- If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
- If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer.
- If you find love and get married, they lose two customers.
Which one will they optimize for?
My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person.
Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.
I think you are describing a person who has worked on himself. Like doing sports, that's good. I think too many guys continue with their teenage hobbies like playing computer games, and that's generally not attractive to women.
Of course, there are no guarantees. There's no magic checklist that you can fulfill and be guaranteed to find a partner. But I think there's always more you can do to make yourself more attractive.
It's just that, at current point of my life I think I'm ready for a relationship. My daily life loop is satisfactory for me, the only thing I'm missing is someone to be with.
i play games with my wife and kids, life is good!
I know people like this, but they also are unlucky in love because they also have negative attitudes about women and life that they refuse to become more enlightened about.
Even assuming I take you at your word, this describes a good roommate, not a good romantic partner.
> do sports, learn new things
Has negligible if any effect on romantic relationships. Both fat and stupid people still find romantic partners (and sometimes end up happy with them nonetheless).
> Then the fuck more you want
Somebody who is fun to be with, who makes me feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside, who at times makes me feel safe and at other times dares me to go farther. Somebody who is willing to go to new depths of vulnerability together, so that I can trust that they see me, the whole me, even the crummy parts, and I can see them, the whole them, even the crummy parts, and be loved and accepted nonetheless.
> The value of "a relationship" has dropped through the floor
This is transactional language. Strong, fulfilling romantic relationships are not transactional. Part of working on yourself is learning how to develop non-transactional relationships without getting hurt / getting exploited in your attempts to do so (i.e. by lemons on the market).
> more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person
I highly disagree, assuming that you find the right person to live with, which is the whole challenge. Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing. The absolutely most economical arrangement is usually Dual-Income No Kids (DINK).
Cool. If I had stated that I am like this, then someone else would've complained that this is overly romantic view and in reality a relationship is built with someone who can help with boring everyday tasks like doing the laundry or watching the kids. The point is, even if I were Jesus Christ himself, someone would find a flaw that makes me undateable in their opinion.
> This is transactional language.
Because all relationships are transactional. Welcome to adulthood. I don't really have time to argue with someone who still believes in Santa Claus.
> Living with another person who you enjoy living with, economically speaking, means splitting at least rent and electric bills (water bills are more linear with the number of people in the house), sometimes splitting a car payment (if you are a one-car household); when you split rent, you split the rent of the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and at least one bedroom, that are all shared. You eat better by cooking for two and sharing.
It's strange to me that you tell me not to be transactional, but then you point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support. Also, there's a huge difference between "without a relationship, I'll literally starve to death" and "without a relationship, I'll go on holiday once a year instead of twice a year".
Something tells me that your view of relationships is incoherent at best.
Well yeah, Christ isn't really dateable because he would never be able to be vulnerable with you (after all, if he died for your sins, you can't really repay the favor, can you?). People want to take celebrities to bed, they don't want to date them. It's a different kind of relationship - more shallow.
But more to the point, a flaw is not what makes somebody undateable. We all have flaws. I have flaws. My partner has flaws. Some kinds of flaws make people undateable, others do not.
> Someone who still believes in Santa Claus
I mean, my partner makes me happier than Santa Claus ever did, and I don't have to wait until Christmas for her to pay me a visit, so....
> point to money as an example of an advantage of being in a relationship, not emotional support
Emotional support was literally the first example I gave ("feel good, warm, and fuzzy inside"). I added the economic argument to address your framing. The emotional aspect is the #1 most important reason and I would be in my relationship for that reason alone, even without any economic benefits; the economic benefits are a silver lining and insufficient on their own to justify a relationship. But no, I'm not going to pretend that the silver lining doesn't exist.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
The modern interaction have eroded, it is awkward or weird to be approached in public, every middle aged woman or elderly woman has her purse on while shopping at a grocery store, locking the car 6 times and looking back while doing it as if its a James Bond movie. I live in middle class neighborhood and this is the things i see on a daily bases. it is sad.
But there is. It's all the people aging into the dating apps. That's how it works. The rate of people leaving is balanced by new people arriving.
My building is full of divorced 40-somethings dating younger. You see it all over media too. Leonardo DiCaprio is famous for this, and he's hardly the only one.
Women date younger too. My wife's TikTok is full of women empowerment videos; the number of videos on her feed that talk about this is not inconsequential.
Plenty of people to date.
There is even a subgenre of romance writing with this as a theme .. age gap.
Technology was promised to solve our problems, yet it has created so many more.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
Example metrics: - time spent on the site
- times they “swipe right” or whatever
- messages sent
- money spent
If they're optimizing for engagement (the same as Netflix and everyone else), that comes from the the number of active conversations you wind up having. If you're swiping a ton but matches never message you, you'll give up and try another app -- that's not engagement. The more engagement you have from real back-and-forth messages (not spam), the more real-life dates you go on (if you're doing it right). And the more people you meet, the more likely you are to leave.
It's not "enshittified", dating is just hard. People are picky and it's difficult to get a good read on people from just their online profiles. The dating apps just want to keep you engaged and spending money. They don't need to make finding matches harder because they're worried you'll leave -- finding matches is hard enough to begin with. Trying to make it harder is the least of their concerns. They're trying to give you as good of a service as possible, while getting you to pay. So they limit numbers of matches to get you to pay. They're not limiting quality of matches.
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
From what I’ve heard, OkCupid used to be really good at finding compatible people, then it got deliberately nerfed when sold to Match Group.
But if you actually used it, the reality was that a match on paper says next to nothing about chemistry. And overlapping interests or survey questions don't say anything about personality. Except for a few dealbreakers like gender, age range, religion, etc., they didn't actually tell you much.
So OkC switched to prioritizing swiping on photos shortly after Tinder exploded, simply because they're the most effective thing there is for gauging chemistry. At the end of the day, it's way better than the supposed "match score" based on survey questions, or reading lengthy profiles. Not because they were bought by Match, but because it worked better at finding matches.
And OkC was the best at finding people I'd at the very least be friends with - which is foundational to me anyway. And Hinge loves hiding those profiles behind roses.
And yeah I can totally see how the long profiles could be useful for finding friends. But that's not what the site was ever primarily meant for.
The reality is that OkC basically started out for grad students in Brooklyn to be able to find each other, the kind of person who loves writing and reading profiles. But that's not most people, and so as they expanded across the country they shifted to the format that worked better for most people.
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
In the US, you’d only get matched if you were a hot guy. It was more brutal than tinder, hinge, etc. Women in the US aren’t gonna spend a single cent on a guy unless he’s mega hot.
Except there is also a way higher probability of being related to a random person there.
I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority
Edit: people ask me which app, not which spouse.
I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition.
Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.
Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.
Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.
Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.
The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men.
You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.