
The Future of Online Dating Is Unsexy and Brutally Effective - sdsk8
https://gizmodo.com/the-future-of-online-dating-is-unsexy-and-brutally-effe-1819781116
======
ksikka
Dating apps/sites that employ the strategy of "get as much data as possible
and match intelligently" have failed to compete for users against Tinder, the
dumbest, simplest dating app that hardly does any intelligent matching at all.
This implies that it's not the sophistication of a dating app that matters,
it's the simplicity and ability to attract a userbase that in turn attracts a
larger userbase etc in a virtuous cycle.

~~~
Analemma_
Tinder is doing a lot more intelligent matching than you think. The CTO of
OKCupid (which is owned by the same parent company) was on a podcast a few
weeks ago where he briefly discussed some of the algorithmic challenges of
Tinder. They include:

\- it may not seem like it, but Tinder does try to pick people it thinks are
most likely to produce a match, based on-- to be brutally honest-- your
attractiveness (as determined by who has swiped for you) and the other
person's

\- it then orders them approximately from most likely to least likely, but it
has to know how often to start over, because eventually as you go down the
list you'll eventually start running into people that you're less likely to
swipe right on than the people you already passed up

\- carefully arranging things so that "super likes" have a reasonable chance
of producing a match while also not inundating very attractive people with
nothing but super likes from people they will never respond to (which would
drive them off the service)

It's a tough challenge and Tinder is not at all a "dumb, simple" dating app.

~~~
pedalpete
Maybe he missed out on some of the other important things Tinder does on the
"addiction" side of things.

When the app first came out (or possibly when you first start using it), the
first person is/was always a match. Then they got clever about hiding matches
deeper in the swipes.

This triggers addictive behaviour because the "match" reward is inconsistent.
Though, clearly, before you start swiping, Tinder knows which matches it is
going to present to you. It's a delicate balance to judge how long you will
spend swiping, when to show you your match and how to make sure you swipe
right a few times to keep the funnel loaded.

~~~
ksikka
This bolsters the point that the future of online dating is not a computer
estimating compatibility with creepy accuracy, it's someone engineering an app
to be addicting to get the largest userbase.

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maerF0x0
To me the frightening thing is that people seem to be unable to differentiate
between no data and the negative case. For example

* No Fitbit data == "You're inactive

* No Open source github commits == "you dont like code"

* Few Facebook friends == "you dont have friends"

* Few Instagram posts == "You dont do anything"

~~~
Yetanfou
It won't be long before "No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat,
no G+, no nothing" will translate to " _a catch_ " in dating app terms:
someone with whom to share life as we know it, not as we want others to think
we live it.

Then again, maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence (or integrity) of dating
app purveyors. After all, 'real' people are so hard to monetise...

~~~
bdamm
I suspect that people who avoid social networks will start to form
increasingly independent social circles from people who generally engage in
social networks. Furthermore, these circles will change over the lifetime of
individuals.

For example, I was an avid user of IRC back in the late '90s. That medium
formed my social experience and those people became many of my life-long
friends. These days many of my friends from that time (including myself) don't
use social networks much at all; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter included.
We've been there, done that, and are finding human engagement without social
networks to be more satisfying. Consequently, my contemporary relationships
are not significantly maintained through social networks and whether someone
is or is not on Facebook or Instagram has no bearing on whether my
relationships are maintained.

A wise friend of mine once said "Facebook is for people you _don 't_ know!"

~~~
j45
IRC is a successful form of social media that centered around communication
and enriched our physical lives. It's nice to hear others have also held onto
the friendships from that time.

When I hear people excited about slack, I see it as the modern day irc client,
also focused around communication.

ICQ/AIM took a big chunk out of irc, but it still didn't allow people to
connect in channels.

Now we have networks where people aren't communicating as much as sharing and
interacting with moments.

~~~
noir_lord
Not only held on to them but still making new ones, I hang around in an
offtopic channel for a framework I don't even use any more because I made
friends with a bunch of the people in there, hell I'd say half the channel
doesn't use that framework anymore but a lot of us are solo devs in companies
that aren't software companies so it's become our de facto water cooler.

~~~
j45
It's interesting, I have the same few spots as well. Dont' make it back often
as I should (installed Adium to help with this), but it's interesting to see
where we all met as teenagers, now talking about other things that have
happened, whether it's marriage, family, business, etc.

The uncompromising and unquestioned loyalty that exists from having a buddy in
another city is something social media (and maybe even dating sites) could
learn a thing or ten from.

I'd say online message boards (phpbb, etc) in from 99 to 2007 or so were
similar networks. There is something about semi long form communication that
can't be liked, tweeted, shared, etc to be improved.

------
bdamm
When people talk about AI threatening humanity I suspect folks imagine The
T-2000 model Terminator. But here is the real thing; AI is going to change our
society in a profound and slow-moving way, very different from our perspective
of how war and soldiers change power structures.

------
zeveb
> But in the future, apps could identify sexists/racists/homophobes by their
> social media activity and preemptively blacklist them from joining. (Maybe
> this would aid the industry’s problem with harassment, too.)

I don't think blackballing people due to statistical inferences about their
behaviour is any better than harassment.

> I’d guess the findings were racist: OkCupid statistics show that even though
> people say they don’t care about race when choosing a partner, they usually
> act as if they do.

