How Singapore's government-run dating service works
singapore-samizdat.com
singapore-samizdat.com
Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
I am very curious how this will be changed in this government platform. Maybe it won't LOL
On the other side you got a fresh supply on both sides from kids growing up to be adults and from adults divorcing and even if your matchmaking is perfect and divorce culturally shamed against, people still die which leaves widow(er)s behind, of whom a certain amount will want a new relationship.
Dating apps are a race to the bottom. They're collecting a tax on the lonely and desperate of dwindling populations. Ironically it's not sustainable over the long term.
> Keep supply of women high because men will pay anything for a chance?
Grindr has a different fix.
But on the other hand, if it appears "too limited" because the most desirable people disappear off quickly because of a successful match, maybe they'll still struggle to keep the users coming back to it even if they're actually doing a better job at matching people up...
Really depends whether the track record (assuming its good) becomes known enough to people, I'd guess.
Or at least to start practicing how to make babies.
Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.
edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.
What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?
And which nations are scaled to a few billion people?
And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.
Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.
Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.
If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.
So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race.
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To cover the expected pedantic reply:
Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.
"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.
On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.
Fuck that.
Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).
Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.
As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
I would think just a coarse sorting would do, paired with a free meal. Every couple of weeks, you go for a random date with a somewhat well paired person, and see what happens. Maybe you don't meet the love of your life, but you will meet someone roughly your age living in the same society, a perspective worth having regardless of whether you're compatible.
However, if you know anyone from Singapore, you must think this is a rather small plaster on a gaping wound.
Singapore is like a permanent examination hall. Everyone is competing to do well on exams, and then they try to get the best internships, and then the best jobs. It's not exactly conducive to starting a family. You'll lose a step in the rat race, and then your kid will need to join this rat race.
Like, here in Europe we've got right-wing parties on the rise that have this conspiracy theory that the foreigners are moving here en masse to replace the locals (because of ??? they never explained, our jobs, benefits and women I suppose). So they spend a lot of time and effort fearmongering about the for'ners coming here and bring in laws and policies to keep them out.
Meanwhile they don't seem to be doing anything about those that already live here - you'd think these right-wing, own-people-first types would do anything to ensure people living here would thrive and reproduce. But no free child care, no major economic reform to allow single incomes to buy a house, none of that. Because ultimately it's not about foreigners or "own people first", it's about self-enrichment, got mine fuck you.
That’s an irrational reaction, probably conditioned by ideology.
A well-run state has been perhaps one of the most successful enabling factors for human flourishing in human history.
I've never heard this discussed or mentioned as a drawback because it's Nobel Prize winning and "stable" is a shorthand for "fair". Even though there's many unique stable matches that each offer participants different utilities even if individual participants don't have incentives to change their pairing.
In practice, the more powerful party seems to be the proposing side, e.g. hospitals are the "proposing side" when using Gale-Shapeley to match w/ med school students and get their ideal students.
I wonder if anyone who works on dating apps knows if men or women are the preferred side? And is there any research on stable matching that ensures equity (or ideally arbitrary distribution of utility) between the two groups in their stable matches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_of_stable_matchings
The problem is it's a lattice and not fully ordered. There are cases where there are two or more pairings that are worse for women and better for men, but we cannot determine which pairing is superior to the other overall.
But this isn't raw Gale-Shapley-- the participants aren't ranking all hundreds/thousands of others. In particular, the preference matrix is based on identical mutual compatibility scores, so there's a unique stable solution (not multiple stable ones!), and there's no "side" that benefits, since the solution is identical no matter who does the "proposing".
Is that modeling the problem correctly? It seems pretty rare for two partners to have equal amounts of love for each other.
If I have 10/10 love for Halle Berry, and she has 4/10 love for my Jeff-Bezos-looking ass, it's the 4/10 that's going to dictate whether we live happily ever after. So our mutual compatibility is probably well below 10/10.
For marrying: I suspect they are about as picky?
This is absolutely not an accidental phenomenon, this is the optimal outcome for dating apps, because that's the only way to prevent women from finding what they are looking for too quickly (and then leaving the app).
You've never seen this discussed as a drawback? I've seen it mentioned quite a bit. For instance, it came up on the last big thread on this just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915825
“The active salesman got better sales than the person that just sat there and accepted offers? Outrageous!!!”
In sweden we have one semi popular dating site with minimal amount of matching algoritms and swiping and such and its no easier there to find a partner than on tinder.
Had one drop me for a professional DJ.
A friend of mine was convinced she was going to marry a famous basketball player.
You can guess how these "relationships" went.
Super average women with one or two OUTSTANDING characteristics (get it.)
It's a real problem.
Fortunately, I already had kids when we were both younger and dumber which might ultimately be the solution: keep humans off social media until they're grandparents.
> people today have much higher demands on their partner than ever before.
The best summary I have seen: Average women are no longer interested in average men. More details: Since women became economic equals to men, they are no longer interested in their economic equals. They want men who earn (much) more money than them, and that makes those men very rare.
Specific to Sweden, is it really true that women now approach men? I heard about this trend in Denmark and Netherlands, but I am a bit suspicous because it is mostly anecdotal.
