I'm sure that can't be what you are trying to say - although, if it is, I can certainly understand why you made a throwaway to say it.
It's a comment about dating apps, not about people who decided not to go into dating apps i.e. found "a market you can address without doing that."
We all want our data to be handled securely, and we should try to understand why that does not happen.
No one has to make a dating app. I don't see how "no one else could do it without betraying their users either!" as you argue - and, again, even granting this is true, which you've done nothing thus far to show - excuses the actual betrayal that actually has occurred. If you'd like to make an argument that it does, I'd be interested to hear that.
So, sure, the one comment to which you've directly responded here, I'll call that out of line on my part. Everything else I've said throughout these comments stands.
And there always will be someone trying the unscrupulous approach, no matter how many people decide not to.
The incentives are broken, and telling the people who point out that the incentives are broken that they're just making excuses for bad behavior doesn't actually fix the incentives.
It’s an observation that market conditions seem to disadvantage anyone who DOESN’T do that, so unless you like spending a bunch of effort and time (and being less competitive overall because of it, and likely go nowhere), maybe spend your effort somewhere else if you don’t like to be that way.
There are a ton of markets like this. If you wanted to open a ‘good’ check cashing place for instance, go right ahead. Just don’t be surprised if you lose your shirt trying it by not being like the other, less scrupulous players.
This thread reads to me as there may be perverse incentives due to nature of dating and capital markets that make it nearly impossible to compete while valuing security.
But this is a conscious choice. A small team should not need to make the decision to do something like this.
Also Grindr or Scruff isn't exactly small and have a fairly devoted base that doesn't end just because they get into a relationship.
Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can sell the functionality back.
We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing out major tools and functionality for free because of the privacy invasion.
I have to wonder how things would have looked had that not become the norm.
As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year. Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume they are pulling in quite a bit of money.
At least in the US, one might imagine this is more important to users than hiding their sexual preference.
I'm not sure I agree, though. In an open relationship it'd be no surprise to my partner if I were using Grindr (he probably would be too, in that case!) and I think therefore that'd be more or less orthogonal to the concern around the risk of forcible outing posed by Grindr's misuse of data. Both are certainly of concern, but I think independently so.
understood. the only practical response to the banal corporate indifference of modern markets is ultraviolence. establish a rival dating app and send ninjas to the bedrooms of match owners to threaten their lives
hn says "there's not much a small team can do about it" but they are clearly considering only a small team of technologists and a few salespeople/growth marketers. hn has drastically discounted the impact a small team of (kunai-wielding, not mid-2010s startup recruiter speak) ninjas can have
>Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.
Match owns almost all of the dating app market because they've acquired who? Startups who created popular apps in a crowded marketplace that they don't already own.
Now, if you want to argue that you cannot create a popular app in a crowded marketplace without accepting a buyout offer from the dominant player, now that's a topic I think is worth quite a bit of discussion.
Well, they can. New entrants to the dating app market always start out this way. They gain loads of initial trust and word of mouth growth by putting users first. But they inevitably fall victim to the same market forces as their competition, and slowly become the same thing. It happened to Tinder, it happened to Bumble, and it will happen to Hinge.
Sounds like a business opportunity.
People still use Grindr a ton even though these security issues have been well known for years and in most areas users have real concerns for their safety and lives if they’re caught using it, so I can’t say they’re wrong.
It is actually what I would expect from a dating site. Match group apps look more like a vehicle that only exists to transfer money from your pocket into theirs.
Match owns almost all of the dating-app market, and they have extremely deep pockets to buy/extinguish competition with.
Because of the consolidated nature of the market, and the winner-takes-all nature of the industry, I really believe that it is impossible for a new entry to gain popularity and focus on hard problems like security.
This is fundamentally a problem with capital allocation and incentives. There's not much that a small team can do about it.