This is very similar to an except in Derek Sivers book on cdbaby.com. (CD Baby let independent artists sell their music CDs on the site long before iTunes). In it, he writes:
At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if
every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd
be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?"
I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians.
If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut
it down and get back to making music."
He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about
the survival of his company.
To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers
more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good
service? *It's all about them, not you.*
The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine.
Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team).
Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.
I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I heard it, but I've heard it roughly summarized as: Companies are founded by people who are loyal to a vision, but tend to promote people who are loyal to the company. Eventually the people who are loyal to the company have all of the power. The people loyal to the vision are only left in the lower ranks, if at all.
At least people who are loyal to the company care about the long term viability of the company. I think Cook, Nadella and Jassy (my skip*7 manager) care about the company. I don’t know what the hell Pichai cares about.
Google has the focus and the vision of a crack addled flea.
Google was organized such that the founder didn't have to do much, but that also means that the CEO doesn't have much power to run things so Pichai would need to rebuild the whole company to start to change how things are run.
This is the reason why Google can launch so many products, but also why they can cancel so many products: there is no person holding the reins and instead middle managers just go off and do their own thing. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all have a clear power center created by the founders, Google doesn't have that which is why they are so much more unpredictable.
It seems like the best model of Sundar Pichai's behavior is someone who myopically cares about his own career. He puts most of his effort into looking smart and avoiding offending people.
Honestly, Ruth Porat seems to run most of the impactful decisions at the C-level, and that's a good thing.
The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.
Right. Well I think that’s one of the reasons Musk doesn’t take Spacex public. The why he operates under is very much not palatable for any reasonable shareholder. Shareholders would want to scale out space deployments of practical things (satellites) and focus on that. If they knew Musk’s why, which is to get to Mars, well … well I mean that’s just crazy. What board is going to go for that?
Out of sight? He talks about it publicly and constantly (at lease he used to. Before Tesla and then Twitter started occupying more of his attention).
Shareholders can be told that they are aiming at Mars, full stop. As long as they don't control the voting and were told that before they bought the shares, it's fine.
I don’t disagree with what you’re trying to say, but keep in mind that SpaceX still has shareholders, and a board. It’s a much more limited and vetted set of investors, but very much not a closely-held corporation or anything like it.
> a private owned company can care about it. Even successors.
In theory, but rarely in practice. I've seen a lot of private, family-owned businesses go out of business or get sold after the son/successor takes over because of exactly the phenomenon jesuscript mentions. Even if the successor cares, they don't care about the same things as the founder.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Jobs would have said well then we just shut down Apple if there is not a need for us anymore. From what I have read he was a business man first. He also very clearly had a very good sense of product quality and was good enough technically to understand not only what was possible, but what was going to be possible in 5 years. But that he was all about the users needs and not himself is not something I think the facts bear out.
Seems like everyone was treating the non-founder Jobs as being typical of a founder to me. If he had stayed at Apple instead of going off to do Next he would have been more typical and probably have still been bad at quality and focused on slimy sales tricks.
He's really more an example of someone who was forced to correct some pretty massive defects and lack of vision in important areas where most lottery winning founding CEOs will never get corrections.
I would be kind of curious but I found it very funny if he wasn't a black mark against Next hardware back then given that workstation users were already going to see consumer as cheap even if he didn't have a reputation for cheapening his line further.
Really I think his behavior was much more inline with Cook than his earlier self once he was successful and founder envy was more an external benefit than related to some actual behavior he had.
> The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not.
A good follow up question is why not make CD Baby a non-profit instead of for-profit? Being a non-profit foundation would telegraph to everyone, including future leadership, where their priorities should lie.
A non-profit is largely motivated to stay alive, just like a for-profit, but mainly does it by asking for money from rich people rather than selling things.
Also, the extra accounting and regulation is intense for a small organization.
Much of the wealth a non-profit generates can get lost on large salaries and expense accounts. A charity might have more rules and send a stronger signal.
But having said that the creator could make tons of money and then shut it down because it is not needed. That's perfectly logical
It helps that CDBaby was handling a lot of stuff that musicians didn't want to do themselves. They were happy to outsource it. If the alternative were easy, people would already have done it.
That wasn't what CDBaby lost to. They lost to the fact that CDs disappeared. CDBaby had a great business, removing a pain point, and they could genuinely want that pain point to go away entirely.
Such are the best possible businesses, genuinely caring about your customers while having enough moat to avoid being undercut tomorrow. Not all businesses can do that, regardless of the best intentions of management.
This isn't intended to reflect on any particular business owner. But I have yet to hear any business owner announce "We are totally motivated by greed, and will screw over our customers and partners to make money". Elizabeth Holmes said a lot of touchy-feely stuff. So I wouldn't put much weight in what any business owner says about their motivation.
Lots of business owners end up treating their businesses as their kids in the sense that they see them as extensions of themselves primarily, rather than their own thing. This, of course, is deeply narcissistic and hurts everyone in the vicinity.
> What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website?
Can anyone imagine the hell that would be "every musician setting up their own website?" Centralization offers a lot of benefits to the users. I can buy CDs of multiple artists at the same time. I can find similar artists (there's a natural competition here). None of this one password per artist. There's a reduced security risk for me buying from a centralized service (just need to trust one site instead of hundreds, and specifically small artists that might not know things). I definitely would not have answered that question so well.
> Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good service? It's all about them, not you.
If you good-service yourself into being unprofitable and eventually bankrupt, it's not good for yourself and eventually your customers as well.
If it were possible for a dating site to consistently make great matches, they wouldn't bother taint their results. Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine, even if you're continually having to find new customers, since that's how dating sites currently function.
