Tagged Dating Site Reviews
The e-mail came across my screen innocently enough. A former boss, Dinda, whom I hadn't heard from in some time, was sending me pictures through some social-networking outlet called 'Tagged.' Interesting. Did Dinda and I snap a photo together back in the day? I didn't think so, but I often forget if I've washed my hair two minutes after rinsing the shampoo. How could I be sure she wasn't sending me a poignant shot from four years ago? Plus, who doesn't like looking at their younger, better-looking selves?
Or maybe Dinda wanted to update me on her family. Who knows? In any case, I was intrigued. The message said that 'Dinda sent you photos on Tagged.' Below that message was a link. Under the link it said, 'Click Yes if you want to see Dinda's photos, otherwise click No. But you have to click!' Funny, there were no 'Yes' or 'No' tabs in the e-mail. Below that message it said, 'Please respond or Dinda may think you said no :(' The sad face is a strong guilt trip.
(See the five websites to avoid.)Tagged is a social discovery site that can be used to make new friends or get a date. Founded in 2004, the brand has consistently grown, and it now boasts of more than 300 million users around the world. Let’s see our complete review. How Does Tagged Work, Actually? At first glance, Tagged is a bit more complicated than the average dating platform. However, our Tagged review will help shed some light on the way the service functions. With many intriguing features such as original games and virtual cash, you can quickly get immersed in the fun universe of Tagged, meet new friends, or even find a love match. Tagged has to be the worst site ever. Tagged has to be the worst site ever. And it ALLOWS and turns a blind eye,to the fact that most of the members are fake, they are either scammers or sex cam workers. The report button makes no difference and they NEVER reply to support tickets. How this company is allowed to operate amazes me.
So I clicked on the link — a disastrous decision. I'm not going to retrace the exact steps, because to do that, I would have to click on that link again, and I'm deathly afraid of it. Basically, as I remember, I registered for the site through a Windows Live hotmail address, and very early on in the process it asked if I would like to send along a similar message to every contact in my account. Now, why would any sane person want to invite every person in their contact list to look at photos they hadn't even uploaded? Contact lists are diverse — friends, family, professional acquaintances, people you haven't spoken to in five years. I have 227 people in there, some who probably don't know who I am. No need to shoot them beach pics.
(See '10 Social Networking Apps.')I thought I declined that absurd request, but somewhere along the line I remember clicking Yes, thinking it was part of the registration process. At no time did I intentionally click on anything that gave Tagged the right to spam my contacts. Still, unbeknownst to me, a message with the subject line 'Sean sent you photos on Tagged :)' went out to every single address on my list. Again, I never put photos on Tagged. And I don't have a 'smiley-face'-style relationship with most of my old professors.
Meanwhile, in my quest to see Dinda's pictures, the site asked me to upload a headshot. Sure, no biggie. Then it started asking for my cell-phone number and making all these ridiculous offers for sweepstakes and other stuff no one should want. I'd skip an offer; another would come up. It was all junk. That's when I realized this was shady. I finally got to Dinda's page — no pictures at all.
I shut it down, but it was too late. The calls, text messages and e-mails came pouring in. 'Did you send pictures?' 'What is this Tagged stuff?' 'Thanks for the headshot, jackass.' I had to send out a bunch of apologies and explain what the heck was going on. I didn't want to disturb anyone else's afternoon, but I probably did. I was had, 100%.
(See 'The Downside of Friends: Facebook's Hacking Problem.')I'm not alone. Over the next few days, I heard a dozen or so complaints from people that Tagged had spammed their entire contact list. One quick sweep of the blogosphere reveals a multitude of Tagged victims, dating back to 2007. But the scam is red-hot now. 'Don't Get Tagged!' one blogger warned on June 6. 'Spread the word: Tagged stinks!' shouted a Facebook friend the same day. The Better Business Bureau's grade for Tagged: a big fat F. Yes, I blame myself for being gullible. But the site was confusing and dishonest. And it's nice to know I'm not the only sucker out there.
So what is Tagged? The company calls itself a 'premier social-networking destination focused on 'Social Discovery,' ' whatever that means. It claims to have 70 million registered users worldwide, though I'd imagine some of them are accidental like me. Believe it or not, Tagged is the third largest social network in the U.S., with over 70 million monthly visits, according to comScore. Impressive — but again, I'd like to know how many of those visits were intentional, not the result of spam.
(See the top 50 websites.)Two Harvard math majors, Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, co-founded Tagged in 2004. I called them up, wanting to know why they're using Harvard math degrees to annoy the piss out of people. Tseng, the CEO, was unavailable, but Schleier-Smith, the chief technology officer, agreed to talk, but only over e-mail. 'We did not intend to cause people to invite contacts by accident,' Schleier-Smith wrote. 'The recent backlash hurts, and we want to ensure our continued growth helps people rather than creating problems for them.'
So what exactly happened? 'Recently, we integrated the 'Tags' photo-sharing feature with the registration path,' Schleier-Smith wrote. 'Advertising photo-sharing may be causing some users to rush through the path, and in some cases inviting all of their contacts inadvertently. The pop-up warning that prevented accidental invitations in the past is not sufficient anymore.'
Tagged Dating Service
Is Tagged A Dating Site
Techie language aside, that explanation is problematic. The pop-up window I saw asked, 'Are you sure you want to invite all your contacts?' That warning was perfectly understandable to me, and likely to 95% of the people who got tricked. The answer is no. The 'fix' is that the new window asks, 'Do you really want to send e-mail invites with these photos to all ___ of your contacts,' with the blank representing the number of addresses on your list. Sure, it's clearer, but it wasn't the warning that caused confusion. What's irritating is that despite the warning, the message still went out to all those people. (One co-worker tells me she avoided the mass-spam mess by deselecting all of her contacts, but that's an extra step that most innocent visitors to the site will not think to take.)
