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Comment by Kapura | Hacker News Reader

Feels like this is tyranny of easily measured metrics. If your north star metric is something more focused (number of fun dates!) that incentivizes features and experiments that push that number up, but if the number is DAU, suddenly you've decoupled "success" from the actual intention of the website or app.

Obviously, "number of fun dates" is a lot harder to measure, relying as it would on surveys with low response % and a variety of circumstantial factors. Whereas you can easily measure DAU, and put them on nice charts that point up and to the right to justify a bonus for some executive. Such is life.

Finally, there's a level of personal responsibility. Code doesn't get worse without developers making it that way. If you think your job is bullshit, making things worse, say something, and leave. Do your best to not be part of the problem.

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And note that the incentives for the user and the company are at cross purposes with dating apps.

Users use dating apps with the intent of not needing dating apps. A dating app that works well destroys it's user base. Their desired user base is people looking for hookups. Is it any wonder the apps have degraded into stuff pretty much only useful for hookups?

Yep, the ideal dating app in terms of profitability is one that makes users think they're going to meet the person of their dreams (so they are motivated to use it), but continually falls short (so they are retained). Which is exactly what the market has optimized for.

That's true for a lot of business that still can be a good business model, lots in medicine, for example: lifetime vaccinations, and cures for diseases like HepC.

There are plenty of vaccines and treatments you can't get because they're not profitable to manufacture.

If you can't find a long-term relationship on a hookup app that's an attractiveness issue on your part. How's the app going to stop you from going on a second date?

Nothing, but an app can do plenty to string you along while you pay for a membership hoping to get to a first one. And yeah, ugly people want long term relationships and need love too!

The active user metrics doesn't come from the company though, it's what the advertisers and investers will look at first glance, before going deeper and check what they really care about.

Let's face it: in general we're not good at nuance and that has downstream effects in many places.

The escape hatch is probably to have businesses that mostly stand on their own, sustained by their users and don't need to convince random marketers and crypto bros that they're worth paying attention to.

i work at a dating app and number of fun dates (worded slightly differently) is our north star metric! it's one of the major ones, and it has helped it stay relatively non predatory :)

But doesn't that inherently imply you try to keep users from making long-term connections? Users having lots of fun dates are not doing them with the same person and continuing to use your app. It's a bunch of dates that ultimately went nowhere.

That's the thing with dating apps/sites. If you succeed too well, you've lost 2 users.

this is usually where i get frustrated with capitalism. Not everything has to be about retaining customers. If i hire someone to build a brick outbuilding, i probably won't need another brick outbuilding.

I'd rather a "pay for 3-6 months of full access upfront, a 3 day trial option" than a subscription model for anything where there's a chance i won't be using it in 3-6 months. when i see a dating site ask for a year upfront i know they're not going to actually help me.

I met my wife (and two close friends) on OKCupid over 15 years ago, so i remember what it was, and what a site could be again, just not OKC

> when i see a dating site ask for a year upfront i know they're not going to actually help me.

the longest i've seen is 6mo (at least thats OUR longest) and while fewer people use this, it captures the demographic that is either self aware and think they'll need it for a long time, or folks that are happier with dating around. the point of these longer subs isn't because we're willingly creating dark patterns to avoid helping our users, i promise

i won't speak on behalf of my company, but as someone who was on dating apps for a while until i found my current fiancee, I will say that a lot of it is a numbers game.

also, the company i work for is focused on more serious relationships. we are focusing heavily on reducing ghosting, lowering treating people like they're disposable, etc.

Comeon tell us what the app is!

i would, but i don't want to dox myself

> say something, and leave

So you want me to give up my mid-six figures job so your dates go a little bit better?

Do you really want to spend your life adding dark patterns to a dating website?

Most things you can work on are equally bad, so why not? We all want to survive, and survival in America is expensive.

Mid-six figures have absolutely nothing to do with survival.

Sadly, I've worked with software engineers who had absolutely no ethical qualm with implementing basically anything their boss wanted them to implement. Dark patterns, Benchmark cheating, Excessive user data collection, I'm sure they wouldn't even balk at writing Malware or Ransomware. This is why ethical engineers opting out of the project or job will never work: There's always someone lined up willing to write the unethical code.

I recommend that everyone read Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority about his fake shock experiments.

Some people simply suspend moral judgement entirely in circumstances where someone else is calling the shots. They no more regard themselves as culpable for the bad outcomes as they do an automobile operated by a drunk driver. At a certain point, many people just switch off the moralizing, automatically assigning all of the responsibility to the order-giver.

It's an interesting phenomenon. A side effect, I find, is that people get very very upset when you name and shame individual employees doing unethical things at work that are legal and fall under the umbrella of "corporate initiatives" such as implementing antipatterns. The guilt for such seems to be perceived to fall with management or "product people", not developers, even though the developers are the ones who wrote the code.

Same for, say, warfighters. People don't regard the conscripted infantrymen at fault for the deaths, even though it is often literally their hand on the trigger.

I think, the reason for that, is that management/leadership gets compensated fairly well for it. If this management doesn't have any particular talent or skills that can justify their compensation, then it's the responsibility that they are holding.

I recommend the the article about the infantry men who did not shoot https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-soldiers-who-didnt-s... Or better yet the book humankind from rutger bregman. Who wrote a whole chapter about why this experiment does not support this conclusion

Useless, maybe. Bullshit, likely. There's definitely worse things, but that's not a sound argument.

I want you to have some amount of self respect, and appreciation for your craft.

His craft may be writing software that maximizes profit.

It's hard to take that seriously for a few reasons:

- the gatekeepers of the craft are random and inconsistent and the competency standards are suspect

- the people on the other side of your employment relationship won't do the same

- leaving for self respect may not look good into getting you your next position. It may even harm your chances if you quit too soon

- For the US, losing healthcare benefits for the love of the craft seems just like shooting yourself in the foot for no good reason

We should strive to be better, but criticism about not living up to the craft often involves just a difference of opinion or preferences

hey in this instance does this mean you are making ~150,000 or ~500,000?

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