Hacker News Reader

I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popularity become synonymous.

I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project.

In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale.

In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids.

This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice.

This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.

Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.

I'm not sure, really. I assume that it would probably be mostly "theory-less" in practice. Google built ways of accessing web page quality. This seems somewhat related. pagerank? amoorthy's project seems to be citation-based. That sounds like a good start, I think.

From what I hear, FB are now pretty worried about fake news and other issues relating to the last US elections. I suspect they're also going over a few other big political events where FB played a big role. After seeing it happen at home, it probably feels more real. Brexit. The Syrian protests, later civil war. ISIS. The Turkish coup attempt. FB played a bigger role than any other media in all these.

I suspect what they are doing about true fake news is probably spam filtering.

What I'd be interested in seeing them try is the stack overflow approach. Have a subjective opinion about what a good contribution to FB is. Design features to promote that kind of content.

FB makes money from ad impressions. SO loses money. That's why FB is biased toward garbage engaging/enraging content.

We've written an algorithm that scores news for quality. It's a work-in-progress but you may be interested in checking out our chrome extension at http://www.civikowl.com/

How do you distinguish objective quality from your own biases?

>This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said.

Makes more sense than blaming Russia and Facebook.

Why would you think the two thesis cannot work together as force-multipliers? If name recognition matters, then why can't Russian troll farms influence an election by hacking what names you recognize most using Facebook?

Because occam's razor says that the mundane reasons (terrible Democratic candidate, poor economy, Trump's name brand value) are more plausible than sinister conspiracy theories involving unimpressive ad budgets pushed by media orgs who just happen to be large DNC donors.

Occam's razor applied by neglecting evidence is just bad reasoning.

Not if the evidence is poor.

Terrible democratic candidate translates to "she's a woman"

From Europe that's what it looked like

And that's what fake news and russian trolls pushed

And also "she wants war" and now we're getting closer and closer to a new world war

Occam says that the most simple solution should be accepted

But Occam was an english monk from the 13th century

He could not know that hacking the news using money power is easier than spreading a good message through a decent candidate

>Terrible democratic candidate translates to "she's a woman"

No, it translates to:

* Obvious corporate shill and corrupt beltway insider - made even more obvious in light of the content of the leaked emails.

* A candidate who had a chequered political career that included dog whistling racists - an event that Trump made massive political capital out of and used to get large portions of a base she was relying upon - black voters - to stay at home.

* A candidate whose approach was to present herself of defender of the status quo at a time of obvious economic distress for most Americans which has never worked, ever.

* And yes, warmonger (that much was obvious from her term as secretary of state)

* A candidate whose strategy to get people to vote for her was to hypocritically either imply or outright state that you were sexist or racist if you considered voting for the other guy. Funnily enough that backfired massively but people (like you) are still flogging that dead horse in what I can only assume is an errant attempt to ensure that Trump wins a second term in office.

The really puzzling part of this whole thing is the number of people on Hacker News who will argue out of one side of their mouth that Facebook ads area a scam that simply don't work and on the other hand that spending what is essentially political pocket change on them will buy you a presidency. Crazy.

Defender of the status quo? Her voting record shows otherwise(1). She defended those who needed it most, going back far longer than her Senate tenure. My daughter's life was saved by a clinic that would not have existed but for the rural health program in Arkansas she championed.

[1]https://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/55463/hillary-clin...

if that were true, Gore would have won in a landslide and Bush Sr. would have beaten Clinton.

I don't see how that follows.

Quality implies a scale (e.g. the best, at what?)

So what you consider quality is probably different that what the (mode) average person considers quality. Perhaps the issue is joe sixpacs are the bulk of the bell curve.

Compounding this is most people are also information-overloaded anyway and don't have time for quality. Emotional appeals and manipulation on the other hand are hard to ignore even if you don't really have the time or desire to engage with them ..

> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally.

Sure. But I think it's analogous to the days of patent medicines. Coca-Cola really did contain cocaine at some point; opium and heroin were also popular ingredients. [1] Did the people making those medicines intentionally set out to sell dangerously addictive substances? I doubt it. They just tried to make their sales graphs go up and to the right, experimenting and copying what worked in other patent medicines.

