[kresten]

Well duh.

OKCupid specifically requires your real name which is beyond stupid for a dating site.

Anyone whose done online dating knows about stalkers and the need to hide your identity but these guys want real names.

As for Grindr we’ll isnt that owned by China? What better place to entrust your most compromising personal information, and what better long term investment if you want compromising information that one day in the distant future might be to your advantage.

[Avshalom]

Before (and for some amount of time after) they made the Real Name policy their safety tips page specifically said Guard your identity. Don’t share your real name https://web.archive.org/web/20160928225651/https://www.okcup...

[LannisterDebt]

They also removed a blog titled "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" when they were acquired by Match.com (a paid dating site) [0].

[0] https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

[ryanmercer]

Even before requiring your real name, OkCupid was pretty blah for some people, a friend of mine had a woman message him, before he could reply, with a few things in his profile she was able to identify him and then went full psycho. Ultimately she made multiple posts on Cheaterville.com and made claims he gave her STDs etc, which cost him an acting job when the casting people googled him and BAM it was one of the first things to pop up. The messages she sent were just nuts, I documented them here: https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2012/1/20/a-troll-a...

And then more than a month later she started with more Cheaterville posts, this time posted as his full name https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2012/3/15/aimeexx1-...

Now, I wonder if perhaps staff/owners of Cheaterville weren't using dating sites to attempt to find people to blackmail. IIRC the site would remove any posts about you for a hefty fee.

I was an early adopter of OkCupid, in fact long before they were acquired I was actually a volunteer moderator. It was interest in the early days because you could tag stuff "I like [[Metallica]], I read a lot of [[science fiction]], and I like to eat [[pizza]] before going to [[SCA]] fighter practice" and you could find people with similar interests that way, which was cool. I actually met some really cool women and am still friends with a couple of them. But then it started going downhill pretty quickly once they were purchased by the Match.com folks. Lots of dumb changes, removal of long-standing features, drastic increase in spam messages from people hundreds (or thousands) of miles away, requiring real names etc.

Didn't surprise me.

Every single time I'd pay for a Match.com account (over multiple years, as recently as last year), within a day of my subscription someone would message me. I'd always, like a sucker, pay again and reply and nothing... or they'd reply once or twice with very basic replies and stop. Now, I'm not saying they're scamming users to get them to pay for another month but... sure feels like it.

I anecdotally noticed a massive increase in spam/fake accounts when the same company bought Tinder too.

[icedchai]

Is this actually a problem? Many people use a fake name that looks real. The same is true on Facebook and other services that "require" a real name.

[lifeisstillgood]

This sounds to me more like "better police involvement around the crime of stalking" than "okcupid are bad"

I can see why having "screen names" is good and why having "Jenny S from NYC" beats "picture of Jennifer Smith, 32 acadia Avenue Queens" on the site profile but if it's crime we worry about, it's police we need.

I would be interested in knowing if I am deaf to a much larger problem than I am aware of.

[arijun]

“I can see why having a lock is better than leaving your door open, but if it’s robberies we worry about, it’s police we need.”

Yeah I still would be upset if my landlord didn’t fix the lock on my door.

[pessimizer]

If the person who kills you is caught and prosecuted, it's almost like you're not even dead.

[tomp]

Isn't it better to prevent undesirable behaviour in the first place rather than place additional burden on the police (for a trivial mostly non-dangerous behaviour)?

Also, is stalking actually a crime now? When does "wanting to talk to someone" become a crime? Are recruiters stalking me on LinkedIn? What if they keep sending me emails and I keep not replying?

I think the bar for putting people in jail should be much higher than that.

[Spacemolte]

Eh, we are not really talking about facebook "stalking" with someone looking at your facebook profile, but about people continually harassing you and trying to contact you through all sorts of means.

I think the bar for putting people in jail for the above is just right, might even be too low.

[JohnFen]

> Also, is stalking actually a crime now?

Stalking has a crime in all of the US states for 15 years, and has been a crime in most for longer than that.

If you are repeatedly contacting or surveilling someone, despite being told to stop, and are making them feel unsafe or intimidated, then you are probably violating the laws against stalking.