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I worked in this space briefly. This is a really good article in line with the conclusion of the OK Cupid! team which were scrubbed from their web site but are in this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataclysm

If you're a guy and you want to depress yourself, find a female friend who is signed to a dating app and see all the likes and messages she gets. When I was in this space, an attractive woman was getting on the order of 1000 messages a day. 95% of those messages were one-worders, "hi", "wassup". Basically a total tsunami of garbage.

LLMs are going to change this space enormously as they are going to act as your agent to talk to the other person's agent. The world of online dating is going to be horrible.

I already know people who have dozens of verified female dating app profiles staffed by LLMs and overseas operators that they use to trick men into clicking links to generate revenue.

Enshittification all round.




The OK Cupid blog was on my mind as I read it as well.

The thing interesting about that blog was — if I remember it correctly — they posted results of initiations by men and women. That suggested there was kind of an optimal strategy for men and women, in that there was kind of mismatching going on in terms of who reached out to who.

IIRC, they were suggesting that it was good for women to reach out to very attractive men, because men in general were not getting contacted, including attractive men, but were responsive to being contacted, and a woman could take advantage of that, even if they were less attractive themselves. Men in contrast would do better to reach out to women who were slightly less attractive, because most of mens' attention collectively was focused on a very small group of very attractive women, and the women who were less attractive, even slightly so, were getting contacted much less often.

Typing this out I think the distributions were very different from in the current article, but also I think they were analyzing different things. In that they were looking at actual initiations, and in this they're looking at likes. Also this article breaks things down a bit more in terms of goals in using the app, which plays into things as well in a big way.

The complexity of it all increases quite a bit very rapidly.




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