The only reason things changed is that there was a national outcry. People came to recognize the dangers of addiction. When Coca Cola was created in 1885, it was made from coca leaves and kola nuts. By 1891, they cut the coca content by 90%. They cut it again in 1904, and by 1922 went entirely without. [1, 2] And it wasn't until 1983 that they offered a version without the other addictive stimulant. [3]

I think we're starting to see the beginnings of a similar outcry today. I hope we'll see more of it. But if we want it to have an effect, it will have to happen at a societal level (e.g., the threat of regulation) and an individual level (with more people refusing digital time-sucks like Facebook and Candy Crush). I also think it needs to happen at an interpersonal one; people working on addictive digital products should face social questions, just like somebody making cigarettes would. Because as you say, many of the individuals creating things like Facebook just aren't thinking about these broader issues.

[1] See, e.g. https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-market...

[2] https://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-Free_Coca-Cola

That Snopes article is just wrong. Coca Cola still contains coca leaf extract. Coca leaf extract is not cocaine.

One coca leaf extract is indeed cocaine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_C...

So I believe my comment above is still correct.

Only one extract. Referring to coca as cocaine isn't helpful.

It takes some effort to transform one into the other.

One is a medecinal herb (commonly used to fight altitude sickness), still used by Coca-Cola today, the other is a dangerously addictive substance that Coca-Cola used before they understood it's dangers.

> constant optimization towards viral dreck

Classifying a topic as/as-not viral dreck is, I posit, quite hard. Indulge me a bit here - I primarily come to HN to read about ML/AI/DNN. I mark the ones I like with the favorites button. During my work downtime, I go back to my favorites folder and re-read the topic. For some of the topics such as Word Embeddings, I must have re-read that paper a dozen times. I have actually used the material I learnt from my HN favorites list at my workplace, built it into products, gotten $$ off of it. So stuff like JIT compiler, LibHTTP, Bitcoin Bubble, Nintendo (all the topics trending right now) are viral dreck to me. I don't want this viral dreck. Get it off of HN!

You can see how quickly this sort of reasoning becomes vacuous.

I have an FB account mostly to interact with my extended family. Most of them are in their 70s and 80s. Every single topic they interact with on FB qualifies in my mind as viral dreck. However, by the nature of their comments, they seem to derive much pleasure in engaging with it. Given their age, who am I to deny them their cup of poison. Its not like they are going to get wise on word embeddings at the age of 75. Let them have their viral dreck.

..Indulge me a bit here - oh don’t encourage me. :)

On the “this is hard” point. Yes it is. I’m asserting that every business have a handful of core, hard problems. One of journalism’s is maintaining good quality standards, traditionally using subjective yet fairly well established definitions and methods, like an editor with good taste, formal fact checking, etc.. One of Apple’s hard problems is making consumer tech elegantly simple. The rhetorical click-wheel iPod. Again, there’s a lot of subjective elements that go into this.

How does a FB tackle this? Judging by your favourite HN article, I will forward a guess that you immediately jump to an ML or an algorithmic way of classifying things. On that front, I think FB could get some wins. Is dreck classification all that different from spam classification? Does PG’s “plan for spam” apply here? I would guess that it does for some dreck types. I actually think FB is currently deploying some spam-filter like system to deal with the most onerous “fake news.” Google’s starting point was page rank, a relevance ranking system. Fairly quickly, they added in “quality” ranking to supplement that. This is probably the least monolithic of their core systems. At the same time, SEO came into being and anti-spam became the third plank to google search. Taken together, this is quality classification. The inverse of dreck classification.

I don’t want to overemphasise these things though. FB is one of the best positioned to use “computer science-ish” solutions. But, I think the bigger choices are not at that level. They’re not a choice of technological approaches. It’s more mundane, values, priorities, product culture. Defining what they are and making good content a part of that definition.

