
A Matchmaker Who Flirts on Dating Apps for You (2017) - howard941
https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/matchmaker-dating-apps-meredith-golden.html
======
mothsonasloth
Good for her finding a niche market like this however I pity the clients and
the people on the other end.

Tinder and the likes are a numbers game, with everyone procuring their,"best
self" in 6 photos and a witty bio. There is already so much artificiality in
the interactions and this will just add more to it.

I was terrible and shy when I first used Tinder but I treated it like any
other problem. I iterated and reviewed; improved my appearance and well being.

Then I started getting matches; at which point I couldn't think of anything
funny to say. So I went with cliched or weird intros. After another bit of
iteration and self reflection and lots of trial and error I was getting dates.

This whole evolution took place over a year or so and was a good benchmark for
me.

Whether you are a woman or a man, if you are failing on
Tinder/Bumble/Match/Dates etc. I suggest you do a bit of self reflection and
try and change it up, I believe in you!

People who are trying to skip parts out are more likely to stumble at the next
hurdle in my opinion.

~~~
strikelaserclaw
Seems like every aspect of our lives is becoming like a big job hunt. Putting
in all the right keywords regardless of whether they apply to you or not.
Making yourself look better artificially at the cost of authenticity. smh.

~~~
lotsofpulp
A job hunt is just selling yourself and dating is selling yourself as a good
partner.

Networking events and friendships are also selling yourself, since you can’t
possibly give the same time and importance to everyone, so you need to pick
and choose.

~~~
strikelaserclaw
Don't know about you but i never had to "sell" myself to make friends. It's
the mechanization of human experiences and emotions due to technology that
scares me the most of all. It's putting numbers on unquantifiable things and
convincing society that it is indeed quantifiable. What next? Some "visionary"
comes up with a way to rate our all attributes on an n dimensional scale, and
we all strive in our lives to make those numbers go up? "Introducing FB person
ratings, where we rate things like dating desirability, job efficiency,
intelligence, charm" Then tinder will hook into this system and suddenly we
have people putting " >85 attractiveness, >70 charm" in their profiles as
preferences. That kind of world, which i hope will never happen, will be a
complete shit hole imo.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Even if you don’t think of it as selling, it is. The way you speak, the
actions you do, the interests you have, the way you look are all being
interpreted by others, and everyone is consciously or subconsciously
determining whether or not someone is worth more of their time.

------
jasode
It seems inevitable that if AI algorithms help humans flirt, it means we'll
eventually have a 2 people get married because John with help from Google's
flirting AI interacted with Mary with help from her Facebook flirting AI.

 _Basically, it means it was the Google software engineers flirting with with
the Facebook software programmers!_

Seems ripe for a Hollywood romcom script. Two people hook up because of their
respective dating AI apps told them what to say. If the movie was long enough,
you could include them getting divorced and the husband & wife's attorneys
each using legal AI software to optimize the best divorce settlement.

~~~
mokus
I could see this as a Black Mirror script too

~~~
sct202
The "Hang the DJ" episode is sort of along those lines where your AI's pretend
date in a virtual world and give a result back in an app.

~~~
ergothus
I believe Stross had that as a background detail in Accelerondo too

------
tptacek
So, she's an agent! She should get 15%, the standard agent rate. What's 15% of
a marriage? With a dozen clients at ~500/mo, she's not making enough to live
in Manhattan right now.

This is terrible, but I read this and my mind switches back to nerd stuff: how
great would it be if software developers could hire someone like this but to
handle job outreach and negotiation? You: kick back, solve programming
puzzles, go to the occasional tech-out interview. They: reach out to
prospects, arrange your interviews, and do the salary negotiation.

They're really different skills, programming and job negotiation. They're not
even correlated! I know so many excellent negotiators with excellent jobs who
aren't even in the top 50% of programmers I've worked with, and vice versa.

I suppose it's probably similar with dating; being a good partner probably has
little to do with being good at arranging dates.

