The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#81

Post by thomas93 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

ajiang wrote: post #30

We believe that the $0.57 average revenue per user that Match Group reported in their Q2 2018 Investor Presentation is just a fraction of the user profile's real value. At the risk of taking the wrong thing away from this article...IAC is an undervalued stock?

Only if you assume that the market was not already aware of this and therefore has not already priced it in.

Companies are (at least theoretically) valued based on their future potential. Just because "real value" of user profiles may not currently be getting realized, does not mean that it isn't already incorporated into the value of the stock.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#82

Post by juhzy » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:22 AM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #62

nradov wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Body odor is probably mostly genetic. As human genome sequencing gets cheaper I expect someone will eventually start a dating service based on genetic matching. With a large enough training data set of successful long term relationships you could probably figure out combinations of genotypes that are likely to be compatible. (Or maybe it will end up being no more scientifically valid than horoscopes.)

This is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard and this generalized would most likely lead to the extinction of our species (or at least reinforce really bad racist stereotypes).

Reality is racist. Racism is natural. We've had to force ourselves not to be racist for a reason.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#83

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

rhegart wrote: post #74

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #69

I used to work for a German dating site called friendscout24 when it was still in it's early stages. we worked with a psychologist to help improve the quality of the match-making logic (now be2.com). I didn't really care too much about the product back then and was mostly trying to scale the backend which was my passion. Linux, Java lot of traffic and scaling issues everywhere in these pre-cloud days. The whole thing…

Wow...that’s so wrong. I was al2ays curious how they got women to sign up to such degrading websites when I see those ads. Now I know...

I always thought it was bots and scams.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#84

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #32

BadassFractal wrote: post #6

Speaking of LTV, the power users in online dating can easily be worth several hundred a month. Super swipes and super likes are about $1 each these days and in crowded dating markets you have to rely on them heavily if you're hoping to cut through the noise of everybody else's profiles. I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid money to have your profile be seen first in your city.…

Swipes are based on elo and attractiveness proximity. This is probably a much better user experience than uglies paying to boost their rank. If you see only attractive people then congratulations.

Tinder shows some pretties then some uglies, then back and forth. It should be very visible that successive swipes are groups.

Turns out that users stop noticing pretty if they only see pretty. Better highlight the contrast to keep users engaged.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#85

Post by yorwba » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

rhegart wrote: post #74

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #69

I used to work for a German dating site called friendscout24 when it was still in it's early stages. we worked with a psychologist to help improve the quality of the match-making logic (now be2.com). I didn't really care too much about the product back then and was mostly trying to scale the backend which was my passion. Linux, Java lot of traffic and scaling issues everywhere in these pre-cloud days. The whole thing…

Wow...that’s so wrong. I was al2ays curious how they got women to sign up to such degrading websites when I see those ads. Now I know...

They don't even need any women to sign up. A bunch of bots with profile pictures scraped from the web and a large enough catalog of vaguely seductive messages are enough. Want to reply? Sure, sign up for premium membership here.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#86

Post by Delfino » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:45 AM UTC

samat wrote: post #68

nradov wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the opposite? Race as most people conceive of it today is primarily a social construct with only a slight genetic basis.

Most people in your room? In reality you know race by persons face. Is face a social construct?

As some of "mixed race" these conversations always get weird. Defining a person's race seems mostly exclusionary in my experience. By that I mean, when I'm around a group of people who identify as one of my races, they think I look like a member of the other group (noticing the differences more prominently than the similarities) so either way I'm defined as an other. My family is pretty heterogenous and in a few generations I see it being hard to peg specific individuals as a particular race.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#87

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

BadassFractal wrote: post #37

jwagenet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the apparent profile quality seems better on Bumble, I get an order of magnitude fewer matches through that service. My bet is Tinder became the de facto dating app (and has taken on the generic name for dating apps), which brings the bots and the abuse. The bots will follow the community if it leaves Tinder.

This has been my experience as well. Although there's some sort of strange seasonality to it. I can go a couple of months with barely any matches on Bumble, followed by a few weeks of matching with everybody and their cousin. Can't tell if it's single people feeling bad for not bringing anybody back home for Christmas or simply Bumble messing around with their ELO rankings of users behind the scenes.

Bumble used to sort profiles by attractiveness and never remove inactive users. Their user base is too small and they have to get down to these tricks.

That's why you'd see so many great people and no match, they all left long ago. It's ghost town.

You probably get news matches when people sign up or come back, dating is very seasonal.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#88

Post by mattbierner » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

julienmarie wrote: post #50

ggm wrote: post #48

Back before we thought intelligent machines were going to be a thing, (we're talking 1970s here) I discussed online dating with my brother, who proposed writing a simple DB to match random men with random women. Neither of us had considered the possibility. I think we'd got to the idea that if they both liked tennis, it was plausible to rank them higher. He got pretty quickly to "its unethical, but simple" Now we hav…

I made that mistake when launching my first dating website By trying to be more efficient. Unfortunately, this market is not about dating, it's a dopamine delivery market. You want to keep people long, increase your LTV, show them an ever better possible "match" so you never settle. You don't want them to actually meet someone. Hence the crappy chat features ( while the rest of the tech stack is usually pretty solid…

Have any companies in the market been successful going the premium route? A service that costs a lot but is designed for the best user experience and outcomes? Maybe they interview potential members in person and work to ensure the “marketplace” has a good balance. Or maybe they take a more active role in the pairing. Starts sounding like a matchmaker.

For a dating service company not to be overly incentivized to keep users swiping forever, a membership model like with a country club could also work: a large upfront fee to join and then maybe a smaller reoccurring fee to maintain membership.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#89

Post by tpetry » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 10:26 AM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #53

BadassFractal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a big city a good looking woman will accumulate 5 or maybe 10 thousand right swipes within a few weeks. How is she ever to get to your profile without you doing something to bump yourself to the top of the queue? There's physically no time in the day for her to even swipe that far.

But shouldn’t there also be thousands women on the site? Are you saying there’s 1 woman with 10000 matches, and 9999 women with 0 matches? Or that there are 10000 women, with 10000 matches each? Wouldn’t it make sense for the dating site to optimize it so that the women with the least matches get to the top of the queue, so you have a better chance of a mutual match?

All women habe thousands of matches. But there are many more guys than women. So if a woman would have in average a thousand likes in a week a guy would have 100 (1:10 population). But while women have many more likes they can be much more selective, so these 100 guys with likes will be the most attractive ones.

Showing people with less likes would make it more fair, that is right. But the effect will be that a woman will see more „less attractive“ guys and will stop using the app. And women are the users all dating apos have to keep because of the large gender inbalance on dating apps.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#90

Post by watwut » Wed, Dec 19, 2018, 10:50 AM UTC

cies wrote: post #78

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, race has no taxonomic significance when applied to modern humans, because all modern humans are the same species . The system for grouping people together by facial features seems to be a social construct most of the time. I can think of a partial exception to this rule: facial features which can be linked to diseases and injuries (for example, the tell-tale evidence of stroke make it possible t…

I feel that the new "PC" word for race is ethnicity. As I understand it serves pretty much the same purpose.

Ethnicity is defined primary through shared history and social grouping. Race is defined through genetics. They share some of the same, but are not the same.