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 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.
Indeed. I live in a muslim country and here everyone uses dual-sim phones with 2 sims for the sole purpose of having 2 accounts at everything: one for the conservative part of the family, another for the modern.
I used to have a Facebook list specifically for the conservative part of my family so I could block the more "out there" stuff I wrote on the platform.
However now I just let it rip. I'm not trying to be weird like I was in my 20s, and I also realize I don't need to self-censor as much as I thought I needed to.
2FA by phone should be dead. SMS is insecure and I've deprecated it for all forms of communication with me. I use virtual numbers for all websites and banks that have stupid forced phone 2FA, including Facebook.
Twilio is a good place to start and has a pretty feature-complete API. There are other alternatives as well.
Do note that some services aren't able to send SMS to virtual numbers in the US, for some reason. If that happens, try again with a virtual number in the UK or somewhere else, or if there is a voice call confirmation option that may also work for you as you can redirect the call programatically. Considering the phone numbers typically cost only $1/month each you can keep a few around to deal with this situation.
I still don't understand. Occasionally you need a phone number to sign up, but I've never needed a phone number to log in to something unless 2FA get triggered. But in any case, nobody else knows what phone number I used to create an account.
You often need two different phone numbers to create two different accounts on the same service. Otherwise you will get errors like "phone number already used, did you forget your password?".
Switching sims doesnt log me out of whatsapp either - as far as i can tell its totally optional whether i want to update my whatsapp number to my phone number or not.
Yes it’s true that switching sims doesn’t log you out, but if you decided to intentionally log out from account A and create a new account B, you would need a second SIM card, that’s what the parent comment was trying to explain.
Yes, but you can explicitly log out from your main account and then log into an alt account - as long as you’re not using the sim associated to your main account
Not only that but if things don’t work out (most people will have to meet multiple people before finding someone to go steady with), it can get awkward.
I think this thing has to have some ephemeral nature to it (delete account, create new one if need be later) to avoid harassers and or those who get infatuated or attached; people who just fell out in a bad way, etc.
I mean, you definitely don’t want to expose your friends and your work to new and to you unknown people. They may use your FB friends network and work and whatever other info to harass and follow, etc. also your ex-es can see activity, etc. I don’t see much good in this product.
>To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
It makes a ton of sense from their business perspective, which is to sell highly personalized ads. If you have one single internet persona, it is far easier to tailor ads to you.
Not really no. If you have only one online persona, then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook. People are unlikely to change how they are, they'll just change how they use the tool.
Letting people show different angles of themselves through differently branded websites makes it much easier for facebook to build complete, thorough profiles of people.
> then you'll only show one angle of your life, and the rest will simply become invisible to facebook.
I feel like the opposite may happen? I.e. instead of only showing one angle of their life, the idea is that people share _all_ angles of their lives. Either way you end up with the same result "one persona".
The only people who care this deeply I think are the same ones who block ads or don't use facebook anyway.
> 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.
I disagree with this characterization. I live in SV and literally everyone I've talked to about privacy/anonymity on the internet sees the value in being able to partition one's life into different buckets for different audiences, and many of them actively maintain such partitions.
This has nothing to do with culture; this is about technology limitations and laziness. Companies like FB want to make it easier to track people online and tie everything you do to a single identity. They can certainly do a lot to link supposedly-unrelated personas through various forms of fingerprinting, but it's never perfect, and they'd love for things to be simpler.
There's also the issue of anon/pseudonymity: companies like FB don't like that because they want an indentifiable real-world person to be accountable for the things they do online.
(Really, think about it: the idea that the people who live in Silicon Valley have some magical weirdo culture where social and professional partitioning doesn't exist... well, that's absurd and doesn't even pass the smell test.)
Not sure if the point you're trying to make. The parent called it a "cultural thing unique Silicon Valley", which to me implied that it's pervasive in people's thinking. But it's not. The fact that some few CEOs seem to think that way does not make it a "cultural thing" by any stretch of the imagination. It's a scheme to make money and gain market share, not commentary on social values.
That the interest in a single unified online identity is not merely exceptional in its association with Silicon Valley, but a specific subset of the Valley: power-brokers and corporate heads.
There are of course exceptions -- rank-and-file tech workers who have drunk the cool aid, and some outside tech who think this is a Good Thing (often for Others but not Themselves).
Ascribing the fixation to SV is, again, generally accurate.
It wouldnt be as big a deal, had facebook started as your "public" identity, like linkedin. But instead everybody who signed up 10 years ago was using it as their "private identity with a couple friends."
I'm glad it's not just me. I've pretty much abandoned my facebook account because it's full of all my stupid high school personal stuff, and doesn't really feel relevant any more.
Yesterday a colleague had me link a third-party application to a business-related page using my personal account, and it felt like a huge invasion of my personal sphere to have pages for a band I was in ten years ago appear on the list next to the business' pages. (Not to mention giving this third party access to all of my personal information in order to allow it to help manage a few public pages.)
Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities? I'm considering creating an alternate account just for business pages, but that seems a bit disingenuous to me.
> Do social media workers have some kind of strategy for managing their public and private identities?
Got me, I'm a social media refusenik. I have only encountered one third party application for work that was lazy and broken enough to require FB login, and I made up a throwaway account specifically for it. (I also had to remove all the 127.0.0.1 entries for FB names in /etc/hosts, but that's different.)
Does doing that feel disingenuous to you because of Facebook's expectations, or a different reason?
(I personally have zero problems with lying to FB, given that FB routinely and consistently lies to the rest of the world in order to decrease others' ability to not do business with them.)
I haven't managed to create throwaway FB accounts for a while now. It always ends up requiring a phone number, and I don't have throwaway phone numbers.
I have three email addresses not counting my work email. It’s me for professional stuff, a private one, and a junk one for accounts and mailing lists. (Ironically, only my professional one gets spam.)
Not counting work, I guess have three or four Google accounts. (Ironically, none of them are gmail.)
Frankly, I never use the social media sign ons if I can avoid it.
Is WeChat a social network or a messaging platform? I realise it is expanding, but I'd have no problem doing talking business on WhatsApp (which is the closest analogue to what I understand it to be for).
Which is a separate app and doesn't leak much to the people you talk to (does it? I don't really use FB or Messenger anymore, I don't remember if you have to be friends to get messages delivered)
It's not just you! I have a Facebook (relatively unfiltered, friends-and-comrades-only), a Twitter (kept "academic casual"), and a LinkedIn (kept really stiflingly conformist and corporate). I'm married, so I don't have to worry about dating or dating apps, but dear God, if someone wanted me to use the same persona for every social profile, I'd just shut all of them down.
Hell, I already deleted my reddit account last year just because.
I deleted my Facebook account ages ago because I needed different personas for different groups of friends, never mind coworkers. Just too much work to try to maintain separation. Terrible place for honest discussion.
> 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.
I'm from Seattle so I'm not knee deep in that, but I just don't understand how someone can actually have one persona that they represent to the world.
Different situations have different requirements and norms. You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
One might pretend that you're the same in person at work as in close social situations, but this just doesn't seem practical.
I only have a single, global persona. It's why my username for various sites is either 'dana' (my first name) or 'diederich' (my last name), with very few exceptions.
I've been using the Internet almost daily since 1988, and for the first 8 or 9 years, I embraced being pseudo-anonymous. I really can't say why, it was just what everybody was doing. If all of the online activity of all of my different personas was mixed in public, it would have been no big deal.
Having said that, I understand and respect that, I presume, most people need to be able to maintain different personas.
> You're going to have to act differently in different situations.
While I certainly don't say exactly the same kinds of things to everyone, everywhere, I do generally act the same in every situation.
And I think that's kind of unusual.
Feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you like.
Without seeing the actual FB dating app, I'm assuming it masks the dating persona, much like joining a FB group, until a true "friend" connection is made.
FB is acutely aware that "[X] is in a relationship with [Y]" is a strong social signal in today's world. So the implication is that genuine identities ultimately should connect via any dating app.
>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.
With a name like "Facebook Dating", it doesn't sound like they're trying to enter the Tinder-esque hookup space. If the product is focused on long-term relationships, the dating profile and the career profile probably won't have that many differences. At least not for most people, and Facebook (the website) is clearly aimed at "most people".
After all, a Tinder-like app would already face huge competition, whereas the market for online dating services that work for older and/or more conservative people has been largely stagnant and is currently fragmented across sites like "FarmersOnly". You don't gain traction by solving a problem someone else already solved. Old people are lonely too.
The whole Maven / Damore stuff at Google shows the strengths and weaknesses of this “one persona” approach. People in Silicon Valley bring their entire selves to work, they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly, there’s something to admire about that but most people elsewhere are happy to keep work at work and not get too worked up about what their company is or isn’t doing.
