24 ms·

Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

119 points by empressplay 5y ago

erikerikson 5y ago
The value of internet dating for people looking for a serious connection is access to scale and therein the bypass of the happenstance of initial conditions. This approach gives up on scale. At first I was challenged with how to effectively gain the value of that access to scale. But then I selected a dating app (okcupid) that allowed for depth and designed my profile to ward off others and select for the subpopulation that I had hypothesized was most likely to hold the partner I was interested in. It's only been 10 years but I'm happy with my results.
- Arech 5y ago
  Ha! I second for okcupid. The only normal dating site (that allows indepth profiles) that I was able to find back in 2015-16. Never needed it since then, because I married a girl I met there)
  - doctorwho42 5y ago
    Unfortunately okcupid has trended away from what it was 5+ years ago. My last SO was through okcupid right before they changed the incentives in the system. Now it has been driven towards the same swipe culture as all the other apps. Though you can still answer questions and write detailed profile... The system doesn't seem to promote that as much. My key gripe right now with how it is setup is that the only discovery is through one of 5-6 swipe categories and your filter criteria no longer impacts any of those swipe decks. So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective
    - klipt 5y ago
      The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer. Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.
      - toss1 5y ago
        >>Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives. And that, right there, is probably the key principle for a solid matchmaking app...
        xtracto 5y ago
        I wrote it in another older thread: Make a service that asks you for say $1000 USD upfront and then pays you back partially every month until you find a match. Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.
        karpierz 5y ago
        If you found a match, how would the site know that you matched successfully if you didn't want the site to know (so you could recover the full amount)?
        ipaddr 5y ago
        They would continue to setup dates and if you stopped showing up they could treat that date as the new relationship date.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        Then wouldn't the app have an incentive to send you on dates with the most obnoxious and/or dangerous people possible, so that you refused to attend any more?
  - icedchai 5y ago
    Okcupid is pretty awful now. Last I checked, they had removed even the most basic search functionality, making it more Tinder like. Dating sites were better in the 2000's. Yahoo personals? Craigslist? Even the old match.com were better than what we have now.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    OkCupid after being acquired has become yet another of "those" dating apps
- tmhrtly 5y ago
  Has he given up on scale? He's already got a news article and (many) thousands of eyeballs on him. Maybe the scale is in the publicity. Still, by no means easily reproducible by anyone else trying to do the same.
  - erikerikson 5y ago
    I completely agree. I was factoring in that his attempt is novel and noteworthy but doesn't generalize. I wouldn't expect copycats to achieve similar results.
    - jcims 5y ago
      I think this scales in quality vs. quantity and it might actually work better that it does for this guy when folks copy this approach. Dating apps clearly have more eyeballs, but the suggestions he receives through this are likely to have some context and social status.
- godelski 5y ago
  Giving up on scale might be a good thing tbh. With scale comes a lot of noise. Also with it comes choice paralysis. On noise, it's not uncommon to see less than 1% of male right swipes to turn into a match. As many here may know, this can be pretty emotionally taxing. Then add on the choice problem. It's a well known psychological effect that too many choices can cause us feel bad about our choices. The classic example of this is with cereal in the grocery store. If you only have a few choices you pick one and think "I did the best I could" but if you have a hundred to choose from you'll think "maybe I could have done better" and doubt yourself even if you like the cereal. In relation to dating I think we end up judging a bit more than normal on first dates. I know I do. But first dates are often awkward and not a great indication of if you're a good match or not, unless there are major red flags. I'll admit that I've had more success by being set up by friends. They know your personality, they know the other person's personality and if you will match. I think there's also a bit of pressure to go on a few dates and help get out of that awkward stage and really find out who the other person is. But everyone has different takes. With scale one method might work well for some people and might not work for others. A wide array of tools is honestly the best because there never will be a singular solution for everyone. I think the major problem here is that were trying to turn all forms of dating into Tinder like and pretending like that's the only successful model.
  - erikerikson 5y ago
    I mentioned okcupid as an option that helps focus better into your expected compatible population. Others are noting it is changed from when I used it. The reason I liked it is that all my choices were far higher quality and my experiences helped me better understand my deeper nuances. If you're looking for a relationship I would suggest avoiding the swiping apps. That fits my bias. I think that choosing a partner or partners in life is one of the most important and most salient things we do and should get commensurate attention. Further, none of the most important aspects of a person are present in their appearance, not to mention a mere image. I believe this is so even if there are echoes of them available and accepting that our presentations to the world are generated by the pattern that we manifest. It still seems to me that it is the pattern you are attempting to discover, evaluate compatibility with, and create relationship to. The point there being to create new configurations and patterns according to the value systems of participants and structures of reality. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to devise a swiping app to help with that.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  Met my partner through okcupid (about 8 years ago I gather it's gotten a little worse since) - at the time it was leagues ahead of the other offerings though.
tomtimtall 5y ago
Interesting experiment. Traditionally when people reach the point of wanting to pay money to get a wife, they travel to some less well off country and buy a wife from there.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  But online dating sites are just that, pay money, hope to get a wife.
  - cassonmars 5y ago
    Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.
    - coder583 5y ago
      There is an approximately equal amount of men and women in the population. How is it possible that so many matches are "low quality" for women?
      - bluejay2 5y ago
        Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.
        baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Sounds like you've read the OkCupid blog post that used to be online, before Match decided to buy OkCupid and censor them.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> He's offering prizes of up to $7,000 in value to anyone who can help him get a date, and ultimately, a wife. That's the gist of the article. I don't like online dating either. But this "social experiment" is just, I dunno, grimy?
- dleslie 5y ago
  He also plans to hand out the money after the wedding. It's all very... Transactional.
  - photochemsyn 5y ago
    In my experience of human society, marriage is extremely transactional. It's modern legal form was invented largely to legally codify how wealth transfers related to marriages would be handled, essentially. A marriage in today's society is more of a business partnership than anything else; infidelity is as common as not. Often in wealthy circles joint business ownership precludes divorce as well, so enter the side partners. Typical aristocratic nonsense, which is what you get with Empires.
    - COGlory 5y ago
      I'm very sorry that has been your experience.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Every interaction in life is transactional. But there is no requirement to view or focus on everything through a single lens.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    I've joked to friends (but would follow through) that if they introduce me to my future wife I would give them 5k. That is such a small amount of money to help you find the most important person in your life. I think its a bit worse to pay for dates/access which is the entire premise of dating apps, matchmakers, clubs etc. because those dont have a vested interest in helping you find anything long and successful. In fact, its the opposite.
cassonmars 5y ago
> He says the swipe-right or swipe-left nature of many of the apps means people are judging a person based on very little, a photo and a short bio. Sounds like he’s using the wrong apps for his goal. It’s intuitively determined that the gradient of intentions for dating apps goes from being hookup-oriented to long term compatibility in direct proportion to the amount of info given before matching.
rektide 5y ago
i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile, before google killed the android notifications for eddystone. the inability to communicate digitally with those around us at a bar or at a park is pretty silly. it'd be so neat to start more ad-hoc, non-applicationized communications channels! and a chief use would definitely be, "hi, single and interested!" was talking with someone yesterday about dating & they actually brought up dating & knowing people's availability, & tech for facilitating info exchange at a bar ornwhat not. which is a twist, because usually it's me semi-subtly wading into a discussion about p2p tech. latter in the conversation they brought up stoplight parties- using very visible clothing (red/yellow/green) to signal interest (no/maybe/yes). trying to think of more over real world ways to connect seems ultra interesting to me.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile When I got my first smartphone, I wondered if there might be a trend of single people setting their Bluetooth device name to the URL of their dating profile. Ideally the profile would have a machine-readable set of fields in (alongside a human-readable equivalent) and an app could calculate if you are compatible with anyone in the vicinity. The system could still work without an app, though, since the user (when they notice someone they are attracted to nearby) could manually scan for Bluetooth device names using their phone, and browse to each page to check if the profile picture matches the person they noticed. I know there have been some geo-location based dating services, but I think they have an incentive to make the matching radius as wide as possible, so that you keep looking at their app. On an open system, though, the economics of hosting these profiles should be similar to that of hosting Fediverse accounts, so there shouldn't be the same conflicts of interest.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
Whatever happened to just asking pretty girls you see on dates? That’s how I met my wife. Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out for coffee. Been married ten years now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kortex 5y ago
  That approach for most folks is a) really daunting b) usually extremely low odds of success. It's one thing if it's someone in a social circle, however big. Total stranger? Seems to only result in frustration for most folks.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    It's a skill that can be learned.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - CyberDildonics 5y ago
      You are absolutely right but you will never be able to convince anyone here that this is true.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      100%, I still remember all of my epic failures when I started learning it!
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Skill is certainly involved, as are sometimes crushing demographics. I grew up in churches that taught one to only date non-Catholic Christians. In the area those were rare, especially single ones my age. Then everyone has deal breakers further reducing the pool of possible candidates. I learned to be less picky but still had to travel about 50 miles away and only made 2 successful matches (i.e. second date) over 5y.
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
I've never used a dating app, probably never will. I don't see the allure. It's like the fast food of human relationships - completely synthetic and made to fill a desire (in some cases). Not to mention the level of vanity in these apps.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  If you've never used one, how do you know?
  - dazc 5y ago
    For somone who's never used a dating app, he seems to have a fairly good idea.
    - CyberDildonics 5y ago
      Why do you think that? Nothing really matters until you meet up in person and once you do, how you planned it doesn't really matter. It isn't some backpage transaction, there isn't any commitment or investment before you meet up. If you want to leave you leave.
      - dazc 5y ago
        The 'fast-food of realtionships' sums it up pretty well. However, if you disagree and have found otherwise then I respect that too. Personally, it's not for me but then I have been single for a while so I'm not really qualified to criticise.
        CyberDildonics 5y ago
        Again, you are just saying the same thing but not actually explaining why you are saying that.
        jesusohchrist 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ctrlp 5y ago
