There is an incentive: if people know your platform is riddled with scammers, they’re not going to use it. There are hundreds of dating apps out there that people just don’t use because they’re not trustworthy.
Dating apps are only interested in making people pay. As long as the bots and scammers are willing to pay one or 2 months subscription, the apps are never going to change because that would reduce their "numbers" and make Wall Street anxious.
They are good at convincing you that they have some immediate financial need.
Many people on dating apps are so lonely that anyone who can pretend to be interested, friendly can easily manipulate a lonely person into falling for them. Basically, the scammers are using the same techniques that con-men use to fleece their marks.
I got so many bots and romance-scammers that I quit all dating apps years ago.
Having known scam victims here & there since before there was an internet - the short answer is that some people's heads are just wired differently. In a high-enough-trust society, they may be model citizens. But watch 'em interact with a shyster, and you'll understand the old saying about "a sucker born every minute".
They start with a trivial amount and build from there. Each time, it's emotionally harder for the victim to accept the romance they built in their minds does not exist, AND the money they paid was not spent on a good cause.
It's much easier to deceive a person when their subconscious is collaborating with the scammer.
I think it sucks the we don't provide comprehensive "scam education" in schools. The effects can be devastating but the rules to prevent them are actually quite simple (I really hate the common framing of "look, anyone can be a victim" - it makes it sound like these scams are hard to prevent when they're usually not).
For example, the "hang up, look up, call back" rule (or analogous rules if you are texted/emailed) is simple to remember and prevents the vast, vast majority of cases where a scammer is contacting you while pretending to be someone else (your bank, the IRS, etc.) While that wouldn't prevent this particular dating scam, there are other simple rules that could prevent these scams.
Scammers take advantage of human social instincts that developed over millennia and were based on face-to-face contacts. That's no longer viable in a remote contact world, so people need to be educated specifically on how to curb their natural instincts.
Exactly -- there are precious few, if any at all, problems, communicated by a remote person, that are only solved by immediately and unquestioningly transferring a sum of money. Learning about specific scams is a waste of time and you'll always be one step behind. People need to learn how to apply a heuristic.
Given the steep fall in relationship formation, and birth rates, I honestly think the government should spin off a non profit org that runs it's own dating app. Make it independent of the government, like the federal reserve, require people to upload their drivers license or other docs to prove who they are (Yes, yes, privacy concerns, people smarter than me will have to figure out how to address this). Allow people to report bad behavior and give out bans for egregious stuff. Heck, maybe auto enroll folks unless they opt out. That would solve the gender disparity.
I'm sure someone smarter than me could poke holes in the above idea, or make it better, but look at the state of things now. We hand over all sorts of sensitive data to private companies, who have fundamentally misaligned incentives. I would think some sort of non profit app would have to be better.
Because the privately owned dating apps measure their success in profits, which gives them a misaligned incentive to ensure people don't meet anyone. Its not crazy to say a nonprofit dating app wouldn't face the same problem.
I'd support a non-profit dating app in a heartbeat.
There are so many dark patterns in for-profit dating apps, it's the app equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
For one, something like 75-90% of the profiles are dormant/inactive, but they're still shown as active profiles to give current users the illusion that there are lots of options in your area. Second, a successful dating app experience (assuming they're looking for something serious), means the user churns, so the app company is financially incentivized NOT to put you in front of people that you would likely connect with, at least without trying to extract as much money from you at first. Finally, the paid accounts have gotten ridiculously expensive, which drives real users away from the platform. And of course, they don't have to be transparent about any of it.
A non-profit app has much less incentive to (frankly steal) from their users because they're able to offer the service at a lower cost, without the need for the funhouse mirror BS, and could even provide meaningful aggregate community data on how many couples they've connected, etc.
People have different motivations. Some people, particularly women, do it for entertainment and just enjoy validations. Men who are unusually attractive or high status get an endless stream of playmates or victims
>Some people, particularly women, do it for entertainment and just enjoy validations.
