An Interview with Tom Quisel, Former CTO of OkCupid (2017)
logicmag.io
logicmag.io
> You might provide answers for how you feel that night, which may not be reflective of your larger perspective. [...] So that’s one of the big challenges: understanding what someone is really trying to say when they’re answering questions about their preferences.
> There could be two different interpretations for the question, and you just answered one of them. [...] Knowing this can happen, we use the algorithms to help us understand the statistics behind each question, and we’ll try to identify questions that are the most likely to be mistaken in this way so that we can remove them.
These are both issues with the question system that users have raised concerns about, and generally assume that the question-matching data is just going to be messed up by these. So, to learn that they were actually addressing these issues in code with statistics and analyses, makes the whole system seem a lot more sensible.
He also talks a lot about ethics and fairness and grassroots ideals - and with OkC it did seem like those were more than just corporate talk, they realy were a user-focused, transparent company for a long time. He seems to have left before the Match.com acquisition (I'm assuming) though, and unfortunately there have been complaints after that that the company is gradually moving away from those ideals.
Oh, I didn't know that. Never used match.com but I've heard such terrible things. Does this mean OkC has jumped the shark?
The way it works now is that a message you send to someone who hasn’t liked you back appears on your profile page (if they they view it) instead of their inbox. In addition, I believe once you’ve sent a message, that user’s profile is hidden from you unless they choose to respond. So for the receiving user, they don’t have to take any action to pass on a mountain of “sup girl”s, and their inbox will only contain the people they’re actively messaging.
I don’t know if there’s an indicator that someone has sent you a message which you can see from the profile thumbnails, but if there is it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s for paying users only. They could have skipped the “like” requirement and just implemented the other messaging changes, but I think it’s a pretty good balance of free vs paid features overall.
"Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating".
A very interesting read, and one of two articles that were removed as part of the Match.com acquisition. Does anyone remember the other one?
Well, you failed miserably. Not just OkCupid but online dating in general.
I think it is one of the few aspects of 21st century life where the Internet/technology made us more close minded instead of more open minded. If you are at a party and meet five different people, you will immediately notice something that you don't like about them, but you will give them the benefit of doubt and engage them in conversation for at least five minutes and allow them the chance to show you their best selves.
No such thing in online dating.
At a typical party you have a finite number of people to interact with. So you might as well work with who's available.
Online, the number of people available to us is practically infinite so we can afford to discriminate.
It’s entirely possible to encourage positive social behavior with technology.
Users could just move to another platform without artificial scarcity and... stay there, because there is no scarcity.
I'm not sure that coercing people to settle is positive behavior, but regardless, enforcing artificial scarcity isn't a feasible strategy for a dating app.
You’re equating more choices with better outcomes. I argue that isn’t the case. Unless we’re going to feed every data point we can into a ML black box, and out will come your arranged ideal partnership (there’s even a black mirror episode about this).
Getting to know people sounds more fun, but I’m old shrug
To be fair though, if people could be convinced to buy into the platform with its restrictions, it could make for an interesting experience.
While Tinder profiles are built for speed, with only a few pictures and blurbs, profiles on your platform could have much more detailed biographies, videos, etc...
It would be a more immersive experience.
If done right I think your idea does have potential.
At the very least it discourages the strategy of blindly swiping right as fast as possible and then choosing a mate from the intersection of "those who also swiped right on you" and "people you'd ever consider dating".
The problem is that's not what causes the problem.
What happens is that different people are different levels of desirable and everyone messages the highly desirable ones first. Then those women ignore most of the flood of messages they got, even the ones from other highly desirable people, because they don't have time for so many messages.
So then all the senders, dejected, realize the majority of messages won't get a response and become less selective in who they send them to. So then the second most desirable set of partners get flooded with messages and it repeats on down the line.
Which creates the illusion of choice, because even if you're a "6" you'll get messages from many people, including an "8" or three, but you can't actually have them. They only messaged you because they messaged everybody. So then the 6 wastes their time responding to the 8 instead of the other 6s they actually had a chance with, who then get no responses from other 6s.