This guy and his experiment seems like a good signal for women to avoid him. Why, exactly, is he finding it so hard to meet someone? What's wrong with him? He's not ugly. He seems to have his own place. Yet he feels he has to pay his friends for help? What kind of friends are those? Moreover, he's the kind of person who publicizes his love-life in the paper. It looks to me like he's casting himself in his own private season of 'The Bachelor'. Ladies, run. As an aside, I feel bad for the generation that thinks dating apps are the best way to find a mate. The whole 'scale' argument seems ludicrous to me. It sounds like the ultimate consumerist approach to finding companionship. Compatibility is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a happy marriage. Anyone who has been part of a good marriage knows that you grow more compatible over time as you build a family and are challenged by life together. The whole concept of finding someone who isn't like you (or your supposed ideal -- how do you even know what your ideal is??? Think about your ideal child. Now think about your actual child. Would you trade?) so that you can grow with/towards that person seems like a better life than just finding that person you can be your lousy self with. Maybe your self at 25 sucks? If you haven't been in a long-term relationship by 35 then I say with confidence your self probably does suck, not because you're a bad person, but probably just selfish and immature, sorry. Moreover, delegating mate selection to an algorithm is maybe the most unromantic thing I could have conceived in 1999. No offense, but it pains me to imagine all the 'how I met your mother' stories. It sounds so transactional. Passing through dozens or more people on your way to a marriage seems like Goldilocks tasting porridge. Moreover, it's been argued that dating apps are bad socially for the larger dating pool. Women on these apps compete for the 20% of "high-status" males. They are conditioned by these males to think they have a chance and to expect to land a high-status mate. Many never find "Mr. Right" and miss out being in a committed relationship during their most productive years. Meanwhile, the 80% of men are competing unsuccessfully for women who are uninterested in them. The 20% of males who can pick and choose are disincentivized to settle down, they also waste their productive years 'playing the field' and ultimately find they are unable to love at all. Sounds like a lose-lose-lose to me. Here come the down-votes (ducks). Tell me I'm wrong.
blunte 5y ago
This makes a nice news story, but based on the criteria mentioned, it is doomed to failure. 1. There are very, very few life-long partnerships. And of the ones that are, some of them are for reciprocal benefits (not love); some are because the people are too scared or complacent to leave; some are because the two are completely lacking in ambition and hope for a better future. Most people change over time, and most people change differently (especially different sexes). To imagine them remaining on a parallel trajectory through long life by nature (instead of sheer willpower or complacency) is naive. 2. Swiping left/right by looks is not for long term partnership. It is for short term physical excitement. And in that regard, it's a good start. 3. No amount of online communication or friend referrals will compare to frequently being around someone, getting to know them, and falling in love with them. This is a very low percentage game he's betting on (unless he's just betting on publicity, in which case he wins 15 minutes of fame). 4. Wait until the (unnamed nationality) recruiters get wind of this. For a chance of $7000, they will inundate him with dates. The smartest of them will promise to share half of it with the women, in which case he'll have more dates than he has time for. And if he has some money, the more desperate women will fake their way to marriage, winning the $3500 and potentially a comfortable life (only having to have sex with him a couple of times per week). This may sound pessimistic, but it's really just an observation on traditional modern marriage. People don't work like the story books suggest, and the story books are based on fiction that doesn't represent the vast majority of human history. The good news for him and anyone else who wants to expand their awareness is that one can have many good meaningful relationships and some really great physical relationships in one lifetime. And be happy through most of it.
- echan00 5y ago
  You sound so pessimistic you should just keep your comments to yourself from now on out.
  - blunte 5y ago
    It seems pessimistic, but it's only pessimism if you accept the current systems that are in place (economic, human relational, etc.). I actually think that there can be great joy, mutual success, and net-postive happiness amongst people if they are willing to reconsider the rules and boundaries set by 1-20 generations before them. Just as with studies and news articles, it's important to consider who benefits from the message being presented. Quite often, it's the "establishment". After all, the establishment has tried to convince us that smoking was good for you, that mastubation would make you blind (and a host of other maladies), that burning fossil fuels wouldn't harm the environment, that eating low-fat packaged goods wouldn't make us fat, that drinking diet sodas wouldn't make us fat, that vaping wouldn't do some really wack stuff to us, that politicians represented us, etc. etc. There are places in the world today where a woman breastfeeding in public is considered offensive. Who made that determination? (I use this example because it's about the most natural human activity, perhaps beside sex.) And yet, much of the US establishment wants us to believe that it's inappropriate. All of these crazy rules and artificial limitations could be much of what's wrong with our relationships and our behavior. I'm trying to point out the absurdity of things.
vgel 5y ago
