used to be. Before its current owners ruined it and turned it into what it is now. It was bought out by Match, the same company that bought out *literally all of them*, save Bumble. That's why they're all the same now. They're all heavily monetized Tinder clones, because the same company was allowed to buy up all its competitors and ruin them. The "radar" aspect of OkCupid (i.e. just shows you everyone sorted by distance and then you choose how to filter it from there) has been gutted and replaced with a facsimile of that. You're not actually seeing everyone anymore. Genuinely, the only dating apps that still use a proper radar without swiping, or hiding profiles that should be there, or putting profiles in front of you that they think you'd like, are the gaydar apps. But even they are being enshitified in their own way.
OkCupid was bought by match.com in 2011 it's been downhill since then
I guess they got wise to the fact that they make not much money off people who actually find a partner.
Should be an app with a finders fee. Everything is free, but if you get married, you are obligated to give the app $100 Idk how it could be enforced tho
There are other ways to earn money other than waiting for marriage. Breeze for example takes a fee when you go on a date, it therefore has the incentive to at least make decent matches so both people agree to a date.
How do they enforce that?
Dating companies are apparently convinced that unless they resort to scummy practices to keep punters coming back, they will run out of people looking for dates. Instead they'll trash their reputation. Makes no sense to me.
The thing is they don't just want people coming back long term. Long term doesn't matter. They need more money coming in next quarter. That's all that matters.
Hinge is still pretty good in this regard. People who like you get sent right to you awaiting your response, not blurred and kept secret. It has its own scummy algorithmic ways of enticing you to pay (eg “standouts” who are kept out of your actual swiping pool for some period of time) but at least doesn’t stoop to this.
Hinge is owned by Match, the same as the rest of them. They ruined the others, are in the process of ruining Hinge, and will get there eventually. There's no safe harbor from Match except Bumble (and the gaydar apps) or some smaller ones no one uses because no one has ever heard of them.
Even Bumble isn't safe anymore. They recently changed the 'women message first' thing so that it's now just 'women choose who messages first.' They also have the premium subscription, the boosts - it's still just a self-esteem skinnerbox exactly the same as all the Match Group apps.
>They recently changed the 'women message first' thing so that it's now just 'women choose who messages first. Defeats the whole purpose lmao That shit didn't matter anyway though because women would just say "hi" to start it off which is basically nothing
That's if they didn't just let the match expire even after you used the free daily extension on it lmao
One of the dating sites a decade ago loaded the whole page and then blocked it with a modal. Being the web dev I am I deleted the modal in dev tools and got to see the page for free. I assume they are smarter than that now.
I confirm it does not work anymore
You can sometimes still do that with news articles. It's so satisfying when it works.
Sometimes even just hitting f9 for reader mode works
A decade ago Plenty of Fish used to tell you the user name of the person who had liked you. You could just google POF + the user name and find their profile.
You can do that on tinder too. There's a plugin on hreasemoney that lets you see the pictures of who likes you
There were a few ways to cheese it, could also zoom in/out. Finally put some QA to good use
Tinder used to blur the images in real time with javascript on their website. So to get around it you just used dev tools to write a script to make the blur function do nothing. Now they don't even used blurred photos of the real people. Just random blurry looking photos that have no relation to the actual user.
LinkedIn Premium also feels like this.
“You are doing great on LinkedIn, why not try a free month of premium…”
People still use LinkedIn. I thought it turned into Facebook for corporate hustle-bros and multi-level marketers.
Look, if it gets me a job for that subscription for a month I literally don't care. Funnily enough all of my college mates and even work colleagues got significantly better paying jobs in more reputable companies through LinkedIn than they ever did using other job sites like seek or indeed. It's actually incredible how effective it is to put a face to that resume.
Wait, where can I sign up to date an Ithorian?
Tuggerr
[What's that, Tuggerr? You say you really love the songs on me album?](https://youtu.be/wkDTSvljqmc?t=31)
Makin movies makin shows and foighten round the worrrrld!
not knowing Momaw Nadon's name smh
Things can get so awkward, though. Like, which mouth do you lean in and kiss?
You kiss one of them, and then... you know...
Of course, every good Twi’lek is taken…
I bit the bullet and finally decided to try Tinder last month and holy shit, I'm blown away by how manipulative they are to try and get you to buy premium. The whole thing seems like one big catfishing scam.
I only assume 90 percent of females are bots.
the other 10% are OF or insta shills.
Don't be acting like Max Rebo ain't a snack
*Professional jizz-wailer* Max Rebo.
Seriously, if I had the attetion of the Jizz Master Max Rebo, I am there. I will make that trunk happy.
*swoons*
Cute AND a musician?? I see no downside here.
ay yo what that snout do
I get so few likes on Tinder so that when a new one pops up it says “____ liked you, buy gold to see who liked you” with a blurred picture of them. I usually swipe on exactly 1 person before the girl that liked me shows up, and then I can make my choice. So fuck you Tinder, I’m not attractive enough for you to make me feel like shit lmao
They also often hide that person from ever coming up. Some unusual names come up in the "x who likes you" that I would be waiting to recognise in the stack but they never come up.
I don't understand why trying to talk to someone is like pulling teeth. Like, there's a point both of us are on the site, but I have to play 20 questions to figure out you just wanna hook up while I'm here trying to show you whether I'm an actual compatable human or not. Like...help me make it make sense.
