Ok, I may not have great photoshop skills, but I do have a knowledge of ancient memes:

<3

oops!

Fuck.

Wrote too hard.

Somebody should just convince him to add DMT and Shrooms to his Hunter S Thompson-esque drug kit, and maybe there’s a chance he’ll develop a modicum of self awareness and empathy after experiencing total ego death.

We investigated ourselves and everything looks peachy actually!

Yep, no need for any independent audit mr. auditor regulator man person!

=D

I lack the photoshop skills, but uh

The ‘plap plap GET PREGNANT’ meme, but with a therapist shouting:

‘accept what you can’t change’

‘don’t blame yourself for things out of your control’

‘oh, the copay is $125’

‘you missed the last appointment so we charged you for not canceling in advance’

‘im worried you’re not taking our sessions seriously’

sorry psych professionals, there is no ethical therapy under capitalism

Probably not, I’m the one that’s hated and shunned and gaslit by the entire family because of how easily and often I point out that they are both hypocrites and objectively wrong about nearly every single political, economic or sociological idea they have.

But I do appreciate your validation, lol!

Yeah, got two bachelors degree’s simultaneously.

Managed to do it in 4 years + 1 summer quarter.

But uh yeah, I’m basically too knowledgeable for my own good, and the autism doesn’t help with dealing with abusive narcissist family members.

Oh well!

I ghosted them to the point they probably think I am actually dead.

short answer:

Dating Apps/Sites are basically social media sites, they only really work via the network effect, by being so huge that they necessitate significant financial investment.

…

long answer:

A dating app is only broadly, mass appeal successful if it can scale to have a wide selection of people, users, ideally, in as many places as possible.

This requires a large amount of servers.

A large amount of servers requires a large amount of money.

A large amount of money requires investors.

Investors require as much profit as possible.

…

A conventional dating site/app, as we think of the big ones today… its a social media platform.

Just with a different, more constrained feature set, a different UI… but roughly similar levels of network infrastructure and overhead.

…

You could actually make a reasonable argument for running a non profit, or … some kind of collectively owned and operated dating service that is restricted to say a city or small region, or maybe a neighborhood in a larger city.

(Indeed, many of the older ones kind of began this way, pitched more like a … a club that you join and pay membership dues for, thats how they were marketed in the late 90s / early 00s… though these of course were largely actually privately owned, but the marketing angle was that of ‘exclusive community’)

The technicals of exactly how to do that, legally and financially, might end up being impractical though… and if the government is directly involved, well… 10, 20 years ago I would say thats a rather serious privacy problem, but at least in the US right now, I am sure Tinder will sell your info to a data broker who sells it to the FBI if they want to investigate you, so… yeah.

The other obvious problem is that the best dating app is the one you use the least… so… some kind of unconventional payment structure would have to be figured out, to counteract this massive and glaring incentive conflict between app and user.

Maybe high upfront fixed costs to the user, but if you don’t find a good match after a year, 75% gets refunded to you?

Not sure. Could be legal nightmare.

…

Other than that, privately owned and operated dating communities can work fairly well without huge server overhead… if they are precisely targeted at a pretty specific kind of people, be it a religion, or a bdsm community, or a specific ethnicity, who knows… those can at least theoretically work at a larger geographic scale, because that kind of scale doesn’t also massively ramp up user count.

But there’s nothing stopping them from being bought out if they get too big.

…

Bonus!

Job application / recruiting sites are also basically dating apps/sites.

Its just person vs job instead of person vs person.

Broadly, guys on dating sites have been flooding women with match requests for years now, women have been overwhelmed by the volume and believe they can be very picky.

Now replace ‘guys’ with ‘job seekers’, ‘match requests’ with ‘applications’ and ‘women’ with ‘companies’.

Both scenarios result in wasteful amounts of energy going into ‘match-making’, which is horrendously inefficient.

‘Look at all these people that think I’m pretty, who I could have if I wanted to.’’

It’s the mirror from Snow White, but it lies better the more you pay it, the more time you spend staring at it.

Skinner box.

Wire the rat up to stimulate its pleasure receptors if it pushes button.

Rat will push button untill it dies of dehydration.

OkCupid used to actually work rather well at finding compatible people who were actually honest about what they were looking for.

Then it got bigger, got acquired, and the matching model of the whole industry was intentionally modified to be more monetizable, and to keep giving matches that are close, but not close enough to be truely long term compatible.

You aren’t using the app/website anymore if it works and gets you a successful long term match.

You are using the app for a longer time if you keep getting close but just missing the mark.

…

Do people not think their dating app is tracking… how many matches and text exchanges they have?

How much time elapses between you matching, chatting, leaving… and then going back to swiping?

