‘Date me’ Google Docs and the hyper-optimized quest for love | Hacker News Reader

‘Date me’ Google Docs and the hyper-optimized quest for love

wired.com

161 pointsindiantinker213 comments

In early oughts, like in 2001 or 2002 when I was much younger and dating my now wife, we met a young and cute girl at a theme Halloween party, and we kept in touch for other parties. She at some point met this guy which we will call Prez because that was what people called him (both his First and Last names were last names of two presidents).

I remember visiting them in New Orleans after they moved away and asking how they met. Apparently they went out on some sort of blind date or something, it was set up for them by someone, really hit it off, then went home, and both wrote a long-form blog post (that was really new and fresh then) about whom they just met, while at the same time also refreshing each other's blogs to see if they wrote about each other. Apparently both finished the articles within few minutes of each other, can't remember who was first, and that was the confirmation that they should go out again.

Oh and the guy programmed in TCL. shudder. I wouldn't be surprised if Prez is on this site, he was that kind of hacker.

> Oh and the guy programmed in TCL.

That's a pretty big red flag :-)

Tcl feels like a bastard child of Lisp and shell, and is beautiful in its own unique and quirky way. I'm not surprised at all that someone would find it lovable ;)

I have a love/hate relationship with it.

Every couple of years, I spend a month or two writing almost exclusively in TCL for personal projects.

Its the same with Perl. And expect scripts...

Every few years I look at Scid, the chess app, and think about learning Tcl just to be able to add stuff to it but then life starts seeming very short.

So to identify the guy we just have to figure out what two president names people would give you the nickname Prez for having.

I'm going with Abraham Washington, I would definitely call a guy with those names Prez. George Lincoln - not so much.

both his First and Last names were last names of two presidents

hmm, what Presidential last names work best as first names, not McKinley or Hoover...

Kennedy Grant Garfield (although hard to imagine a guy named Garfield getting the Prez nickname) Fillmore? Jefferson Washington Wilson Jackson

also what ones would be commonly known presidential names and maybe the first thing one thinks of when hearing the name is the President - Kennedy for sure, but Grant is a common enough name that I don't think of Ulysses when I hear it.

My impression was that in the US, any surname can be used as a first name. Wasn't there even someone with Mackenzie as first name? Plenty of Harrisons, Taylors and other names that really don't sound like a first name.

Truman isn't too uncommon as a first name. Harry S. Truman was a president.

Both names are last names. That’s a big clue.

First name has to be Grant or Jackson right? Maybe Wilson, potentially Adam if you stretch it.

Last name could be anything. I’m going with Jackson Adams - seems like a regular name, common last name, just hoity toity enough for a nickname like prez to stick.

I made some comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33463317 when someone else mentioned the two last names thing

didn't think of Adams, the thing is do people think of Adams the president when hearing Adams the last name. I think the first thing to spring to mind would be The Addams family. I think both names should be so obviously associated with President's in the mind that it just be like - Heyyy, it's Prez -

Washington Jefferson for example.

on edit: although I think some names like Washington would be sort of messed up to give your kid, but hey who am I to throw stones - I named my daughter Coraline.

If we're going to guess, I'm going with Roosevelt van Buren.

Nixon Cleveland?

Randolph Davis??

It was Harrison Ford, obviously.

Here I was thinking Dwight Garfield.

Maybe Andrew Garfield?

Wow this blew up. How about a hint - both presidents had trouble with impeachments. But NOT trump (again, think 2001) I looked him up on LinkedIn, and he's not there. Speak up Prez if you're here!

Clinton "Clint" Johnson.

Bush Gore,

Trump Obama,

Reagan Biden,

Kennedy Carter,

Johnson Ford,

Wilson Cleveland,

Harrison Arthur,

Hayes Johnson,

Tyler Jackson

Clearly baiting people to respond. You most likely intended Bush Clinton or Clinton Bush (which sounds better), instead of Bush Gore.

People like to rag on dating apps -- they're shallow, promote surface-level judgements / interactions. But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in the real world (in very early considerations of who to approach). Getting this person out of the app into an in-person conversation should be the goal.

A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences.

Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter.

Creeps and stalkers will often try to get a woman's contact info (email, phone, GPS) so that they can continue pursuit and evade scrutiny by the dating app's monitors, who are often very good at identifying and banning unscrupulous people who are not in it to win it, so to speak.

Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.

Interesting case in point. My erstwhile fiancee and I met on a MMORPG in 2008. She lived in Europe and I live in these United States. She inquired politely of our mutual friends and acquaintances and then promptly booked a flight to visit me. Then she applied firm feminine pressure and caused me to fly to Europe and visit her for a month. As it turns out, I was not ready for the kind of relationship she sought and we flamed out spectacularly. She could not have expected this after how it went on that MMORPG and based on the reputation I had there among the other gamers. But if she'd asked real-world friends... it might've been a different story.

>> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship.

How naive :)

Dating apps are many billion dollars businesses - users striking up a real relationship are lost customers and profits to them and they optimize their algorithms against it.

Do you have any sources for that? The biggest change that happened in online dating in recent years is that it's been normalized, no longer seen as weird. That surely has something to do with the success its users had and is obviously very profitable for the companies running these services.

Think about it, what if Tinder’s algorithm somehow matched everyone directly with their soulmates. How many of those users would be on the app the next day? How many of those would continue paying for the app? Providing this sort of service for free is just bad business sense. A more profitable approach is to hold the best matches out on the user and to promise that if they pay, their odds of finding their soulmate increase. As long as Tinder is a for-profit company accountable to shareholders it will never be in its best interest to provide the best possible matchmaking

That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app. There's better ones:

- attract new users; there's new 20 year olds every day.

- move into related niches, like finding friends, where it actually is fine to keep using the app after you meet someone. (Or polycules.)

- move into cheating, mistresses etc, where people will secretly keep using it and not tell anyone.

I think IAC/Match does try the evil way, but that only works as long as you can keep buying out new dating apps. It's not like there's a moat.

> That's not a good strategy either if users notice you're doing it, because they just won't use the app.

Users can be informed about all kinds of user-hostile behavior by dating sites/apps and still use them. Turns out companies don't go out of business because of screwing over their customers. Companies have been caught knowingly poisoning their customers and still they've stayed in business and are profitable.

Companies often put on a good show in their twitter feed but they don't actually fear customer backlash. If doing something evil is going to make a company money they will do it. We'll bitch about it on social media until we get distracted by something else, but we'll continue to accept their abuses over and over again. We'll even keep paying the company that did it to us.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08...

https://money.com/match-com-is-being-sued-for-using-fake-pro...

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/21/denver-dating-co-lawsu...

https://theblogofdimi.com/meet-guy-behind-dating-sites-fake-...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scammers-a...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dating-apps-bots-and-fake-profi...

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/11/10/ashley_madiso...

You are assuming people use Tinder to find a life partner. A large proportion use it to find a short to medium term companion, and if they do that successfully will return.

Worth noting too that Bumble offers a lifetime subscription rather than yearly. There doesn't seem to be a misalignment of incentives there.

You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase. Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll hate because then you'll want to move again.

