TIL that one company owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match.com and at least 40 more dating sites/apps

10 days ago by als to c/til

fonix232 119 points 10 days ago

Yep. it's essentially a ridiculous, yet somehow legal racket.

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TeaWithDani 46 points 10 days ago

And they convinced several generations that using them is necessary for dating.

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boonhet 36 points 10 days ago

It somewhat is for some people. Like where are you going to meet people of the opposite gender? I don't think most women want to be hit on at work, gym, grocery stores, whatever. Men are starved enough for attention that many of us will appreciate any, anywhere, anytime, but I'm not into guys.

We need a real-life amulet of Mara tbh.

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wonderingwanderer 37 points 10 days ago

Except third spaces have been systematically dismantled by capitalist interests, and the dating app industry's astroturfing on social media has done a lot of damage to the perceived validity of meeting someone in person organically.

You can't just say dating apps are necessary because there's nowhere else to meet people and ignore the fact that that very problem is socially engineered. It's manufactured scarcity.

Like if nestle were to poison a town's water supply so that they could sell more water bottles. After buying out deer park, dasani, and aquafina. And patenting the idea of selling water in bottles. You wouldn't say "actually it's necessary to buy their water bottles," you would say "that's fucked up and should be illegal."

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boonhet 14 points 10 days ago

Agreed on third spaces, but it's mostly because of car-centric city design and everyone having to work 40h or more a week (leaves little time to even visit those spaces). The dating apps have capitalised on it, but the change has been happening since before them. And also drinking has fallen out of fashion with young people... Bars and clubs were a major place to meet new people in the past. If you look at the statistics now, Gen Z barely drinks at all. In my country, most clubs are shutting down because people under 50 barely go and people over 50 are starting to get too old to go. Bars are still fairly popular among younger people, but not as much as even a decade ago.

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DeLancre 13 points 10 days ago

The wildest part is that all those apps in post basically useless, even if you pretty — girls there in free market basically, where they can choose anyone who messaged them, there no point for them to seek attention first.

And in just a minute after registering on grindr I got hit on multiple times. So yeah, I guess I'm gay now.

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StillAlive 5 points 10 days ago

Congratulations, I guess.

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HerbGrower 4 points 10 days ago

So if all the single men become gay the problem will solve its self!

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boonhet 3 points 10 days ago

Good for you, I sometimes wish I was gay because it sounds easier lol

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TeaWithDani 8 points 10 days ago

My advice for dating has always been: focus on making friends first. Meet people from work, sign up for a class, rekindle with old friends, volunteer somewhere. Just make new guy and girl friends, don't go in looking for anything more.

You start inviting people for stuff, you'll get invited to stuff. Then other people might show up to, friends of friends, relatives, etc... Such and such might not be into you, but she has a cousin the same age. Or such and such is a cool friend and he has a female best friend he brings along to parties.

Worst case scenario you are single and have a really healthy social life. Then when you least expect it... bam someone falls out from somewhere you never expected. lol

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SmoothOperator 1 point 10 days ago

You don't have to hit on strangers, the ideal person to proposition is a friend of a friend. So start by getting friends, then tastefully flirt with their friends.

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ImminentOrbit -1 points 9 days ago

My experience using Bumble was great. I treated it as a background task that I want expecting immediate results from. When I was killing time, I'd swipe instead of using socials. When I matched, I'd chat briefly to see if she seemed ok, but then quickly asked to meet. Found my wife using it. My adult daughter found someone on Hinge and he's great. I'd recommend trying apps to everyone looking.

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TeaWithDani 2 points 9 days ago

Yeah, I won $50 with scratch offs one time... I don't recommend trying the lottery.

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TankovayaDiviziya 14 points 10 days ago

Absorbing other companies is illegal under anti-trust, but taking a company as a subsidiary is not, which is the workaround for anti-trust. It gives the false illusion of competition being available.

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baggachipz 7 points 10 days ago

anti-trust

As if that were a thing anymore.

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wonderingwanderer 3 points 10 days ago

Someone needs to patch that hole but we know the current government won't...

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Cricket 1 point 10 days ago

Absorbing other companies is illegal under anti-trust

Huh?