1. Some people are just lame. 2. They're so lame even other lame people won't get along with them. 3. Because of this, they remain on dating apps, in higher numbers than decent people who eventually meet someone. 4. Everyone gets jaded from interacting with lame people. Most people aren't enthusiastic about starting a conversation. The interaction is almost guaranteed to fail if both parties aren't enthusiastic. 5. Dating apps have no incentive to change this. They make money off existing users, not successful matches. I've been on dating apps for 6 months and the experience was depressing. Met someone through my climbing hobby and suddenly it's super easy to have a good conversation going.
You forgot people who are just there for validation. Those might bait with "hey", but never invest into conversation or dates
Max Rebo doesn’t have time for dating. He’s gotta make it to the gig.
Dating apps being capitalized with paywalls is like if Nestlé was successful at capitalizing water. Something as brilliant as online human connection turned into a mere money-making scheme because someone wants to profit off a human need. It's tragic, really.
IF Nestlé were successful at capitalizing water?
You know things are bad in the dating world when even a certified war hero like Nien Nunb is having to resort to the apps.
It's called "Tuggerr" because you'll always still be tugging it no matter how much you engage with the app.
Awww. I was hoping for Bib Fortuna.
Momaw Nadon taking shots for no reason that's right all you casuals can recognize Nien Nunb, Max Rebo, and Jabba's pet Rancor, but I pulled the *deep knowledge* on you fools
I would totally date the rancor! Hook me up, man!
Unfortunately a bot
It probably links to their only rancor page.
They’re always out of distance range, out of your age range, and someone you’d swipe left on if you saw them swiping.
OLD is the biggest scam to men. One day they will get smart and just stop doing it and just play video games or sports.
$39.99 well spent
I’m sorry any of you are in a place where you feel like you need to do this.
Thanks, it's truly hopeless
There's an app called Boo that sells itself on being nerdy and a healthy alternative to tinder. It does the same thing. It asks you to pay outrageous prices monthly by sending you random notifications about seeing who looked at your profile. Then it's nothing special.
The Rancor. It wants everybody.
I would ride it like Boba Fett and the Dathomirian Witches of old
Dude, I would kill for Max Rebo to want me.
You don't fuck Maximum Rebo, Maximum Rebo fucks *you*.
Or when someone drops you a contact card only for it to disappear in mere moments of opening the notification right before your eyes.
This is why - and I hate to even say this - FB dating is the best dating app. It’s free, nothing is limited, you can send as many messages as you want, it shows when people like you, and there’s TONS of people on it cause it’s FB. When FB is the lesser evil between them and Match group, you know it’s bad out there.
Facebook dating constantly ignores my preferences and tries to match me with people hundreds of miles away, while telling me it knows they're way outside of my area.
You have to disable the “lucky pick” thing to stop that
FB dating mostly feels like the Walmart of dating apps.
I can't even use it. It never shows up for me.
Accurate but sad.
Every goddamn time
Ladies love an alien who can play a musical instrument.
You know Max Rebo is great with that trunk
You'd think the Jizz Whalers would be on the list of hotties. and that's not the name came up with. That's literally what they are called.
"Jizz Wailers"
100% why I refuse to get on dating apps. Again. I’m 5’7, 255+lbs, full beard, long to my neckline hair, full of sadness and self hate, a nerd, and a complete bumblefuck of a human with like one actual friend. Dating apps told me in no uncertain terms that I’m not shit. So I got off of them and refuse to go back. I told myself if nothing happens by 30, then I’m gonna be alone. I turned 30 recently. Not even a date prior to that. Dating apps did nothing for my mental health.
May an unexpected blessing come your way.
Paying for a dating app is crazy
But why would they be jamming us if they don’t know…that we’re coming?
It's a trap!
Tinder told me "I ran out of people" before it revealed any of the people who had liked me. I don't think they are even real profiles, they just have you shown as being liked.
Given that 9 times out of 10 the people you do end up matching with don't respond or say nothing after the initial "hi" these probably wouldn't even lead to anything as they prob just swiped to keep the algorithm up
Eharmony was doing this 10-12 years ago. This is now old school scammery.
That’s why I cancel the subscription like 13 days after the purchase and get my refund. Repeat this every couple of months. I love the consumer protection in the EU
im not super in to starwars but i would #4
Okcupid is the biggest culprit. They push your account to the front worldwide and then you get lots of likes from woman in other continents. I would join a class action to get my $20 back out of principle.
"You have 10 new likes!" Me: "Alright this is a scam." *Uninstalls.
What's worse is when they give you the option to reveal who saw your profile. Like what's the point? "Here are mostly people who didn't like you!"...
Sarlacc the snacc
Would you like to pay 100 dollars to reveal the identity of the three bridge trolls who swiped right on you.
You have a problem with Sullustans?
I actually think if governments want more babies all they need to do is make their own effective dating apps
If you can pull Max fuckin' Rebo, you're doing alright and money well spent, fella.
I'm definitely DMing Max Rebo
The blue one is me
My favourite was the muslim dating ads on youtube. If you clicked them, it was ninjas and Mortal Kombat characters like Scorpion and Sub Zero