I think this might be a (relatively) rare strategy error for Facebook. If the success of Snapchat, LinkedIn, and also the separate WhatsApp/Instagram properties proves anything, it's that there are very different faces of ourselves that we show to the professional world, to our friends, to partners, and to the world at large.
If I was facebook, I would very explicitly announce this as a spin out project, under a different name and brand. While HN has a good knowledge of the ultimate parent owners of apps, I meet a lot of people who protest facebook by moving to Instagram/WhatsApp. Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
> it's that there are very different faces of ourselves that we show to the professional world, to our friends, to partners, and to the world at large
I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. Just my personal feelings on the matter, though. I'm not trying to call out anyone who likes that way of life (and perhaps has a personality that's well suited for it), just that it should not be imposed on everyone.
I kind of like the old model where you pretend to be conservative at work, and are free to be as weird as you want to in your own time.
I think this is an "old people's thinking" perspective. Younger generation are way more open about their dating life than us. They openly talk about their dating life at work or friends group. They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.
From their privacy page, interesting bit: You can also choose how you want to present yourself to potential matches, like whether you provide different information than you have on your Facebook profile
It also seems particularly poorly timed when a breach exposing Facebook user phone numbers just made hacker news yesterday. Does anyone really want to trust a dating service that aggressively collects anything and everything about a person and may accidentally share it? Sounds like a stalker's paradise.
I think HN should in particular not feel informed enough to comment on strategic benefit of product decisions like these, because the general HN opinion of FB which is at such odds at FB's place in society is enough to conclude that HN doesn't really understand FB.
HN is a SV or SV-adjacent bubble that takes pride in not having social media profiles and doesn't hesitate in boasting about it in every frigging thread, multiple times a day. In contrast, (b)millions around the world find value in social media every single day and use it for all kinds of applications.
I am confident FB understands this much better than people like us here who can't think of any good use cases of social media without presenting 10 riders to assure the crowd that we hate FB.
This seems like something they should have added ten plus years ago, when their demo was primarily college kids.
I know many people who were clamoring for it at the time. It would have been an obvious addition as dating and relationships were a large part of the reason a lot of people used Facebook. I half suspect this is an attempt to pull college kids back into Facebook.
I think they missed their chance with this by a long shot.
This is what Facebook was ten years ago. The problem is dating wasn't as successfully monetized as it is today. Tinder/Bumble/CMB etc. have cracked that code, and Facebook wants to get in on it.
No way. This is looking at yesterday's decisions from today's zeitgeist. Without Grindr and Tinder and the other apps paving the way culturally, Facebook date would have creeped out their user base.
Many of the college kids of 2005 are now divorced, with kids, and desperately trying to fit dating into their busy lives.
I suspect that's a market potentially more easily attracted by the relative convenience of Facebook Dating compared to other services where you have to do more work to build up a profile and figure out UI, etiquette, etc.
Do you know how hard it is to meet new people after the age of 25? The statistics, historically, are not in your favor!
Dating and social apps have made it far easier for busy people, who lack 8 hours a day to socialize with others on a campus/forum, to organize dinner, dates, etc.
That might have worked but college students already used FB as a defacto dating app and facebook still grew to be a monopoly without that feature. Now that facebook is out of favor with young people this might be a good way to increase engagement with older single people.
i agree with that. it almost seems like they're throwing their weight into an already way overcrowded market. but it's still too early to tell - how is Facebook Marketplace doing against 5mile/LetItGo/etc?
Facebook's massive user base might make this a success. Depending on whether or not there's a fee involved.
This has been live in Canada for some time in a "beta" incarnation, and from a purely product standpoint it is terrible.
The UI is just bad. You cannot browse profiles, you must say "yes" or "no" and the decision is final. If you scroll down to read a profile more, when you pass, it leaves you in the same scroll spot in the next profile. This is User Interface 101 level stuff. The list of problems goes on from there.
Everything about it says "throwaway add-on" that they haven't spent any real time on optimizing.
When originally announced, Match stock dropped 25% on the news, only to bounce back. I don't see this product really making a big dent in the Match bottom line.
>Everything about it says "throwaway add-on" that they haven't spent any real time on optimizing.
Maybe this is a little unfair considering it was only a beta. Isn't a cornerstone of agile to get an MVP in front of users and iterate on user feedback? It doesn't seem right to judge any software based on a beta experience alone.
