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Props for building this! The online dating market is a complete mess. It's basically an oligopoly, and has a pretty obvious misalignment of incentives. Novel id
by dlkf 7y ago
Props for building this! The online dating market is a complete mess. It's basically an oligopoly, and has a pretty obvious misalignment of incentives. Novel ideas and competition are sorely needed.
As regards all the brilliant psychologists here who are commenting "looks matter to most people!": it's not as though you will find every person you meet on ohmyperson unattractive. The issue is that meeting people you find attractive might happen less frequently than it would on eg Tinder. How much less frequently is an empirical question. It's worth noting that edited, filtered, selection-biased Tinder profile pics are not always useful. Sometimes they're worse than nothing. I've been on a bunch of internet dates in the past year, and half the time my date looks nothing like their photos. At least with ohmyperson I won't feel duped.
The problem I see with this model is that it might naturally lead to the situation where people develop a strong connection over messages and then feel disappointed when they meet IRL, only to find that they are incompatible for reasons of physical attraction. This happens sometimes and it's a real bummer. (It's for this reason that I think you should meet - or pass - after sending a couple messages, rather than having a protracted convo).
Just as the Tinder model provides a coarse grained filter for looks, I can see ohmyperson providing a coarse grained filter for interests, values, and relationship goals. Some apps (bumble, okc) have various filters for these sorts of attributes, but in my opinion none have really figured it out all that well.
- chillacy 7y agoThis is basically what happened when Ok Cupid tried this as an experiment for one day. Long conversations were instantly abandoned.
- iudqnolq 7y agoCan you expand? I'd like to learn more about this. Ok Cupid used to publish lots of interesting blog posts, so I'm assuming you got that from one, but I can't find it. Do you have a link?
- c0nducktr 7y agoI wonder if the old blog posts are even still up. After they were bought by Match Group, all those experiments stopped, and the site became one with the borg. It's depressing that one shitty corporation, controls every fucking dating site, and has the money to buy pretty much any competitor at this point.
- disqard 7y agoSomebody archived them here [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_archives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/aapn1l/okcupid_blog_...
- iudqnolq 7y agoThank you. The one top of chain was referring to was https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/weexperimentonhumanbeings.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/weexperimenton...
- yorwba 7y agoThat doesn't seem to show that "Long conversations were instantly abandoned." The graph of "conversation life expectancy vs. normal" vs "where in the thread the photos came back on" does show a dip in life expectancy of 20%-30% if photos appeared after just a few messages, but the gap grows smaller the more messages had been exchanged. In other words, the longer a conversation had been going on, the smaller the influence of learning what the other person looked like was.
- gieoon 7y agoI don't think that it's only the dating market that is an oligopoly, it seems that most verticals are dominated by a few key players who have managed to create a standardized system for consistent delivery. In my personal experiences I find myself having unexpectedly interesting conversations with a myriad of people, many who may not stereotypically raise my curiosity. I think looks can be deceiving, and this is an attempt to remove that factor to give a chance to anyone who you would find interesting. In stating this, it's true that you may lose interest in someone after realizing a lack of physical chemistry, but I think the opposite also holds true where you lose interest in someone who's very attractive because of a lack of compatibility. Maybe the best relationships stem from friendships that develop into deeper understanding and compassion. I think we're heavily focused purely on appearances, and in doing so neglect the other important features that define our uniqueness