 _Later_

Heading off a bunch of replies right here:

Recruiters work for hiring firms. How you know this is, developers don't
generally pay recruiters. The essence of an agent/principal relationship is
that the agent works for, and is compensated by, the principal. Recruiters
aren't talent agents for developers.

~~~
subvocalize
I'm an ex-PM that works as a talent agent (100% comped by candidate, no formal
relationship with companies) for tech jobs, mainly PMs but some devs. It's a
side business I'm trying to grow into full-time work. I take up to 4 clients
at once since it's a lot of work per person and I don't have a lot of
automation in place yet.

I'm amazed that professional help isn't standard, since your job determines so
much of your happiness and future path, but most people rely on skills they
dust off every few years to get one.

Much like the article's dating example, it's not clear to the employer that I
as an agent exist, because employers often categorically don't want to hear
from third parties early in the game. So in practice this involves a lot of
ghostwriting on a new, shared email account, which the candidate reviews and
submits. Interview coaching is also a big part of it.

Also, from a pure negotiation perspective, Josh Doody at
FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com (I'm not affiliated) is very good and
specializes in developers.

~~~
lucasverra
share email please, i have a question

~~~
subvocalize
coaching at unusuallydifficult dot com

------
Radim
Ah, good old "outsource non-vital parts, so you have more time for yourself
(sic)".

How much of your life can be outsourced, before it's no longer _your_ life?
How much of a man still makes a man?

Edgar Allan Poe had a funny little story about that and technology, all the
way back in 1840:

[https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom2t032.htm](https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom2t032.htm)

~~~
tptacek
Look around your living space. Make a list of the things you do every day as
part of your daily routine. Think about a person living in the middle ages,
and how your routine differs from theirs. How many outsourcing relationships
do you benefit from, compared to them? Do you have more or less agency than
that other person?

~~~
Radim
Hidden in your questions is a presupposition of a well-defined "you", a human
essence that decides/benefits as an indivisible whole.

As that EA Poe story skilfully anticipated, and as our modernity puts more and
more into practice, "you" is just a chimera, a leaky abstraction. It appears
the questions of tomorrow will be around "what's the entity exercising agency"
more than "how much agency".

Surrogate matchmakers are but a taste of things to come.

------
draugadrotten
(2014) [https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-
okcupid/](https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/)

Video:
[https://datascience.hubs.vidyard.com/watch/tYeyAch76caSFrHDf...](https://datascience.hubs.vidyard.com/watch/tYeyAch76caSFrHDf5P55a)

This is about a guy who wrote a Python script to ... "set up 12 fake OkCupid
accounts and wrote a Python script to manage them. The script would search his
target demographic (heterosexual and bisexual women between the ages of 25 and
45), visit their pages, and scrape their profiles for every scrap of available
information... After three weeks he'd harvested 6 million questions and
answers from 20,000 women all over the country. "

Not. Creepy. At. All.

~~~
aboutruby
[http://weboob.org/applications/havedate.html](http://weboob.org/applications/havedate.html)

------
mhd
Cyrano As A Service? Totally outsourcing it seems a bit skeevy to me, but some
on-demand-coaching would be nice.

"Don't tell her about your D&D group yet!" would've been some good advice in
the past. For a friend of mine, of course.

~~~
tptacek
Didn't Cyrano do the whole date? This person is just arranging meetings.

~~~
mhd
He wrote letters, and she's posing as her clients, so this seems roughly
equivalent.

Which to me personally is a step to far. If you're getting tips or even
literal phrases, you still have the option of not using or changing them. Not
even participating in the courtship until the first date seems morally
unsound.

The matchmakers of old would be the dating service itself. Or maybe their
shoddy algorithms.

------
elliekelly
Woman here so I would guess my dating app experience is a bit different from
most HN readers. Just reading the headline I was kind of disgusted. But then I
read the article:

> When she messages potential matches, Golden typically comments on their
> photos: What a cute dog! Oh, your kids live in the city, how lucky are you?
> She types out full sentences, and she does not use emoji, and she certainly
> does not use innuendo. “I’m not gonna say like, ‘How big are your feet?’”
> she giggled.

Women are absolutely _bombarded_ with so many messages on these apps that they
can't possibly respond to most and have to narrow it down. At a very high
level, the process of elimination for most women goes like this:

1\. First, skip all of the creeps who fortunately make it super easy for you
to spot (bathroom selfies & "Wanna sit on my face?" messages).

