I see FB dating as having similar success. I can see you and your connections and validate that you aren't going to kill or rape me when we meet up for coffee (or if you're male; I can see that you are a real person and not a bot).
Interesting. In my area, Facebook Marketplace is almost all stolen/burgled/shoplifted goods. People even call it "Fencebook."
Want a brand new, unopened PS/4 for $25? Fencebook to the rescue!
If they're selling close to the original price, just get it from a shop instead, that way you'll get warranty etc too (there's generally no warranty on goods with "lost" invoices).
In general, look out for suspicious behaviour. Are they willing to meet with you at their home or office? Do they readily share their phone number? Do they have many excuses (one of the most common tells for liers are an excess of over-thought out excuses) for not doing things transparently? If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
Sure, there are legitimate reasons for not getting any of these right, but if they get all of them wrong, be very careful.
Edit: never mind, just realized you're worried I or someone else is trying to sell stolen goods and will abuse such a list that way, sigh...
At any rate they didn't just say the information exists, they also said it was basic pawn shop training, so I googled "pawn shop detect stolen goods" the top answer was from quora https://www.quora.com/How-do-pawnbrokers-verify-that-the-ite... and there was something from a blog of somebody called the blog nerd which is a little difficult reading because of all the SEO keyword optimization he seems to have done
https://www.pawnnerd.com/how-do-pawn-shops-track-stolen-item...
there seemed to be a reasonable number of other informative links.
I'm curious because I've used Craigslist all across the west coast in the USA and I've never found myself worried. I've used it for bigger ($XXXX) and small purchases ($X). Brand new and very used. Most people I've met are very friendly and decently honest. Flakey is usually my biggest complaint with Craigslist people.
Other than that, the pseudo anonymity makes people uncomfortable with craigslist. At least, that’s the sentiment I’ve gotten from a few people who’ve used it. Contrasting that with the feedback I’ve heard about marketplace, people just feel safer when you can creep a buyer’s profile before they show up at your house.
This seems like a joke question, of course. But consider: Ten years or fifteen years from now, supposing nearly everyone is using Facebook's dating service, could Facebook Inc adjust their matching algorithm to give shittier / less promising results to those people for whom it identifies as having a dislike for Facebook Inc's behaviour? Conceivably, what about matching them with someone who is likely to be sterile?
Could those who express objections to Facebook Inc's behaviour be gradually phased out of the population (not completely, obviously), by a motivated director, over a few generations?
Possessing objections to domineering corporate behaviour does not have to be genetic, nor does it even have to be overwhelmingly heritable -just mostly so- for Facebook Inc's incentives and capacities to align towards considering this sort of dystopian strategy.
I don't raise this because I imagine it to be true at all; I raise it because we are reluctant to spend time actually considering these kind of hypotheticals for how massively-dominent social platforms might affect our society and way of life, and often as a society we only consider them in retrospect. For example, Cambridge Analytica's unethical actions are a fairly predictable outcome of Facebook's business model and have (already) now lead to significant negative effects on a worldwide scale.
Consider planned destructive testing in engineering, where perhaps one component is built purposefully weakened and then the whole system stressed in order to ascertain where and how the other components fail in response. This can lead to better understanding and to superior alternative designs in future.
In a related way, we can imagine destructive testing on facets of our institutions and societies, and try to ascertain how our systems may then fail in turn.
One example is when designing constitutional separation of powers, we might find it implausible to imagine a president intentionally undermining the Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, but yet still design the constitutional separation of powers in such a way that the system retains some amount of robustness or integrity should that ever eventuate.
We might choose to design our medical quarantine protocols in such a way that they don't overly rely on protecting against known agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, amoebae etc) but have some robustness against not yet encountered classes of threat, eg quarantine protocols that were concieved before the discovery of prion diseases.
The problem with your Facebook hypothetical is the absence of a mechanism by which the bad situation happens. How do we get to a point where Facebook to any practical degree has the power to prevent someone from dating at all? There has always been smaller and larger groups of misfits and outcasts, and they have generally been capable of connecting with each other beyond the majority hegemony (caveats here of course for repressive government power, but that's out of scope for this hypothetical, and belongs in constitution-related hypotheticals).
But let's then consider the hypothesis: Even if they do get to a significant position in dating, there are plenty of reason to believe they wouldn't use that power to prevent "anti-Facebookers" to date: privately owned publishers and printers happily print and sell the communist manifesto. You can sell your anti-Amazon book on Amazon, and publish it to Kindle. You can search for all the reasons Google is the worst company ever on Google. You can put "I hate Tinder" in your Tinder profile. And you can form a group about why Facebook is awful on Facebook, organise a "down with Facebook" rally using Facebook events and sell "Facebook sucks" stickers on Facebook marketplace. The logic of private markets very simply shows that it's plainly in a company's interest not to discriminate against people for the transgression of merely not liking the company.
(Or at least used to allow, don't know the current state.)
If fb shared more data I'm not sure how well that would go over, at least here.
Doesn't mean they're not up for hookups though.
Fear of everything you do in private being creepy is just a self-limiting belief.
Digging for bikini pics isn't part of the process here.
I don't think it's any less weird to meet up in person with someone after just seeing 3-5 pictures of them and a vapid bio. Looking at the Facebook profile can give you a sense of how they conduct themselves and whether they're crazy. Like if their wall is dedicated to some MLM scheme and they get in fights with their friends/family. Or whether their Tinder pictures are from 5 years and 100 lbs ago.
If you think it's weird, then I'm not convinced you've used Tinder enough to escalate it into a date. If you did, you'd know that having one mutual friend in common makes it easy to hunt them down and even if you don't, Tinder gives you enough info to anyways unless they have their privacy settings jacked up.
You lookup people from Tinder on Facebook? For what?
I would say its not a sanity test; you just simply a creep.
Worst. Sanity test. Evar!
Stalking and/or looking up 13 year old college party photos is probabally, shall we say, less sane.
Even if you're on a separate dating service like Tinder, you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. FB already plays a large role in dating and the signaling involved. It just makes sense for FB to own the process from start to finish when they have the ability to do it better than any existing dating app today.
FYI: Shares of Match Group (they are a public holdings company for many of the popular dating sites out there) plunged after FB announced this.