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moldy_rice 75 points 10 days ago

Federated dating app when?

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cantstopthesignal 44 points 10 days ago

OKCommune?

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moldy_rice 53 points 10 days ago

okcommie

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mattyroses 28 points 10 days ago

OKComrade - we ONLY swipe left

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HeartyOfGlass 25 points 10 days ago

Our date

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harrys_balzac 3 points 9 days ago

OnlyMLs

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blarghly 29 points 10 days ago

When someone wants to moderate it.

Hint: ain't nobody want that

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cosmos8188 10 points 10 days ago

Moderation would be a nightmare, especially since Lemmy is used within many jurisdictions.

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HerbGrower 7 points 10 days ago

Don't a lot of instances just bother with laws in the host country though?

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DeLancre 24 points 10 days ago

I think it can be replaced with the group chat in matrix.

There no point in making dating app for 5 users.

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fruitycoder 14 points 10 days ago path: 0 25211159 25215152, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 1
Dremor 27 points 10 days ago

From my tests, it is full of fake bot account, bugs (my account simply vanished, twice, without reason), and moderation is basically nonexistent.

None of my 30+ interactions was with a genuine human, all of them were crypto scams, or similar scams.

It comes from a good idea, but god it is badly done.

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nullify3112 2 points 9 days ago

Fedivr

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frunch 51 points 10 days ago

Makes perfect sense! How many companies would you expect to own all the popular dating sites? 5? 10?

Of course not! There should only be one company controlling entire markets, it's the American way 🤡

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Delilah 45 points 10 days ago

Here are all the sites the match group owns. All of the '* people meet' sites are making me laugh.

Archer Asian People Meet Babyboomer People Meet BB People Meet Black Christian People Meet Black People Meet Black Professional People Meet BLK Catholic People Meet Chinese People Meet Chispa Delightful Democratic People Meet Divorced People Meet Genxpeoplemeet Her Hinge Indiamatch Interracial People Meet Italian People Meet J People Meet Latino People Meet Ldsplanet Little People Meet Loveandseek Marriage Minded People Meet Match.com Match Japan OkCupid Ourtime Pairs People Meet Pet People Meet Plenty of Fish Republican People Meet Salams Seniorblack People Meet Single People Meet Sniffies (minority stake)[63][64] Stir The League Tinder Upward Yuzu

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blarghly 64 points 10 days ago

If you want each entry to appear on a new line, you need to put two spaces at the end of each line.

Line 1
Line 2

If you want a paragraph break, use two newlines

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

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Trex202 60 points 10 days ago

Archer

Asian People Meet

Babyboomer People Meet

BB People Meet

Black Christian People Meet

Black People Meet

Black Professional People Meet

BLK

Catholic People Meet

Chinese People Meet

Chispa

Delightful

Democratic People Meet

Divorced People Meet

Genxpeoplemeet

Her

Hinge

Indiamatch

Interracial People Meet

Italian People Meet

J People Meet

Latino People Meet

Ldsplanet

Little People Meet

Loveandseek

Marriage Minded People Meet

Match.com

Match Japan

OkCupid

Ourtime

Pairs

People Meet

Pet People Meet

Plenty of Fish

Republican People Meet

Salams

Seniorblack People Meet

Single People Meet

Sniffies (minority stake)[63][64]

Stir

The League

Tinder

Upward

Yuzu

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datavoid 35 points 10 days ago

I tried Yuzu, but the only one who wanted to fuck me was Nintendo.

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SatyrSack 10 points 10 days ago

For a list of items like this, it makes sense to use either an ordered list

1. Item one
2. Item two
3. Item three

or an unordered list

- Item one
- Item two
- Item three

neither of which require extra spaces or extra newlines

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Trex202 4 points 10 days ago

The problem is converting the list to point form. I would have used bullet points if it was easier than spacing

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SatyrSack 8 points 10 days ago

A bit of an advanced technique that I use often: Paste the list into a text editor like VSCodium, then use find/replace (in regex mode) to add a hyphen and a space to the beginning of each line, then copy all and paste that into Lemmy.

