It no longer respects geographical preferences. Here in Estonia, if you go on OkCupid from Tallinn, you see about 30 Finnish people from Helsinki (across the sea, 80 km away) before you encounter a local (you also get 30 likes from Central Africa and South-East Asia).

It also has the card stack system now.

The question system remains and remains helpful, just the rest is broken.

A more detailed description:

Provided a card stack system, the dynamic balance of liking vs. skipping tends to stabilize into a state where men like everyone reasonably cute (“to get more chances”). This is also caused by their inability search for a conversation partner in a rational manner, because it’s a card stack system. Often enough, all the information you have is a photo, age and city.

This causes women to experience a saturation of likes: everyone likes them. This causes them to be extremely picky about who they like back.

The result: unbalance. Dating sites view women as a “resource” to attract men, and men as customers to be scammed out of money to actually show their profile to someone, once in a while.

Society is borked in many ways, and dating sites often reinforce this with their policies.

The Wikipedia article about online dating tells that typical (I assume: card stack, like / dislike) dating sites cause different genders to adopt different strategies:

Men liked a large proportion of the profiles they viewed, but received returning likes only 0.6% of the time; women were much more selective but received matches 10% of the time. Men received matches at a much slower rate than women. Once they received a match, women were far more likely than men to send a message, 21% compared to 7%, but they took more time before doing so.

By sending out questionnaires to frequent Tinder users, the researchers discovered that the reason why men tended to like a large proportion of the women they saw was to increase their chances of getting a match. This led to a feedback loop in which men liked more and more of the profiles they saw while women could afford to be even more selective in liking profiles because of a greater probability of a match.[15]

P.S.

My biggest peeve is that the monopolist Match Group (runs Tinder, bought and ruined OkCupid, etc) and its nearest competitor Bumble have both adopted a card stack system that makes searching impossible. They also won’t display any statistics to a user about the number of people who saw their profile - keeping their customer in perfect darkness.

In most fields of life, a customer would not be satisfied with this kind of shit. A company advertising their product would demand instant feedback about the number and profile of people who viewed their ad, where they came from, how long they browsed, etc.

Basically, we are all getting scammed by a few monopolists, who are actively ruining people’s ability to find partners. I would support a politician who promises to let the best university in the country to build a non-profit dating site.

It was the lights test.

In the fog test, it plowed through the mannequin kid (and in real life, they’ve been observed plowing through deer).

Regarding e-mail: “riseup.net” requires that a long-time user vouch for a new user and invite them. If the new user quickly turns into a complaint magnet (there’s a coming-of-age period after which their actions are considered their own), both the user and the inviter will be held responsible (kicked off the service). I think (hope) they aren’t so strict with VPN, but they have limited people and could not administer a mess made by a big bunch of people.

Needless to say, none of my (anarchist) comrades have ever been kicked off RiseUp, but they don’t send spam or threats, they just send their cat pictures encrypted with GPG, causing the authorities endless work. :)

Just like every reasonable service, RiseUp has a few technical mechanisms to ensure they aren’t compromised (disk and inbox encryption, etc) but obviously those can’t help against a dedicated and well-resourced adversary.

So, whatever e-mail server you use - use PGP / GPG. :) Then the adversary must compromise your device. If you are hardcore, encrypt and sign on an offline device. Then the adversary must breach the air gap.

(I used to sign releases for some anonymity-related project years ago. Those were the times when I seriously took measures because others depended on me. Currently, not so much.)

P.S. As for the lack of resources at RiseUp: this can be alleviated by donating to them. Which reminds me, I should set up a small regular donation to their representative organization in the EU.