And then multidimensional matrix comparing that to every other definable variable about you?

Including whether or not you say you’re looking for something long term, or serious… but you actually keep cycling through people?

These algos, these things… they know exactly to what extent you lie to yourself and others, and they weaponize that to keep people in a sort of optimal (for the app, not you), constant disappointment loop.

…

Everything digital is now way beyond ‘if its free, you are the product’.

The model is now entirely attention, addiction based, and manipulating your emotions in as close to real time as possible is absolutely integral to all this.

People forget that over a decade ago, Zuckerberg said his dream was to be able to predict with high accuracy what any given Facebook user would post next.

Nearly a decade ago, Netflix CEO or some such stated ‘our primary competitor is sleep’.

People largely do not realize the extent to which these corpo fucks have been running highly precise and targeted manipulation of every aspect of human behavior… all to drive goddamn ad revenue and market share, ie, entrench themselves as institutions the modern world is no longer imaginable without.

As a data analyst with an Econ Degree and specialization in Econometrics:

Data and graphs and tables and lists mean nothing to anyone other than nerds, people need a narrative.

As a person who also has a Poli Sci degree:

Uh, the same, but with much more evidence.

Please, stop teasing, my PiHole can only handle so much!

Removed by mod

I mean yeah, technically there will be some EU member states with different guidelines (due to different id/privacy laws) where maybe yes, a few of them could theoretically maybe be pumped up by a bot.

But uh, for some thing… you’d need a fairly well done bot net to even kind of pull that off for long.

As in like, a new and convincingly distinct bot/ip to burn for each signature, that is actually an ip that makes geo sense for the person/real world address it is spoofing…

As you say: basic ip logging.

If its all coming from… a single, or small number of ips… assuming the EU is at least as competent of a server admin as I am, yeah, that’s gonna look pretty fuckywucky in the logs, probably get noticed within 24 hours max.

And yes, I also seriously doubt there would not be some kind of verification of signees at at least some level, that would be initiated after all the thresholds are passed.

But its wildly innacurate to portray this as if… oh yeah any idiot vibe coder could just drill this up to whatever number after 30 minutes.

That was the way the internet worked back in 2006, or how stupid say Twitter polls are now.

Not the same level of inept incompetence going on with EU government websites.

You don’t get it.

What happens if you try to just brute force guess at a bunch of possible credit card numbers and addresses and names in some kind of online store?

After maybe a couple of tries, 30 seconds or less of that… the system is rejecting your bullshit fake numbers everytime, and after enough, it auto ip bans you, sends an email to the security admin team, and your journey to getting a chat from INTERPOL or the FBI or what not has now officially begun.

This system doesn’t just accept any old random bullshit you give it.

It is not a random slapdash online poll.

Its only going to count up on that total signatures count if the system actually verifies the info you put in as being consistent with an actual, real, specific person in the system.

I again repeat: You are an idiot.

And I use idiot specifically: you are not only drastically misinformed, but determined, and seem to think very dangerous actions… are not dangerous… you think very unfeasible methods… are feasible.

You are an idiot.

No you cannot fill in any number you want.

This is an official EU webportal for formal citizens initiatives petitions.

Like, ok, I guess you could just spam it with a bot/script, and then INTERPOL comes after you for fucking with an official government website, potentially hundreds or thousands of counts of attempted impersonation / identity theft and lying on a government/legal document.

Like sure, go do a DDOS on I dunno, whitehouse.gov, or your US’s state’s unemployment assistance application web portal.

Those are approximately equivalently stupid things to do.

I repeat: You are an idiot.

Early Facebook was cool, and then all our parents joined.

I nuked mine… a decade ago? Around when the Cambridge Analytica story broke.

Only if the person I met decided to basically dox me.

But hey, that’s how trust works in a relationship, eh?

Gotta take that chance.

… I guess this all serves as a neat little illustration of how much I value privacy, haha.

I’d very much prefer someone similar, who isn’t attention/validation seeking on social media all the time, isn’t an ‘influencer’… isn’t really any kind of a public figure.

I’ve had too much drama in my life already thus far, and would ideally like someone who is also rather private and discreet.

If you can figure out who I am based on my Lemmy profile, I’ll be extremely impressed.

Yep, even giving out as much personal info as I have in my comment history.

I do not exist on any other social media sites.

Pretty sure I’ve never uploaded an image to lemmy that has any useful exif data, just download and repost memes.

I would also be impressed if even a mod or admin could geolocate me based on IP to an accuracy of better than a 100 mile radius.

Were I to theoretically find someone who wanted to move beyond messaging on lemmy… we’d be moving to signal.

Not saying its impossible, just saying I’d be impressed.