I interned at a dating site a while ago and there's no need to taint anything. People are far too complicated to predict beyond who will send a message to who. Also, the problem is adversarial (IE, people misrepresent themselves as the person they want to be as opposed to the person they are), so trying to find the signal is a continuous game of cat and mouse.
> Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine
Not if you already have almost the whole market to yourself.
> Match Group ... owns and operates the largest global portfolio of popular online dating services including Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, UPWARD, Ship, and OurTime, totalling over 45 global dating companies
Intuitively, the largest dating app has a moat because people will open the app that has the people they want to date. Nevertheless, Match has had to continue acquiring competitors in order to stay in first place. So maybe that moat isn't so defensible?
Dating apps seem more prone to the “eternal September” effect than other forms of social media. In practice, this looks like less quality messages being sent, more fake/catfish users, and monetization where it didn’t exist previously.
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful." - Steve Jobs
Most of those companies were acquisitions for the match group, so basically build a great dating site and match group will pay you a barrel of money to buy your money printing machine.
Exactly, the factors that really matter for a relationship to work (empathy, emotional availability, tolerance, will to change, etc.) are not presentable in a profile. You cannot make "great matches" without that information, even putting aside the fact that people lie.
The dating apps actually work better for hookups (including people travelling), and the companies know this, which is why Tinder had those ads promoting "single life".
Results are tainted by default. The simplest dating app is a random number generator attached to a list of user IDs. This probably performs badly. (But who knows? Maybe build it and see what happens!)
The question is simply whether there is really a deliberate, focused effort to identify who gets into long-term relationships and to replicate the conditions that lead to such relationships. If dating sites were actually trying to help their customers, they would do this; someone would have worked on it; there would be an internal lore about what was learned from these attempts. The absence of any of this shows that it just isn't a priority, and that's enough.
>Dominating the dating site market is a money printing machine
One problem with modern dating is that people don't have a potential partner's reputation to go on as much as they used to. Relationships formed "through friends" have declined significantly, in tandem with a decline in friendships themselves. But this decline in friendships also poses a problem for any word-of-mouth dating site marketing strategy. People who have lots of friends are probably the least likely to benefit from dating apps, but they're the most likely to hear about the hypothetical "good dating app".
I don't actually know how most of my friends met their partners — even people who I know many other things about. It's in my mind as an awkward question. Furthermore, most long-term relationships in my friend group are older than most dating apps. It would inevitably take years to build a reputation as a dating site that does this, because you don't know if you have a stable relationship until it stands the test of time. But investors generally aren't so patient.
>If dating sites were actually trying to help their customers, they would do this; someone would have worked on it; there would be an internal lore about what was learned from these attempts. The absence of any of this shows that it just isn't a priority, and that's enough.
Or maybe the absence of it shows that the problem is much harder than it sounds.
> One problem with modern dating is that people don't have a potential partner's reputation to go on as much as they used to. Relationships formed "through friends" have declined significantly, in tandem with a decline in friendships themselves. But this decline in friendships also poses a problem for any word-of-mouth dating site marketing strategy. People who have lots of friends are probably the least likely to benefit from dating apps, but they're the most likely to hear about the hypothetical "good dating app".
This is correct, but good luck implementing this in a business while having to tip toe around claims of discrimination, quite possibly getting entangled with the law.
That's not necessarily the right question to ask. Only a subset of customers are trying to get into long-term relationships. Other customers have different goals. Some don't even want human contact through the dating apps at all: they just want validation as represented by matches.
The majority of people who sign up will quit after a month or two anyway (or forget about it and keep subscribing). It doesn't seem like the quality of the matches being bad would affect income in any substantial way. And even if two people pair up, they might sign up again when their relationship hits the rocks. Emotional cheating is a thing.
It’s not possible for them to make great matches in any significant quantity, because our society has become incapable of making good long term matches at all due to changes in morals, expectations, etc. And many individuals, probably a clear majority at this point, are not capable of being psychologically healthy relationship partners.
A steady stream of top businessmen, actors, sportsmen etc. are being divorced by their wives. If these people can’t maintain a marriage, how much more difficult is it for most people?
Right, I don't have any proof, but I think it would be the other way around.
Top execs are often married to their jobs with less time for family. Actors are exposed often to very liberal and beautiful people (affairs are common). And people on the lower economic rungs are more incentivized to stay together to spend less money.
> And people on the lower economic rungs are more incentivized to stay together to spend less money.
The research actually shows that the upper end of the income distribution is more likely to 1) marry and 2) remain married. The lower and middle classes have been most disrupted by social change in the last 50 years.
Probably depends exactly where you draw the line, though - the A-list rich and famous types might well have greater rates of divorce, but there are few enough of them to bring down the average of the top 10% of earners or what have you.
Being more desirable mens's being tempted more often. Doesn't sound like a recipe for long-term marriage, unless you think great character and restraint correlates with being desirable.
Not sure that tracks, because people tend to marry someone at roughly comparable attractiveness levels, all else being equal. If you're being mistreated and also presented with temptations, that doesn't sound like a stable situation.
A lot of people would pay to get the history of their exchanges on a dating site. You don't realize when you close your account that you're also losing all the history of how you met - at the time it's more of a celebration of "job done" and demonstration of commitment.
I understand why it all vanishes (the privacy concerns are non-trivial, storage isn't free), but it would be worth almost any price when the 5/10/20 year anniversaries roll around.
After our third date, my now-wife and I decided to delete our online dating accounts. I had the foresight to screenshot/download her profile and our messages, but I forgot to capture my own. Oh well!
The problem with a free dating site is that it'll quickly become polluted with fake accounts - scammers and people promoting their OnlyFans page. At least that's my experience.
The way to improve the experience is precisely to charge money. Everybody benefits: users are more serious because they have invested money into their own success, the website has a source of funding to keep the doors open, and fake accounts are less frequent because they cost money to run.