HN already has quality built into it. When a feature is released (rarely, after all HN is not even a commercial product) someone makes a decision. Does nesting comments like this encourage dreck, in HN’s case flame wars and quips? Does changing something about moderation improve the quality of discussion? Are the really good, but slower, harder and more technical topics being buried? How do we unbury them? This speaks to your ideal HN.

No one has ever asked and answered such a question about youtube comments, we see the results. I don’t think FB has done enough of this, especially as relates to the high exposure. “viral” content.

The best articulation of the approach (IMO) is Spolsky’s “social UI^” and the early podcasts with him and Atwood. When they were making Stackoverflow, a lot of attention was paid to the type of content/behaviour encouraged by certain product/UI choices. They had an idea of what a good comment, question or answer looks like. They built the product to produce these. It wasn’t just about “more stuff.” They had an opinion about what stuff is valuable.

FB will need to be more programmable, but that’s easier if you start from the Spolsky mentality. Instead of “dreck classifier,” you just need to recognise flame wars, thought bubbles, divisive headlines. You need to decide that a comment by someone who has read an article is more valuable than a comment by someone who has not. The components become more achievable sounding, IMO.

^I wonder if this falls into your “dreck” category, for a little bit of extra irony. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usabi...

>> FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?"

I think this is a general problem. If Facebook is optimizing for whatever users "Like", as you suggest with the data scientists, it is analagous to a business given customers whatever they ask for.

As Henry Ford is said to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" (or something). You have to find a balance between "the customer is always right" and the fact that you are in a better position to be a domain expert.

They have to balance "what gets people engaged" with "what's good for everybody" and hopefully find an optimal solution for both.

Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".

Is Facebook any different than Coke, Pepsi or any other consumed product? (Probably not.) Their KPIs are usage and retention. That's it. The is no "the world is a better, happier, safer place" KPI.

The means - intentional or not - are going to take whatever form necessary to meet the ends.

If there's a surprise here is that its taken Parker et al this wrong to figure this out.

For Facebook, the customers are the ad buyers and the users are the product. Their only focus is to keep the product on the platform diligently submitting personal information and viewing ads.

This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook. In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product, even though it's true in much the same way — the whales wouldn't give you money to play with the other users if the other users didn't exist. In both cases, the product is the product, non-paying users bring value to the product, and paying users turn that value into money.

> This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook.

Well sure. I'm sure thousands of employees have very sophisticated and subtle views. But when you average out all of those views, it winds up that the only thing that really matters is getting eyes on ads.

No one needs to be a villain. The subtle views just cancel each other out, and the huge amount of effort fb puts forth regresses to the mean. Get more eyeballs on ads.

>>In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product

We don't? Seems accurate to me.

No, people don't usually say that, because it is obvious to most people what the product is in that situation, and trying to redefine terms so that it's something else seems like newspeak.

The game is a product — the company produces it. The players are players — they play the game. The whales are a sub-category of players, so if the players are indeed the product, you'd have to say they're buying themselves. In fact, the game is a product that both paying and non-paying customers consume, in some cases with barely differing experiences.

> Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".

It's fiction. Yes, inspired by a true story but fiction nonetheless.

You wouldn't base your knowledge about Nikola Tesla on "The Prestige", would you?

I'm gonna say no, they wouldn't, nor would they base their knowledge about Facebook on The Social Network, and to support this claim I cite the first 5 words: "Not sure how accurate it is."

I guess you're saying "don't trust movies" and/or "Facebook would never exploit human psychology, that's a made-up fiction." Har har, good one.

Regardless, "fiction inspired by a true story" would presumably have some true elements and some not-true elements. If they were all not-true elements, it would be completely made-up, literally 100% fiction (not based on or inspired by a true story), and anyway I don't think there's any such thing as 100% fiction, no matter how hard people try. Every fiction owes something to the reality it was concocted in.

Therefore the problem becomes knowing which elements are true (facts) and which are not-true (fiction).

I wonder how much of this is tied to the commiditization of content and how no one wants to pay for "good quality" content anymore--seems most actual good quality content exists because of philanthropy in our times.

