Fake Men on Hinge

https://www.wired.com/story/i-uncovered-an-army-of-fake-men-on-hinge/

by acqbu • 4 years ago

96 165 4 years ago

graedus• 4 years ago

As a man, online dating is already a miserable experience. But I've been told Hinge is one of the better apps out there. One of the first things I've noticed about using it is how exploitative and money grubbing the company is. The premium version doesn't seem to appreciably change anything about how often your profile shows up. No, to do that they want you to pay for a "Boost" which lasts for a mere hour, and costs $11.99. You can buy 5 and get a measly discount where they only cost $9.99 apiece. If you are already someone who does not get frequent matches, this is a terrible deal and the duration is insultingly low.

Never mind the practice of "Roses" in which the only way to message some women is to buy a like that costs $3.33 each. Again, in bulk you can get that down to $1.49 apiece. But what is so scummy about it is that they seem to have an algorithm that detects the most beautiful of women and locks messaging them behind the need to send roses.

Not to go on too much of a rant, but I really loathe how this company approaches it's customer base. This article showed me that they aren't just horrible to men.

extasia• 4 years ago

Been there and it kills your confidence. Online dating is truly fucked for men.

Checkout Gerbert Johnson on YT, he has a channel with some funny content on it that isn't absurd redpill nonsense.

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

Can confirm. Source: had shaky confidence which now is killed.

abhaynayar• 4 years ago

Thanks for the channel, just binged it a bit -- really cool!

SQueeeeeL2• 4 years ago

Modern dating apps are pretty much all terrible, they basically completely commodify the experience of love and turn relationships into a purely aesthetics based thing. It's pretty terrible because I think most people don't actively have any way to meet single people their age, so people pretend apps are somehow a band aid for a deeply atomized society. Unless you're in a foreign country or a tourist, the advice I've heard repeated over and over is trying to meet others through organic social connections (ultimate frisbee, D&D, work, class) so that there exist some social fabric to base a relationship upon.

(Pretty good, slightly cringey, video on how apps use the language of capitalism https://youtube.com/watch?v=-bcKRd_lfAg )

RichardCNormos• 4 years ago

most people don't actively have any way to meet single people their age

This is absolutely true. The best we've got right now is bars & clubs, and in those environments, there's no preselection for the type of person you'd want a meaningful relationship with.

Case in point: I met my wife at church. Going in the door, it was predetermined that we would share a common set of values.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

It's pretty terrible because I think most people don't actively have any way to meet single people their age

This is probably my biggest problem. I can go out, and women will even approach me and flirt, at least until they realize they have some years on me…

throwaway515• 4 years ago

I think most people don't actively have any way to meet single people their age, so people pretend apps are somehow a band aid for a deeply atomized society

Looking back, I wasted my most dateable years doing exactly this. I thought if I just stayed on the apps a little longer, put up with the dopamine-drip machine bullshit just a little more, I'd meet someone.

I wasn't even relying entirely on them – I attended a church, volunteered at a soup kitchen, and other things where you're supposed to be able to meet people, but I wonder if maybe I would have emphasized them more (seeking out more volunteer opportunities, etc) without the gambler's promise of the dating apps panning out "any day now."

dkarl4• 4 years ago

they basically completely commodify the experience of love and turn relationships into a purely aesthetics based thing

I think this is the right thing to do. Apps work great for a quick check of "does this person look cute and interesting."

They suck for everything else. I think it's great that apps like Tinder have given up on the pretense of helping people present their true deep selves, find compatible people, and figure out if there's a connection before they even meet. I know it seems more enlightened to deemphasize looks and concentrate on inner qualities, your personality and values and dreams, but over decades of painful experience we've learned that that stuff just doesn't convey accurately online. People invest huge amounts of energy creating profiles, answering quizzes, and trying to understand other people through their profiles and through online conversations, and the result are always disappointing.

By now I think we understand that failure well enough that when a company promises to do it well, we should call it a scam. It might work for a few people, but they're very rare and very lucky. Apps should be honest and stick to what they're really good at, which is helping people who mutually pass the superficial visual check find each other, on a scale they could never accomplish IRL, and facilitating them getting face to face so they can find out if they actually like each other.

