safrolic's comments

Facebook only was stupid to start with, but 100+ facebook friends requirement is something else, it means the service is only open to a specific kind of profile, the one who add people without thinking.

Funny thing is in my online dating profile, I have a requirement similar to yours: that people getting in touch with me have no facebook account.

Like a face picture, or stupid myspace/facebook picture.

You'll never thank me for this because you probably won't have to face the worst of identity theft thanks to it.

I'd like to point out that facebook friends are not the same as friends. And friends do not necessarily know the sexual preferences of each other, it's not only about straight or gay, there's a whole range of sexual preferences out there and you don't always tell your friends about yours if they tends to deviate from the traditional cultural norm.

Because he, as you are, is reasoning in terms of market which can only leads to failure to address the needs of the people using the service.

Remove the economist goggles, do without the gender distinction and start dealing with human beings and you'll be on the road for a successful dating service.

The situation you describe here has been fixed a couple times to my knowledge, then the monetization part kicked in and the service became broken for males who don't pay, then for pretty much everyone. The service got worst but the money keeps coming in so it will probably never be fixed.

The point is if you design your dating service with those issues in mind they can be efficiently addressed.

I'd firmly advice against being open about your personal information on the internet, especially on a dating site.

I understand every big internet corporation is pushing the idea that privacy is dead and that you ought to put every thing about you online for every one to see. But what made the internet great is its pseudonymous nature.

Don't lie on your profile, but don't put up identifying personal info either.

Your proposed solution seems really awful. Don't you know that such a power structure (see consumerium wiki about sysop power structure) will inevitably be abused. Also the recent Pycon incident should put some light on the usefulness of a "flag as offensive" button.

Your solution is Hard Security when Soft Security is way enough (refer to meatball wiki for more on these notions).

Not only that but this problem has already been solved a few times, a simple and effective but not perfect solution: a man cannot message a woman until explicitly allowed by the woman. a man can notify a woman her profile caught his interest with a poke-like of which he gets a limited amount per day. There goes the message overload for women issue.

Now remove the heterosexism component and make it so no one can message anyone until explicitly allowed by the recipient and not only you got the message overload issue under control but you get an incentive for people to put some care into writing their profile and reading other's.

There's probably a better way, but this one is IMHO at least an order of magnitude better than your proposition.

The solution is in challenging how we suppose this should work and not in trying to fix those broken assumption by placing additional layers on top of something defective by design.

Exactly my thoughts reading the post, reeks and relents of heteronormativity and heterosexism. Using facebook for a dating site is plain wrong (what happens the day facebook opens a dating service and shuts your website access to facebook down ?) but only using facebook is definitely a tell to go away.

I remember times when online dating was not broken.

Times where it was not organized by a third party trying to make a profit out of it.

It happened on IRC which was quite different: it happened in real time, it was text based (no pictures until you had proven yourself worthy). Though it already featured the too many messages towards women issue but it was easy enough to put the offenders on ignore and as once disconnected there was no way of messaging you they didn't pile up in your absence.

Online dating sucks but to me the main reason is that online dating is mostly governed by businesses trying to build a profitable business model for them, putting their own interest before those of the people using the service.

First comes the somewhat innovative idea, then the launch of the service with the accompanying marketing in order to gather a comfortable bunch of profiles and it's monetizing time in a stupid way usually by putting artificial barriers effectively killing its usefulness. From there it is inertia for a while, then the cycle starts again.

Hollywood may have some responsibility in shaping some people expectation of love but I don't think this is much related to online dating being broken. Actually I failed to find any link in your article which seemed to be a shameless marketing attempt at driving more people to your dating profile service, as is expected during the launch phase.

Then I would not touch anything facebook related with a 10 foot pole, let alone a dating profiles website where facebook friends, a.k.a. not actual friends, are in control without me knowing about it.

IANAL but I wonder about the legality of this, I'm not sure one is entitled to fill an online profile for someone else, it may be considered a form of identity theft.

How would you disallow them to use your name or identifying pictures ?

Funny thing is IINM this is probably illegal in several countries around the world, both setting up an online profile for someone else, without his/her knowledge being aggravating, and not providing exact personal information.

If my friends did this to me, it would probably put a definitive end to that friendship.

Myers Briggs: http://www.skepdic.com/myersb