36 ms·

Working for a Dating Website (2015)

164 points by caseysoftware 4y ago

aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
If you actually have the ability to make great matches, matches so good you are concerned you will lose two customers, you should be running a matchmaking service and not a dating website.
- dmarlow 4y ago
  Would those "happy" customers lead to more word of mouth though? Not everything has to be a gimmick, right?
  - aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
    If I used a matchmaking service and it provided me with "end your subscription to a dating service 90% of the time" matches I would be telling everyone I knew.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Most relationships end at some point, and datings sites are often used by those still in relationships (open relationships, polyamory, cheating, etc...)
- RajT88 4y ago
  This is why there are matchmaking services charging 10k a year. You used to see ads for them in Skymall.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    And how often did they work?
    - RajT88 4y ago
      No clue. I never used them. My role here was writing snarky comments in Skymall catalogs to unwind on my Friday night redeye flights home. (I used to fly a lot for work)
    - RajT88 4y ago
      I will say that the ads were a bit creepy. Always sort of ethereal looking hot 40'sish blonde women. Implicitly promising you'll be able to date and marry one of those (but of course the hot 40's lady is the matchmaker). They sort of similarly implicitly promised you could meet and marry a doctor or exec or something. Also - the ads were never targeted at women.
gregw2 4y ago
There is a business opportunity here IMHO for success for a player with much better aligned incentive structure with their users. (I perceive there's plenty of money in the market however much a monopoly it tends to be now.) Vanguard did/does this with mutual funds for example and grew to be the biggest player (while still leaving plenty on the table for others) in the market. You just have to make it part of your core business model and marketing strategy and stick with it long enough to see success. Here's my stab at how to align incentives for dating sites, both the business, the customer, the employees and the stockholders. Commit to the following type of pricing model and market the heck out of you wanting to see your customer succeed: Your initial price is $50/month (the going rate IIRC). After two months it drops to $40/month. After six months it drops to $35/month. After a year it drops to $30/month After two years it drops to $20/month (below or just at or only slightly above your marginal cost-to-serve) (Vary the dollar values above depending on your economics and behaviors. Maybe you start people at $60/mo, higher than competitors for example but reassure people it will auto-drop for them.) Then you are incented to get people good matches most at the point at which they are most engaged. If your employees are not striving to get people matches at that point, your business will suffer. If you find yourself with a low-margin business with too many $20/mo customers, your stock valuation will suffer. Two other pieces of data I would gather when trying to setup my internal metrics: 1) Ask each customer when they signup what their ideal timeline (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc) is to A) meet someone through the site, B) have a steady relationship, and (if applicable) C) get married. Understand the demand/expectations curve and how it intersects with your pricing curve. 2) Offer customers a $20 refund when leaving the service to tell you if they got married, are in a serious relationship, or never got anywhere with your service. Incent the customer to help you measure your success rate and its correlation with their initial expectations, individually and in bulk. Give customers the option of explicitly refusing to get the refund because they are so satisfied, or to give you a tip and use that as a key KPI measuring customer satisfaction. The above pricing curve also ironically adds stickiness the steeper the price drops are, because people won't want to quit and then resignup later since their price might triple if there's a chance they might get more active again on your site in the next few months. You just don't want your initial price to be too steep to drive too many people off.
- xutopia 4y ago
hardwaregeek 4y ago
Maybe this is making the author's point but IMO dating is hard enough that I don't think online services need to make it even harder
apples_oranges 4y ago
Can't wait for the day when fake-user-ai bots are flirting with flirt-ai-bots. Having said that, 90% of people I know really do find loving relationships via online dating. Sample size isn't great, but my feeling is those online dating relationships are superior, because people really can find good matches easier.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  I think there's definitely some kind of bias in those results. Only certain kinds of people are able to tolerate online dating for very long, and the way they work only really finds "good matches" along a very narrow subset of criteria. Most people I know, myself included, can't stand the shallowness and general feeling that they are participating in a torturously silly marketing exercise.
  - apples_oranges 4y ago
    But what if you wrote that in your profile? Perhaps you would find the boy/girl that digs this kind of view on online dating.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      So many reasons: 1) Negativity is generally not attractive. 2) It's a lie, since clearly I can tolerate it if I'm actually on a dating site saying I can't tolerate it. 3) Someone else who can't tolerate it isn't likely to be there to read it. 4) Stating it out loud doesn't change the nature of dating sites as shallow exercises in marketing.
michaelteter 4y ago
A dating site is #2 or #3 on my personal project backlog. I have significant successful (and unsuccessful) experience as a user, and I have identified some significant improvements to be made (from the user perspective). There's really no point optimizing for profit only, as it almost certainly results in a bad experience for users. Sure, a company can make money (and likely eventually be bought by Match Group, so -cash out-)... but sometimes it's worth actually building something for the good of people. Yes, if two people match well, you may lose two customers... for a while. Most relationships don't last long term, and people who have had good experiences on a dating site will return when they are seeking companionship or love again. If they were happy with your site before, they will come back to you. The current dating site options are a wasteland. Not to beat a dead horse, but most are owned by Match Group. And from my experience with several of them, once they land in Match they are not good sites to use. OkCupid was one of the best at one time, and PlentyOfFish was pretty decent (if you can accept old/functional UI) long ago. But these days, they have pared down the features and upped the pricing to the point where it feels like they are just milking lonely people for all the cash they can get. At least they are possibly not stuffing fake female accounts like Adult Friend Finder and Ashley Madison did (and I suspect Bumble currently does). Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...
- dboreham 4y ago
  A dating site is like trying to solve an NP problem. It's provable that there's no correlation between information generated by users and outcome. For example the known factors that affect couple compatibility are things like attachment style. People are generally unaware of their attachment style.
  - derefr 4y ago
    So why wouldn't a dating site just put its users through trusted high-power psychological screening instruments, to determine that sort of stuff? They're just questionnaires, mostly; they can be done entirely through a web/mobile UI, and scored without any humans in the loop. Do the developers of dating sites think that people will consider it too much of a bother to fill out such things, or consider such questions too invasive? I don't know why; people love personality quizzes. (IMHO you could make the whole site just a BuzzFeed "what kind of person are you? take this quiz to find out!" site at its core, except through all the quizzes you're doing, it's building up a very thorough psychological profile of you; and when it's got enough, it opens up the ability for you to date through it.)