You could have an exponential backoff, if someone gets a lot of potential matches, but doesn't move forward with them, they're downranked in search results. Honestly I could see that being beneficial to both parties because plenty of women talk about being overwhelmed and swamped on the apps. Men get shown women who are serious, women get a sane number of matches they can actually deal with, and those playing games don't get the validation they're looking for.
If they honestly wanted to help people get together there are a lot of things you could do in terms of mechanism design, but as it is they get paid through monthly subscriptions as opposed to when people pair up so they have the wrong incentives. It doesn’t help that almost all of them, except for Bumble, are owned by the same company, Match Group. There ought to be an antitrust lawsuit!
There is a fundamental problem though that the perception that you have unlimited choice can lead you to never settling down because you always imagine that if you keep looking you’ll find somebody better. Falling in love requires you, for at least a while, believe that that person is absolutely singular and unlike everybody else as Stendhal writes in the classic On Love a.k.a. “Love the one you’re with”
Even a non-pathological dating app might not move the needle as much as you want. Like with image-based social media, a decent portion of women using dating apps are looking for attention and validation, and are not necessarily interested in a relationship with the men messaging them.
Provoking more relationship formation and births at societal scale seems like it would require overcoming a whole host of challenges: the decline of third spaces, the absence of local-community or religious-denomination pressure for most people now, readily available birth control, and the distraction machines that are phones. A single app would be up against all that.
Con artists have been fleecing people since before there were railroad trains for them to skip town on. While I'm sure the dating apps could do far more to discourage scams, there simply is no viable level of effort on their part which would fix things. (And the more that they did, the higher the "it was reasonable to assume that..." threshold, for vulnerable people regarding random strangers on the platform as trustworthy.)
Maybe the least-bad solution would be a low, gov't-mandated level of effort, combined with blunt disclosures of what that did, and didn't cover?
I recall a post here on HN from a few days or weeks ago where someone said they wished online dating was like in 2010-2012 okcupid, and someone else replied that it still worked that way.
But they conveniently forgot to mention now it is a ghost town with sooooooo many bots and scam accounts and, like in the local case, many of the actual human accounts are just selling so-called "content".
The phone ones pretend to have met me and want to get together. Usually the peculiar area code is a dead giveaway. Another tell is they never identify their names, or call me by name.
Some are blackmail emails that pretend they saw me doing something nasty through my webcam. I don't have a webcam.
I also have several email addresses that I do not use. Identical scams will come through more than one of those addresses at the same time.
I hover over the response link, and it's to some bizarro domain.
Most of those “pig butchering” scams develop over the course of a few months but there are “sextortion” scams where people are tricked into sending a naked photo and immediately blackmailed… and sometimes people, especially teenagers, wind up committing suicide and it is all over in twenty minutes.
It amazes me too. Like I will certainly try to seduce somebody when the opportunity comes up but I cannot see how anybody would ever sext, like they never read
For that matters my crew in the 1980s would never use the phone to talk about, say, selling weed, and how it is the children that run Facebook would document that they don’t want to control scam ads because they don’t want to lose the revenue is beyond me. Like if you send me an email about something I could conceivably have to explain in court I will slap you in person.
I'd like an email system where it costs a penny to send an email. That would make the mass email spams & scams unprofitable. (I receive well over a hundred emails a day.)
In my opinion, the real scam, at least when I was on the apps a while ago, was that scammers put up very legitimate looking profiles, gather likes and paid superlikes, match everyone back, and change their profile to point to an Instagram or Snapchat account. Those superlikes are never refunded, and I suspect there is a reasonable class action to be had.
An interesting aside to the dating app discussion - religious institutions discourage - implicitly or explicitly - dating within the community. I’m 34 (like literally able to start a family) and one of my pastors told me they prefer people didn’t because it’s “messy”. Statistics state that only 3-4% of couples meet at religious events now.