I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps. As someone who tried dating apps for a while, I never had much luck with them. I ended up meeting my wife in person at the LGBTQ center at my college, we were friends for awhile, started dating, then got married a couple years later. I'm not sure what dating apps optimize for. It's easy to say "for hookups!", but it seems like a very low% of matches on those apps lead to any kind of in-person connection, date or hookup: anecdotally I think I had a few hundred matches on Tinder, but only went on ~10 dates / hookups as a consequence. For most matches, the conversation would fizzle after a few messages. Maybe it's different for straight people? My hypothesis is there's a "Market for Lemons"[1] problem here: take a pool of potential matches on Tinder. The pools narrow like so: 100% of people are on the app (given) x<100% of people will match with an average person (picky) y<x% of people will message or reply to a message[2] z<y% of people will go on a date / hookup with someone[2] People in each pool will be selected out of the swiping pool, leaving the people left for you to swipe on being, on average, less committed to ultimately going on a date. For example: people in the `z` group will get into short/long-term relationships and stop using Tinder. People in the `y` group will be busy texting with someone they met on Tinder (using pickup lines, etc.) and swipe less. Etc, etc. I'm not sure how a dating app would solve this issue. Traditional ways of finding partners, like meeting people at a bar or hobby group or at college, doesn't either: it's just there's a benefit to making friends or talking to people beyond trying to hook up or start dating them. Most people, if they make 5 friends at a college club but don't start dating any of them, are still happy, I would think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons [2]: Why would people match or reply to a message, but not want to go on a date? I've anecdotally known several people who do this: some just wanted validation from random strangers, some are just shy and would theoretically want to go on a date but didn't work up the courage to actually do it, etc. etc. Lots of reasons.
- minikomi 5y ago
  I think a largely unsolved problem is it's more satisfying to match than to re-kindle a conversation with a past match. The window after a match where a conversation can spark and lead to an offline interaction is fleeting and, once gone, it feels weird to re-message a past match.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 5y ago
$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it's a recipe for disappointment. Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one. Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game. For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly. Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them. That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.
- techbio 5y ago
  A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.
bgro 5y ago
This sounds like a sex trafficking idea I'd expect to come from a reddit/discord mod.
senectus1 5y ago
anybody thinking getting a companion is a goal is going to end up in a bad place. companionship is a road not a destination. every single second of building up to it, achieving it and maintaining it takes work.
waspight 5y ago
On the dating app subject. It is interesting that the most successful customers will never come back. Must be hard to keep up the number of active users if the service is too good…
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Starting with being one of Match's first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I've given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I've found is that paid services, even if it's just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid services unfortunately have their own incentives to keep you around even after finding mutually attraction and compatibility but the free (and freemium) sites are designed to suck up your time and attention, which are monetized, instead of you paying directly. Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels. For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.
- Ajef 5y ago
  > Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. This is interesting. Can you provide a little information on the context: - what is the number of people you've encountered to form this opinion? - Is this all in one region/sub-population or do you suspect socio-economic differences to play into this?
danrobhawkins 5y ago
This guy is me. Interested in this chat. And how I can improve my model. Get more info about the project at noodler.substack.com
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > And how I can improve my model. With no offense intended, I think the "dating affiliate" model you've come up with should be totally scrapped. First, having your friends send your "profile" to women they know as email "bait" is cringe. Imagine you're a woman who receives this email. What would you think? My guess is that a lot of women will find it creepy or desperate, even if you really are a nice guy and great catch. Even consider how your "experiment" is being portrayed in this news article: you're "tired" of online dating, not enjoying it and have been looking for years without luck. All negative. Second, you're asking women (who you call "candidates") to take time to submit a profile so that a committee of your friends can decide whether they're worthy of your attention. There's a fundamental disconnect here: the supply of dates you consider to be of sufficient quality is apparently low but you're treating the women as if the opposite is true. Not a good look. Third, you want to meet a woman and get married right? If a woman applies for the job, why not be respectful and make a decision about whether you want to go out on a date or not? Once again, I think any woman who encounters this "experiment" is going to see this as a huge negative. As a general rule, women are more attracted to men who are decisive and take responsibility for their lives. It doesn't mean you have to act like a NAVY Seal but I believe asking your friends to decide who you date is going to be unattractive to the vast majority of women. Fourth, I think you should consider the possibility that how you're presenting yourself will have a bigger impact on your results than the model you use to distribute your "profile". You describe yourself as a "fun guy serious about love" but again, put yourself in a woman's shoes. Does the very next sentence ("steady income, with a good credit rating") scream "fun!"? Do your requirements/preferences for a woman ("You’re kind and have a curious mind. Live within 10km of Vancouver. Or have good wifi") make it seem like you really know what you're looking for, or provide enough meaningful detail so that you might connect with someone you share a unique common interest, hobby, etc. with? The quality of your presentation makes all the difference and again with no offense intended, I don't think you've got your profile down. Great profiles gets interest, lackluster ones don't. In any channel. Having your friends deliver your profile to women through email won't change that. Finally, introductions from friends to potential dates can be a really good way to meet women. You shouldn't have to pay your friends to introduce you. If you've let your friends know that you're single and hoping to meet someone and they never introduce you to anyone, it's worth figuring out why.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I just wonder whether ghosting will be as socially acceptable in the future as it is today.
jojadog 5y ago
Don't give up, just take a break or choose a different format for communication. For example, I liked the video chats. I think that in your case we should look for different options such as the https://coomeet.com/ https://coomeet.com/ page where you can connect without internet problems and especially with this page you can do many things like meet girls from different parts of the world.

