20 Wild Things People Learned While Working for Dating Apps

‘Tinder Gold gives a false sense of hope’
20 Wild Things People Learned While Working for Dating Apps

Dating apps are a miserable place for the people who use them, but working for dating apps is its own circle of Hell.

One Redditor’s ex-boyfriend worked on the Yahoo! Italy dating site in the early aughts, and he was responsible for customer retention with a particularly unethical twist. When he saw that a man’s account was about to expire, he was required to pretend to be a woman, message them and engage in conversation — all in hopes that this man would renew his account. When he did, the Redditor’s ex-boyfriend would ghost them, trapping the man in a cycle of rejection. 

Other Redditors have exposed the wild things they’ve learned while working for dating apps, and one thing is for certain: the algorithm sure gets a lot of help from human hands.

Drach88 2y ago I didn't work for one, but there was a startup dating app I'm aware of that started to run out of investor funds when their primary source of data dried up due to changes in the privacy and data-usage policies of the systems they were pulling from. As a result, they were substantially bleeding their male audience, which in turn led to a sharp downtown in their female audience. Little by little they got rid of their engineering and operations teams until there were just a few people in the office, at least one of which would
tex23bm 4y ago This is my favorite bit from my time working at PeopleMedia, which is part of Match several years back as a software engineer. One day while deep in the depths of code related to our spam filters (I forget what was in there for) stumbled across a curious code statement. It was like if (userld == XXXXX) return; Which is a very curious thing to see. It basically said that if the user was a certain person, don't filter them as a spam profile. Immediately I laughed and was like uh... What in the actual &@$# is
Sighne 4y ago A couple met on the dating app I worked on. Unfortunately, the man passed away and the lady returned to the app where they met for remembrance. One day, a bug in the system made some profile likes to be sent again after months and she received one from her deceased boyfriend. Her bug report was heartbreaking. 39K ...
Undercoverfootmodel 4y ago I work for a cyber security company. These companies protections are a joke. Most people know how you can look in the code to unscramble your likes on tinder. But we also found a way to see everything they signed up with. Their location, phone number, and where they were at that moment. Bumble the verified profile means shit. That's what my team was in charge of. I got verified profiles of about 10 different celebrities within 30 minutes. That blue check means nothing. 6 ...
TheCharlienator 4y ago I moderated a lesbian dating site for a short while and about 70% of the users were male fetishist, who would DM these women, thinking they would change their sexuality to do weird kink things with them. I don't kink shame, these things were legitimately really weird, a lot of those DMs were straight up creepy. 9 ...
2y ago Edited 2y ago Tinder Gold is a scam targeted mostly at men and ugly people. The algorithm basically looks at your match ratio and people who are below a percentage are heavily targeted. Its designed to make you think you'd get more matches by upgrading when in reality its designed to give you a false sense of hope. No idea if they changed it but that's exactly how it worked a few years ago. - 13 ...
MikeJesus 4y ago Once upon a time I worked in a start-up dating app that eventually went bust. Was a quirky 'let us write the first 30 messages for you' sort of deal where users would be prompted with conversation trees that I got hired to write. Did my work and left because the ''CEO was all sorts of weird and the money was all sorts of bad. Couple months later I end up chatting with a girl on the app who chooses all the funniest options available, but the app bugs out as soon as try to engage in
tubaguy1998 4y ago I worked customer service for a company that oversaw Christian Mingle, JDate, and some others (five sites in total). The only real dirt I had was that I, as an agent, could see every message ever sent on any given account, even if the member had deleted the messages off their account. I did, however, have my fair share of amazingly insane conversations with people just looking for love. One I'll never forget is a school teacher that offered me a letter of recommendation as reward for helping her get her account in order. 11 ...
cinnapear 4y ago I ran a niche dating site for about 4 years before closing it down. Most of the users were men. Women would get swarmed with messages. Many men lied about their ages. Many men created a serious account and a play account with slightly more attractive stats. The serious account would send presumably serious messages and the play account would spam every woman seeking sex. 6 ...