This is wrong. Stable matches still mean something, and in fact probably mean quite a lot.
You are given a much better match than a random pairing. If you still aren't interested, you can decline. If you go on a date and it doesn't work out, you can decline.
Nothing forces you to use this process, it is just an offer of a significantly better than random matching to what you might prefer.
It doesn't even need to account for preferences not covered by the questionnaire.
https://matchmakerireland.com/
Social media had a story on an American lady disappointed with dating choices in her city who went over there for fun, met an Irishman and in less than a year of transatlantic dating got married.
Bet you have just as much a chance of finding a life partner there than any online dating service, probably much better.
Don’t they? Here in the UK at least participation in programs like that is a requirement of unemployment benefits. One has to attend a job center where one is given advice, sometimes training can get enrolled in trainung and etc. Not saying that they do a great job of it but they seems to at least try to do what you describe. At least nominally.
Modern dating problem comes from too many online platforms trying to sell you a lifestyle and tell you what you should have. People do not need another online platform to solve the problem caused by online platforms
Oh yeah, the government workers, a group of people known for their prolific dating and people skills. This will go so well.
"Any hard Nos for you?", well, those who ignored the calls to their number is a no brainer big No, and also those who don't know how to fill their SMFF-29f-A form, which is different from SMFF-29F-A. Everyone here hates people who don't know the difference between SMFF-29f-A and SMFF-29F-A.
Let's see what other, more "progressive" governments will think about that. Lots of possibilities in government-run partner matching for out future AI overlords.
These are well defined criteria which can be queried upon.
However the ranking only works if both sides are honest.
You can then still apply your usual filters afterwards, such as smell, looks, vibes.
But if it helps likeminded people to find each other, then it absolutely has some value.
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
How many people see their ideal match and get humbled (or emboldened) by surprising results? How many of these try immediately to change something about themselves?
Since the match pool will never be exactly 1:1, do you do anything at all about the least matchable people?
Would it become possible to gauge whether changed answers are efforts to widen one's net or legitimate personal growth and/or a bit of self-reflection?
If the dating service detects deceptive answering, is it correct to just pair these people with other dishonest users?
Can you gather any feedback from unsuccessful dates and apply a "Je n'sais quoi" Factor to positively/negatively weight their chances when calculating their compatibility with future matches?
If you take this idea to the extreme, can you start to distrust negative date feedback if the feedback provider is shown to be unreliable? (Person A doesn't like anybody, their feedback shouldn't matter.)
Are there detectable signals of someone's Je ne sais quoi Factor in their profile metadata, including profile photo(s) and answering habits? (i.e. People answering the full survey in less than 15 minutes at 3 a.m. are 28% less desireable on average.)
While it's good to grow together with a partner, it doesn't always work out that way. How would such an algorithm be able to determine that an ambitious (broadly: likely to dramatically change) person will not be paired with a long-term apathetic, set-in-stone person? (I do realize they have the, "always working on yourself?" question, but there's so much this question leaves unanswered.)
Is this a ploy to get more applicants to join the government staff, if the pilot remains closed to the public?
(tying together "least matchable people" and "government staff") Do you start monitoring the extreme ends of matchability to see if there's a link between perceived social agreeableness and job performance? What was that again about detecting dishonesty and limiting the pool to government workers?
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One detail I particularly liked about early OKCupid was the ability to rank how much someone's answer mattered. For instance, I don't particularly mind someone's exercise and organization preferences, and it's fine if we didn't match because they DO have expectations from me in these areas which I fail to meet. I would hope the Singapore service would implement this as well, although a description of FirstDate in The Straits Times suggests this nuance isn't there.
Another thing the Singapore dating service has in common with OKCupid is at least a few poorly worded questions: "What’s a country that’s ruined all other countries for you?" is akin to OKC's "In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" You can't split hairs as a Yes/No response in OKC, "sure: I would understandably have tons of negative excitement, a sudden spike in anxiety/dread, instantaneous long-term shift in priorities, etc.; although the use of atomic weapons thoroughly horrifies me," just like you can't explain whether the country that "ruined others" did so via greatness (Spain with its social and expressive population, food, beaches, siestas, and music) or by causing a loss of faith in humanity (Ireland, due to a stolen laptop plus being verbally threatened by a primary school-aged child while I was walking with a baby stroller).
My personal take on the nuclear war question? I just tried to optimize (cast the widest net) and decided, "Anyone willing to misunderstand this one question while also prioritizing and demanding its response is less likely to be someone whose company I value," and left the question unanswered + unimportant to me.
Now if only my local government had a "friends group" service, so I don't end up hanging out with other parents just by virtue of also being a parent and needing to be around them in the same places at the same times...
If (say) both would-be parents in a couple have to work long hours to afford their own food, housing, & such - yeah, NO. They obviously can't have many kids.
Anyone here familiar, to comment?
That's the actual problem, though (a lack of it)! Above all else, you'll probably overlook a lot and still commit long-term to someone you can trust.
especially for country like korea and japan ???? Yeah bro they need it
I don't understand your question.