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The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

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Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#101
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people. Same thing > A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct. And also perhaps because they actually are from the same race? Do you consider all the current inhabitants of the USA to be native americans?…

All Africans are black and all Europeans are white? That's a new one. As for medicine, while the efficacy of drugs can be ethnicity dependent, race is such a weak proxy for it that it often leads to mistakes when doctors operate by habit. Nothing trumps actual genetic screening (as opposed to "which Anglo-centric category do you fit best based on how you look").

> All Africans are black and all Europeans are white? That's a new one.

In terms of race, yes. But of course, in terms of citizenship, no. You have white south africans and black europeans obviously. But obviously white south africans hail originally from europe and black europeans hail originally from africa.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#102

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…

All dog breeds are part of the same species, and dog breeds are fundamentally a social construct. Does this mean that we need to stop categorizing dogs into breeds? I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to t…

> and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.

No, you can't. You can get bullshit geneology which you shouldn't take seriously.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21687013

> But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".

> The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.

> They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/04/home-dna-kit-f...

>Ancestry’s DNA expert Mike Mulligan (93% Irish – everyone’s email at Ancestry gives their ethnicity breakdown) admits that the ethnicity percentage is a “top line” estimate derived from just a very small part of our DNA, a couple of letters long in the 3bn letters that make up our DNA, and that there are a lot of “inferences” made from the data. Precision is still a problem for DNA kits. Mulligan says that the Irish, Scots and Welsh are “almost indistinguishable from a DNA point of view”. Meanwhile, when it comes to western Europe “it is the most traipsed-about part of the planet The amount of DNA that has been blurred together is incredible”. Remarkably, DNA testers can’t really tell the difference between German and French DNA.

https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-herit...

> I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.

etc etc.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#103

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…

All dog breeds are part of the same species, and dog breeds are fundamentally a social construct. Does this mean that we need to stop categorizing dogs into breeds? I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to t…

I agree in the real world, I can send a swab of spit to 23andme and get a guess as to where my ancestors were. I could also send a swab of spit to ancestry.com and get a completely different guess. These services are not precise, and even if they were, race and ancestry are not tightly coupled. Race is phenotypes, color of skin, shape of nose. Gene expression is a crapshoot, with the number of genotypes often dwarfing the number of phenotypes, racial features can skip generations or disappear entirely. My grandfather had white skin, a sharp nose, yet none of these features were passed on to me. Ancestry (genetics) and race (gene expression) are not tightly coupled.

I do think that ancestry can provide valuable insights into one's self, however I'm still not sold on the necessity or reality of race. Ancestry is not written on a person's face.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#104

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…

>The messages women saw when visiting burda.de would be something like "looking for Mr Perfect?" or some other drivel that only fashion magazine readers would be gullible enough to respond. The women would click on it and sign up in an iframe of the original (girly) site (and not have a clue that this was c-date). And men would be targeted with a more honest and different message (on xhamster, redtube, youporn ... you name it) which read: "looking for horny sluts in your area that just want to get f!cked - click here ". Absolutely fucking degrading.

If it's stupid and it works...

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit. Online you get to le…

Bars/clubs are optimized for making people go home with a hole for their peg or peg to fill their hole. There's a lot of bad matches but if you test drive enough pegs/holes eventually you find one that belongs to someone you are compatible with.

It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it.

If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>dating is very seasonal.

So what are the best seasons for it? I'm guessing December, though my recent experience has been somewhat the opposite.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#107
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.

Bumble has a lot of professionals and will actually want to meet within a few messages back and forth. Tinder is a lot of people that "hate drama", ie they crave it. I have met quite a few very pleasant people but we just mutually realized "not for me" after a date or two. We wished each other luck and parted ways. In the case of bumble in my experience there is an emotional maturity and interesting people. But appar…

That gives me a great idea for a profitable new business: a website where you upload some photos of yourself, and it photoshops them onto a background of Machu Picchu so it looks like you went there for vacation, and can use this on dating apps.

I agree, it does seem ridiculous: here in the DC area, it does seem that every single professional woman over 30 has such a photo.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I met my wife when she asked me how to get out of vi. She was a new PhD student, and I was the departmental sysadmin. To be fair to her, she knew vi just fine, but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC, where ESC was mapped to F11.

Best comment.

> but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC

One of these things? https://deskthority.net/wiki/File:LK201AA_top.jpg

I'd have trouble getting out of vi with that too.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well. There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes…

Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.

Stop using marketing jargon to describe your love+sex life, you'll start soon believing it.

Re: The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love

#110

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.…

I met all my girlfriends including my wife in nightclubs. I didn't even like nightclubs but wanted to meet women. This probably sounds as quaint as arranged marriages nowadays.

I tried online dating a lot but in comparison meeting women in reality works soo much better despite not being the most social person/nervous. But probably that's also because I'm not mega good looking, thus I guess it's far more difficult to match through random photos/a profile giving just a small glimpse of a person.
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