>If memory serves that same co-founder wrote multiple blog posts where he pointed out various races just don't do well online. Maybe just maybe he doesn't want certain people using his app?
The OkCupid guy posted data showing that Asian men and Black people in general got worse responses on OkCupid. All indications are that the data was fairly collected. He described this as an unfortunate bias present in the population.
It's extremely unfair and counterproductive to accuse him of encouraging racism when he was in fact calling it out.
I worked in the online dating industry for five years (OkCupid 2011-2015, Grindr in 2020). I’ve heard this argument many times but it isn’t true. I’ve never heard of anyone in the dating industry applying this logic, because no app is good enough at making permanent matches that it makes sense to worry about.
I would assume for the users of Jdate that marriage-kid outcomes is exactly their reasoning for using a niche service like Jdate. Other dating apps and services....maybe less so. On the one hand that gives jdate a clear target and metric for success and marketing, but also gives them a smaller % of the population to try to appeal to.
I think you're in agreement with the article - the author says that they didn't need to taint results because they were already terrible. And that they're not going to fix things because there's no incentive.
I think the OkCupid questions in that period were great (submit your answer, what you'd like your match to answer, and how important you think the question is). My ex found her now-husband on that site.
When I was an OkCupid user, those questions seemed like a smart way to design matching at first, but the more profiles and match evaluations I looked at, I realized that the data they gathered was extremely dirty because too many people didn't understand this system. You'd see questions where they had filled out the "answers you'd accept" answer as if they were answering for themselves, or that they didn't realize they were supposed to check all the answers they would accept (thus rejecting people who actually aligned pretty well). A prime example is the question that asks "would you prefer to give a massage or receive one." You'd see all kinds of people saying they'd like to receive a massage, but they wouldn't accept a partner who said they'd prefer to give a massage.
Very Darwinian of you but it's not just a simple question, it's an oddly-presented survey whose directions are a little confusing and unlike any other survey you've ever taken. Proficiency on this task isn't really part of my dating criteria. I ultimately married a pretty smart person who utterly failed to understand it, but I had already learned to discount the "match percentage."
When such a large percentage of people blow it, I tend to blame the UX, not the individuals.
I tried it around 2010 and it seemed very focused on personality quizzes and oversharing; besides wondering how all these people had 20 different favorite movies, my 100% match was someone I already knew and wouldn't want to date.
Didn't seem to consider revealed preferences and the appeal of people who aren't exactly like you much.
The hardest part of a dating site is getting new people through the door. The personality quizzes, in a very buzzfeedish way, were very effective at drawing people in. In fact they were a little too effective, because they drew in many people who weren't serious about dating and just wanted to fill out quizzes.
What OKCupid failed at was being a usable dating site. The matching algorithm was awful.
Plus, successful couples are great advocates for the website that introduced them. You lose two customers in the immediate term but gain more as time goes on. (Also OkCupid, 2012-2015.)
Do you have any insider knowledge from your time with Grindr on
1) why the app appears to remain a terribly bad buggy mess and never seems to improve? Is there any awareness of this in the company? Is it just a legacy code issue?
1) If everyone on the app finds great matches, everyone will stop using the app, and therein kill the possibility of the company in making a profit.
2) They laid off developers to save money, and desktop apps can be hacked to get around paywalls and user controls a lot more easily than on mobile apps, so getting rid f desktop apps always looks like a win for a software maker.
3) There is so much competition with expensive cloud host overhead that if a company can gaslight users into thinking that their app is worth money, they push it all the way in a bid to maximize their traditionally weak earnings on the deceptively small user bases they have... They also create tons of fake accounts and profiles to also emulate that they are running vibrant communities.
Dating on the internet is a flawed concept and no kind of hacks are going to fix it, because it is human behaviour that is the issue.
If hypothetically, you had a benevolent dating website, and then you had 100 attractive men and 100 attractive women on it, that would work just fine.
BUT, that is not what you have with dating websites. Most women don't have trouble meeting men, and don't need to take the additional risk of meeting a stranger on the internet. So the women on dating sites are already self selected in many ways, and in any case there are too few of them in comparison to the men.
I mean, I already frequented an engineering university with 25% female students and that was brutal enough. I do not need to go online on some stupid website to keep experiencing exactly the same bullshit. At least the quality of women at the university was decently high.
I think that characterization only applies to young people: no standards, no idea of what they want or what they're looking for, but imagine that someone else in their life will bring clarity.
Yes, it's quite easy for your average woman to be bombarded with men on OLD. But after a certain age, it starts becoming a problem when you're looking for something more serious. You have a better grasp of who you are, and what you want, and the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff."
A simple progression of tastes. You may have been able to stomach junk food and boxed wine everyday in younger days, but now it revolts you -- and you need something different. Something with subtlety and depth that adds to your life, rather than getting in the way of it.
The majority of people using OLD are young, and shallow, and so the platforms cater to them: creating an experience that's quick, and without depth.
Tinder and Bumble the obvious examples. Compare to OkCupid (before it was bought out by Match.com, and completely destroyed): you could find people and filter through all of them based on a very large amount of aspects you considered important (values, lifestyle, beliefs, etc.) -- to cut down on the wasted time.
Hinge is probably the only dating app I can think of at the moment that creates an experience that isn't so shallow (but it lacks vision, and pales in comparison to what could be -- likely due being developed, once again, by Match).
I think there needs to be a dating experience that feels mutual/equal and doesn't have completely different experiences for different genders.
Like you say 'the majority of the men flooding in are not "up to snuff"'. That's one (common) perspective, but I don't know why anyone thinks that someone from one gender is generally better than the other. Maybe one has different expectations, but that doesn't mean that the other gender is garbage like a lot of messaging around dating implies.