Tinder does a perfect job of this. Just a few pics and a tiny profile. Put vital info in the profile (kids? open to what kind of relationship?) and some polarizing context in the pics (signals of political and cultural preferences, whatever feels important to you.) If someone wants to chat for more than a week without meeting you in person, unmatch them, because they're probably a bot or somebody just doing it to kill time. (Unless they say hey, let's put this on ice for a bit, I just met someone and if it doesn't work out I'd like to meet you next. That's valid.)

Paying to increase the attention you get is a scam, too, of course, and I won't defend any app doing it. It basically turns the app into a strip club where the women work for free and it's even easier for the men to delude themselves into thinking they'll get something out of it. Really if you aren't getting hits then all you can do is work on your profile or cast or wider net, or take a break for a month while you wait for new people to become active.

nradov• 4 years ago

You're giving terrible advice. If I had relied only on organic social connections I would have never met my wife. We didn't share any of the same activities, worked in different industries, and attended different schools.

There's no need to restrict yourself to one approach. People can do both.

pcbro1414• 4 years ago

Same thing with Tinder and their multiple tiers, multiple types of boosts, multiple types of Super Likes. All these dating apps exploit desperate men.

The truth is if you're not already getting a decent amount of likes on the standard tier, there's no point paying for 10 boosts like that will change your attractiveness.

electrondood3• 4 years ago

Tinder gives me the exact same dirty feeling as visiting the strip in Las Vegas. It's like sex gambling, but for body CVs.

slimginz• 4 years ago

Hinge is owned by Match Group. Along with also owning Match.com they also own Tinder, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, Black People Meet, Our Time, and about 20 more services. AFAIK the only "big" dating app that they don't own is Bumble. It's honestly insane how much of a monopoly Match Group has on the modern dating scene.

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

Hinge is owned by Match Group [...] AFAIK the only "big" dating app that they don't own is Bumble.

Bumble/Badoo have some Russian connotations... so the choice is between cancer or syphilis. Within the last 10 years we voluntarily have delegated our mating preselection to them... and "in real world" is even worse...

Tangurena2• 4 years ago

To make things worse, Match.com translates profiles from one "platform" to another. So that interesting person you see on, say, PlentyOfFish never posted their profile to POF - they originally only wrote an OKCupid profile. If you bother to read the "terms of use" then you'll find they can do this.

Many times when it looks like someone else is interested in you, the appearance is made that they can only be reached by subscribing for money, it turns out that the person is not there, never was there and had abandoned the other platform due to lack of interest.

And paying for the service never makes it easier to get dates either.

FiatLuxDave• 4 years ago

Match is known for buying out their competition.

So does anyone know if there is a startup accelerator specializing in making dating apps for selling to Match?

Something like: "Here's a list of features that users love, and here's a bunch of marketing techniques for making your userbase grow fast. Don't worry about monetization, Match is going to buy you out anyways. We're just going to keep on repeating doing this until Match runs out of money or everyone we know is rich."

fuzzy2• 4 years ago

Match Group is one of the worst internet companies I know. I was quite surprised when I found out they own basically every online dating thing.

I’m not sure whether… innovation in the online dating space would do us any good, but I’m positive that Match Group is hard at work to prevent it from happening.

bombcar3• 4 years ago

If we take dating to have an end-game of a long-time relationship, then it's a market segment that is always limited, if you're successful your customers leave.

Much, much more profitable to simply drag your customers along forever and use every whale-milking technique ever designed.

wollsmoth2• 4 years ago

I'm out of the game now that I'm seeing someone. I did meet her online but I'm now convinced that you're much better off just going out in the world. I think most people still don't meet or look online.

llaolleh• 4 years ago

After the pandemic it has shifted. I read that 40% of couples meet through dating apps. Wild.

I believe it as that's how most of my friends met their partners.