I even try to pay for "good quality" content but it's increasingly mimicking viral sources that are sensational, rushed to publishing, and irrelevant.

Speaking as a content director myself and former writer/journalist, it does kill me a little inside that much of my day is spent around figuring out how to do this mimicking and how much I have to push my writers to think about this too in their writing. The state of the media industry/content makes me sad.

Also just read this, coincidentally, about Buzzfeed today: https://www.startups.co/articles/interview-jonah-peretti-co-...

> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally...

Totally agree.

> ..arrived at through a sort of natural selection process.

I am not so sure. This all well-known stuff and employed methodically. There is an interesting article where a Google design ethicist explains how technology hijacks your mind [1].

TL;DR:

Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?

Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important.

Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.

Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts.

Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay

Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously.

Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want.

Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times.

Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.

===

[1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

> When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts.

There's a worse version here: some companies will mine various sources of information to get a strong indication that A knows B, suggest to B that they should connect to A in a way that sounds like an invitation from A but isn't, and if B takes the suggestion, send an invitation to A saying that B wants to connect.

All of this is discussed in depth in Hooked, an excellent read[1].

[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1382248812

Excellent comment. I remember psychologists talking about the addictiveness of certain games (most notably MMOs) and identifying similar design elements.

In college I thought I might want to make games but got a dose of reality from MMOs and realized I wanted no part in building those traps for other people.

It's funny - my group of friends used to be hardcore MMO gamers, but after a while the skinner box effect became so obvious to everyone that we could no longer bring ourselves to play them. We've been discussing whether the addictiveness of games such as WoW actually spelled out the death of MMOs.

WoW has actually toned down the Skinner box effect. People would get stuck trying to repeat an event 10 times with a 20% success rate per try. If you have a lot of players then the number of people screwed over by getting the long statistical tail resembles the participant count of your forums. Bad press.

So you get credit for effort. Your odds go up with each attempt until you succeed. Rare items though, still Skinner boxes.

Just a minor point but I know actual psychologists (PhDs in clinical psychology) employed by Facebook, so it's definitely not just data scientists running a/b tests.

Not a minor point at all. Gaming companies hire psychologists too. Corporations are doing this sort of thing very deliberately and have been for a while.

> Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular."

Problem is: Quality itself is defined by quantitative measurements. It's not some separate product attribute. If something increases your business KPIs, it is ipso facto higher quality. Motivated only by the imperative to optimize these KPIs, a company will do so, believing that it is continually making the product better. Allowed to run its course, you end up with a Paperclip Maximizer [1].

1: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

The inevitable quality decline of popularity is much noted.

"A Theory of Mass Culture", Dwight Macdonald. First Published June 1, 1953

https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301

(Available via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301)

Cannot agree more. The Internet has a natural selection mechanism that rewards the product that captures the most attention, for the longest time. As long as this mechanism is at play, there will always be mind hacks that get people hooked. So it's not that people are evil, it's the system, the ad-driven business model.

No of course it is inevitable -

All firms, are in competition.

Media firms must get attention to succeed.

There is more media than any human can consume in a life time.

Therefore, to succeed, you must be the media consumed, instead of someone else.

THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs.

This is sufficient to create the situation we have. You can always add some twist to the whole thing, but this is sufficient.

> THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs.

But that is a very narrow view. The New York Times could claim they have proof Trump is an Alien from outer space. For the day, they would win the attention of the world.

But the cost would be their credibility, which would lessen the share of attention they would receive on every day afterward.

So the NYT pursues a strategy of building a customer relationship. And trying to get as much sustained attention as they can over the course of a relationship. They don't purse getting attention AT ALL COSTS on each individual day, and neither should Facebook.

Eh, unless attention is worth far more than credibility. If the user base doesn't value credibility, then seeking it is a poor monetization strategy.

In the short-term or the long-term?

This happens all the time. The New York Times has become an incredibly biased source. New York City is an incredibly Democrat-leaning echo chamber (I don't care what party it is, I care that a major news source is biased). New York State at large isn't.