Find: ^

Replace: -

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MelodiousFunk 9 points 10 days ago

You can also put a backslash before the new line

Like\
this.

Like
this.

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Janx 2 points 10 days ago

I
had
NO
idea.
Thank
you!!!

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Cricket 1 point 10 days ago

If you want each entry to appear on a new line, you need to put two spaces at the end of each line.

Line 1 Line 2

Interesting, I had no idea and always wondered what was the deal with line breaks here. I only know how to do the paragraph breaks. Thanks!

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grue 1 point 10 days ago
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anewfox 45 points 10 days ago

and reminder, these places make more money if you don't find a match. they are actively disincentivized from doing their stated job.

same is true for companies like incogni. if mass data harvesting is made illegal, they're out of a job. and many of them are owned by companies that also own data brokers. the removal process is often just sending your data to a data broker and asking if they have it, which obviously just hands that data right over in the process. they will make more money from data harvesting staying legal and they know it.

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blarghly 1 point 8 days ago

As a reminder, you can make your own dating site if you think you could do better. And there is huge financial incentive to do better. Say you make a dating site that actually effectively finds people good matches quickly and easily. Millions, if not billions of people would flock to your site, and you could name your price to use your service.

Since I've been online, I've seen a lot of different dating sites with different formats and gimmicks. Craigslist personals, OK Cupid (the old style), Grindr, Tinder, r4r, Bumble, Hinge, Fruitz, Badoo, Feeld, along with countless others that never took off. Match group doesn't have a stranglehold on the industry. Any of their competitors could become "the dating site that actually gets you good matches" if they wanted. And since dating apps are purely digital, it would cost zero money to make an open source version and collapse the whole industry. So why hasn't anyone done that? Why does it seem like online dating engages in a constant cycle of novelty, rather than ever getting better?

Well, probably because the fundamental problem is not solveable by software: people want to "date up", but don't want to improve themselves. It's like Ronnie Coleman said - "Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights." If you made a dating app that told people what their problem was - "The person you just liked is an instagram model, but you are not instagram-model-hot, go hit the gym" - then no one would use it.

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A_Random_Idiot 41 points 10 days ago

the best way to avoid monopoly charges, is to create multiple companies that "compete" with eachother, that you own.

Luxotica learned this a long time ago, which is why they profit on almost any pair of glasses you buy, and why no one things its a monopoly

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Zamboni_Driver 7 points 10 days ago

I really like Bolle sunglasses. They are outside of the Luxottica monopoly.

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modus 4 points 10 days ago

For now.

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Zamboni_Driver 2 points 9 days ago

Uh ok. The brand has been around since 1888.

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UltraMagnus0001 4 points 10 days ago

I'm assuming Pepsi and coca cola are similar since they own all the food, or what they call food.

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edgesmash 8 points 10 days ago

IIRC, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are not owned by the same parent umbrella corporation. But you are generally right. Again, IIRC, there are like six companies that own something like 85% of brands in grocery stores.

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shyguyblue 1 point 10 days ago

Pretty much. Pepsi and Frito lay are one thing now.

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Janx 29 points 10 days ago

One giant corporation, profiting off of, and intentionally worsening the loneliness epidemic by buying up all the dating apps, pushing premium features, and matching you with bots... It's shit like this that gives me trust issues with government, big business, rich people, etc...

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bluegreenpurplepink 2 points 9 days ago

As someone who's never used these apps, matching you with bots?! what the fuck!

How does that even work and what do you do about it?

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MajorasTerribleFate 4 points 9 days ago

As others have noted, they benefit from you being a continued customer - not finding a forever match. What better way to achieve that then never letting you match a real human at all?

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Janx 1 point 9 days ago

Plus, the dopamine hit of getting interested messages and matches from attractive strangers keeps you interested, and interacting with LLMs, spammers, and scammers. And as you alluded to, obviously none of them are going to lead to a relationship...

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blarghly 1 point 8 days ago

Most of these platforms operate by showing you profiles of others, and showing them profiles of others, and requiring some kind of mutual match to start a conversation. I very much doubt any of these services create bot accounts to do this, and to be fair, they don't need to. The bots are created by scammers hoping to run a scam on lonely people.