IgorPartola4• 4 years ago

See I think fees for stuff like this aren’t a bad thing because it makes it harder for spam and BS to get through. The problem is that the company has to be really truly good about their matching algorithm to make it work. Here is the issue:

Say the company charged $1 per first contact you make with a person. They can then show you people most likely to respond to help you get your conversation going ASAP and give you the highest value for your money. Or they could instead keep giving you poor matches so that you keep paying over and over. As far as they are concerned, the minute you fully engage with someone, assuming you are monogamous, you will not be a client for them for 6-18 months or whatever the length of an average relationship is in your demographic. But as long as your matches are mediocre (enough engagement to keep you going but not enough for you to get off the app), they can keep making money.

This is where hookup apps could do a lot better than lifetime partner apps: a hookup app will have repeat business with this pricing model and will actually do better in terms of expectations but a LTR app will lose you soon as you find a suitable candidate.

The alternative is 100% free apps which mean that bots have a zero cost to be bots and so you can run as many of them as you want. It is a problem of the commons in a way: soon as a certain percentage of bots spoils your interactions with the app you have no reason to come back.

Small rant: Bumble IIRC shows you most popular people in your area if you are on the free tier. These are almost guaranteed to not match with you and might not even be online having been overwhelmed by the attention. But if you pay, they’ll first show you people who have actually liked you, you know the ones recently online and ones you can swipe right on to start talking. This is the wrong incentive though makes them money in the short term.

quest882• 4 years ago

I'm going to refute that it's a miserable experience because you're a man. As a decent looking man in a stable career I had a great time on hinge. I had many simultaneous conversations, and many dates that I had to cancel after finding someone I wanted to be exclusive with. We've now been together almost a year and I was in the app for less than a month.

This experience was highly location subjective though. I had many great matches in the bay area.

YMMV

BlargMcLarg5• 4 years ago

Your solo anecdote does not weight up against the hordes of counterexamples.

Additionally, age plays a huge factor. None of the comments have mentioned age so far.

BitwiseFool4• 4 years ago

"I'm going to refute that it's a miserable experience because you're a man."

I think you have given a counter-example rather than a refutation. I don't deny that some men have great success on dating apps, but that experience is not evenly distributed.

kodah• 4 years ago

Most online dating apps are owned by the same company, Match Group. There's also Bumble but Bumble put predation on steroids, imo, and gave it a very homely facade. I would get few matches on any stock experience, which on each service encourages you to pay. Paying has no guarantee of success, or a refund when faced with absolute failure, so if you spend money on superlikes (or whatever feature) if it doesn't work or some person is having a wine night and uses that opportunity to make fun of you there's no getting that money back. Once you follow the incentivized spending plan the app is somewhat useful but more gimmicky than anything.

The problem is that men have been griping in public and private about this for years but they're continually shrugged off or made fun of for doing so. Some gripes are obviously unhinged, but I don't think there's even a shred of empathy for this problem even without those unhinged folks. This business model is absolutely normalized.

electrondood3• 4 years ago

A rose is the same as buying a drink. All it communicates is "I don't think I have anything else going for me, so I spent money to get you to notice me."

bruceb• 4 years ago

Online dating also enables men to say hi to women you may never have been able to if you just waited on organic situations. Some men are just not great at initiating conversation.

In some areas it is going to be more difficult and those areas probably are over represented on HN. SF/Bay Area, Seattle, Bangalore etc. The dating apps can't change the male to female ratio.

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

Not really, a man is brutally paywalled to interact or even to bubble up. The asynchronicity can be noted when some women's bios write "just write to me", as women simply swipe right and after almost guaranteed match can send a message...

pphysch3• 4 years ago

The ugly truth is that this is how the core dating game works.

Men desire a beautiful woman. Women desire a wealthy man.

Women are able to signal their appearance by uploading pictures. Men are able to (more credibly) signal their wealth through otherwise pointless IAPs.

I'm not saying Hinge's system is perfect or good or even worth anyone's time, but it is a more honest portrayal of "the game" than putting both sexes on equal footing.

maerF0x08• 4 years ago

Women desire _more_ than a wealthy man. They also preferentially select for "masculinity"[1]. So while a rose / perks signal wealth, At least anecdotally women also seem to have a bit of a resentment/disdain for using apps at all. They want a man with the "balls" (so to speak) to approach her, talk to her, not be afraid of rejection, have options but choose her[2].

