Never pay for online dating (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#411

Post by rngname22 » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:44 PM UTC

skyyler wrote: post #182

auveair wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bisexual thing was pretty stupid and pretty revealing how much this blog post was bullshit, there was a bunch of reason why you would pick one gender as a bisexual, especially if online dating was just to meet more of the gender you wanted. But a bi dude, in 2010 you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi and plenty of gay dude would turn you down as well, so you just wouldn't bother and write gay o…

>But a bi dude, in 2010 (and still today) you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi This is simply not true. Maybe I'm just hot enough to overcome the queer disgust? I don't feel like I'm that hot.

"Results indicated that heterosexual women rated bisexual men as less sexually and romantically attractive, less desirable to date and have sex with, and less masculine compared to straight men. No such differences were found for heterosexual and gay men’s ratings of female and male profiles, respectively. These results support previous research findings that indicate more negative attitudes toward dating bisexual men than bisexual women." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15299716.2018.15...

"63% of women, however, say they wouldn't date a man who has had sex with another man" https://www.glamour.com/story/glamour-sexuality-survey

If you do some casual searches you can find qualitative and quantitative data supporting the idea that unfortunately for bisexual men, male-attracted women are not into them and you're incentivized to hide or downplay it if you want to appeal to the broadest group (though I'd argue you may as well focus on those that can accept male bisexuality if you're successful enough at dating).

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#412

Post by bjustin » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #309

carabiner wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Match has turned all of its apps into tinder. That is, gambling-like "one more swipe" photo centric dating apps, where the artificial restriction of choice keeps every person starved. Tinder is casual hookups, okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships, Hinge is politically moderate tinder for traditionalists, and so on. Each is a different marketing segment, but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet wome…

I would not say Hinge artificially restricts choice. You are limited in how many “likes” you can send each day, but it’s a different model where each like is actually a notification/puts you in someone’s “inbox”, so letting everybody like too much would make it too spammy to work. That model is also quite good because you don’t need to pay for women to notice you. Those 10 people you like will notice you anyway, unli…

I also found Hinge to have a much higher hit rate of conversations-per-profile-seen, and dates, than the other apps.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#413

Post by pmyteh » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #403

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> nd yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased? Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you make the leap that people looking for dates via a matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable of people looking for dates?

The sample size is, honestly, mostly irrelevant for these 'headline' type analyses. A good sample of a few hundred will get you a strong estimate, while a biased sample of a few million will get you a bad one.

The classic illustration is the Literary Digest poll of the 1936 Presidential Election. They got over two million respondents and confidently predicted a heavy Roosevelt loss. George Gallup got a comparatively tiny but well sampled set of respondents and correctly estimated the Roosevelt victory. The magazine's problem was partly sampling bias (their readers were richer than the average American, amongst other things) and partly non-response bias (they got a return rate of ~25%, which is pretty good, but probably disproportionately from the most politically engaged of their readership, who hated Roosevelt).

I don't know how bad the sample is here for extrapolating to 'all those seeking dates', but the size is a distraction - the sampling is all.

(This isn't necessarily true if you're making individual profiles, searching for rare phenomena, or something else which is more in the 'big data' than 'social statistics' space, and which genuinely needs that much training data. It's also not true if you're studying the site members themselves, for whom the site members are a perfect (non-) sample. The latter is true for the in-house data science team themselves, but we shouldn't just assume their experience will extend to the rest of the world).

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#414

Post by lake_vincent » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:50 PM UTC

actionablefiber wrote: post #315

lake_vincent wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, in a way yes. For example, super easy to delete your account. No dark patterns or hoops to jump through. Also, the profiles themselves are pretty minimal - they are like ads, and are practically disposable as such. Once I got what I came for, I just threw it out.

> Also, the profiles themselves are pretty minimal - they are like ads, and are practically disposable as such. That sounds pretty counterproductive to me? I feel like many people on Tinder already volunteer way too little information about themselves in their bios. I guess maybe that's OK if you're just swiping based on the person's pics but that seems like a bad strat for finding a partner.