The better apps do things to remove bot accounts. Hinge, for example, doesnt have many bots atm ime. Tinder, meanwhile, has been losing marketshare for the past several years and is becoming more lax about policing bots (not that it was ever particularly stringent...) in order to inflate user numbers to show to their shareholders.

People tend to match with bots because the bots will try to match with basically anyone, and because the profiles are made with pics of hot people.

For anyone who has adopted an effective strategy in dating apps, bots are not a problem. You can identify bots quickly and easily because bots don't go on dates. So if you match with someone cool, ask them out not long after you match. Most people who are actually using a dating site to find a partner (long term or otherwise) want to go on dates, so this is normal and expected. Any effective strategy minimizes long, drawn out conversations with people (since these convos almost always go no where anyway, even with real people), which is the opposite of what scammers want (finding people desperate and lonely enough that they will make an emotional connection with someone they have never met in real life).

But the biggest problem people have with bots isnt actually getting scammed, but rather, the emotional turmoil of seeing the notification that you got a match, then realizing it was just a bot. This can be effectively delt with by getting more human matches by becoming more attractive and getting better pictures to show off this attractiveness, and having modes outside of OLD to get dates so your whole romantic life isnt caught up in the internet (which, btw, is also attractive)

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kayzeekayzee 27 points 10 days ago

Are there any that are more independent?

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siftmama 22 points 10 days ago

Bumble is the only mainstream one I know for certain is independent.

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NGram 26 points 10 days ago

It's not technically independent since Badoo (owned by Bumble) is a very popular dating app too. Those two apps/companies have a weird history (Badoo's owner funded Bumble), but Bumble was also started by an ex-Tinder employee.

And looking at their Wikipedia entries, Bumble seems to be publicly traded with Blackstone owning a significant portion of the company. Bumble also bought Fruitz (another dating app) a few years ago.

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StillAlive 13 points 10 days ago

Fun fact about Bumble:

Initially, only women were able to start conversation after matching. This 'feature' was removed recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/...

Lol. Lmao even.

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boonhet 6 points 10 days ago

Tried Bumble. Got a match with a woman whose interests seemed fairly similar to mine, seemed like a very cool person overall.

Couldn't message her and the match expired because they only last 24h or something on Bumble and I believe you can extend once (for 24h).

Stopped using the app shortly after that.

At least on Tinder I'd get matches. Mostly low quality (by low quality I don't mean the person... I mean that we just didn't have much in common), but they existed and I could message them.

Bumble removing that means it's perhaps now usable for someone who's not super conventionally attractive, but has enough personality to kick off a conversation. But it also means that now it's just the same as all the other apps.

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wonderingwanderer 5 points 10 days ago

The article doesn't say what you're claiming it says.

While it is not ditching the requirement for women to make the first move, its female users can now send a template question such as “What book or film changed the way you think?”, using the site’s Opening Moves feature.

I'm going to ignore all the problems in the article, like how it pretends that putting in effort to message someone first and not getting a sufficient reply is some new phenomenon that uniquely affects women 🙄 holy shit

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ICastFist 4 points 10 days ago

I've met my current girlfriend via bumble, back in early 2023. As a man, I was extremely annoyed at how many women would match with me and never send a message, felt like a full 2/3. Seems like half of them skipped the "you, woman, are supposed to start the conversation", never understanding why none of the men ever sent a hi

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nullspace 3 points 10 days ago

The Bumble IPO was when I knew online dating as a business was done. Look up the stock and pour one out for anyone who bought it five years ago.

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siftmama 1 point 10 days ago

Whelp, this was a rabbit hole I was not expecting. Talk about optics!

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als 10 points 10 days ago

Grindr is publically traded

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finallymadeanaccount 13 points 10 days ago

And kept in business by a thriving community of convention-attending Republicans.

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boonhet 8 points 10 days ago

Publicly traded is even worse tbh

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swab148 6 points 10 days ago

The only "success" I've ever had on a dating app was one called "Boo", but it's possible that I suck at dating apps.

