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Comment by chasingsparks | Hacker News Reader

I tried -- and failed -- to produce a online dating startup. I spent a lot of time reading the academic literature on the matter. Here is my summation:

compatibility ~ attraction + age + sex + serendipity

Serendipity is more appropriately called the error term. In my opinion, real-time news feeds will at best add nothing, if not actually degrading the signal by adding excess noise. You can't date (i.e. appraise compatibility) online. You have to date in "real life".

Then again, that was the premise of my startup, and it failed so maybe i should STFU.

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I'm more interested in the kind of stuff a person reads on the internet. If you read similar topics, we're going to have a lot of stuff to talk about, which is attractive to me. There are tons of people on dating sites who I am attracted to and are around my age. You need a filter, and similar interests are easier to express implicitly than writing a huge block of text about all the things you enjoy. That was the premise for a site I worked on (mostly dead for now), though it isn't targeted at dating.

http://sitesincommon.com

Example profile: http://sitesincommon.com/users/niran

I tried simple tagging of interests, favorite activities, books, etc. From that, I tried for find clustered similarity. It may have worked -- if i had any users.

I'm never interested in women working in the same profession than I'm working in, having the same views, etc... I don't need someone to acknowledge everything I say. I can do that myself.

I don't need someone to acknowledge everything I say.

Then why are you posting this to a social news site?

I read more on the internet than just tech stuff, and those are interests I'd like to discuss with the people I spend a lot of my time with. What do you plan on talking to someone about if not shared interests?

What heuristic would you use to find people who would complement your views rather than reinforce them? It doesn't sound like an easy problem to solve. Looking at what someone reads does give a good indication of what their views are, but that's not how you have to use it. You can just use it as an indicator of a general interest in politics, for instance.

What is the "academic literature" for online dating? Is that an established field of research?

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