For anyone who thinks this isn't the case it isn't aware of the extent because the paper is paywalled so you can't see how had it is, page back to the debacle where the editorial staff were asking whether it was their job to question politicians' statements, or just "we report, you decide". A lot of people dropped their subscriptions because that's literally the only thing they were subscribing to the NYT for, and the editorial staff were announcing it didn't fit their profit model.

The only readers they have left, are ones who don't mind tuning in to get the DNC agenda for the day. More or less.

I got a free trial, and called to cancel it early (I had to call!), because it's just another tabloid. The only major news source I can stand to read anymore is maybe Reuters? I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.

> I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.

And where do you find these citizens? Twitter?

I just saw this comment - your comment is affected by survivorship bias.

Over the past several decades, a huge number of news papers have gone out of print.

In its place there is an explosion of non-newspapers, which have lower barriers to quality, accuracy, and cost.

The NYT website, as you recall was the first website perhaps aside from the WSJ, which jumped the trend of going free in order to survive.

As an aside - Even prior to the internet, there was sweeping consolidation in the media world. Most news papers could not afford to stay in print or defeat takeovers.

There is an older theory on industrialized economies - that most media firms will eventually be taken over, and therefore be soft on their particular conglomerate and sister firms.

How do you explain TMZ, People and the Enquirer / Globe / Weekly World News? Seems taht credibility isn't a necessary condition for popularity... at least not globally.

Reminds me of the dystopian conclusion of AI that to protect humans you have to enslave them in some manner to protect them from themselves. Facebook's endless psychology games and A/B testing will ultimately create the most profitable product - which will be the most manipulative product possible.

Well "shitty tabloids" tend to survive financially. The media companies that don't work that way tend to require a rich benefactor who doesn't mind making little money or losing money to keep it alive. So it's no surprise FB etc value survival.

I din’t see tinder winning so much as creating a new (and very psychologically exploitable) app market. It was not inevitable; many still don’t use tinder style dating at all.

I think you are focused on the style of dating (Quick hookups) where the person you are responding too is focused on the unique app feature that made tinder "Stand out" from the crowd (Swipe left/right).

It's that app feature which plays into the "exploitation" part of quick, responsive, immediate.

Right, but the feature only makes sense if the risk is low (quick hookups). There aren’t any meaningful signals; just photos.

Tinder is a "hookup" app isn't it, ie a way to find someone to have sex with; whilst OKcupid is aimed at "dating" ie people to have a longer term relationship [I know it has options for use in several scenarios, spouse seeking, dating, hookups, etc.].

I think that is the way it is framed, but as the OKCupid user base bleeds out those users are most likely turning to Tinder as it has more people. OKCupid has actually lifted some features off of Tinder which makes no sense as they're owned by the same parent company which is kind of shooting itself in the foot with this approach.

Anecdatally, I know people who have had long term relationships off of Tinder, some still together. I imagine that people will continue migrating over to Tinder from OKCupid.

> I think that is the way it is framed, but as the OKCupid user base bleeds out those users are most likely turning to Tinder as it has more people. OKCupid has actually lifted some features off of Tinder which makes no sense as they're owned by the same parent company which is kind of shooting itself in the foot with this approach.

Do you own index funds? I do. Which means I have stock in Coke and Pepsi both. But this is stupid because Coke and Pepsi are competitors, so my Coke returns are offset by my Pepsi losses whenever Coke wins and vice versa, right? Actually, no, because the beverage industry still grows in aggregate over time, and in exchange for not having to guess who's going to win the cola wars, I get to collect the benefits of both companies growing the overall market.

In this analogy, I'm match.com and OKCupid and Tinder are Coke and Pepsi.

This mostly makes sense but the ok cupid bleeding into tinder—the only part of okcupid worth reading was the fact that it was text centric rather than photo centric.

You can meet and keep anyone you like on Tinder. OKCupid is for people with dating anxiety, who need to distract themselves from talking to each other by filling out personality tests.

Okcupid was there first. Tinder was just more exploitative.

You are what you measure.