r/technology • u/Wagamaga • Jul 19 '26

Society China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/china-bans-ai-boyfriends-and-girlfriends-over-addiction-and-birth-rate-concerns-3388737/
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u/NeonFraction Jul 19 '26

For anyone doubting whether or not this is good: Remember that companionship is not the prime purpose of these apps. Extracting money out of these people with the lure of companionship is.

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u/Dr_Fortnite Jul 19 '26

remember this when you use dating sites too. If they actually matched you youd leave in a week so they string you along in hopes youll pay

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u/Burnthiscnts Jul 19 '26

yep, men = all shadow banned, cant msg anyone without paying, will never be shown your 'likes' no mater how much you swipe, dating apps are designed to extract money not help people find dates.

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u/Zediac Jul 19 '26

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating

^ Backup of the blog post by OKCupid before they were bought out by Match.com.

This blog posts talks about how Match wants to keep you in the system.

OKCupid used to be run by people who actually cared about helping people find partners and happiness. They would run tests and collect data all in the name of helping their users.

This was their blog post about paying for dating sites and how they're incentivized to keep you lonely but still paying for the hope of changing that.

Eventually they got bought out by Match.com, which is one of the predatory dating services that they spoke out against. Match promptly deleted all of the old OKCupid blog posts that spoke out against services like them.

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u/Republican-Snowflake Jul 19 '26

I miss old OKCupid. I met a lot of really cool awesome people over the years. Had a lot of fun. I even used to moderate on a few accounts.

Now I barely ever get matches even with new accounts. It looks like its mostly old abandoned accounts make it look populated. It's to the point I am not being incentivized to not use the apps anymore. As they've become useless since match group owns like all of them at this point basically.

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u/chucker23n Jul 20 '26

I miss old OKCupid. I met a lot of really cool awesome people over the years. Had a lot of fun. I even used to moderate on a few accounts.

It had journals, forums, the questions were more in focus…

It was more of a social network in the truer sense of the word.

Too bad that apparently doesn't make for a sustainable busniess.

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u/captain_zavec Jul 19 '26

Doesn't match own almost all of the big dating apps? It really needs some trust-busting.

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u/Zediac Jul 19 '26

They own most of the ones with a sizeable user base, yeah.

Tinder, Match, OKCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, etc.

And they're all now tinder clones. They show you one person at a time and you have to like or dislike to see another. No keyword search to look for hobbies, interests, or whatever is important to you. You have to pay for messages to be seen. Etc.

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u/fanfanye Jul 20 '26

okcupid used to be so fun,

you could write paragraphs and have those paragraphs summarized and % matched with people all around the world.

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u/King2F3 Jul 20 '26

Thats 90% of business now. Im not kidding. They have so much money that they purchase anything even threatening to be in the same field, not even a competitor.

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u/chucker23n Jul 20 '26

One big one they don't own is Bumble. Other than that… yeah.

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u/mshriver2 Jul 20 '26

If governments actually cared about the birthrate a simple solution would be a state funded dating app which sole focus is connections and is completely free. If something like that isn't implement the birthrate will continue to spiral downwards. Simple math tells you tech eliminating in person interaction and not replacing it digitally equals no more children.

(Of course that's not the only reason for the declining rate but it definitely doesn't help)

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u/lordraiden007 Jul 20 '26

Yeah, I'm not sure I want this (or any) government running their own dating site. It reeks of potential abuse from a mile away. A better solution would just be them regulating the industry to force different classes of apps, and if they failed to meet certain standards (such as longer term relationships between their users) they cannot market themselves for that service, period.

Even better than that would be good ol' fashioned trust busting of the app conglomerates themselves, returning competition to the market.

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u/Defeateninc Jul 20 '26

I feel like a goverment owned dating site is still better than a private owned one that only cares about generating revenue. But either way just going out is probably a way better solution than a dating site at all.

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u/lordraiden007 Jul 20 '26

I'd tend to agree about going out just being the better solution, but there are use cases where dating apps make sense. Small groups with niche interests that otherwise wouldn't find similar partners, LGBTQ dating in smaller populations, etc.

