Tinder’s pricing algorithm can charge users up to 5x more for same service(foundation.mozilla.org) |
Tinder’s pricing algorithm can charge users up to 5x more for same service(foundation.mozilla.org) |
They will explain they need answers to a bunch of questions to know if the product is a good fit for you. What they're really trying to do is figure out the max you will pay.
It's just that the product was somewhat complicated and the pricing form converted better when it generated leads for the sales team than when casual browsers bounced off it.
Anyway I am against it, find it immoral, and think the EU should have some regulations forbidding it.
Specifically the social origin, genetic features, and property should cover this.
I feel very cynical about this. The best solution they can come up with is to let the GDPR deal with it? It's hard to believe that unchecking 5 boxes every time I visit a new site truly aligns with their goal of transparency. The researchers suspect that a lot of personalized pricing schemes are in violation of the GDPR, but I just don't know what enforcing compliance will change.
Coincidentally, I just started writing an essay in my ethics class on methods to deal with unethical algorithmic decision making. I'm very happy to discuss this.
[0] https://www.consumersinternational.org/media/369078/personal...
[0]: https://www.consumerreports.org/consumer-protection/tinder-i...
In short, males looking for females are very even in their rating of women along a bell curve. Females looking for males heavily skew towards the top 20% of males, while considering the bottom 80% "below average".
Tinder, and every other dating app, absolutely take advantage of this deep truth of human psychology and milk the bottom echelon of desperate men for every penny they can.
It mostly has to do with the gender ratio. If there are women on there (common enough on many forums) or any guys who’ve never experienced any amount of sustained sexual frustration (uncommon but happens) - the incel talks start coming out. Mostly due to willful ignorance on their part.
2. Even if it is the same service, what is the problem with Tinder charging some people an extra $20? This isn't an essential service in any way.
3. foundation.mozilla.org ? Why is the Mozilla foundation of all groups investing time into this sort of advocacy?
I am not a lawyer, but I do know age is a protected class in the US. It could be seen as age based discrimination. My understanding is that protected classes are the same criteria we use to, for example make it illegal to have a separate price for different races.
Edit: as the article mentions, they have already been hit with a lawsuit about this issue on these grounds before https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/tinders-24-million...
Though sex is also a protected class and plenty of establishments have preferential rates for ladies nights, so I am not sure how black and white the law really is here; that particular issue has a pretty back-and-forth history as far as I can tell, and maybe this would similarly have some kind of carve out? Definitely seems like a very large legal risk. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies%27_night#:~:text=Ladi....
The predatory monetization scheme makes more sense in that context.
(I’m a FF fan but this seems off brand to me)
> We are committed to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth — where a person’s demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience.
There is no other way to meet women this efficiently. And it was a lot of fun, too. It took out all the slog out of dating. It would be a steal at $100/mo.
You have to really question what kind of young woman is desperate enough to meet a man that she'd use an app, ... not the kind I'm interested in.
Occasionally, the photos were a bit old (pre-pandemic) or very flattering, one might have been a tad unstable, but in general, they were just normal and nice.
Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.
Is this then legal?
Or, they could use one of those automated finger-swiping things, like some guys tend to do.
It's unlikely age-based price discrimination will ever be made illegal, because it would effectively outlaw senior discounts.
There's some anecdotes online that it used to charge more for men. I don't know if all those people didn't live in the US.
Why isn’t there a free platform for dating? (not counting the subreddits and FB groups for that, because they’re retooling something else, not built from the ground up to solve problems specific to this space).
It’s one of the biggest social issues imo, especially in cultures that restrict or repress dating in meatspace, or places with uneven demographics (e.g. there are literally millions of more men than women out there, which means that many will inevitably “die alone”)
If more people could find a suitable partner or even just compatible friends, it would make the world a much better place, if only by reducing misery (and spurring the economy :)
Why isn’t anyone else stepping in besides the wolves that just prey upon loneliness and desperation?
Dating specifically is a pretty difficult problem space because of the creeps, abusers, asynchronicity of the experience of men and women, etc. This is also a problem in non-dating; for example every city where I've attended Couchsurfing meetups there was at least one "creepy guy", and almost every women I've talked to for some length had at least one story.
Plus, it also depends on the "network effect"; why is everyone on Tinder? Because everyone is on Tinder! couchsurfing.com is a badly run platform but none of the alternatives have taken off because there just aren't that many people there.