Schleier-Smith insists Tagged is trying to control the damage. 'At the moment, all invitation e-mails are stopped while we change the product to prevent confusion,' he says. If the mix-up was really a mistake, give Tagged credit for apologizing. But I've been burned, so here's my advice: If you get any kind of message from Tagged, delete it. Avoid the site altogether. If you want 'social discovery,' sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace work perfectly fine.
(See 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business.)And whatever you do, stay away from the headshots.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.See the Cartoons of the Week.Over the past two years, one of the fastest growing social networks used for dating and hookups has been Tagged.com. Originally intended as a social network for teenagers, it has evolved into a quasi-dating platform. Complaints about its performance and spamming are numerous, but so too are the voices praising it.
The environment on Tagged is definitely lively. However, is it for everybody? Can you really find compatible partners for long-term relationships? How about for hookups? Is it safe? Is it reliable?
All of these questions and more are answered in the following Tagged.com review.
Tagged.com Review Results
- Popularity - 78
- Value - 54
- Features - 42
- Quality of Members - 36
- Safety - 39
- Customer Satisfaction - 35
Final Word on Tagged.com
We found Tagged to be unwieldy, unorganized, and just a little bit creepy. Trying to be both a social network and a dating platform — at least the way Tagged is doing it — doesn't seem to be working. Paying for a VIP membership for such a site seems ludicrous to us.
We would rate Tagged as POOR.
If you want to have a good online dating experience, it's probably better to stick to sites that focus solely on that service.
— Pros and Cons —
Pros
- Available for both mobile and desktop
- Super fast registration
- In operation since 2004
Cons
- Half of the profiles displayed are from members thousands of miles away
- VIP membership required for full functionality
- Presence of members under the age of 18
When you first visit Tagged.com you might be confused or overwhelmed by its appearance. It may be helpful to understand Tagged better if you knew a little bit about its past. Originally launched in 2004, it was intended for users under the age of 18. Quite literally Tagged was targeting social interactions between junior and senior high schoolers. In 2006, Tagged started allowing everybody to join, regardless of age. Today, the membership demographics of the site indicate that over 60 percent of users are between the ages of 30 and 49. Obviously, it is no longer a teen site. However, many of the original features aimed at a younger audience persist. It is as if Tagged is trying to be both a teen social network and a dating discovery app for adults. An incongruent mixture if ever we saw one.
An example of this is the social network type of aesthetic used on the site. To us, it is akin to a hybrid between Facebook and what Friendster looked like decades ago. Also, the integration of online social games on the platform reinforces its appearance as a social network aimed at younger people, not a dating platform.
Regardless of its look, Tagged has steadily grown in popularity as a resource for meeting people for dating and hookups. We’ll be honest, at first glance, it would never occur to us to use Tagged for this purpose. Honestly, it seems creepy to do so. Nevertheless, since a significant number of people are doing so it seemed appropriate for us to review it through an online dating perspective.
— Available Platforms —
Tagged is available for desktop and mobile. The desktop version is easily accessible from any browser. There are also native apps for iPhone and Android devices. Between the iTunes App Store and Google Play, the Tagged app has been downloaded nearly 2 million times. In both repositories, it has an average rating of four-stars as of August 2017.
During our testing, we encountered some slight sluggishness in the Android version. While it did not freeze, it did make for substantially slower navigation compared to the iPhone app.
— Registration Process —
From a desktop computer registration on Tagged requires navigating to the Tagged.com website. From there, new users can register by using their Facebook or Google Plus credentials. Alternatively, users can register manually. The latter requires minimal information. Either registration method takes less than one minute.
Users that download the mobile app and who wish to register from their phone can do so following the same steps outlined above for desktop registration.
Immediately after registering, tagged redirects you to a screen from which you can invite your friends from various platforms — such as a Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. — to join Tagged. In the mobile app version, it is quite easy to accidentally initiate this process. You should be careful because if you do, you will be sending email invitations to your contacts on those platforms. This may be the reason why there are so many complaints posted online about “unwanted spam” being sent to your contacts.
On both the desktop and mobile platform, Tagged will remain connected by default unless you specifically sign out.
— Members Area —
Tagged utilizes your location information to determine the best profiles to display on your home screen. During our testing, however, whatever mechanism they were using for this selection wasn’t working so well. Over half of the profiles appearing on the front page of the member’s area where from people thousands of miles away from us — some of them on the other side of the world.
Also, some of the age ranges of those member profiles were — how can we phrase this? — uncomfortable. Due to the social network model used by the site, it was not uncommon to find profiles of members under the age of 18 on our home screens. As all of our testers proclaimed, “that was way too creepy.”
— Features —
Tagged Dating Site Download
There are two people discovery features on Tagged. The first one is the list of profiles that are supposed to be from your immediate area that is presented on your home screen. The second discovery feature follows the swiping model. In that feature, you are shown a series of profiles which you must either swipe right to like or swipe left to pass. If both members swipe right, a communication link is established between both numbers. Unfortunately, the same problem that plagued the “who is nearby” feature also plagued the swiping feature. During our tests, approximately half of the members shown to our testers were from areas too distant from their location. No matter how many times we fiddled with the profile settings, this problem persisted. It occurred on both mobile and desktop.
The free version of Tagged limits your ability to initiate conversations with other members. In order to get full communication functionality, you must purchase a VIP membership. This has a cost of $9.99 per month. This VIP membership also allows you to see who has seen your profile, as well as allowing you to check if your messages have been read. Tagged also alludes to an upcoming VIP feature which is supposed to filter other members’ profiles based on attractiveness. No details are given as to how that feature is supposed to work or when it will be released.