Towards Better Online Dating

Post by law » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 12:07 AM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #7

The best data is just hard to collect online. Photos of person in their social group to deduce personality type would probably fail since there are so many variables. Lab scientists can measure biological or physical properties http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGfznq9OgdU&feature=playe... like sweat scent which reveals immune system compatibility. They're getting very good correlations for long term relationships from…

Post by usaar333 » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 12:12 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #2

I agree with everything the author said save this: > "Then only allow people to access others they are likely to match against." This only works if you are 100% confident that your matching algorithm is infallible. The odds of this being the case is about 0%. I've thought about this problem some, and I think there are a few unacknowledged issues: - Who you will get along with, and are a good match for, is often diffe…

Post by patio11 » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 12:16 AM UTC

MBlume wrote: post #14

patio11 wrote: post #8

It would be interesting to see an online dating site which treated users like mailing service providers do: "We really want you to succeed with this, but our priorities are to the ecosystem first and you a very distant second. You're guilty until proven innocent, we're going to invest a lot of effort into educating you in how to suck less, and if we catch a whiff of you being a nuisance you are banned for life." (It…

This, but combined with ookblah's comment -- you only really need to treat the men this way.

Post by amalcon » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 12:22 AM UTC

Joakal wrote: post #11

orangecat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you want to build a successful long-term dating site you HAVE to cater 90% towards the women Of course. Seems like one obvious way would be to limit the number of emails that men can send per day/week/whatever, so women don't get spammed quite so badly.

An obvious workaround: Multiple accounts can be created. It's that easy. Otherwise if you add hurdles, single account people would be put off from signing up.

  - Free accounts exist.  They have mostly full privileges.
  - A given user can only receive so many requests per period
    of time.  A given user can only receive one request per
    user for a given period.  Others are informed that they
    will be put on a waiting list.  The site could play games
    with the waiting list, like purging inactive accounts or
    increasing the priority of requests similar to ones the
    user has already responded to.
  - Paid accounts exist.  There is at least one incentive to
    pay:  you may skip a waiting list every so often.  The
    cost should be enough to reduce the incentive for account
    cloning and keep the spammers out, as it exists only for
    that purpose.

Post by seiji » Fri, Feb 11, 2011, 12:27 AM UTC

kscaldef wrote: post #22

Honestly, I think that meetup.com ends up being a better "dating site" than most sites that actually position themselves as such. As the article says, it's better to just focus on helping people find other people they might be friends with. From there, the relationships just sort of happen. Also, the social distance problem is largely taken care of because of the focus on group activities, and also because group orga…