karpierz 4y ago
If it were possible for a dating site to consistently make great matches, they wouldn't bother taint their results. Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine, even if you're continually having to find new customers, since that's how dating sites currently function. I interned at a dating site a while ago and there's no need to taint anything. People are far too complicated to predict beyond who will send a message to who. Also, the problem is adversarial (IE, people misrepresent themselves as the person they want to be as opposed to the person they are), so trying to find the signal is a continuous game of cat and mouse.
- smnrchrds 4y ago
  > Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine Not if you already have almost the whole market to yourself. > Match Group ... owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, UPWARD, Ship, and OurTime, totalling over 45 global dating companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
  - red_trumpet 4y ago
    I fail to see how this would not make it a money printing machine?
    - Smar 4y ago
      It is already, regardless of quality of their product?
    - smnrchrds 4y ago
      "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful." - Steve Jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
      - 4y ago
7373737373 4y ago
A reputable dating website can most likely not be for-profit. "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", written by a co-founder of OkCupid: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne... before they, too, sold out to the Match Group monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_owned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ow... The world needs a site with the moral integrity and user-only focus the likes of lichess.org
- thomasahle 4y ago
  > The world needs a site with the moral integrity and user-only focus the likes of lichess.org A low-costs + donations model ala lichess would actually be quite interesting for a data site. Maybe you could even convince "alumni" to donate, in appreciation of their successful relationship. The longer it lasted, the more donations.
  - yurodivuie 4y ago
    A lot of people would pay to get the history of their exchanges on a dating site. You don't realize when you close your account that you're also losing all the history of how you met - at the time it's more of a celebration of "job done" and demonstration of commitment. I understand why it all vanishes (the privacy concerns are non-trivial, storage isn't free), but it would be worth almost any price when the 5/10/20 year anniversaries roll around.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      After our third date, my now-wife and I decided to delete our online dating accounts. I had the foresight to screenshot/download her profile and our messages, but I forgot to capture my own. Oh well!
- 999900000999 4y ago
  [flagged]
goodside 4y ago
I worked in the online dating industry for five years (OkCupid 2011-2015, Grindr in 2020). I’ve heard this argument many times but it isn’t true. I’ve never heard of anyone in the dating industry applying this logic, because no app is good enough at making permanent matches that it makes sense to worry about.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Do you have any insider knowledge from your time with Grindr on 1) why the app appears to remain a terribly bad buggy mess and never seems to improve? Is there any awareness of this in the company? Is it just a legacy code issue? 2) why the desktop web version was shut down? 3) why unlimited pricing is that outrageous?
  - winternett 4y ago
    1) If everyone on the app finds great matches, everyone will stop using the app, and therein kill the possibility of the company in making a profit. 2) They laid off developers to save money, and desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps, so getting rid f desktop apps always looks like a win for a software maker. 3) There is so much competition with expensive cloud host overhead that if a company can gaslight users into thinking that their app is worth money, they push it all the way in a bid to maximize their traditionally weak earnings on the deceptively small user bases they have... They also create tons of fake accounts and profiles to also emulate that they are running vibrant communities.
    - ahtihn 4y ago
      > desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps This would imply that paywalls and user controls aren't implemented entirely on the server side, which sounds like an obviously bad idea?
      - pcthrowaway 4y ago
Eisenstein 4y ago
Misaligned incentives are always fascinating. 'If I pay you and you do your job well, you will get less money than if you do your job poorly, but not so poorly as to be obviously incompetent or malicious.' The key here is to realize when these incentives line up and try to mitigate them as much as possible -- usually the best way to do this is to look for motives beyond profit. Examples would be: they are looking to build or maintain a reputation; they have a philosophical agenda; they are your friends/family.
- numbers_guy 4y ago
  Isn't that pretty much how every transaction these days is structured? If I hire somebody to remodel my bathroom, he will do the job well enough that I won't raise too much complaints but also cut as much corners as possible without me realizing, so that he can save time and money. If I buy literally any kind of consumer product, it has planned obsolescence built into it. If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission. If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    That's not true of craftsmen as much because they live and die by reviews and referrals, and people raving about your craftmanship, punctuality and politeness lets you charge a premium relative to your competition. Cutting corners and slap dashing work gets you 3 and 4 star reviews.
    - numbers_guy 4y ago
      Most people cannot tell their ass form their face when it comes to this kind of stuff, so the reviews are completely useless. They will rate the craftman who is the most sympathetic to them as the best and most reliable one, yet he might be the one who uses the cheapest materials and does work in such a way that it looks good at first but has no permanence, or in such a way that if you need to ever do repairs you have to tear everything us because everything is glued/cemented together.
fckgw 4y ago
Such an odd blog post. Author says that dating sites don't want people to actually find great matches, alluding to his time spent working at a dating website. Insinuating the whole thing is a scam basically. At the end of the post he says the site he worked at didn't actually do any of this and that he voluntarily quit once he had this major epiphany. Even uses that boring old trope of "you are the product" that people like to say but isn't as profound as people think it is.
Ethan_Mick 4y ago
This is very similar to an except in Derek Sivers book on cdbaby.com. (CD Baby let independent artists sell their music CDs on the site long before iTunes). In it, he writes: At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?" I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians. If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut it down and get back to making music." He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about the survival of his company. To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good service? *It's all about them, not you.* I think a lot of companies forget that.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine. Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team). Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.
  - Fnoord 4y ago
    The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.
friedman23 4y ago