> they protest their own company when they feel it is not having properly
You're right, but I don't understand that perspective.
If my company is doing something that I think is morally wrong, I'm going to be finding employment elsewhere and telling them why. I might even speak out about it... after I leave.
If we're doing something that I think it's great but doesn't justify my quitting, then I'm going to be speaking up internally about it. Going public with a grievance against your employer just strikes me as being counter-productive - you're risking being fired, you're damaging your future prospects for advancement there, and you're potentially damaging the entity to which you've tied your financial future.
The way I see it, when I work for a company I'm part of their public face. Even though I may not (certainly don't, actually) represent the company, my actions and statements still influence people's impression of the brand. If I'm upset about something enough that I'm willing to damage the company's brand to speak out about it, then I'm upset enough that I don't want to be providing material support to them by continuing to work there.
I think the calculus for most people is: This job is paying me a lot and I don't want to leave it, and I do think that this company can be a net force for good in this world (easier to believe at Google than at Facebook). But I don't want it to do bad things, and if I damage the brand publicly, the company will still survive, but will think twice about doing something like this in the future since they won't be able to just contain it internally.
The people who are just purely about the money won't care enough to protest at all. I think the protesters' intentions are in the right place.
I agree that their intentions are good. I guess what I'm really saying is that I can't relate to them. I understand it intellectually, I just can't quite see things from that perspective.
> I do think that this company can be a net force for good in this world (easier to believe at Google than at Facebook). But I don't want it to do bad things, and if I damage the brand publicly, the company will still survive, but will think twice about doing something like this in the future since they won't be able to just contain it internally.
That's the thing, at least for me - if you believe the company is not currently being a net force for good in the world, then I'd be contributing to something that is a net force for evil. Even if I believed that could be changed in the future, I couldn't do that. It's the difference between utilitarianism and deontology.
This has got to be an over generalisation, surely?
People in Silicon Valley are highly unlikely to be a homogenous whole.
And given what we know about Gell-Mann Amnesia, it seems likely to me the media’s portrayal of the situation is, at best, amiss, and, at worst, intentionally deceptive.
Probably that a vocal minority generate a kerfuffle, and a huge majority keep mum.
When I was researching early history of Google+, I ran across mention of NSTIC, the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
Source was Kristine Schachinger's G+ post-mortem:
In the years between 2009-2015 (loosely speaking), there was a push by corporate entities and governments around the world to build an online ecosystem that could replace passwords.
Not only did they want to replace passwords, but they wanted to help better identify the person behind the log-in as a real human, a verified person.
This “verified” identity was to make it, so users were known to the companies they interacted with online.
I don't need to know the random opinions of my coworkers. The job is just a job, and if I only know them through work then all I need to see about them is work-related stuff. Leave the personal life at the door.
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone.
It's the other way around, in my experience, not a "goal" but a reflection of the people who built it. It made them absurdly rich, and all they know how to do is double down on what makes the numbers go up.
> I think Facebook's goal is to make it so that you have one persona you show to everyone.
How is that Facebook's goal? Considering the available per-post privacy settings and all, I feel like it facilitates having a different persona to different people.
> To me, that seems like a cultural thing unique to Silicon Valley that the rest of the world does not necessarily want.
I feel like "one persona to everyone" is almost the cultural opposite of Silicon Valley. Like at every birthday party you go to, every person asks "How's your startup going?", it seems that the cultural norm is you're supposed to say "It's going fantastic, how's your startup?" except if they are a close friend, when you say the truth.
This goes hand in hand with our atomized modern existence: we don't know our neighbours, we don't have anything occupying the place churches used to have in terms of community building with the people who live around us, etc. so we replace it with workplace relationships.
Thing is, workplace colleagues are seldom actually your friends in the true meaning of the term. Many of us lose contact with 99% of the people we worked with when we switch jobs. A friend is someone whom you have an ongoing relationship with independent of where you live or work, I think.
Being in silicon valley, I don't think the single persona thing is something that tech people like at all, but rather something unique to facebook or more specifically zuck and his fans.
We might recognize that the internet never forgets and just don't put much out there, but that is a bit different than embracing a single persona life.
It looks like the Dating profile is separate from your main facebook profile (see the announcement). But that might not give you much comfort since they're still both under the facebook umbrella.
> If you have one persona, that means that you need to optimize that persona for your career and ironically it feels more stiflingly conformist.
I understand where you're coming from, but this statement isn't necessarily a truism. You can wear who you are on your sleeve and even be quite extreme, if you're a reasonable person who can build and maintain professional relationships.
I do almost everything online under my real name, and am not optimized for career purposes. It's just me. As a result, I've had my political beliefs and such come up in interviews on multiple occasions. In one case - as I found out a year or so after being laid off - my interview process took a couple of weeks longer than was typical because one of the executives/partners at the company was concerned specifically about my politics. On the other hand, I did in fact get that job (and loved it!) and I've gotten several connections and invitations to apply based upon my discussions. Surprisingly, they seem to be about evenly split between people who agree and who disagree with my stances. I'm passionate about political issues, but I do my best to be accommodating to others and not be aggressive about them.
It would be fair to say that my positions are pretty extreme, too. I'm a political anarchist; Anarcho-Capitalist / Voluntaryist, to be more precise. I am open about that even in professional settings because it has such an influence on how I approach relationships and the world in general. I tend to be a "systems thinker", and see everything as a balance of competing forces. I see the whole world through this lens; everything is influenced by incentives and disincentives. I have exactly one tattoo, a stylized graph of supply and demand.
Okay, try putting "Card-carrying gun owner and anti-abortion activist" on your resume and apply for big tech companies.
Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers. Watch your callback rate dramatically decline.
I grew up in a suburb of a conservative state, and I learned early on when to show "who I am and what I really believe" and when to be low-key about it. Others like me who did not learn that skill were bullied relentlessly. I got along pretty well.
If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
> Okay, try putting "Card-carrying gun owner and anti-abortion activist" on your resume and apply for big tech companies.
Well, a resume isn't a place for that sort of thing at all, but I do pretty much that now. My name is unique - look me up. For what that's worth, a good portion of my posts even here on HN have something to do with guns. I try to be more "informative" than "confrontational", but that's because of the nature of the site more than anything else. I'm here to discuss, share, and learn, not to argue.
I'm definitely a "card-carrying gun owner". I literally put guns in the hands of children on a regular basis (I'm a 4-H youth firearms instructor), a past board member of a state gun rights organization, and an outspoken advocate for the recognition of individuals' rights to both defend themselves and to own and carry the most effective tools possible to that end.
It would be fair to say that I'm anti-abortion as well, with the caveat that I'm much more anti-government. I believe abortion is a terrible thing, but I also believe that giving government the power to prevent it would be much, much worse.
> Or hell, even start a personal blog using your real name talking about opinions that are anathema to coastal dwellers.
> If you actually had opinions many people disagreed with strongly, you'd be bullied and held back as well.
Did you read my last paragraph? I'm an anarchist. The license plate on my Jeep is literally "ANARCHY." I'm actually not sure I could name a political position that's more strongly opposed by more people.
It's massively OT for this thread, but it's interesting that you consider anarchy the natural state. Aren't humans absolutely hardwired to form hierarchies and seek leaders?
It seems that we're just as compelled to create presidents, kings, and gods for ourselves as pack animals are to follow their alphas. The lone wolf is the vanishingly-rare exception in the animal kingdom, just as the anarchist is in the realm of human politics. NTTAWWT as far as having a lone-wolf personality type is concerned, but any model of human interaction that seeks to exalt the lone-wolf nature in each of us seems bound to fail. (Small-scale egalitarianism is just a separate case of that, since the same hierarchies will inevitably emerge between groups.)
If this condition isn't "natural," then why do things always -- virtually without exception and never sustainably so -- turn out that way?
I don't think I disagree with anything you said here, I just sorta see it from a different perspective.
I didn't mean "natural" as "default" or "as found in nature" - I meant it in the sense of a "natural right". Anarchy is the social and political system we start with, and government is a distortion placed upon it. Further, government's nature is to grow in scope and power over time. This growth leads to tyranny, and eventually, to rebellion.
Honestly, I'm not sure that a truly anarchic society is either possible or stable. I see it as an ideal, not something that I think is reasonable to see in my lifetime. To put it another way - I don't want to destroy the government, I want to shrink it to the point that people question the need for it and eventually just decide to stop pretending we have one.
> I'm an anarchist. The license plate on my Jeep is literally "ANARCHY." I'm actually not sure I could name a political position that's more strongly opposed by more people.