So, I'd use this, as someone who has trouble getting matches on dating apps usually. Facebook already has the largest issue for dating apps solved: the network chicken-and-egg problem. Dating apps are non-exclusive, I have 3 installed on my phone and using an additional one isn't a big deal.
If they are able to provide a differentiated feature set from other apps because they can better leverage FB interest data, I don't see why this couldn't work.
Is anyone else on this thread even in the dating scene right now? I really don't see how this is a plainly bad idea.
Also, what people on HN seem to be missing is that with dating, I don't care where I get my "leads" from. I can be using every single dating app at once, so what do I care about clicking "enable dating" on Facebook?
Facebook gave me a notification to try FB Dating the other week. I clicked it, chose my pics, and was on the meat market immediately, receiving phone notifications like "Karen liked you" just like any other dating app. I click it, view their profile, and start messaging them. Being linked to Facebook profiles, I also have more trust in the other party which is how Tinder started out.
HN rants so consistently about dating apps that I think it's mostly just ranting about dating in general.
Facebook is ubiquitous in Mexico where I live. And when I go back to the States and meet people 20-35 downtown, I have yet to find people who aren't on Facebook. I think HNers vastly overestimate the exodus from Facebook, if there is one, just because we like to cover FB's privacy issues here on HN.
Does anyone actually have up to date interest data on FB these days? I can't remember the last time I "liked" an interest or artist page. All of the data in the system now is leftover from when I was like 15 using the platform (24 now and yes, actively dating).
Only thing I actively use FB for these days is messenger and fantasy football shit talking groups, which are all "private".
"If your crush isn’t on Dating, doesn’t create a Secret Crush list, or doesn’t put you on their list — then no one will know that you’ve entered their name."
I'm looking forward to watching the shitstorm when that info gets leaked or an exploit is found that allows you to see whose lists you're on.
Reminds me of this dialog from the Social Network movie:
Relationship Status, Interested In. This is what drives life at college. Are you having sex or aren’t you. It’s why people take certain classes, and sit where they sit, and do what they do, and at its, um, center, you know, that’s what the Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually gonna, (get laid), meet a girl. Yes.
Date your friends! :D On a more serious note though, why not? If their mission is to help connect people and this helps connect people that otherwise had trouble dating and this does so in a meaningful way then sounds good to me. Privacy is always a concern no matter what the app/site/technology.
Yeah, like, as much as I detest Facebook, if I was looking for a partner... I'd consider using this. It'd be using my social graph of people I know to find people I don't know but who are probably similar or would fit well into my life? I feel like this is likely to be a lot more effective than the old dating app questionnaire.
Definitely a bit nerve-wracking on who can see if you're using it, potentially, since you know, I'd never want people on Facebook to know I'm using a "dating app", but other than that, I actually really like the implementation here.
The article says this: Facebook Dating won’t match you with friends, unless you choose to use Secret Crush and you both add each other to your list. All of your Dating activity will stay in Facebook Dating. It won’t be shared to the rest of Facebook.
> Privacy is always a concern no matter what the app/site/technology.
It’s not “privacy is a concern”, it’s “this thing is significantly worse for my privacy than this other thing”. Not caring about privacy because it’s “always a concern” falls to take into account that there are varying levels of privacy that services provide.
Because the only connecting they are doing is consumers to advertisers.
We've already seen what social media connected to advertising does to election security, do you really think its a good idea to test it on your love life?
If I look at who I know that is still using fb it is almost exclusively older people. I'm 33 and deleted my fb account, almost every person I know younger than me either did the same or was never on in the first place.
I see this being huge for older adults who are divorced or widowed, those are the people still using fb and I think would be happy to use this service.
"a Dating profile (separate from your main profile)"
"Secret Crush lists"
"All of your Dating activity will stay in Facebook Dating"
"Feel safe by sharing details"
I don't know how anyone who's read a news article about Facebook in the past year (or browsed the web and glanced at the ads they get) can believe any of this.
This may feel weird to us, HN people. But perhaps it’s the good move for Facebook because a lot of people use it differently than we do.
There are a lot of people using Facebook as a serious communication platform (think your mum and dad, or your friends from high school). These guys aren’t hiding who they are much on facebook.
