Thread

1. janalsncm · 1790819453 · focus · HN ↗

   In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.

   Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.

   The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.

   1. nomilk · 1790821184 · focus · HN ↗

      > Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.

      Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).

      Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.

      1. janalsncm · 1790822503 · focus · HN ↗

         Marriage records are often public. But usually two people don’t stop using a dating app and get married the next day. They will date for months or years after. And that info is not so easy to get.

         As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.

         1. paimapi · 1790822943 · focus · HN ↗

            It really can't be that hard to derive that data. If there's a match, keywords matching location names, addresses, etc as the last message followed by a large usage drop, you can probably identify 80%+ of longterm monogamous relationships forming

            I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it

      2. guelo · 1790866470 · focus · HN ↗

         Huh? The target variable is revenue.

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