Working for a Dating Website (2015)
caseysoftware.com
caseysoftware.com
At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if
every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd
be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?"
I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians.
If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut
it down and get back to making music."
He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about
the survival of his company.
To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers
more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good
service? *It's all about them, not you.*
Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team).
Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.
He carefully keeps that one out of sight.
Shareholders can be told that they are aiming at Mars, full stop. As long as they don't control the voting and were told that before they bought the shares, it's fine.
In theory, but rarely in practice. I've seen a lot of private, family-owned businesses go out of business or get sold after the son/successor takes over because of exactly the phenomenon jesuscript mentions. Even if the successor cares, they don't care about the same things as the founder.
I am living that particular dream (nightmare) as are a handful of us 'vision loyalists'.
Google has the focus and the vision of a crack addled flea.
This is the reason why Google can launch so many products, but also why they can cancel so many products: there is no person holding the reins and instead middle managers just go off and do their own thing. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all have a clear power center created by the founders, Google doesn't have that which is why they are so much more unpredictable.
Honestly, Ruth Porat seems to run most of the impactful decisions at the C-level, and that's a good thing.
He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.
A good follow up question is why not make CD Baby a non-profit instead of for-profit? Being a non-profit foundation would telegraph to everyone, including future leadership, where their priorities should lie.
Also, the extra accounting and regulation is intense for a small organization.
These have been getting popular recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
But having said that the creator could make tons of money and then shut it down because it is not needed. That's perfectly logical
- first it was a non profit credit union that served a few local large companies.
- then it became a larger “regional credit union”
- then they said “fuck it we are a for profit bank”.
Every large organization seeks to increase its power. You see the sane thing in churches.
He's really more an example of someone who was forced to correct some pretty massive defects and lack of vision in important areas where most lottery winning founding CEOs will never get corrections.
I would be kind of curious but I found it very funny if he wasn't a black mark against Next hardware back then given that workstation users were already going to see consumer as cheap even if he didn't have a reputation for cheapening his line further.
Really I think his behavior was much more inline with Cook than his earlier self once he was successful and founder envy was more an external benefit than related to some actual behavior he had.
That wasn't what CDBaby lost to. They lost to the fact that CDs disappeared. CDBaby had a great business, removing a pain point, and they could genuinely want that pain point to go away entirely.
Such are the best possible businesses, genuinely caring about your customers while having enough moat to avoid being undercut tomorrow. Not all businesses can do that, regardless of the best intentions of management.
Bad business extracts value from customers.
Can anyone imagine the hell that would be "every musician setting up their own website?" Centralization offers a lot of benefits to the users. I can buy CDs of multiple artists at the same time. I can find similar artists (there's a natural competition here). None of this one password per artist. There's a reduced security risk for me buying from a centralized service (just need to trust one site instead of hundreds, and specifically small artists that might not know things). I definitely would not have answered that question so well.
If you good-service yourself into being unprofitable and eventually bankrupt, it's not good for yourself and eventually your customers as well.
I interned at a dating site a while ago and there's no need to taint anything. People are far too complicated to predict beyond who will send a message to who. Also, the problem is adversarial (IE, people misrepresent themselves as the person they want to be as opposed to the person they are), so trying to find the signal is a continuous game of cat and mouse.
Not if you already have almost the whole market to yourself.
> Match Group ... owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, UPWARD, Ship, and OurTime, totalling over 45 global dating companies
And if we don't suppose that, I do not see relevance of that quote.
https://infogram.com/us-dating-app-marketshare-1h8n6m3konzmz...
Intuitively, the largest dating app has a moat because people will open the app that has the people they want to date. Nevertheless, Match has had to continue acquiring competitors in order to stay in first place. So maybe that moat isn't so defensible?
A steady stream of top businessmen, actors, sportsmen etc. are being divorced by their wives. If these people can’t maintain a marriage, how much more difficult is it for most people?
