Online Romance: Readers Share The 20 Most Insane, Behind The Scenes Facts About Popular Dating Sites

Dating apps and sites are the new standards for meeting someone in this fast-paced, ever-changing world of ours. Gone are the days of feeling weird about meeting someone online and the embarrassment of sharing that you met online. It’s more often now to hear that two people met online versus meeting in public somewhere or by chance. 

Someone’s Gotta Do It

One user shared, “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 d****k pics all day. Five days a week. That’s all. No stats. Just a weird job.”

Ghosted

A second user added, “My ex-boyfriend worked for the Yahoo Italy dating site in the early 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.”

Analytics

A third user said, “I ran operations for an online dating company. From database analytics, I can tell you a few things. Men initiate contact around 80% of the time in straight matchmaking. Suppose you are a woman looking to date other women, and you simply initiate contact with another woman. In that case, you have a good chance of success simply because it’s very, very, very common for women to match, but then neither initiates contact. IIRC, we were able to determine that it takes on average about 3 dates before s****x happens.”

Warrants

This user shared, “I work for a large online dating company. We get so many requests for information from the police that we have an informal system with them to save them from wasting time getting warrants for information about people who we didn’t have data on, they would ask about a particular name/email/whatever other identifier, and we would just say yes we have data about them or no we don’t. If we did, they’d get the warrant for a copy.”

The Rule Of Three

This Redditor said, “Oddly enough, Bumble is owned by a woman who was also a co-founder of Tinder. The rest of that founding team owns The Match Group, which owns almost every other dating site/app.”

Good Photos

A poster commented, “I can tell you from doing analytics, and this isn’t really at all surprising, is to get some decent profile photos. Get your talented friend, or just hire a photographer to take some really nicely-lit well-composed photos of yourself and watch your match rate soar.”

Cat Fish

This Redditor recalled, “My old boss was the financial controller of a big dating site. He kept seeing these big invoices for modeling 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.”

Former Relationship

A user shared, “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.”

Adultery

A Redditor said, “We sort of already saw the inner workings of Ashley Madison. All the women are just bots designed to encourage men to pay for the service. There were almost no real women, and the women on AM were prostitutes looking for clients.”

Inactive

One user added, “I used to work with a guy who had been an engineer for Match.com. He said 99% of the profiles were inactive and that 80% of the active profiles were men. He 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.”

Plenty Of Fish?

This user shared, “I’m a pretty average-looking woman in my 40s and would average 40-50 new messages daily on OkCupid. My profile wasn’t flirty or indicated hookups only. I met my wonderful partner there, and he says in 3 years, he probably has around 2 first messages the entire time. One was me, and the other was someone asking for money.”

Data Doesn’t Lie

A poster commented, “A friend wrote her master’s thesis about the different criteria in online dating and real life. Almost half (43%) of the female participants who were in a relationship said they’d never have swiped right on their current partner. Other interesting results were that over 60% of men they wrote with on apps and agreed to go on a date would have no chance if they asked in real life.”

Fake Accounts

A commenter said, “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.”

Murder

One Redditor commented, “I worked for a dating app for a few years in a role that was pretty high up, where I was privy to almost all of the inner workings of the app. ⁠We had a murder on our platform. The top of the company got interviewed as witnesses. TBH, there wasn’t really anything we did or could have done about it, but it is crazy to think about.”

Six Figures

This poster said, “I was a moderator for a smaller dating app. One of our members got scammed out of six figures, and there was nothing we could do about it either. She was older and lonely, and the person used an attractive picture and kind words to play off that. If you let them, people will find any way to scam and abuse those that are lonely.”

Educated Guesses

A Redditor added, “I work in analytics for many of the larger dating sites. Believe it or not, the algorithms are less sophisticated than you think. They mostly consist of educated guesses and then trial and error to see what creates the most engagement. This engagement could be anything from returning to the app to sending messages. The main goal of the algorithm is always to get you to pay, never to actually ensure you meet somebody in real life, as much as we tried to lie to ourselves that it was.”

Won’t Play Cupid

A top-liked comment said, “I won’t say which company, but you can probably guess from this next part. ⁠No dating professionals or psychological professionals were ever consulted when we were building our software, software that basically plays cupid and changes the course of people’s lives. I kept thinking it would be a good idea to have experts and scientists tell us what determines attraction and set up a relationship for success. Still, nobody was ever interested in hearing that. Instead, we made our own choices about how to build this thing.”

Sad But True

This user divulged, “⁠I worked in PR/social outreach for a company and met hundreds of our users in person, and they were all pretty great people. Many of them were willing to come in and talk because they were struggling with finding people and matches on our app. It was sad that our software was failing them. Some of the best, most lovely people really struggled to find a partner.”

Three To One Ratio

A Redditor stated, “As you can probably already guess, almost every dating app has a significantly larger percentage of men than women.”

Blind Dating App

This poster mentioned, “I work for one of your favorite online dating apps, and we toyed with the idea of doing a test of “blind dating” where you couldn’t see a user’s profile picture until after a match, but that failed really quickly. People truly are superficial.”

Source: Reddit

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