My guess is a liability concern because churches don’t want to be blamed if things go sideways or risk having to deal with people living together before marriage (statistically almost no Christians are abstinent anymore and the purity culture mentality hasn’t really left the scene)
Reminds me of a local interview they did with someone whose job is to investigate these scams. It was both fun and tragic to listen to.
The biggest problem he has is convincing the target they've been a victim. Repeatedly, they've intercepted the money and returned it to the victim. The victim gets really upset that their loved one isn't getting the money. They show evidence that the recipient is a scammer, and involved in multiple romances, but the victim refuses to believe the officials.
He said it's very common that they'll quickly send the money again using alternate channels.
The amounts are huge. $100K isn't a large outlier.
Simulacra | 4 hours ago
baron816 | 4 hours ago
HPsquared | 4 hours ago
akellermann | 4 hours ago
gattr | 3 hours ago
Now I'm wondering, if one created a brand new dating app marketed "WE ARE NOT OWNED BY MATCH GROUP", would it make bank?
mlmonkey | 3 hours ago
And then Match bought OKCupid.
Tangurena2 | 3 hours ago
orangedog | 4 hours ago
Tangurena2 | 3 hours ago
Many people on dating apps are so lonely that anyone who can pretend to be interested, friendly can easily manipulate a lonely person into falling for them. Basically, the scammers are using the same techniques that con-men use to fleece their marks.
I got so many bots and romance-scammers that I quit all dating apps years ago.
the_real_cher | 3 hours ago
ASalazarMX | 3 hours ago
stavros | 2 hours ago
bell-cot | 3 hours ago
aljgz | 3 hours ago
Sunk cost "fallacy" helps the scammer a lot.
They start with a trivial amount and build from there. Each time, it's emotionally harder for the victim to accept the romance they built in their minds does not exist, AND the money they paid was not spent on a good cause.
It's much easier to deceive a person when their subconscious is collaborating with the scammer.
chihuahua | 3 hours ago
Also, anyone who acts too interested in me would be an instant red flag.
hn_throwaway_99 | 4 hours ago
For example, the "hang up, look up, call back" rule (or analogous rules if you are texted/emailed) is simple to remember and prevents the vast, vast majority of cases where a scammer is contacting you while pretending to be someone else (your bank, the IRS, etc.) While that wouldn't prevent this particular dating scam, there are other simple rules that could prevent these scams.
Scammers take advantage of human social instincts that developed over millennia and were based on face-to-face contacts. That's no longer viable in a remote contact world, so people need to be educated specifically on how to curb their natural instincts.
Wingman4l7 | 3 hours ago
wing-_-nuts | 4 hours ago
I'm sure someone smarter than me could poke holes in the above idea, or make it better, but look at the state of things now. We hand over all sorts of sensitive data to private companies, who have fundamentally misaligned incentives. I would think some sort of non profit app would have to be better.
verteu | 4 hours ago
deaton | 4 hours ago
CodingJeebus | 3 hours ago
There are so many dark patterns in for-profit dating apps, it's the app equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
For one, something like 75-90% of the profiles are dormant/inactive, but they're still shown as active profiles to give current users the illusion that there are lots of options in your area. Second, a successful dating app experience (assuming they're looking for something serious), means the user churns, so the app company is financially incentivized NOT to put you in front of people that you would likely connect with, at least without trying to extract as much money from you at first. Finally, the paid accounts have gotten ridiculously expensive, which drives real users away from the platform. And of course, they don't have to be transparent about any of it.
A non-profit app has much less incentive to (frankly steal) from their users because they're able to offer the service at a lower cost, without the need for the funhouse mirror BS, and could even provide meaningful aggregate community data on how many couples they've connected, etc.
stavros | 3 hours ago
Madmallard | 3 hours ago
They also hide the people you find most attractive behind a paywall
[OP] PaulHoule | 3 hours ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/stephen-matthews-sente...