Yet dating apps and strategies kind of assume that men put in the effort up front before they really know who the other person is. They are put through a bunch of time and money hoops. Some people may feel they have no other option and feel pressure to act a certain way, which can lead to resentment later on. As a guy it can feel like you are constantly proving yourself with costly signals for the first month (that women don't have to do), so it's hard to relax and open up and can feel defensive.
I think dating should require equal commitment from the beginning. It doesn't have to be exactly 50/50, but as a guy, when you have to do the legwork in the apps (send 100s of messages, etc) and a significant minority of women label you a cheapskate if you don't pay for the first few dates, it's hard to not feel like you are being taken advantage of in dating.
This probably starts by not having a mentality that most men/women you meet aren't going to be human garbage. Of course, don't accept shitty behavior.
Women have issues of course and dating sucks for everyone, just my perspective as a man.
You're not going to get very far complaining about inequality and telling people to alter their behavior. Different genders have different expectations. Whether that's due to culture or biology or other factors doesn't really matter; the situation isn't going to change any time soon regardless of how dating apps work. It is what it is.
Expectations are also heavily influenced by the gender ratio in a region. If you're living somewhere like "Man Jose" then you're automatically at a disadvantage. Try somewhere else.
> There are apps where women have to initiate contact. If you want to put in less effort then just use those.
I remember an article about one such app. I seem to remember that men didn't really like it because the women would initiate the contact with extremely low-effort messages, so it was on the man to get the interaction going.
Basically, it's like a regular app, with an extra step that doesn't really guarantee anything.
> I think that characterization only applies to young people: no standards, no idea of what they want or what they're looking for, but imagine that someone else in their life will bring clarity.
IOW, that characterisation only applies to the majority of single people?
What? You were a (presumably male) student at a 25% female college and don't see the point of a dating app that would drastically increase the pool of women you could interact with? What am I missing here?
Unless you were in the apex male top 5% at the college, that just sounds nuts.
Women may meet a lot of men regardless of dating apps, but everyone wants a bigger better deal. Dating apps provide access to many people, such that a better quality mate is possible. Again, you may be flawed by being in university.
In the real world you meet a far wider range of people in demographic, socioeconomic status, age, education, etc. So the people you meet that may match what you want is drastically lower that university, which will generally function as a filter for socioeconomic status, demographic, location, and especially intelligence. At a technical college, it even preselects for area of interest.
IIRC the OkCupid data indicated that women pursued the top 20% of men almost exclusively, rated by physical attraction. Men pursued the top 50% of women.
Online is a stacked deck, though I'd agree it can still widen an IRL pool. Met my SO through an online site. Though it still took years and I was using 4 sites at a time, occasionally paid ones too.
I have to wonder if some of this is due to women wearing makeup and more flattering clothing, so that the top 50% of women are as attractive as the top 20% of men. IME as a bisexual on dating sites, women typically have more game, or at least know how to flaunt it better. Back in the day I certainly reached out to many more women than men… though in retrospect, that’s also because women are less intimidating; it was easier to break the ice with them.
> ...due to women wearing makeup and more flattering clothing, so that the top 50% of women are as attractive as the top 20% of men
Possibly part of the picture. It could also be that women aren't expected to disclose their waist, hip, or bust size; yet men are often expected to disclose their height and fitness.
Dating services are not representative of general population. Even biggest most well established slow dating platforms have m/f ratio of about 2. Young people dating - parent would be lucky to get into a 4:1 pool. Like he said, it's the same thing, except more shallow and at a higher pace.
He's saying that the ratio and attitudes are the same. Women can almost universally get a massive number of dates, regardless of what they can bring to the table. It leads to some bizarrely inflated egos, and other frustrating issues.
It is true that it's easier for attractive women, but IME, it really seems like everyone was getting loads of attention. Not just low effort moves for quick sex, although that's still a huge problem. I didn't know any women that didn't get more serious attempts by decent looking, and normal enough guys.
My CS degree was 5-9 men per woman, and in some courses (automate theory) had ZERO women in it.
If you do a CS major, you're trading social skills and dating prospects for earning potential.
Seriously, never ever mention you're a tech bro if you're at a bar or club. Doesn't matter if you make 300K+, doesn't matter if you've got a fat title. Always say lawyer, doctor, or anything else. Just don't be stupid enough to out yourself as a stemlord.
Where I am, it could either be an asset (for people after your money) or a liability (for those who aren't in tech and hate us for the economic impact), but I date old enough that regardless of money, the women generally dig a stable nerd with a sexy responsible streak.
A dating site is #2 or #3 on my personal project backlog. I have significant successful (and unsuccessful) experience as a user, and I have identified some significant improvements to be made (from the user perspective).
There's really no point optimizing for profit only, as it almost certainly results in a bad experience for users. Sure, a company can make money (and likely eventually be bought by Match Group, so -cash out-)... but sometimes it's worth actually building something for the good of people.
Yes, if two people match well, you may lose two customers... for a while. Most relationships don't last long term, and people who have had good experiences on a dating site will return when they are seeking companionship or love again. If they were happy with your site before, they will come back to you.
The current dating site options are a wasteland. Not to beat a dead horse, but most are owned by Match Group. And from my experience with several of them, once they land in Match they are not good sites to use.
OkCupid was one of the best at one time, and PlentyOfFish was pretty decent (if you can accept old/functional UI) long ago. But these days, they have pared down the features and upped the pricing to the point where it feels like they are just milking lonely people for all the cash they can get.
At least they are possibly not stuffing fake female accounts like Adult Friend Finder and Ashley Madison did (and I suspect Bumble currently does).
Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...