They’ll probably get way better matches on Facebook than on traditional dating sites.
This is not a competitor to Tinder, I see this as a serious dating site for shyer or older people.
Whereas tinder, instagram, and others value add is from their content, the value of Facebook (the platform) has always been the network.
Facebook as a company has always been chasing after content. This is because content has a direct and clear monetization strategy whereas helping people make use of their network is difficult to make money from. Well, it shows - $40bn in revenue, 80% of it in ads.
Helping people to use their network effectively is basically charity work to Facebook. How are you going to at-scale monetize that out? The answer: you don't.
But with some irony, after chasing content for over a decade, I think Facebook is now in a position to do some charity work. Similar to Google, who saturated their ad team's return on value and has it's employees working on moonshots all day, Facebook can now afford to sit on their content engines and attack problem spaces that are harder to monetize and solve but provide more meaningful value.
Long story short, I think it's the right time for Facebook's hayday to sneak up on us because it can quietly focus on adding real value via our networks without chasing after money from them.
I really like the idea of Facebook Dating, because 1) it already has the network and doesn't need to build it, and 2) it doesn't need to make money.
Most dating apps suffer under the pressure to make money and grow. For a dating app to grow it has to focus on building cohesive user bases that find value in each other and eventually creates its own ecosystems that damages the experience for others (i.e. hookup culture). While Facebook Dating might still have some of that, I could see it ending up as a more serious dating platform because it doesn't need to focus on user growth.
How would you monetize Marketplace? Facebook Dating? The answer is: you don't care that much, throw some ads on it and let it cover costs. 7-8 years ago when people were searching for Facebook's killer money printing machine, these projects would have a lot of pressure to make a lot of money. Nowadays, sheltered by the content engine that Facebook has amassed, these projects can focus on providing immediate and strong value through Facebook's core benefit (it's network) and hold off on how to make money for a couple of years.
>The consolidation of social activities (such as the process of dating, dating apps, and the network effects that result) into these walled gardens makes being a conscientious objector of social media more challenging each time they announce a feature like this.
I and others don't want to use Facebook. Please don't leave us with no choice.
I don’t get their strategy. Why are they patching on to Facebook like this? Would this dating feature not be better strategically in Instagram? Facebook is rotten in the minds of users but IG is not yet.
If you read the announcement, this is already pretty tightly integrated into IG, assuming you link your IG account to your Facebook Dating profile.
Of course, that means you probably need to have a Facebook profile. And in that regard you have a valid point. Nowadays I'm pretty certain that most of the types of people I'd want to connect with have dropped their FB profile but still maintain an IG profile.
But I suspect we underestimate the number of people who are still quite active on FB and have maybe only heard of IG. The older, less tech savvy social media users out there still want to date too.
That is exactly why, FB is private. IG is cool and public, lots of people don't cross the two and tinder is in with the younger crowd. They are betting on this helping FB rather than driving the feature. FB knows that anything they make will be used by millions so at this point they are playing a different, longer game to try to drive general social impression. They know they are the default for a lot of things. Facebook's primary concerns and biggest fears are towards the impression of the company, privacy and 'cool' factor with the young crowd.
Dating makes money, Tinder is successful, so Facebook are leaving money on the table... or worse, letting someone else take the money from the table... if they don't do dating.
Of course, the pool of potential people you can date is "those on Facebook", so that's hilarious and compounds existing problems with echo chambers.
All dating apps target millennials... because they are developed by millennials. When will SV get for once that they don't get their demographic as they have nothing in common with people 40+. For example, except Microsoft, no other SV company gets families. I was surprised by the idiotic family support Google offers in their ecosystem and especially Google One. Same with Spotify, Netflix, etc. Facebook with their "family" support of children less than 13 is totally idiotic as well (scrapbooks or whatever they call it) - and so is their "dating" app! They just don't innovate these days - they just copy competitors in sick hopes to make people come back.
Seeing something like this come out of Facebook makes me glad to be married. Is it a good idea for them? Yes. Will people use it? Probably. Is it a little creepy to imagine a company that’s already under constant scrutiny about how it handles your data to also know more about your dating life? Absolutely.
That said, Facebook is already out with 20-somethings. Is this really going to used by that audience? Or is this replacing Yahoo Personals for 40-somethings?