Top execs are often married to their jobs with less time for family. Actors are exposed often to very liberal and beautiful people (affairs are common). And people on the lower economic rungs are more incentivized to stay together to spend less money.
The research actually shows that the upper end of the income distribution is more likely to 1) marry and 2) remain married. The lower and middle classes have been most disrupted by social change in the last 50 years.
Because they are much more desirable than average people are.
Results are tainted by default. The simplest dating app is a random number generator attached to a list of user IDs. This probably performs badly. (But who knows? Maybe build it and see what happens!)
The question is simply whether there is really a deliberate, focused effort to identify who gets into long-term relationships and to replicate the conditions that lead to such relationships. If dating sites were actually trying to help their customers, they would do this; someone would have worked on it; there would be an internal lore about what was learned from these attempts. The absence of any of this shows that it just isn't a priority, and that's enough.
>Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine
One problem with modern dating is that people don't have a potential partner's reputation to go on as much as they used to. Relationships formed "through friends" have declined significantly, in tandem with a decline in friendships themselves. But this decline in friendships also poses a problem for any word-of-mouth dating site marketing strategy. People who have lots of friends are probably the least likely to benefit from dating apps, but they're the most likely to hear about the hypothetical "good dating app".
I don't actually know how most of my friends met their partners — even people who I know many other things about. It's in my mind as an awkward question. Furthermore, most long-term relationships in my friend group are older than most dating apps. It would inevitably take years to build a reputation as a dating site that does this, because you don't know if you have a stable relationship until it stands the test of time. But investors generally aren't so patient.
Or maybe the absence of it shows that the problem is much harder than it sounds.
> One problem with modern dating is that people don't have a potential partner's reputation to go on as much as they used to. Relationships formed "through friends" have declined significantly, in tandem with a decline in friendships themselves. But this decline in friendships also poses a problem for any word-of-mouth dating site marketing strategy. People who have lots of friends are probably the least likely to benefit from dating apps, but they're the most likely to hear about the hypothetical "good dating app".
This is correct, but good luck implementing this in a business while having to tip toe around claims of discrimination, quite possibly getting entangled with the law.
I suspect there are reasons why this never happened but I doubt they are good reasons.
The dating apps actually work better for hookups (including people travelling), and the companies know this, which is why Tinder had those ads promoting "single life".
"Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", written by a co-founder of OkCupid:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...
before they, too, sold out to the Match Group monopoly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ow...
The world needs a site with the moral integrity and user-only focus the likes of lichess.org
A low-costs + donations model ala lichess would actually be quite interesting for a data site.
Maybe you could even convince "alumni" to donate, in appreciation of their successful relationship. The longer it lasted, the more donations.
I understand why it all vanishes (the privacy concerns are non-trivial, storage isn't free), but it would be worth almost any price when the 5/10/20 year anniversaries roll around.
1) why the app appears to remain a terribly bad buggy mess and never seems to improve? Is there any awareness of this in the company? Is it just a legacy code issue?
2) why the desktop web version was shut down?
3) why unlimited pricing is that outrageous?
2) They laid off developers to save money, and desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps, so getting rid f desktop apps always looks like a win for a software maker.
3) There is so much competition with expensive cloud host overhead that if a company can gaslight users into thinking that their app is worth money, they push it all the way in a bid to maximize their traditionally weak earnings on the deceptively small user bases they have... They also create tons of fake accounts and profiles to also emulate that they are running vibrant communities.
This would imply that paywalls and user controls aren't implemented entirely on the server side, which sounds like an obviously bad idea?
- https://web.archive.org/web/20190223153650/http://www.ydesou...
Probably more like a synagogue, but point taken…
Didn't seem to consider revealed preferences and the appeal of people who aren't exactly like you much.
What OKCupid failed at was being a usable dating site. The matching algorithm was awful.
When such a large percentage of people blow it, I tend to blame the UX, not the individuals.
Conversely, if a question cannot be understood by, say, 25% of the population, it's not a simple question.
