I’m an older single male that would like to find a long term partner. I also have a background in economics, and in data science (the industry of creating predictive models, AKA “algorithms). After several months on the two biggest sites, I observe them presenting me with lots of potential candidates, many of whom are just objectively not matches, and a few of which have been interestingly close, but ultimately not a fit.
I have always tried to understand how an internet operation makes money off me, so that I understand whether they have my interests in mind, or some other party.
A couple of nights ago I told a woman I had dated several times that I don’t think we’re right for each other. I smoked a doobie and was ruminating on how this had happened.
All of the sites charge a monthly fee for a full featured experience. If you assume that all of the sites are run by smart, motivated people, you would conclude that they will use predictive models to be very targeted about to create connections that will MAXIMISE THEIR REVENUE. Their logical goal is keep you using the site as long as possible. Quickly presenting you with a match that works leads to shorter term subscription choices, and termination of subscriptions. Presenting you with interesting choices that ultimately don’t work out would lead to you thinking the site was useful, and keep you engaged. The profit maximizing behavior would be to present to people choices that are likely to connect, but not succeed in the long term. If a match is excellent, the sites are disincented to present you that choice.
I conclude that, if I were the CEO OF Match/POF, et al, that I would try to present people with matches that are close, but doomed to fail after a short period, because that would keep people paying subscriptions for as long as possible. I assert that dating sites are incented to NOT present you candidates that are a likely long term fit.
Change my mind. I’m on my way to the intake class at the monastery.
31 comments
I wouldn’t give them a cent or my fuck fuck em. Dating apps exploit people’s loneliness and isolation so some proletariats to earn your money.
They dont. Its why they allow all the fake profiles and such. Their goal is to make money. So to do that they fill up their websites/apps with fake profiles who “talk to you” and then vanish after awhile or get quiet. I wouldnt be shocked if their was a warehouse in china housed by 10 thousand people who have all the major dating apps pulled up and who just chat with people(and then of course the ones that scam you out of money to).
My thought about this is that they don’t have to *try* to give matches that won’t work. Most matches don’t work anyway. They send us people they think we might be mutually attracted to and let us mess up the rest.
I mostly use Tinder. A fair amount of profiles are pics only with no or minimal text. How is the algorithm determining long-term compatibility? Isn’t it possible that the entire model of internet dating just doesn’t work the vast majority of the time, so people naturally end up remaining on the sites longer? We would have to measure against a control group of people who don’t OLD.
We know that already.
I don’t doubt they try to figure out ways to make money off of us. That said, in order for them to intentionally provide slightly interesting but not the best matches, they would need to understand what makes a perfect match. I don’t think science has figured that out yet, it’s too complex.
You’re not wrong. Dating apps are difficult to make work, I always say it’s like an art to make work.
I totally agree, I think that’s really important to keep in the back of your mind when you are using these services. Ultimately they are public companies, and the most important thing is to keep the shareholders happy and that’s with the bottom line. So they will do what they can.
I think it’s also important and to be mindful that most of these apps and services need to be seen as a matching service, as that’s what they do. They serve you up matches, and then it is up to YOU to figure out how to date and move forward with your matches.
Personally, and from most people I meet, they don’t have a hard time MATCHING with individuals. The difficult part comes with when you are dating. Talking to individuals, figuring out how to know if someone likes you, ghosting, rejecting people, trying to date multiple people at once, etc. All of that comes down to the individuals and how they go about ‘dating’ and in theory not to do with the app.
I’m a male in my mid 30s, and not a single one of my issues are from the app themselves, but more how people go about the app in terms of just using it as a conversation platform, or not engaging in dates, or catfishing, or ghosting, etc.
