Dating apps are rough. Decided to give Tinder one more go. It's enshittified heaps since the last round.
That aside, in some of the photos the 1000 yard stare of a mistreated human being stands out like a dog in a cattery. I can just about see the reflection of the people who hurt them in their eyes. It's heartbreaking.
(1/2)
I like Bumble's model better than Tinder's. It makes way more sense for hetro dating to normalise the woman choosing from her matches and sending the first message, rather than drowning in a flood of naff texts and dic pics from potential suitors. Also men don't have our confidence eroded by a flood of implicit rejections, so it's better for us too. *Especially* those of us with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.
(2/2)
A week ago I said I was back on Tinder. So far, as usual, it's been a grim and completely unproductive waste of life.
Now I learn - thanks to @thenewoil and others who've shared the link here - instead of letting people pick photos for their dating profiles, Tinder are going to force them to let a Trained #MOLE DataFarm their personal photo collections and do it for them;
https://www.404media.co/tinder-plans-to-let-ai-scan-your-camera-roll/
So back to Bumble ...
(1/?)
I tried to login to Bumble at the time, but oh that's right, on mobile they force us to use their proprietary app. So I shelved that, and today I logged in using the web app ... which they tell me they're discontinuing soon. So the only way to use Bumble will be with the mobile app. FFS.
It really is time to build a federated dating network ...
(2/?)
Having said that, I'm going to miss Bumble (unless they publish full source code for their mobile app and get it into F-Droid, which seems unlikely). Everything about the way it works is better than Tinder (the only 2 I've tried so far), from letting women send the first message to matches, to the way they lay out profiles.
* photo with age
Then as I scroll down;
* photo 2 with personal details
* more photos with response to prompts
* photo with location
(3/?)
That makes sense, since apparently Bumble was started by some women who'd got frustrated with Tinder. I'm guessing they took VC, because that's been the standard way of starting a new online service for a couple of decades, and now they've lost control of the company. Because the enshittification that's underway must be just as frustrating for them as it is for anyone else.
(4/?)
It would be great to get some of the Bumble founders involved in developing a federated replacement for the rapidly enshittifying Tinder, Bumble, etc. I can imagine them bringing some great insights to both a UX and Trust & Safety aspects. I wonder how I'd go about making contact with them?
OTOH any woman reading this could too if they've had horrific experiences with online dating designed by men, or been frustrated with the enshittification of existing dating apps.
(5/5)
@screwlisp @strypey I will read it properly tomorrow, but Bumble is dire at Trust and Safety.
Whitney (Bumble) is sensible in one sense, in that she has seen that dating apps are going nowhere and they have broken themselves with the swipe model - So last I heard, she was going for a more in-person networking and activity friendship model. But I dunno, I am not at all convinced. She's a billionaire anyway, so what does she care?
Computer #dating has a pretty long history of success, and the model didn't change drastically from its invention over 60 years ago (I wrote my first one in 1983, so I was late to the game!) until it had to be adapted for small devices and short attention spans. I imagine there's still space for going back to the old model, and taking it out of the hands of Match Group would be great.
That being said, these days the cool kids are meeting via hashtags and mutual interest site areas - if someone is looking for their perfect Swiftie, Pokemon fan partner, then they are going to look at people with a history of posting and commenting on both of those topics on TikTok (for example), where the interest can't be faked. It's really a very good, naturally made model that a commercial site can't replicate.
I suppose the next move would be for hashtags like #looking or #available to evolve and be properly adopted, then it would be even more in the open. For all I know, they already have! I am somewhat of a dinosaur outside of my own areas :)
(1/?)
@lorry
> Bumble is dire at Trust and Safety
Care to expand on that or link me?
> Whitney (Bumble) [is] a billionaire anyway, so what does she care?
I presume she didn't found Bumble by herself, maybe wasn't even part of the original group (as with Melon Husk and Tesla). What about the rest of them?
(2/?)
@lorry
> I imagine there's still space for going back to the old model
There's plenty of new models to be tried that would be a huge improvement over playing hashtag roulette, either on DataFarms or decentralised social networks. One idea I saw was online dating as a group-based social experience. This is a handwave in the right direction. As is @cy's idea about matchmakers in another branch of this thread.
(3/?)
Speaking of roulette, what about a Chat Roulette style speed-dating app?
The app could;
* perform some basic T&S vetting (to minimise unsolicited dick-cam, etc), including confirming what general area you're in (ask me how!)
* throw you into a round of realtime speed dating with others in your area (text? Voice? Video? see 4/4).
* As with normal speed dating, if you both Favourite each other after talking, you get each others' contacts
(4/4)
The realtime chat could be handled a number of ways. My first thought was voice/video, with access only to those with cam-on. Making it as much as possible like in-person speed dating.
But then I thought it would be good to have a mutually-agreed no-cam option, for those who are nervous AF on camera, or don't want to be prejudged on their appearance.
By the same token, mutually-agreed no-voice options, for those who can't speak or struggle with situational mutism, etc.
@strypey I nearly joined #Chatroulette, but then Covid and the Ukraine war started, so that never went anywhere. I had a different direction I wanted to take them, though.
