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Either/or. The language isn’t important, but I think that excluding people with convictions and/or arrests for violent crimes and domestic violence–or at the very least putting red flag warnings in their profile that they can’t remove–would be helpful. There was a website that purported to do similar, but it was based on first-hand accounts rather than public records, and ended up getting sued into oblivion. But if you’re using public records, then as long as it’s factual, there’s no reasonable claim of defamation.

idk i feel like that phrasing is rather ambiguous, but maybe that's supposed to cover both sides of people? Regardless, something like that pulling public records or making public records would be pretty much cleared from the get go. That would definitely work.

If you’re actually looking for a serious relationship–and not the hookup culture that people are supposedly fleeing–then knowing that a potential partner isn’t legally married is pretty much the low end of the bar. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s something you can use that’s a matter of public record that can exclude people.

yeah, maybe we need more broad relationships status capabilities in general. Regardless dating someone cheating on someone else is not a fun prospect, but i'm also not sure how likely you are to be aware of it either. Depends on the person probably.

Well, if you don’t have very strong and effective security, then you need very deep pockets to pay out the damages when it does get hacked.

and historically that seems to be exactly what happens, a similar thing happened to target recently.

That’s a pretty good idea.

I could see having a integration between things like whatsapp, or signal being a nice alternative, giving you a relatively flexible and vetted set of alternatives to the integrated platform.

I think that, for me, an ideal system would be one that was end-to-end encrypted unless one of the two participants forwarded the message chain to a safety team at the company, and only then would it be visible to the safety team. So no one could just peek at your chats, but as soon as you sent a message to a safety team about harassment, the entire chat up to that point would be visible.

yeah i could see this working, although i would prefer it to be E2E the entire time, with the ability to bring in a third party for review, which would likely close that conversation permanently and then make it clearly visible, otherwise it might be a little sus.

You’d need to have very clear guidelines set up so that it was clear what constituted a “no”, so that there wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation; there are plenty of people (all genders) that will take anything up to a hard ‘no’ as a ‘try harder’, and there are a bunch that will even take that ‘no’ as a ‘try harder’.

a pretty good functional alternative is just killing the message chain entirely. Platform account blocking maybe? There are certainly some options available.

As I said, I think that the problems with apps can all be solved, but I don’t think that they can be solved if you’re trying to monetize the whole thing. It only works if the goal is matching people up rather than making boatloads of cash.

yeah anything with VC money in it from the get go is going to be a heaping pile of shit once > 50% market share is achieved.