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Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

466 points · 499 comments · rzk

  1. janalsncm · · 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. 010ED67913 · · focus · HN ↗
      > Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.

      what do you mean? if you stop opening the app, they were not successful. any seas founders here who want their users to stop using the service?

      1. pnt12 · · focus · HN ↗
        I guess OP was using the user centric approach of measuring success, however naive or ir realistic it is nowadays.

        That's the problem: ad based apps want to keep you there, not solve your problems.

        I thought about a dating app where you pay for entry and that's it. Then the incentive is that you don't need it anymore ASAP, because the more time you spend there, the more costs.

        Theres a network problem, where it must be high quality, successful, and with lots of people before people are willing to pay. Maybe it would need to start with a free trial in a small region to get some traction before, and rolled out slowly.

        1. someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
          Apps like you describe exist. They usually show you tons of fake profiles and "15 hot women want to message you - subscribe to read messages!"
      2. janalsncm · · focus · HN ↗
        Tinder doesn’t know if you stopped using it because you found a partner they recommended, found a partner in some other way, got frustrated and gave up trying, or got frustrated and tried a different app.

        Also they won’t know who you started dating. It’s most likely not the last person you matched with or messaged. So any training data will probably be incredibly noisy, because romantic compatibility is not something that happens in the app.

        1. fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
          Why wouldn't they? In this day and age, if we're them, I'd be buying all the third party advertising data I could, and correlate users in order to find the answers to your questions, so I know who to serve which advertisments to. Girlfriend posting angry things about boyfriend to Instagram? Perfect time to drop an ad for her to come back to Tinder.
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