You're not an anarchist and you should stop try to adopt an identity with a vivid anti-capitalist history to represent your desire for corporate feudalism with guns. Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.
You aren't harassed for your beliefs because people with your economic beliefs literally hold every branch of government.
I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.
> Anarchists are socialists and anything otherwise is misusing the word.
So.. you're saying that the other anarchists "own" the word itself? How does that work, exactly? Is it their private property, or merely a personal possession?
I jest, of course; I mean no offense.
The fact is, "Anarcho-Capitalist" is the most precise term for the economic side of my beliefs I've found. "Voluntarist" is the most precise term for the social side. I'll continue to use those terms until I find more descriptive ones.
> I'm sure you'll come back with something about republicans wanting big government to police morality, but those differences mean almost nothing when your economic incentives are aligned.
I'm pretty disillusioned with both major parties; I'm not going to be defending "Republicans".
I generally get along better socially with people on the political right, but that's because I grew up in a "Red State" not because of a greater number of shared beliefs.
Okay, try putting "Card-carrying gun owner and anti-abortion activist" on your resume and apply for big tech companies.
Even if someone did put something on their resume that I personally agreed with, I still wouldn’t hire them. In the context of work, I only want someone who comes to work to do the best job they can at the company, collect a check and go home. I don’t want to talk about politics at work.
Sort of related, my wife and I are Black in a mostly White part of the city. We rode an Uber and the driver who was also Black immediately started talking politics because he assumed we “would relate to each other”. I agreed with most of his political points but that’s not what we wanted to hear when we are just wanting to have a relaxing night on the town, and have a few too many drinks.
I work for a big tech company and I can guarantee you that it will not count against you. Some of my very successful friends
and people I look up to come from conservative backgrounds and are outspoken about it.
That being said you need to be respectful of everyone, regardless of their religion, ethnicity, gender identification etc. I think it is very possible to do that and still be a strong conservative.
Bullshit. You can be as conservative as you want as long as you remain silent and not protest anything at all that the diversity and inclusivity mob proposes. One word against that crowd in a SV tech company and you are dead in every sense of the word except physically.
That is the power dynamic of our times and hence why the need for dual personas.
You describe yourself as extreme, but then say people are evenly split between those who disagree and agree with your stances. So while your position may feel extreme, in consequence it is the definition of moderate.
And obviously you are coming from a specific background and applying for types of jobs where a your contribution is valuable enough to the company that they are willing to overlook potential political issues.
If you were not as skilled, or applying for government, non-profit, banking jobs, or jobs in Red States your experience might have been completely different.
So try to recognize your coming from a privileged position. I know my organization checks Twitter accounts when they get resumes, and they will throw away the ones that use foul language immediately. This is bizarre and backward to be sure, and I'm fighting to change that but its still goes on currently.
Edit: After googling you, you are awesome, fountain pens are awesome, and smart people everywhere should want to hire you.
> Edit: After googling you, you are awesome, fountain pens are awesome, and smart people everywhere should want to hire you.
LOL - well, thank you very much!
Fountain pens are in fact awesome. I'm carrying a semi-custom Indian pen today, an ASA Galactic. I replaced the nib it came with with a TWSBI #6 in extra-fine that I pulled off a broken Vac700. I've smoothed it a great deal and it's probably somewhere between a medium and a fine right now. I have a broad nib that will fit it as well that I'm thinking of grinding into an Architect. My work notebook is a top-bound Clairefontaine A4. I prefer French ruled, but am using "plain" ruled right now.
> You describe yourself as extreme, but then say people are evenly split between those who disagree and agree with your stances. So while your position may feel extreme, in consequence it is the definition of moderate.
I think you misunderstand - I'm saying that the professional contacts I've gained through this are about evenly split. Those contacts are not representative of the general population; people who agree with me are very disproportionally represented.
> And obviously you are coming from a specific background and applying for types of jobs where a your contribution is valuable enough to the company that they are willing to overlook potential political issues.
Of course. This applied even before I was a developer, though. For instance: when I was working as an electrician.
> If you were not as skilled, or applying for government, non-profit, banking jobs, or jobs in Red States your experience might have been completely different.
I could never work for government. I've worked for non-profits for the three of the past seven years, and the fact that they were considering accepting federal funding was a factor in my leaving that job.
I live in Arkansas, one of the reddest of Red States. My employer is in California. My previous employers are mostly in Charlottesvlle, Virginia.
> So try to recognize your coming from a privileged position.
I never said I wasn't - everyone here is coming from a privileged position. That's potentially relevant when considering what I say, but it doesn't make my perspective invalid.
> I know my organization checks Twitter accounts when they get resumes, and they will throw away the ones that use foul language immediately. This is bizarre and backward to be sure, and I'm fighting to change that but its still goes on currently.
I'm OK with that, because as I said before I see protecting the company's brand image as part of the employment contract. I wouldn't want someone working for (or with) me that doesn't come across as a reasonably mature adult. I wouldn't disqualify someone for "foul language" in and of itself, but I would absolutely do so if it featured prominently in their speech or if it were being used in an aggressive way.
Gosh man, I really mean no offense to you, but I am really glad people I work with are not this open about their viewpoints.
Plenty of people probably think some of my views are wacko, but because they are reletively personal, noone needs to confront my wacko views. I would really prefer not to work with anyone who openly and gleefully calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist. I probably work with some people that hold similar views, but by separating our personal and work lives, we can work productively together without needing to confront that.
Different strokes for different folks though, or something, I guess.
> Gosh man, I really mean no offense to you, but I am really glad people I work with are not this open about their viewpoints.
No offense taken whatsoever.
I will note that "open" is not the same thing as "aggressive". I'm not trying to convert anyone, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable at work. For one thing, I'm an empathetic person and don't like to think that I've unintentionally offended someone. For another... if someone is working with me, by definition we're contributing toward the same things. Alienating them would harm damage that cooperative action, and I wouldn't be there if I didn't think it was right.
> I would really prefer not to work with anyone who openly and gleefully calls themselves an anarcho-capitalist.
Why? People's actions are what I care about, not their reasons for them.
At a previous employer I was working to increase access to scientific publications and supporting materials to the general public. One of the reasons I think that's important is because much of the work is funded by taxes, and I view it as much worse to use tax dollars for private gain than to use it and at least make the results available to anyone. Several of my coworkers were authoritarian socialists of various stripes. Their reasons for wanting to make that stuff available were wholly different from mine - but we shared a common cause. We'd discuss politics sometimes over beers or after a "crunch time" when we were all in the office at 2am and a bit delirious, but otherwise it just didn't come up.
> without needing to confront that
Ahh, that's the rub. I know I'm an extreme minority politically. I know many of the people I work with and interact with on a daily basis hold positions antithetical to my own. I have zero desire to "confront" that. Discuss it? Sure, if they're open to it. I'm happy to debate if someone wants to do so (and if they're similarly willing to not make it personal), because that's how I arrived at my positions.
Metaphorically, I feel like my positions have been forged over time by repeatedly beaten against the anvil of others' positions. Where they were deformed, they were weak. I modified them and repeated the process. At 35 years old, I feel like my views are fairly rigid - but that doesn't mean they are unchangeable, and it's because I continually do my best to test them and look for weaknesses. To me, a good political discussion is one where I come away with something to think about that I hadn't considered before. A great one would be where an inconsistency in my positions was pointed out to me.
I actively try to avoid this conversations with coworkers, because many people aren't comfortable with them. That's OK. If they change their mind later I'm happy to oblige, but it's not like forcing people to argue politics is something desirable.
Anarcho-Capitalists wouldn't be considered anarchists. An-arch means without order. Ancaps believe in private property and hierarchy as a beneficial and necessary feature in society. Anarchists traditionally believe in equality as an intrinsic good.
>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
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.
How old is old? I'm 28 and would not use this because I don't trust Facebook.
My little brother is 16 and I know he won't use this because no one he knows uses Facebook. I don't even think he has an account. They're all on Snapchat and IG. I was talking to him about this last week. They all think of Facebook as for a different generation. As stale.
I feel similarly and know a lot of my circle does too. Except for events and sometimes messaging, nothing happens there.
Very true in my experience. While many (maybe 60%) still have an account, they basically do nothing with it. If you're a Facebook employee you may see that number of signups number and go "yeah they are using it" but the amount of use is VERY different from what I can tell.
Generally I'm very in agreement with the parent: The older won't want to use Facebook for dating, the younger would never look to Facebook.
That said, I'd go even farther and say the original claims are offbase here. First, teens absolutely have multiple personas they show, but they tend to be privacy circle based in that there are maybe 3/4 levels and they share increasingly more/less with each level.