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jumping_redditor 1 point 10 days ago

I've seen adds gor duolicious on 4chan, it's allegedly open source

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DarkFuture 23 points 9 days ago

Is that why they all feel the same and suck equally?

OKCupid used to be great. Felt different. Less corporate I guess. Easier to talk to people. Was shit the last time I checked a handful of years ago.

Fun Fact: OKCupid used to be SparkNotes, which used to be a CliffNotes type site. Then they started doing user generated quizes. Which X-Men would you be? Then it was randomly a dating site one day.

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GiantChickDicks 7 points 9 days ago

Back in the day, TheSpark.com used to be unhinged and a lot of fun. The Stinky Meat Project was so stupid, but so dedicated, that I couldn't help following along. And the quizzes were a great way to abuse poorly supervised time with computers at school, too!

It sucks getting old, but I'm grateful for the time we got online before it became all this.

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GreenKnight23 1 point 9 days ago
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SpongyAneurysm 1 point 9 days ago

Oh god the quizzes, I almost forgot about those.

It's almost a shame they didn't use them for their matching algorithm. I could've found the Dr. Jean Grey for my Cyclops. 😏

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blarghly 1 point 8 days ago

OKC changed its model because it was losing marketshare to Tinder. Now they are both owned by the same company - but I would guess the two sites operate largely independently and try to compete with each other, since from the parent company's perspective, two services trying to outcompete each other will drive eachother to also outcompete outside competition.

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some_guy 23 points 10 days ago

Twenty years ago, dating apps would introduce you to people you wanted to be with. In fact, there were no apps. They were websites.

That I actually had success meeting someone that I love and care about shows a flaw in their business model rather than a successful match. They accidentally lost two customers after extrapolating a lot of money from me without being helpful for more than a decade.

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cupcakezealot 21 points 10 days ago

and the other one, eharmony, is owned by a religious zealot

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Imhotep 20 points 10 days ago

It's one giant database with different filters for each website.

Other than privacy concerns, I dislike the consumption aspect. I see them swiping and it looks like they're shopping. I know some people have found meaningful relationships on Tinder, but I can't get over it.

I wonder if so many using it almost as the default way of dating makes it harder to find someone for those who want to avoid it.

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wonderingwanderer 9 points 10 days ago

I wonder if so many using it almost as the default way of dating makes it harder to find someone for those who want to avoid it.

That absolutely does happen. They've done a lot of astroturfing on social media to discredit the idea of meeting someone in person organically. They created this stigma that people who try to do that are "creeps", when that's how nearly everyone found their partners until about twenty years ago...

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Cosmonauticus 4 points 10 days ago

The problem is meeting ppl organically is impossible now because we've been priced out of 3rd spaces. Ppl can't afford $15 beers or $300 concert tickets.

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cantstopthesignal 4 points 10 days ago

That's a problem with going on dates in general. Special interest clubs have always been a great place to meet people offline.

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Cosmonauticus 2 points 10 days ago

All the special interest clubs in know about require memberships/fees. Plus finding the time outside of work is a whole other issue

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HerbGrower 2 points 10 days ago

Wetherspoons gets a lot of shit online - to be fair the owner is a bit of a cunt, but many pub landlords are cunts too. So what difference does it make?

But its the only place I can get a pint for £1.99

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Fluke 2 points 10 days ago

If I was out looking to meet people in the hopes of a relationship, Wetherspoons is definitely somewhere I would avoid like the black fucking plague, to be honest.

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0x0 2 points 10 days ago

Try group activities like the local book club, knitting group or swing bar.
Ya know, like.minded people.

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Cosmonauticus 2 points 9 days ago

Not my hobbies. Im more into rap, art, politics, and video games. Outside of online spaces there arent spaces like that for like minded individuals in my area. Plus id have to change my immigration status if I get involved with German politics. Also German rap is horrible

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Treczoks 18 points 10 days ago

Probably with shared fake profiles, too.

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UPGRAYEDD 18 points 10 days ago

And they have made the apps intentionaly worse, because a successful dating app deletes its users.