What about a dating site that only charges the user once they stop visiting the site? Put some ads on it too so that if people try to game the system by visiting it often they get money from ad impressions.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  Rebecca is sponsored by Colgate watch this commercial to send her the 100,000th message she gets today and never even will see.
jfengel 4y ago
The article talks about abstractions, but doesn't mention anything concrete that his employer was doing to promote that model. It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you. "Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18. I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it. There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task. So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18. Well known as the day when they start being interested in forming a romantic relationship.
  - jfengel 4y ago
    Well known as the day dating sites are willing to let you use them. Dating sites for children would be fraught.
- naasking 4y ago
  > if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business It wouldn't though, because most pharma companies are diversified somewhat. However, if your company has little in the pipeline except a cure where your competitors are more diversified, you have strong incentives to sit on a cure for a bit.
wzdd 4y ago
I don't see why this is any more likely to be true than "by giving ok but not perfect matches we lose two customers, but then they both come back after 6 months", or "by giving absolutely dreadful matches we convince two free-tier customers to pay" or "by giving perfect matches we gain 5 customers because they all tell their friends".
blowski 4y ago
Similar problem to recruitment: recruiters need you to change jobs every couple of years to stay in business.
numbers_guy 4y ago
Dating on the internet is a flawed concept and no kind of hacks are going to fix it, because it is human behaviour that is the issue. If hypothetically, you had a benevolent dating website, and then you had 100 attractive men and 100 attractive women on it, that would work just fine. BUT, that is not what you have with dating websites. Most women don't have trouble meeting men, and don't need to take the additional risk of meeting a stranger on the internet. So the women on dating sites are already self selected in many ways, and in any case there are too few of them in comparison to the men. I mean, I already frequented an engineering university with 25% female students and that was brutal enough. I do not need to go online on some stupid website to keep experiencing exactly the same bullshit. At least the quality of women at the university was decently high.
- datethrowaway0 4y ago
  I think that characterization only applies to young people: no standards, no idea of what they want or what they're looking for, but imagine that someone else in their life will bring clarity. Yes, it's quite easy for your average woman to be bombarded with men on OLD. But after a certain age, it starts becoming a problem when you're looking for something more serious. You have a better grasp of who you are, and what you want, and the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff." A simple progression of tastes. You may have been able to stomach junk food and boxed wine everyday in younger days, but now it revolts you -- and you need something different. Something with subtlety and depth that adds to your life, rather than getting in the way of it. The majority of people using OLD are young, and shallow, and so the platforms cater to them: creating an experience that's quick, and without depth. Tinder and Bumble the obvious examples. Compare to OkCupid (before it was bought out by Match.com, and completely destroyed): you could find people and filter through all of them based on a very large amount of aspects you considered important (values, lifestyle, beliefs, etc.) -- to cut down on the wasted time. Hinge is probably the only dating app I can think of at the moment that creates an experience that isn't so shallow (but it lacks vision, and pales in comparison to what could be -- likely due being developed, once again, by Match). There's no conclusion here, just my thoughts.
  - 4y ago
thomasahle 4y ago
How was Match Group allowed to vacuum up every single dating app out there? I thought we lived in times of increased antitrust scrutiny.
- latchkey 4y ago
  > I thought we lived in times of increased antitrust scrutiny. If that were true, we wouldn't have Live Nation Entertainment. Globally, they own every large venue (or the access to those venues), along with the ticket and merch sales.
siliconc0w 4y ago
Successful couples do exit but they dfi get a pretty good permanent marketing machine because everytime someone asks, "How did you meet?" They'll promote the app. Also many (most?) people on there aren't looking for a long term relationship.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  There is still significant stigma against online dating in many communities. Its still quite common for couples to come up with an agreed upon lie about how they met lol.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    What communities are these, and what proportion of the population do they make up? All of the weddings I've attended in the last 7 years were among people who met online. The couples came from all over the US, with differing education levels, birthplaces, and socioeconomic levels.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      I'm not American, so idk about the culture there. In Ireland and the UK almost every couple I know that have actually met on tinder/whatever tell their family and such that they met at a bar, lol. It does strike me as very funny that people still have this impression that online isn't where you meet anyone "serious", but a bar is.
spants 4y ago
Also in the same vein, Big Pharma doesn't want to cure you - they would lose a customer.
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  Company A develops treatment for disease, doesn't bother with developing a cure because it's more profitable long term to sell a life long treatment. Company B develops a cure. Company A loses all the resources it put into developing the treatment. If a cure is possible, it will be developed.
- astrange 4y ago
  1. There's always new people. 2. Most countries in the world have universal healthcare.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I heard a talk by a Singles guru a long time ago, and the brutal logic of male-female dating is as true as it ever was: * Younger men far outnumber younger women * Older women far outnumber older men This is a very shallow article and actually wrong. Dating success stories, i.e. "word of mouth" is the most powerful form of marketing. As a personal anecdote, FWIW, I tried JDate even though I'm not Jewish, because a friend met his wife there.
metalliqaz 4y ago
I'm surprised one of the big social media networks hasn't disrupted the online dating space. 1) The value of a dating site is proportional to the size of its user base. Dating sites can't match the big social networks. 2) Successful matches wouldn't leave the site entirely, they would just go back to using it for all the other non-dating functions. 3) It would presumably be cheaper for users because the social networks are primarily funded by advertising. So, why hasn't the Zuck rolled out Facebook Romance(TM) to eat Match Group the way that Facebook Marketplace ate Craigslist?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  There is already a Facebook Dating, isn't there?
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    Wow I didn't even know. But my point still stands. It just checked my rarely-used facebook account and I don't see any reference to the dating app anywhere. My intention with above comment was that it was seamlessly integrated into the social app.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      https://www.facebook.com/dating https://www.facebook.com/dating
- csa 4y ago
  My guess is that making a match-killer would barely move the needle for FB’s bottom line. If they could figure out a way to combine dating with effective ad delivery, then they might be onto something bigger.
- lotsoweiners 4y ago