> It takes the work out of creating a dating profile and gives you a more authentic look at who someone is.
It feels like most people post too many fake pictures, news and crap on their profiles and this isn't going to be a good idea. "Look guys, I'm happy on Virgin Islands, like this!" (also on Prozac)
With Facebook's embracing of machine learning and their very deep dataset of personal information about users, this could be quite an amazing user experience and quite a terrifying prospect for privacy.
Facebook has a wealth of information on social relationship interactions and also on personal interests. Adding in information on romantic relationship interactions will allow them to (eventually, when the ML models are well-trained) provide amazing matches for users. The downside is that they'll now have a deep understanding of yet another aspect of your persona.
What are the dangers? How can they monetize this new relationship knowledge?
* Life insurance companies might want to know if someone is prone to date adrenaline junkies and be easily coerced into participating.
* Insurance might want to know if someone "hooks up" frequently, which could indicate that the person is at risk of medical problems OR has issues with impulse control.
* Dating profiles often match people by self-reported social activities like doing drugs, drinking, etc. That might be of interest to lots of companies.
* Relationship going well? Expect to see a lot of ads related to co-habitation (joint checking accounts, moving services, etc)
* If the dating service has a "feedback" component to allow people who go on dates to give information on aspects of the other persons personality, facebook might get information about a person that they don't even realize themselves and thus don't self-report. Such as the other person dresses badly, smells funny, needs dental work, tips well, etc.
* If facebook determines that you tend to fall for a certain types of physical traits, ads featuring models with those traits will become a thing.
* People don't give facebook every bit of information about themselves, but they do give it to dating services.
Think of all those questionnaires that ask about your opinions on abortion, if you want to have kids, if dating someone with different political beliefs is a hard pass, etc. Dating services use it to match people up who might be compatible, but Facebook will use it help advertisers get even more granular controls over their targeted users.
Even worse, if Facebook wants a certain political party to win, they could match up people who are firmly established in the political party they choose with people who are on the fence in order to let the dominant personality win.
[+] [-] estsauver|6 years ago|reply
If I was facebook, I would very explicitly announce this as a spin out project, under a different name and brand. While HN has a good knowledge of the ultimate parent owners of apps, I meet a lot of people who protest facebook by moving to Instagram/WhatsApp. Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
[+] [-] asdfman123|6 years ago|reply
I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone. To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
It seems like a mistake. If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist. Just my personal feelings on the matter, though. I'm not trying to call out anyone who likes that way of life (and perhaps has a personality that's well suited for it), just that it should not be imposed on everyone.
I kind of like the old model where you pretend to be conservative at work, and are free to be as weird as you want to in your own time.
[+] [-] msoad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JorgeGT|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelon88|6 years ago|reply
Just because I go out on a date with someone doesn't mean I want to be friends with them on Facebook.
[+] [-] tryitnow|6 years ago|reply
It's also important for a dating app to have critical mass. Almost everyone is on FB, only a fraction of those people are on IG.
[+] [-] technofiend|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|6 years ago|reply
HN is a SV or SV-adjacent bubble that takes pride in not having social media profiles and doesn't hesitate in boasting about it in every frigging thread, multiple times a day. In contrast, (b)millions around the world find value in social media every single day and use it for all kinds of applications.
I am confident FB understands this much better than people like us here who can't think of any good use cases of social media without presenting 10 riders to assure the crowd that we hate FB.
[+] [-] donatj|6 years ago|reply
I know many people who were clamoring for it at the time. It would have been an obvious addition as dating and relationships were a large part of the reason a lot of people used Facebook. I half suspect this is an attempt to pull college kids back into Facebook.
I think they missed their chance with this by a long shot.
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roland35|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|6 years ago|reply
I suspect that's a market potentially more easily attracted by the relative convenience of Facebook Dating compared to other services where you have to do more work to build up a profile and figure out UI, etiquette, etc.
[+] [-] cdolan|6 years ago|reply
Do you know how hard it is to meet new people after the age of 25? The statistics, historically, are not in your favor!
Dating and social apps have made it far easier for busy people, who lack 8 hours a day to socialize with others on a campus/forum, to organize dinner, dates, etc.
[+] [-] ritchiea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrnichols|6 years ago|reply
Facebook's massive user base might make this a success. Depending on whether or not there's a fee involved.
