All of these sites do shady shit. I'm so glad I'm no longer single.
I signed up for eHarmony with a unique email address dedicated to that site. After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened. It was a unique account that I had not used anywhere else just for this specific reason, and my hunch was justified.
After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened.
Facebook is also guilty of this.
I set up a Facebook account for a relative around 2006. The e-mail address is name_facebook@ a domain that I control.
Every six months or so, Facebook will send out almost daily e-mails for a month saying "Person x commented on your post!" or some variant. You know how I know this relative of mine didn't make a new post?
Since all the alleged comments are allegedly from people he knew, and not new strangers, I find it hard to believe that someone has been impersonating him on Facebook for the last 15 years.
How do you know they are not commenting on old content? FB could be pushing old content like 'remember X from 18 years ago' and then someone comments about remembering their friend under an old photo.
I do this for every site I sign up for. I have a 'catch all' email address, so I can put [email protected] and the emails will get to my inbox. So now I know who is selling or leaking my email address. So far it's been very few, but I also don't sign up for new sites very often.
They were good 15 years ago. As with all things, it went to shit when Match.com started consolidating everything and the bean counters realized that a quality product was not as profitable.
Surprised it took this long to get litigation. So many people complaining about how crap dating sites are, but no one thought to realize the site itself was the problem and fell into the whole "looksmaxxing" grift. Some people really will do anything except admit that rich people are corrupt.
Dating sites are an extremely hard business to be in.
On a traditional (social) network, whether that'd be Facebook, the railroad or the Bloomberg Terminal, you have the network effect. The more users you get, the more interesting the network becomes, which means yet more users want to join. This is a positive feedback loop.
The entire point of a dating site is to find somebody to leave that site with. Statistically speaking (and at that scale, statistics is the only thing that matters), attractive users[1] are more likely to find a match and leave, while unattractive users are likely to stay (or come back) and keep looking. As time goes on, the fraction of unattractive users will keep increasing. You can fix this with enough growth, but exponential growth can't go on forever due to population size constraints. And once you get into that state, your growth will be constrained further, which just puts you onto a downward slide into hell.
And then there's the question of revenue. It's hard to scalably do deals where the user must pay you when they find a relationship on the site (like the matchmaking services of old used to do), so subscriptions or one-time fees are your only options. Neither of them are great, subscriptions encourage you to keep users on the site (which puts your goal opposite to what the users want), one-time fees work against the network effect and constrain growth.
[1] By "attractiveness", I mean something much wider than just visual / physical attractiveness. An ability to enter and maintain a successful long-term relationship in general.
I signed up for eHarmony with a unique email address dedicated to that site. After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened. It was a unique account that I had not used anywhere else just for this specific reason, and my hunch was justified.