Blog by okcupid when they were free before match.com bought them (and removed this blog entry)
Why you should never pay for online dating:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpayforonlinedating.html
Dude I agree. Hookups fund a lot of dating sites for a long time especially done like tinder where its pushed at least to the men to buy gold or platinum so you have a higher chance of finding someone. But they want you to find someone short term so when you’re done with them you keep paying to find someone else, smart but scummy business model. Especially when they use our loneliness against us to drain our pockets. Doesn’t work on me though. I’m too poor
I might be a cynic. OK, fine, I am a cynic. But I don’t think two assumptions you’ve made are true. First, I don’t think people match based on things in their profiles. You want some general matches on things important to you, but many people end up with “the type of person I never would have chosen or expected.”
Second, I don’t think they have to make most matches fail. Humans are involved, and most relationships fail. Even those successful on short and medium terms, even long term, often fail.
What I do think they’re incentivized to do is offer you lots of matches and a little bit of mystery about who that person is or who might be there tomorrow. I think it’s less about being disingenuous with who matches based on who’s available. And more about human nature of wanting to see what’s in the other closed fist once you’ve chosen one. Only in our minds, the fists keep appearing.
Plus, no one is perfect and selling the “soul mate” and “perfect match” tropes reinforces that untruth.
Cynic, signing off!
Dating apps are merely tools, most people don’t know how to use them, lack self-awareness, effort, communication skills, photos, writing skills, lifestyle choices etc. Even if you have all of this, if you are swiping outside your league, living a dull/boring lifestyle, life far away from everyone or have bad first messages, you won’t get far.
The thing is, this:
> interesting choices that ultimately don’t work out
Is just what dating is, on or off a dating site.
You’re doing the exact same thing when you meet people at bars or parties.
Also, in order to knowingly present you with someone who is just close enough, but ultimately not a fit, they would first have to know what *would* be a perfect fit, wouldn’t they? And can you really say that’s been quantified by anyone?
I’m pretty confident this isn’t some machine learning conspiracy. Finding love is just hard. Dating apps only need to capitalize on that inherent difficulty. They don’t need to have fancy algorithms to do that.
Also, personally, I live in San Francisco and with the amount of friends I have in big tech, including data science, I feel like I would have heard at least *something* to this effect if there really was a master algorithm that could lead you to your true love but deliberately chose not to.
dude, you’re like the 1,000,000th person to say this on reddit
They’re kind of like Casinos. They lure you in make you feel like you’re winning at first then take your money and you leave with nothing. While the house always wins.
Why is this written as if you’ve had some remarkable epiphany or have made a deduction from years of research? This is one of the most surface level possible thoughts one could have about online dating. There is nothing your data science background adds to this at all. It’s a matter of well-known objective fact that dating sites want you to keep paying for their services. It’s a commonly-shared fact here and most everywhere else.
> A couple of nights ago I told a woman I had dated several times that I don’t think we’re right for each other. I smoked a doobie and was ruminating on how this had happened.
This paragraph is actually “I broke it off with someone I’d been seeing them smoked weed and thought about it.” The rest of the post is “I realized they make more money when I’m on there, so they’re disincentivized to get me off there.” Instead you wrote a small article as if you’re the world’s first data scientist to investigate online dating while also being a leading contemporary philosopher.
You could’ve also just googled “how do dating sites make money” at any step of this process.
I been thinking about that too, i havent re-entered the dating scene yet, i have hinge downloaded and building up my profile slowly taking my sweet time but i consider what would be the best option. Im even considering match making service but could easily fall into the same traps.
So my best guess is too actually go out and meet people with mutual interests like hobby groups.
Its certainly intriguing too think about the algorithm this way.
> matches that are close, but doomed to fail
Being able to calculate near misses like that just doesn’t seem technically feasible.
Not that they’re acting in good faith. It’s just not that clever.
Are long or short bios better? Who cares, mandatory bios are user signup friction.
The reality is that dating sites should work way better but should be expensive. The problem is that nobody wants to spend money on everything and have an entitlement that everything should be free to use, so instead we get tinder and other apps which make their money the way they do.