I worked at an online dating company. Matching people is fucking hard. It's hard enough predicting who will message who, much less who will actually date who. There's far more money in matching them well than stringing them along; if you had even a 10% success rate, you could get away with charging a silly amount of money.

The unironic use of Shakespearean "erstwhile" tripped me up for a minute, was that royal English part of your MMORPG chat game?

As hinted previously, IRL she would have beenn tipped off when he doffed his fedora to m'lady.

> Users of dating apps are often warned that they should do due diligence and use caution when moving from the moderated, patrolled environs of the app into another mode of communication or encounter.

> Of course, yes, a dating app's ultimate goal is meeting in person and striking up a real relationship. But anyone crossing that boundary had better be very sure that they've gotten to know the person and they really can trust that an encounter won't turn into a craigslist murder.

Too much caution and delaying IRL encounters for too long can be dangerous, though.

Disclaimer: I'm married and it's been long since I last was in the dating market, so these are quite old recollections from when Tinder wasn't a thing and people hooked up in ICQ, IRC and the like. This is also purely subjective.

I remember many women were extremely cautious, to the point of not dating in person until they had talked to a guy online for literally months, in some extreme cases even years. But the problem is that they talked to these guys without meeting them IRL for so long, that often idealization kicked in very hard. Because they didn't see the guy, they built an extremely rosy mind model of him and then trusted him too much when they finally met, when they shouldn't have. Sometimes they would even fall in love online. Manipulative guys often took advantage of these things: it's easier to get away with all sorts of shady tactics if they can't see you and everything is asynchronous.

So my advice as an internet dinosaur would be: sure, don't meet IRL before having at least some nontrivial conversation, and sure, take basic precautions (meet in a busy place, don't go to a total stranger's house, etc.). But don't go overboard postponing meeting in person, thinking that this will let you know the other person better and reduce risk. That can easily backfire. Once you've talked for 3-5 days, I think the risk mostly goes up from there, not down.

Perhaps no one is so cautious anymore so this doesn't apply anyway.

You got engaged to your stalker and it didn't work out and it surprised her and what is the moral of this story?

I think the issue with dating apps is that it creates the too many choice problem. Relationships, especially starting out, are hard because you have to get over speed bumps. Things that in the rear view mirror look petty and you forget, but in the moment are much more serious.

There's also a huge difference in how the genders experience the apps, despite a lot of us pretending it is the same. I heard someone say "men are dying of thirst in a desert. Women are dying of thirst in the ocean. Men look at the women and say 'at least they have water.'" Most women get far more matches (the ocean water) but often they are low quality (salinity), whereas most men have a lack of matches all together. If you're just looking to get laid, then there is definitely a power imbalance (an amplified version of what exists offline) and women "have it easier". But that's not what most people want. They do want deep meaningful connections, and in that respect there's no difference between trying to drink sand and trying to drink sea water. But because we're dying of different things it creates fundamentally different strategies. (one e.g. men being nonselective with swipes but selective with matches vs women being highly selective with swipes[0]) We have fundamentally different experiences on the apps. I don't know a single man who's admitted to sending a dick pic, but every woman I know has received one. It's too easy to paint with a broad brush with the paint of our experiences, especially the bad ones.

But I think a major issue of why these apps don't work is that we're so wrapped up in our experiences that we don't recognize those of others (classic human problem: "Everyone thinks like me and shares the same experiences."). It causes us to paint with too wide of a brush when seeking something that is by definition intimate and personal. I think the problem with apps is that it is hard to see the other person as a person. While I don't know if I'd ever do one of these profiles, but the goal seems straight forward: to be seen as a human and an individual. You're not just another box of cereal on the grocery store shelf, but an individual human being. I don't think this is backwards and I think it makes sense why people see this as an alternative. They've felt dehumanized by those apps (men and women in different ways) and want to be seen as a living person.

edit: [0], another example is men wanting to meet in person quickly to make the match real vs women often wanting to me more cautious. There are different selective pressures for these things and different societal norms. But it is silly to not attempt to understand the experiences of someone we want to intimately bond with.

I think the willingness to meet in person has more to do with logistical issues of physical security rather than some underlying difference in desires to defer / accelerate IRL meet-ups. I think if you were able to assure both people that the other person wasn't going to go crazy on them, we'd see similar willingness to meet in-person.

I do agree with you that when in the app, there is an inherent lack of desire to really understand the other person. In my experience, however, that goes away when we are able to meet face-to-face and share our true selves more authentically. So, this desire is reasonable, I just think that trying to use technology again to try to solve it (google doc instead of hinge) really isn't very different, and we need to change modalities to actually get anywhere on this issue.

Statistics don't exactly line up with that idea. Strangers don't cause problems as much as people like to believe. Men in general have gotten a lot softer while women are the ones pulling more weight on this security.

The people causing problems are generally people you already know, or people with existing relationships. The problem is largely hearsay and doesn't line up with the behavior people exhibit (if stranger danger is so big why use dating apps at all).

The statistics are exactly this way, because women are super wary of strangers already. If they started trusting strange men into their lives that would change very quickly.

No, these are your assumptions made through fearmongering and looking away from what is actually happening. Women are not fragile flowers being super selective with strangers out of security. They are increasingly hooking up with strangers compared to before, and they specifically select men in populations which are more likely to have psychopaths or men with dark intentions. Your average woman has plenty of suitors and friends able to set her up with dates, and she chooses not to.

The entire notion falls flat the moment you look at the actions of women and men as a whole, and take a moment to remember what ideals 80s and 90s coming-of-age movies showed.

I think OP has a point, which does not contradict yours.

https://xkcd.com/795/

I don't get the XKCD analogy. Are you inferring that women who are aware that the actual statistics say that they will be murdered by a loved one are more likely to be killed by a stranger?

The implication is that the statistics are what they are under the condition that women take the precautions that they do.

In other words, the 1/X statistic is conditioned on the average person's precautions (like not walking outside in a lightning storm), and by not applying on those precautions, you're using the statistic outside of the distribution that it applies to.

The issue that GGP brings up though is that women actually aren't following these guidelines since they date complete strangers via these apps.

The analogy is about an aggregation error when using statistics. While the statistic is true it is not accounting for the environment one is in (it has aggregated all environments). Of course there's a big difference asking a girl on a first date on a hike in the woods vs meeting at Starbucks. (A lot of statistical paradoxes are because of aggregation errors. Conditional estimation matters a lot)

It's also a risk/reward thing though. Putting an obstacle to the first date is a great filter to remove people who aren't particularly interested or who would have incompatible lifestyle. From this respect a hike might be far preferably to Starbucks.

While I don't think you're wrong, I think the issue with the hike is being missed. It is a more dangerous situation meeting someone alone in the wilderness (exaggerating a bit) vs meeting them in a very public place that has cameras. That was the intended note.

But I think there are also some complications you're missing. These lifestyles matches can be a form of luck. Maybe you're having a busy week. You're probably paying attention to the app less because of course you will. On the other hand if you're being set up by a friend then that friend can be like "hey, they're busy this week but let's set you up next" and there is more empathy involved.

A major problem with dating apps is that they are trying to be that friend that sets you up but they are doing a really terrible job at replicating what that friend is able to actually do.

