The data here falls in line with the infamous OKcupid study (which got cancelled and taken down because men and women are identical, donchaknow?)
The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances.
Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.
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.
This only works in a vacuum. In the real world women will just close your app and open the one that has hot guys. I do wonder what would happen if you told people their own ranking and the ranking of their recommendations plainly though.
The only way to find out if it will show them hot guys is by using it for a while, at which point they'll already have liked some normal guys. Who then reply to them and aren't all pickup artists and make them want to keep using this app instead of the one that only matches them with polygamous himbos.
won't work. many women won't end up liking anyone. And like he said, the most expensive thing to acquire is women. You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
And in apps, much much much more so than in real life, they will mostly all choose the same dream man.
showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
The implication being that the 60th percentile women who don't like 60th percentile men would have liked 95th percentile men. But that's useless, because finding matches for those men was never your problem to begin with. And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup, so you're neither solving any problem for the platform nor any problem for the women.
> You have to be able to give women their "dream man" to retain them.
That's just a charade. The 60th percentile women on average can't actually land the 95th percentile men, but if you show them all the 95th percentile men then it reduces the rate at which they like the men they could actually land, which frustrates both the men and the women, because they're both looking for real matches that could actually go somewhere.
> showing a 60 percentile woman, men that around 60 percentile is a sure way to drive women away from your app
If you show them 95th percentile men then they like them but so do most other women, and then the men in that group will either not reply to most of them or will reply to all of them intending to ghost them after having sex or cheat on them, which... is a sure way to drive women away from your app.
> And those men are also going to match with 95th percentile women and then choose them over the 60th percentile women anyway unless they're only looking for a hookup
That’s exactly what happens. Those guys have plenty of hookup opportunities, and the women have the mirage of being able to get any guy, just for some reason all these jerks only want sex, but somehow someday one will stick
Which is why you need to take away the mirage so they stop chasing it and go find actual water.
Having them leave the app isn't any worse than having them never like anyone they could actually land. Having the ones with impossible standards go malign your competitors could even be to your advantage, because then the competing apps get a higher proportion of the women who never reply, whereas the thing you need to make your app work is to have the women who do reply.
if women left the app, guys would leave. possibility of connecting with women is what's being sold to paying customers on dating apps. Without ladies, the men leaves and the app dies.
It isn't all women who leave, it's the ones who refuse to have anything to do with men in the same percentile as they are themselves. And you couldn't sell that to men anyway.
less women overall, worse experience for guys, paying customers leave. App dies. Its a vicious cycle. A dating app, commercially has no reason to chase women off. A woman who is present and only occasionally swipes is very very commercially viable.
Your premise is that this would chase women off. Let's consider their experience.
Under the status quo, they get shown 100 guys and like five of them. Four are above the 95th percentile and two of those never even reply. The other two are players. The fifth was at the same percentile as the woman and is the only interaction we're trying to preserve because it's the only one of any genuine value to either her or him. He also replies, so she gets three replies, but the two players are hotter so her first two dates are with them. They both suck and one is so sleazy it turns her off the app before she even goes on the third date that might have been good, and she's gone. And if she's not gone yet then she matches with another player before she goes on a date with the third guy, so even if she goes on the date she's already written him off because she's got a date with another philandering Ken doll the day after.
Now suppose you don't show her those guys. She doesn't like as many people at first -- only three or four instead of five. But they're all in the same percentile as she is, they all reply, none of them are players, and she goes on dates she actually enjoys. She's now going to be on this app until she enters a committed relationship with someone instead of quitting after two bad dates.
Yeah I guess. If we could get Trump to nuke Tinder or something I don’t know that I’d loudly oppose it. It would be better for all of us for that mirage to go away, but the fact is women choose it. They do land the guy occasionally. Only it turns into a situationship, hot-cold, disappearing and coming back later, the illusion of him just slipping through her grasp (even if there was no chance at a real relationship from the start). I’ve watched as female friends have gone through it over and over. You wanna say something, but at the same time, we all have our delusions, and it’s especially hard to be real with yourself when an addictive slot machine makes money from your remaining deluded.
Being shown to people who don't like you causes you to move down. Being liked causes you to move up. Apply the relevant statistical math to apply a slightly stronger signal when the like is from someone who themselves is higher rated.