When someone does try to have an actually high quality app that requires you to spend money, it generally fails. The other problem is that even if the app worked perfectly, people are imperfect, so people would still lie and not know what they want.
I have an anecdotal example. I matches with someone who was very attractive in all of their photos. They were very good at posing and really knew how to present themselves well in photos. Not only that, the profile was full of interest place and witty comments. It was all copied. The places in those profiles were like all the interesting things they’ve done in their entire life. They were an introverted homebody. I actually didn’t mind any of this, and we hit it off, but it got me to thinking. How many people did they disappoint before me who wanted that adventurous instagram model looking person they are soft catfished by in the photos?
I had the exact opposite experience with my ex. She represented herself as a homebody and had bad photos. She was much more attractive in person and liked hiking and wanted to travel a lot. You never know. My point is that dating apps would still suck even if they were perfectly designed.
So… I have a friend who works as a chat partner for a dating site. She is basically the “voice” behind a bunch of fake profiles and chats to men and women for a while, but will keep putting of going on a real date. It’s not one of the famous apps, but dunno if they have those too.
Which is why her advice is to meet people off the app as quickly as possible.
Whether they rigged the algorithm, I don’t know. One of my friends complains she never gets to see the really hot guys on Tinder, while a male friend said, he always gets to see women out of his league who never match back/are only there to promote OF/Instagram. Might be a subjective experience.
As someone who dated before the apps, you should know that in real life you also just met people who were either not interested or only almost a match by the dozen, and only about one a year that could have been a match, but was already taken etc.
From a marketing perspective – when you find a match they loose a customer
Kinda makes me wonder if I should change all of mine to casual for a while just to see if it throws people wanting LTR at me.
I think you are vastly over estimating a dating companies abilities to determine match quality and likelihood of it being a good match.
>Presenting you with interesting choices that ultimately don’t work out would lead to you thinking the site was useful, and keep you engaged.
I don’t think companies have enough data to know this. Yes they have a large amount of data on their users but a lot of the data they have is data on how people choose to present themselves not who they truly are. What each person is looking for will be slightly different and hard to quantify with the data they have. Plus the way people act on a first date would be not captured. It is also hard for them to determine outcome. When I match and date a person from a dating sites perspective they get data up to point where I asked them on a date or got their number but then they have limited data after that. I and many others date multiple people, a dating site would have a hard time determining if I quit the site because I found a partner, got bored, switched sites, or other reasons.
If they had data to only give people close but not perfect choices, that would imply they also have the data to find a perfect match. That ability just doesn’t exist yet.
On a interesting side note, with advances in AI/Machine Learning we may actually be getting close to that point. I could imagine an AI match maker in the near future.
If someone could tell me a non-malicious way to keep users engaged on a dating app, I’d be truly amazed. Having people match and eventually leave the app is the pure anti-thesis of their business model.
Yup, and as far as I know Hinge is the first app to admit this. Go to the monetized “standouts” section and read what it says. It says all the people that are most your type are there. Their algorithm learns who you like and then starts to only display those types of profiles in a section where you have to pay to like them.
Not only that, but Match.com ACTIVELY BLOCKS messages between “good matches” while allowing messages between “bad matches” to go through. It is a crime against humanity. Then people go and fuck a bad match, and then dump the bad match, and they both think the site is legit because they got any relationship.
everyone is breaking up after the first date anyway because it’s too hard to agree on how to split the bills.
Personally I think what we have working against us is ourselves and the fact that the apps make you feel like the grass is always greener. The issue with online dating is that people find what they’re looking for, but they keep looking.
I’ve used both paid and unpaid options on Hinge and Bumble and I feel like I’ve had more success with their free versions, so they won’t see my money ever again.
Everyone here agrees with your view. I am fine paying them if they can rid of the bots and OF girls. But they can’t even do that.
This reality is why we should all hold hands and cry together
Or you could go out and socialize and meet people the old-fashioned way.
That way you’re wasting your money buying drinks.