  I agree with you. Every dating site I've been on feels like a scam that is full of fake accounts and wants to charge you more money per interaction. I had a lot of dating success with AOL back in the day. I had several longer relationships, quite a few short term relationships, and of course some duds with women I met on their. Part of what worked in my opinion is it was free since you were already paying for AOL and there were lots of people just hanging out and maybe interested in chatting/dating. Earlier on when everyone was playing Farmville etc, they should have made a way to easily meet and friend/date new people without it appearing as part of your main activity on the site. Maybe they struggle with some of the same issues Craigslist struggled with as a dating platform.
kitd 4y ago
OTOH, if you are good at perfect matches and advertising the fact, you'll probably replace those 2 lost customers pretty fast, and with lots more on top.
otikik 4y ago
Cory Doctorow has written very similar pieces about social networks and tech companies. There's one literally called "Even if you are paying for the product, you are still the product" https://doctorow.medium.com/even-if-youre-paying-for-the-product-you-re-still-the-product-2a22bbde037f https://doctorow.medium.com/even-if-youre-paying-for-the-pro...
leashless 4y ago
https://youtu.be/q5fbLQJu-XY https://youtu.be/q5fbLQJu-XY maybe not quite ten years ago I did a talk about this before the numbers were anything like this bad - maybe only 10% of people met through apps. Dating is 100% an area where the algorithms should be 100% transparent and open to inspection. The talk asks what a Socialist government would do with the State dating website, to contrast with the (equally terrible) incentives for a dating website generated by the free market. There's no way out of this without open protocols and visible algorithms. The agency problem is not easy to solve.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Bah, by that logic lawyers don't want their clients to stop having legal troubles and my handiman doesn't want my roof to stop leaking. Just for starters most people are not psychopaths and just want to provide a useful service. But even if they didn't care about your happiness, they would still care about reputation. Happy couple will have friends and tell them how they met. Or direct repeat business, realistically most dating site relationships do not last a lifetime. Above all, successful matches are extraordinarily high. Partly because chemistry is not apparent online and there are many dimensions - values, emotional, financial - that need to align in a viable relationship. But I would say mostly because people are delusional about their own perfection and expectations on others. You would turn down someone who is perfect but happens to smoke? REALLY? So site developers can break their back and still have an abysmal success record. I don't think anyone would hobble algorithms on purpose.
- deterministic 4y ago
  Heh have you actually worked with lawyers? They are paid by the hour and will do whatever it takes to increase the number of hours as much as possible. And the end result will be a contract so convoluted and muddy that they again will have to be hired to interpret their own work if there ever is a dispute. Lawyers is a racket. In a previous company we realised that it was cheaper and way faster to hire a lawyer than using external lawyers. The difference in results was night and day.
fallingfrog 4y ago
I haven’t had too much luck with online dating, especially after I grew my hair out. I feel like a lot of women are looking for don draper, tall, confident, clean cut, etc- and I’ve always been a weird little artist. I did try cutting my hair short and acting in the most masculine way I could for a while, and it worked, I got a lot more attention. But it feels so bad to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to get people to like you. You always have in the back of your head, if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t like me anymore. I think a lot of women deal with the same kind of pressures, of course. I would rather be alone.
- geoffbp 4y ago
  Definitely a better idea to just be yourself!
thrownawaydad 4y ago
I briefly tried (and paid for) OkCupid. Not many matches. Initially seemed like zero. Turns out it was one--someone I could never have met in real life. Perfect fit, and we're now happily married.
- klabb3 4y ago
  That’s sharpshooting. Congratulations!
- jamiek88 4y ago
  I did the same except I got a Free weekend on match.com. Got three matches. Emailed all three, two replied. Dated one. Been married 18 years.
BizarroLand 4y ago
There's an old adage about if you're not paying, you're the product, implying that anything that doesn't cost you money generates its money from your actions. The idea was that if you use sites that you pay for, you will be the priority and your desires are more likely to be granted. Looks like dating websites took a look at that idea and said, "What if we made them pay to be the product?" and it worked. I bet they also sell your data to marketers and spammers. So you pay to participate, your presence increases the potential value of the site to other potential payees, and then the site gets money from selling your profiles, actions, location, and answers to any questions or quizzes to whomever will pay for it. I should have made a dating website.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
I worked for Ashley Madison (or should I say, the company that runs it), so I have a somewhat twisted take on this article. > Others will sign up for the site, use it a few times, forget they have a membership, and continue to get billed for it, sometimes for years. It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also. > If someone joins the site and is successful, the site loses two customers. This is where AM is devious because, in theory, everyone is cheating on eachother. If you're a cheater you're probably gonna keep your account to continue cheating. Brilliant. The other devious thing that everyone already knows about knows about, is that there are actually barely any real women on the site. Most call them bots, but they are basically just automated accounts which is just built right into the monolith. Some of them are actually accounts from real women that just became dormant and aren't used anymore. Some are just fake accounts setup by the company. They got slapped by regulators for running bot accounts (among other things) after the big hack, but now they just use dark patterns to make everything look above board. I am not endorsing their business model. I started working there out of morbid curiosity and because I was going to be working on things like increasing the security and privacy of the site - which seemed noble at the time - I was laid off during a restructuring. It is a seriously demented company to work for and feel that overall it is a stain on my career in hindsight, though it is an interesting ice breaker.
- BryantD 4y ago
  > It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also. Also often true for subscription-based massively multiplayer online games. I'd love to see stats like this across Apple and Google's stores, too: how many subscriptions are maintained by people who never open the app?
BryantD 4y ago
Is there a subtle difference between a dating website designed to get you single dates and a matchmaking website designed to get you a long term relationship? Tinder's really successful; I am being clueless here but I don't get the impression that it's designed to generate stable relationships. The perverse incentive described is only perverse if you assume your customers want to stop using the site after the first good match.
personjerry 4y ago
I've been sitting on this idea for a while. Monetized dating apps cost $$$ and are disincentivized to match you well. So, we build dating profiles by public Github. We specify a protocol, you make a pull request to add your profile, the app pulls from the repo every day and automatically shows all the profiles that you've matched with. What could possibly go wrong?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xutopia 4y ago
  Only dudes would use it :P
fayazari 4y ago
I WANT LOGIN TO NUMBER WHATSAPP