That's not the point. If one cites 'yeah it's because women are responding accordingly', they are ignorant to the fact women are A; not responding in accordance to the idea 'don't trust strangers', B; much safer than before and C; independent individuals capable of making their own decisions.

Whether the statistics would be lower if women trusted strangers less doesn't matter. It's what they choose, despite being educated on the matter since youth, and having plenty of options available in general.

The issue with the water analogy is that the "water" that the men receive is from the same source as for women therefore is just as salty.

But the broader point is true that dating sucks for everyone, men end up feeling undesirable and women feel objectified and dehumanized.

Hence the solution of relying on matchmakers in one’s network, such as parents, friends, cousins, aunts/uncles, grandparents, colleague, etc.

They will somewhat know the dating candidate, and they will have skin in the game via their reputation to present somewhat viable options so it is not as high of a chance of rejection.

However, this depends on having access to vast (good) networks, either directly or indirectly.

> The issue with the water analogy is that the "water" that the men receive is from the same source as for women therefore is just as salty.

Well, the other issue is that being lost at sea is much better than being lost in a waterless desert. You can't drink the seawater, but you don't die of thirst while you're lost at sea.

Yes, you do die of thirst if lost at sea. You can't drink the water, and if you do it just makes you thirsty/sick.

Interestingly, you can drink 60%fresh / 40%sea water. So if you're on a lifeboat you can make your fresh water rations last almost twice as long.

> Yes, you do die of thirst if lost at sea. You can't drink the water

You say that as if I hadn't already pointed it out. Being unable to drink the water doesn't mean you die of thirst while at sea. There are many well-documented examples of people surviving at sea for much longer than it would take to die of thirst. It doesn't matter that you can't drink seawater; you can get water in other ways.

But in the desert, you'll die.

I think you're confusing what's happening. People die of thirst faster in the desert because deserts are generally hot and dry, so you sweat profusely. Meaning you are going to lose your store of internal water faster.

Also, I think you're just taking an analogy made way too literally. Analogies are messy but used to help illustrate a point. They do require one to read the intent of the speaker more than the literal words used.

> I think you're confusing what's happening.

Why do you think that?

You don't die of thirst when lost at sea. You can survive indefinitely there.

You can't drink straight seawater, but that doesn't matter because water is available by other means.

>> I think you're confusing what's happening.

> Why do you think that?

Because

> You don't die of thirst when lost at sea. You can survive indefinitely there.

Is a objectively false statement that is trivial to verify by a quick google search or anyone who has spent any reasonable amount of time in or around an ocean.

> You can't drink straight seawater, but that doesn't matter because water is available by other means.

And those means are...? If you're floating in the ocean, good luck distilling the water. Idk if you've ever tried to distill water before, but it isn't as easy as the movies make it look. Trust me, I've done simulated survival exercises both on land and in the ocean. Or don't trust me and just google it.

I was never so disappointed as when I tried a solar still and it was probably a waste of water (sweat) setting it up compared to yield.

Male here: there are ways around it. Currently having 1 to 2 dates per week (still all friend zone, but I'm just back into it, so it's a skill issue, slowly getting better).

The biggest thing that has helped me is to cater towards my "niche", which means I need to focus on presenting myself as artistic, meditative and adventurous. Those are strong sides of my personality. I need to dial down the logic/rational side, and dial up my playful side. That seems to work relatively well. Adjust on a case by case basis of course, also dial things back to normal when you get to know them for longer.

It's polarizing, but the matches I get are more up my alley immediately :)

And yea, I had to experiment relentlessly. Then again, that’s life.

Regarding your "niche", I have noticed that dating apps will not let you say that you are a programmer. I have scrolled through the "my interests" list of Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, and the only one that more or less fits is "startups", but that's it. I honestly feel midly offended.

Do you want to say that your interests are reading, traveling, living and laughing? Sure, go ahead. Do you want to write "tech"? Sorry, this app is for cool kids only.

The technical accuracy of your job title probably won’t be the determining factor as to whether a girl likes your profile or not.

There’s a bio where you can write text. If you want to be accurate, you can do it there.

I don’t even have my job on there. Most people don’t get programming, so I don’t want to steer the conversation there.

I write the fun stuff in my bio.

I know you can write anyhting you want in there, that's not my point. And no, I don't want to write how proficient in Python I am.

My point is: if you are a tech-minded person who likes tech for fun the apps will discourage you from showing it. Bumble's interest list [1] has ca. 200 interests including ~20 TV show genres, 30 sports, 10 types of traveling, and 15 personality traits. And yet there's exactly one mildly-tech-related interest, namely, "video games".

Being at my most generous I would read that as "geeks tend to make horrible dating profiles so Bumble steers them towards what's more likely to get them dates", but (as I said originally) I feel mildly insulted by the idea that "bringing my whole self" is something to discourage.

[1] https://eddie-hernandez.com/bumble-profile-template-prompts-...

It looks like they simply don't have entries for stereotypically male-dominated activities. No home improvement, no woodworking, no cars or motorcycles, etc. And thus, of course, no entries for anything tech-related.

That's why you have prompts and bios to list this info. These interests lists are not mandatory and are very basic (people who know how to write a good profile can skip these interests and use their own words - more effective.

Not listing function/job is rather vague, suspicious. Might as well put entrepreneur aka unemployed.

The more vague your profile is, the less information people have to assess lifestyle choices, availability, financial security etc.

You mention OkCupid by name, and for the longest time they let you pick in the 'Languages' field C++. I used to use that as shorthand for programmer. Saw a handful of people use it here and there.

Also it's not like they deleted your profile if you mentioned being a programmer in any of the open text boxes. I've spotted several people that mentioned that in their profiles, and I was looking at women exclusively, so I didn't see it as often, but I did see it.

This was quite a few years ago though. Might be different now.

> Do you want to write "tech"? Sorry, this app is for cool kids only.

You can still type that in your profile prompts and bio. No one is stopping you from doing that.

If you want more interests listed, just contact Bumble. They are known to make relatively straightforward updates to the app like this.

Man that's fucking tedious. Thing I like about in-person meetings, which is the only way I've ever ended up in a relationship with someone, is that I don't have to be a fucking salesman and can just be me.

I do both. The dating landscape has changed, or so it seems. I time capsuled for 10 years (2 long-term relationships that happened quickly one after another). Imagine my shock when I noticed many people are online now. I meet people IRL (actually right now I just met someone on the train :P). But it really does have a different feel to it nowadays.

Did you go up and initiate conversation with that person on the train? I feel like interacting with strangers has been heavily discouraged in the US but it's really the best way to expand your social circle.

Yea

I initiated by saying: I like your scarf-jacket combo. Did you match it on purpose?

Note: when giving a compliment, expect nothing in return. Simply know that you prefer a conversation but be ready to jump out at a moment’s notice when she isn’t feeling it.

Her: haha, no I always have this scarf

Me: even with a deep purple coat?

Her: even then…

Me: oh god… going to Berlin?

Her: yep, you?

Me: same, I think almost everyone is going to Berlin

Her: I guess yea

Me: so what are you up to there?