If hypothetically, you had a benevolent dating website, and then you had 100 attractive men and 100 attractive women on it, that would work just fine.
BUT, that is not what you have with dating websites. Most women don't have trouble meeting men, and don't need to take the additional risk of meeting a stranger on the internet. So the women on dating sites are already self selected in many ways, and in any case there are too few of them in comparison to the men.
I mean, I already frequented an engineering university with 25% female students and that was brutal enough. I do not need to go online on some stupid website to keep experiencing exactly the same bullshit. At least the quality of women at the university was decently high.
Yes, it's quite easy for your average woman to be bombarded with men on OLD. But after a certain age, it starts becoming a problem when you're looking for something more serious. You have a better grasp of who you are, and what you want, and the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff."
A simple progression of tastes. You may have been able to stomach junk food and boxed wine everyday in younger days, but now it revolts you -- and you need something different. Something with subtlety and depth that adds to your life, rather than getting in the way of it.
The majority of people using OLD are young, and shallow, and so the platforms cater to them: creating an experience that's quick, and without depth.
Tinder and Bumble the obvious examples. Compare to OkCupid (before it was bought out by Match.com, and completely destroyed): you could find people and filter through all of them based on a very large amount of aspects you considered important (values, lifestyle, beliefs, etc.) -- to cut down on the wasted time.
Hinge is probably the only dating app I can think of at the moment that creates an experience that isn't so shallow (but it lacks vision, and pales in comparison to what could be -- likely due being developed, once again, by Match).
There's no conclusion here, just my thoughts.
Like you say 'the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff"'. That's one (common) perspective, but I don't know why anyone thinks that someone from one gender is generally better than the other. Maybe one has different expectations, but that doesn't mean that the other gender is garbage like a lot of messaging around dating implies.
Yet dating apps and strategies kind of assume that men put in the effort up front before they really know who the other person is. They are put through a bunch of time and money hoops. Some people may feel they have no other option and feel pressure to act a certain way, which can lead to resentment later on. As a guy it can feel like you are constantly proving yourself with costly signals for the first month (that women don't have to do), so it's hard to relax and open up and can feel defensive.
I think dating should require equal commitment from the beginning. It doesn't have to be exactly 50/50, but as a guy, when you have to do the legwork in the apps (send 100s of messages, etc) and a significant minority of women label you a cheapskate if you don't pay for the first few dates, it's hard to not feel like you are being taken advantage of in dating.
This probably starts by not having a mentality that most men/women you meet aren't going to be human garbage. Of course, don't accept shitty behavior.
Women have issues of course and dating sucks for everyone, just my perspective as a man.
Expectations are also heavily influenced by the gender ratio in a region. If you're living somewhere like "Man Jose" then you're automatically at a disadvantage. Try somewhere else.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11231284/does-san-jose-deserve-the...
There are apps where women have to initiate contact. If you want to put in less effort then just use those.
I remember an article about one such app. I seem to remember that men didn't really like it because the women would initiate the contact with extremely low-effort messages, so it was on the man to get the interaction going.
Basically, it's like a regular app, with an extra step that doesn't really guarantee anything.
IOW, that characterisation only applies to the majority of single people?
Unless you were in the apex male top 5% at the college, that just sounds nuts.
Women may meet a lot of men regardless of dating apps, but everyone wants a bigger better deal. Dating apps provide access to many people, such that a better quality mate is possible. Again, you may be flawed by being in university.
In the real world you meet a far wider range of people in demographic, socioeconomic status, age, education, etc. So the people you meet that may match what you want is drastically lower that university, which will generally function as a filter for socioeconomic status, demographic, location, and especially intelligence. At a technical college, it even preselects for area of interest.
Online is a stacked deck, though I'd agree it can still widen an IRL pool. Met my SO through an online site. Though it still took years and I was using 4 sites at a time, occasionally paid ones too.