Not only that, Facebook knows this. Instagram launched "close friends" explicitly because everyone was using "sinstas" and "finstas" to post to a smaller subset of people.
To me, all of this says that Facebook is probably targeting an older market of maybe say Match/OkCupid users who aren't used to a type of Hinge style interface. Anyone I know on Hinge would laugh you out of the room if you asked them to switch to Facebook dating.
Wrong verbiage, point still stands. Probably a decent number of MAU on Facebook in that range but logging in and checking one thing twice a month is a big usage difference from daily or semi daily sessions that last for minutes, not seconds.
"Active" there means opened, not actively consumed. I'm "active" almost every day, but the majority of my sessions are below 20 seconds. They mean nothing to Facebook, and they mean nothing to me. Facebook lost the value it had for me.
Another anecdata, but our kid's babysitter (also 16) doesn't have a Facebook account, and neither does her twin sister. They both have IG and Snap though. She said the same thing: "Facebook is for old people".
Also my 20 year old cousin didn't have a FB account until he went to college and was forced to get one to join some local FB groups. But he only uses it for that. Otherwise he's on IG and Snap.
and still fb grows and grows and grows, be it instagram, whatsup or the blue app, facebook doesn't seem affected by opinions of hacker news people. in many countries it is basically the internet wether you like it or not.
My comment was specifically about Facebook.com and acknowledged that younger users are moving to instagram. I didn't say younger people are leaving all Facebook-owned subsidiaries.
Similarly, I referenced my circle of friends—who are not hacker news people—as not using Facebook either.
I think in a marketers mind, you are from the outbound Millenial generation rather than the current 'young' Generation Z (or Zoomers as they're called in the Wojak meme world).
> 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.
Being young and LGBTQIA+, I can assure you that I never discuss my dating life at work or with my relatives (none of whom know I'm gay, but thankfully, I don't live with them anymore).
Until there are strict federal anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQIA+ folks, I'll never trust an employer to know that side of my life.
OkCupid's "hide my profile from straight people" feature is fantastic for exactly this reason. Pity the site's fallen out of favor, it's the one dating app I felt comfortable with.
It's not a generational thing, it's called being in your 20's. Those currently well past their 20's talked openly about their dating when they were 20, too.
Do people under 25 even use Facebook? I mean... most of them see it as another LinkedIn for sharing Granny Photos.
I was on Bumble a little late at night... kinda mindlessly swiping... girl looked cute... little familiar... swipe... Instantly realize as it chimes with "boom" that it was my boss. Nope nope nope, delete the whole thing and never return. They all have a problem around showing you co-workers, and it'd be so easy to just be like, "Cool, never show me people who work here, or never show me people I know on Facebook / LinkedIn." Wouldn't catch everything, but it'd catch a lot of it. Ha, and... the bigger problem I guess is that I don't really trust any of these sites to link them to Facebook or LinkedIn. They all seem fundamentally scammy and spammy.
But... I've had some fun with Bumble. Just... yeah I don't even trust it with my Spotify playlists.
>They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.
they don't mind now. One of the big problems with digital transparency is that this information will be hard to get rid off if they ever wish to in the future.
Is openness about past relationships in the workplace still a good idea if it leads to some sort of office intrigue a year or two down the line?
That is a HUGE generalization. You may be open about your dating life, but that doesn't mean everyone is nor do they want it to be associated with their professional life. True in point, say you are into a kink, do you want everyone in your social circle knowing about it?
Yeah it's a load of assumptions, I'm chalking it more up to a "socially anxious person's thinking" than "old" person's thinking. For many people I think being able to smoothly integrate their existing social life into a dating app is a godsend.
Right, I mean secret crush seems like a real improvement over the status quo in its ability to discover potential relationships without risking making existing friendships awkward.
You would think. Those of us who have been wasting time on the internet for long enough remember the Secret Crush Meme from LiveJournal [1], which worked just like this. It was great up until someone realised they could just say they had a crush on everyone they knew to get a list of who had crushes on them, without any genuine reciprocity of the crush.
If you could figure out a way to make it somehow costly to falsely say you have a crush on someone, this might work, but until then, this is game-theoretically wince-inducing.
Generally speaking for 99%+ of people, You shouldn’t have more than a few crushes at once. And they shouldn’t change that often. That would’ve curbed that a lot without restricting many people
I have plenty of people in my extended friend group who are in their mid to late 20s, and most of them are still quite active on FB.
Nobody thinks it's cool or fun anymore, of course. But it's still the go-to spot for sharing life events, family news, anything you want to brag about really. Or any vacation pictures that you'd like grandma and grandpa to see.
IG is still image driven, so it's not a platform you can easily use for relaying text based information to your social network.
It makes me wonder how sensitive generation Z is to privacy concerns. It would seem to me that there would be vast differences between that generation and say, Gen X and Boomers (who for a long time refused to share credit card numbers with e-commerce sites). Perhaps the true success of this feature will become apparent with the coming Generation(s), assuming Facebook manages to maintain its position as the premier social networking site.
Boomers I know can't even conceive of how privacy has been eroded. Sure they won't share cc numbers with ecommerce sites but they have no problem giving up every detail of their life to facebook.
I think they will be even more sensitive to privacy and understand better about wearing a different mask for different groups. They grew up with this understanding that FB was where their parents are, thus were conscious about curating their image. Likewise, I'm sure they will continue to treat other social media with the same scrutiny.
People in their 30s grew up in an era where FB allowed only college students. And they were old enough not to really care once it became open to their parents.
I would say they are a lot more sensitive. They witnessed all the millennials post anything and everything on social media at first with little regard future consequences. I think there is a much better cognitive understanding that anything you post is permanent versus in 2007.
> They openly talk about their dating life at work or friends group. They don't mind getting matched with a coworker or classmate.
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Coworkers and classmates aren't the problem. For young people, facebook is where mom and grandma is. Not that you're gonna match with them, but just sharing the name is a turn off.
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
There are definitely upsides to this, like being able to put your general geographic area than your exact town which you might have on Facebook, for instance. But I'm curious also if it is usable to be downright dishonest.
For one, I think people will be less willing to lie in a form where one company can see both profiles, but on the other side, it comes down to what Facebook lets you change. Hopefully they won't let your profile specify two different ages, for instance.
> Just because I go out on a date with someone doesn't mean I want to be friends with them on Facebook.
That's true for casual dating. By the other hand on older demographics, I think they nailed it: I suspect among older people, casual dating is less relevant, so they are not afraid of adding eachother as friends. And they don't need to install anything else..
Ads don't always (and you could argue rarely) show their target demographic.
I see plenty of overweight people in ads for diabetes treatments. I see plenty of fit people in ads for workout machines. Right now I see an ad on the side of a bus encouraging people to get free STD testing, and it shows people dancing at a club.
There are aspirational ads, but the use of "rare" in your comment doesn't reflect reality.
The era of 'supersize me' fast food marketing is long gone. Most fast food restaurants are not targeting that specific of a market anymore, they're aiming at a much large cross-section of the population. A better example would be an all-you-can-eat buffet.
According to the CDC, over 70% of American adults are overweight or obese, so by targeting a "large cross-section" of the population restaurants are in fact aiming at 'large' customers. This reality isn't represented in advertising for obvious reasons.
Specifically targeting a population, and the coincidental demographics of that population are two entirely different things.
That 70% is part of the 100% which they are actually targeting, but only coincidentally. There are plenty of fast food ads targeting health-conscious consumers.
You could also point out that 70% of Americans are also Christian, but that doesn't mean every company that sells to Americans specifically targets Christian customers...
...also, most large fast food companies also have a significant presence in multiple countries.
why would you target a dying demographic? facebook users of my generation started FB in college, and have stuck on. targeting younger people is FB is smart, unless it wants to be come the next AOL.
It’s too little too late. There are well established incumbents for both serious dating and casual dating. It might be more convenient for the older people looking for more serious relationships.
But there will be a very small segment of people they can capture that isn’t already captive to another bigger player like OKCupid or Match.
Among all people sure, but among people in the dating demographic? I would not be surprised at all if more people in prime dating ages are on IG than FB (especially in an active manner, do young people post on FB in any real way?).
Facebook has pitched this showing young people so I assumed that's their market. I guess the boomer dating market is probably underserved, maybe that's what they're actually going for.
I agree for I what I assume you mean by prime dating ages, but think there are more prime dating ages which are not so "prime" in other ways, if you will.
I think it also would be too complicated for many people to keep track of, and I am sure it would be easy to make a mistake of typing something in the wrong profile!
I certainly wouldn't want my grandma to know I like long walks on the beach!
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.
That's demonstrably untrue: there are articles at the top of Google results about this very subject including a guide on how to do it on The New York Times that references the breaches.