119 points by empressplay 5y ago

The value of internet dating for people looking for a serious connection is access to scale and therein the bypass of the happenstance of initial conditions. This approach gives up on scale. At first I was challenged with how to effectively gain the value of that access to scale. But then I selected a dating app (okcupid) that allowed for depth and designed my profile to ward off others and select for the subpopulation that I had hypothesized was most likely to hold the partner I was interested in. It's only been 10 years but I'm happy with my results.

Arech 5y ago
Ha! I second for okcupid. The only normal dating site (that allows indepth profiles) that I was able to find back in 2015-16. Never needed it since then, because I married a girl I met there)
- doctorwho42 5y ago
  Unfortunately okcupid has trended away from what it was 5+ years ago. My last SO was through okcupid right before they changed the incentives in the system. Now it has been driven towards the same swipe culture as all the other apps. Though you can still answer questions and write detailed profile... The system doesn't seem to promote that as much. My key gripe right now with how it is setup is that the only discovery is through one of 5-6 swipe categories and your filter criteria no longer impacts any of those swipe decks. So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective
  - klipt 5y ago
    The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer. Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.
    - toss1 5y ago
      >>Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives. And that, right there, is probably the key principle for a solid matchmaking app...
      - xtracto 5y ago
        I wrote it in another older thread: Make a service that asks you for say $1000 USD upfront and then pays you back partially every month until you find a match. Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.
        karpierz 5y ago
        If you found a match, how would the site know that you matched successfully if you didn't want the site to know (so you could recover the full amount)?
        ipaddr 5y ago
        They would continue to setup dates and if you stopped showing up they could treat that date as the new relationship date.
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        Then wouldn't the app have an incentive to send you on dates with the most obnoxious and/or dangerous people possible, so that you refused to attend any more?
- icedchai 5y ago
  Okcupid is pretty awful now. Last I checked, they had removed even the most basic search functionality, making it more Tinder like. Dating sites were better in the 2000's. Yahoo personals? Craigslist? Even the old match.com were better than what we have now.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  OkCupid after being acquired has become yet another of "those" dating apps
tmhrtly 5y ago
Has he given up on scale? He's already got a news article and (many) thousands of eyeballs on him. Maybe the scale is in the publicity. Still, by no means easily reproducible by anyone else trying to do the same.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  I completely agree. I was factoring in that his attempt is novel and noteworthy but doesn't generalize. I wouldn't expect copycats to achieve similar results.
  - jcims 5y ago
    I think this scales in quality vs. quantity and it might actually work better that it does for this guy when folks copy this approach. Dating apps clearly have more eyeballs, but the suggestions he receives through this are likely to have some context and social status.
godelski 5y ago
Giving up on scale might be a good thing tbh. With scale comes a lot of noise. Also with it comes choice paralysis. On noise, it's not uncommon to see less than 1% of male right swipes to turn into a match. As many here may know, this can be pretty emotionally taxing. Then add on the choice problem. It's a well known psychological effect that too many choices can cause us feel bad about our choices. The classic example of this is with cereal in the grocery store. If you only have a few choices you pick one and think "I did the best I could" but if you have a hundred to choose from you'll think "maybe I could have done better" and doubt yourself even if you like the cereal. In relation to dating I think we end up judging a bit more than normal on first dates. I know I do. But first dates are often awkward and not a great indication of if you're a good match or not, unless there are major red flags. I'll admit that I've had more success by being set up by friends. They know your personality, they know the other person's personality and if you will match. I think there's also a bit of pressure to go on a few dates and help get out of that awkward stage and really find out who the other person is. But everyone has different takes. With scale one method might work well for some people and might not work for others. A wide array of tools is honestly the best because there never will be a singular solution for everyone. I think the major problem here is that were trying to turn all forms of dating into Tinder like and pretending like that's the only successful model.
- erikerikson 5y ago
  I mentioned okcupid as an option that helps focus better into your expected compatible population. Others are noting it is changed from when I used it. The reason I liked it is that all my choices were far higher quality and my experiences helped me better understand my deeper nuances. If you're looking for a relationship I would suggest avoiding the swiping apps. That fits my bias. I think that choosing a partner or partners in life is one of the most important and most salient things we do and should get commensurate attention. Further, none of the most important aspects of a person are present in their appearance, not to mention a mere image. I believe this is so even if there are echoes of them available and accepting that our presentations to the world are generated by the pattern that we manifest. It still seems to me that it is the pattern you are attempting to discover, evaluate compatibility with, and create relationship to. The point there being to create new configurations and patterns according to the value systems of participants and structures of reality. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to devise a swiping app to help with that.
noir_lord 5y ago
Met my partner through okcupid (about 8 years ago I gather it's gotten a little worse since) - at the time it was leagues ahead of the other offerings though.

tomtimtall 5y ago

Interesting experiment. Traditionally when people reach the point of wanting to pay money to get a wife, they travel to some less well off country and buy a wife from there.