I've always wanted dating sites to add features that had more behavioral annotations about users. I'd like to not get a high match score with people who don't even bother to read their messages, for example. Or who read their messages but don't bother to click on the person's profile. Or who do both and never respond. I'd like it to ask why you unmatched with someone and have options like "couldn't hold a conversation" or "too flirty too fast" or "wtf dick pics" and then use that data to boost people who aren't the examples of what everyone complains about on dating sites. In other words, I'd like to have some data-driven reputational info about people used in the matching.
And yeah, I agree with your final sentiment as well: dating sites should be more like people-meeting sites, but with a romantic focus. Aim for casual meetups that aren't dates but might lead to dates. Maybe collect small groups of people that might be compatible and send them out for drinks and then have them do some basic surveys about the people they met for future filtering purposes (again with the reputational concept).
While I agree that in person should definitely be a part of it, as a bit of anecdata I made a huge meetup push for two years (I went to meetups 2-3x a week, every week) in order to meet new people and date, and did get a few dates out of it, but mostly just new friends (that being said, I do know a few people in those same groups that ended up as long-term couples through it, and one of those couples got married eventually).
Meanwhile every relationship I had at that time came from OKCupid, including my wife.
I wouldn't be surprised if all the dating sites are now garbage thanks to them all being owned by Match Group, but at least back then they weren't terrible and I had good luck with it as an average-looking nerdy guy, much more than in-person.
I do credit going to meetups regularly with me becoming a bit more well-rounded and sociable of a person and more dateable as a result, though.
Good luck on your dating app personal project. I worked on one professionally for about six months a long time ago, and it was an interesting and fun project, for the most part (that never went anywhere, we treated it seriously but the client was a narcissist that got lucky in real estate that assumed he'd get 10 million users in a few weeks of release with no marketing, he eventually killed the project when he realized that wasn't going to be the case).
I've had ideas for different takes on dating/social apps since that time, and almost considered pursuing it, but it seemed to be too dominated by Match Group, especially post-Tinder, and I care more about games than apps anyway.
> as a bit of anecdata I made a huge meetup push for two years (I went to meetups 2-3x a week, every week) in order to meet new people and date
Meetups work really well if you're going into one that has a a good ratio of the sex you are interested in.
If you're a single guy, going to Meetups with a Maker theme, or a Star Wars theme, is not going to improve your odds of finding someone - for each girl there, there's 5 guys interested in her.
A good Meetup for single guys to go to is one that is almost completely populated by women (cooking classes used to have a very high ratio of women to men).
Even if these women are attached, they have friends, and IME, attached women are always ready to set up their single friends.
Yeah, I did a pretty wide variety of meetups. I did some more geeky meetups, but also did dinners, hikes, scavenger hunts, escape rooms, movie nights, karaoke, and some other things.
Out of curiosity I checked for cooking meetups just now, as I do a lot of cooking nowadays, and it seems like they're still almost entirely virtual, at least around me (there's a small local group not accepting new people right now also).
A dating site is like trying to solve an NP problem. It's provable that there's no correlation between information generated by users and outcome. For example the known factors that affect couple compatibility are things like attachment style. People are generally unaware of their attachment style.
So why wouldn't a dating site just put its users through trusted high-power psychological screening instruments, to determine that sort of stuff? They're just questionnaires, mostly; they can be done entirely through a web/mobile UI, and scored without any humans in the loop.
Do the developers of dating sites think that people will consider it too much of a bother to fill out such things, or consider such questions too invasive? I don't know why; people love personality quizzes.
(IMHO you could make the whole site just a BuzzFeed "what kind of person are you? take this quiz to find out!" site at its core, except through all the quizzes you're doing, it's building up a very thorough psychological profile of you; and when it's got enough, it opens up the ability for you to date through it.)
The whole concept of dating "websites" is bunk. We need a social video chat app where you can publicly ask questions or make statements, and people can make video replies which can be swiped through in a tiktok style, which also has geo-awareness and some basic personality profile information.
By being video only and gating it securely through the app you'd eliminate catfishing and a lot of the hard misrepresentation you see on dating sites. Having conversations be public by default and needing permission to DM would also help limit bad male behavior.
The similarities are only superficial though. That is like a bunch of video job interviews, what I'm describing is more like a virtual pub where you can preferentially join conversations with other singles who share similar interests.
Sounds like a video chat version of clubhouse. On paper it looked great but devolved into people mostly trying to build/sell/promote their brand which resulted in most conversations turning into something like low quality crowd sourced podcasting.
There will always be people trying to do that for various reasons, but I think optional geofencing and the ability to have the feed algorithm focus on potential romantic partners would make it a bad platform to invest energy in.
I think the big difference is that now we have technology that allows it to be more than an awkward canned VHS sales video you made 6 months ago and close-to-realtime point-to-point interaction.
If someone gave me a big bag of money then working on a better dating site would probably be what I'd do with it. I think it's very hard pull off as a "personal project" though, because a dating site needs people to be useful and attracting people is neither free nor easy. And you also need some form of "content control" to weed out the dickpics and other assorted assholery, which is also neither free nor easy.
> Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...
In principle, I guess, but my experience is that many social spaces of all types are overwhelmingly male. There are probably some commentaries to be made about that, but I'm not sure what.
And while it can set up certain expectations, I don't think that needs to be a bad thing, necessarily.
If you want a "good dating site", it doesn't really seem like it's possible.
But the job to be done of a dating site is to either get you more or better dates. I therefore suggest making a site that's just a page of text telling you to move somewhere with more opportunity, get outdoor social hobbies, and become a millionaire.
I wonder how far you'd get with running on donations. If you're successful in connecting people who fall in love and all that, they're probably thankful and might donate. It'd also kind of be "pay for the result, not for the try". Would you pay $50 to get with the love of your life? I would. Would you pay $50 so you can message people on a site where you don't know if anything will come of it? Meh, depends on how desperate I am, I guess.