[+] [-] phil248|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nasalgoat|6 years ago|reply
The UI is just bad. You cannot browse profiles, you must say "yes" or "no" and the decision is final. If you scroll down to read a profile more, when you pass, it leaves you in the same scroll spot in the next profile. This is User Interface 101 level stuff. The list of problems goes on from there.
Everything about it says "throwaway add-on" that they haven't spent any real time on optimizing.
When originally announced, Match stock dropped 25% on the news, only to bounce back. I don't see this product really making a big dent in the Match bottom line.
[+] [-] haunter|6 years ago|reply
So Tinder?
[+] [-] benja810|6 years ago|reply
Maybe this is a little unfair considering it was only a beta. Isn't a cornerstone of agile to get an MVP in front of users and iterate on user feedback? It doesn't seem right to judge any software based on a beta experience alone.
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|6 years ago|reply
Yeah that doesn't sound like something that'll end up on Pastebin.
[+] [-] carlosdp|6 years ago|reply
If they are able to provide a differentiated feature set from other apps because they can better leverage FB interest data, I don't see why this couldn't work.
Is anyone else on this thread even in the dating scene right now? I really don't see how this is a plainly bad idea.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Facebook gave me a notification to try FB Dating the other week. I clicked it, chose my pics, and was on the meat market immediately, receiving phone notifications like "Karen liked you" just like any other dating app. I click it, view their profile, and start messaging them. Being linked to Facebook profiles, I also have more trust in the other party which is how Tinder started out.
HN rants so consistently about dating apps that I think it's mostly just ranting about dating in general.
Facebook is ubiquitous in Mexico where I live. And when I go back to the States and meet people 20-35 downtown, I have yet to find people who aren't on Facebook. I think HNers vastly overestimate the exodus from Facebook, if there is one, just because we like to cover FB's privacy issues here on HN.
[+] [-] anonymousjunior|6 years ago|reply
Only thing I actively use FB for these days is messenger and fantasy football shit talking groups, which are all "private".
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
wasn't the first feature on mobile dating apps to take in your facebook social graph?
Tinder had this 6 years ago? It would show you if you had mutual friends via your facebook social graph
maybe people didn't know that was because of their facebook connect?
[+] [-] peterkelly|6 years ago|reply
I'm looking forward to watching the shitstorm when that info gets leaked or an exploit is found that allows you to see whose lists you're on.
[+] [-] francisofascii|6 years ago|reply
Relationship Status, Interested In. This is what drives life at college. Are you having sex or aren’t you. It’s why people take certain classes, and sit where they sit, and do what they do, and at its, um, center, you know, that’s what the Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually gonna, (get laid), meet a girl. Yes.
[+] [-] JacKTrocinskI|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|6 years ago|reply
Definitely a bit nerve-wracking on who can see if you're using it, potentially, since you know, I'd never want people on Facebook to know I'm using a "dating app", but other than that, I actually really like the implementation here.
[+] [-] johnisgood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
It’s not “privacy is a concern”, it’s “this thing is significantly worse for my privacy than this other thing”. Not caring about privacy because it’s “always a concern” falls to take into account that there are varying levels of privacy that services provide.
[+] [-] wheelerwj|6 years ago|reply
We've already seen what social media connected to advertising does to election security, do you really think its a good idea to test it on your love life?
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mabermoske|6 years ago|reply
I see this being huge for older adults who are divorced or widowed, those are the people still using fb and I think would be happy to use this service.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
I don't know how anyone who's read a news article about Facebook in the past year (or browsed the web and glanced at the ads they get) can believe any of this.
[+] [-] d--b|6 years ago|reply
There are a lot of people using Facebook as a serious communication platform (think your mum and dad, or your friends from high school). These guys aren’t hiding who they are much on facebook.
They’ll probably get way better matches on Facebook than on traditional dating sites.
This is not a competitor to Tinder, I see this as a serious dating site for shyer or older people.
[+] [-] spyckie2|6 years ago|reply
Facebook as a company has always been chasing after content. This is because content has a direct and clear monetization strategy whereas helping people make use of their network is difficult to make money from. Well, it shows - $40bn in revenue, 80% of it in ads.
Helping people to use their network effectively is basically charity work to Facebook. How are you going to at-scale monetize that out? The answer: you don't.
