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".

This one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49916110

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.

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.

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.)

From the ancient internet:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Scammers making 5-6 figures in such scams would happily pay that.

So make it 2 cents.

If you up the price the people paying for the service become more valuable for scammers (or at least to some targeted scams).

The 2 cents is for sending the email, not receiving it.

it's not a new thing

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/postage-is-due...

There have been various proposals for it before.

I never understood the rationale for not doing it.

email was included by ISPs as a service, people continued to expect it for free.

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?

I get 2 or 3 pieces of junk physical mail, vs 2 or 300 pieces via email.

Isn't that what proof of work does? No idea why this is not common place.

Why would you send somebody that much money?

Emotional manipulation is the obvious answer.

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.

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.

I would never send that much money to someone especially in CRYPTO. Have I just never been that lonely before?

I have been lonely, but never crypto lonely.

Yep.

Indeed, and why would you send somebody any money, if you haven't met them IRL?

Also, anyone who acts too interested in me would be an instant red flag.

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".

I receive pig butchering emails and phone calls all the time.

Can you explain more?

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.

> Most of those “pig butchering” scams develop over the course of a few months

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!

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

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.

I get one or two SMS texts each month from unknown numbers with messages like "have time this week" or "I'm curious - how did we connect?". I have a collection of pics they send and use the pics to respond to others. It's probably smarter to ignore them, but it's hard to resist wasting their time.

The dating apps have zero incentive to change. Bandaids like photo verification are minimally effective at best.

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.

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.

Simply buy up all the dating apps and sites under a single company.

This mostly exists and is called Match Group! Owners of Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com and a bunch of smaller, specialized dating apps.

I'm guessing the parent knows that.

Now I'm wondering, if one created a brand new dating app marketed "WE ARE NOT OWNED BY MATCH GROUP", would it make bank?

That's what OKCupid was supposed to be. They even wrote a blog post about how they are different from the other companies.

And then Match bought OKCupid.

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)

nice, welcome to the dark side brother

"In total, Mary said she sent the man about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments."

I feel for this person, I truly do....but....seriously!?

not a red flag at all

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.

The government of Singapore launched their own dating app, currently only for public officers (?) between 21 and 35:

https://asianews.network/singapore-government-launches-datin...

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.

Right, but those are very long term problems, I'd like to see if a non profit app could improve things, at least until we fix our societal issues.

Singapore does that called FirstDate. Korean incentives marriage with money and grants. But if I were you looking to date, I'd move to Asia.

Why would it be any more successful than the privately-owned dating apps?

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.

Privately owned dating apps have an incentive to keep you on the app, ie to not find you a relationship.

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.

Their goal is to show you what you find attractive not who is compatible with you

They also hide the people you find most attractive behind a paywall

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

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/stephen-matthews-sente...

Other people really want a relationship and keep spending money and get nothing.

>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”

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...

Thank you very much for the book recommendation. I am always looking for more reading.

The above incentives are why I mentioned that I think governments should fund a non profit app. Happier citizens, more stable families filled with the number of kids they want. It's an obvious win win to me.

I am for it. It make take a while for the public to catch up!

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 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.

I find it a bit unfortunate. The scammers have some fairly rare and valuable skillsets. They're able to get a complete stranger to fall in love with them, send money repeatedly all without ever meeting in person. This requires the ability to build rapport quickly, fairly accurate and deep emotional reading, the ability to establish trust.

These seem like skillsets that can be leveraged in legitimate jobs or businesses fairly lucratively.