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Flagstaff 4 points 10 days ago

The proof lies in them not bothering to ask, "Why did you reject this person?" If they actually took note, they would zero in on your type immediately and send you only people of that type and you'd match within weeks. They don't want that lol. They want you to hang around...

path: 0 25212365 25212664 25216850, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
mobyduck648 2 points 10 days ago

Yeah it's one of those cases where basic material interest ought to cast suspicion on the apps in my view.

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Arctic_monkey 15 points 9 days ago

Could we have a fediverse dating app? What would it look like? How would we go about it?

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withheldWitch77 2 points 9 days ago

There have been some solutions but they usually face two problems:

  1. Small userbase due to lack of commercials and aggressive attempts to make users stay there as long as possible
  2. No advanced matching algorithms due to high costs of their maintenance. No ELO. Then we turn back to the userbase and marketing question: people with completely different interests or "look ranges" see each other all the time and their high expectations and standards make them bored on such apps. I'd be very happy to know any FOSS app that defeated these problems but such issues are pretty much universal.
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Arctic_monkey 1 point 9 days ago

Can you point me in the direction of these failed attempts? I'm tempted to try something similar and would rather learn from others' mistake first.

path: 0 25227459 25233092 25241602, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
NahMarcas 1 point 9 days ago

Alovoa.com need improvment

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explodicle 14 points 9 days ago

Pour one out for the greatest dating website of all time, Craigslist Personals. You just posted a picture, wrote literally whatever essay you wanted, and you could subscribe to custom search results as an RSS feed.

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Polisheocket 1 point 9 days ago

The back door Craigslist adds were the best, prostitution unleashed

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MrOtingocni 14 points 9 days ago

Pour one out for Okcupid. In its heyday it was such a fun site.

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Yeller_king 11 points 9 days ago

I met my wife there 14 years ago. I feel bad for people who are dating now. Seems bad out there.

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SpongyAneurysm 1 point 9 days ago

Changend ownership since. They got bought out.

Good on them. It really felt like a genuine attempt by a few math nerds back in the day, if you read the blog. Hope they made bank.

Though I never met The One^TM^ on there, I had a few hook-ups that I really needed at the time. If I hadn't already met The One^TM^ through other means at that time, I would've abandoned ship as soon as I heard that it got sold.

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chunes 13 points 10 days ago

It's just a big game of Monopoly except they're allowed to trick us into thinking they haven't dominated the board yet. What a joke.

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callouscomic 13 points 9 days ago

Wait til you learn about local news.

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jtrek 12 points 10 days ago

Break them up. Fine them for anti competitive practices. Bar their leadership from working similar roles for life. The solutions are easy.

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DarkFuture 14 points 9 days ago

The solutions are easy.

The concept of the solution is easy. The act of carrying it out is difficult because humans like taking bribes from rich people. And corporations. Oops, I forgot corporations are people in America.

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ikirin 4 points 9 days ago

Except they can't get the same punishment as people like 'going to jail' and will instead get a stern talk or maybe even gasp a slap on the wrist

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jtrek 3 points 9 days ago

Perhaps I should have written "simple" instead of "easy".

But yes, the road to implementing solutions is blocked by rich people and class traitors.

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WorldsDumbestMan 11 points 10 days ago

I wonder if they have an eugenics agenda too?

Knowing Epstein, he probably had a hand in this too.

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wonderingwanderer 7 points 10 days ago

Yeah, can't help but notice how a lot of their subsidiaries try to pigeonhole people into racial categories...

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bluegreenpurplepink 10 points 9 days ago

Isn't their reason for existence now just to harvest your data?

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LifeInMultipleChoice 4 points 9 days ago

Many of the sites charge subscriptions. They exist to make money no matter how they do it.

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finallymadeanaccount 7 points 10 days ago

They must be so happy having facilitated introducing so many people to their true love.

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Fix_a_Fix -1 points 10 days ago

...really? That's your takeaway from this?

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Bubs12 14 points 10 days ago

I’m sensing a bit of /s

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Semester3383 5 points 10 days ago

And the best part? Matching algorithms don't do shit. You can't actually predict attraction and interest based on matching character traits.

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thanksforallthefish 6 points 10 days ago

Nah matching algorithms are ineffective because a) people don't know what they want and/or b they're wildly unrealistic about what they want and/or they're delusional about their market value.