164 points by caseysoftware 4y ago

If you actually have the ability to make great matches, matches so good you are concerned you will lose two customers, you should be running a matchmaking service and not a dating website.

dmarlow 4y ago
Would those "happy" customers lead to more word of mouth though? Not everything has to be a gimmick, right?
- aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
  If I used a matchmaking service and it provided me with "end your subscription to a dating service 90% of the time" matches I would be telling everyone I knew.
bdcravens 4y ago
Most relationships end at some point, and datings sites are often used by those still in relationships (open relationships, polyamory, cheating, etc...)
RajT88 4y ago
This is why there are matchmaking services charging 10k a year. You used to see ads for them in Skymall.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  And how often did they work?
  - RajT88 4y ago
    No clue. I never used them. My role here was writing snarky comments in Skymall catalogs to unwind on my Friday night redeye flights home. (I used to fly a lot for work)
  - RajT88 4y ago
    I will say that the ads were a bit creepy. Always sort of ethereal looking hot 40'sish blonde women. Implicitly promising you'll be able to date and marry one of those (but of course the hot 40's lady is the matchmaker). They sort of similarly implicitly promised you could meet and marry a doctor or exec or something. Also - the ads were never targeted at women.

gregw2 4y ago

There is a business opportunity here IMHO for success for a player with much better aligned incentive structure with their users. (I perceive there's plenty of money in the market however much a monopoly it tends to be now.) Vanguard did/does this with mutual funds for example and grew to be the biggest player (while still leaving plenty on the table for others) in the market. You just have to make it part of your core business model and marketing strategy and stick with it long enough to see success. Here's my stab at how to align incentives for dating sites, both the business, the customer, the employees and the stockholders. Commit to the following type of pricing model and market the heck out of you wanting to see your customer succeed: Your initial price is $50/month (the going rate IIRC). After two months it drops to $40/month. After six months it drops to $35/month. After a year it drops to $30/month After two years it drops to $20/month (below or just at or only slightly above your marginal cost-to-serve) (Vary the dollar values above depending on your economics and behaviors. Maybe you start people at $60/mo, higher than competitors for example but reassure people it will auto-drop for them.) Then you are incented to get people good matches most at the point at which they are most engaged. If your employees are not striving to get people matches at that point, your business will suffer. If you find yourself with a low-margin business with too many $20/mo customers, your stock valuation will suffer. Two other pieces of data I would gather when trying to setup my internal metrics: 1) Ask each customer when they signup what their ideal timeline (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc) is to A) meet someone through the site, B) have a steady relationship, and (if applicable) C) get married. Understand the demand/expectations curve and how it intersects with your pricing curve. 2) Offer customers a $20 refund when leaving the service to tell you if they got married, are in a serious relationship, or never got anywhere with your service. Incent the customer to help you measure your success rate and its correlation with their initial expectations, individually and in bulk. Give customers the option of explicitly refusing to get the refund because they are so satisfied, or to give you a tip and use that as a key KPI measuring customer satisfaction. The above pricing curve also ironically adds stickiness the steeper the price drops are, because people won't want to quit and then resignup later since their price might triple if there's a chance they might get more active again on your site in the next few months. You just don't want your initial price to be too steep to drive too many people off.

xutopia 4y ago

hardwaregeek 4y ago

Maybe this is making the author's point but IMO dating is hard enough that I don't think online services need to make it even harder

apples_oranges 4y ago

Can't wait for the day when fake-user-ai bots are flirting with flirt-ai-bots. Having said that, 90% of people I know really do find loving relationships via online dating. Sample size isn't great, but my feeling is those online dating relationships are superior, because people really can find good matches easier.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I think there's definitely some kind of bias in those results. Only certain kinds of people are able to tolerate online dating for very long, and the way they work only really finds "good matches" along a very narrow subset of criteria. Most people I know, myself included, can't stand the shallowness and general feeling that they are participating in a torturously silly marketing exercise.
- apples_oranges 4y ago
  But what if you wrote that in your profile? Perhaps you would find the boy/girl that digs this kind of view on online dating.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    So many reasons: 1) Negativity is generally not attractive. 2) It's a lie, since clearly I can tolerate it if I'm actually on a dating site saying I can't tolerate it. 3) Someone else who can't tolerate it isn't likely to be there to read it. 4) Stating it out loud doesn't change the nature of dating sites as shallow exercises in marketing.

michaelteter 4y ago

A dating site is #2 or #3 on my personal project backlog. I have significant successful (and unsuccessful) experience as a user, and I have identified some significant improvements to be made (from the user perspective). There's really no point optimizing for profit only, as it almost certainly results in a bad experience for users. Sure, a company can make money (and likely eventually be bought by Match Group, so -cash out-)... but sometimes it's worth actually building something for the good of people. Yes, if two people match well, you may lose two customers... for a while. Most relationships don't last long term, and people who have had good experiences on a dating site will return when they are seeking companionship or love again. If they were happy with your site before, they will come back to you. The current dating site options are a wasteland. Not to beat a dead horse, but most are owned by Match Group. And from my experience with several of them, once they land in Match they are not good sites to use. OkCupid was one of the best at one time, and PlentyOfFish was pretty decent (if you can accept old/functional UI) long ago. But these days, they have pared down the features and upped the pricing to the point where it feels like they are just milking lonely people for all the cash they can get. At least they are possibly not stuffing fake female accounts like Adult Friend Finder and Ashley Madison did (and I suspect Bumble currently does). Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...

dboreham 4y ago
A dating site is like trying to solve an NP problem. It's provable that there's no correlation between information generated by users and outcome. For example the known factors that affect couple compatibility are things like attachment style. People are generally unaware of their attachment style.
- derefr 4y ago
  So why wouldn't a dating site just put its users through trusted high-power psychological screening instruments, to determine that sort of stuff? They're just questionnaires, mostly; they can be done entirely through a web/mobile UI, and scored without any humans in the loop. Do the developers of dating sites think that people will consider it too much of a bother to fill out such things, or consider such questions too invasive? I don't know why; people love personality quizzes. (IMHO you could make the whole site just a BuzzFeed "what kind of person are you? take this quiz to find out!" site at its core, except through all the quizzes you're doing, it's building up a very thorough psychological profile of you; and when it's got enough, it opens up the ability for you to date through it.)