bbarnett 5y ago
But online dating sites are just that, pay money, hope to get a wife.
- cassonmars 5y ago
  Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.
  - coder583 5y ago
    There is an approximately equal amount of men and women in the population. How is it possible that so many matches are "low quality" for women?
    - bluejay2 5y ago
      Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Sounds like you've read the OkCupid blog post that used to be online, before Match decided to buy OkCupid and censor them.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> He's offering prizes of up to $7,000 in value to anyone who can help him get a date, and ultimately, a wife. That's the gist of the article. I don't like online dating either. But this "social experiment" is just, I dunno, grimy?

dleslie 5y ago
He also plans to hand out the money after the wedding. It's all very... Transactional.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  In my experience of human society, marriage is extremely transactional. It's modern legal form was invented largely to legally codify how wealth transfers related to marriages would be handled, essentially. A marriage in today's society is more of a business partnership than anything else; infidelity is as common as not. Often in wealthy circles joint business ownership precludes divorce as well, so enter the side partners. Typical aristocratic nonsense, which is what you get with Empires.
  - COGlory 5y ago
    I'm very sorry that has been your experience.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Every interaction in life is transactional. But there is no requirement to view or focus on everything through a single lens.
- handmodel 5y ago
  I've joked to friends (but would follow through) that if they introduce me to my future wife I would give them 5k. That is such a small amount of money to help you find the most important person in your life. I think its a bit worse to pay for dates/access which is the entire premise of dating apps, matchmakers, clubs etc. because those dont have a vested interest in helping you find anything long and successful. In fact, its the opposite.

cassonmars 5y ago

> He says the swipe-right or swipe-left nature of many of the apps means people are judging a person based on very little, a photo and a short bio. Sounds like he’s using the wrong apps for his goal. It’s intuitively determined that the gradient of intentions for dating apps goes from being hookup-oriented to long term compatibility in direct proportion to the amount of info given before matching.

rektide 5y ago

i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile, before google killed the android notifications for eddystone. the inability to communicate digitally with those around us at a bar or at a park is pretty silly. it'd be so neat to start more ad-hoc, non-applicationized communications channels! and a chief use would definitely be, "hi, single and interested!" was talking with someone yesterday about dating & they actually brought up dating & knowing people's availability, & tech for facilitating info exchange at a bar ornwhat not. which is a twist, because usually it's me semi-subtly wading into a discussion about p2p tech. latter in the conversation they brought up stoplight parties- using very visible clothing (red/yellow/green) to signal interest (no/maybe/yes). trying to think of more over real world ways to connect seems ultra interesting to me.

dane-pgp 5y ago
> i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile When I got my first smartphone, I wondered if there might be a trend of single people setting their Bluetooth device name to the URL of their dating profile. Ideally the profile would have a machine-readable set of fields in (alongside a human-readable equivalent) and an app could calculate if you are compatible with anyone in the vicinity. The system could still work without an app, though, since the user (when they notice someone they are attracted to nearby) could manually scan for Bluetooth device names using their phone, and browse to each page to check if the profile picture matches the person they noticed. I know there have been some geo-location based dating services, but I think they have an incentive to make the matching radius as wide as possible, so that you keep looking at their app. On an open system, though, the economics of hosting these profiles should be similar to that of hosting Fediverse accounts, so there shouldn't be the same conflicts of interest.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

Whatever happened to just asking pretty girls you see on dates? That’s how I met my wife. Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out for coffee. Been married ten years now.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kortex 5y ago
That approach for most folks is a) really daunting b) usually extremely low odds of success. It's one thing if it's someone in a social circle, however big. Total stranger? Seems to only result in frustration for most folks.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  It's a skill that can be learned.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    You are absolutely right but you will never be able to convince anyone here that this is true.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    100%, I still remember all of my epic failures when I started learning it!
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Skill is certainly involved, as are sometimes crushing demographics. I grew up in churches that taught one to only date non-Catholic Christians. In the area those were rare, especially single ones my age. Then everyone has deal breakers further reducing the pool of possible candidates. I learned to be less picky but still had to travel about 50 miles away and only made 2 successful matches (i.e. second date) over 5y.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

I've never used a dating app, probably never will. I don't see the allure. It's like the fast food of human relationships - completely synthetic and made to fill a desire (in some cases). Not to mention the level of vanity in these apps.

CyberDildonics 5y ago
If you've never used one, how do you know?
- dazc 5y ago
  For somone who's never used a dating app, he seems to have a fairly good idea.
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    Why do you think that? Nothing really matters until you meet up in person and once you do, how you planned it doesn't really matter. It isn't some backpage transaction, there isn't any commitment or investment before you meet up. If you want to leave you leave.
    - dazc 5y ago
      The 'fast-food of realtionships' sums it up pretty well. However, if you disagree and have found otherwise then I respect that too. Personally, it's not for me but then I have been single for a while so I'm not really qualified to criticise.
      - CyberDildonics 5y ago
        Again, you are just saying the same thing but not actually explaining why you are saying that.
        jesusohchrist 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ctrlp 5y ago

