You know, there's probably fewer perverse incentives with a government run dating service. Obviously I can imagine ways it could suck, but when I compare them to how commercial dating services are run it's hard to see how they could do a _worse_ job.
I contemplated whether to try to build a dating site a few times while I was single, and every time what stopped me was the perverse incentives. Making a financially viable dating service without actively making things worse on purpose is really hard.
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
The original OKCupid was the best dating site and the only one that I enjoyed using. It has since been gobbled up by the Match.com behemoth and is now basically useless.
Amen to that. OKC back in the day was wonderful, for nerds like myself who loved answering questions and data in general.
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
Match Group also knows that buying sites that match people well is good business because there's so much room to juice the profits by applying the lessons from their other sites to them, and the valuations will be relatively low relative to user numbers...
water-data-dude · · focus · HN ↗
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
E.g. at one point I spoke to a woman who told me she'd out of curiosity paid for a month of Tinder's premium sub to see how many had swiped right on her, and her queue was over 3000. She wasn't swiping much. The queue was basically perpetually growing, and the odds for any of the men swiping was accordingly low and dropping. Which was good for Tinder of course - a larger pool of people for men to swipe and get frustrated over lack of responses from, until some proportion pay.
If you're not dependent on frustrating your users into wanting to pay for priority, or getting people off the service because they've found someone is in fact your goal, it's trivial to fix this issue (and many others): Stop showing a profile when the queue gets too deep.
Same thing with not showing inactive profiles. Or actually trying to match profiles of people who are likely to match up (again there's a perverse incentive: you want to match up profiles that one side will like, but not match up profiles where both sides are interested too often; rack up the swipes but not the connections...)
That's the long way of saying I agree, and to get out some of the frustration from past years of using them (hopefully never again...). There are truly few types of services where the interests of users and commercial operators are so totally misaligned.
FuriouslyAdrift · · focus · HN ↗
[edit] mixed up Plenty of Fish with OKCupid
epihelix · · focus · HN ↗
The great thing was that it was self-selecting -- the less compatible types answered very few questions and stumbled over anything involving basic general knowledge, logic or ethics. The compatible ones added thoughtful or witty freeform comments to their answers. You could essentially clear all the usual first-few-dates compatibility dances just by running through people's answers.
I met many wonderful people via that site, and I never went on a bad date with OKC; we always had heaps to talk about. I thankfully found my perfect match for all time via OKC nine years ago, just before match.com ripped up the matching algorithm and the questions and destroyed the site entirely.
It is not a good business model to match people well, and match.com clearly knows that.
vidarh · · focus · HN ↗