B is evidenced by the much joked about every woman wanting a 6'4 30yr old earning 7 figures who is good looking,single (not cheating) kind and funny (maybe 0.01% of the dating pool at most)

C is self evident - 3s who think they're 10s or the woman with 3 kids from 3 fathers not recognising that's a red flag.

A is the one that confounds the matching system though. People will say they want X, but have spent the last decade dating Y. The pic and profile thing is supposed to get ppl to reveal their actual preferences but it doesn't seem very effective

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Semester3383 8 points 10 days ago

No, there's actually no evidence that they work. Period. Not because people don't know what they want--although that's true--but because they can't predict how people will feel in person. Attraction is incredibly complicated, and it doesn't come down to checking a whole lot of boxes. The idea of 'market value' is pure incel bullshit; that's the reason that incels do things like looksmaxxing, and it's also the reason that it utterly fails.

At best, they can help screen people for core values, e.g., I'm not going to be able to get along with an evangelical christian, and I'm certainly not going to be able to date anyone that believes that firearms should be banned or heavily restricted. But even that's difficult, because people that seem to have radically different values can still have good relationships with each other.

Most of it is a placebo effect.

https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/...

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SalamiDommie 4 points 10 days ago

I would be curious as to who owns that company. What investment group?

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new_world_odor 8 points 10 days ago

Your question got me interested, so I took a look.

https://www.marketbeat.com/...

https://www.marketscreener.com/...

Conflicting answers on Vanguard's investment, they seem to have divested recently. But Blackrock is the largest at around 12%, all other companies with holdings are dwarfed by their share. Also, there's only one single person in the board + c-suite that's been there since before 2020. If I were more conspiratorial, I'd start drawing lines here.

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SalamiDommie 4 points 10 days ago

1 - you are awesome. That is some decent research QUICK that I am not as inclined as you to do. 2 - glad you keep a level head. The lines turn into threads, and threads turn into full blown garments. And before you know it you have undone your own fabric of reality. Unable to stitch the tattered scraps back together...

Ask me how I know.

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historicaldocuments 4 points 9 days ago

Be careful with institutional ownership as a metric, as many if not most companies that are publicly traded will have high percentages of institutional ownership. Blackrock and Vanguard, for example, have many, many Mutual Funds and Exchange Traded Funds that are part of normal retirement savings practices without there being anything shady going on.

MTCH fell out of the S&P 500 earlier this year which may be why Vanguard divested some going off what new_world_odor said. I can't get searches to exactly line up on which iShares (the Blackrock ETF side of their house) hold MTCH. There are some funds that have charters about how they'll track an index, so when it fell out of the S&P 500 those funds had to get rid of it or shift those shares internally.

I wonder why they had such a huge drop, though. It looks like their stock shot up during COVID and is kind of falling back down to "historical" levels for something that went public in 2015.

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Puddinghelmet 4 points 10 days ago

And bumble and even a Japanese dating app it says lol

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ironpangolin29 2 points 10 days ago

I wonder if you will find real people, real connections if you create a profile that contradicts what you are looking for.

You want an outdoorsy, travelling, generally adventurous personality to travel the world with. If you ask for that, they're going to match you with introverted hermits.

Ask for hermit homebodies. You'll find your Ellie.

Consider the chance that they built an algorithm that matches you with failures to keep you coming back to the platform.

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explodicle 2 points 9 days ago

That's a losing game. If you think the website is hostile, then don't use it at all.

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Marija_ 1 point 10 days ago

Haha exititis meets romance. Plus let's not forget that now the dating sites are flooded with Bowkys and scammers.

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blarghly -5 points 10 days ago

Hot take: match group is actually doing a pretty damn good job of trying to get you a date. The constant changing fashions of dating sites indicates that the company's sites don't have a stranglehold on the market like, say, facebook does. They have significant competitors in the form of Bumble, Grindr, Feeld, Badoo, etc. People on site like Lemmy often concoct conspiracies about how the sites are somehow nefariously keeping your soulmate from you.