Good luck, hitting critical mass is probably even harder than in other areas. You can grow a community or meme site with a few users who are really active, but that doesn't really work for dating.
The problem is that the guys that send dick pics to complete strangers and women that are just surfing for free meals are still out there. They pollute the entire experience by having a large number of low-effort interactions, and in the donation model they are just going to be a net sink of resources and good will.
I don't think online dating gets any better until someone devises a means to bias against people that aren't acting in good faith. Of course the challenge here is that you're going to be hard pressed to find a strong consensus on what actions do or do not constitute good faith in a dating app.
I have no experience in running a dating site, and barely any in using them. Are unsolicited dick picks common even for the pay sites? I've assumed that it's mostly an anonymity issue that goes away when you tie it to identity (via payment or otherwise), but then again I've never felt the urge to send anyone dick picks, so I wouldn't put much weight on my assumptions.
From what I understand, these days it's not just the dick picks but also love scammers, which aren't low-effort and are welcome by the recipients until the scam begins. These are harder to combat, but shouldn't tying it to identities help?
Niche sites probably work better in that regard because e.g. Christian Dating sites have less trouble getting a strong consensus on what's appropriate, wouldn't they?
>Are unsolicited dick picks common even for the pay sites? I've assumed that it's mostly an anonymity issue that goes away when you tie it to identity (via payment or otherwise)
I don’t know from personal experience but from people I know and the woman I’m dating now, the answer is yes. Common enough, and the guys sending them don’t seem to care that their face and name is plastered all over. I was on a hike with my girlfriend and we bumped into a guy that recognized her. They chatted for a bit and after leaving she said he sent her a dick pic a while back.
Scammers are also a major issue, yes. Not sure if tying to identities would help as they presumably could just buy them.
Niche sites don’t really help because most of the time you can’t vet if someone is Christian for example. An acquaintance tried finding a date on Christian Mingle and was almost immediately propositioned in ways certainly inappropriate for the site. And you can’t really message for free on that site, so the men in question were paying.
I think the problem is based on hit rate the number is a lot higher than $50. If you're charging $10/month the average user lasts 12 months and the number of users who marry is 10% then you're charging $1200 for a successful match to get equivalent revenue, not $50.
That's true, but are you getting the same amount of users when you're charging them $10/month for messaging?
I'd assume that payment adds a hurdle that's somewhat welcome to keep out problematic users, just like rent does. Pay 30% more than the market and you'll only have neighbors who can afford that as well, which are much less likely to be unemployed alcoholics with behavioral issues.
The article talks about abstractions, but doesn't mention anything concrete that his employer was doing to promote that model.
It sounds a bit like the theory that pharmaceutical agencies don't work on cures because they lose customers. But if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business. It's not in your interest to let somebody else get the cure instead of you.
"Successful" users do leave dating web sites... but then they go out to make new customers. Sure, there's a long lead time on that, but new customers are being made all the time. Every day 10,000 Americans turn 18.
I just don't see a need for dating sites to avoid setting up their clients in the best way that they know how. Making a lifetime match is hard enough. Any number of things can cause a relationship to fail. The best thing a dating site could advertise would be how many customers stopped using it.
There are plenty of other dirty tricks for dating sites to play. Not wrong matches, but dark patterns to get them to sign up for the pay site. Those can't work for long: you can't date a bot. You need to actively weed out other people's bots, who will try to use your site for scams. Users will have bad experiences without trying to somehow invent a good-but-not-perfect matcher, which sounds like an impossible task.
So I'd want to know what, if anything, this employee actually saw. It sounds as if they were working from a flawed understanding of the business model and making invalid extrapolations.
> if one pharma had a cure, it would put the others out of business
It wouldn't though, because most pharma companies are diversified somewhat. However, if your company has little in the pipeline except a cure where your competitors are more diversified, you have strong incentives to sit on a cure for a bit.
I worked for Ashley Madison (or should I say, the company that runs it), so I have a somewhat twisted take on this article.
> Others will sign up for the site, use it a few times, forget they have a membership, and continue to get billed for it, sometimes for years.
It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also.
> If someone joins the site and is successful, the site loses two customers.
This is where AM is devious because, in theory, everyone is cheating on eachother. If you're a cheater you're probably gonna keep your account to continue cheating. Brilliant.
The other devious thing that everyone already knows about knows about, is that there are actually barely any real women on the site. Most call them bots, but they are basically just automated accounts which is just built right into the monolith. Some of them are actually accounts from real women that just became dormant and aren't used anymore. Some are just fake accounts setup by the company. They got slapped by regulators for running bot accounts (among other things) after the big hack, but now they just use dark patterns to make everything look above board.
I am not endorsing their business model. I started working there out of morbid curiosity and because I was going to be working on things like increasing the security and privacy of the site - which seemed noble at the time - I was laid off during a restructuring. It is a seriously demented company to work for and feel that overall it is a stain on my career in hindsight, though it is an interesting ice breaker.
> It's shocking how much of the site's revenue comes from this. If dormant subscribers were all removed, AM would be completely wiped out. I'd wager a lot of dating websites are like this. AM had a few "subsites" and they all survived like this also.
Also often true for subscription-based massively multiplayer online games. I'd love to see stats like this across Apple and Google's stores, too: how many subscriptions are maintained by people who never open the app?
Misaligned incentives are always fascinating. 'If I pay you and you do your job well, you will get less money than if you do your job poorly, but not so poorly as to be obviously incompetent or malicious.'
The key here is to realize when these incentives line up and try to mitigate them as much as possible -- usually the best way to do this is to look for motives beyond profit. Examples would be: they are looking to build or maintain a reputation; they have a philosophical agenda; they are your friends/family.