karpierz 4y ago

If it were possible for a dating site to consistently make great matches, they wouldn't bother taint their results. Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine, even if you're continually having to find new customers, since that's how dating sites currently function. I interned at a dating site a while ago and there's no need to taint anything. People are far too complicated to predict beyond who will send a message to who. Also, the problem is adversarial (IE, people misrepresent themselves as the person they want to be as opposed to the person they are), so trying to find the signal is a continuous game of cat and mouse.

smnrchrds 4y ago
> Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine Not if you already have almost the whole market to yourself. > Match Group ... owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, UPWARD, Ship, and OurTime, totalling over 45 global dating companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  I fail to see how this would not make it a money printing machine?
  - Smar 4y ago
    It is already, regardless of quality of their product?
  - smnrchrds 4y ago
    "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful." - Steve Jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
    - 4y ago

7373737373 4y ago

A reputable dating website can most likely not be for-profit. "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", written by a co-founder of OkCupid: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne... before they, too, sold out to the Match Group monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_owned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Group#Dating_services_ow... The world needs a site with the moral integrity and user-only focus the likes of lichess.org

thomasahle 4y ago
> The world needs a site with the moral integrity and user-only focus the likes of lichess.org A low-costs + donations model ala lichess would actually be quite interesting for a data site. Maybe you could even convince "alumni" to donate, in appreciation of their successful relationship. The longer it lasted, the more donations.
- yurodivuie 4y ago
  A lot of people would pay to get the history of their exchanges on a dating site. You don't realize when you close your account that you're also losing all the history of how you met - at the time it's more of a celebration of "job done" and demonstration of commitment. I understand why it all vanishes (the privacy concerns are non-trivial, storage isn't free), but it would be worth almost any price when the 5/10/20 year anniversaries roll around.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    After our third date, my now-wife and I decided to delete our online dating accounts. I had the foresight to screenshot/download her profile and our messages, but I forgot to capture my own. Oh well!
999900000999 4y ago
[flagged]

goodside 4y ago

I worked in the online dating industry for five years (OkCupid 2011-2015, Grindr in 2020). I’ve heard this argument many times but it isn’t true. I’ve never heard of anyone in the dating industry applying this logic, because no app is good enough at making permanent matches that it makes sense to worry about.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Do you have any insider knowledge from your time with Grindr on 1) why the app appears to remain a terribly bad buggy mess and never seems to improve? Is there any awareness of this in the company? Is it just a legacy code issue? 2) why the desktop web version was shut down? 3) why unlimited pricing is that outrageous?
- winternett 4y ago
  1) If everyone on the app finds great matches, everyone will stop using the app, and therein kill the possibility of the company in making a profit. 2) They laid off developers to save money, and desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps, so getting rid f desktop apps always looks like a win for a software maker. 3) There is so much competition with expensive cloud host overhead that if a company can gaslight users into thinking that their app is worth money, they push it all the way in a bid to maximize their traditionally weak earnings on the deceptively small user bases they have... They also create tons of fake accounts and profiles to also emulate that they are running vibrant communities.
  - ahtihn 4y ago
    > desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps This would imply that paywalls and user controls aren't implemented entirely on the server side, which sounds like an obviously bad idea?
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago

Eisenstein 4y ago

Misaligned incentives are always fascinating. 'If I pay you and you do your job well, you will get less money than if you do your job poorly, but not so poorly as to be obviously incompetent or malicious.' The key here is to realize when these incentives line up and try to mitigate them as much as possible -- usually the best way to do this is to look for motives beyond profit. Examples would be: they are looking to build or maintain a reputation; they have a philosophical agenda; they are your friends/family.

numbers_guy 4y ago
Isn't that pretty much how every transaction these days is structured? If I hire somebody to remodel my bathroom, he will do the job well enough that I won't raise too much complaints but also cut as much corners as possible without me realizing, so that he can save time and money. If I buy literally any kind of consumer product, it has planned obsolescence built into it. If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission. If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  That's not true of craftsmen as much because they live and die by reviews and referrals, and people raving about your craftmanship, punctuality and politeness lets you charge a premium relative to your competition. Cutting corners and slap dashing work gets you 3 and 4 star reviews.
  - numbers_guy 4y ago
    Most people cannot tell their ass form their face when it comes to this kind of stuff, so the reviews are completely useless. They will rate the craftman who is the most sympathetic to them as the best and most reliable one, yet he might be the one who uses the cheapest materials and does work in such a way that it looks good at first but has no permanence, or in such a way that if you need to ever do repairs you have to tear everything us because everything is glued/cemented together.

fckgw 4y ago

Such an odd blog post. Author says that dating sites don't want people to actually find great matches, alluding to his time spent working at a dating website. Insinuating the whole thing is a scam basically. At the end of the post he says the site he worked at didn't actually do any of this and that he voluntarily quit once he had this major epiphany. Even uses that boring old trope of "you are the product" that people like to say but isn't as profound as people think it is.