Etc.

> friend zone

People who think like this exude unattractiveness, no matter how old you luck or how smart and funny and talented you are in your non-dating life.

If you go online dating and end up making friends, you WON online dating, because now you have wingpeople IRL to want to hook you up with their friends.

> because now you have wingpeople IRL to want to hook you up with their friends.

Not all friends are the type to wing other friends. Especially not casual friends, which is still what a “friend zone” includes.

I find this kinda odd to be honest. Like you want your friends to be happy. So if you have two single friends that you think might hit it off, why not? You don't have to set them up on a blind date, but just host some event and invite both. No real pressure.

>you want your friends to be happy That's the assumption you're making!

You need better friends then (also, press enter twice to get a new line on HN)

Right. There is a lot to be said about how the apps don't really reflect the reality. What you're talking about creates a feedback loop where women get more selective as men get more desperate.

But the issue of hookups is odd. I don't know if most people find hookups objectionable. I know a lot of people probably want some kind of connection. I see that constantly in women's profiles. So how do we end up with hookups anyway in spite of no one wanting it? I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that in my experience, being upfront to women about wanting a serious relationship seems to scare them off. Why would that be?

One possibility is that women choose hookups in some cases or as a bargaining tool to get a relationship. My own thought is dating apps should probably discourage this instead of selling false hope to men. They could just limit the number of matches or maybe try to set it up so people go for relationships instead of a hookup.

>too many choice problem

This is a different issue I think but it is true. I think what happens is people assume they can do better always and that might not even be true. I could see how people would miss a good match hoping for a perfect one, then age, then face worse options and end up single and alone. I think this is a serious problem we're facing that we should confront.

Another issue I have experienced is that you realize too late that you aren't compatible. It's a lot of effort to get close to people and you end up building up all this attraction in the process. It's by design. Women won't talk to you, period, unless you build attraction. But then you start to learn about each other and realize ok wow this person is completely different and we have very different values.

If you tried this the other way around and put your values in your profile or start asking questions before any attraction is built up on these apps, the women don't respond well to it. It's too boring and dry for them.

> feedback loop where women get more selective as men get more desperate.

> So how do we end up with hookups anyway in spite of no one wanting it?

I think this may be one aspect of the answer. If you're dying of thirst then you'll drink dirty water. But after you've hydrated yourself you think more about how dirty the water is. So you go on searching for clean water. Find yourself dehydrated again, and repeat. I don't think this is a male or female problem, but that we are sexual beings by nature. Even women have post-nut clarity. I'd say that there is even a post validation clarity too. I know when men go through sprints where they get no matches they just start matching with everyone to just get some sort of validation.[0]

But I think there are other issues too. This is definitely a complicated situation and I think the problems with the apps is that they are over simplifying the criteria that people match on. And let's be real here, there's not much incentive pressures to get these apps to actually match people. Dating businesses are weird because the end goal is to get rid of your user. If you're trying to maximize profits you aren't trying to maximize compatibility.

> Another issue I have experienced is that you realize too late that you aren't compatible. It's a lot of effort to get close to people and you end up building up all this attraction in the process. It's by design. Women won't talk to you, period, unless you build attraction. But then you start to learn about each other and realize ok wow this person is completely different and we have very different values.

Something from my perspective, that I don't think is by any means unique to me, is that I notice that someone becomes more physically attractive the more I mentally jive with them. I think this is what gimmicky shows that hide the potential matches exploit. But I'm not sure that's useful either. This really isn't a solution I can really see technology fixing. Physical attraction is definitely the bait in relationship forming but it isn't what reels people in (unless hookup or vanity seeking, which is a valid approach, just not mine). I'm sure I've missed potential matches that would have become exceedingly beautiful to me because the selection criteria is highly dependent on photos. But I don't think things are any better on OkCupid (tried years ago) where you can write a lot about yourself. There too are different selective pressures here because of match rates and this plays a big role in strategies. But I don't think we talk enough about our differing experiences.

[0] To further elaborate on this I've even noticed that when I delete and reinstall the app that the variance of the number of matches I get is extremely high. One reset can get me multiple matches a week for over a month. Another reset can get me zero matches for an entire month. There's a lot of variables at play here, but this is mentally taxing playing with this black box, and that's more what I'm trying to get with all this. Because maybe if we understand what is mentally taxing to each of us we can build better connections (empathy definitely plays an important role in match making)

interesting that you are hacking the apps. I didn't realize you could use the same # over and over. They've done everything they can to not allow VOIP so I had to use my actual #. The extent of this I have done was previously running the app in a VM and being able to change location without having to pay but they made it too difficult and I just decided to pay because it's not that much.

definitely the business model is messed up though.

In retrospect I probably saw warning signs that I wasn't compatible with someone but ignored it because I just wanted a match. Maybe that is part of what was happening when I said I found out too late someone wasn't compatible. It's quite possible I was forcing something to happen. I have to think about that, it was months ago now.

You might be on to something describing the need for validation and desperation that happens. It's definitely making decisions with clouded judgement. A part of me thinks that people shouldn't make the matches themselves, they should be assigned after being checked for compatibility and attraction before any chatting happens. not sure there is a perfect way to do this though.

Oh there are other ways I've found to hack the algorithm. It is really black box probing. I don't think it too difficult if you're into ML interpretation or a hacker, but I firmly believe that this should not be a necessary condition to get matches. That is where the root of the issue lies. If you have to hack the algorithm to make matches, the algorithm has failed. I really do not think Tinder has anywhere near an acceptable algorithm for matching people. I also don't think Bumble is any better.

> In retrospect I probably saw warning signs that I wasn't compatible with someone but ignored it because I just wanted a match.

I think this is unfortunately what that failure causes. Men particularly are lonely (in different ways than women, see thirst analogy above) because social pressures tend to push us to not be as social. So we crave attention and will stay in bad relationships because the fear of loneliness is greater. As someone who has done this recently, I think it is often hard for us to talk about these things openly (social norms).

Both men and women are seeking validation and are desperate, but just in different ways. I really think an issue is that we're not listening to one another and assuming our realities are very similar. Empathy is one of the real things that make humans unique, but I think these apps remove that component and that's why I dislike them.

It's socially frowned upon to say you want hookups, and (especially for women) saying that attracts lower quality hookups.

ya I think that is true. I doubt people planning this write it that bluntly. I don't know what men who plan this say and write, probably something vaguely sexual and provocative.

I do see women write "not looking for anything serious" somewhat commonly.

OTOH I think it goes nowhere if you write you want a serious stable relationship, maybe wife and children at some point. I am guessing but I think it scares some women off and it doesn't really build attraction with them. I have seen women write this in their profiles and when you mention you want something similar the conversation fizzles out real quick. I don't think there is any hard rule here though. A lot of factors can affect this.

> But I think this is simply mirroring how things works in the real world (in very early considerations of who to approach). Getting this person out of the app into an in-person conversation should be the goal.

It definitely was not similar for me. My relationships were in general with people I already knew somehow and seen them interact with others. I would not date someone with only such limited knowledge of. It did not seemed like a good idea.

The issue with dating apps is that your discoverability is locked behind how much you pay.

