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.
The back door Craigslist adds were the best, prostitution unleashed
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…
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?
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?
I would be curious as to who owns that company. What investment group?
Your question got me interested, so I took a look.
https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/MTCH/institutional-ownership/
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/MATCH-GROUP-INC-111381420/company-shareholders/
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.
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.
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.
And bumble and even a Japanese dating app it says lol
They must be so happy having facilitated introducing so many people to their true love.
…really? That’s your takeaway from this?
I’m sensing a bit of /s
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
Try group activities like the local book club, knitting group or swing bar.
Ya know, like.minded people.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
That’s a problem with going on dates in general. Special interest clubs have always been a great place to meet people offline.
All the special interest clubs in know about require memberships/fees. Plus finding the time outside of work is a whole other issue
Pour one out for Okcupid. In its heyday it was such a fun site.
I met my wife there 14 years ago. I feel bad for people who are dating now. Seems bad out there.
Could we have a fediverse dating app? What would it look like? How would we go about it?
Alovoa.com need improvment
There have been some solutions but they usually face two problems:
- Small userbase due to lack of commercials and aggressive attempts to make users stay there as long as possible
- 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.
and the other one, eharmony, is owned by a religious zealot
Are there any that are more independent?
Bumble is the only mainstream one I know for certain is independent.
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.
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.
Fun fact about Bumble:
Initially, only women were able to start conversation after matching. This ‘feature’ was removed recently.
Lol. Lmao even.
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
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.
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
That sounds like a huge issue.
It was.
My gf was one that initially didn’t understand that dynamic and nearly lost our match, she had to be told by a friend (that recommended her use the app in the first place) that she had to send the first message. Dunno how much could be the app’s fault, it does state during profile creation that women make the first move, but it probably didn’t put any other reminders afterwards.
Other dates I went out with also had similar stories of not paying attention to that message.
I’ve seen adds gor duolicious on 4chan, it’s allegedly open source
Grindr is publically traded
And kept in business by a thriving community of convention-attending Republicans.
Publicly traded is even worse tbh
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.
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.
That’s a losing game. If you think the website is hostile, then don’t use it at all.
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 🤡
And the best part? Matching algorithms don’t do shit. You can’t actually predict attraction and interest based on matching character traits.
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
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.
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.
Haha exititis meets romance. Plus let’s not forget that now the dating sites are flooded with Bowkys and scammers.