So long as you can express enough of these signals, wealth beyond her income level won't be a deal breaker.

[1]: please just forgive this term as a stand in for the personality traits that express in people with sufficient testosterone and success as defined by the society.

[2]: this point is just common sense across all genders... having options but choosing one is a form of backing for a compliment. Choosing her out of a pool of no one else is not flattery, it's desperation.

standardUser6• 4 years ago

I'm in my 40's and have dated a lot and been in many relationships and I have never experienced the "women desire a wealthy man" myth that you state as fact.

pessimizer3• 4 years ago

Buying internet gold on a dating site isn't a sign of dominance, sadly. It's a sign of weakness.

maerF0x08• 4 years ago

Never mind the practice of "Roses" in which the only way to message some women is to buy a like that costs $3.33 each. Again, in bulk you can get that down to $1.49 apiece. But what is so scummy about it is that they seem to have an algorithm that detects the most beautiful of women and locks messaging them behind the need to send roses.

Actually this is even far more anti-pattern than that. The fact the recipient knows you sent a rose signals a few things to (presumably) her:

1. You had to pay to get access to her, your ELO/Algorithm score is low enough that they app thinks your beneath her

2. You're not getting enough dates / matches that you're desperate enough that you're now paying money for what others get for free

pavlov2• 4 years ago

Sounds like sending this kind of rose to a woman who already gets lots of attention is futile for the reasons you list. But it might actually be an effective gesture towards a woman who’s not in the top 50% of the site because it signals that you’re not a player who’s simply messaging all the below-average women, and that your score is probably aligned with hers.

serjester• 4 years ago

How would structure your dating app to be different? Presumably you’d have expenses.

Maybe you could make it open source? But sounds like you’re gonna have a hard time staying ahead of abuse. Not to mention attracting enough people for the app to be useful is gonna be difficult if you’re not spending money on marketing.

Maybe you could have a monthly fee? But then who’s gonna use it? And there’s already plenty of established sites like that.

Well maybe you could have a virtual equivalent of buying someone a drink? Ah yes, we end up back on roses. Is it perfect? No. But doesn’t sound like any option is.

teaearlgraycold4• 4 years ago

Even in the Bay Area, a place with notably more men than women and thus a much harder dating experience, I’ve had a good experience with Hinge. I’m sure it helps to be employed in tech (although that should apply to most people on this site).

I’ve never given them a cent. I did put a lot of work into my profile - going on dozens of dates, learning from the bad matches how I could signal incompatibility earlier, and generally just going head first into the trial-by-fire of online dating for the first time.

Things are progressing slowly for me but to be honest my caution is the limiting factor. More importantly there has been progression.

electrondood3• 4 years ago

By Bay Area, do you mean SF? Because outside of that, you're going to exhaust your swipe supply pretty quick.

pdntspa• 4 years ago

Dang, I remember when SF was reputed to be a cis man's dating paradise. With all the gay dudes I had heard rumors that the ratio was something like 3 women to 1 man.

dkarl4• 4 years ago

I found Hinge to be heavily skewed towards well-off professional women looking for well-off professional men. (Can't speak about the men since I only looked at women.) Other than that the mechanics seemed pretty typical. There were fewer bots, sex workers, and badly done profiles than on Tinder, which was nice.

Melatonic2• 4 years ago

This is the real answer. Every guy I know who REALLY has a huge axe to grind with online dating will show me their profile and they will have low quality photos with little effort put in to their profile itself. If someone can't tell what the hell you actually look like or get a good feel for your real personality then why are they going to be interested?

If anything money should be spent on improving the profile itself (you could hire a professional photographer to take some "candid" looking nice photos of yourself + go to a higher end hair cutter, get your clothes tailored, etc etc). All of these things would probably also help you in real life. Worst case you have some great LinkedIn photos or something to send your family and some great fitting clothes to wear to dinner with friends.

_fat_santa• 4 years ago

I did put a lot of work into my profile - going on dozens of dates, learning from the bad matches how I could signal incompatibility earlier, and generally just going head first into the trial-by-fire of online dating for the first time.

