Speaking of LTV, the power users in online dating can easily be worth several hundred a month. Super swipes and super likes are about $1 each these days and in crowded dating markets you have to rely on them heavily if you're hoping to cut through the noise of everybody else's profiles.
I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid money to have your profile be seen first in your city. Same as any other real time bidding in advertising. Have users try to outbid each other to be within first x swipes in the city, instead of "potential match in position 10574" that nobody will ever swipe to.
I realize it might mess with their products' Aha! Moment of seeing only super attractive members within your first few minutes of the user journey, but there's likely a ton of money in it, and a way to strike a healthy balance. I know I would probably end up using something like that.
On an unrelated note, seeding your app with "fake users" siphoned from your peer companies sucks if you're charging for the service. You end up having your users spend hours swiping or paying money to connect with fake profiles. Can't be ethical.
I met my wife when she asked me how to get out of vi.
She was a new PhD student, and I was the departmental sysadmin. To be fair to her, she knew vi just fine, but we had these messed up DEC keyboards with no ESC, where ESC was mapped to F11.
Classic and important question. By some rights, stack overflow is a site designed to help people escape vim, and fills time between users getting trapped with off topic conversations about programming:
I've done the whole bars and night clubs thing pretty actively in my mid to late 20s. My issue has always been that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks. Also I don't drink and have a very consistent sleeping schedule, so prowling bars for women until 3 in the morning has lost a lot of its appeal when I spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit.
Online you get to learn a bit more about them before you invest your time: do they have similar values, similar interests, compatible lifestyles and socio economics? Not all of it is written as text, a lot of it can be easily inferred from the photos, which is why Instagram is so popular these days in online dating as a lifestyle resume. Yes, it's heavily edited to show the best parts, like a resume, but you can still draw some conclusions from it. Like with hiring for your company, the mode you do it, the better you are at guesstimating what that person is like from their profiles. Several hundred first dates and your model gets trained with a lot of data.
Eh. There's a lot to be said about actually meeting people. When I went out I wasn't looking for a perfect match, I was looking for fun. I eventually married because I kept having fun with the one person. We're polar opposites in personality and to some limited extent in values, but it just works well.
There's also a lot about attraction and compatibility that's not only nonverbal but inarticulable. "Chemistry", goes the analogy. The club environment is stacked in favor of the attractive, but chemistry usually wins the day.
Definitely, agreed. That's why the online phase of dating IMO should last as little as possible: you want to get to that in-person stage to validate the chemistry, which is one of the biggest drop-offs in the funnel.
Unfortunately people don't actually put more info or good pictures. 20-30% of profiles say nothing. Just pictures. In Japan where the Japanese culturally hate putting up pictures of themselves online around 10-15% of profiles don't even have a picture of themselves. (on FB where the goal is not dating it's more like 95% don't have a picture of themselves) And then 90-95% of all profiles say the same things. "I like yoga, shopping, dinning out, movies, travel".
I know this probably is somewhat less in other cultures. Certainly I seen no profiles with no picture in the USA but I still see 80% or so of profiles with no useful info in them, just generics.
Not suggesting a bar is better. I'd love to find and/or develop a better system that some how encourages better matches
Bars/clubs are optimized for making people go home with a hole for their peg or peg to fill their hole. There's a lot of bad matches but if you test drive enough pegs/holes eventually you find one that belongs to someone you are compatible with.
It's the Red Army circa 1945 approach to dating. Throw enough bodies at the problem and eventually one of them will be the one that solves it.
If you want to make fewer higher quality matches don't go to a bar.
> that your ability to be selective in that kind of environment only extends to the looks.
Which, as the non-photo portion of the prevailing Swipe-To-Date format shrinks, increasingly describes the problem with dating apps.
Similar problem with Instagram.
The interesting thing is that the success of these apps/media suggests they are how people engage and apparently behave as if they actually want, regardless of whether they might theorize something else would be better in some way.
I met my wife at a hostel on a volcanic island in the jungle, who turned out to live near me back home. Long way to go for someone I could have met on tinder.
I tried online dating a lot but in comparison meeting women in reality works soo much better despite not being the most social person/nervous. But probably that's also because I'm not mega good looking, thus I guess it's far more difficult to match through random photos/a profile giving just a small glimpse of a person.
I suspect that a lot of people would stop using Tinder if they became aware it was possible to pay to boost your
"position". People don't want to think that the person they matched with got there by paying lots of cash.
Tinder has one of those monetization schemes that transparently resemble operant conditioning to anyone with the knowhow. Captology.
The more you use it, the more it knows your type, the more it recommends them, then it dangles out more possibilities that are just beyond reach but could be accessible if you just throw money at it.