I used to get lots of Tinder matches. Then I went about 2 months of nothing. I felt like it must be holding matches back. So I paid for a Tinder boost, where you become seen by more people for 30 minutes (or so they say). Within a few minutes I had like 2 new matches, within 30 minutes I had 6.

Now, if Tinder was doing what they claimed, why aren't they showing me to these people? Why don't they show me to people who have the same interests? Clearly there's more people that would match with me but they can only find them when you pay up money.

From a cynical business POV it's in a dating app's best interest to not let you find a relationship and keep you spending money/watching ads.

You could say they want you to have a relationship so you spread good words and bring in new users, but all my experiences go against that.

Ages ago (2013/2014?), when I was on tinder, I remember going through some generations of their algorithm. With their algorithm becoming increasingly hostile as the generations passed.

Gen N - whenever someone liked YOU, Tinder would immediately bring this person to the front of your like queue. This meant that if you hadn't used the app for say, in a day, then the first X persons presented would be people who liked you and you would get a bunch of matches.

Gen N+1 - Gen N was changed, such that maybe you'd get one match if you consistently liked the first 20 or so people in your queue. However, people who liked _you_ were not filtered out by the setting on your distance filter. So, you could set this filter to distance 1 KM, and basically get a list of matches to the forefront again.

Gen N+2 - the above hack was fixed, such that these likes would be filtered out as well (bastards). And then it felt like their algorithm became more and more hostile, post-poning presentation of people who liked you more and more. Basically, they really started to gamify the system, so that you would need to get these "power" boosts to get any matches at all apparently? I quit not long after this filter-hack was "fixed", so not sure what happened then.

The change you describe from N+1 to N+2 wasn’t made to defeat your hack. It was made because we got lots of complaints that people thought the filters were buggy/broken when they saw people who didn’t match their filters and because they were seeing irrelevant people, lowering the chance of a match. The set of people who already liked you were being served out of a different service than regular recommendations and it was, iirc, just a Redis list until fixed. (More generally, we never purposely made the recommendation algo worse to increase boosts or because people would only stay if they didn’t meet someone during my era, even if everyone thought that’s we did. I haven’t been involved in several years however.) In any case, sorry!

>More generally, we never purposely made the recommendation algo worse to increase boosts or because people would only stay if they didn’t meet someone during my era, even if everyone thought that’s we did.

Would anyone admit this publicly? That's a surefire way to destroy your career or getting sued.

Also begs the question for which performance indicators did you optimize if not engagement and retainment?

> From a cynical business POV it's in a dating app's best interest to not let you find a relationship and keep you spending money/watching ads.

https://teddit.net/r/LokiList/comments/s0a0w6/why_i_made_lok...

Why you should never pay for online dating

https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...

This reminded me that OKC used to blog about results and data a lot. Before they got bought by Match it really did seem like they had some interest in matching people. But it is also crazy now that of the 3 main apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge), Match owns 2 (Tinder and Hinge). The unfortunate part of all this is that network effects are essential to dating apps working, so it is hard to enter the space.

Things IRL work differently. I mean, if you are into picking people at bars just by their looks, then yeah, dating apps go in that line. If you have long conversations with a friend of a friend at a party (or on some special interest groups), then dating apps are nothing like that. OK, maybe OkCupid, but back in the good old days.

I often hear from women dating men that they would have swiped left their partner on Tinder.

Almost every partner I have had (including my wife) where duration of relationship exceeded two months, I met IRL by pure chance.

Online? Pretty much only ever resulted in a couple of dates with the person, or a one and done hookup.

Its anecdotal, and friends have had the opposite experience, so I can't draw much of a conclusion from it besides that I was not suited to online dating.

Your experience mirrors mine. My wife and my last serious relationship before - both IRL chance encounter or created through pre-existing friend connections. Some meaningful relationship-ish connections through online dating.

I think the problem for most people is that we simply don't have many opportunities for these type of interactions at a certain point in life. Also, why do you need to have deep conversations before going out on a date? If there is physical attraction and some shared interests, what's the harm of meeting for some drinks?

I don't claim that dating apps are a bad idea - but that they are not optimized for my use case.

Why talking first? Well, for me:

P(attractive|interesting) >> P(interesting|attractive)

and by a few orders of magnitude (1000?). YMMV.

But the best way to talk is...on date!

Texting or whatever is terrible. There's no way to convey sense of humor and text is rife with misunderstanding tone.

I think the issue here is that if you're the type that prefers the latter method then there's no real app for that and I'm not convinced you can have such an experience on an app. Best I can think of is that you provide chat rooms and pressure people into talking one on one. But the in person experience you're describing also highly depends on a lot of non-verbal cues, albeit noisy and easy to misinterpret. These cues don't translate really well in text (and I'm sure that the metaverse isn't going to fix this either).

I have yet to be with someone I had an initial physical attraction to. My current girlfriend didn't appeal to me until we spent some time chatting while hanging out with mutual friends. It's the best relationship I've yet had.

Online dating, every time I have tried it, has been such an awful experience that I decided I preferred celibacy. Oh, and it has only got worse as time has gone on. Frankly, I'm amazed our species manages to reproduce under these conditions.

Dating and reproduction have different requirements and happen at different periods. It’s like travel and emigration.

> A 'date me' profile feels like the opposite -- trying to get a bunch of data on someone before actually interacting with them in person. I think this is completely backwards and we need to lean in far more into IRL experiences.

I don't think so at all.

The thing about meeting IRL is that you get a ton of context just by how you meet. Where did you meet? How were they dressed? Were they with friends; what are their friends like?

And sure, there's a difference between online and IRL. But a big part of that is driven by the inherent structure of online dating. Without any sort of filters, there's nothing to stop extreme "r" style daters from drowning everyone else out.

This is an interesting dichotomy to me. I've been married and not dating for a while now, but back in the 2000-2007 era, I was pretty active on the sites available back then. It was great in the really early days. I was able to meet multiple reasonably well-known television actresses since I lived in LA and the overall pool was still small enough. I didn't even have to contact them. They found me!

I always took the approach you're advocating. Get off the site as quickly as possible, ideally only one message, and then meet in person. I didn't see much point in getting to know someone only to find there's no physical chemistry. That worked well in terms of just getting dates. At least back then, plenty of women felt the same way and weren't as overwhelmed by sheer numbers or as cautious, especially at that younger age, being I was still in my early 20s.

It's ironic, though, because I did meet my wife on OkCupid (granting she's my third wife, and I met the other two in school), but not in this way. They used to have social features in the pre-Match Group days, including the ability to post a personal journal and follow other people's journals. Before they also introduced discussion forums, this resulted in online communities of people who all followed each other, talking about basic issues of romance, but not necessarily actually dating since this was spread all over the country and even other countries, not local. At the time, I still lived in LA and my now wife lived in New York, so we "knew" other and talked plenty, but never had any plans to meet. I didn't meet her until years later when we both happened to move to Dallas independently. So assuming you're in to win it and not just to hit it, the only real "success" I ever had online dating was someone I didn't meet until six years after our first message exchange. Most of the people I immediately met never went past three dates.