Isn't that pretty much how every transaction these days is structured?
If I hire somebody to remodel my bathroom, he will do the job well enough that I won't raise too much complaints but also cut as much corners as possible without me realizing, so that he can save time and money.
If I buy literally any kind of consumer product, it has planned obsolescence built into it.
If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission.
If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
Yeah, it kind of taints the whole transaction. We got our house insulation replaced and I could never really get the salesman to talk frankly about the marginal benefit of dense pack insulation on the sloped portions of our ceilings.
When the sale was in the initial stages and might not go through, he was fine saying it could be omitted from the work order. After I partially committed and asked him what the marginal benefit was, all I could get was, "it might be cooler in the rooms without it...its your house." Some would say, "what did you expect?" but for a not-small job I'd hoped there could be a bit more rapport.
Also, there's a very real scarcity mindset right now due to economic downturn.
That's not true of craftsmen as much because they live and die by reviews and referrals, and people raving about your craftmanship, punctuality and politeness lets you charge a premium relative to your competition. Cutting corners and slap dashing work gets you 3 and 4 star reviews.
Most people cannot tell their ass form their face when it comes to this kind of stuff, so the reviews are completely useless. They will rate the craftman who is the most sympathetic to them as the best and most reliable one, yet he might be the one who uses the cheapest materials and does work in such a way that it looks good at first but has no permanence, or in such a way that if you need to ever do repairs you have to tear everything us because everything is glued/cemented together.
I had to sue a contractor a few years back who not only did bad work but lied about its status and falsified documents from inspectors. To get any settlement in the 2.5+ year battle, I finally had to agree NOT to post reviews of his work on a specific list of sites. Unfortunately for him, my own personal site, Twitter, Facebook, etc were not listed.
> If I buy literally any kind of consumer product, it has planned obsolescence built into it.
Some do, but plenty don't. And plenty have "this part is rated for X hours of use" where X is all designed around some common expected lifespan.
> If I go to a wealth manager, they will try to sell me the investment/pension fund that gives them the best commission.
This is true of some managers. It's also why some advertise that they are fee only (that is, they only make money off a fee you pay them with no commission) and why there are laws if they advertise themselves as fiduciaries (they are not allowed to consider their commissions).
> If I go to a dentist he will try to sell me on treatments that will earn him the most money.
I mean, all medical (and legal among others) professions suffer from the fact that the person selling you something knows better than you do what services you need. This is a real problem, and is often dealt with by professional codes of conduct and oversight boards. At least dentists seems so in demand that they don't need to invent work, since most people don't verify a cavity exists.
Such an odd blog post. Author says that dating sites don't want people to actually find great matches, alluding to his time spent working at a dating website. Insinuating the whole thing is a scam basically.
At the end of the post he says the site he worked at didn't actually do any of this and that he voluntarily quit once he had this major epiphany. Even uses that boring old trope of "you are the product" that people like to say but isn't as profound as people think it is.
I haven’t had too much luck with online dating, especially after I grew my hair out. I feel like a lot of women are looking for don draper, tall, confident, clean cut, etc- and I’ve always been a weird little artist. I did try cutting my hair short and acting in the most masculine way I could for a while, and it worked, I got a lot more attention. But it feels so bad to pretend to be someone you’re not in order to get people to like you. You always have in the back of your head, if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t like me anymore. I think a lot of women deal with the same kind of pressures, of course. I would rather be alone.
I briefly tried (and paid for) OkCupid. Not many matches. Initially seemed like zero. Turns out it was one--someone I could never have met in real life. Perfect fit, and we're now happily married.
Successful couples do exit but they dfi get a pretty good permanent marketing machine because everytime someone asks, "How did you meet?" They'll promote the app. Also many (most?) people on there aren't looking for a long term relationship.
What communities are these, and what proportion of the population do they make up? All of the weddings I've attended in the last 7 years were among people who met online. The couples came from all over the US, with differing education levels, birthplaces, and socioeconomic levels.
I agree with you. Every dating site I've been on feels like a scam that is full of fake accounts and wants to charge you more money per interaction.
I had a lot of dating success with AOL back in the day. I had several longer relationships, quite a few short term relationships, and of course some duds with women I met on their. Part of what worked in my opinion is it was free since you were already paying for AOL and there were lots of people just hanging out and maybe interested in chatting/dating.
Earlier on when everyone was playing Farmville etc, they should have made a way to easily meet and friend/date new people without it appearing as part of your main activity on the site. Maybe they struggle with some of the same issues Craigslist struggled with as a dating platform.
In the same way that a dating site can work because you know the people on it want to go on dates, the people on social networks don't want to go on dates, or at least aren't comfortable with their friends knowing they have a dating profile.
Besides, if you're super attractive you can just leave your DMs open.
Wow I didn't even know. But my point still stands. It just checked my rarely-used facebook account and I don't see any reference to the dating app anywhere. My intention with above comment was that it was seamlessly integrated into the social app.
Cory Doctorow has written very similar pieces about social networks and tech companies. There's one literally called "Even if you are paying for the product, you are still the product"
If you actually have the ability to make great matches, matches so good you are concerned you will lose two customers, you should be running a matchmaking service and not a dating website.
If I used a matchmaking service and it provided me with "end your subscription to a dating service 90% of the time" matches I would be telling everyone I knew.
Always sort of ethereal looking hot 40'sish blonde women. Implicitly promising you'll be able to date and marry one of those (but of course the hot 40's lady is the matchmaker).
They sort of similarly implicitly promised you could meet and marry a doctor or exec or something.
Most relationships end at some point, and datings sites are often used by those still in relationships (open relationships, polyamory, cheating, etc...)
Monetized dating apps cost $$$ and are disincentivized to match you well. So, we build dating profiles by public Github.