I think why so many guys get mad at the apps is they just don't have the resilience for that amount of rejection. It's very easy to get disheartened when you match with someone, talk for a few days and ask them on a date only for her to not be interested. It's so easy to get mad when this happens and just go "F this entire thing", but you have to keep telling yourself that it's part of the process and keep going.

I've had a rather positive experience on Hinge but I think one of the main reasons is I set the expectation for myself that there will be alot of rejections.

thomastjeffery3• 4 years ago

You missed the most important anti-pattern that exists in all of Match's dating apps: limited swipes.

The entire foundational purpose of dating apps is to make the numbers game tractable.

By limiting the amount of swipes you can do, you limit the amount of people you can contact. By paywalling swipes, you limit the amount of people who can contact you.

Somehow the only popular dating apps are the ones literally designed to fail.

LorenPechtel3• 4 years ago

I think limiting them is a good idea--you have to be selective about who you approach rather than using a shotgun. However, I think there should be a left/right/maybe system. (Perhaps there is--I've been off the market since before apps were a thing.)

bel_marinaio3• 4 years ago

Hinge is a steaming pile of horse shit. If any match complains about you they will ban you for life (Guilty without any investigation) and refuse to tell you the reason. Good luck with your appeal.

Before any SJW replies that I must be some troll here is the proof "Revenge reporting" is real. Revenge reporting happens to men too.

https://www.stylist.co.uk/relationships/dating-love/dating-a...

Melatonic2• 4 years ago

They have algo that rate everything behind the scenes. OKCupid has lots of good articles on it.

What it really comes down to though is how much effort you put into your profile. I do not do online dating really but all my female friends complain about the low quality photos of 90% of men and the lack of effort in their profile. They show me what they are dealing with and it is honestly kind of laughable. And the guys they do end up going for often are not even the most attractive.

It also helps a lot if you put the effort in immediately after making your profile. Once the algo starts rating you low then it can be harder to come back from.

xenospn2• 4 years ago

As a man who self-admittedly gets quite a few matches every day, I can confidently say that the less effort you put in, the better the results are. Just have good photos, everything else is secondary.

microtherion• 4 years ago

Apparently it gets better for men if you manage to live to an advanced age: A college buddy recently told us that his widowed father is absolutely inundated with Tinder matches, because in his age range (70s-80s), the gender ratio is increasingly skewed female.

Not that this helps you much right now, I suppose…

gs172• 4 years ago

IIRC I sent one of my free roses to my current girlfriend. She wasn't one of my standouts but I wanted to get her attention and it worked. With how many normal likes she showed me she had in her inbox, there's no way we would have even chatted if I hadn't jumped the queue.

The "Standouts" feature still felt like a total scam to me though. "Here's a bunch of women we think are out of your league, pay us and we'll let them know you exist".

hizxy• 4 years ago

Well you certainly know a lot about their business practices…

AussieWog933• 4 years ago

As a man, online dating is already a miserable experience.

Based on what I've heard from women, it's bad for them too. Easy to find a root, but hard to find someone to introduce to mum and dad.

IRL dating is worse. Apparently in the post-#metoo era men just stopped talking to women in general.

midoridensha5• 4 years ago

Online dating is much safer than meeting women IRL. If you try to ask out women IRL, the chance for rejection is extremely high (they probably aren't looking for a date at all, after all), and if it's at work, that opens another big can of worms.

If you meet someone on a dating site, then you know they're interested in dating. And if you mutually match them (as most apps work now), you know they're at least a little bit interested in you.

itsthejb• 4 years ago

I’ve used Hinge somewhat. Regarding the roses, and the “premium profiles” (I can’t remember the feature name), I considered this a boon - if you’re a normal guy, those are the women you should _avoid_. Conversely, if you’re a woman who really does want a relationship, then you don’t want to be one of those profiles!

IgorPartola4• 4 years ago

Only semi-related but I find Tinder to be the most fascinating of the current bunch of online dating platforms. It has suffered some kind of reverse of the normal effect of online social platforms: while any normal online platform (dating, gaming, social, etc.) quickly becomes all about sex, Tinder started out as a hookup platform and somehow moved to a relationship-seeking platform. That isn’t to say that hookups no longer happen via Tinder, but it seems to me based on personal experience and reading discussions of other people’s that the platform is now largely used for finding long term partnerships. This has led to creation of apps like Pure, focused solely on hookups (which from what I gather never got the massive popularity needed to make it usable), and Feeld (much friendlier towards alternative relationships and desires).