It's weird that wanting to produce children with someone of the same ethnic
background as oneself is seen as racist. It seems quite unremarkably _normal_
to prefer folks from a similar background. There's nothing wrong, of course,
with those who choose someone different than themselves, but I think _they
're_ the outliers.

~~~
Analemma_
> I don't think blackballing people due to statistical inferences about their
> behaviour is any better than harassment.

What? Harassment is active disruption of your life. Hiding you from someone's
search results or "compatibility" list is not. It's not a great future, but
let's have some perspective and not equate apples with oranges.

~~~
zeveb
Blacklisting people is active disruption of their lives, too. If it's based on
statistical modelling, not actual misdeeds, then it's not even based on what
they've done.

------
bambax
> _Already, some apps do this by learning patterns in who we left and right
> swipe on, the same way Netflix makes recommendations from the movies we’ve
> liked in the past._

Netflix recommendations are utterly bad.

Musk et al. warn us constantly about "AI" and its dangers, but so far AI
doesn't seem to work very well. Translating from Italian to English with
Google Translate results in complete gibberish; Amazon (the other
recommendation engine everyone mentions in that kind of discussion) is only
ever able to suggest products one has already bought.

It's probably hard to judge the efficiency of those dating systems since there
is no control, and people want them to work. It would be interesting to
compare a "sophisticated" dating engine with a more random one and see if
there's any difference in outcome.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
Musk's hype of AI is just marketing.

~~~
chc
Musk's "hype" of AI? He says we should be _scared_ of it.

~~~
qbrass
He started a company to research making friendly AI, so he wants you to be
scared of AI that isn't his.

------
Mz
One of the problems with this idea is that it kind of paints you into a
corner. It doesn't allow you to aspire to be the person you desire to be. It
predicts that who you are is static and then it helps make that a reality.

During my divorce, I intentionally sought to _not_ allow past relationship
data to influence whom I hooked up with.* I had been with four people. Three
of them were blonde. Three of them were born within a few weeks of me. All
four of them were either in the military at the time or joined it later
(because we were both just 17).

I didn't hate the man I was divorcing. I didn't think I had missed by much on
finding a great match for me. I was trying to figure out how to sort the wheat
from the chaff.

For me, a dating app that said "You clearly like blondes. Here are all the
blondes." would have been the exact opposite of what I wanted. I wanted to
make personal connections that were not biased by shallow details of that
sort. I succeeded in that goal and it was a growth experience.

So, to my mind, a dating app that would be this thorough is the dating
equivalent of redlining colored communities and not approving mortgages there.
I say that because one of the issues was that I had been molested as a child.
So, my feeling is that if you limit future relationships based on passed
behavior, you are saying that you are 100% fine with painting abuse survivors
into a corner they can never, ever escape. And that doesn't sit well with me.

I generally like to give life room to surprise me. I have gone out of my way
to let men surprise me with being better people than my bad past experiences
led me to believe I could find in men. The last thing I want is someone or
something essentially telling me "So, we hear you like abusive men who will
shit on you. Here are your matches."

Yeah, no. I never asked for that. But finding my way out of it has been a
long, strange journey because, seriously, society doesn't yet have a good play
book for how on earth you do that. So, you very much have to roll your own.

* [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/10/reducing-bia...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/10/reducing-bias-in-dating-small-personal.html)

~~~
irremediable
Very, very well said. This kind of thing risks turning dating into the filter
bubble we see in online news -- but worse, because it's a more important part
of life.

It also ignores how attraction works. Sure, someone may find blond people
attractive, but it's seldom a deal-breaker. These algorithms tend to select on
characteristics that are easy to assess, discarding many potential partners
who'd be more suitable in other ways.

------
forapurpose
What I find most disturbing is the viewpoint underlying this article, an
emerging faith in AI and a magical ability to divine things about the world,
with no discussion of its strengths and limitations, its false positives,
false negatives, true positives, etc.

It's starting to approach that point in the adoption curve where skepticism
fades and people think of it as the solution for (or threat to) everything,
rather than as a tool that is good at some things and not at others and that
has characteristics like accuracy. With AI and the widespread blind acceptance
of our surveillance society, that could be a dangerous point of view for the
public to embrace.

------
odammit
Married, so I probably won’t be using that site anytime soon. I did meet my
wife on OkCupid and I was doing the Ng ML class at the time and studying NLP
and wrote a bit of my own “crawlers” to weed out people, find matches, and
draft letters.

Intersting thing with this is I have 4 different twitter accounts for all of
my different personalities:

\- political

\- work related

\- life(dog) related

\- shit posting

I kind of want to see the different matches I’d get based on my tweet
taxonomy.

------
alehul
> it’s paired with the language processing company Receptiviti.ai to compute
> the compatibility between me and its user base using the contents of our
> Twitter feeds.

They're measuring compatibility on language analysis of your tweets? This
seems inefficient and unnecessary.

Wouldn't it be both simpler and more effective to analyze who you follow for
compatibility? In regards to feeds themselves, retweeting the same article
could be a great talking point and measure of similar interests.

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pmlnr
This is so wrong. Your partner is someone that balances you, not a mirror of
you. Sure, you need a lot of similar interest, but also differences to get a
relationship work, and those I don't yet see in these algoritms, not even
remotely.

~~~
dogruck
Aren't you assuming that they are matching on equality, not inferred
compatibility?

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purplezooey
Weren't we promised this 20 years ago? Some has changed, some hasn't.

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3pt14159
So I signed up to evaluate the application but after giving the platform
access to my timeline I do not see any of the breakdown the author is talking
about. Is it because I'm using the web interface?

