How exactly does it legitimize anything?
I see Siren as a very pragmatic solution to the problem. The problem exists, this app is a response to lived reality.
The fundamental model behind Siren exactly agrees with their prediction. I meant "legitimizes" only of in the sense of "to those people", which it does: the gender norms presented in Siren exactly correspond to the prediction or norms thought of by those problematic actors.
In this way, it actually (to them) encourages their problematic behavior rather than discourages it by way of reaffirming their (warped) worldview that makes those behaviors seem reasonable.
> I see Siren as a very pragmatic solution to the problem. The problem exists, this app is a response to lived reality.
Setting aside for the moment that I don't think that Siren actually even addresses the problem that it claims to, even if it did, solving the named problem only solves the problem that (some) women have with online dating at the cost of making a gender-based power structure, while simultaneously ignoring (or even worsening) the problems felt by the other gender in the same arena.
I'm not sure I view this as "pragmatic" if your overarching concern is the poor treatment of women in the dating scene or sexism in a more general setting.
How exactly does this app encourage men to creep/stalk women? I don't see where it "makes behaviors seem reasonable." It explicitly denies men the ability to perform actions that other platforms allowed.
The fundamental structure of the app is that women are to be trusted, men are not, and that if men want to speak to women, they must perform feats which meet the approval of the woman. (This is just paraphrasing their own description, from the news article.)
This exactly agrees with the world view of those problematic actors: that relations between gender is a game where you simply need to strike the woman's fancy a particular way and have little to no control over the outcome, besides simply throwing messages to the wind.
From a strictly rational perspective, the best way to succeed at that (if you're looking for short lasting relationships with many women) is to attempt to evade the evaluation criteria using trickery or find women with less stringent criteria, both of which are best accomplished using a lot of activity with generic responses/profiles and attempting to interact with as many women as possible.
In this sense, Siren is actually incentivizing bad behaviors in a manner similar to other dating websites, except that it takes it a step further, and explicitly acknowledges and incorporates this gender bias. Further, it allows bad actors to concentrate all their effort on making a single profile good (in order to bypass the first layer of filtering and allow them to message as many women as possible), instead of having to create many messages. A profile, in this sense, is simply automating the copy-and-pasted messages that women receive.
As I mentioned, I don't think that it's any easier to filter problematic profiles in order to locate good ones, meaning that throwing your net wider (eg, many profiles of mediocre quality) and being a larger portion of the noise is more likely to get you noticed than being a high quality respondent.
In particular, why do you think bad actors are less likely to respond to many questions or post many videos than people who make quality submissions?
This seems dubious at best, and leaves Siren with a very nasty filtering problem: removing very active, low quality users without impacting high or low activity, high quality users.
Ed:
I guess I should mention that Siren will solve one problem that it explicitly aimed to: men can no longer simply message women in droves, and it allows the woman to regulate the rate at which messages reach her.
However, the more fundamental problem is that women weren't able to filter poor quality messages from problematic actors away from high quality messages they wanted to get. While Siren solves the flood of messages, in the sense of raw message count, it does nothing to address this fundamental problem of filtering quality from not, and might actually make that more challenging.
In short, I think that Siren has some really good ideas in terms of privacy and rate limiting, but that it falls short of its real goal, which is the quality filtering, and does so in a way that's liable to make the actual problem worse.
So they fixed the use case where the woman's photo is exposed, but leave the same problem for guys?
I've had a couple creepy female stalkers, and honestly, would prefer the same protection they're offering women. It's certainly the case that dating sites are dominated by creepy men, but a high ratio doesn't necessarily translate to a lack of problematic female actors. As a side issue, the fundamental gender imbalance of the website actually legitimizes the problematic world view that creates many of these problematic guys in the first place - namely that relations are a game in which women hold the power and they just need to play a numbers game if they want to win, with perhaps adjusting their wording to slip by filters.
Further, I don't think this app actually solves the problem it attempts to: it actually lowers the effort on the part of bad actors, since they only need to maintain one profile rather than messaging many women. I'm not sure how they're proposing to have women sort through a large number of profiles that are made by bad actors any more than they could sort through a large number of messages made by bad actors, nor do I think that filtering the profiles is a fundamentally easier task than filtering the messages would have been. (Actually, I think the opposite: that it's easier to make a misleading profile than a misleading message.)
Glad to see another sexist project pitched as a solution to social problems.
Ed:
I actually want to tone down my comment a bit, but will leave the original wording as is. I don't mean to condemn the authors, because they're addressing a complicated and sensitive issue without any known solutions. That being said, while I think their hearts were in the right place, their execution seems to focus primarily on /their/ issues, while completely ignoring the issues faced by the other side of the equation. Programming things that solve your problems and not other peoples is hardly unique to this case or a new development (heck, it might be the hallmark of software), but it's disappointing in this case, because they clearly have many well thought out features, that unfortunately, I'm completely unable to take advantage of to solve my problems or my issues with online dating.
Let me say that again: the inherent sexism of the app is particularly disappointing, because while it does many of the things I'd want in a dating app, it refuses to let me use them and instead frames me as enemy-until-proven-otherwise.
I just don't understand, at a fundamental level, why both sides don't have their pictures hidden and only be allowed to interact via their video/question/etc interface until both sides approve. (Well, I have one conjecture, but I'm reluctant to ascribe it as true: that they're tacitly admitting women want eye candy, not just personality, and that their app isn't meant to serve the interests of men.)