We specify a protocol, you make a pull request to add your profile, the app pulls from the repo every day and automatically shows all the profiles that you've matched with.
There's an old adage about if you're not paying, you're the product, implying that anything that doesn't cost you money generates its money from your actions.
The idea was that if you use sites that you pay for, you will be the priority and your desires are more likely to be granted.
Looks like dating websites took a look at that idea and said, "What if we made them pay to be the product?" and it worked.
I bet they also sell your data to marketers and spammers. So you pay to participate, your presence increases the potential value of the site to other potential payees, and then the site gets money from selling your profiles, actions, location, and answers to any questions or quizzes to whomever will pay for it.
What about a dating site that only charges the user once they stop visiting the site? Put some ads on it too so that if people try to game the system by visiting it often they get money from ad impressions.
Is there a subtle difference between a dating website designed to get you single dates and a matchmaking website designed to get you a long term relationship? Tinder's really successful; I am being clueless here but I don't get the impression that it's designed to generate stable relationships.
The perverse incentive described is only perverse if you assume your customers want to stop using the site after the first good match.
OTOH, if you are good at perfect matches and advertising the fact, you'll probably replace those 2 lost customers pretty fast, and with lots more on top.
I don't see why this is any more likely to be true than "by giving ok but not perfect matches we lose two customers, but then they both come back after 6 months", or "by giving absolutely dreadful matches we convince two free-tier customers to pay" or "by giving perfect matches we gain 5 customers because they all tell their friends".
> I thought we lived in times of increased antitrust scrutiny.
If that were true, we wouldn't have Live Nation Entertainment. Globally, they own every large venue (or the access to those venues), along with the ticket and merch sales.
Can't wait for the day when fake-user-ai bots are flirting with flirt-ai-bots.
Having said that, 90% of people I know really do find loving relationships via online dating. Sample size isn't great, but my feeling is those online dating relationships are superior, because people really can find good matches easier.
I think there's definitely some kind of bias in those results. Only certain kinds of people are able to tolerate online dating for very long, and the way they work only really finds "good matches" along a very narrow subset of criteria.
Most people I know, myself included, can't stand the shallowness and general feeling that they are participating in a torturously silly marketing exercise.
Bah, by that logic lawyers don't want their clients to stop having legal troubles and my handiman doesn't want my roof to stop leaking. Just for starters most people are not psychopaths and just want to provide a useful service. But even if they didn't care about your happiness, they would still care about reputation. Happy couple will have friends and tell them how they met. Or direct repeat business, realistically most dating site relationships do not last a lifetime.
Above all, successful matches are extraordinarily high. Partly because chemistry is not apparent online and there are many dimensions - values, emotional, financial - that need to align in a viable relationship. But I would say mostly because people are delusional about their own perfection and expectations on others. You would turn down someone who is perfect but happens to smoke? REALLY?
So site developers can break their back and still have an abysmal success record. I don't think anyone would hobble algorithms on purpose.
Heh have you actually worked with lawyers? They are paid by the hour and will do whatever it takes to increase the number of hours as much as possible. And the end result will be a contract so convoluted and muddy that they again will have to be hired to interpret their own work if there ever is a dispute. Lawyers is a racket.
In a previous company we realised that it was cheaper and way faster to hire a lawyer than using external lawyers. The difference in results was night and day.
There is a business opportunity here IMHO for success for a player with much better aligned incentive structure with their users. (I perceive there's plenty of money in the market however much a monopoly it tends to be now.)
Vanguard did/does this with mutual funds for example and grew to be the biggest player (while still leaving plenty on the table for others) in the market. You just have to make it part of your core business model and marketing strategy and stick with it long enough to see success.
Here's my stab at how to align incentives for dating sites, both the business, the customer, the employees and the stockholders. Commit to the following type of pricing model and market the heck out of you wanting to see your customer succeed:
Your initial price is $50/month (the going rate IIRC).
After two months it drops to $40/month.
After six months it drops to $35/month.
After a year it drops to $30/month
After two years it drops to $20/month (below or just at or only slightly above your marginal cost-to-serve)
(Vary the dollar values above depending on your economics and behaviors. Maybe you start people at $60/mo, higher than competitors for example but reassure people it will auto-drop for them.)
Then you are incented to get people good matches most at the point at which they are most engaged. If your employees are not striving to get people matches at that point, your business will suffer. If you find yourself with a low-margin business with too many $20/mo customers, your stock valuation will suffer.
Two other pieces of data I would gather when trying to setup my internal metrics:
1) Ask each customer when they signup what their ideal timeline (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc) is to A) meet someone through the site, B) have a steady relationship, and (if applicable) C) get married. Understand the demand/expectations curve and how it intersects with your pricing curve.
2) Offer customers a $20 refund when leaving the service to tell you if they got married, are in a serious relationship, or never got anywhere with your service. Incent the customer to help you measure your success rate and its correlation with their initial expectations, individually and in bulk. Give customers the option of explicitly refusing to get the refund because they are so satisfied, or to give you a tip and use that as a key KPI measuring customer satisfaction.
The above pricing curve also ironically adds stickiness the steeper the price drops are, because people won't want to quit and then resignup later since their price might triple if there's a chance they might get more active again on your site in the next few months. You just don't want your initial price to be too steep to drive too many people off.
https://youtu.be/q5fbLQJu-XY maybe not quite ten years ago I did a talk about this before the numbers were anything like this bad - maybe only 10% of people met through apps. Dating is 100% an area where the algorithms should be 100% transparent and open to inspection.
The talk asks what a Socialist government would do with the State dating website, to contrast with the (equally terrible) incentives for a dating website generated by the free market.
There's no way out of this without open protocols and visible algorithms. The agency problem is not easy to solve.
