4 ms·

Unless there are somehow millions of musicians looking to get matched in a single city, the "swipe" UI is pointless and will just make the whole thing unusable.

by paxys 3y ago

Unless there are somehow millions of musicians looking to get matched in a single city, the "swipe" UI is pointless and will just make the whole thing unusable. The search + filter pattern for online datasets was perfected many decades ago. Use it.

Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
Yeah, swiping is a dark pattern employed by dating apps. Even with millions of users, there's better ways to match people up than a simple swipe. It's to keep people at the mercy of an algorithm where spending money is the only way to get any sort of control over what you see. It exists only for shady monetisation.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Actually if you use the same interface for recommendation systems for content (say RSS feed items, videos, etc.) you get much better results than western content recommenders which don't get accurate negative samples. It finally hit me the reason I didn't understand a lot of the recommender literature is that it doesn't make sense and it's transformative to treat recommendation as a classification problem the way TikTok does. The real Dark Pattern is that YouTube and every other western app looks like https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/idiocracy-ow-my-balls.jpg https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id... where you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item. (That and the scan-ignore-repeat UI paradigm that has kept RSS readers thoroughly out of the mainstream forever) Even if you want to have a search-based UI it would still make sense to show you one match at a time and let you thumbs up and thumbs down and have the system remember your choices so you can come back next week and look at new items without the considerable cognitive burden of ignoring. But say “see something once, why see it again?” and people look at you like you’re a psycho killer. The whole advertising economy though is based fundamentally on spamming you with the same crap over and over and a ‘dislike’ button that works (negative sampling) would end it overnight, i guess there’s a reason why you can’t explain something to a person whose paycheck is based on not understanding it.
  - derefr 3y ago
    > it's transformative to treat recommendation as a classification problem the way TikTok does Treating recommendation as a classification problem has all sorts of flaws, mostly down to normalizing the user's indications into a larger model. People will be more passive sometimes and more engaged at other times. Sometimes they'll blindly accept and watch everything that comes along (or blindly swipe right on every match, etc); other times they'll be very choosey. It's kind of the same problems that asking users for star ratings has — people interpret the meaning of "one star" or "three stars" or "five stars" differently; and there are selection biases on when people will bother to vote at all. (The Netflix Prize was a challenge for a reason!) You can avoid all these temporal and selection biases, though, because content recommendation is actually ultimately a ranking problem: any recommendation algorithm ultimately wants to generate a subjective ranking of its universe of items, such that everything gets put in a sequence, with the thing the user would most like to see next, first. And conveniently, we already have a mathematically-perfect way to do ranking: ELO. Or, in app UX terms: the classical HotOrNot design, where you're presented with exactly two options, and you have to pick one as being better than the other. And you get to see the each option several times, paired against different other options each time. In user-engagement terms, a HotOrNot interface would be just as much of a "dark pattern" as a Tinder interface. But in recommendation-tuning terms, the backend of a HotOrNot-UX app could build you a subjective scoring function that's much more accurate, much sooner. > you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item The real negative signal that sites like YouTube (and to a degree, TikTok) use, is landing on something though a more passive engagement action (e.g. auto-play next) and this inducing engagement in a previously-passively-consuming user to "get away" from this content.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      Classification gives you calibrated scores that you can use together with other information. A classifier may not be the ideal recommender by itself but it is a good component. A probability score for “will he like it?” works as a ranking score in my experience with some caveats which aren’t so much about the score as a score but that recommendation is really a sequential problem. That is, if I get different versions of the same news article that all score 0.9, it might be OK to show me one or two articles from that list. I believe people’s satisfaction with an article is greatly influenced by being spammed with too much of the same thing and that is not so influenced by ranking scores. I’ll go so far as to say full text search should also be treated as a classification problem, in particularly you need a probability score if you want to make a service like “Google Alerts” where you tell people about new marching documents. Also if you are trying to combine several radically different searchers (like IBM Watson did back in the day) the probability score is essential.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  I mean. Tinder is pretty awful in general. But the UI does have some merit. It’s exactly the idea of not filling out pages and pages of details about yourself that is great. And likewise, being able in principle to randomly find potential partners that you would not had you gone the route of manually tweaking a bunch of search parameters that your potential partner has to fit. Swipe UI is not the problem. Tinder is separately awful independently of its UI.
  - gizajob 3y ago
    The UI has some merit for attractive people.
- HelmetFigNewton 3y ago
  Swiping doesn't match people. It's simply a (usually shitty) UI affordance for the user to progress through the application.
solumos 3y ago
wait, why isn't there a dating app that has this?
- derefr 3y ago
  Because then people would drill down and either find their perfect partner quickly, or figure out there's nobody compatible with them on the app quickly; and either way, delete the app. Dating app monetization creates a principal-agent problem: both subscriptions (for paid apps) and advertising/data-brokering (for free apps) are revenue streams that depend on people engaging with the app as much as possible — which people who actually manage to find solid romantic relationships won't do. The only good dating app monetization model, would be a one-time-fee model. This would induce the correct incentives: as long as people are on the app, they continue to be a cost burden on the service with no further revenue — so, like people hogging a table at a restaurant, the service would be motivated to satisfy them and get them out the door! But AFAIK, nobody has ever done this yet. (I think it's just because such a site would make so much less money than the traditional "milk your user base eternally" type of dating site. And people who build dating sites are usually in it for the money.)
  - zero-sharp 3y ago
    We need an open dating platform. "OpenHinge"?
    - excalibur 3y ago
      In the world of dating, "open" doesn't mean what you think it means.
      - zero-sharp 3y ago
        "AjarHinge"?
    - gizajob 3y ago
      When it first started, OKCupid was about the perfect dating platform until Match.com bought it and totally killed the functionality with monetisation.
saila 3y ago
Considering how important style is in most genres, I think the swipe interface could be a good way to quickly find better potential matches, assuming there's a pre-filter based on your selected genres. If I was looking to start a band today, I'd definitely give this kind of thing a try.
chrisin2d 3y ago
Furthermore, this photo-forward interface design pattern presents candidates' physical attractiveness as the most salient feature. While this is desirable in a dating app, this is probably not very relevant for assessing people for their potential as musical collaborators. From the top of my head, I'm going to guess people want (1) personable and agreeable bandmates with (2) compatible music styles, (3) musical talent and skill, and (4) can play instruments or roles that a band is missing. So the interface should support users in presenting and finding these traits. If I were to design it, I'd have: - Auto-playing music sample gallery. This is the most important thing to present. The current design asks the user to dig into Youtube and Soundcloud links — which is very high-friction and would have the user jumping between this app and other apps every few seconds. - One-minute self-introduction video. This helps the user grok the general 'vibe' of someone. - Allow users to connect their Spotify or other music accounts. Then show users their shared music interests. This can provide another clue about having compatible musical personalities.
- arcticfox 3y ago
  I like your ideas, and I feel like tiktok/reels would be the better base for this type of app than tinder
- pg5 3y ago
  I agree with pretty much all this. I avoided in-app videos because of the complexity and cost of building a transcoding/streaming system. But I suppose audio-only wouldn't be too bad.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pg5 3y ago
Good point, I do intend to add genre and instrument filtering. I figured I had some time to do that since there are barely any users. Not much point of having filtering if there are 5 people in your area.

