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Never pay for online dating (2010)

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Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#131

Post by welshwelsh »

romankolpak wrote: post #82

Related personal anecdote: I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes. Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of t…

Honestly, I am ok with this system. Paying a couple dollars for a matchmaking service isn't a big deal. If you go to bars instead you will pay way more. An introduction to a potential partner is worth at least $50 in my opinion, if anything Tinder is too cheap.

There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you filter out the free users and only match guys who pay for boost with girls, it's a much better ratio for those guys and a better experience for the women since guys who buy boost are more invested and more likely to follow through.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#132

Post by rglullis »

rdtwo wrote: post #100
rglullis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinder and OkCupid are not in the "I want to find a partner for life" demographic, they are in the "we give you a constant stream of hookup connections" business.

Isn’t it the same company now

You know how the big car companies have different brands (VW and Porsche, Ford and Jaguar, Toyota and Lexus), each for a specific market segment?

Same thing.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#133

Post by Bakary »

globular-toast wrote: post #99
Bakary wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK from past discussions on here, the Hinge model is to make it harder with people with a low Elo on the app, and to provide them with more fine-grained options to pay to boost their chances ("roses" etc.) If you have a higher than average Elo, it will seem like having a free lunch. But that's because it's fueled by someone else's desperation at being caught in low Elo feedback loop early. You then have high Elos…

How do they make it harder for people with low Elo? Surely it being harder for low Elos is the natural way of things? They are just cashing in on the fact that low Elos (which are disproportionately male, of course) will get desperate and more likely to try the "premium" options.

Attractive people will have options, so the app has to show them other attractive people to retain them. That's why there is a containment system where if your Elo drops low enough you get shown other low-Elo accounts. You also need attractive people to retain the low-Elo accounts (Elo being a relative measure to the userbase, by definition) so you can seed them with attractive people once in a while but generally keep them confronted to low-Elos. Ideally, you want to create an impression of potential at first, which will get the user to spend in the face of loss aversion as the Elo bucketing sets in.

That said, this is not the only thing happening, and the platform apparently also does the opposite, or does batches (exclusively low-Elo followed by exclusively high-Elo for a while). At the end of the day, it's an ML blackbox.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#134

Post by mensetmanusman »

Carrok wrote: post #113
Cloudef wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> meet people in real life like you are meant to be Keep this gatekeeping nonsense to yourself. I met my wife of many years on a dating app. We probably never would have met by chance.

Realizing there is survivorship bias might help people appreciate the complexities this topic.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#135

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

afpx wrote: post #120
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies. Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey. They also…

Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment? I enjoy reading these types of articles, and in my next project, I was planning to do something similar.

> Would it be ok if they warned that it's just for entertainment?

I mean they were always ok, but the problem is presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science".

If you counted how many people have red hats in your way to work and publish it as a blog it can be fun. If suddenly far right groups start making posts about how your red hat stats correlate with immigration and theft statistics then your post is not the problem, but there is a problem.

same with the OkCupid blog. I have 0 issue with their work (albeit they could show their work cause a lot looked incredibly amateurish), but the talking points that came from it are still being repeatedly wrongly 10 years later and did real damage.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#136

Post by bradlys »

Relatedly: Has there been any new dating apps that haven't been acquired by Match and are trending upwards? I feel like just as Hinge was getting popular and people were talking of its success - it fell off hard due to acquisition by Match in the following couple years.

It seems like you have to always go to a newer app to find success before Match ruins it.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#137

Post by rglullis »

consp wrote: post #83
rglullis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinder and OkCupid are not in the "I want to find a partner for life" demographic, they are in the "we give you a constant stream of hookup connections" business.

Surprisingly I thought the same though there is more than one person I know who is married to his Tinder date. Somehow it works out apperantly (this is still anecdotal).

Don't tell anyone, I also met my wife on Tinder. But we are the exception, not the rule.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#139

Post by drewcoo »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #20
teeray wrote: post #9

You, as a user of a dating app, are forever in a Nash Equilibrium with the dating app. When you find the love of your life, you delete the app forever. Therefore, everything the app does to help you find that person works directly against their own goals (user growth, “engagement”. subscriptions).

I wonder if there is an alternative business model which would put users and the business on the same side. Could you put a lien against someone's marriage, such that in order to marry someone you meet on HappyDating.com you had to pay the outstanding debt? Anything less extreme?

Additional "relationship management" services? Anniversary reminders/suggestions to counseling to help on any possible angle of being a couple. Probably also access to lawyers (possibly paired with more dating).

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#140

Post by nemo1618 »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #76
jefftk wrote: post #12

OkCupid was bought by Match Group (who run almost all online dating sites, including Match, eHarmony, and Tinder) in 2011 and took down this post not long after. EDIT: the purchase was Feb 2011 [1] and the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4]. [1] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-Bu... [2] https://web.archive.org/we…

Can’t wait to see all our old private messages get leaked by some hack of the parent organization now too. Or for it all to just get sold to advertisers

I wish! After I met my (now-)wife on OkCupid, we deactivated our accounts so that we'd stop getting notifications. A few months later we wanted to revisit our first messages to each other -- only to find that OkC had already deleted them. I was pretty shocked at how eager they were to discard a few KB of potentially priceless ASCII. :(
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