The problem with dating (both in person and in apps) is that you have this period of bullshit during early interactions. It's worse with dating apps, since you can have old/fake/not representative pictures (as opposed to being overly made up in a dark environment) and it's easier to spin a web of lies when you're not being interrogated face to face. Dating apps are also too much work, it'd be nice if they were fun.

My ideal dating app would just let me record short video questions/statements with a filter that makes them somewhat homogenous (no duck face/angle play, background replaced with something generic, etc), then let other people respond with their own similar videos, and an algorithm would order responses based on my past swiping history. This would make it sort of like a tiktok-esque video chat app for single people. If the video questions/responses were ephemeral That would eliminate a lot of the fakeness as well, unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day.

> unless you wanted to get made up for glamour videos every day.

Which is what most single women do.

I don't see how this is "hyper-optimized". Doesn't seen to be an attempt to optimize anything. It's just a new genre of blogging. A long-form, modern version of ads people ran in the classified section a hundred years ago.

I think there should be an XML schema for these docs ;) Make it machine readable. Then we can talk about optimization.

A federated, open online dating protocol could be a real glimmer of hope in a world of soul-crushing IAC monopoly.

Who wants to start the OpenDating 1.0 RFC?

> A federated, open online dating protocol

A natural way to implement this would be to extend ActivityPub and build modules for Fediverse sites like Mastodon that add dating site features. (In fact, ActivityStreams already has support[0] for defining relationships between people, with "Would Like To Know" being a standardised value[1]).

The searching/matching functionality would probably have to be done at the level of an aggregator, like "Social Search"[2], but what's really needed is a privacy-preserving way of only revealing your contact information to someone who matches with you. That's sort of equivalent to the "socialist millionaire problem"[3], so there could be a nice zero-knowledge protocol for implementing this. You might need to couple it with some form of proof-of-personhood / Sybil-resistance, though, to stop someone just generating every possible profile and matching with everyone else.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-relati...

[1] https://vocab.org/relationship/#wouldLikeToKnow

[2] https://search.noc.social/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaire_problem

IAC?

Ahh -- InterActiveCorp?

yes along with Match Group they own Vimeo, Dotdash, Tinder, Match, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid and Hinge, and ANGI Homeservices, HomeAdvisor, Angie's List and Handy.

Serious question: anything like this exist?

https://old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/ete9on/new_full...

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/dating-is-a-free-softwar...

how would an open federated one be less soul crushing though? this is not me trying to undermine you with a passive aggressive question. I would like to hear about this idea.

Agreed. I don't really see the current apps as flexing some sort of monopolistic power to give you shittier dates. Their solution to the classic problem of asymmetric supply/demand regarding hot/not hot people is for them to take a fee.

Actually match corp owns idk at the moment but something like 90% of dating apps and sites. 100% of the popular ones so they are a monopoly.

There has been some decent research highly suggesting match optimizes for failure of its customers. It makes sense since in their biz a happy customer us no longer a customer.

I could see that happening (whether on purpose or even inadvertently) but haven't seen any such literature myself. Do you have some references (asking earnestly)?

I've read enough people say that these apps are "soul crushing" and people explain that sadly this characteristic is baked into the algorithms in order to a)make the apps/games addictive and b) keep people engaged, c)make people, especially men, think that there's hope - but only if they sign up for a subscription.

If I had to guess I'd say 99.99% of profiles and profile views in such a setting would be male.

Datecoin could be the unironically be very good solution.

Ha, it would be a total disaster. There are already a dozen or so startups doing some variant of “dating on a blockchain” and they're all doomed to failure, because 99% of the people who think that's a good idea are nerdy (read: unattractive) heterosexual men.

All the gay dudes are on Tinder instead, and all the heterosexual women that like nerdy men have a gazillion options already, so any blockchain-based or open-source dating protocol would be a total sausage party.

Yup I would not personally try it because these reason but it would still be those stupid but same time kinda brilliant idea.

Bizarrely, and to my utter surprise (as someone who has worked in tech all my adult life and recently decided to try crypto) I think there are more women in crypto than any other tech field I've been in.

In the NFT field (as in people working in it, not holders) I'd say in some cases it would approach 50% female/male.

Yep, crypto (currency) has a MUCH better gender and diversity balance than most of the rest of tech.

Which is deeply funny, because a lot of the "rest of tech" likes to slam it as a "white dudes only" club.

> "rest of tech" likes to slam it as a "white dudes only" club

I don't think this is true - at least I haven't heard that criticism in particular. In the NFT world the Vice (I think?) where they went to the BAYC party pointed out how it sort of felt like weird mix of wannabe rap artists, scam artists and tupperware sales parties.

The NFT world is very racially diverse. DeFi does run white/Asian I guess.

Do you mean NFT tech people, or artists trying to make money from NFT connected to their art?

Because the artists are also in the art scene, which is a much nicer scene to get into

Both.

I think arts administration has a large proportion of female workers, some of whom now run NFT projects

Sausagecoin

Nerdy is not what makes someone unattractive. In the Blockchain space especially, nerdy is not the part that turns people off.

Bumble exists too, so its a duopoly.

Feeld seems to be picking up steam.

Coffee Meets Bagel?

Agree with all except the XML schema in 2022, jesus christ.

It was a joke - sort of ;)

the other options being yaml and json? protobufs? csv? there isn't a clear winner in my mind, but as long as I'm not writing it out by hand and there's a helper library to do it for me, it's all good.

There was somethink like that, Geek Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code

The best way to "optimize" for dating is to: 2) Become hot and 2) become happy.

A happy and hot person is someone more people want to be around. If more people want to hang out with you, you have more options, become less needy, become more clear headed ... list goes on, it's a virtuous cycle.

Using the scale of 1-10 is not great, but its mildly accurate... most people, via work on their character, attitude, physic, lifestyle, finances, fashion, etc. can bump themselves up as much as like 3-6 "levels" on the "hot scale". Seriously. Some people can go from like a 3 to an 8. One's life changes drastically when this happens.

Doesn't matter if its a dating app, bar, friend of friend, w.e. It's much easier to find a partner if a person is very satisfied with who you are.

For me, it always comes down to genuine self-esteem. Someone's fashion style, physic, or facial symmetry really doesn't matter if they have no confidence in themselves.

But it does matter if the have.

In other words, have something to offer that is worth more to others than it is to you,so people want to be around you but don't drag you down. (This is looking-gglass similar but very diffrent from desperately simping, which costs you more than it benefits them).

Agreed. Perhaps it's due to the people who frequent HN, but it's amusing to see so many think they can "algorithm" their way into the relationship(s) they want. Some even proposing blockchain solutions!

If we're going to redefine dating profiles I'd like to propose my ideal: A random sampling of 10 of your recent conversations with others. I know that's not feasible and wouldn't happen if it was. But I think for me one of the most important things is figuring out who this person really is in practice.

Struggling with what this would mean in practice -- do you mean like a screenshot / recording of the text / voice conversations you've had? I wonder if it might be tough to filter out things that are mostly just logistics, which personally tend to be a big percentage of my electronic-based interactions.

I mean face-to-face interactions. The goal is to find someone that cares about others and can think selflessly on a regular basis.

