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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. |