Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue with dating applications/services today is that they are focusing entirely on the wrong thing: matchmaking.

No online service or the algorithms behind it is going to be sufficiently advanced and AI-ified enough to be able to determine whether or not person A and person B would be a good match.

There are too many variables. What even is a good match? Hell, MOST of the time humans get it wrong. How many times have you met someone who fits about 80% of the bill... but you don't find each other funny enough, or attractive enough, or the sex isn't so good. You can't determine ANY of that via an online service.

The real magic is going to happen in the real world. You put people together and see what happens, plain and simple. Dating sites need to stop focusing on match percentages, political affiliation, BMI, hair color, how many keywords match in your bio, etc...

I am an economically conservative person. I did not vote for Obama and do not want him to be our president. On the other hand, I could easily date and get along with a woman who disagrees with me. (most do actually) I tend to prefer brunettes, but I don't really care what color your hair is. If I was locked into some kind of algorithm or search query in a dating app, I might never meet a blonde girl who shared a lot of my common interests. Maybe you're great at writing a witty/funny bio but you're incredibly shy / dry in person. Maybe you look like you're killer in bed, but in actuality you don't even enjoy sex. None of this will come from a dating service. It all comes from meeting people and getting to know them through real life events.

I'd continue and explain what I think is a good solution to this problem but it will be easier for me to just link to the app when it hits the app store in the next week or two :)

> But those same women might tell me of a night they just "went crazy" and slept with some guy they just met. And you know what, everyone does this.

That second sentence is very false, even if you replace "everyone" with "almost everyone". Just 52% of people surveyed by a Durham University study had had a one-night stand (1,743/3300). Furthermore, this sort of behavior is often regretted; of the women who had reported a one-night stand, only 54% said they had positive feeling about the experience.

> Women predominantly reported "regret at being used," with additional comments including: "I felt cheap," "horrified afterward," and "I felt degraded. Made myself look cheap and easy. Total regret."

Popular summary: http://www.livescience.com/2678-realities-night-stands-revea...

Paywalled academic article: http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-008-9036-2?L...

(I predict the results will only change moderately if you restrict the sample pool to whatever particular age range you're interested in.)

I think you're incorrectly generalizing from a very non-representative social circle. I know you're just writing off the cuff, but you don't do anyone any favors when you downplay the very real emotional risks people (especially women) take when behaving promiscuously.

I understand what you're saying but at a basic and common human level: we all make choices that we occasionally regret. Sometimes that leads to change, "I'll never do that again", while other times it just makes you look out for that particular scenario while continuing in the same behavior. I've had one night stands I regret purely because of the social stigma against it. Other times I've had mutually good one night stand experiences with people.

In relationships such as these, one person will be coming from a place of higher value and another will be coming from a place of lower value. That isn't to say the woman is always the one coming from a place of lower value.

Thanks for linking to the articles, adding them to my reading list.

> You put people together and see what happens, plain and simple.

IMHO, the whole point of online dating is to be able to avoid having to be put together with someone you know you won't like. We all know what our deal breakers are and all those matchmaking algo's are great at letting us filter out people we aren't going to get along with.

You say you don't care about their politics, so don't filter on that or rate it as important to you; for those who do, they do filter on that and rate it important to them. It's not the algo that determines your match, it's you setting up your preferences and saying what you like and don't like that determine what the aglo says matches.

It honestly sounds to me like you've not actually sufficiently used a dating site well enough to have such a strong opinion given that your complaints seem rather made up. I could be wrong, but that's my impression. I met my current girlfriend on a dating site and all those things are exactly what made it work so well and contributed to finding what is IMHO my perfect match.

Spot on! Computer matching is fundamentally flawed. That's why we are building ElimiDate... Key is to throw people into a pressure-free environment so that they can know each other.

No long-winded profiles,

No browsing through countless fake photos

and no computer "matchin algorithms".

Just fun and chance to be creative :-) If you are interested, take a look and sign up here for beta: http://www.ElimiDateapp.com

There's also the issue that how well you come off on an online dating site is going to be very skewed by 1) How good you are at written english and 2) How good your pictures are.

Agreed. It's always amusing to see those photos where there "trying hard" not to look like they're trying hard to look good.

Without the matchmaking part, and just meeting people through real life events... isn't that the same as regular dating?

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