Ethan_Mick 4y ago

This is very similar to an except in Derek Sivers book on cdbaby.com. (CD Baby let independent artists sell their music CDs on the site long before iTunes). In it, he writes: At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?" I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians. If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut it down and get back to making music." He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about the survival of his company. To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good service? *It's all about them, not you.* I think a lot of companies forget that.

jesuscript 4y ago
The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine. Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team). Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.
- Fnoord 4y ago
  The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.

friedman23 4y ago

What about a dating site that only charges the user once they stop visiting the site? Put some ads on it too so that if people try to game the system by visiting it often they get money from ad impressions.

citizenpaul 4y ago
Rebecca is sponsored by Colgate watch this commercial to send her the 100,000th message she gets today and never even will see.

jfengel 4y ago

The article talks about abstractions, but doesn't mention anything concrete that his employer was doing to promote that model. It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you. "Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18. I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it. There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task. So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18. Well known as the day when they start being interested in forming a romantic relationship.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Well known as the day dating sites are willing to let you use them. Dating sites for children would be fraught.
naasking 4y ago
> if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business It wouldn't though, because most pharma companies are diversified somewhat. However, if your company has little in the pipeline except a cure where your competitors are more diversified, you have strong incentives to sit on a cure for a bit.

wzdd 4y ago

I don't see why this is any more likely to be true than "by giving ok but not perfect matches we lose two customers, but then they both come back after 6 months", or "by giving absolutely dreadful matches we convince two free-tier customers to pay" or "by giving perfect matches we gain 5 customers because they all tell their friends".

blowski 4y ago

Similar problem to recruitment: recruiters need you to change jobs every couple of years to stay in business.

numbers_guy 4y ago

Dating on the internet is a flawed concept and no kind of hacks are going to fix it, because it is human behaviour that is the issue. If hypothetically, you had a benevolent dating website, and then you had 100 attractive men and 100 attractive women on it, that would work just fine. BUT, that is not what you have with dating websites. Most women don't have trouble meeting men, and don't need to take the additional risk of meeting a stranger on the internet. So the women on dating sites are already self selected in many ways, and in any case there are too few of them in comparison to the men. I mean, I already frequented an engineering university with 25% female students and that was brutal enough. I do not need to go online on some stupid website to keep experiencing exactly the same bullshit. At least the quality of women at the university was decently high.

datethrowaway0 4y ago
I think that characterization only applies to young people: no standards, no idea of what they want or what they're looking for, but imagine that someone else in their life will bring clarity. Yes, it's quite easy for your average woman to be bombarded with men on OLD. But after a certain age, it starts becoming a problem when you're looking for something more serious. You have a better grasp of who you are, and what you want, and the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff." A simple progression of tastes. You may have been able to stomach junk food and boxed wine everyday in younger days, but now it revolts you -- and you need something different. Something with subtlety and depth that adds to your life, rather than getting in the way of it. The majority of people using OLD are young, and shallow, and so the platforms cater to them: creating an experience that's quick, and without depth. Tinder and Bumble the obvious examples. Compare to OkCupid (before it was bought out by Match.com, and completely destroyed): you could find people and filter through all of them based on a very large amount of aspects you considered important (values, lifestyle, beliefs, etc.) -- to cut down on the wasted time. Hinge is probably the only dating app I can think of at the moment that creates an experience that isn't so shallow (but it lacks vision, and pales in comparison to what could be -- likely due being developed, once again, by Match). There's no conclusion here, just my thoughts.
- 4y ago

thomasahle 4y ago

How was Match Group allowed to vacuum up every single dating app out there? I thought we lived in times of increased antitrust scrutiny.

latchkey 4y ago
> I thought we lived in times of increased antitrust scrutiny. If that were true, we wouldn't have Live Nation Entertainment. Globally, they own every large venue (or the access to those venues), along with the ticket and merch sales.

siliconc0w 4y ago

Successful couples do exit but they dfi get a pretty good permanent marketing machine because everytime someone asks, "How did you meet?" They'll promote the app. Also many (most?) people on there aren't looking for a long term relationship.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
There is still significant stigma against online dating in many communities. Its still quite common for couples to come up with an agreed upon lie about how they met lol.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  What communities are these, and what proportion of the population do they make up? All of the weddings I've attended in the last 7 years were among people who met online. The couples came from all over the US, with differing education levels, birthplaces, and socioeconomic levels.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I'm not American, so idk about the culture there. In Ireland and the UK almost every couple I know that have actually met on tinder/whatever tell their family and such that they met at a bar, lol. It does strike me as very funny that people still have this impression that online isn't where you meet anyone "serious", but a bar is.

spants 4y ago

Also in the same vein, Big Pharma doesn't want to cure you - they would lose a customer.

metalliqaz 4y ago
Company A develops treatment for disease, doesn't bother with developing a cure because it's more profitable long term to sell a life long treatment. Company B develops a cure. Company A loses all the resources it put into developing the treatment. If a cure is possible, it will be developed.
astrange 4y ago
1. There's always new people. 2. Most countries in the world have universal healthcare.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I heard a talk by a Singles guru a long time ago, and the brutal logic of male-female dating is as true as it ever was: * Younger men far outnumber younger women * Older women far outnumber older men This is a very shallow article and actually wrong. Dating success stories, i.e. "word of mouth" is the most powerful form of marketing. As a personal anecdote, FWIW, I tried JDate even though I'm not Jewish, because a friend met his wife there.

metalliqaz 4y ago

I'm surprised one of the big social media networks hasn't disrupted the online dating space. 1) The value of a dating site is proportional to the size of its user base. Dating sites can't match the big social networks. 2) Successful matches wouldn't leave the site entirely, they would just go back to using it for all the other non-dating functions. 3) It would presumably be cheaper for users because the social networks are primarily funded by advertising. So, why hasn't the Zuck rolled out Facebook Romance(TM) to eat Match Group the way that Facebook Marketplace ate Craigslist?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
There is already a Facebook Dating, isn't there?
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  Wow I didn't even know. But my point still stands. It just checked my rarely-used facebook account and I don't see any reference to the dating app anywhere. My intention with above comment was that it was seamlessly integrated into the social app.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    https://www.facebook.com/dating https://www.facebook.com/dating
csa 4y ago
My guess is that making a match-killer would barely move the needle for FB’s bottom line. If they could figure out a way to combine dating with effective ad delivery, then they might be onto something bigger.
lotsoweiners 4y ago
I agree with you. Every dating site I've been on feels like a scam that is full of fake accounts and wants to charge you more money per interaction. I had a lot of dating success with AOL back in the day. I had several longer relationships, quite a few short term relationships, and of course some duds with women I met on their. Part of what worked in my opinion is it was free since you were already paying for AOL and there were lots of people just hanging out and maybe interested in chatting/dating. Earlier on when everyone was playing Farmville etc, they should have made a way to easily meet and friend/date new people without it appearing as part of your main activity on the site. Maybe they struggle with some of the same issues Craigslist struggled with as a dating platform.