1) Why would someone build software that sophisticated and not expected to be rewarded for their time and effort? The the amount of skill needed to determine an algorithm good enough to connect people that might be a good match for each isn't a trivial thing that one can pull a library from npm for.
2) How do you attract a large enough user base to make it effective in the first place?
though you don’t have to pay for tinder, and certainly not to have success.
Marketing methods are often a little more fuzzy and less ethical than the actual underwriting. Insurers and marketers know about all sort of stuff that affects insurability, from eating habits, to gun ownership, to participation in high risk activity.
I don’t necessarily understand what Tinder does precisely, but it’s pretty obvious that you can exploit the insecurity or desperation of people looking for dates. It’s gonna be easier to extract cash from a 45 year old divorced woman than a 25 year old single woman. And you may want to use tolls as a friction point to reduce the number of undesirable or less profitable men.
You can probably use willingness to pay as a factor to score matches that will generate more churn that keeps the subscription in place. Generally speaking, I expect the most evil imaginable from companies like this. Online dating is a real mill, especially when you pass the threshold where you’re not attached and most people in your cohort are.
May as well just ban the sub-180 midgets who are wasting their time. Then charge a premium for having a choice pool of candidates for the other half.
In the US, at least, you actually need to to get pre-approval for your prices and how you arrive at that price, and that information becomes public record.
But some factors get a free pass whereas others don't. eg. age/sex is allowed, but race/income/education isn't (although zip codes approximate some of those, to an extent).
E.g., I'm a redhead living in the Southern Hemisphere who has been active in the outdoors all my life and who smoked for 30 years.
So to get insurance that paid out in the event of terminal illness, I had to either pay a massive premium, or agree to exclude melanoma and lung cancer.
Makes sense - redheads produce minimal melanin, and there is far more UV exposure in the Southern Hemisphere due to the ozone "hole" that forms over Antarctica every year and drifts north onto southern South America / southern Africa / Australia / New Zealand. So as a ginger who had spent a lot of time outdoors under a harsher sun, I'm definitely in one of the rows in that actuarial table that's coloured red in Excel.
(And smoking is self-evident).
Now, back to Tinder. Are they charging based on risk? No.
They're charging what people will pay. And I'm willing to bet that they consider a recently divorced 48 year old man is able to pay more, and if I'm being uncharitable, desperate enough to do so.
So your comparison is very much apples and oranges.
It's well-known that insurance rates vary a lot from person to person (transparency) _and_ there's multiple insurance companies offering what's effectively the same service (competition). So, if I don't like the price, I can get my car/house/boat insured with someone else who will likely give me a different personalized price.
In this case Tinder seems to be working hard to keep the magnitude of the pricing variance secret and there's no real competition since Tinder's apps are the only way to access the service.
Personalized pricing for a digital service with a more-or-less constant cost-per-user doesn't make sense here (unless you want to maximize profits by unfairly discriminating against certain demographics).
Is that 'unfairly discriminating against a certain demographic'?
1. Consumer surplus
2. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7042/economics/examples-o...
The most sense it makes for Tinder to do is to chage men more than women, which they already did.
Insurance cost is determined based on actuarial tables, whereas Tinder probably doesn't even consider the size of anyones table.
You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from their un-informed customers. A company finding new ways to leverage their market power, position, and information asymmetry.
Note, the post this is a reply to originally said "You mean a company becoming more efficient at extracting money from customers".
If one thinks of commerce as "willing buyer,willing seller" then a transaction occurs at the point where both sides are content with the money/product swap. What other people paid for the same product is only tangentially relevant - if I'm happy with the transaction today why should I be less happy tomorrow based on someone else's transaction?
Outside the US you see this in places where markets are more fluid, and in some places have no pricing at all. You are expected to haggle (I mean, negotiate) - failure to do so makes a fool of the vendor to offer first too low a price.
In other words, the world is unfair. Sometimes in your favour, sometimes against. The sooner one accepts that the easier life becomes..
Equally though unfairness creates a gap in the market. Girls toys cost more than boys toys (same toy, different package) suggests an opportunity.
[1] for the purposes of this discussion I'm not talking about protected classes, such as race. There are some unfairness that are considered to be unacceptable.
jealousy. Even animal studies have shown that monkeys who sees another monkey receive more reward for the same "work" gets angry (i recall it was some experiment where one monkey got "paid" in grapes, while another was paid in something else less desirable - i forgot what - and initially both were happy, as they did not see each other's payment, but once the monkey saw the grape reward, they refused their reward and got angry).