If you limited the number of messages then everyone would only message the most desirable partners. So the 10s would still be flooded and not respond and the 6s would go from having too many messages from unavailable senders to having zero messages from anyone.
Some sites do the "user's mailbox is full" thing to try to avoid this, but that doesn't really fix it either. It just accelerates the problem because then the most desirable partners all have full mailboxes, so the second most desirable partners get flooded with messages even sooner.
What you need is some way to match people with the people they actually have a chance with (and who actually have a chance with them). But that's easier said than done.
“At scale” is f*ucking with how humans operate, and not for the better.
It's not that they never do, it's that they on average don't, in either case. The average person will choose an 8 over a 6, and the average 8 will have that choice. And I mean it as an overall rating including things like intelligence and wealth, not just physical appearance. It's not that a 6 can get an 8 because she's interesting, it's that being interesting makes her an 8 too.
So interactions between 6s and 8s (or, especially, 3s and 8s) are much more likely to be a waste of everyone's time than interactions between 6s and 6s, but that's what dating websites cause to be common.
Odds are that many of these people actually shared one or more interest with me, but neither of us had any idea because we didn't know anything about each other at the parties, so never talked about it, and so never found out we might have something in common and so might be compatible. Thinking of all these wasted opportunities makes me sad.
With online dating, by the time I meet with someone, we'll already know that we have a bunch of things in common, and already know what many of those things are. So there's a lot less guessing and blindly stumbling around trying to find something of interest to both to talk about. We can cut to the chase and immediately start talking about our (hopefully many) common interests.
To add to your point, I’ll say this: as a Asian guy I’ve interacted with hundreds of non-Asian female profiles and not a single one had mutual interest in me. Not one. And I don’t say this because I only date non-Asians so much as I don’t care about a persons ethnicity, a belief that isn’t shared by others online.
Meanwhile in real life I’ve gotten to know and date extremely successful, smart, non-white women. Why? Because by having conversations with them in real life prior to moving onto the next stage, I likely broke down generalizations about Asian men and got to show my best self.
One of my best friends who is white and extremely successful (successfully went through the top medical programs) once said to me she never dates Asian guys from online sites because she doesn’t know if they’ll speak fluent English.
One of my good looking Asian male friends has made the similar observations to me. He’s only met any of his SO’s from parties and get togethers because people online treat him differently.
1. Answer a lot of them. Always answer very abruptly (all the questions are very important).
2. Look for interesting potential partners.
3. Remove the questions where you disagree.
4. Enjoy your 99% match and message him/her.
I don't understand. What other side? And why are Filipinos special? How is that fundamentally different from any other race-based selection?
Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.
"And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate." --> A significant portion of our users wanted to be able to filter by race, but we were afraid it'd create an internet shitstorm.
"But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—" --> So here's the semi-PC thing we invented to cover our ass, just to give our users the feature they wanted anyways without being the target of a social activism campaign.
Regardless, they have since removed the feature.
(That's not to say I am free of hangups, but mine are different)
1. Is she acceptably attractive?
2. Is she acceptably not crazy?
Match those two things and you are 99 percent of the way to the chapel. Women have more complicated criteria mainly because what they really want (someone at the top of social pyramid) is ineluctably scarce.
I've been thinking a bit about online dating (heh) and dating in general. My latest idea is that a successful match is not much a matter of state, but rather a matter of process. Two people might be well suited for each other but to get beyond the most superficial attraction you need time spent together and meaningful experiences.
They could create a dating website that encourages "matches" to go through a set of random activities, that would be fun (and, I guess, successful).
Lucky punters might have to go to Ibiza as part of this ritual to meet the guy from five miles up the road and back in their home town they do not live their life on a daily basis like how they spent their holiday in Ibiza that time.
There may not be messaging online but there can be clumsy 'my friend fancies you' messaging not attempted since early teenage years.
In these organised events it is clear that everyone is there to find a partner, so there is no time spent chasing those that are not in the same 'available state', it is straight onto 'process'. I don't believe the numbers get better, if real world online organised dating was that good there would be more of it than there is, I think it peaked before everyone had smartphones.