It's definitely a bad strat for finding love, but not bad for finding company lol.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#415

Post by flutas » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

no_time wrote: post #344

somedude895 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was on Tinder I'd delete my profile and make a new one once every three months or so, seemed to do the trick.

I'm very suprised they are not using face tracking and/or device fingerprinting to thwart this.

It's all speculation, but they _seem_ to track a large amount of data to try and check for "new profiles" that are old users starting a new account, supposedly for 3 months after you delete your account. These are the ones I've seen commonly talked about.

- Phone Number

- IP

- Device IDs

- Email

- Photo hashes

- Photo exif

- Facial recognition

- Linked Facebook, Instagram, Spotify accounts

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#416

Post by lmm » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #74

houstonn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

If the problem was that the results were inaccurate, there would be no need to suppress what the post originally said. Incomplete data is a fixable problem. No, the blog was a gaffe in the Kinsley sense: they accidentally said the truth.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#417

Post by lelanthran » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #263

mpweiher wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups? What if you're bi, but not that open about it so you mostly take the chance on the opposite sex on a public dating platform? There must be so many other factors like these that at least should invalidate any broad claim by a company only seeing a small p…

> What if you're bi, but for a long term partner through match.com you're mostly interested in the opposite sex, vs your behavior other places for more casual hookups?

Then why on earth would you put down "bi" in the profile?

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#418

Post by lmm » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #168

kikokikokiko wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far from your Burger King straw men, there's even a very famous study, out of the UK if I'm not mistaken, that confirmed the thesis of black women being the least attractive group across the whole spectrum of major ethnic groups. I mean, there must be one group, out of all, that would score lower than the others ain't there? Reality doesn't have to be politically correct at the end of the day.

Source or it wont be discussed. But aside from that, and the inherent assumption that beauty standards are universal and biological which is a pretty big assumption. A slight societal preference does not lead to the conclusions people drew from the article. To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a socie…

> To give an example, taller men have a higher chance of being promoted. Fortune 500 CEOs are disproportionately tall compared to the general population. As a society we still promote meritocracy, and working hard. Not telling people who are 5'4 to just give up and be unemployed cause they will never be the CEO of Ford Motor company.

Now you're moving the goalposts, which shows you knew your original claim was wrong. "It didn't happen, and if it did they deserved it" indeed.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#419

Post by ephbit » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

nemo1618 wrote: post #140

barbariangrunge wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :(

Just because the enduser doesn't see the data anymore, doesn't mean the company doesn't have/use them anymore.

Re: Never pay for online dating (2010)

#420

Post by lelanthran » Tue, Oct 11, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #409

lelanthran wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nd yet their sample was incredibly biased despite it being large. I gotta ask, in case what way is the sample of a few millions of people who want to date 'incredibly' biased? Slightly biased I might buy, but how on earth can you make the leap that people looking for dates via a matchmaking site is not at least slightly representable of people looking for dates?

Online dating already mostly skews towards collage age. Secondly apps like OkCupid with long forms will self select the users who are not willing to disclose that information, don't wanna spend the time, or won't engage seriously with the form. So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.

> So you will have mostly a group of 20 year olds, who are willing to answer a lot of questions. It doesn't matter how big the pot is, thats not a random sample of society.

Is that all? That doesn't make it "incredibly" biased.

I mean, looking at your example of "black women being the least desirable on OkCupid", it's easy enough to check if it applies only to 20 year olds who are willing to answer lots of questions or if that correlation actually exists outside of that group[1].

Your way, of simply dismissing it instead of regarding it as a data point that can be further investigated is the opposite of science.

[1] OkCupid certainly had the data, and on one of the blogs I recall seeing their distribution of ages, and it was not dominated by the 20-30 age group, even if they were a majority. It would have been easy for OkCupid to redo that desirability analysis for particular age groups.