This guy and his experiment seems like a good signal for women to avoid him. Why, exactly, is he finding it so hard to meet someone? What's wrong with him? He's not ugly. He seems to have his own place. Yet he feels he has to pay his friends for help? What kind of friends are those? Moreover, he's the kind of person who publicizes his love-life in the paper. It looks to me like he's casting himself in his own private season of 'The Bachelor'. Ladies, run. As an aside, I feel bad for the generation that thinks dating apps are the best way to find a mate. The whole 'scale' argument seems ludicrous to me. It sounds like the ultimate consumerist approach to finding companionship. Compatibility is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a happy marriage. Anyone who has been part of a good marriage knows that you grow more compatible over time as you build a family and are challenged by life together. The whole concept of finding someone who isn't like you (or your supposed ideal -- how do you even know what your ideal is??? Think about your ideal child. Now think about your actual child. Would you trade?) so that you can grow with/towards that person seems like a better life than just finding that person you can be your lousy self with. Maybe your self at 25 sucks? If you haven't been in a long-term relationship by 35 then I say with confidence your self probably does suck, not because you're a bad person, but probably just selfish and immature, sorry. Moreover, delegating mate selection to an algorithm is maybe the most unromantic thing I could have conceived in 1999. No offense, but it pains me to imagine all the 'how I met your mother' stories. It sounds so transactional. Passing through dozens or more people on your way to a marriage seems like Goldilocks tasting porridge. Moreover, it's been argued that dating apps are bad socially for the larger dating pool. Women on these apps compete for the 20% of "high-status" males. They are conditioned by these males to think they have a chance and to expect to land a high-status mate. Many never find "Mr. Right" and miss out being in a committed relationship during their most productive years. Meanwhile, the 80% of men are competing unsuccessfully for women who are uninterested in them. The 20% of males who can pick and choose are disincentivized to settle down, they also waste their productive years 'playing the field' and ultimately find they are unable to love at all. Sounds like a lose-lose-lose to me. Here come the down-votes (ducks). Tell me I'm wrong.

blunte 5y ago

This makes a nice news story, but based on the criteria mentioned, it is doomed to failure. 1. There are very, very few life-long partnerships. And of the ones that are, some of them are for reciprocal benefits (not love); some are because the people are too scared or complacent to leave; some are because the two are completely lacking in ambition and hope for a better future. Most people change over time, and most people change differently (especially different sexes). To imagine them remaining on a parallel trajectory through long life by nature (instead of sheer willpower or complacency) is naive. 2. Swiping left/right by looks is not for long term partnership. It is for short term physical excitement. And in that regard, it's a good start. 3. No amount of online communication or friend referrals will compare to frequently being around someone, getting to know them, and falling in love with them. This is a very low percentage game he's betting on (unless he's just betting on publicity, in which case he wins 15 minutes of fame). 4. Wait until the (unnamed nationality) recruiters get wind of this. For a chance of $7000, they will inundate him with dates. The smartest of them will promise to share half of it with the women, in which case he'll have more dates than he has time for. And if he has some money, the more desperate women will fake their way to marriage, winning the $3500 and potentially a comfortable life (only having to have sex with him a couple of times per week). This may sound pessimistic, but it's really just an observation on traditional modern marriage. People don't work like the story books suggest, and the story books are based on fiction that doesn't represent the vast majority of human history. The good news for him and anyone else who wants to expand their awareness is that one can have many good meaningful relationships and some really great physical relationships in one lifetime. And be happy through most of it.

echan00 5y ago
You sound so pessimistic you should just keep your comments to yourself from now on out.
- blunte 5y ago
  It seems pessimistic, but it's only pessimism if you accept the current systems that are in place (economic, human relational, etc.). I actually think that there can be great joy, mutual success, and net-postive happiness amongst people if they are willing to reconsider the rules and boundaries set by 1-20 generations before them. Just as with studies and news articles, it's important to consider who benefits from the message being presented. Quite often, it's the "establishment". After all, the establishment has tried to convince us that smoking was good for you, that mastubation would make you blind (and a host of other maladies), that burning fossil fuels wouldn't harm the environment, that eating low-fat packaged goods wouldn't make us fat, that drinking diet sodas wouldn't make us fat, that vaping wouldn't do some really wack stuff to us, that politicians represented us, etc. etc. There are places in the world today where a woman breastfeeding in public is considered offensive. Who made that determination? (I use this example because it's about the most natural human activity, perhaps beside sex.) And yet, much of the US establishment wants us to believe that it's inappropriate. All of these crazy rules and artificial limitations could be much of what's wrong with our relationships and our behavior. I'm trying to point out the absurdity of things.

