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Comment by cliglot | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve been scraping dating sites and feeding them to ChatGPT, and it’s amazing how few of the profiles still say anything about the person.

I’ve long described dating apps as “distilling an entire person into a few curated photos and a snippet of text”. In all dating app profile advice I’ve ever seen, creativity, personality, and anything against the grain is highly discouraged. No wonder they barely work.

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So he fed millions of profiles into a summarization machine and was surprised to find no sharp edges? Crazy work.

i'd argue against that point to a degree. going against the grain does work, if you know who you're looking for and can send the right signals accordingly

it's that okcupid data about how the highly tattoo'd people tended to get the most negative responses, but also very strong responses from other seriously tat'd people

fly a flag, signal theory, etc.

That only worked in first-gen dating sites where you browsed profiles. I think this strategy was called "spearfishing" where you make your profile as polarizing and authentic as possible, because it would cut out all the people you don't want to meet and appeal strongly to the person you do want to meet.

In today's Elo-score face swiping apps, your profile just tanks because all those people you didn't appeal to left-swiped you, and the one person who would have liked your tattoos never sees you. The only strategy for these apps is to 1) be attractive 2) don't be unattractive.

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