kitd 4y ago

OTOH, if you are good at perfect matches and advertising the fact, you'll probably replace those 2 lost customers pretty fast, and with lots more on top.

otikik 4y ago

Cory Doctorow has written very similar pieces about social networks and tech companies. There's one literally called "Even if you are paying for the product, you are still the product" https://doctorow.medium.com/even-if-youre-paying-for-the-product-you-re-still-the-product-2a22bbde037f https://doctorow.medium.com/even-if-youre-paying-for-the-pro...

leashless 4y ago

https://youtu.be/q5fbLQJu-XY https://youtu.be/q5fbLQJu-XY maybe not quite ten years ago I did a talk about this before the numbers were anything like this bad - maybe only 10% of people met through apps. Dating is 100% an area where the algorithms should be 100% transparent and open to inspection. The talk asks what a Socialist government would do with the State dating website, to contrast with the (equally terrible) incentives for a dating website generated by the free market. There's no way out of this without open protocols and visible algorithms. The agency problem is not easy to solve.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Bah, by that logic lawyers don't want their clients to stop having legal troubles and my handiman doesn't want my roof to stop leaking. Just for starters most people are not psychopaths and just want to provide a useful service. But even if they didn't care about your happiness, they would still care about reputation. Happy couple will have friends and tell them how they met. Or direct repeat business, realistically most dating site relationships do not last a lifetime. Above all, successful matches are extraordinarily high. Partly because chemistry is not apparent online and there are many dimensions - values, emotional, financial - that need to align in a viable relationship. But I would say mostly because people are delusional about their own perfection and expectations on others. You would turn down someone who is perfect but happens to smoke? REALLY? So site developers can break their back and still have an abysmal success record. I don't think anyone would hobble algorithms on purpose.

deterministic 4y ago
Heh have you actually worked with lawyers? They are paid by the hour and will do whatever it takes to increase the number of hours as much as possible. And the end result will be a contract so convoluted and muddy that they again will have to be hired to interpret their own work if there ever is a dispute. Lawyers is a racket. In a previous company we realised that it was cheaper and way faster to hire a lawyer than using external lawyers. The difference in results was night and day.

fallingfrog 4y ago

I haven’t had too much luck with online dating, especially after I grew my hair out. I feel like a lot of women are looking for don draper, tall, confident, clean cut, etc- and I’ve always been a weird little artist. I did try cutting my hair short and acting in the most masculine way I could for a while, and it worked, I got a lot more attention. But it feels so bad to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to get people to like you. You always have in the back of your head, if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t like me anymore. I think a lot of women deal with the same kind of pressures, of course. I would rather be alone.

geoffbp 4y ago
Definitely a better idea to just be yourself!

thrownawaydad 4y ago

I briefly tried (and paid for) OkCupid. Not many matches. Initially seemed like zero. Turns out it was one--someone I could never have met in real life. Perfect fit, and we're now happily married.

klabb3 4y ago
That’s sharpshooting. Congratulations!
jamiek88 4y ago
I did the same except I got a Free weekend on match.com. Got three matches. Emailed all three, two replied. Dated one. Been married 18 years.

BizarroLand 4y ago

There's an old adage about if you're not paying, you're the product, implying that anything that doesn't cost you money generates its money from your actions. The idea was that if you use sites that you pay for, you will be the priority and your desires are more likely to be granted. Looks like dating websites took a look at that idea and said, "What if we made them pay to be the product?" and it worked. I bet they also sell your data to marketers and spammers. So you pay to participate, your presence increases the potential value of the site to other potential payees, and then the site gets money from selling your profiles, actions, location, and answers to any questions or quizzes to whomever will pay for it. I should have made a dating website.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

I worked for Ashley Madison (or should I say, the company that runs it), so I have a somewhat twisted take on this article. > Others will sign up for the site, use it a few times, forget they have a membership, and continue to get billed for it, sometimes for years. It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also. > If someone joins the site and is successful, the site loses two customers. This is where AM is devious because, in theory, everyone is cheating on eachother. If you're a cheater you're probably gonna keep your account to continue cheating. Brilliant. The other devious thing that everyone already knows about knows about, is that there are actually barely any real women on the site. Most call them bots, but they are basically just automated accounts which is just built right into the monolith. Some of them are actually accounts from real women that just became dormant and aren't used anymore. Some are just fake accounts setup by the company. They got slapped by regulators for running bot accounts (among other things) after the big hack, but now they just use dark patterns to make everything look above board. I am not endorsing their business model. I started working there out of morbid curiosity and because I was going to be working on things like increasing the security and privacy of the site - which seemed noble at the time - I was laid off during a restructuring. It is a seriously demented company to work for and feel that overall it is a stain on my career in hindsight, though it is an interesting ice breaker.

BryantD 4y ago
> It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also. Also often true for subscription-based massively multiplayer online games. I'd love to see stats like this across Apple and Google's stores, too: how many subscriptions are maintained by people who never open the app?

BryantD 4y ago

Is there a subtle difference between a dating website designed to get you single dates and a matchmaking website designed to get you a long term relationship? Tinder's really successful; I am being clueless here but I don't get the impression that it's designed to generate stable relationships. The perverse incentive described is only perverse if you assume your customers want to stop using the site after the first good match.

personjerry 4y ago

I've been sitting on this idea for a while. Monetized dating apps cost $$$ and are disincentivized to match you well. So, we build dating profiles by public Github. We specify a protocol, you make a pull request to add your profile, the app pulls from the repo every day and automatically shows all the profiles that you've matched with. What could possibly go wrong?

deleted 4y ago
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xutopia 4y ago
Only dudes would use it :P

fayazari 4y ago

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