Possibly part of the picture. It could also be that women aren't expected to disclose their waist, hip, or bust size; yet men are often expected to disclose their height and fitness.
It is true that it's easier for attractive women, but IME, it really seems like everyone was getting loads of attention. Not just low effort moves for quick sex, although that's still a huge problem. I didn't know any women that didn't get more serious attempts by decent looking, and normal enough guys.
Try computer science in the early 90's if you think that was brutal. More like 2.5%.
If you do a CS major, you're trading social skills and dating prospects for earning potential.
Seriously, never ever mention you're a tech bro if you're at a bar or club. Doesn't matter if you make 300K+, doesn't matter if you've got a fat title. Always say lawyer, doctor, or anything else. Just don't be stupid enough to out yourself as a stemlord.
Where I am, it could either be an asset (for people after your money) or a liability (for those who aren't in tech and hate us for the economic impact), but I date old enough that regardless of money, the women generally dig a stable nerd with a sexy responsible streak.
There's really no point optimizing for profit only, as it almost certainly results in a bad experience for users. Sure, a company can make money (and likely eventually be bought by Match Group, so -cash out-)... but sometimes it's worth actually building something for the good of people.
Yes, if two people match well, you may lose two customers... for a while. Most relationships don't last long term, and people who have had good experiences on a dating site will return when they are seeking companionship or love again. If they were happy with your site before, they will come back to you.
The current dating site options are a wasteland. Not to beat a dead horse, but most are owned by Match Group. And from my experience with several of them, once they land in Match they are not good sites to use.
OkCupid was one of the best at one time, and PlentyOfFish was pretty decent (if you can accept old/functional UI) long ago. But these days, they have pared down the features and upped the pricing to the point where it feels like they are just milking lonely people for all the cash they can get.
At least they are possibly not stuffing fake female accounts like Adult Friend Finder and Ashley Madison did (and I suspect Bumble currently does).
Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...
Do the developers of dating sites think that people will consider it too much of a bother to fill out such things, or consider such questions too invasive? I don't know why; people love personality quizzes.
(IMHO you could make the whole site just a BuzzFeed "what kind of person are you? take this quiz to find out!" site at its core, except through all the quizzes you're doing, it's building up a very thorough psychological profile of you; and when it's got enough, it opens up the ability for you to date through it.)
Good luck, hitting critical mass is probably even harder than in other areas. You can grow a community or meme site with a few users who are really active, but that doesn't really work for dating.
I'd assume that payment adds a hurdle that's somewhat welcome to keep out problematic users, just like rent does. Pay 30% more than the market and you'll only have neighbors who can afford that as well, which are much less likely to be unemployed alcoholics with behavioral issues.
I don't think online dating gets any better until someone devises a means to bias against people that aren't acting in good faith. Of course the challenge here is that you're going to be hard pressed to find a strong consensus on what actions do or do not constitute good faith in a dating app.
From what I understand, these days it's not just the dick picks but also love scammers, which aren't low-effort and are welcome by the recipients until the scam begins. These are harder to combat, but shouldn't tying it to identities help?
Niche sites probably work better in that regard because e.g. Christian Dating sites have less trouble getting a strong consensus on what's appropriate, wouldn't they?
I don’t know from personal experience but from people I know and the woman I’m dating now, the answer is yes. Common enough, and the guys sending them don’t seem to care that their face and name is plastered all over. I was on a hike with my girlfriend and we bumped into a guy that recognized her. They chatted for a bit and after leaving she said he sent her a dick pic a while back.
Scammers are also a major issue, yes. Not sure if tying to identities would help as they presumably could just buy them.
Niche sites don’t really help because most of the time you can’t vet if someone is Christian for example. An acquaintance tried finding a date on Christian Mingle and was almost immediately propositioned in ways certainly inappropriate for the site. And you can’t really message for free on that site, so the men in question were paying.
By being video only and gating it securely through the app you'd eliminate catfishing and a lot of the hard misrepresentation you see on dating sites. Having conversations be public by default and needing permission to DM would also help limit bad male behavior.