Anecdotally I deleted mine over privacy concerns but it was prior to the breaches. My wife didn't like the fact that friends of friends could see photos of her. She didn't know those people and didn't like it. I was more exasperated by Facebook tweaking privacy knobs through updates and was always to share more not less.
So I deleted my account since I couldn't promise that even if I choose privacy settings today that protected her privacy they'd be there tomorrow. Ironically she's still a Facebook customer and has no clue how to change privacy settings, but that's between her and Facebook.
I actually think it's a strange but probably a solid strategy under a couple of assumptions:
1. They want to differentiate their dating product.
2. There's a sector of the population interested in dating but that at the moment is underserved, too shy to try it, or just on the fence about putting the effort to try it out.
What this does is it essentially puts a dating app on everyone's phone, reducing the friction it takes to give online dating a shot.
It also "feels" different and more serious. Anecdotally Facebook seems to be, amongst my circles, a lot about life events or important stuff and less about the casual, funny, edgy, etc persona. By associating that image with their dating platform, they give it a strong identity for the get go as a place for serious relationships.
> Even announcing this through the instagram brand would have made more sense to me.
Would it? I feel like Instagram is better off being about friends and oneself, and it could be tarnished by involving dating. What dating "identity" would befall upon it? Would it lean on the side of Tinder— superficial, more about hookups than long-lasting relationships, etc? I associate instagram with influencers, young people (as in, teens), etc a lot so branding-wise it doesn't make that much sense to me personally, though of course, this is just my opinion.
It seems they do care, but about actively destroying any idea of privacy. Zuckerberg has said before that he feels people need to be accountable and one way of doing that is forcing us all into a singular identity.
This is a very personal thing. For some people (I would guess most people), it matters, and they -- at the very least -- present a different face when at work vs. out with friends. Many people have further stratification.
I do get what you mean, though. As I've gotten older, I've found that maintaining different personas is just exhausting and not really worth it. But I also don't have anything in my life that I'd be embarrassed about depending on audience, and I don't consider myself a member of any underrepresented groups or subcultures that the mainstream would consider "weird" or somehow undesirable. So it's easy for me, which isn't true for everyone else.
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.
We have real numbers about Facebook and they no more jibe with your anecdotal experience than all of the geek rage about Uber, Amazon, or that people care about “openness” and the “right to repair”.
I think you misunderstood Facebook's strategy here completely. The whole point of this feature is to add value to Facebook's main app, as this is a feature in the app and not a separate app itself, it makes the product more sticky and less likely people will delete their facebook account in future.
Okay, walk me through this - do you, say, see a cute girl (friend of a friend, someone in your city, etc.) that you might fancy, and just randomly send her a message?
Yes. You casually introduce yourself, mention a thing or two in common (same groups for instance), and ask if they'd be interested in getting to know each other —assuming you have a solid FB profile and not something fake. Pretty much like you'd walk up to a person in a real life in a social setting and say Hi. Many of my friends met their girlfriends like that. If you don't get a reply then that's your answer, no hard feelings. If they're a friend of a friend, well, you just ask your friend for an introduction. I don't know how things are in the US, but it's not considered awkward at all in my country. I've had women approach me in this same way as well.
This is mostly between friends-of-friends , not for randomly adding people for hookups. Typically it involves sending a friend request followed by chat
>I meet a lot of people who protest facebook by moving to Instagram/WhatsApp
I see. So these people dont like FB the product not FB the company. That feels like a very restrained response. I protested by just moving to Signal (and never using insta) and boy does it suck if other people wont do the same.
I'm sure they have enough data to support this new business. In fact, lot of people date in Facebook/Instagram. When you see in Tinder or other apps "msg me on Insta/fb" you can understand many things from their preferences: (getting followers, likes, etc).
I think what they’re looking for is a way to get more consistent and precise user location data, via the Facebook app. It’s a relative missing piece in their user data suite.
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.
Agreed, though I would take the (possibly) more charitable interpretation that many HNers get that FB understands the mainstream, but struggle to understand why the mainstream is the way it is. Or they do understand the mainstream, but feel the need to rail against them for what they view as naïveté and short-term thinking.
For me, I'm surprised it took FB this long to launch a dating feature. Despite their decline in some demographics, they are still uniquely positioned to do a much more comprehensive (I hesitate to say "better") job of connecting people on the romantic side than a random new dating startup, or even possibly one of the giants like Match.
Perhaps they've hesitated for so long because they were afraid FB users would be afraid of mixing their public FB life too closely with their dating life?
I don't know enough about FB's realistic position, but it is theoretically better positioned than specialized dating-app companies to provide a better matchmaking service. Specialized dating services fail to provide value to their users once they are no longer in the dating market, whereas FB can continue to get involved in its users' lives post-dating, and arguably moreso when they experience a lifestyle change.
For this reason, there is more room for the incentives of FB and those in the dating market to align, and so I welcome this.
Agreed, I (grudgingly) understood the value of fb during volunteer work. Most grassroots refugee support initiatives were run by non tech savvy people. They created Facebook groups to communicate with people who wanted to help. As there sometimes were right wing attacks against their work, they would not accept anyone into the group with an empty fb profile. They also used it for event planning, there are few alternatives to creating events on fb - meetup.com costs too much and does not have the same reach among volunteers. Similar dynamic with most local sports / dancing groups I know, a fb profile with some group memberships and likes serves as social proof.
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.
How is that correct? 10 years ago, it was mostly young folks, college, HS, 20-somethings. There was a good deal of dating-related activity happening, but the vast majority of FB back then was not related to dating.
The scene in The Social Network about adding relationship status to users' profile sums it up perfectly. Facebook was a large catalog of your friends, friends' friends, classmates, coworkers etc., and showed you their profiles, pictures, if they were dating, who they were dating, their interests and more. Facebook was the largest dating site in the world the moment it got popular.
I don't agree. Allowing someone to list their relationship status on their otherwise-non-dating-site profile is a far far cry from providing tools and UX to help people match with others they might be interested in.
Certainly people have found romantic partners on FB in the past 15 years, but I would view that as in spite of the lack of dating-related features. Up until now, FB has not been geared toward or especially useful as a dating platform, especially given the availability of dating apps that actually fill that niche.
I think FB Dating has the potential to be way more successful to a mainstream audience than nearly any dating app built to date, though.
When I was in high school, back before the news feed, Facebook was the best way to flirt! Go to someone’s page and post a comment — it was was so casual. Too bad Facebook killed it when they started broadcasting everything you post.
This is why people defaulted to Snapchat shortly after. Having temporary messages/pictures was ideal when after seeing evidence of failed relationships, people wanted the evidence of early flirting to be gone from the record.
This was a while ago, but I think in its early days Tinder was just an app on Facebook where you would “like” people on your friends list. If they “liked” you back the app would indicate a match.
I always thought this was a really cool feature, and I wish they kept it. It felt more personal.
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.
when things devolve into such specific niches as "farmersonly" and 'blackpeoplemeet" and stuff like that, I figure that it's overcrowded. The iTunes App Store alone has at least a dozen. Many of them non-IAC too. It's a lot.
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.
When the largest accompanying FB news headline is: "Over 400 million Facebook users' phone numbers exposed" this feels like the most poorly timed product launch.
I assume they're thinking the groups of people that read security disclosure articles and those that would use FB dating are disjoint. They're probably not wrong.
We overestimate change in the short-term but underestimate it in the long term. Any individual news story isn't going to be the reason Facebook loses 75% of their users over night, but the steady march of these stories isn't going to have no effect. I find it easy to imagine a world where in 5-10 years, Facebook is a complete non-entity, and for all the articles written that claim to understand why, nobody will actually be able to point at any small set of events as an explanation. It could be the very small contributions of a lot of events.
I (physically) don't live in SV or its bubble, and I can assure you, the news that Facebook isn't necessarily trustworthy is getting out there to "the masses". It isn't necessarily changing people habits yet, but the process is certainly started. By the time it causes noticeable problems for Facebook, it may be too far progressed for them to do anything about it.
I agree with you, but Facebook seems be aware and is mitigating using brands like Instagram and Whatsapp which average people don't associate with Facebook. If they keep acquiring undervalued social companies and downplaying their ownership, I could see them sticking around for quite a while unfortunately.
Don't underestimate Facebook. I am sure they have stats that show that almost no one knows. Because almost no one knows - not even most IT professionals. There is also something I call "sulking to the giant" (my made up term) - I've seen many times people say "I would never tell Facebook my name/city/age/..." only to do it a year later.
Yeah, I don't know about underestimating them, I've been chatting back and forth with our FB account manager regarding our business needs for something in their Ad biz.