vgel 5y ago

I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps. As someone who tried dating apps for a while, I never had much luck with them. I ended up meeting my wife in person at the LGBTQ center at my college, we were friends for awhile, started dating, then got married a couple years later. I'm not sure what dating apps optimize for. It's easy to say "for hookups!", but it seems like a very low% of matches on those apps lead to any kind of in-person connection, date or hookup: anecdotally I think I had a few hundred matches on Tinder, but only went on ~10 dates / hookups as a consequence. For most matches, the conversation would fizzle after a few messages. Maybe it's different for straight people? My hypothesis is there's a "Market for Lemons"[1] problem here: take a pool of potential matches on Tinder. The pools narrow like so: 100% of people are on the app (given) x<100% of people will match with an average person (picky) y<x% of people will message or reply to a message[2] z<y% of people will go on a date / hookup with someone[2] People in each pool will be selected out of the swiping pool, leaving the people left for you to swipe on being, on average, less committed to ultimately going on a date. For example: people in the `z` group will get into short/long-term relationships and stop using Tinder. People in the `y` group will be busy texting with someone they met on Tinder (using pickup lines, etc.) and swipe less. Etc, etc. I'm not sure how a dating app would solve this issue. Traditional ways of finding partners, like meeting people at a bar or hobby group or at college, doesn't either: it's just there's a benefit to making friends or talking to people beyond trying to hook up or start dating them. Most people, if they make 5 friends at a college club but don't start dating any of them, are still happy, I would think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons [2]: Why would people match or reply to a message, but not want to go on a date? I've anecdotally known several people who do this: some just wanted validation from random strangers, some are just shy and would theoretically want to go on a date but didn't work up the courage to actually do it, etc. etc. Lots of reasons.

minikomi 5y ago
I think a largely unsolved problem is it's more satisfying to match than to re-kindle a conversation with a past match. The window after a match where a conversation can spark and lead to an offline interaction is fleeting and, once gone, it feels weird to re-message a past match.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

motohagiography 5y ago

$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it's a recipe for disappointment. Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one. Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game. For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly. Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them. That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.

techbio 5y ago
A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.

bgro 5y ago

This sounds like a sex trafficking idea I'd expect to come from a reddit/discord mod.

senectus1 5y ago

anybody thinking getting a companion is a goal is going to end up in a bad place. companionship is a road not a destination. every single second of building up to it, achieving it and maintaining it takes work.

waspight 5y ago

On the dating app subject. It is interesting that the most successful customers will never come back. Must be hard to keep up the number of active users if the service is too good…

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Starting with being one of Match's first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I've given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I've found is that paid services, even if it's just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid services unfortunately have their own incentives to keep you around even after finding mutually attraction and compatibility but the free (and freemium) sites are designed to suck up your time and attention, which are monetized, instead of you paying directly. Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels. For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.

Ajef 5y ago
> Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. This is interesting. Can you provide a little information on the context: - what is the number of people you've encountered to form this opinion? - Is this all in one region/sub-population or do you suspect socio-economic differences to play into this?

danrobhawkins 5y ago

This guy is me. Interested in this chat. And how I can improve my model. Get more info about the project at noodler.substack.com

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> And how I can improve my model. With no offense intended, I think the "dating affiliate" model you've come up with should be totally scrapped. First, having your friends send your "profile" to women they know as email "bait" is cringe. Imagine you're a woman who receives this email. What would you think? My guess is that a lot of women will find it creepy or desperate, even if you really are a nice guy and great catch. Even consider how your "experiment" is being portrayed in this news article: you're "tired" of online dating, not enjoying it and have been looking for years without luck. All negative. Second, you're asking women (who you call "candidates") to take time to submit a profile so that a committee of your friends can decide whether they're worthy of your attention. There's a fundamental disconnect here: the supply of dates you consider to be of sufficient quality is apparently low but you're treating the women as if the opposite is true. Not a good look. Third, you want to meet a woman and get married right? If a woman applies for the job, why not be respectful and make a decision about whether you want to go out on a date or not? Once again, I think any woman who encounters this "experiment" is going to see this as a huge negative. As a general rule, women are more attracted to men who are decisive and take responsibility for their lives. It doesn't mean you have to act like a NAVY Seal but I believe asking your friends to decide who you date is going to be unattractive to the vast majority of women. Fourth, I think you should consider the possibility that how you're presenting yourself will have a bigger impact on your results than the model you use to distribute your "profile". You describe yourself as a "fun guy serious about love" but again, put yourself in a woman's shoes. Does the very next sentence ("steady income, with a good credit rating") scream "fun!"? Do your requirements/preferences for a woman ("You’re kind and have a curious mind. Live within 10km of Vancouver. Or have good wifi") make it seem like you really know what you're looking for, or provide enough meaningful detail so that you might connect with someone you share a unique common interest, hobby, etc. with? The quality of your presentation makes all the difference and again with no offense intended, I don't think you've got your profile down. Great profiles gets interest, lackluster ones don't. In any channel. Having your friends deliver your profile to women through email won't change that. Finally, introductions from friends to potential dates can be a really good way to meet women. You shouldn't have to pay your friends to introduce you. If you've let your friends know that you're single and hoping to meet someone and they never introduce you to anyone, it's worth figuring out why.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I just wonder whether ghosting will be as socially acceptable in the future as it is today.

jojadog 5y ago

Don't give up, just take a break or choose a different format for communication. For example, I liked the video chats. I think that in your case we should look for different options such as the https://coomeet.com/ https://coomeet.com/ page where you can connect without internet problems and especially with this page you can do many things like meet girls from different parts of the world.