But with some irony, after chasing content for over a decade, I think Facebook is now in a position to do some charity work. Similar to Google, who saturated their ad team's return on value and has it's employees working on moonshots all day, Facebook can now afford to sit on their content engines and attack problem spaces that are harder to monetize and solve but provide more meaningful value.
Long story short, I think it's the right time for Facebook's hayday to sneak up on us because it can quietly focus on adding real value via our networks without chasing after money from them.
I really like the idea of Facebook Dating, because 1) it already has the network and doesn't need to build it, and 2) it doesn't need to make money.
Most dating apps suffer under the pressure to make money and grow. For a dating app to grow it has to focus on building cohesive user bases that find value in each other and eventually creates its own ecosystems that damages the experience for others (i.e. hookup culture). While Facebook Dating might still have some of that, I could see it ending up as a more serious dating platform because it doesn't need to focus on user growth.
How would you monetize Marketplace? Facebook Dating? The answer is: you don't care that much, throw some ads on it and let it cover costs. 7-8 years ago when people were searching for Facebook's killer money printing machine, these projects would have a lot of pressure to make a lot of money. Nowadays, sheltered by the content engine that Facebook has amassed, these projects can focus on providing immediate and strong value through Facebook's core benefit (it's network) and hold off on how to make money for a couple of years.
Sounds familiar? It sounds a lot like Gmail.
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19790889
[+] [-] gtirloni|6 years ago|reply
What? You don't want to use then don't use it. That's your choice.
[+] [-] yalogin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitbuilder|6 years ago|reply
Of course, that means you probably need to have a Facebook profile. And in that regard you have a valid point. Nowadays I'm pretty certain that most of the types of people I'd want to connect with have dropped their FB profile but still maintain an IG profile.
But I suspect we underestimate the number of people who are still quite active on FB and have maybe only heard of IG. The older, less tech savvy social media users out there still want to date too.
[+] [-] AgloeDreams|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|6 years ago|reply
Of course, the pool of potential people you can date is "those on Facebook", so that's hilarious and compounds existing problems with echo chambers.
[+] [-] nikolay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electricslpnsld|6 years ago|reply
Millennials are almost in their 40s now! The prime dating app market (low to mid 20s) is now Gen Z.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madrox|6 years ago|reply
That said, Facebook is already out with 20-somethings. Is this really going to used by that audience? Or is this replacing Yahoo Personals for 40-somethings?
[+] [-] strikelaserclaw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akerro|6 years ago|reply
It feels like most people post too many fake pictures, news and crap on their profiles and this isn't going to be a good idea. "Look guys, I'm happy on Virgin Islands, like this!" (also on Prozac)
[+] [-] deftnerd|6 years ago|reply
Facebook has a wealth of information on social relationship interactions and also on personal interests. Adding in information on romantic relationship interactions will allow them to (eventually, when the ML models are well-trained) provide amazing matches for users. The downside is that they'll now have a deep understanding of yet another aspect of your persona.
What are the dangers? How can they monetize this new relationship knowledge?
* Life insurance companies might want to know if someone is prone to date adrenaline junkies and be easily coerced into participating. * Insurance might want to know if someone "hooks up" frequently, which could indicate that the person is at risk of medical problems OR has issues with impulse control. * Dating profiles often match people by self-reported social activities like doing drugs, drinking, etc. That might be of interest to lots of companies. * Relationship going well? Expect to see a lot of ads related to co-habitation (joint checking accounts, moving services, etc) * If the dating service has a "feedback" component to allow people who go on dates to give information on aspects of the other persons personality, facebook might get information about a person that they don't even realize themselves and thus don't self-report. Such as the other person dresses badly, smells funny, needs dental work, tips well, etc. * If facebook determines that you tend to fall for a certain types of physical traits, ads featuring models with those traits will become a thing. * People don't give facebook every bit of information about themselves, but they do give it to dating services.
Think of all those questionnaires that ask about your opinions on abortion, if you want to have kids, if dating someone with different political beliefs is a hard pass, etc. Dating services use it to match people up who might be compatible, but Facebook will use it help advertisers get even more granular controls over their targeted users.
Even worse, if Facebook wants a certain political party to win, they could match up people who are firmly established in the political party they choose with people who are on the fence in order to let the dominant personality win.