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For-profit dating sites also share a common problem: they need to extract revenue out of you, but the more successful they are at being dating sites, the sooner

For-profit dating sites also share a common problem: they need to extract revenue out of you, but the more successful they are at being dating sites, the sooner they lose you as a customer. All the problems we discuss are pretty much related to this point: They probably have good matching algorithms, but they only showed you actual good matches you'd be gone from the site (taking the other person with you). So they have an incentive to show you 99% noise and 1% signal, and some go to the length of more or less explicitly paywalling the good 1%.

leppr 7y ago
That's one dynamic. But there's also the opposite incentive of word of mouth from positive experiences. When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator. So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.
- ken 7y ago
  It's a strange situation where they're literally telling you the great thing they found on that website is no longer available! It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
  - leppr 7y ago
    That's an amusing comparison, but I would compare it more to job or house rental listing sites. Of course the "item" you end up settling on is always going to be an intimately personal decision, but the benchmark would be the number of decent candidates you had the opportunity to consider, and the effort you had to expand during the search.
deleted 7y ago
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ken 7y ago
To some extent, isn't that true of all products? When you sell a product to solve a problem, once you make the sale, assuming it actually solves the problem, the customer won't come back. That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway. This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.

leppr 7y ago

That's one dynamic. But there's also the opposite incentive of word of mouth from positive experiences. When I hear of real people paying money on a dating site and finding what they want, that's a powerful motivator. So we can only hypothesize whether a few desperate users do cough out more cash than a larger number of one-time subscribers would, but the later strategy is certainly more sustainable over the long term.

ken 7y ago
It's a strange situation where they're literally telling you the great thing they found on that website is no longer available! It's also a very personal decision, perhaps more like picking movies or music you'd like. I don't generally trust any of my friends' movie or music recommendations.
- leppr 7y ago
  That's an amusing comparison, but I would compare it more to job or house rental listing sites. Of course the "item" you end up settling on is always going to be an intimately personal decision, but the benchmark would be the number of decent candidates you had the opportunity to consider, and the effort you had to expand during the search.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ken 7y ago

To some extent, isn't that true of all products? When you sell a product to solve a problem, once you make the sale, assuming it actually solves the problem, the customer won't come back. That's why, for example, Photoshop used to cost $1000 (outrageous!) and now costs $20/month (outrageous!), and users hate it both ways. Or why electronics are less repairable than ever, and companies are optimizing for cheapness, and you can just buy a new one when it breaks. When you open the hood on your car you just see another hood, and you couldn't really work on your engine (it's a big noisy proprietary computer now) if you even could get to it, anyway. This is simply how the economy works today. People complained yesterday about software patents being legal roadblocks to make easy things hard. Then they go back to writing proprietary APIs for closed-source web services, which are mostly just technical roadblocks to make easy things hard. Most of the work we do now is to serve the preservation of the capitalist system, not because it's actually useful work.