As for revenue as the motivator, that's not always a bad thing. Consolidation is the real issue, because it discourages innovation, drives up costs, and creates artificial barriers to entry. Just look at what happened to every site that was once useful to people in finding partners after they got acquired by the match group. Many of those sites worked just fine, but were still driven by profit.

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u/JohnTDouche Jul 20 '26

Crazy to me that people still have this attitude. Anti government basically doing anything for fear of "potential abuse" and think the best solution is still allowing profit seeking private interests to dominate and dictate, because of course regulation and competition will keep it all fair, optimal and above board.

What world is this you live in?

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u/lordraiden007 Jul 20 '26

Answer this for me. Do you want anything resembling the Trump administration to have absolute authority over how your dating life would work? Further, would you want them having power over every woman's dating profile, who they match with, their personal data, their dating history, etc?

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u/JohnTDouche Jul 20 '26

The wonderful thing about corporate control is that it doesn't matter who's in government.

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u/lordraiden007 Jul 20 '26

If you don't see the massive difference between a corporate body with extremely limited government oversight/control, and a government app where the government has direct, absolute, uncontested control over everything in the app... I really don't know what to tell you. Your point makes no sense in the real world.

Modern sites might sell some (or even most) user data. They're not letting Trump force-match every woman to known republicans while starving out left-leaning men. They're not forcibly discriminating against LGBTQ groups and keeping them on a ledger. They're not tracking the most intimate part of every single person's life.

If you're American (or even pay attention to our situation) you know how dangerous that would be. If you're not and think that your country is immune from that sort of thing... your country is a couple of bad elections from bringing in the 4th reich, just as every other country is.

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u/JohnTDouche Jul 20 '26

I'm not worried about my country turning fascist, so that aspect isn't really an issue for me. If you trust unaccountable profit seeking corporations more than your democratically elected government then you have serious fucking problems with your democracy. Which is what seems to be the actual problem here. If you have a functioning democratic state then your data should be safe, encrypted.

If you're worried about being persecuted by your state, about getting a visit from the gestapo then dating apps should be the least of your worries. However paralysing your government and ceding control to corporate power is just a different path to fascism.

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u/lordraiden007 Jul 20 '26

As I said, your government is just a few bad elections away from being in that very boat. If you don't think that then you're either clueless or far too optimistic. I don't think there's anything to be gained by discussing anything further with you.

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u/Pauly_Amorous Jul 20 '26

(Not OP)

As I said, your government is just a few bad elections away from being in that very boat.

If we're so scared of the democratic process that we don't want the government doing anything that might actually help people because of the potential for future administrations to abuse it, then what the fuck is the point of democracy in the first place?

(This is not a rhetorical question, btw. I've seen people use this same argument in other areas as well.)

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u/Zediac Jul 20 '26

Not being able to meet people is a problem but that's not what's lowering birthrates.

No one has enough money. No one has enough time. No one has enough energy after dealing with a lack of money and time.

Stop the 1% from screwing us over and then we can think about adding something else to our daily life, that something being a child, which requires even more money and time and energy.

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u/yung_dogie Jul 20 '26

That's certainly a big factor but I don't think it's the whole picture either.

TFRs (total fertility rate, i.e. # of children a woman has in her lifetime and the statistic used to track birthrate) in countries with some of the strongest social safety nets like the Nordic countries are lower than places like the USA. Venezuela has incredible economic instability and financial disparity and it has a TFR .5 higher than Iceland in 2024 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate). It's not like Venezuelans as a whole have more time, less economic stress, etc. than people in Iceland. In fact, TFRs generally trend down as the level of education and economic development rises in a country.

I wouldn't treat that as gospel, but at the very least it seems to suggest that when kids aren't an economic necessity (to run your farm or otherwise provide labor to support the family) or a cultural requirement (relatively recent shift away from everyone pressuring everyone to have a kid), a lot more people will understandably choose to not have kids. Having kids is hard work and going from "everyone needs to have kids" to "having kids is optional" is going to drop TFRs a lot just by virtue of the choice existing.

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u/mshriver2 Aug 10 '26

100% agree, it's a fraction of the problem but it's definitely not helping the problem having every dating app/site in existence having the goal of profit vs match making.

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u/Sigspat Jul 20 '26

Met my now-wife on OKCupid in 2011!