The problem with that is the heavy bias towards people having a good day, and the chilling effect it will have as everyone spends their lives talking in an instagram worthy way. Black mirror.

Goodhart's law strikes again.

Doesn’t matter. For me I’m looking for someone that does good to others. If people are doing that because they’ve been tricked into it then so be it.

Saying the right things for the media and doing good are 2 different things.

I don't see how anyone besides this one, random, survivor-biased Twitter dude will have any luck with throwing a message-in-a-bottle doc out there. No one will ever read it. They'd have better luck posting flyers at bus stops and near Whole Foods.

There's a balance between being organized and tilting at windmills seeking a love "algorithm".

Get your sh*t together and it will come. Or be hot and have fun.

In bragging-disclaimer: I live in a major metro (with a respected university) where there's an infinite supply of women and no real need for a dating app. I don't understand hookup apps as they feel gross and Brave New World to me while dating apps feel loser-ish for people who can't socialize but are desperate.

Where did you socialize during Covid?

Outside, at a nearby park after the first couple of weeks of lockdown.

People with vague senses of sense recognised outdoor hangouts were basically zero risk.

> while dating apps feel loser-ish for people who can't socialize but are desperate.

Apps allow you be to visible to other people who are also open to getting together. Not all of the "infinite supply of women" in your area want to be approached at stores, work, on the sidewalk, etc.. Giving them control over who can talk to them (and when) can make dating a safer experience.

Further, there may be people with similar interests who live further away and don't frequent your circuit of clubs, bars, or wherever else you meet people. Apps can bridge those distances too.

And for other populations like LGBT folks, where they're a minority seeking a minority, apps are basically required in certain areas.

Your view here feels overly reductive.

The sweet spot might be singles nights and events. You go expecting to maybe be chatted up but it is in the physical realm.

But yes nothing wrong with using online tools. Same arguments can be made about online food ordering or job searches.

Searching for jobs online is for losers. Normal people don't resort to that; they print out a bunch of resumes, then go door-to-door and demand to talk to the hiring manager for local companies.

(/s if it's not obvious)

Get the /s … but sounds like it might be a conversation between generations in say 1997

Yeah, that's the idea. There's still people complaining about how their Boomer parents or grandparents are saying stuff exactly like that though, and it's just as realistic and relevant as the idea that online dating is for "losers". Online dating works great (well, better than the alternatives at least) for people who have already exhausted their social circle, which is pretty much everyone who's over the age of 30 and doesn't hang out at bars or have a job that puts them into contact with new dateable people on a regular basis.

For older demographics in less populated areas, dating apps are often the only reliable way to meet new people. There isn't an "infinite supply" of either gender, especially not single people. Though I agree with your other points, and as a loser-ish person who doesn't like to socialize, I recognize that is a limiting factor for me as well.

So what, they reinvented OKCupid profiles circa 2010, but self-published?

Interestingly, the date-me doc linked in the title [1] has apparently been taken down for ToS violations.

1. https://twitter.com/ch402/status/1564631228166201345?s=20&t=...

There are several misuse cases when publishing the source code to your heart. Namely, bad actors will know how to hack you.

Dating apps enormously improve discoverability - find like-minded people in roughly the same area, but whom you'd never meet. It's not like the day before dating apps you had this rich network and you lost it. It's a net plus. You can still do IRL, in fact you might have better chances at it, because it is a rarer skill.

Agree with discoverability. I met some fellow programmers :)

Were they girls though? :P

Yep ;-)

In my area (suburbs) the only women's profiles I saw in Hinge that were programmers were in Standouts - which basically means they are unmatchable. You can try, but you will fail.

It seems, the world is stumbling back onto the Hindu-system of having multiple 'jatis' that hyper-specialize in everything from archery to metallurgy to mathematics, and basically turning into endogamous communities for much better success in partnership. Many 'elites' I run into are already doing this.

(The trouble Indians face today is that these medieval groupings are no longer functionally meaningful - all the rest of it is 'anti-heathen' bullshit that derives more from Christian propaganda than lived reality.)

Had to look up "jati" cause I wasn't sure if it was a person, place, or thing:

> (Hinduism) a Hindu caste or distinctive social group of which there are thousands throughout India; a special characteristic is often the exclusive occupation of its male members (such as barber or potter)

What's wrong with me that I never used dating apps and never had problems finding people to date through friend of friends or social-oriented clubs(ie intramural sports leagues)? Are my standards just too low? Everyone I've dated I've already known on a platonic level - I think it would be really weird to go out on a date where you've basically just looked at their picture.

Lots of people just don’t have that kind of friends network.

It’s an attractor some social circles get stuck in. All my friends and all my friends’ friends are on dating apps, and all the new couples I’ve known since college met on dating apps. It is weird, and nobody I’ve talked to likes dating apps, but no one individual can really break the equilibrium.

> through friend of friends or social-oriented clubs

Seems likely a limited pool of relatively homogenous people to date in? That's why people use apps - to meet different people outside their friend and hobby groups.

And I think a lot of people very specifically don't want to date in friend and hobby groups, to avoid mess.

I mean, you're probably not freakishly ugly and cringe-inducing like most of the crazies on HN. Oddly enough, it's not my sharp mind, good looks or impeccable charm that keeps the ladies interested IRL. It's my reputation for being utterly despised by dang.

Wait so if I put "Despised by dang" on my profile I might get more matches? I have to try that.

Dating apps are supposed to work for people like me who don't belong to sports leagues, or have any outside-the-house hobbies, or really have strong platonic friendships. [1]

They don't work, but they're sold with such a premise.

[1] My last really good platonic friendship is now my spouse of a few years.

"Dating apps are for people who are terrible at dating, and they don't help" is classic "identify a problem and sell a fake solution" advertising-driven -sales business. (See also: politicians)

Possibly tangential, but I'm currently reading a very interesting and insightful comic book by the (IMHO) great Liv Strömqvist. She describes that romantic love is muchly devaluated because it's not perceived as a magical/mystical thing any more. These days, love and dating are driven by data and measurements, just like everything else. She argues that this makes it essentially much more rationally accessible and consequently a lot weaker.

The book is apparently not available in English yet, but will be released by Fantagraphics [1]. I found the insights very eye-opening and frankly somewhat depressing.

[1] https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/liv-stromquist/pro...

I like this idea. I have found dating apps to really push you into a box. It's strange to say that men might like monogamy because it's so reinforced that all they want is casual sex. You can't escape this box on dating apps. In my experience, in fact, stating this on dating apps pushes women away. The format is geared towards casual hookups too. You can't just abruptly go on and on about yourself and what you want to make sure the other person is a match. You will be ghosted.

So as a result the dating apps push you to be brief, flirtatious, and a lot of people use completely canned, artificial profiles and pickup lines. This idea does seem freeing from that but I don't know how you would drive people to view the date me doc in order to find someone who likes you. Reaching a target audience is an age old problem.

https://archive.ph/pWIPE

Hot-take: Are social media platforms all fundamentally just fad services that burn out due to bad design decision accumulation and/or unsustainable business models?

Friendster. AIM. Match. MySpace. Facebook. Tumblr. Flickr. Tinder. Twitter? TikTok? All dying or dead.