PhiloPhocion 4y ago | don't know if it's changed but (with a classic not me but) my roommate used to work at one of the big dating apps and one of the issues they had was that their algorithm changed at one point to more emphatically enforce dating pools where people who got more right swipes would only see profiles of people who get more right swipes etc. With the idea being that it would put people in similar tiers to actually match. One big issue they were having was ... well racial preferences or sexual racism being pretty amplified
newdroidnewreddit 4y ago Late 2016 / Early 2017, I worked for a software company that startups would buy to control cost as they scaled engineering headcount. Got pretty far into the buying cycle with Grindr. I distinctly remember them talking about processing 90M messages a day. I can't remember the number of images exchanged but it was also astronomical. Found a HBR paper from '15, they were processing 70M messages amongst 2M daily active users. The last stat I saw clocked current DAU at 27M. Back then they posted and boasted about their stats online. Don't seem to be the case anymore.
KnobDingler 4y ago I worked for Successful Singles in 2001. It was a dating agency. We cold called customers to get them to spend $3000 to be professionally matched. We would get some $$ if they showed up; we got more if they spent $ on the service. They claimed to have a highly technological matching computer. This was actually two high school girls in a room with two filing cabinets, one labeled male, one female. All leads came from a fake profile on match that said send me your phone number so we can talk. I personally shut the
SupermanistheDR . . 4y ago We used to create fake accounts and chat with users. It was everything from someone having a premium account that wasn't getting responses to bored employees. 13K ...
Marzana1900 4y ago I tested the communication feature for a dating company that shall remain nameless. Nothing unusual in itself. The message exchange function needed to be flawless (glitches ironed out etc.) Except in this case, the requirement was to establish a relationship with a user (usually 3 on the go simultaneously) and keep it going for about 2 months. Fake identity was used of course. Months! I researched the person, likes, dislikes, interestes and so on. A whole fake relationship was build. Then, after the test run was over, ghost them, delete my profile and move on to the
jimpez86 . . 4y ago My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site. Не kept on seeing these big invoices for modelling agencies and initially thought it was because of the big parties they used to host. When he asked about it it turned out it was just content for the fake profiles they created to lure in users. - 3.9K ...
CastSeven 4y ago This was years ago now, but I used to work with a guy who had been an engineer for Match.com. Не said 99% of the profiles were inactive, and that 80% of the active profiles were men. Не didn't provide numbers but also said the was a huge disparity between the average number of messages sent to women versus those sent to men. According to him, all told the site was mostly men reaching out to dead profiles and never getting responses. As I said however, this was years ago, so it's entirely possible that they've cleaned
Lettuce-b-lovely . 4y ago I have a friend who works for... I wanna say Tinder. Anyway, the company isn't important; what is important is that her ENTIRE job is to remove inappropriate images. Her JOB is to look at dick pics all day. Five days a week. That's all. No stat. Just a weird fucking job. - 11K ...
Jimmypeglegs 4y ago I used to moderate OK Cupid. The amount of unsolicited dick pictures men would send women, not even accompanied by any words was horrifying. I mean, you'd expect it because online dating is a cesspit but the sheer amount would still surprise you. I had to look at each reported picture and say Yes, that's a penis. - 24K ...
visualisewhirledpeas 4y ago My ex bf worked for the Yahoo Italy dating site back in the earlyish 2000s. His job was to pretend to be a woman, and message male customers just as their accounts were going to expire. This would encourage them to pay to renew their subscriptions. Once they renewed, he would ghost them. Не only lasted for a few months due to how unethical it was. 12K ...
mips-404-andi . 4y ago I work for the family of companies that owns tinder. I hate this fact. It might have changed by now but I doubt it. The algorithm showed older men MUCH younger women (like 50 year old men and 18 year olds) because that was the most successful. Ugh, gross. 5 ...

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