#Bumble #TrustAndSafety ? Well, the industry isn't exactly full of dating site whistleblowers, but safety workers in the industry do talk to me. I know more than I would ever want to know about the inside workings of most dating sites, and sadly. It's not really an amazing revelation that Bumble is as bad as the rest, though.
None of the dating sites puts more than a veneer of effort into T&S. They weigh the cost of litigation against the cost of actually doing the work, and so far, litigation costs have always been lower.
@lorry
> he industry isn't exactly full of dating site whistleblowers
Any particular reason for that?
> They weigh the cost of litigation against the cost of actually doing the work, and so far, litigation costs have always been lower
Huh. The Fight Club principle at work. Sad. We deserve better from our digital matchmaking tools.
#looking seems like a profile flag and one that should be hard for strangers to search. And yet, some process has to know in order to nudge people together somehow.
Is this an overlap between hosting in the server sense and the human sense? Every couple of weeks servers hosting the Helpful Introductions protocol do a pairwise check to see if they have “looking” members who have liked each others stuff a lot, or liked the same things?
(1/?)
@clew
> # looking seems like a profile flag and one that should be hard for strangers to search
The biggest problem with using hashtags for anything in the fediverse, is that searches can only select from the posts on the service being searched (usually the one hosting the searcher's account). Which means posts from people followed by accounts on that service.
(2/?)
Some kind of Guppe/ Chirp/ FediGroups style group could work better. In that everyone looking for dates could send a post indicating that to @[email protected], existing members would get it in their feed, and anyone on a service with at least one member of the group could find those posts in searches.
(3/?)
Problem being that anyone who's just joined (if theirs is the first account on their service to join) wouldn't have access to all the past messages. Unless the group had some kind of archive they could search.
A Lemmy/ MBin/ PieFed community could work better. Main problem there being the fragmentation problem, people setting up loads of different dating communities on different services, creating decision paralysis about which to join.
(4/?)
But even if you somehow avoided the fragmentation, and get a critical mass of daters on 1 @dating community on 1 service, you end up with all the world's seeking singles in one huge pool. Whereas what people mainly want from online dating services is to meet people in person, which means the global dating community needs to be sharded by geographical area somehow.
(5/?)
You also end up with people looking for casual meetups and short term fun, in the same pool as those looking for long term relationships, and maybe marriage and kids.
So what you'd really need is 2 sets of communities - one seeking casual, one commitment - and each set divided into communities that cover a geographical area within which people could realistically meet. With the ability to widen searches to neighbouring areas, for the more mobile/ adventurous.
(6/?)
Trying to build a coherent and easily discoverable and navigable dating network like this using existing federated group/ community/ forum software just seems like a non-starter to me. I think we'd better to set up dedicated dating portals - local and specialised - and federate them into a larger search space.
One advantage of this approach is that existing dating services, like Alovoa, may be willing to add their accounts to the overall network effect.
(7/?)
I was also thinking about who ought to own dating services? In response to first round of geekout posts about this, @cy (IIRR) suggested a role for matchmakers. It occurred to me that people keen to play this role (and good at it) could be the best owner-operators of dating services run as platform co-ops.
(8/?)
A dater-owned co-op doesn't make much sense when the goal of a dater-centric dating service is to get people into relationships (or enough hookups) that they don't need it anymore. A successful service would have high turnover in usage and also in governance if dater-owned.
(9/?)
A worker-owned co-op *might* work. But what keeps the interests of workers aligned with those of daters?
This problem is demonstrated in the Loomio.com platform. Where despite its founding ideals and co-op structure, any change that benefits *either* worker-owners, *or* communities using the platform to make decisions, but not both, ends up weighted towards the former. A bias rationalised away on the basis that it can't serve communities if it goes out of business.
(10/?)
A producer co-op doesn't make sense in the context of a dating service. The product is dates, and the producer of those is the daters, or the service itself, or an amalgam of both. A multi-stakeholder model was tried for meet.coop, but proved too complicated for bootstrapping a new online service.
At this point we've pretty much ruled out all the standard co-op ownership models.
(11/?)
But there are people out there who just love helping others meet potential partners (whether causal or committed).These matchmakers either have a natural talent for sniffing out people who might be compatible, or get good at it through lots of trying. These people have existed in human communities probably as long as we've had culture, we call them matchmakers.
(12/?)
Matchmakers have an ongoing interest in dating, whether they're single or not themselves. But their intrinsic motivations are totally different to those of people running a service to make a profit, or even just a living. Matchmakers have no interest in trapping people on dating sites - to be monetised somehow as they endlessly hopescroll - they want to get them matched and off the site (at least for the night, ideally longer).
(13/13)
So maybe matchmakers would be the best people to govern dating services as platform co-ops?
@cy
> The same sort of thing would apply to matchmakers I'd say, where people who get a relationship understand it's their obligation to help the system that helped them
Exactly what I was thinking. The combination of being inclined towards matchmaking, and having a good experience on the platform when looking for dates, might motivate people to stick around and join the long term stewardship team. Even if they get into a monogamous, long term relationship and don't need to.
Strypey
screwlisp
Lorry
clew
Cy
Light