DW Community Catch-up Thread
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@hfantods I think that’s a good response and that’s the best you can do right now. My condolences to him & his family. I’m sure he will be grateful you’re there for him. 🙁
You guys…I have my FIRST EVER STANDUP SHOW this week! The girl who produces it spent this evening at my house helping me with my set. EEEK. Several people are coming to see me and I am so nervous but also excited! I’m going to ask someone to film it and then submit that to the comedy festival here as well, I think. 😀
So over the weekend, I was using Facebook messenger from my phone. By accident, I ended up in a section for filtered messages (i.e., messages from people with whom I am not connected with on Facebook). There were about a dozen or so messages, mostly from guys I don’t know saying hello or using a kissy face emoji, but most were fairly benign. One was from a guy in a city three hours away who saw my profile on Tinder, then found me social media, then decided it was a good idea to send me a lengthy message telling me about himself and asking if I’m open to dating him. The last sentence of his message amounted to, “I hope it’s cool I contacted you on here!” No, sir, that is NOT cool. It was creepy and felt invasive. The message is over a year old, but I’m debating responding because I kinda wanna put him in his place. But no good will come of that, I’m sure.
In other, unrelated news – if anyone remembers about six months ago I started a thread on DW about a breast lump my PCP had found. I had to go in for my first-ever mammogram about 10 years early, as well as an ultrasound, and found out I have many (almost certainly benign) tumors. I’m now in a two-year monitoring phase and had my follow-up this morning. Nothing has changed, and no biopsies are needed, which is a huge sigh of relief! They said if I get the all-clear at my next follow-up in six months, I can go a full year until the next follow up.
So, no, definitely don’t contact him.
I’m curious about this though. How easy is it to see a Tinder profile and then figure out who the person is? I know on the websites, if you used pictures that were elsewhere on the web, someone could do a google image reverse-search and find you that way if they felt like it, but how safe is your identity on Tinder?
I always found it quite easy to find guys on Facebook. On Tinder you see their first name, which is pulled from their Facebook profile, their age, and by default it shows your job title/where you work unless you choose remove that option when setting up your profile (maybe they got rid of that, I haven’t been on in a year).
So I would just search Name + City and they would be fairly simple to find.
Another thing is, Facebook is quite creepy in terms of who they suggest you should be friends with in the People You May Know widget. All of these apps connect and use your data in the background, so they find all kinds of links and connections based on your activity. So I would often see guys from Tinder pop up in People You May Know.
I can find most people from Tinder without much hassle. Tinder usually lists distance (so you’d know the city they live in), university, and company. There are brief bios wherein people can volunteer whatever information they want. Tinder used to require you include your work info on there. It’s not longer required, and mine is no longer on display. (I can’t remember when this changed, so I’m not sure if this guy had access to that information.) With name, college, and work info, it can be pretty easy to find people. I find guys on social media if I’m able to before dates — usually LinkedIn is the easiest place to find them with the info that’s available — but I do it as a quick safety check before meeting rather than to use an alternate platform to get their attention.
All my Tinder profile lists is my very common first name and very large university. There’s a short “About Me” with no identifying details. My photos aren’t used on other social media profiles. I’m not too concerned about safety, to be honest. Even with this message, which WAS weird to receive, the guy strikes me as sad/desperate/lonely rather than anyone legitimately dangerous.
Facebook scans the photos on your phone too.
Back when I was dating Pilot Jones, he kept telling me that he wasn’t on Facebook, that he had just set up a dummy profile so that he could try out Tinder (you have to have an FB account for Tinder, unless that has changed in the last year).
I had tried numerous times to find him online and couldn’t find anything.
Then one day he sends me a selfie and I thought he looked really cute, so I saved the photo to my phone. A few hours later, his profile shows up in People You May Know on Facebook with that same selfie as his profile pic.
Oh and also with Tinder you have the option to connect your Instagram so people can look at your Feed. So when I did that I had a lot of guys requesting to follow me. I also used it to check out a lot of guys.
Tinder isn’t meant to be an anonymous app. It’s meant to be a social platform, so all these features are meant to try and get people to connect.
I had a guy who I went on one date with from OKCupid (and who I had very purposefully NOT given my phone number) find and message me on Facebook…twice.
The first time I ignored it, because I have just literally never gotten a good response from telling a guy I wasn’t interested in that way, they ALWAYS argue with me and get belligerent, but then the second time, like 2 months later, I responded and told him I wasn’t interested. (He lived a few states away and wanted to be a “pen pal”.) Thankfully he took it relatively graciously.
I only ever “ghost” or go silent after the first date. If we’ve been on more than one I always answer. I do feel guilty about that sometimes and wonder if it’s dating karma that’s getting me, but it’s Pavlovian because every single time I’ve tried to let a guy down easy after the first date – or even if we haven’t gone out at all!!! – they respond very, very poorly. Sometimes it’s scary. So to me, it’s just not worth it.
@MissDre How big is your city? I usually can’t find Tinder guys on Facebook easily, and have never noticed any suggested to me by Facebook. I’m in a large U.S. city, and most guys seem to be named, like, Matt or Dan. I’ll usually find them on LinkedIn to get a last name, then can find them on Facebook once I have a first + last name combo.
Oh, also, if someone has register a phone number to their Facebook account, you can type in someone’s number and find them that way. I recently found a date this way. I’m glad I never gave FB my phone number.
That would scare me, that a guy could figure out my name, place of work, and address before I’ve met him and figured out if I want to give him that info. Just because he’s on Facebook and maybe marginally connected to someone I know, doesn’t mean he’s someone I want to know. Creepy.