BitwiseFool4• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, that does not match my experience at all. When I relented and got a Tinder account I was immediately inundated with dozens of likes. I was instantly skeptical because Tinder kept bombarding me with prompts to buy their premium service at a discount. And, truth be told, having consistently received such a low number of matches on other platforms, I was suspicious about being so suddenly popular.

Lo and behold, every single one of the matches/messages I received were nothing more than advertisements for their OnlyFans or an invitation to follow one their social media profiles. I've also found that most of the profiles shown to me are either low effort, or belong to women that are thousands of miles away - despite me disabling the worldwide setting. As a result my overall impression is that Tinder is the worst when it comes to non-genuine accounts. By genuine I don't just mean real humans, I mean people who are actually using the site sincerely.

IgorPartola4• 4 years ago

I should have been more clear. I don’t mean that Tinder isn’t a huge platform for only fans et al ads. What I mean is that the genuine users started initially using the platform for one night stands/hookups but the focus of the genuine users has quickly shifted towards LTRs. I have not seen other platforms do this. Lots of other platforms go in the opposite direction where they start out with LTR culture only to add hookups as a major focus.

jrnichols2• 4 years ago

were nothing more than advertisements for their OnlyFans or an invitation to follow one their social media profiles.

This is a huge huge huge reason why so many guys start off a conversation with something like "hi."

we are full on expecting to get some bot response or OnlyFans spam. it's incredible what a cancer OnlyFans has become across the internet.

throwaway2037• 4 years ago

This experience is very interesting. I have used dating apps in a few countries in East Asia. I never once had the issue that you mention, but I definitely believe it happens. Thinking deeper about it, advertising via a dating app for your OnlyFans site sounds like a brilliant idea! If you have a very visually appealing profile, then men are very likely to select you and at least read a few messages.

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

Are you sure this observation is not just a side-effect of you, your peers, and your romantic interests getting older? I kind of suspect that the 18-25 crowd on Tinder is still mostly looking to hook up.

IgorPartola4• 4 years ago

I am not just basing this on my own interests, though admittedly I am not conducting a full on rigorous research project.

3qz• 4 years ago

It’s honestly fascinating to me that women think bots are so interesting that they deserve an article like this. I feel like almost all men match with more bots than real women. We live in entirely different worlds.

ghostpepper• 4 years ago

I was kind of disappointed that the author was contacted by the scammer and then after exchanging no real information, decided to wrap up the investigation. I understand she might have concerns for her personal safety (giving a VOIP number instead of her real one might have been prudent) but I thought this story was going to go much deeper. The author didn’t really find out much of anything, and mostly just relayed a personal anecdote.

pcbro1414• 4 years ago

The raw male perspective on modern dating is rarely featured in mainstream media. The only place to get men's perspective on modern dating is basically 'red pill' type of content, which is unfortunate. Most journalists are women, and quite frankly in most of their dating columns they don't seem too interested in understanding male perspectives on the frustrations of modern dating (unless it's to bash extremist incel/red pill types). I can't recall reading many mainstream media dating articles sympathetic to men's frustrations with modern dating, you can find plenty sympathetic to women's frustrations though.

majormajor2• 4 years ago

None of the men I talk to in real life have the experiences I see men complaining about online. The women I meet in real life, on the other hand, have stories that match the ones I read about online.

The male complainers just naturally have more to gripe about than the "meh, it's fine" crowd who usually can't be bothered (or aren't believed in the crowd of complaints).

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

Ironically, this video focusing on "incels" has a pretty good understanding of the male online dating experience (starting around 17:00): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

I agree that the various "red pill" subcultures have done a terrific job of sucking the air out of the room RE conversations about men's dating experience. It's a hard conversation to have with any amount of nuance in 2022.

swagasaurus-rex2• 4 years ago

What men are sold are "Best date ideas for a special woman", "Top 10 things you can say to make her knees melt", "The perfect gemstone for your perfect woman".

jimbob45• 4 years ago

Yeah, there’s this desperate push by feminists to have this “we’re just like men with the exact same problems!” narrative. Meanwhile, reality.