But they arent. Dating sites arent difficult because the companies are evil (sure, they are evil, but thats not why dating sites are difficult). They are difficult because people are difficult.

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Brgor 22 points 10 days ago

The thing is, they're not incentivised to find you someone permanent because then you'll leave the site. The less competition they have, the less reason they have to keep a good reputation.

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TeaWithDani 4 points 10 days ago

It's just trying to get you engaged to ultimately pay. You can have matches and they'll be super far in the cue forcing you to buy matches or access to seeing them.

The prices to make the apps functional are incredibly high.

Besides, I don't think they need to engineer anything to be bad. Dating random people outside your social network and interests is just not a recipe for success. Much easier to date people in the same environment as you: work, school, friend group etc...

Dating apps cant do that. Matching people you kinda know is really weird and awkward lol

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StillAlive 3 points 10 days ago

Besides, I don't think they need to engineer anything to be bad. Dating random people outside your social network and interests is just not a recipe for success. Much easier to date people in the same environment as you: work, school, friend group etc...

Dating apps cant do that. Matching people you kinda know is really weird and awkward lol

That's not what people who used dating apps prior to enshittification (before 2019, I guess) say.

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TeaWithDani 2 points 10 days ago

It was always shit, I promise you release day Tinder was not all that different from today. Maybe less expensive to use.

Hell, first dating advice I got was "use the websites that charge you for replies, people are more serious there". lol, you used to have to pay to talk back prior to smartphones.

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blarghly 1 point 10 days ago

But they do have competition, as I mentioned earlier. There are other well known and used dating sites, and people always have the option of simply leaving the house to meet someone.

At the end of the day, they are incentivized to find you a match, because a dating app that actually generates matches and dates is far more valuable than one that doesnt.

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Snapz 10 points 10 days ago

What a confidently ignorant statement.

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ICastFist 3 points 10 days ago

Nah, match group has been using fake accounts to lure mostly men into their sites for decades. Make a free account, get a message within 30 minutes, pay 5 bucks to read it.

Last time I used tinder, in early 2023, the app was actively hiding any of the "49+" profiles that had swiped right on me. I'd get, at best, 1 match a week. I mean, 300 (yes, I counted) swipes left and not a single "you missed a match"?? They probably had fingerprinted my device and knew I was a returning user, even if I was on a different phone number, so I was a better target for them to sell their subscriptions. Either that or the algo caught how I was just going left without a thought and kept showing all their fakes and bots.

hell, tinder is so awful that the vast majority of brazilian users there just leave their instagram handle on their profile, with a few also asking to "only message if we match"

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blarghly 1 point 10 days ago

If your complaint is "this business won't give me their services for free", then that's not a real complaint. They're a business, and businesses exist to make money. Last I checked, the price of a hinge subscription for a month was about $30. You could easily spend that much on a few drinks in a night at a trendy bar.

Is tinder full of bots? Yes. But also, tinder is something of a sinking ship, and the bots keep their numbers inflated while not fighting thr flood saves on expenses. I've had much better luck on Hinge.

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ICastFist 1 point 9 days ago

If your complaint is “this business won’t give me their services for free”, then that’s not a real complaint.

No, my complaint is that they were doing all they could to force me to pay up, possibly because I've been a free user for too long. Yes, I get they're a company intent on making money, but they already severely limit free users to 50 likes a day while dropping ads between profiles.

Since I've used them a couple of times between 2015-2018, I did see firsthand how it enshittified

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Flagstaff 3 points 10 days ago

If they did an actually good job, they would ask every person after every single swipe, "Why did you reject/accept this person?" and zero in on your type instantly. They'd use that data to immediately, strictly filter for such people and you'd be off in a month, tops. I don't know how many times I have to repeat it: they do not care about you matching.

With that said, people being difficult and guarded and full of expectations sure don't help, either, yeah.

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blarghly 2 points 10 days ago

That is an awesome idea for a dating site. You should make it, and when it starts finding people their soulmates within a month, it will quickly become the most profitable app in the world and you'll make oodles of money.

Or else you'll figure out some flaw in your plan, and it will end up about as good at finding people matches as showing them a random assortment of people on the site.

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