The value of internet dating for people looking for a serious connection is access to scale and therein the bypass of the happenstance of initial conditions. This approach gives up on scale. At first I was challenged with how to effectively gain the value of that access to scale. But then I selected a dating app (okcupid) that allowed for depth and designed my profile to ward off others and select for the subpopulation that I had hypothesized was most likely to hold the partner I was interested in. It's only been 10 years but I'm happy with my results.
Ha! I second for okcupid. The only normal dating site (that allows indepth profiles) that I was able to find back in 2015-16. Never needed it since then, because I married a girl I met there)
Unfortunately okcupid has trended away from what it was 5+ years ago. My last SO was through okcupid right before they changed the incentives in the system. Now it has been driven towards the same swipe culture as all the other apps. Though you can still answer questions and write detailed profile... The system doesn't seem to promote that as much. My key gripe right now with how it is setup is that the only discovery is through one of 5-6 swipe categories and your filter criteria no longer impacts any of those swipe decks.
So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective
I really want to call out the technical founders here, Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, because they've done nothing but leave a legacy of abandoned products in the hands of untrustworthy companies: in the case of OkCupid they sold to Match.com which devastated the site committing it to the same wastebasket as Match.com's portfolio of other predatory dating products.
Then they created Keybase, which was fantastic, before selling out to Zoom. Development has all but stopped.
This style of hit and run get what's mine is endemic to SV. Nobody takes responsibility for the lasting legacy of the things they build.
OkCupid was a safe haven for people who really wanted something genuine. It had a culture-wide effect the same way that Tinder cemented hook-ups as the New Normal of dating. We need to start taking responsibility for the things we make that touch millions of people.
Chris' Twitter [1] professes his love for making things. Yes but you don't love being a good steward of the things you build.
You could call okcupid feature complete. Keybase however still had plenty of exciting greenfield work to do (IMO) - my friend and I emailed them asking to pay for KBFS but the founders declined!
And thus why most software is utter crap too.
When people first talked about holding software development to the same standards as professional engineering I thought it was crazy, but the longer I've been in this the more I think it is absolutely required - for this reason if nothing else.
It's called work for a reason and the un-fun stuff is often as or more important than the fun stuff.
Leaving aside the fun, maintaining them is also often not economically rewarding compared to building the next new thing. I dare say the founders of these sites will be happy enough with their decision even if they are called out once or twice in comment threads by critics with no skin in the game.
The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.
Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.
> The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.
Ironically, OKCupid wrote about this exact issue, explaining why membership incentives were bad, etc.
Then they were bought by Match.com, went to a membership based subscription model, and deleted that post.
I wrote it in another older thread: Make a service that asks you for say $1000 USD upfront and then pays you back partially every month until you find a match.
Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.
If you found a match, how would the site know that you matched successfully if you didn't want the site to know (so you could recover the full amount)?
Then wouldn't the app have an incentive to send you on dates with the most obnoxious and/or dangerous people possible, so that you refused to attend any more?
That's very sad news... I think it'd already started to mutate back then in 2015-2016, but it was still possible to make and to discover a detailed user profiles, that actually allowed to get interested in a person.
On the other hand my internal entrepreneur says that it could be a great opportunity to launch okcupid2.0 given that there's an actual demand for this kind of site.
Giving up on scale might be a good thing tbh. With scale comes a lot of noise. Also with it comes choice paralysis.
On noise, it's not uncommon to see less than 1% of male right swipes to turn into a match. As many here may know, this can be pretty emotionally taxing.
Then add on the choice problem. It's a well known psychological effect that too many choices can cause us feel bad about our choices. The classic example of this is with cereal in the grocery store. If you only have a few choices you pick one and think "I did the best I could" but if you have a hundred to choose from you'll think "maybe I could have done better" and doubt yourself even if you like the cereal. In relation to dating I think we end up judging a bit more than normal on first dates. I know I do. But first dates are often awkward and not a great indication of if you're a good match or not, unless there are major red flags.
I'll admit that I've had more success by being set up by friends. They know your personality, they know the other person's personality and if you will match. I think there's also a bit of pressure to go on a few dates and help get out of that awkward stage and really find out who the other person is.
But everyone has different takes. With scale one method might work well for some people and might not work for others. A wide array of tools is honestly the best because there never will be a singular solution for everyone. I think the major problem here is that were trying to turn all forms of dating into Tinder like and pretending like that's the only successful model.
I mentioned okcupid as an option that helps focus better into your expected compatible population. Others are noting it is changed from when I used it. The reason I liked it is that all my choices were far higher quality and my experiences helped me better understand my deeper nuances.
If you're looking for a relationship I would suggest avoiding the swiping apps. That fits my bias. I think that choosing a partner or partners in life is one of the most important and most salient things we do and should get commensurate attention. Further, none of the most important aspects of a person are present in their appearance, not to mention a mere image. I believe this is so even if there are echoes of them available and accepting that our presentations to the world are generated by the pattern that we manifest. It still seems to me that it is the pattern you are attempting to discover, evaluate compatibility with, and create relationship to. The point there being to create new configurations and patterns according to the value systems of participants and structures of reality. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to devise a swiping app to help with that.
Has he given up on scale? He's already got a news article and (many) thousands of eyeballs on him. Maybe the scale is in the publicity. Still, by no means easily reproducible by anyone else trying to do the same.
I completely agree. I was factoring in that his attempt is novel and noteworthy but doesn't generalize. I wouldn't expect copycats to achieve similar results.
I think this scales in quality vs. quantity and it might actually work better that it does for this guy when folks copy this approach. Dating apps clearly have more eyeballs, but the suggestions he receives through this are likely to have some context and social status.
Met my partner through okcupid (about 8 years ago I gather it's gotten a little worse since) - at the time it was leagues ahead of the other offerings though.