Turns out, they can't deliver on this pretty universal feature (even Twitter has it), so huh yeah, let's talk about how great they are again.
Honestly, if my Tinder swipes went public it wouldn't be an issue in the slightest. Its not a heart lock bound journal. Its just a list of people you'd have coffee with.
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.
I haven't read all the comments in this thread but I do agree with the idea that this _could_ erode trust even more, ultimately being one of the 1,000 cuts that causes their death. I don't see a big problem with it in general or in the short-term and it's something that's been thrown around for years: why doesn't FB do dating?
In reality, you nailed my experience with dating apps (self + friends on them). Every single person I know uses multiple since the source of a date does not matter to them. They just want what they're looking for. The cost to use an app is so low and context switching is easy enough. And everyone hates on some or all of them...and continues to use all of them.
Many of the non-tech people I meet in real life don't even know the difference between an app and the mobile web. They know interfaces well enough to get the things they need done, done.
FB already has the social layer and lots of other data, so I don't foresee this as a terrible idea. Seems more like a small bet.
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".
I was more talking about the "dark" data they collect from our surfing over the internet =P Not great, but it could potentially help with this one particular case.
Sure, but that social graph didn't instantly have Tinder. This is built into the Facebook app, you don't even need to install another app. Much easier to get a larger network faster.
"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.
You presumably will still avoid obvious social nukes like crushing on your friend's wife.
I don't see much downside to the crush system. If someone's going to have a hissy fit or ruin relationships because they insist on doing the work of cycling through all their friends, then, well, they should be careful for what they wish for.
But that strategy has the same drawbacks of swiping right on every friend you recognize on Tinder "because of course I'd swipe right, we're friends!" It always leaves the other friend wondering if maybe there was any meaning in your right-swipe.
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.
Add all your friends to Secret Crush. Watch who matched you.
"Sorry buddy, I wasn't really using the thing, I just added everyone, but thanks for letting me know you like me!"
Idiots. And this is why the shared identity is a terrible idea for dating sites. You want dating profiles to be throwaway, and you want it to be hard for your friends to find your dating persona for this reason!
But of course Facebook doesn't understand the need to keep secrets from (some of) your friends.
Ok, so then you rotate that list through your friends. They might make it tedious to go through all my friends, but if I'm determined enough, I can do it.
People who seriously use this feature will put their secret crushes on the list, and then forget about it.
I come along a few months later, and rotate all my friends through this list, and so I discover which of my friends have secret crushes on me, because I'm not using the feature like you're "supposed" to.
It doesn't work that way based on the international betas, but if you want to believe you've hacked Facebook Dating, go ahead and believe that if it will make you feel better.
>"Sorry buddy, I wasn't really using the thing, I just added everyone, but thanks for letting me know you like me!"
Just say you were doing the same thing. Can atleast deny it to leave some doubt, can't really question why you added everyone to Secret Crush when they also apparently did it.
> 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.
Counter-anecdote: I'm 30 and have yet to meet someone in my dating/friend range (20-35) that never had Facebook here in Mexico or home in Austin.
I'd be curious if you're socializing in some sort of anti-FB bubble or actually have a sample size of like 5 people when you consider the people you actually know this info about.
I'm 25. I use Facebook. I've noticed many of the people younger than me don't use it at all and many of the people around my age do have accounts but rarely actually use it.
I agree with you. I'm in my 20s, and I know a lot of people who still use Facebook -- Although my little sister may have something different to say (she's 17).
29 here, I have Facebook and use it almost exclusively for responding to events organised by my girlfriend’s friends. She and her friends use it constantly for group activities.
If I don’t respond to an event I’m not going to they’ll text her to text me because if I don’t respond on FB I might as well be dead??
Within my circle of friends we organise ourselves via text message and I don’t think any of them use Facebook on the regular. As far as I know nobody has deleted their account due to some sort of privacy sentiment. They just don’t use it.
23 here, my age exactly tends to be mostly but few actively use it. Even just 2 years younger and it drops a ton. I only myself use it for 2 meme groups. The only people I even talk to on messenger are one friend, my grandma, and the random person who doesn't have my number.
It's not an unusual tendency for women to prefer men older than them, and men to prefer women younger than them. So these preferences can match up to a mutually preferable arrangement for both parties.
Also, FWIW, parent said "friend/dating" range. Which potentially means 20-35 may not fully apply to both categories.
This is veering wildly off topic but I'm curious: don't you think people in their early 20's would also be on a wildly "different clock"? I'm only slightly older than you are and through a weird series of event ended up frequenting a WhatsApp group populated mainly by people in their early 20s and the culture shock is pretty large.
People in their early 20's are generally students, they have different priorities, lower incomes, different cultural differences etc... It seems easier to find 40yo who share my interests and my lifestyle in my experience.
The "different clock" hombre_fatal is referring to is the "biological clock" - A single childless woman aged 35 who wants a family with two or three children has very little time to waste (assuming she wants a traditional two-biological-parent family structure which is extremely common among members of the upper middle class).
They need someone ready to make a lifetime commitment - and as it's rare to marry without dating for at least a year or so, they've only got a few rolls of the dice left.
If that's not where hombre_fatal is in his life, such women won't see a future with him.
Your clock as a guy actually isn't as different as you might think compared to women.
Yes, biologically speaking, having kids later in life is more doable for men than women. But you don't really want to put it off much. Kids require a lot of energy, and you want to be around for them growing up and moving out. And hopefully having their own children.
Don't be thinking you have all the time in the world!
"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.
Literally the entire lesson of the social networking age is that it's not entirely your choice. If everyone you know is on Facebook, and everyone you want to date is on Facebook, all the events you want to attend are organized on Facebook, etc., you have very strong pressures on you to use Facebook, whether you want to or not.
Pressures are not the same as force. Like all other choices in life, there are trade-offs. For some, the things Facebook gives them mean more to them than whatever reason they don't want to use Facebook, for others they don't.
It's a bit like saying you'd like to stop eating veal, but you're forced to keep eating it because it's so tasty.
Nonsense. Just don't use Facebook. Send email or use iMessage/Signal whatevs. If you are "left out" -- then those people probably cared about your involvement only superficially. As far as people you want to date -- how weird would it be to actually talk to the person? You'd stand out from the crowd specifically because you aren't like everybody else. Grow a spine.
Not using Facebook is fine for direct conversations. It really isn't an option in larger groups.
----
Here's a great example. I go on a canoe weekend with a bunch of old friend each year. Some years it has an upwards of 100 people attending. I know about 10 to 20 people, including the hosts, very well. The rest are either acquaintances, second connections, or friends/family of the hosts.
Everything gets done via a Facebook event because it's the easiest way for the hosts to communicate with a group of 100 people. A few people "refuse" to use Facebook so all communication with them about the event has to be done on a secondary channel. Sometimes those people accidentally get left out of important notices. It's nothing malicious, just the hosts having jobs and busy lives and forget about a few odd ones out.
I don't use Facebook. When I want to hang out with friends, I call or text them on my mobile phone. If I want to invite people to an event, I call or text them on my mobile phone. Or if we're hanging out I'll say something like "we should go to [event] next week!"
I haven't used Facebook for years and it has not obstructed my social life in any way.
What's wrong with someone caring about my involvement only superficially? It doesn't mean I don't want to be involved. Let's talk parties: sure, if a friend I see regularly is having a party, I'll get invited whether I'm on Facebook or not. If it's a more tangential connection I don't see very often just spam inviting their friends list, they might not even have other contact details for me, but it'll still probably be a fun event that I'd like to go to, and if I'm not on FB then I miss out.
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.
IMHO it's not about Facebook directly making money from dating subscriptions, it's about getting back a chunk of the user engagement that Facebook has lost to dating apps, i.e. adding dating gives users another reason to stay in the Facebook app, helping Facebook stay relevant in their lives (and spend less time in other apps), plus of course increase session durations & other positive metrics which help company reports, and ultimately derive income by showing more ads to users, likely within the dating experience itself (eventually, if not intially).
What about people like me, who have a FB account but never really do anything with it?
The only things I use mine for are 1) using FB Messenger (lite) to communicate with some other people who use that, and 2) selling some of my crap on FB Marketplace.
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.
True about millennials and Gen Z, but "millennial" now acquired the meaning of "ungrounded young people". It depends on what you call a "market". Real dating apps charge fees and don't have hidden agendas like Facebook (rule the world and sell your data to advertisers) - that's what I call a "dating app market". Sifting thru photos is not really dating - especially Instagram and Facebook photos, which, in most cases, are twisted reality.
As a millennial a few years shy of hitting 30, I find your rounding up a bit too generous. That aside, I’d still say that the prime Tinder age group is millennials.
