What really happens inside a dating app

It does imply a potentially interesting algorithm though:

Show all of the women to all of the men. From this you get numbers on which women are the most highly rated. Then, show women a) men who are at the same percentile as them or below and b) the smaller number of men who have already liked them.

The result is that 60th percentile women end up primarily liking 60th percentile men and so on, because they're the highest rated men they're typically shown, and they're going to pick the top 5% of whatever distribution you show them.

Then you end up with good matches, instead of having all the women match only with the 95th percentile players who don't want a serious relationship.

It tracks, actually. Men tend to pick a sexual orientation and be disgusted by the other sexual orientation[0]. Women are a lot more hetero- (and homo-) flexible.

[0] It works both ways! A guy once told me and my wife that we made a cute couple despite how disgusting heterosexuality really was. And I was like... okay, thanks?

Equal parts fascinating and dystopian.

I'm even more convinced now that online dating has reached a local optima, but eventually someone is going to find a solution that is less shallow and predatory and blow it out of the water.

That's similar to getting votes on HN, it's mostly about appearing near the top of the comments, and that has mostly to so with getting in relatively early.

You also need to be reasonably good at commenting (ie, don't be ugly).

> You would need to be a pro at user interviews to really get interesting feedback. (Well maybe this is the norm in B2C but at the end of the day user interviews were of no help).

This shouldn’t be surprising. Interviewing humans is a skill. Doing so in a product context, and learning useful things from it, is not easy.

I hope they don’t approach other things this way. “You’d need to be a professional plumber to stop water leaking out of this. Maybe that’s the norm but at the end of the day plumbing was no help.”