2\. Then narrow it down by intelligence so anyone who seems to have trouble
putting together a full sentence or spelling gets a pass.

3\. Finally, narrow it down based on effort so 90% of the remaining messages
are ignored because they're some variation of "hey" or "there she is!"

These filters suck. But they're the best we can do with an overwhelming amount
of inputs and limited additional information. Occasionally creeps get past the
filter and we don't find out until we meet in person. Conversely, are all men
who take bathroom selfies or ask 'wut u doin' or who play the "numbers game"
by sending 'hey' to 1000 women worthy of being skipped over? Probably not. I
bet there are a lot of awesome guys who have done one or more of those things
and get "filtered out" by women who would otherwise really enjoy their
company. But, for now at least, women don't have a better way of separating
the wheat from the chaff.

The messages Golden sends on behalf of her clients bypass all of these
filters. My boyfriend is 13 years older than me, twice-divorced and has a 12
year old. We never would have met via a dating app because I would've filtered
him out for a hundred different reasons. (And he's a numbers guy so he would
absolutely be guilty of #3.)

Assuming Golden does some sort of creep-QC on her clients, if two people meet
in person and really hit it off because Golden was able to get the right guy
past the right girl's tinder filters, well I think that's great.

But also, someone needs to come up with a better way to deal with women's
dating-app inboxes. Bumble tried to make an effort but there is a LOT of room
for improvement.

~~~
tormeh
Tinder already did that. I think I saw a screenshot once from the olden days
of OK Cupid, where men could _and were expected to_ send a message to any
woman they found interesting. I think there were hundreds of messages per day
or something.

~~~
elliekelly
Yes but I'm saying even with Tinder its unmanageable. Progress, yes. But not a
solution. I'm Tinder loses a lot of users because their female users are
overwhelmed and their male users are underwhelmed.

~~~
tormeh
You should try the contemporary OK Cupid. It's really great. The match scores
are awesome. It essentially means you'll never have a truly bad date.

------
kyrieeschaton
[https://delicioustacos.com/2018/01/28/talk-to-her-for-
me/](https://delicioustacos.com/2018/01/28/talk-to-her-for-me/)

------
xfitm3
I’ve used services like this - in addition to self improvement. Messaging
women takes a lot of time and it’s a pain in the ass. I’d rather just meet
them.

------
AnimalMuppet
The problem is that the target (that seems like an appropriate word) finds the
_matchmaker_ interesting, not _you_. That may get you a date. It _also_ may
leave the other person rather disappointed when they meet you and find out
that you aren't the same in person as they thought you were online.

~~~
908087
We can solve this by going one step further and having the matchmaker follow
along on dates to continue the conversation for you while you sit quietly and
stare.

~~~
MrMember
There was a Black Mirror episode sort of like this. The person on the date
wore glasses with a camera and an earpiece so the "matchmaker" could tell them
what to say and do.

------
esotericn
This feels, quite frankly, extremely odd to me.

What's the long term? Do you tell your partner on your wedding day "hey,
remember when we first got chatting? that wasn't me, it was hired help, oho!".

Unless you have a very transactional attitude to relationships (e.g. a sort of
elite-dating style situation where you just want a partner that earns well and
looks good at social occasions) I can't see this working out well. Your entire
relationship is built on a lie.

Oh, then there's the limiting case. Two matchmakers end up pitted against each
other. A prime candidate for automation!

~~~
MrMember
>Unless you have a very transactional attitude to relationships (e.g. a sort
of elite-dating style situation where you just want a partner that earns well
and looks good at social occasions) I can't see this working out well. Your
entire relationship is built on a lie.

I don't see it that way. Dating apps are a game. If you don't play the game
"correctly" you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. And if you're an
average man you're already starting at a disadvantage. To succeed you need the
"correct" photos and profile. You need the "correct" opening line. You need
the "correct" witty responses. And that's all before you even meet someone in
person! I can see the value in a service that bypasses the game to get right
to a face to face meeting.

------
908087
Seems like the next logical step in the instaface generation quest for total
inauthenticity. Maybe we can use "AI" to create "influencer couples" who are
well suited to pushing specific corporations' products.

