Facebook Dating’s goal of creating meaningful matches through shared interests and activities has its skeptics; among them is Madeleine Fugère, a psychology professor at Eastern Connecticut State University who specializes in romantic relationships and sexual attraction. Fugère emphasizes that although people tend to think shared interests are more likely to lead to attraction, they’re hardly a reliable predictor. “Liking someone depends very much on that in-person ‘clicking,’ which is extremely hard to predict ahead of time,” she told me.

Fugère also questioned whether Facebook Dating could find success among what one would have to assume is its target market—single people in their 20s and 30s. While Facebook is aiming to re-create virtually the experience of meeting someone in person, it’s not clear whether users will want so much information transmitted online between themselves and someone they still have not actually met: Pew research has recently suggested that young people have been leaving Facebook, especially after the revelation that the voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the private Facebook data of millions of Americans ahead of the 2016 election. Perhaps relatedly, Facebook Dating is one of a few recent projects that seem intended to remind people of Facebook’s capabilities as a tool to create and maintain relationships. A recent ad campaign, for example, reminded viewers of Facebook’s origins—as a platform that connected people through shared friends and shared interests and facilitated the sharing of happy or funny moments, rather than a shockingly penetrable database holding a good portion of the global population’s personal data.

While Facebook Dating may certainly be a more curated, more individually tailored alternative to other dating apps, it’s still pretty robotic and random compared with, you know, simply talking to people who seem attractive or interesting out in the real world. Camille Virginia, the author of The Offline Dating Method, for example, understands the appeal of the “Secret Crush” feature—which, the Facebook representative told me, was a direct response to the survey finding that 53 percent of respondents who were currently online dating had a crush on someone they already knew in real life but were too nervous to ask them out. But, Virginia pointed out, if you like the thrill you get from disclosing to a helpful dating robot that you’re into someone and wondering whether that person has also told the dating robot that they’re into you, then you’ll love the thrill of “finally chatting up that cute guy you’ve seen at the dog park recently—or asking that intriguing woman in line behind you at Starbucks which drink she recommends.”

And to some people, a more curated and tailored approach that matches people according to their shared interests isn’t an improvement over the totally uncurated, here’s everyone who’s available to you experience that other apps offer. Ross, a 24-year-old currently living in California (who requested that I use only his first name because he didn’t want to discuss his dating life publicly), used Facebook Dating while he was in the Philippines over the summer and immediately found the logical end point of the benefits of an algorithm that matches people based on shared interests and connections: As soon as he logged on, he matched with an ex-girlfriend he’d previously unfriended.

“I think Facebook connected me with her because of mutual [friends], same place of residence, and pages that we liked,” he told me. He didn’t get in touch, he says. He just ignored her profile, “and had a laugh.”

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