(Did a quick search that turned up two low quality links to illustrate what I mean)
https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/nation/lessons-learned-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/found-footage-awkward-80s-vi...
Meanwhile every relationship I had at that time came from OKCupid, including my wife.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the dating sites are now garbage thanks to them all being owned by Match Group, but at least back then they weren't terrible and I had good luck with it as an average-looking nerdy guy, much more than in-person.
I do credit going to meetups regularly with me becoming a bit more well-rounded and sociable of a person and more dateable as a result, though.
Good luck on your dating app personal project. I worked on one professionally for about six months a long time ago, and it was an interesting and fun project, for the most part (that never went anywhere, we treated it seriously but the client was a narcissist that got lucky in real estate that assumed he'd get 10 million users in a few weeks of release with no marketing, he eventually killed the project when he realized that wasn't going to be the case).
I've had ideas for different takes on dating/social apps since that time, and almost considered pursuing it, but it seemed to be too dominated by Match Group, especially post-Tinder, and I care more about games than apps anyway.
Meetups work really well if you're going into one that has a a good ratio of the sex you are interested in.
If you're a single guy, going to Meetups with a Maker theme, or a Star Wars theme, is not going to improve your odds of finding someone - for each girl there, there's 5 guys interested in her.
A good Meetup for single guys to go to is one that is almost completely populated by women (cooking classes used to have a very high ratio of women to men).
Even if these women are attached, they have friends, and IME, attached women are always ready to set up their single friends.
Out of curiosity I checked for cooking meetups just now, as I do a lot of cooking nowadays, and it seems like they're still almost entirely virtual, at least around me (there's a small local group not accepting new people right now also).
> Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...
In principle, I guess, but my experience is that many social spaces of all types are overwhelmingly male. There are probably some commentaries to be made about that, but I'm not sure what.
And while it can set up certain expectations, I don't think that needs to be a bad thing, necessarily.
But the job to be done of a dating site is to either get you more or better dates. I therefore suggest making a site that's just a page of text telling you to move somewhere with more opportunity, get outdoor social hobbies, and become a millionaire.
And yeah, I agree with your final sentiment as well: dating sites should be more like people-meeting sites, but with a romantic focus. Aim for casual meetups that aren't dates but might lead to dates. Maybe collect small groups of people that might be compatible and send them out for drinks and then have them do some basic surveys about the people they met for future filtering purposes (again with the reputational concept).
It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you.
"Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18.
I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it.
There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task.
So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.
Well known as the day when they start being interested in forming a romantic relationship.
It wouldn't though, because most pharma companies are diversified somewhat. However, if your company has little in the pipeline except a cure where your competitors are more diversified, you have strong incentives to sit on a cure for a bit.
* Younger men far outnumber younger women
* Older women far outnumber older men
This is a very shallow article and actually wrong. Dating success stories, i.e. "word of mouth" is the most powerful form of marketing.
As a personal anecdote, FWIW, I tried JDate even though I'm not Jewish, because a friend met his wife there.
> Others will sign up for the site, use it a few times, forget they have a membership, and continue to get billed for it, sometimes for years.
It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also.
> If someone joins the site and is successful, the site loses two customers.
This is where AM is devious because, in theory, everyone is cheating on eachother. If you're a cheater you're probably gonna keep your account to continue cheating. Brilliant.
The other devious thing that everyone already knows about knows about, is that there are actually barely any real women on the site. Most call them bots, but they are basically just automated accounts which is just built right into the monolith. Some of them are actually accounts from real women that just became dormant and aren't used anymore. Some are just fake accounts setup by the company. They got slapped by regulators for running bot accounts (among other things) after the big hack, but now they just use dark patterns to make everything look above board.
I am not endorsing their business model. I started working there out of morbid curiosity and because I was going to be working on things like increasing the security and privacy of the site - which seemed noble at the time - I was laid off during a restructuring. It is a seriously demented company to work for and feel that overall it is a stain on my career in hindsight, though it is an interesting ice breaker.