by paxys 3y ago

Philip-J-Fry 3y ago

Yeah, swiping is a dark pattern employed by dating apps. Even with millions of users, there's better ways to match people up than a simple swipe. It's to keep people at the mercy of an algorithm where spending money is the only way to get any sort of control over what you see. It exists only for shady monetisation.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Actually if you use the same interface for recommendation systems for content (say RSS feed items, videos, etc.) you get much better results than western content recommenders which don't get accurate negative samples. It finally hit me the reason I didn't understand a lot of the recommender literature is that it doesn't make sense and it's transformative to treat recommendation as a classification problem the way TikTok does. The real Dark Pattern is that YouTube and every other western app looks like https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/idiocracy-ow-my-balls.jpg https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id... where you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item. (That and the scan-ignore-repeat UI paradigm that has kept RSS readers thoroughly out of the mainstream forever) Even if you want to have a search-based UI it would still make sense to show you one match at a time and let you thumbs up and thumbs down and have the system remember your choices so you can come back next week and look at new items without the considerable cognitive burden of ignoring. But say “see something once, why see it again?” and people look at you like you’re a psycho killer. The whole advertising economy though is based fundamentally on spamming you with the same crap over and over and a ‘dislike’ button that works (negative sampling) would end it overnight, i guess there’s a reason why you can’t explain something to a person whose paycheck is based on not understanding it.
- derefr 3y ago
  > it's transformative to treat recommendation as a classification problem the way TikTok does Treating recommendation as a classification problem has all sorts of flaws, mostly down to normalizing the user's indications into a larger model. People will be more passive sometimes and more engaged at other times. Sometimes they'll blindly accept and watch everything that comes along (or blindly swipe right on every match, etc); other times they'll be very choosey. It's kind of the same problems that asking users for star ratings has — people interpret the meaning of "one star" or "three stars" or "five stars" differently; and there are selection biases on when people will bother to vote at all. (The Netflix Prize was a challenge for a reason!) You can avoid all these temporal and selection biases, though, because content recommendation is actually ultimately a ranking problem: any recommendation algorithm ultimately wants to generate a subjective ranking of its universe of items, such that everything gets put in a sequence, with the thing the user would most like to see next, first. And conveniently, we already have a mathematically-perfect way to do ranking: ELO. Or, in app UX terms: the classical HotOrNot design, where you're presented with exactly two options, and you have to pick one as being better than the other. And you get to see the each option several times, paired against different other options each time. In user-engagement terms, a HotOrNot interface would be just as much of a "dark pattern" as a Tinder interface. But in recommendation-tuning terms, the backend of a HotOrNot-UX app could build you a subjective scoring function that's much more accurate, much sooner. > you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item The real negative signal that sites like YouTube (and to a degree, TikTok) use, is landing on something though a more passive engagement action (e.g. auto-play next) and this inducing engagement in a previously-passively-consuming user to "get away" from this content.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Classification gives you calibrated scores that you can use together with other information. A classifier may not be the ideal recommender by itself but it is a good component. A probability score for “will he like it?” works as a ranking score in my experience with some caveats which aren’t so much about the score as a score but that recommendation is really a sequential problem. That is, if I get different versions of the same news article that all score 0.9, it might be OK to show me one or two articles from that list. I believe people’s satisfaction with an article is greatly influenced by being spammed with too much of the same thing and that is not so influenced by ranking scores. I’ll go so far as to say full text search should also be treated as a classification problem, in particularly you need a probability score if you want to make a service like “Google Alerts” where you tell people about new marching documents. Also if you are trying to combine several radically different searchers (like IBM Watson did back in the day) the probability score is essential.
codetrotter 3y ago
I mean. Tinder is pretty awful in general. But the UI does have some merit. It’s exactly the idea of not filling out pages and pages of details about yourself that is great. And likewise, being able in principle to randomly find potential partners that you would not had you gone the route of manually tweaking a bunch of search parameters that your potential partner has to fit. Swipe UI is not the problem. Tinder is separately awful independently of its UI.
- gizajob 3y ago
  The UI has some merit for attractive people.
HelmetFigNewton 3y ago
Swiping doesn't match people. It's simply a (usually shitty) UI affordance for the user to progress through the application.

