Saturday, January 18, 2014

Is meetme.com a playground for pedophiles?

Since I ended up with a meetme.com account, I decided to poke around a bit, and see what it was exactly. It was a rather educational journey. I was fairly careful not to monkey with the account too much, well, other than giving the kid a new profile pic.


But that is the extent of my vandalism of the account, and I mostly did that to see if I could get one of his friends to come out of the woodwork, so I could confirm his legitimacy.

Anyway, I did learn a few interesting things about meetme.com

It is populated primarily by 14-20 year olds, 15-17 being the most prevalent ages listed. It is less focused on communication and more focused on building connections.There are three main strategies I observed the accomplish this: Q&A, Blind Date, and Secret Admirers.

Q&A is fairly obvious. Someone asks you a question - any question, and you answer it. The questions I saw ran the gambit from "What is your favorite band?", to "You are cute!"(yeah, I know), to "Can I have your number?"(Danger Will Robinson! Danger!), to "........."(censored due to X-rated content).


Blind Date is a fun little game, which selects 4 random profiles, and asks you multiple choice) questions previously answered by them. Three questions for each "profile", if you get two right, you are considered a match, and and make a connection. If you get it wrong, you don't. Except, you can cheat. meetme.com has its own virtual currency, which you earn for correct answers, and which you can then spend in the blind date game to get extra guesses, or to peek at the answers. Oh, you can also by meetme.com currency with paypal....


Secret admirers is a simpler game, it starts by looking a profile pic's and "admiring" them. The admiree is notified that they have a secret admirer, and is then presented with a group of... I think it was 16 photos. They have five guesses to pick the one who admired them. If they get it right, they get to make a connection. If they get it wrong, they can spend meetme.com currency to get more guesses.

So a smart person with cash to blow through, can pretty much own the place...

Something to think about.


1 comment:

  1. It seems as though these kids are way to young for a site like this

    ReplyDelete