Also often true for subscription-based massively multiplayer online games. I'd love to see stats like this across Apple and Google's stores, too: how many subscriptions are maintained by people who never open the app?
The key here is to realize when these incentives line up and try to mitigate them as much as possible -- usually the best way to do this is to look for motives beyond profit. Examples would be: they are looking to build or maintain a reputation; they have a philosophical agenda; they are your friends/family.
If I hire somebody to remodel my bathroom, he will do the job well enough that I won't raise too much complaints but also cut as much corners as possible without me realizing, so that he can save time and money.
If I buy literally any kind of consumer product, it has planned obsolescence built into it.
If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission.
If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
I had to sue a contractor a few years back who not only did bad work but lied about its status and falsified documents from inspectors. To get any settlement in the 2.5+ year battle, I finally had to agree NOT to post reviews of his work on a specific list of sites. Unfortunately for him, my own personal site, Twitter, Facebook, etc were not listed.
When the sale was in the initial stages and might not go through, he was fine saying it could be omitted from the work order. After I partially committed and asked him what the marginal benefit was, all I could get was, "it might be cooler in the rooms without it...its your house." Some would say, "what did you expect?" but for a not-small job I'd hoped there could be a bit more rapport.
Also, there's a very real scarcity mindset right now due to economic downturn.
Some do, but plenty don't. And plenty have "this part is rated for X hours of use" where X is all designed around some common expected lifespan.
> If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission.
This is true of some managers. It's also why some advertise that they are fee only (that is, they only make money off a fee you pay them with no commission) and why there are laws if they advertise themselves as fiduciaries (they are not allowed to consider their commissions).
> If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
I mean, all medical (and legal among others) professions suffer from the fact that the person selling you something knows better than you do what services you need. This is a real problem, and is often dealt with by professional codes of conduct and oversight boards. At least dentists seems so in demand that they don't need to invent work, since most people don't verify a cavity exists.
At the end of the post he says the site he worked at didn't actually do any of this and that he voluntarily quit once he had this major epiphany. Even uses that boring old trope of "you are the product" that people like to say but isn't as profound as people think it is.
Its still quite common for couples to come up with an agreed upon lie about how they met lol.
In Ireland and the UK almost every couple I know that have actually met on tinder/whatever tell their family and such that they met at a bar, lol.
It does strike me as very funny that people still have this impression that online isn't where you meet anyone "serious", but a bar is.
1) The value of a dating site is proportional to the size of its user base. Dating sites can't match the big social networks.
2) Successful matches wouldn't leave the site entirely, they would just go back to using it for all the other non-dating functions.
3) It would presumably be cheaper for users because the social networks are primarily funded by advertising.
So, why hasn't the Zuck rolled out Facebook Romance(TM) to eat Match Group the way that Facebook Marketplace ate Craigslist?
If they could figure out a way to combine dating with effective ad delivery, then they might be onto something bigger.
Besides, if you're super attractive you can just leave your DMs open.
https://doctorow.medium.com/even-if-youre-paying-for-the-pro...
Not everything has to be a gimmick, right?
You used to see ads for them in Skymall.
My role here was writing snarky comments in Skymall catalogs to unwind on my Friday night redeye flights home. (I used to fly a lot for work)
Always sort of ethereal looking hot 40'sish blonde women. Implicitly promising you'll be able to date and marry one of those (but of course the hot 40's lady is the matchmaker).
They sort of similarly implicitly promised you could meet and marry a doctor or exec or something.
Also - the ads were never targeted at women.
Monetized dating apps cost $$$ and are disincentivized to match you well. So, we build dating profiles by public Github.
We specify a protocol, you make a pull request to add your profile, the app pulls from the repo every day and automatically shows all the profiles that you've matched with.
What could possibly go wrong?