Eventually we can even tune the algorithms to match couples who are most
likely to give birth to "influencer babies".

------
lm28469
Yes please, let's remove everything that makes life worth living so we have
more time for work and media consumption. The trend of micro
managing/optimising our lives is really getting out of control.

Dating apps are already dehumanising most of the dating process, let's see how
bad we can make it. I wonder if people in the future will be able (or even
know that it's possible) to start discussions with the opposite sex outside of
dating apps.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Without commenting on the TFA, the thing is that dating is already a
crapshoot.

Ever go out to try and meet women? I'm comfortable enough with it that I've
gone to bars alone just to do it, yet I'd still call it uncomfortable at best.
You're essentially cold-approaching strangers and don't know if they're single
much less if they even find you attractive. Sometimes you hit it off like a
romcom which is rewarding, but everything that's not that is a crapshoot.
Certainly doesn't feel "humanizing".

Ideally you meet women through your social circle or your social events. I met
my last girlfriend through a kayaking event on meetup.com in Guadalajara. But
your social circle might not have anything to offer you. Or you find meetups
just as impersonal or you don't have time or are still working up the courage
to conquer your own anxieties or you're in a new city with no friends yet.

Dating already was a numbers game. Dating apps like Tinder have improved my
quality of life here enormously. The ability to narrow down strangers to the
ones who at least find you attractive (attraction isn't a choice) is an
invaluable tool, and not having this tool in the physical world isn't any more
humanizing. You just have to remember easy come, easy go. You can't fixate on
one woman and you can't be outcome-dependent, but those were already things
you shouldn't be doing in the physical world.

Besides, the point of dating apps is to quickly escalate to a face to face
meetup. Something that can help you meet more humans face to face seems the
opposite of dehumanizing.

My suspicion is that dating apps are so easy to hate because they bring to the
surface what dating really is, and it was never all that pretty to begin with.

~~~
lm28469
Yeah sure, if you see dating as an end it makes sense to use these apps. For
me it's most about meeting people, talking, learning etc ... it's part of the
thrill. "But you can do that on tinder too", nah, being face to face
explicitly for a date changes everything, people are not themselves in these
conditions.

I don't want to meet people I "matched" because we watch the same shows,
listen to the same music, have the same hobbies. That's not bad per say but
I'd much rather learn that organically, even if it ends up being a "waste of
time". I feel like reading a tinder profile + the first convo is removing most
of the fun of meeting someone.

> Ever go out to try and meet women?

I don't go out with the intent of finding a date but if something happens I'll
go with the flow. I met my last 2 ltr like that and learned a lot from it /
them. Sure if you compare that to having 3 dates a week on tinder my numbers
look low, but I also avoid all the shit I don't want to put up with.

> You just have to remember easy come, easy go.

Yes, that's exactly what I don't like about these apps, you'll always have the
occasional "I met my wife/husband on tinder" but it's mostly short term
things. My personal theory is that the more people you date / the easier it is
to find a mate, the less you'll engage and the faster you'll get disappointed
/ bored and go look somewhere else. It's always more exciting to start a new
relationship than to face and overcome hardships in a newish one.

> My suspicion is that dating apps are so easy to hate because they bring to
> the surface what dating really is.

You could be right, I haven't dated many people so I'm probably extremely
biased. All I can tell is that it saddens me to listen to the tinder stories
of my friends and see them glued to their tinder app when I meet them in real
life, it brings them way more issues than happiness.

------
sixstringtheory
Wow this is from early 2017, I’m falling behind the curve thinking this is
clever for today!

------
paulie_a
This is really stupid. If you can't get a first date with a few messages back
and forth of general chit chat, then asking to meet up you are doing something
seriously wrong. Unless there is a schedule conflict that delays meeting, the
conversation should be 4-20 messages tops.

------
notTyler
I'm sure this woman's clients see lots of success, because I'm guessing she
probably screens them based on whether they're actually dateable or not from a
female point of view. (Similar to the way that if Eharmony thinks you're a
sociopath they will straight up refuse your money.) If it works for them and
they end up in good relationships, great. But I think for a majority of people
who have trouble dating, it's not just "getting past the first few messages
and onto a date." But if she helps people, more power to her.

