[InitialLastName]

A long time ago, when I lived within dating distance of the default coordinate (maybe City Hall?) of a global-destination city, a dating site I used introduced a feature that let users set their locations manually. Within hours of rollout, the site was completely unusable due to being full of people from around the world saying "I wonder what the dating scene in $city is like?".

[rchaud]

That is still the case on some big apps like OKCupid. There are green-card hunters from poor countries that fill up the swipe queue and all have the same giveaway line:

"I'm not based in [your city], I just change the location to talk to new people". It's frequent enough that I stopped using the app altogether. OKC was already going downhill well before this.

[NaturalPhallacy]

OKC died when match bought it and they took down their blog post about why you should never pay for a dating app.

[vhanda]

Surprisingly, I don't mind that at all.

It takes a few seconds and they are really upfront about it. I can imagine OkCupid charging for such a filtering feature, but I've never paid for it just didn't seem "worth it". Especially since Match.com owns it, and I'm not really helping the underdog.

( I understand that I might not have been making a sensible economical decision, as I have many examples of not doing that in the past )

[rchaud]

How is that upfront? You want to chat with someone new, go on Omegle. This is just spam and it's directly against most TOS to spoof your location.