The idea was that if you use sites that you pay for, you will be the priority and your desires are more likely to be granted.
Looks like dating websites took a look at that idea and said, "What if we made them pay to be the product?" and it worked.
I bet they also sell your data to marketers and spammers. So you pay to participate, your presence increases the potential value of the site to other potential payees, and then the site gets money from selling your profiles, actions, location, and answers to any questions or quizzes to whomever will pay for it.
I should have made a dating website.
The perverse incentive described is only perverse if you assume your customers want to stop using the site after the first good match.
If that were true, we wouldn't have Live Nation Entertainment. Globally, they own every large venue (or the access to those venues), along with the ticket and merch sales.
Having said that, 90% of people I know really do find loving relationships via online dating. Sample size isn't great, but my feeling is those online dating relationships are superior, because people really can find good matches easier.
Most people I know, myself included, can't stand the shallowness and general feeling that they are participating in a torturously silly marketing exercise.
1) Negativity is generally not attractive.
2) It's a lie, since clearly I can tolerate it if I'm actually on a dating site saying I can't tolerate it.
3) Someone else who can't tolerate it isn't likely to be there to read it.
4) Stating it out loud doesn't change the nature of dating sites as shallow exercises in marketing.
Above all, successful matches are extraordinarily high. Partly because chemistry is not apparent online and there are many dimensions - values, emotional, financial - that need to align in a viable relationship. But I would say mostly because people are delusional about their own perfection and expectations on others. You would turn down someone who is perfect but happens to smoke? REALLY?
So site developers can break their back and still have an abysmal success record. I don't think anyone would hobble algorithms on purpose.
In a previous company we realised that it was cheaper and way faster to hire a lawyer than using external lawyers. The difference in results was night and day.
Vanguard did/does this with mutual funds for example and grew to be the biggest player (while still leaving plenty on the table for others) in the market. You just have to make it part of your core business model and marketing strategy and stick with it long enough to see success.
Here's my stab at how to align incentives for dating sites, both the business, the customer, the employees and the stockholders. Commit to the following type of pricing model and market the heck out of you wanting to see your customer succeed:
Your initial price is $50/month (the going rate IIRC).
After two months it drops to $40/month.
After six months it drops to $35/month.
After a year it drops to $30/month
After two years it drops to $20/month (below or just at or only slightly above your marginal cost-to-serve)
(Vary the dollar values above depending on your economics and behaviors. Maybe you start people at $60/mo, higher than competitors for example but reassure people it will auto-drop for them.)
Then you are incented to get people good matches most at the point at which they are most engaged. If your employees are not striving to get people matches at that point, your business will suffer. If you find yourself with a low-margin business with too many $20/mo customers, your stock valuation will suffer.
Two other pieces of data I would gather when trying to setup my internal metrics:
1) Ask each customer when they signup what their ideal timeline (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc) is to A) meet someone through the site, B) have a steady relationship, and (if applicable) C) get married. Understand the demand/expectations curve and how it intersects with your pricing curve.
2) Offer customers a $20 refund when leaving the service to tell you if they got married, are in a serious relationship, or never got anywhere with your service. Incent the customer to help you measure your success rate and its correlation with their initial expectations, individually and in bulk. Give customers the option of explicitly refusing to get the refund because they are so satisfied, or to give you a tip and use that as a key KPI measuring customer satisfaction.
The above pricing curve also ironically adds stickiness the steeper the price drops are, because people won't want to quit and then resignup later since their price might triple if there's a chance they might get more active again on your site in the next few months. You just don't want your initial price to be too steep to drive too many people off.
The talk asks what a Socialist government would do with the State dating website, to contrast with the (equally terrible) incentives for a dating website generated by the free market.
There's no way out of this without open protocols and visible algorithms. The agency problem is not easy to solve.
Company B develops a cure.
Company A loses all the resources it put into developing the treatment.
If a cure is possible, it will be developed.
2. Most countries in the world have universal healthcare.