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?
In my opinion, it might actually prove to be better than letting people decide based on super superficial attributes on dating profiles. Online dating completely sucks, guys have no choice, girls have too many bad choices.
There are other dating apps outside of Tinder and Bumble. I am married, so I don't use them personally, but my friends use/used Tinder/Bumble for more casual dating/hook ups. When they were looking for something a little more serious they would use something like OK Cupid to provide matches based on similar interests.
Either way, I don't see how online dating will ever not suck. I have no clue how it is in gay communities, but I do not see straight people's problems ever being different: i.e. Women having to deal with the ocean of terrible men, and Men having the problem of trying to stand out in that ocean (and in some of my male friends cases, not being so picky).
Online dating just makes obvious the reality of actual dating.
For example, HNers talk about online dating as though they think they aren't being sized up in real life based on their looks and how they dress. And that it wasn't until Tinder that people started doing this.
I think you're overstating the use of "algorithms" in these apps. They just throw people at you that you haven't set up any filters to avoid seeing, and vice versa. The algorithm appears to be "people you didn't explicitly rule out based on a small handful of criteria you provided, and they didn't rule you out too".
Just look at how poorly all the various recommendation systems out there work and be comforted by the fact that any such algorithm will be easily approximated with a random number generator.
> 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.
If you can remember which countries traditionally mostly speak English, and which mostly spoke a Romance language, you have a shot at getting it right.
I wonder how this fares for Tinder and Bumble. People already use Instagram to 'source' potential mates. Now they can delete one more app off their phone, remember one fewer login.
Nobody I know uses Snapchat anymore because of Instagram stories.
Which is why I can't for the life of me understand why people value companies like snapchat so highly when they are simply the current fad. Then you see oh they lost $20 Billion since their IPO and you wonder why people with that much money can't see what's clear as day to me. In 5 years, snapchat will be myspace, I'm willing to bet on it.
Wild no one is addressing the floodgate of harassment this is opening. At least when one is harassed on another app they can just close it or delete your account and the harasser has little recourse.
Given their history, FB will likely just let this mess fester
Yup, great idea! Cue the 'calling out' posts, the bitter posts when it does not work out, the wackos of all ages, and a new culture of publicly describing your personal life in a new reality TV-like, shameless manner.
Some years back a nephew (who was about 18 then), had a public back and forth with his girlfriend while their many friends Liked each post like two teams.
Let's bring the hyperreality to dating. I won't participate but I'll surely be watching the results.
Online dating seems to be a perennial problem, like a note-taking or "todo app" that attracts many different approaches from startups, but whose end result never quite scratches the itch (for me, at least).
a bit offtopic, but have any HN users successfully used dating websites in the past 2-3 years to find long-term partners or spouses? If so, which did you use and do you feel the site/app helped facilitate that process, or was it more of luck that it worked out?
I've met three girlfriends on Tinder that I dated for more than a year.
Dating is always a crap shoot and there's nothing an app can do about it except expose you to volume and ensure you're seeing women who think you're attractive at all. I don't think there's anything I can know about someone that can predict if we'll have chemistry, and that's almost all that matters in the sense that it's not a choice for either person nor can you make it past a meetup without it. For that reason I'm interested in meeting basically any woman I'm attracted to, and that's exactly what an app like Tinder facilitates.
I've had zero chemistry with women everyone thought were perfect for me. And I've had long relationships with complete opposites. The question is simple: wanna grab a drink or not?
Dating isn't an easy problem. And the reality of it feels cold and cruel to begin with. Apps can't fix that part. There are always people out there who won't even give you a shot because of something out of your control, and that's a hard pill for some to swallow.
It sounds to me like a primary use case of this would be... cheating...
Unlike other dating platforms, this one is integrated with your supposedly up to date profile. Being able to set up a low risk secret crush with a known friend seems likely to be popular to those interested in doing so.
That is to say, a person who wants to cheat has no problem having a Facebook profile, so there’s not a need for anonymity against being found by known acquaintances like you might expect on other platforms.
There's no way Facebook would allow someone to use Facebook Dating while their relationship status is set to "married" or "in a relationship." That leaves only alternate accounts as an option for someone using their dating to cheat, but I dont think Facebook has much of an alternate account culture.
Unless someone has an account for personal use and an account for "work" use that they cheat with? And their work friends list are all part of the pool for the Facebook dating protocol? That would get real messy.
Yeah, this is going to break up a lot of marriages, imo. People are going to get suspicious of their spouses facebook activity in a way that they aren't currently.
Man what a shame, if they weren't a decade late (both in terms of competition and in terms of folks having trust in Facebook), this could have been cool.
Facebook has 10+ years of data about people and their friendships and relationships unfolding through time (tagged pictures, relationship status, updates, likes, etc.). It's hard to tell if they've built and deployed such a model for proposing matches, but this could be their killer feature. Superficially, this product seems no different from existing data apps.
That was what I thought! I’m a pretty anti-Facebook person, and I don’t have a profile anymore. But facebook has data on you both explicit and implicit. They can predict your mental health state, socioeconomic status, and they have tons of data on the formation of relationships and marriages. They can even predict who you like and who you’re going to date next. As creepy as that data is, why shouldn’t they use it to actually connect people who they would predict to be compatible? A huge problem for online dating platforms is making good suggestions, and Facebook is probably the most well equipped to address it.
Not only that, but as much as I like to bad-mount FB, I will say that when I post stuff on FB Marketplace to sell, I never get people saying they want to buy it from me with a cashier's check. There are a lot of flakes, however, but that's the case with CL as well, but I've never run across a scammer, whereas on CL I get scammers all the time with the stupid cashier's check scam.
This is totally regional and item category specific. Anything primarily bought sold by the people that write "I check email once a week and don't text so call me" in their CL ads is not going to be on marketplace.
I don't follow. I can post the exact same listing on FBM and CL, and with CL I get bombarded with scammers, and with FBM I never do. In fact, with FB, I'm not sure how you would ever get contacted by scammers at all, since it's tied to your FB account, so someone would have to go to the trouble of maintaining a fake FB account just for this purpose, and it would presumably be quickly flagged and disabled as soon as a couple people got obvious scam communications from it. For better or worse, the "real person" feature about FB and lack of privacy, actually seems to work in its favor here. Anyone with a phone (or who can spoof a phone number in your area code from Nigeria) can contact you on a CL listing, whereas with FB the bar is much, much higher and there's a lot more policing.
Seriously? From what I see in the German version of Facebook, Marketplace is nowhere near "eBay Kleinanzeigen" which is by far the most popular website for things like that. Actually Marketplace is even lower in quality and if you've ever used eBay Kleinanzeigen you know that it's hard to get under that level.
Facebook-the-(news feed/profiles/messenger) are just the most successful applications on Facebook-the-platform. Marketplace and Dating are just continuations of this trend. The strong platform underneath is what makes Facebook successful but conversely, they need these value-adds to keep their platform from crumbling beneath them.
Does this service exist only as an app at this time? I have long ago decided that Facebook is not trustworthy enough for it to be allowed to have an app installed on my smartphone. Which I guess should remind me that it is not trustworthy enough to run a dating service that I should take part in.
I know this is cynical (my Facebook bias is showing, I know), but I find it somewhat telling that they've delayed launching in any country that has implemented GDPR or a derivative of it.
I mean, I get that such laws may be a complication from a compliance perspective. There's a small chance this is due to their legal processes, not because of product reasons. But FB not being ready for modern privacy law when launching a product in 2019 makes me wonder what shenanigans they need to cover up before a European launch.
Dating platforms are incentivized to keep the client (whether they are a paying customer, or an individual giving them passive income through advertising) from leaving the platform. What do you think is in Facebook’s interest? You leaving the platform to live a satisfying love life?
I hate to say it, but this is actually an advantage of FB here. Once you're no longer dating, you'll still use their platform, just like you did before. They have no incentive to keep you in the dating pool.
It doesn't seem to do anything that a normal "Dating" app does. It's just a private friends list. You can already like and message people you have a crush on, without this. Who is this for?
"Secret Crush lets you match with people you already know on Facebook and/or Instagram."
Because what people have been clamoring for is to know which of their friends like them more than is mutual, so they can feel weird.
"You can choose to see other people who are using Facebook Dating that fit your preferences within the groups you are part of and the events you have attended or will be attending."
'Oh look, this person at this upcoming event is looking for a date! I'll go hit on them in person without messaging them.'
>Because what people have been clamoring for is to know which of their friends like them more than is mutual, so they can feel weird.
I haven't read the article, but I'm guessing this is probably a typical 2-way match algorithm, or else it really doesn't make sense. i.e., both friends have to put the other in their "secret crush" list for it to inform them that they have a crush on each other.
