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Never pay for online dating (2010)

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Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#351

Post by btbuildem »

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…

It IS exploitative, by design. If you don't have the paid service, they'll never show the people who liked you in your normal stack. But once you pay, they've identified you as willing to pay, so the incentives are at extreme odds (any time you get a match, it's a risk for Tinder that you won't pay again)

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#352

Post by bongoman37 »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #183
kikokikokiko wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"presenting some silly fun data analysis as "science"" Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on, but yeah, it was just a silly fun data analysis.

> Their silly data analysis had a sample that was probably orders of magnitude larger than any cohort an university paper could dream of getting their hands on and yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. A big set of data still churns out bad results. Most of their blog posts did not show the data, how they normalised it, percentage of each group. They just run regression on it and anything wit…

No post body was provided.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#353

Post by btbuildem »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #348

If someone reproduced what OKCupid was before the Match acquisition, that would disrupt the dating app market. Dating apps as a whole have been a race to the bottom thanks to Match.

I think onboarding users is the biggest problems. How does one approach that?

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#354

Post by acuozzo »

535188B17C93743 wrote: post #78
EmilyHughes wrote: post #62

I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting? All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where the mental health problems and mass shootings come from. I really don'…

Seems like a waste of tax-payer money to me. Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.

> Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.

Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect to ignore them.

They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much more filled with fish than it truly is.

And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective date(s).

Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket from seemingly-flawless suitors?

Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then they likely know what's available from friends, relatives, etc.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#355

Post by btbuildem »

crazygringo wrote: post #193
londons_explore wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is worse than that... The app/site developers interests are directly opposing the users interests. The user (perhaps) wants to find a lifelong partner, and never use dating apps again. The site developer wants users to never find a lifelong partner, and to spend months/years returning to the app to find new candidates. In my experience, the developer usually wins - some users on dating sites have been the…

This isn't really the case though. If an app isn't getting you decent dates every so often, you'll move to an app that does. And it's pretty clear within a couple of months if an app is working for you or not. And then once you're in a relationship, the app has zero control over whether it succeeds or not! So no, dating apps aren't working against your romantic interests, simply because a) there's too much competitio…

Most of the apps are owned by Match.com, and they've slowly migrated to the same mechanism, the only difference is the demographics they cater to.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#356

Post by vintermann »

mpweiher wrote: post #210
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…

They're not surveys, and that's exactly the point. Surveys reveal how people claim to behave, which may nor not be how they actually think they behave, which may or may not be how they actually behave. If they were surveys, your criticism would be valid. Instead, this was about how people actually behave, so neither fooling themselves nor others.

Well, people at Okcupid. Back then. We don't know how well it generalizes.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#357

Post by btbuildem »

teeray wrote: post #302
skizm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you find the love of your life you move from user to free marketing. People constantly talk about how they met, early dates, etc. New users always enter the dating market, either by just younger people getting older or breakups, divorce, erc. So it seems like it wouldn't be in the best long term interest to keep users in the dopamine loop.

Sounds good in theory, but consider two dating apps: one with hockey stick user growth and high retention, and another with stagnant growth but high user churn. Which one would get the VC dollars? The story you tell would present itself in metrics as the latter app (high churn).

This here is the crux of the problem: approaching everything with the "would someone think of the VCs" mindset.

Can we for once build something good and useful, and leave the greedy gamblers out of it?

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#358

Post by rafaelero »

houstonn wrote: post #28
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…

More Orwellian still, they edited articles that contained data inconvenient to the politically correct narrative and elite ideology. Edit: Here's an example. “I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/h…

Cool data. Isn't there something more up to date?

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#359

Post by coupdejarnac »

btbuildem wrote: post #353
coupdejarnac wrote: post #348

If someone reproduced what OKCupid was before the Match acquisition, that would disrupt the dating app market. Dating apps as a whole have been a race to the bottom thanks to Match.

I think onboarding users is the biggest problems. How does one approach that?

If I could have come up with a cheap solution, I would have done it already.

It would probably be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian her $250k featured post fee to get a bunch of women to join. Something along those lines.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#360

Post by coupdejarnac »

codethief wrote: post #170
chatterhead wrote: post #145

OkCupid was awesome. Can someone please make another one? We need a site dedicated to Test Taking! OkCupid wasn't just about dating; it was about the tests you could create and take. It was awesome. The dating was also based on tests and archetypes OkCupid created and they were pretty good. We need something pure like that from the early 2000s.

Could you elaborate on what OkCupid was like in the early 2000s? I've only known it for a few years.

In my experience, Okcupid's match percentage was a very good estimate for how good of a match you were with someone. So there was that.

Plus, the whole OKCupid experience wasn't a game of deception to trick you into buying subscriptions or IAP.

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