Women have problems in online dating too, even equal in severity and scope. Just not the exact same problems.

CharlesW5• 4 years ago

Yeah, there’s this desperate push by feminists to have this “we’re just like men with the exact same problems!” narrative.

Show me what in the article says (or implies) that women are "just like men" or "have the exact same problems".

ironmagma• 4 years ago

Not only bots, but scam artists in general: people abusing the platform for soliciting themselves, advertising their OnlyFans, or (this has actually happened to me) people giving out their (fake? but convincing) social security card photos, presumably to get the receiver to reciprocate. This is on a dating app.

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

This particular woman was interested, I doubt most would be. This article wasn't interesting at all, she didn't even find out anything about the scam. I don't see why it was written. Newsflash there are scammers on the internet.

erulabs• 4 years ago

I really enjoyed the writing style and tone.

Liwei is convinced that “Christianity.” That’s it, that’s the sentence: “I’m convinced that Christianity.”

AI really hits peak ironic humor quite well. I would be shocked if there isn't a real person somewhere with that exact profile string as a gag, even if this AI generated it regurgitation style.

“Fuck, you,” was all he could say. Paul did not sound German, and he was probably not in Pacifica. Rattled, I hung up and blocked Paulbot. I had tried to peek inside dating app scams, and reach the people who feel compelled to run them, and I had failed. Or maybe I had succeeded, if success meant confirming that humans are still scamming other humans, from a world away, by exploiting the false closeness we experience through screens.

Just top notch writing - I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. Great writing, interesting topic, no absurd over the top title or implications, and funny? Lauren Goode has a new fan :)

itake2• 4 years ago

I had a different feeling... The author didn't try very hard to gather more information about the group after they gave up immediately when the person refused to answer explicit direct incriminating questions.

This would be much more interesting if they went down the rabbit hole. They could have matched with multiple fake accounts, seen if it was AI or a human, seen if the accounts take you to the same website or if its a bunch of different groups operating.

jonatron• 4 years ago

The autocomplete for googling "hinge only" is "hinge only showing fat" and "hinge only showing ugly". There's pages and pages of people saying they get shown nothing but the least attractive people on hinge, which would cause real people to just delete it.

nelsondev• 4 years ago

I’m guessing they have a low Elo score, and are matching with other low Elo scores. I believe best thing to do is delete the account and create a new one to reset your score.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

They need to study their chess theory more.

bradlys3• 4 years ago

100% this. Your experience on hinge will be terrible generally unless A) lucky or B) very good looking.

I’ve gotten lucky with the ELO score once on Hinge out of the dozen times I created accounts on it. I was shown attractive women and got matched even to a few (which went nowhere of course). But most times I got shown fat and ugly people. I know I’m not good looking but sometimes I see the people on these apps and I think, “man, some people really get it way worse than I do…” And that’s who it shows to me overwhelmingly.

Meanwhile it’ll lock all the attractive women behind paid features.

It’s a bad app. I think a few years ago before it was bought up it had some potential but since Match integrated all their practices into Hinge - it’s a bad app.

itake2• 4 years ago

I find that filtering by language drastically improved the quality of matches. Choosing people that speak non-english languages, reduces overweight native talent.

heyheyhey• 4 years ago

Hinge has a weird bucketing technique where it'll show you 30 straight unattractive profiles one day then 30 straight mega-attractive profiles the next day. No idea why they do that.

gs172• 4 years ago

My Hinge feed (when I used it) seemed to be sorted in increasing attractiveness order. Maybe showing people you're more likely to have a chance with (assuming everyone is willing to date someone "more attractive" than themself, which might be a big assumption) is considered more likely to create matches?

Bumble seemed to do something resembling the opposite which felt slightly more pointless.

cm42• 4 years ago

The author discovered bot armies on dating/social sites in much the same way Columbus discovered America.