Other people really want a relationship and keep spending money and get nothing.
wing-_-nuts | 2 hours ago
You could have an exponential backoff, if someone gets a lot of potential matches, but doesn't move forward with them, they're downranked in search results. Honestly I could see that being beneficial to both parties because plenty of women talk about being overwhelmed and swamped on the apps. Men get shown women who are serious, women get a sane number of matches they can actually deal with, and those playing games don't get the validation they're looking for.
[OP] PaulHoule | an hour ago
There is a fundamental problem though that the perception that you have unlimited choice can lead you to never settling down because you always imagine that if you keep looking you’ll find somebody better. Falling in love requires you, for at least a while, believe that that person is absolutely singular and unlike everybody else as Stendhal writes in the classic On Love a.k.a. “Love the one you’re with”
See https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
If I was really going to “do something about it” I’d try to put couples through a structured experience, see
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/14/love-is...
TFNA | 3 hours ago
Provoking more relationship formation and births at societal scale seems like it would require overcoming a whole host of challenges: the decline of third spaces, the absence of local-community or religious-denomination pressure for most people now, readily available birth control, and the distraction machines that are phones. A single app would be up against all that.
wing-_-nuts | 3 hours ago
fhn | 3 hours ago
chihuahua | 2 hours ago
https://asianews.network/singapore-government-launches-datin...
bell-cot | 4 hours ago
Maybe the least-bad solution would be a low, gov't-mandated level of effort, combined with blunt disclosures of what that did, and didn't cover?
Gualdrapo | 4 hours ago
But they conveniently forgot to mention now it is a ghost town with sooooooo many bots and scam accounts and, like in the local case, many of the actual human accounts are just selling so-called "content".
rationalist | 3 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49916110
WalterBright | 3 hours ago
the_real_cher | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 3 hours ago
Some are blackmail emails that pretend they saw me doing something nasty through my webcam. I don't have a webcam.
I also have several email addresses that I do not use. Identical scams will come through more than one of those addresses at the same time.
I hover over the response link, and it's to some bizarro domain.
[OP] PaulHoule | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 2 hours ago
Yes, but I am talking about the initial opening communication.
> but there are “sextortion” scams where people are tricked into sending a naked photo
I have difficulty imagining how someone, even a teenager, can be tricked into sending a naked selfie to a stranger.
I do have a friend who responds to such entreaties with with a disgusting porn screen grab. They never bother him again!
[OP] PaulHoule | an hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses
For that matters my crew in the 1980s would never use the phone to talk about, say, selling weed, and how it is the children that run Facebook would document that they don’t want to control scam ads because they don’t want to lose the revenue is beyond me. Like if you send me an email about something I could conceivably have to explain in court I will slap you in person.
WalterBright | 3 hours ago
chinathrow | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 3 hours ago
boelboel | 3 hours ago
WalterBright | 2 hours ago
calvinmorrison | 3 hours ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/postage-is-due...
WalterBright | 3 hours ago
I never understood the rationale for not doing it.
calvinmorrison | 2 hours ago
other networked systems (EDI VANs) charged traditionally per document, sometimes even per character.
though I mean people literally PAY to PRINT PHYSICAL CRAP and MAIL IT right to my junk box. half of my mail is junk.
how much is an email worth?
abtinf | 2 hours ago
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
jonlucc | 3 hours ago
the_real_cher | 3 hours ago
I feel for this person, I truly do....but....seriously!?
kylehotchkiss | 3 hours ago
My guess is a liability concern because churches don’t want to be blamed if things go sideways or risk having to deal with people living together before marriage (statistically almost no Christians are abstinent anymore and the purity culture mentality hasn’t really left the scene)
BeetleB | 3 hours ago
The biggest problem he has is convincing the target they've been a victim. Repeatedly, they've intercepted the money and returned it to the victim. The victim gets really upset that their loved one isn't getting the money. They show evidence that the recipient is a scammer, and involved in multiple romances, but the victim refuses to believe the officials.
He said it's very common that they'll quickly send the money again using alternate channels.
The amounts are huge. $100K isn't a large outlier.