The Future of Online Dating Is Unsexy and Brutally Effective

Post by bambax » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 6:37 AM UTC

rndmize wrote: post #23

bambax wrote: post #9

> Already, some apps do this by learning patterns in who we left and right swipe on, the same way Netflix makes recommendations from the movies we’ve liked in the past. Netflix recommendations are utterly bad. Musk et al. warn us constantly about "AI" and its dangers, but so far AI doesn't seem to work very well. Translating from Italian to English with Google Translate results in complete gibberish; Amazon (the othe…

I'll be honest - I think that Amazon's recommendation engine is deliberately bad. There was an article a few years back on Target and their efforts to track/manipulate customers: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... . It's fairly long, so I'll quote a few parts: > One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, liv…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 8:51 AM UTC

irremediable wrote: post #52

Mz wrote: post #41

One of the problems with this idea is that it kind of paints you into a corner. It doesn't allow you to aspire to be the person you desire to be. It predicts that who you are is static and then it helps make that a reality. During my divorce, I intentionally sought to not allow past relationship data to influence whom I hooked up with.* I had been with four people. Three of them were blonde. Three of them were born w…

Very, very well said. This kind of thing risks turning dating into the filter bubble we see in online news -- but worse, because it's a more important part of life. It also ignores how attraction works. Sure, someone may find blond people attractive, but it's seldom a deal-breaker. These algorithms tend to select on characteristics that are easy to assess, discarding many potential partners who'd be more suitable in…

Post by ksikka » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #37

ksikka wrote: post #10

Dating apps/sites that employ the strategy of "get as much data as possible and match intelligently" have failed to compete for users against Tinder, the dumbest, simplest dating app that hardly does any intelligent matching at all. This implies that it's not the sophistication of a dating app that matters, it's the simplicity and ability to attract a userbase that in turn attracts a larger userbase etc in a virtuous…

Tinder is doing a lot more intelligent matching than you think. The CTO of OKCupid (which is owned by the same parent company) was on a podcast a few weeks ago where he briefly discussed some of the algorithmic challenges of Tinder. They include: - it may not seem like it, but Tinder does try to pick people it thinks are most likely to produce a match, based on-- to be brutally honest-- your attractiveness (as determ…

Post by MrMember » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

moogly wrote: post #46

Yetanfou wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be long before "No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no G+, no nothing" will translate to " a catch " in dating app terms: someone with whom to share life as we know it, not as we want others to think we live it. Then again, maybe I'm overestimating the intelligence (or integrity) of dating app purveyors. After all, 'real' people are so hard to monetise...

I fear such a person (I am one of them) would more likely be tagged as a serial killer than a catch.

Post by j45 » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 6:31 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #38

j45 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is a successful form of social media that centered around communication and enriched our physical lives. It's nice to hear others have also held onto the friendships from that time. When I hear people excited about slack, I see it as the modern day irc client, also focused around communication. ICQ/AIM took a big chunk out of irc, but it still didn't allow people to connect in channels. Now we have networks where…

Not only held on to them but still making new ones, I hang around in an offtopic channel for a framework I don't even use any more because I made friends with a bunch of the people in there, hell I'd say half the channel doesn't use that framework anymore but a lot of us are solo devs in companies that aren't software companies so it's become our de facto water cooler.