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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

I do find it interesting that intentional UX choices like allowing people to filter others out by race go pretty much unchallenged in the straight community.

For comparison, Grindr used to allow filtering out other people based on race, but as a result of people pointing out that it not only recognized existing racial biases but also reinforced them, they removed that feature, and connections became more equitable across different racial groups.

On the other hand, straight dating apps don't really seem to care about this. Sometimes companies even gaslight about it--"we put in this filter to allow for people to search for people with a shared background!"--even though these filters are overwhelmingly used to filter out non-whites (except for the occasional white male user filtering exclusively for Asian women).

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So what? Attraction isn't a choice. Removing the filter just lets you avoid facing an uncomfortable truth about the world and dating.

The fact that dating and matching patterns actually did change indicates that this isn't about attraction but UX choices that encourage thoughtless biases. Yes, of course Asian men would still have worse outcomes, but those outcomes would be those determined by actual patterns of attraction and not exacerbated by app design. And if someone has to swipe left an extra 10% of the time because they absolutely can't stand Asian guys... I mean, so be it. No one's entitled access to a particular filter.

For point of comparison, most heterosexual dating apps steadfastly refuse to add weight filters, despite them being the most demanded filters (aside from height). Why? Usually there are excuses about how it's impossible to implement or that the people who want weight filters are confused about what they want, but somehow LGBT dating apps all are able to add weight filters without any difficulty or controversy. Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.

And dating apps could, in principle, tell the people who want race filters to pound sand just as much as they tell the people who want weight filters to pound sand. The fact that they don't is a political choice.

> Why weight filters are considered an undesirable feature in heterosexual dating apps is left as an exercise to the reader.

I don't get it, why is that?

Straight dating apps suffer from a relative lack of women to men. On net, women dislike being subject to weight filters more than they like the ability to apply them. Not having weight filters results in attracting and retaining more women to your platform, which means more male users and more revenue.

An example of this in action is Hinge. They require users to include height in their bios (and always show it on profiles), but don't have a field for weight.

It's funny how height (a trait which we have very little control over) gets the green card for filtering but weight (a trait we very much have control over) is deemed too offensive to ask for.

I think it's because we know that our weight is completely up to us and that a failure of keeping the weight that is desirable to others is a failure of ourselves. It's a thing we deep down know is our own fault and it scares us. As for height, it's not my fault I'm short or tall, if you don't like it, meh, I didn't screw up or anything.

Is it market dynamics in action? Someone above said that women hate the idea of having a weight filter, and they tend to have the power on the market here (because they are more "in demand"). I know many men hate being subjected to a height filter, but they tend to have less power on the market (because most are a dime a dozen).

Yep. Most intrinsic theories of "why not have a weight filter" fail because they can't explain the many online dating sites (primarily LGBT) that do offer a weight filter, because it's very obviously a major factor in attraction that's easily quantifiable. The theory that the available filters are driven by which market participants have market power, on the other hand, does.

Perhaps not coincidentally, initial attraction is also a poor predictor of long-term relationship success, which most people want eventually.

This is absolutely right, and is not being highlighted enough in these threads. Outside of the dating sites, the numbers and the reality is not so bad. People fall in love with personalities, and personalities are presented to people longitudinally. In other words, it takes months to really get to know someone's personality. They can become attractive in ways that a dating profile would never show.

Dating apps have artificially forced people into making superficial choices.

I actually am looking into some really interesting data about match rate between different personality types and it seems like people with compatible with personalities match at a higher rate. Not sure about long term success but it's pretty crazy that I'm seeing that in match rate.

Well that would be making perfect sense. Once initial attraction wears off (and it always will), what remains is personality. The bigger the difference, the more conflicts. Whoever came up with 'opposites attract' didn't do a followup after couple of years.

I'm a cofounder of a dating app and we actually resisted letting people filter for race. Not sure about the impact on metrics but it is our current position. We let people filter on nationality instead because that speaks to the person's values and world views. We also let people filter based on personality and language.

It's been interesting and fun trying to fix what's wrong with online dating. The big thing being the misalignment of interest. https://www.fairytrail.app/reinventing-the-online-dating-bus...

It seems to me that not being able to filter people for things like race is an antipattern designed to increase engagement. IE waste my time trying to find what I want. Unless you're willing to not optimize your income, I doubt you'll be able to solve online dating.

Isn't "solv[ing] online dating" a business antipattern?

Yes, exactly. :)

> The big thing being the misalignment of interest.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this?

I'm currently out of the market, but your app looks more interesting than the typical one. Best of luck with it!

To state the obvious, I know some of us white folks have despicable views on race. But, surely we’re not the only people using the race filters on dating apps. Maybe in the most innocent of ways as a proxy for cultural values but it’s used by non-whites too.

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