Welcome to ‘I Made This,’ a special edition of it’s steffi, where I show you how I wrote a story, and the many stories behind it.
For four months, I tried to track down the source of prominent STI dating app Positive Singles that many claimed to be a scam. This is that story.
It all started in April, when sex and culture critic Ella Dawson tweeted. “Hey tech writers,” she wrote. “There's a story to be told about Positive Singles and how it financially exploits a vulnerable population (people with stigmatized STIs) by providing a service that preys on their insecurities.”
There’s an entire ecosystem of highly niche dating sites that is shrouded away from the mainstream. Apps like Oromoon that match you with people based on astrology, community-based sites like KannadaMatrimony and MuslimMatch, FarmersOnly that lets you meet up with available cowboys near your property. There’s also ones that no offense, seem like breeding grounds for dudes with weird fetishes: InterracialMatch, Large Friends, Older Women Dating.
Positive Singles is the preeminent dating site and app for anyone with herpes and other major STIs, including chlamydia, HPV, gonorrhea and HIV, among others. It has over 2.3 million users, and is also rife with bad reviews about anything from randomly banning accounts, to not offering a free messaging model (it’s $35 per month), and many also saying the model is built on perpetuating stigma.
The first thing was figuring out how much of a scam it was. In daily life, I toss around hyperbole all the time: this queue is evil. The BeReal you took of me is hateful. That Benihana has got bad vibes. But as a reporter (and just like, in life), you quickly learn that the fabric of our society is basically a scam. So you need to be specific. Was it a scam in a specific way, or a scam in its inherent nature of being a for-profit company?
Here are some of the common claims I gathered: you could not have a conversation with someone without paying for a premium membership. Men would often send users unsolicited dick pics. People were often randomly banned, but creeps still continued. There were a lot of bot and ghost and scammer accounts. Some said they got spammed with notifications about potential matches on a free account which inconspicuously disappeared when you paid.
I checked in with Dawson first, since she was the expert. She also sent me several messages in which Positive Singles solicited ambassadorship from her, from all these different individual Gmail accounts over the course of seven years.
In my opinion, saying you work with a company from a personal Gmail account is weird. How the fuck do you follow up with accountability if something goes wrong? What if you get double-charged on your account? You just have to keep guessing general Gmails to get in contact with someone? For a company that was sued in 2014 for selling consumer data, it sure seems they didn’t work on improving transparency. Not funny ha ha…funny weird.
It’s a tricky topic. Dating apps, even without a niche focus, can already be pretty gross and predatory, and use all sorts of marketing tactics in order to engage our desire for connection and love. There are so many stories of women being targeted and assaulted from dating apps, and many also offer very expensive packages that claim to better your chances at meeting someone.
Getting a slew of interviews was the top priority, but it was difficult. People were hesitant to talk about their diagnoses and their experience on Positive Singles. Which makes sense, right? Talking about your STI with a reporter, putting your name out there, is unnerving. It was very slow-going. I did an interview with a previous user, then interviewed three more. I was highly aware of the fact that I was coming into this story with no expertise at all, which meant I’d have to talk to a lot of people to learn as much as I could from a ground-floor vantage point. So most of the interviews would take an hour, and sometimes more.
These interviews were really tough, and it will never not be difficult, this dance of knowing when to push and when to back off. Everyone’s boundaries are different. A lot of dating coverage that I do is often intertwined with someone’s memories of assault, harassment, misogyny, body dysmorphia, insecurity, intimacy. I did my best to make everyone feel comfortable when talking with me — I mean, this is such a personal topic and it can suck to relive it to a random stranger that’s taking notes. Hi, how are you? Tell me about this experience you said was emotionally fucked up? So I just had to find the right person who was willing to discuss the details of their story.
Writing wise, these pieces are stressful because they’re not like, one-off news of the day type pieces. They look at a larger phenomenon and try to introduce something to an unknowing mainstream audience. I also wanted to be able to tell these stories in an empathetic way, to show why it matters. I framed and re-framed it and re-framed it again. I was re-wrote this piece like, three times. The spookiest thing is getting no notes at all, and one lone comment that’s like “call me so we can talk it over.” That’s when you know your editor hated it. I got one of those notes. And then a lot of notes. And then only a couple notes. Yeah, I got so fucking sick of writing this piece. But every version included a new reported detail that made it better.
I also tried to sign up for the platform myself, to see the interface, and got banned automatically. The website asked for my driver’s license in order to appeal. I have no idea if that’s the norm for all dating apps, but I still think that’s weird! Imaging you’re just trying to have sex and then you get asked for ID.
While that was going on, I also needed to contact someone at the company for a statement. I couldn’t pin down any public-facing figure. Remember InterracialMatch, Large Friends, and Older Women Dating? They are all owned by one company, Successful Match — which also owns Positive Singles.
The site for Successful Match is, speaking frankly, a disaster. I don’t know where they spend their money from their users, but it’s definitely not in their UX department. All of the brands Successful Match owned were focused on niche dating. People seeking other millionaires, people with herpes, senior citizens who wanted to fuck. Successful Match also owns the second-biggest herpes dating app, Meet People With Herpes. It all gave me kind of Chewing Gum plot vibes. Specifically that arc where Tracey is handing out flyers for the Jehovah’s Witness and meets that one guy who wants to have sex with her because she’s Black.
I called the phone listed on their website. Dead. I called another number that I found related to them. Dead.
One random article cited the name of a supposed CEO, but when I checked that person’s LinkedIn, their bio said they were a customer support-type. I mean, I guess there are those companies, where one guy is the entire C-suite and marketing department and janitor too. But this person had an email listed in their LinkedIn (another random personal Gmail), so I sent a message to it anyway. Wouldn’t you know it? It was dead! But when I Googled that email, a different address came up in one of the search results, so I sent the same message to the new email. After following up three times, that one worked.
The spokesperson sent over a bunch of positive press clippings and happy reviews from customers. Fair enough; some had also told me they’d had good experiences on the app. I asked if they were the CEO. They said they were a project supervisor, not the CEO. I asked if they could tell me if those disparate Gmail accounts were, in fact, employees.
“We cannot expose any information about our affiliate partners,” they wrote. “We will not check if they are our affiliate partners or not. Please understand.”
My requests for a phone interview were ignored. No one from those disparate email addresses responded to my requests for interviews.
Most of those I interviewed joined Positive Singles when they were newly-diagnosed. A lot of people I spoke to said they often felt, in the beginning of living with herpes, that their lives were over, that they’d never be able to date a non-status person. Herpes is ridiculously common — like, half of US adults have gotten oral herpes, and 16 percent have been diagnosed with genital herpes — so why is there such a market for herpes-specific dating app, two major players owned by one corporation, that don’t let you talk to another person for free?
That’s the center of the weirdness of STI dating apps, I think. There is simply no clarity from these businesses claiming to help an ostracized group of people, who are already combatting societal judgment and misinformation. Dating in the digital age is already preloaded with dangers of violence, scam, companies taking financial advantage of people who feel insecure or down on their luck. And then STIs are stigmatized from mainstream culture, particularly in the world of dating.
Perhaps it’s not a groundbreaking business model, taking advantage of downtrodden populations for profit and implementing Good Samaritan marketing along the way (see: Weight Watchers, those Amazon worker ads, the entire beauty industry), but it’s definitely an internet niche that is rarely examined. It’s not even like everyone I talked to had a bad experience. One even met their life partner on Positive Singles. But as our societal prejudices remain the same, and for-profit internet continues to tighten its chokehold on our lives, these intersections and their ethical impacts need to be put on the hot seat.
You can read my piece on Positive Singles here.