You missed the fundamental point. The only ranking that can be done via a dating app is a ranking of the attributes that can be shared via a dating app. That will always leave out the attributes that would otherwise be shared via person-to-person interaction.
The only way to meaningfully change this situation is by sorting/ranking after interpersonal interaction.
The article identifies a very specific problem. Women will swipe through the app and reject the bottom 95% of the men immediately, but then all of them women end up matching with only 5% of the men. This is useless to both the 95% of men who don't get any matches and the 95% of women who can't all be in a monogamous relationship with that 5% of men.
In theory you could just stop showing the top 5% of men to anyone, but that's pretty useless. Then the 90-95th percentile men would get all the matches and you haven't solved anything.
You could assign percentiles at random so that some 80th percentile women only see 40th percentile men and vice versa, but that seems less likely to work for obvious reasons.
The problem you need to solve is to get the 60th percentile women to go on a date with the 60th percentile men to begin with. What happens then is up to them, but at least you're putting people in a situation that could lead to something, instead of the one:many matching that sucks for everyone except the players.
Again, this is all predicated on what data can be measured inside the app.
The top 5% of men would be a completely different group if it was measured differently. It's not the actual men we are ranking here, it's their profiles.
the implication is that they have a lot of water but it's unpalatable or toxic most of the time and needs filtering I think - easy matches but most of them bad?
The blog post wasn't taken down because of DEI reasons like you imply. Match group acquired the company and the blog post which can be still be found online said that you shouldn't pay for a dating site because of how ineffective they are.
The okcupid labs reports are still available through archive if you're interested. I don't have the links handy at the moment (they're on an old laptop I think), but if you know what you're looking for, you can probably find it by searching with site:reddit.com/r/okupid or "OKCupid study" site:reddit.com , grabbing the URL, then plugging into archive.org
One thing that lead to this problem is that pretending every relationship goal must be bundled together with every other relationship goal.
There is nothing invalid about wanting casual sex. The problem is failing to communicate that that is what you want. The result of that problem is "players" of "the game" devolving the entire situation into something that is fundamentally intractable for everyone involved.
It turns out that a significant percentage of women do want casual sex. The overwhelming majority of those women also don't want to be exclusively objectified and used, because that leads to poor quality sex, and a general lack of post-sex aftercare (which is important groundwork for good next-time sex). This situation is nearly always expressed by women with the same overgeneralized story that paints every man who has ever interacted with her as an abusive narcissist. The problem is that a woman's desire for casual sex is overwhelmingly catered to by men who ignore this story, and most of those men do so by behaving (intentionally or not) as abusive narcissists. Why? Because the men who do listen to this story are left with no meaningful room to make a move.
We have too much narrative focus on women telling men "don't". Obviously that's an important discussion to have, it just needs to be accompanied by women telling men what to "do", and "how". Most men really need to hear everything a woman is concerned about, good and bad.
Dating apps have involved themselves in this problem by replacing dating itself with advertising. If a woman has a real conversation with a man, then there is real room for her to lay out positive interest. On the other hand, if a woman advertises her positive interests, then she is effectively asking for both constructive and harmful interaction. So very few women actually communicate (on a dating app) any interest other than a desire for committed romance. Those who do are overwhelmed with men who finally found what they are looking for. Those who don't are overwhelmed with men who just want to check behind the curtain.
If a man wants to advertise himself as a thoughtful listener, there is no meaningful way for him to prove he is genuine. If a man wants to advertise himself as the best compromise (who will give you lazy sex, but be hot enough to make up the difference), then he must compete with the rest on a scale of immediate attractiveness and nothing more.
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Like most of our social problems, the advertising model sits right at the heart of it. My answer to that is to do something about its foundation: eliminate (or significantly redesign) copyright.
The takeaway is that humans best date by meeting people in person through mutual acquaintances.
Without the forced direct social interaction, women are only interested in the top 10% of guys, and guys are just aimlessly running at anything that moves regardless of their actual interest (i.e. liking and seeking sex from women they have no real interest in dating). Guys end up with no likes and no dates and women end up with mountains of disingenuous likes and dates with disingenuous men.