solumos 3y ago

wait, why isn't there a dating app that has this?

derefr 3y ago
Because then people would drill down and either find their perfect partner quickly, or figure out there's nobody compatible with them on the app quickly; and either way, delete the app. Dating app monetization creates a principal-agent problem: both subscriptions (for paid apps) and advertising/data-brokering (for free apps) are revenue streams that depend on people engaging with the app as much as possible — which people who actually manage to find solid romantic relationships won't do. The only good dating app monetization model, would be a one-time-fee model. This would induce the correct incentives: as long as people are on the app, they continue to be a cost burden on the service with no further revenue — so, like people hogging a table at a restaurant, the service would be motivated to satisfy them and get them out the door! But AFAIK, nobody has ever done this yet. (I think it's just because such a site would make so much less money than the traditional "milk your user base eternally" type of dating site. And people who build dating sites are usually in it for the money.)
- zero-sharp 3y ago
  We need an open dating platform. "OpenHinge"?
  - excalibur 3y ago
    In the world of dating, "open" doesn't mean what you think it means.
    - zero-sharp 3y ago
      "AjarHinge"?
  - gizajob 3y ago
    When it first started, OKCupid was about the perfect dating platform until Match.com bought it and totally killed the functionality with monetisation.

saila 3y ago

Considering how important style is in most genres, I think the swipe interface could be a good way to quickly find better potential matches, assuming there's a pre-filter based on your selected genres. If I was looking to start a band today, I'd definitely give this kind of thing a try.

chrisin2d 3y ago

Furthermore, this photo-forward interface design pattern presents candidates' physical attractiveness as the most salient feature. While this is desirable in a dating app, this is probably not very relevant for assessing people for their potential as musical collaborators. From the top of my head, I'm going to guess people want (1) personable and agreeable bandmates with (2) compatible music styles, (3) musical talent and skill, and (4) can play instruments or roles that a band is missing. So the interface should support users in presenting and finding these traits. If I were to design it, I'd have: - Auto-playing music sample gallery. This is the most important thing to present. The current design asks the user to dig into Youtube and Soundcloud links — which is very high-friction and would have the user jumping between this app and other apps every few seconds. - One-minute self-introduction video. This helps the user grok the general 'vibe' of someone. - Allow users to connect their Spotify or other music accounts. Then show users their shared music interests. This can provide another clue about having compatible musical personalities.

arcticfox 3y ago
I like your ideas, and I feel like tiktok/reels would be the better base for this type of app than tinder
pg5 3y ago
I agree with pretty much all this. I avoided in-app videos because of the complexity and cost of building a transcoding/streaming system. But I suppose audio-only wouldn't be too bad.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pg5 3y ago

Good point, I do intend to add genre and instrument filtering. I figured I had some time to do that since there are barely any users. Not much point of having filtering if there are 5 people in your area.