Elon is going to break Twitter. Will the US gov ban TikTok? What will come after?

Only exception I can imagine is Reddit, although it may just be slower given that it’s more of a forum than social media. It has its own myriad of technical problems that bog it down.

>Only exception I can imagine is Reddit, although it may just be slower given that it’s more of a forum than social media. It has its own myriad of technical problems that bog it down.

Reddit has banned everyone interesting that used to post there. Now it's just repost bots replaying to repost bots.

That's not my experience, but I mostly only subscribe and read smaller subreddits many of which I have found quite interesting and helpful.

Then you're not looking very far. Go to a discussion from 5 years ago which talked about something useful in any topic and you'd find more than half the people were banned.

yes and no. Some social media sites are still around after a long time but I think a big perk of these apps is having an 'in crowd' that produces content. Once the site is too popular it attracts people who are no longer in the in crowd and people move on.

What does this have to do with the post though?

Clearly not the future of dating.

Paradox of choice. What’s interesting to me is that despite the enormous amount of effort Americans put into dating, the couples don’t seem any happier or better matched than the facilitated marriages where I’m from.

Does anyone actually do this, or is it just wired being wired?

I thought about doing it, but never really got to it. Similar to what many in the articles have claimed, online dating is really really HARD. So I came to the same idea on my own. Not surprised at all.

I know several people who have done this.

My understanding so far is that it's a "thing" in Lesswrong/Rationalist circles [1-2], but I'm not sure about outside of that.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/axmxy7kiqwcRPSGXH/are-long-f...

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6yiayg5QWtWme4JN8/anatomy-of...

It doesn't really sound like that bad of an idea, considering tinder's business model of dicking people around. The only problem is getting a bunch of people to do it

It seems to be popular among mildly autistic tech workers.

That's an oddly specific observation to make. Why them in particular?

Going oblique - I've seen people do this, but the doc is a tik-tok profile. I know of 3 woman-seeking-woman couples that found each other this way.

RMS had one ages ago. People made fun of him for it buti thought it was cool

it was so ernest!

I’m fully convinced long form writing is the way to go and working on an app/site based on this premise: https://textually.app/

> "you need to be properly verified (as an actual person) before being allowed to post"

What method are you planning to use to determine whether a person is "actual" or not?

(Also you talk about going "from blobs of text to more structured data", but is the plan to allow keyword searching for common interests, and allow filtering out profiles based on attributes you are not compatible with, once this structured data is available? I can imagine the UX being quite frustrating for, say, someone who only wants to date a vegan, if they end up having to read thousands of words from dozens of people before finding that keyword. At that point it would make more sense to write a browser extension that automates the "Ctrl-F" and "swipe left" steps until it finds a relevant profile.)

(Disclaimer: I am making this all up as I go along. I just have a vague hunch that there exists a world of people who prefer reading long form text over swiping anything.)

1. I am imagining it to be really small, so either personal referrals or actual verification of people.

2. And yes, once there is some structure forming in the data, it will allow for labelling and searching on these criteria. This is how it naturally evolves, e.g. in subreddits that invent their own lexicon and labelling allowing for quick filtering.

so why dont we have AI for mating?

...Isn't that just your brain?

suggested hot girls in your area!

*girl . Singular. The AI has found the One and can never be wrong

The propagation of the species is too important to be left to rational choices. This is why places optimized for finding partners tend to have things like alcohol, dark lighting, flashing lights, loud music etc to subdue the neocortex. These kind of attempts to treat dating like hiring are largely doomed to failure, though you might see an occasional couple hitting it off.

This article and the comments on it are veering into creepy, Richard Stallman "pleasure card" (or Chris Chan "love sign") territory.

>Normal online dating seems pretty suboptimal. Recently, I’ve seen several people experiment with public ‘date me’ docs

Why not write a message on the walls or post ads on phone poles?

Actually difficult to find dates irl.

Beyond apps, or any methods, lots of females are just busy with life. They got friends, hobbies, social media, endless entertainment and a career path.

I wonder if we'll go the way of Japan, where virtual girlfriends and virtual social lives are increasingly seen as a better option then real life relationships.

As technology gets better, I think this will be a more default option for people. Imagine dating someone that's always available, always interested in you and your hobbies, and there's never any need to compromise. You can pause them at any time when you are tired etc.

Not to mention less and less people have best friends or friends. More interactions is purely virtual. At some point, if a bot passed the Turing test, what's the difference? Virtual youtubers have a mass following despite being a purely virtual being. Could an AI model be trained to act like them, with the latest AI voices that sound real?

Honestly, I'm the same. Dating is just so time consuming and there's no many other things I want to do. Work is already 6+ hours, watching anime, playing games, reading, writing, doing podcast and walking. So much I want to do and so little time. Or maybe I'm just saying this cause I have no partner kek

> females

Callin 'em "women" would be a step in the right direction re: dating.

Unless you're a Ferengi, then it's okay!

> At some point, if a bot passed the Turing test, what's the difference? Virtual youtubers have a mass following despite being a purely virtual being. Could an AI model be trained to act like them, with the latest AI voices that sound real?

There have actually been attempts at creating AI chatbots for companionship, like Replika: https://replika.ai/

It was curious to take a look at it, but it very obviously had its limitations and was directed towards watered down conversation and whatnot, for being marketable. Probably still useful or therapeutic for some folks to talk or vent when nobody is available!

That said, the idea of actually building "relationships" with bots has garnered some criticism, here's one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUQNiy4K7VU

It is exaggerated for views, but at the end of the day you'd still end up with a possibly unhealthy substitute for an actual human connection, much like attempting to replace aspects of intimacy with pornography.

Even outside of things like that, parasocial relationships usually aren't very healthy either, since you're still an audience, as opposed to interacting 1:1 with another person.

Also, those VTubers still have real people behind them, with their own senses of humor, personalities and other aspects, which wouldn't even be easy for AI to replicate or substitute.

Personally, I try not to be too judgmental of these things, because everything that I named probably has a place in the lives of many folks out there, but looking for ways of turning away from human relationships reminds me of something like "Bowling Alone": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

I also say that as someone who isn't doing too well with dating, admittedly.

Yeah, I've been wondering about whether vtubers have not been handicapping themselves by not using their much more expressive real faces... (and before someone points it out, this is not that much about looking attractive : consider the many otherwise pretty photograph-ugly comedians and stand up artists that are completely transformed thanks to their wit and charisma...)

I would rather be lonely for the rest of my life than get fake companionship from a bot. The fact that already exists is dystopian as all hell.

> I wonder if we'll go the way of Japan, where virtual girlfriends and virtual social lives are increasingly seen as a better option then real life relationships.

That's overstated. Japanese people weren't into relationships because their economy was bad, which made them not marriage material. (They still had sex though, just not relationships.)

It's improved a little; you don't hear so much about hopeless otaku anymore and the birth rate has gone up slightly.

Erotic role-playing with an offline bot would be pretty cool.

Well, there are a lots of issues with this, so I will just point at the most obvious one : if ultimately one of your main goals is to find someone to raise your kids with, it's more of a hindrance than a help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com