What they really need is a "secret crush for FWB only" list: what if I have a friend that I'd be happy to be FWB with, but have zero interest in a serious relationship, but don't want to broach that topic with her for fear that it would mess up our friendship? This would be a perfect use for FB.
>What they really need is a "secret crush for FWB only" list: what if I have a friend that I'd be happy to be FWB with, but have zero interest in a serious relationship, but don't want to broach that topic with her for fear that it would mess up our friendship? This would be a perfect use for FB.
So just straight up ask the person "Have you ever thought about us hooking up?". If they don't want it, they'll just decline, and you can both get over it. Or they'll think you're a creep, and you won't be friends anymore, which is probably for the best seeing as you were harboring secret desires for this person.
Either way, being up-front and honest will have a better result than letting Facebook connect you because you were too scared to broach the subject.
>Because what people have been clamoring for is to know which of their friends like them more than is mutual, so they can feel weird.
How the hell is this something despicable and wrong in your eyes? Honestly, you sound like you have some kind of psychological problem if you think it's wrong to be attracted to a friend.
Calm down buddy. A lot of people are weirded out when they find out their friends want to screw them. It's a common problem for women that just want platonic friends.
Don't tell me to "calm down"; you sound like a patronizing asshole. You're injecting your prudish religious values here, not me. There's nothing wrong with being sexually attracted to people, and if you only make friends with opposite-sex people you find repulsive, then there's something wrong with you.
I am patronizing you, but I'm not religious or prudish in the least, and I never said that nobody should ever be attracted to their friend; only that they might find it weird. You're not really listening to what I'm saying, though, you're just being defensive at the idea that your affections for your friends might be regarded badly. You can feel however you want about others, but don't expect them to be super flattered that you want to have sex with them. (Ok, you can expect whatever you want, but reality might be a different story)
>but don't expect them to be super flattered that you want to have sex with them.
Why the hell do you think I made the suggestion in the first place? Of course I realize this.
>and I never said that nobody should ever be attracted to their friend; only that they might find it weird.
Wrong. You called me out as some kind of freak for being attracted to friends. Go read your own writings above. The whole reason I made the suggestion is because of course I realize some would find it weird (or more accurately, uncomfortable) if their friend voiced their attraction out loud, so a 2-way match app would solve this problem without anyone being made to feel uncomfortable or anyone missing out on an opportunity because of being afraid of making their friends uncomfortable. You're the one who said this was morally wrong and that people should just tell their friends this and ruin their friendships.
I did say people should tell their friends, because I find being honest and straightforward to be more virtuous (and realistic) than being secretive. But I never called you a freak, and I certainly never said it was immoral to be attracted to friends. If I thought those things I would just say so.
I remember there being a similar 2-way matching "app" based on your FB friends back in 2009 or so. People gamed the system by adding their entire friends list.
I am shocked by the ignorance here. "Why would Facebook do this? Nobody trusts them, they've run out of ideas, etc."
They're the largest social network in the world, and this site is a filter bubble of privacy advocates and relatively anti-social people. Do you truly believe there isn't a market on Facebook for dating? Do you really think Facebook brand is universally tarnished in some way that this isn't a good move for a company with such power and money on hand?
Come on.
I'm angry at myself for not predicting this. Although back in the day, it was allowable to search for people by a lot more filters, such as town, interest, school, etc. to find people. Now it's doing it for you.
> Do you really think Facebook brand is universally tarnished in some way
I can only report on what I see, and my non-tech friends seem even more anti-Facebook than my tech friends. I'm sure there are plenty of users in the world who still love Facebook, but the company has definitely gone past the tipping point of "only techies hate it, and for obscure reasons".
I really fail to see how trying to get into the dating market for 40-80 year old right-wing conservatives is really going to help them. The 20-somethings don't use FB, and sure as hell aren't going to use it for dating, and the 30-somethings probably aren't either.
> The 20-somethings don't use FB, and sure as hell aren't going to use it for dating, and the 30-somethings probably aren't either.
Facebook has been known (and are starting to) take over their family of apps. Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are already used by the 20 somethings and all the founders are gone so they have full control over them.
I wouldn't be surprised that they would shower features into it's family of apps that already exist on FB. (See Stories)
On a tangential note; there still seems to be a lot of improvements to be done in the area of dating apps.
I still can't believe that in the era of Machine Learning, Big Data, etc. Tinder insists on presenting me with people with certain characteristics that I almost always pass up on.
Companies know with scarily accuracy which things I want to buy but can't present me with someone I'd like to meet and which will potentially want to meet me as well? (Or maybe there's no such person, heh).
Or maybe this is just so that I spend all my "Passes" and I buy Tinder Gold or whatever their premium service is called...
What I find most interesting about this is that a dating application finally gets away from the core business model conflict. Facebook doesn't need users to stay on the Dating application to be profitable.
The one thing they failed to mention in this press release was pricing. All the competing dating apps are so expensive. If this is free, that's a game changer!
> Facebook Dating makes it easier to find love through what you like
I don't like Facebook... No dating for me!
Seriously, Facebook seems to be a tool for self-advertising (look at my wonderful holiday photos), while dating is more personal/intimate/truthful (in theory at least). How long can a relationship last that's not based on truth?
People who use dating apps usually quickly convert to one of two states: "meet in person" or "stop contacting each other". You're suggesting that people meeting in-person are going to be not truthful with each other in a way different than any other dating app?
Not all dating is about long term relationships. There is a large spectrum between, say, AdultFriendFinder on the one and Parship on the other end. Not sure where Facebook think they are going to be in that spectrum.
If I was an exec at Tinder what do you do here? There's nothing exactly that differentiates FB Dating from Tinder and I can't think of an USP differentiating the two, except that FB Dating may be more convenient.
Kind of an interesting precedent though that FB decided to build this in-house rather than buy Tinder as well.
>There's nothing exactly that differentiates FB Dating from Tinder and I can't think of an USP differentiating the two, except that FB Dating may be more convenient.
I couldn't disagree more - Tinder shows you pretty much random people apart from some incredibly basic criteria (age, gender, proximity) whereas FB has the potential to be massively more effective at matching you given that it has a huge wealth of information (e.g. liked posts, pages, etc) to draw upon to select candidate matches to show you. It may naively assume that similarity is always good and that isn't necessarily true so hopefully their algorithm isn't so naive.
Either way, so FB's dating experience could completely destroy Tinder unless they get their ass in gear quickly and deliver a more more success-focused user experience, right now Tinder doesn't seem to care at all about match quality, nor eliminating fake & dormant profiles.
Heh.. This may actually work and I'm surprised it wasn't implemented sooner.
Back in the mid 2000's, I was on Hi5. So were a lot of people where I lived. Although a social network, everyone I knew was using it solely for dating. I got dozens of good dates from Hi5. It was pretty awesome.
> Starting today, you can choose to opt into Facebook Dating and create a Dating profile (separate from your main profile) if you’re 18 years or older and have downloaded the most recent version of Facebook
So this is mobile-only? Exclusive of WhatsApp/Instagram, isn't that a first for FB?
Didn't Facebook originally start as a "reductionistic" way for nerds around Mark to connect with "secret crushes" at Harvard? Didn't YouTube start as a dating site at UIUC as well, for pretty much the same reasons?
Seems weird it shows you mutual friends. Part of the appeal of online dating is stepping outside of your friend circles and looking elsewhere. I definitely wouldn't want to broadcast my dating profile to mutual friends either.
In a way this arrives extremely late, and minus the secret crush thing it's very much copying Tinder's design. On the other hand I don't see the online dating market collapsing anytime soon.
I think it's a good opportunity to buy the small dip in Match. That stock has done incredibly well (doubled this year) and every earnings report has been massive as far as new subscriber count goes.
Considering FB has a history of running psychological tests on users, I can easily see how their "Secret Crush Lists" could be used as a psychological test.
Tried to just to see... "We aren't suggesting people in your area yet." I guess I will have to wait. At least this didn't reject me like other dating sites did.
In any case, I'm not sure if I would be inclined actually meet someone from the result. Maybe because of my demisexual nature, but am I the only one feel reluctant to meet up with someone from dating sites?
It's not a jab, it's seeing someone for who they really are. Facebook hasn't suddenly decided to play cupid out of the goodness of their heart, they now have a system to effectively rank their user's social scores based on things like swipes and messages. Most of the Match.com apps do the same, but the scale of facebook puts most of them to shame. The fact is that they aren't offering a new way of dating, just a new way of gathering more valuable data on you. After all, who wants to waste time advertising to someone with no friends or influence when they can promote to the person getting swipes left and right.
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.