Obviously there are cases where you'll never get the grapes, but that's why we have executive function.
Provided answer: Create a Facebook account.
If Tinder wants to overcharge certain demographics, they have to do it to the majority or offer something of equivalent value to them in return.
How are the people who built HN, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok etc. being “rewarded for their time and effort?”
Why can’t the same be done for dating?
What you're looking for takes enough intelligence to solve and code a solution to the optimal stopping problem, enough money to perpetually host such a system, and enough legal training and patience to comply with the legislative demands of 200 countries. Why shouldn't such a company want to be rewarded in hard currency and no just likes or gratitude?
They're a) far more likely to find a partner and b) leave the platform when they do.
So higher "risk" of exiting the platform from Tinder's POV, so you'd want to get their money upfront, presumably?
Divorced men who are going to fat while balding, with 50/50 care of three kids and alimony to pay, aren't flying off the shelf.
So for Tinder, they're a low exit risk, and typically far more able and willing to pay for features that they think might aid them.
A 25 year old man in good shape, no kids, and starting out on a good career, is far less likely to _need_ the features Tinder charges for.
I would not do something as stupid using cards to discriminate pricing.
Now of course, we live in a society where the courts would never actually make that link, so you can argue I'd be a bad leader leaving money on the table like that...
But I'd say that's more a problem with our system than anything.
”They’re charging people using the costco mastercard more!”
”Yeah, and?”
”Well, everyone knows that the jews love costco, and you can’t discriminate against an ethnic minority!”
Cash app targets underbanked people... guess what demographics are underbanked: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/unbanked-and-underbank...
So guess who they market heavily to: https://trapital.co/2020/03/18/how-hip-hop-helped-cash-app-g...
It's not racist, but it does make people look at uncomfortable truths about equality...
You might try making an argument that theaters have to give you senior pricing as soon as you turn 40; I don't know what's going on there.
I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.
The biggest challenge is that Tinder can be an emotional rollercoaster and really screw over your self-esteem.
You're doing a lot of mental gymnastics to redefine terms like "average". Ah yes, it is perfectly fine for women to consider 80% of men to be below average in attractiveness, because those 80% are just a no-brainer "no" because they are not attractive and math is hard.
> I don't deny that using these apps as a man is a more difficult experience in actually landing a date, but many women are also frustrated by the tons of crappy/creepy men out there (e.g. "dickpics" and such). Being in the "top 30/20%" is easier than you'd might think.
Perhaps you are in the top 20% of men so you feel that it is easy to be in the top 20% bracket, but men who are not up there don't really have a path to get there. You imply that men should simply stop sending dick picks (and stop doing other, very obviously bad things), but the proportion of men sending unwarranted dick pics is vanishingly small.
I've been married for a long time so thankfully don't need to use Tinder, but this reported rating distribution squares with my memory of the dating market in meatspace. 90% of women go after the top 20% of the guys. Online probably doesn't change this.
There are "dating" sites that specialize in connecting wealthy/successful people (mostly older men) with young, beautiful people (mostly women). They do charge quite a bit and make bank.
The Jeff Bezos / Leonardo DiCaprio scene clearly shows that money can’t buy sexual attraction.
Also, if someone can't be bothered to even write a single word. Meh.
I suspect it gets a free pass because the demographic being discriminated against is better off (eg. adults who tend to have more disposable income). If it were the other way around (eg. software companies charging elderly people more because they don't know any better), there's going to be more backlash.
this is why you don't see a discount for couples usually - coz they were going to pay even without the discount.
"Most people are fine with movie theatres charging 65+ SENIORS less than they charge adults."
If discrimination by gender or other relevant characteristic was illegal in the US that might have some legal, not moral bearing, but no one cares.
> In the United States, a few states have adopted statutes forbidding gender-based price discrimination, but these policies are largely unenforced.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-based_price_discrimin...
That "crap" is something you brought up on your own. We're discussing unfair discriminatory pricing, not mating.
Agreed, which is why it was a big collective fuckup for Western societies to migrate from the societies where premarital and extramarital sex was condemned, thus ensuring a far more even distribution of sexual access for men and women.
(Side note, in the lead up to the restriction on how insurers could base their premiums, there was a failed initiative in the 90s that would have made California a no-fault state and would handle funding insurance through a surcharge on gasoline prices.)
