Paul le fou blog

I’ll skip the intro but a few days ago I came to a new country and wanted to make new acquaintances.

So I created a tinder account, added some photos, bought a platinum subscription, activated a boost function (basically your profile is at the top of other profiles for 30 minutes), and forgot about the app until the evening.

In the evening I opened the app and see 0 likes (0 people have liked me). Now, I’m not the most handsome guy in the world, but 0 likes? That is something that never happened to me before. Then I started to notice that the app, in general, does not work for me correctly. For example, they have a “Sent likes” page (the page that shows people that you liked) and it was always empty no matter how many likes I sent. The profiles that I see every time I open the app are always the same. At this point, I decided to contact the support, can you guess what happened next?

That’s right, they permabanned me for violating their “terms of service”. Now I didn’t have a single match, had 0 likes, and yet I was able to violate their terms of service, pretty impressive isn’t it?

Here are screenshots of our discussion with support:

So what about big tech? The big tech does not mind having a few false positives. They will never care. It’s more or less obvious what happened here. Some algorithms didn’t like my account, support if they really looked into my profile, which I couldn’t be sure as there is (as always with big tech) no reasons or any specific information were provided about the ban, decided that is not worth to deal with it and nobody would care. Of course, they cannot name you the reason as this could be later used against them and their proprietary algorithm. How could they?

In the future, people will be trying to please the algorithm. They will double-check if what they are doing right now could be considered by algorithms as something strange, something that most people wouldn’t do.

It’s fine if it’s tinder, but what are you gonna do when the same will happen with your bank application or a messenger that you use on a daily basis to connect to the people whom you care about?

PS: btw I paid 12 bucks for this shiny tinder platinum, what do you think happened to my money?