Match.com, Yahoo Get Dates Of Their Own -- In Court
from the hell-hath-no-fury-like-an-online-dating-user-scorned dept
One risk of any dating service is that people aren't always who or what they say they are. Things like "experienced, rugged, huggable SWM seeks SWF for fun, excitement, future" tend to really mean something closer to "balding, fat middle-aged guy seeks hot young thing for some action", and if somebody's not happy with how they look, they can easily send potential dates a picture of somebody better looking. But how many people would ever expect their dates are moles planted by the dating service themselves? Users have sued Match.com, alleging company employees responded to customers' ads, and even went on dates with them to try and prevent them from cancelling. Meanwhile, Yahoo's been accused separately of putting up fake profiles to pump up its user numbers. Online dating sites are seeing declining use, but these tactics (assuming they were actually used) are pretty drastic, and differ drastically from the patented "method and system for identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship." Online dating users often get derided as sad and desperate -- but if the companies have to resort to such dirty tricks to hang on to users, their desperation would seem to go a bit deeper.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
(I have some familiarity with classifieds, as I used to write classified ad management software.)
The "ethics" of the practice were to discard all replies to the fakes. I witnessed clients dutifully separating replies to planted ads and shredding them unread.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
eHarmony didn't work for me
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
match.com and adultfriendfinder.com
AdultFriendFinder.com shows my town as having about 3,000 *beautiful* woman, when the town has a population of only 5,000.
So, all in all, I gave up on matchmaking sites and went back to the old way of searching for a lady friend, which worked much much better.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: match.com and adultfriendfinder.com
and you're right about adultfriendfinder. they have a lot of.. ahem.. 'professional' ads in there.
they inflate the numbers to get more schlubs to subscribe.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Match
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Match
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Match.com worked for me
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
Then again I've already done the online dating thing a couple times. Met one whack job and one honest decent girl.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ORKUT
Which you can buy on ebay, of all places. Speaking of which, I think that the combination of Froogle and GoogleBase is going to kill ebay. Even faster if "GooglePay" ever becomes more than a rumor.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: No Subject Given
It's not everybody that wants to social network.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
All motivated by greed..
When yahoo was accused of posting fake profiles, their dating site became inaccessible for several days. They probably needed to pull the fake profiles off the site.
eharmony is another site that most people are unhappy with.
All these companies are motivated by greed. It's probably high time we start supporting the Free dating sites. oasisoflove.com, and a few others are phenomenal.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Other free sites
Oh, and they have serious and just-for-fun user-created questions and tests. On the "Zombie Preparedness Test" I found out, for instance, that I won't survive because I'll go back to save my family and/or friends! ;-)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Other free sites
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]