Men under 25 pay the highest premiums due to their repeated statistically demonstrated tendency to take far more risks and accordingly have far more serious accidents.
(And good luck getting full insurance if you're male, under 25 and own a vehicle with a turbo.)
Likewise, women 30+ get lower premiums than men because while they have more fender benders, they have far less serious crashes - and our insurance companies proudly advertise to women on that basis.
And your car premium will vary based on your location's car theft rates, although how you store your car (garage vs. driveway vs. street parking) and installed antitheft devices will reduce it.
However, race based pricing is very much not a thing.
It probably could be, as a proxy for socio-economic status, as the indigenous people of NZ are over-represented in all negative socio-economic indicators, thanks to colonisation followed by about a century of government policy, some deliberate (e.g., Tohunga Suppression Act 1907), some accidental (Manpower Act 1944).
And poor young men are even more at risk of serious accident than other young men.
That said, as no insurer will pay out if your car didn't have a current warrant of fitness (proof that your car meets minimum safety regulations), or current registration (just a tax, used to fund road maintenance and our no-fault accident insurance scheme), that effectively discriminates against poor people anyway.
Incidentally, NZ doesn't have compulsory third party insurance.
And I strongly support that - making it compulsory only benefits insurance companies by reducing their risk (which they aren't compelled to pass on to customers as lower premiums), and because once something is mandatory, you can charge far more than is fair, and people can't respond like a rational market would by just not buying your service.
It's a problem because it puts consumers at an even further disadvantage in a game that's already stacked against them. That you're still willing to pay makes no difference - you're still worse off than before.
Maybe it would be somewhat fair if consumers had their own well-funded departments, studying corporations to determine the lowest price they'd still be willing to sell a product for, and then collectively negotiating the price.
But we don't, and it would be a waste of humanity's limited time to play these zero-sum, when we can just make the behavior illegal.
And this entire time, nobody has generated definitive proof that this is happening which is a photo of two phones side by side going to the same location listing different prices despite how easy such proof would be to generate.
It's the same as the whole "Yelp deletes reviews if you don't buy ads" or "Facebook is listening to your microphone and serving you up ads". Proof is easy to generate and yet it never appears, only endlessly more anecdotes and speculation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/13/uber-l...
I don’t believe you because I hardly believe anything i read in comment sections. People are normally under informed or being malicious.
But in any case I still use it because I find it useful regardless of this custom pricing
Funny thing is religion and monogamy were built to solve this tinder problem. Society has known about it for a long time
i'd say rather than not allowed, it's more an uncomfortable truth that people are too socially stigmatized to agree or say.
I think as society sheds such stigma, over time, society becomes more progressive and "free".
- Hunter Biden laptop wasn't allowed on social media before the election under the guise of "hacking" and "misinformation".
Maybe I wasn't supposed to answer this question...
> you are in the top 20% of men
Not at all.
You're missing the point. The major finding in that OkCupid post was that (according to that post) women have an unrealistic expectation of the attractiveness of men. They demonstrated this by showing that the majority of women consider the majority of men to be below average in attractiveness. This claim is not refuted by your observation that some men send unwanted dick picks, and it's not refuted by your observation that some men use badly lit photos. I don't know why you feel like these observations somehow refute this claim? Even if 100% of men were sending dick pics and 100% of men were using badly lit photos, this still wouldn't change the fact that 1+1=2, or the fact that top 50% of men in terms of attractiveness are above the median in terms of attractiveness. If a person holds a world view to the contrary, their world view is factually incorrect.
Tinder is entitled to charge as much as they want to whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against a protected class.
The free market resolution requires competition, though. There might be a reasonable case to be made that products that don't have comparable competition can't be priced in a way that exploits different customers by charging more for receiving the same service or good?
I don't think there's anything comparable to tinder that found be considered legitimate competition- match.com, Madison, adult friend finder, etc are operating in very different markets with very different tools and expectations.
Price discrimination[1] relies on market power. This is a completely uncontroversial thing. Any discussion on price discrimination will tie back to market power.
1. Not a judgement here. This is a technical term from microeconomics.
Is my understanding incorrect?
[1] Not perfect
I don't see how consolidation into a couple of major players swallowing most of the companies in the space is avoidable. It's Booking Holdings vs Expedia Group all over again.
Sugar dating is very much a transactional one. It’s a more affordable version of sex work.