Anyway, congrats, I guess. https://xkcd.com/1053/

pmarreck• 4 years ago

Here's what a lot of terrible dating, both on- and offline, has taught me:

The things that make a person "intoxicating" as a significant ingredient in LTR material, are completely irrational and not captured by any dating app: Things like how a person moves; their posture; how their voice sounds; their smells and, perhaps, tastes; their interaction manner; the fluency of their expressiveness; their emotional and physical openness; how their hands feel on your body; how much respect they garner or give (to themselves, to you and others), etc. etc.

The rational stuff? Sure, these sites will let you get a bead on those at least, such as general intelligence, values, general static attractiveness/smile/etc., politics, tastes etc. But I believe they overvalue these things, and while we are collectively some quite proud intellectual beings who wish to base all of our decisionmaking on things at intellectual and rational levels, evidence shows that the body wants to have its say as well, and a quite powerful one at that, due to things like MHC comparisons being very important for creating healthy offspring: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5006172/, https://www.splice-bio.com/can-you-smell-sexual-attraction/ etc. Basically, the keys to the vagaries of the process of reproduction have only barely been given to us; the whole thing is still largely biologically-driven, and biology requires physical presence to work!

The second problem with online dating is that it shifts the power dynamic too far away from men and too much into the hands of women. Whereas in a pre-online-dating context, a woman might have, say, 2 to 10 (or more) "suitors" or interested men, in an online dating context, the most desirable women now have 100 or 1000 or more to sift through (and even the middlingly-desirable ones likely have a hundred or more), and can select the best possible ones (at least on the basis of rational reasons, see above) and then let the MHC game play itself out among those. Meanwhile, a regular man on these sites who previous to online dating might have had a shot with the desirable women in his extended circle of acquaintances or coworkers etc. thanks to boons such as the "proximity leads to sexual attraction" effect https://www.neuroscience.org.uk/proximity-mere-exposure-effe..., have now been stripped of that edge, since those same women in their circles can now simply go online-date and benefit from a significantly larger pool of eligible men to choose from, and because those men themselves now have to send, say, 1000 sincere and time-consuming messages in order to perhaps get 2 or 3 responses. (And women complain that most of their messages from guys online are either too simple or too formulaic or "low-effort"... this is why!)

On the bright side, perhaps it's high time for men to sincerely step up their game!

I'm going to tell my (still a toddler) son to skip online dating because it's a losing game for him, to get himself out there physically in front of women by being present physically at things out in the world, to ask them to dance or otherwise physically interact playfully in order to let the MHC/scent thing do its thing, and to de-emphasize "rational" reasons to choose someone. I'm also going to tell him that that, plus enduring mutual respect (thanks to the work the Gottman Institute did on uncovering the importance of this), and basically little else, are the ingredients of a good LTR: https://firstthings.org/4-reasons-why-respect-matters-in-mar...

So, back to the article, I'm not terribly upset that some women on Hinge now have to do more work to weed out bots in addition to "terrible men", because they were already (HUGELY) benefiting from online dating to begin with.

ivank• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-EtdC4zQso ‘Forced to Scam: Cambodia’s Cyber Slaves’

maerF0x08• 4 years ago

FWIW I've come across a ton of fake Chinese accounts (in the appearance of the woman in the photos). It got to the point that I just didnt swipe on women who appeared Chinese. like 19/20 times they'd just try and get me off app to WhatsApp in the first few messages, and then the thread would go dead.

I can't help but think it's a form of social engineering where they're creating a drag net of data like "This phone number is on Hinge, and responds to warranty texts, and their IG suggests they've lived in <places>" ... I'm not sure to what end but I'm wary.

Paulbot was never removed from Hinge, because he preemptively deleted his account. I’ve canceled my subscription.

This simply could be the aim here. Nefarious actors win by eroding trust, or competitors.

durnygbur4• 4 years ago

Have the same in a location where there are no Chinese or any other eastern Asian women on the streets.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 4 years ago

Oh no! Fake men! Whatever will those women do now they get the same experience as men? Fake accounts, of either sex, are there to keep you paying although sometimes they are outside scammers.

yawnxyz• 4 years ago

How do you start building bots like this, that can interact with people so convincingly? From the sign in / sign up process to the profile generation to the conversations?

Fake Men on Hinge

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