The prospect of matching with someone you find very desirable keeps you swiping, making you more likely to do it in the future.
I'm not sure if this is necessarily unethical, but it is clearly an example of a knowledge-based power imbalance. Because I am quite sure the majority of Tinder users are unaware of all the machinations behind the curtains.
I do not understand the bit about the noise. It's like saying it's harder to find a partner in a bigger city, because there are so many other people?
As long as the gender ratios remain similar, I don't understand how a higher amount of users results in worse dating odds. Are you referring to the paradox where the same ultra-hot 100 people get all the messages, were the site's population 100, 100k, or 100 million?
In a big city a good looking woman will accumulate 5 or maybe 10 thousand right swipes within a few weeks. How is she ever to get to your profile without you doing something to bump yourself to the top of the queue? There's physically no time in the day for her to even swipe that far.
But shouldn’t there also be thousands women on the site? Are you saying there’s 1 woman with 10000 matches, and 9999 women with 0 matches? Or that there are 10000 women, with 10000 matches each?
Wouldn’t it make sense for the dating site to optimize it so that the women with the least matches get to the top of the queue, so you have a better chance of a mutual match?
All women habe thousands of matches. But there are many more guys than women. So if a woman would have in average a thousand likes in a week a guy would have 100 (1:10 population). But while women have many more likes they can be much more selective, so these 100 guys with likes will be the most attractive ones.
Showing people with less likes would make it more fair, that is right. But the effect will be that a woman will see more „less attractive“ guys and will stop using the app. And women are the users all dating apos have to keep because of the large gender inbalance on dating apps.
I suspect the website optimizes for giving you the most desirable matches first to give you hope that you can match with people like that. Thus it follows some sort of a power law, where the most desirable options get the most matches, and everybody else gets whatever they can get. Yes, there's talk of ELO score, but I haven't seen evidence of that much in practice.
Swipes are based on elo and attractiveness proximity. This is probably a much better user experience than uglies paying to boost their rank. If you see only attractive people then congratulations.
The best solution here is to simply not use Tinder. It's just a waste of time. CMB and Bumble are far better and have much better people. Tinder just seems to have some ultra-attractive and probably fake profiles for their "daily curated matches", and then a bunch of extremely undesirable people who haven't figured out that everyone's moved on from Tinder to better services.
Bumble has a lot of professionals and will actually want to meet within a few messages back and forth. Tinder is a lot of people that "hate drama", ie they crave it.
I have met quite a few very pleasant people but we just mutually realized "not for me" after a date or two. We wished each other luck and parted ways. In the case of bumble in my experience there is an emotional maturity and interesting people. But apparently you are required to have a photo at Machu Picchu.
That gives me a great idea for a profitable new business: a website where you upload some photos of yourself, and it photoshops them onto a background of Machu Picchu so it looks like you went there for vacation, and can use this on dating apps.
I agree, it does seem ridiculous: here in the DC area, it does seem that every single professional woman over 30 has such a photo.
Why do you say that? I haven't seen a lot of photos like that on womens' profiles; in fact, I don't think I've seen any.
But strangely, I actually have a photo just like that on my profile! It was taken at the NYC Natural History museum.
For women's profiles, the stereotypical photos are:
1) Macchu Picchu
2) at a bar with an alcoholic drink in-hand, frequently looking drunk
3) at a beach
4) in bed, cuddling with a big smelly dog
5) at a gun range
These are pretty typical of 30+ white women in the DC area, though they're never seen all in the same profile (the women who like guns don't go to Macchu Picchu).
Also, you say that in your experience on Bumble, women are more emotionally mature. In my experience there, I'd say there seem to be more professional women there, but if you're not a big bar-goer and drinker, you're not going to do well there, at least in this city. Also, the women there seem to be almost all white and black; all the Asians seem to be on CMB, which is where I get the vast majority of my dates.
While I agree that the apparent profile quality seems better on Bumble, I get an order of magnitude fewer matches through that service. My bet is Tinder became the de facto dating app (and has taken on the generic name for dating apps), which brings the bots and the abuse. The bots will follow the community if it leaves Tinder.
This has been my experience as well. Although there's some sort of strange seasonality to it. I can go a couple of months with barely any matches on Bumble, followed by a few weeks of matching with everybody and their cousin. Can't tell if it's single people feeling bad for not bringing anybody back home for Christmas or simply Bumble messing around with their ELO rankings of users behind the scenes.
Bumble used to sort profiles by attractiveness and never remove inactive users. Their user base is too small and they have to get down to these tricks.
That's why you'd see so many great people and no match, they all left long ago. It's ghost town.
You probably get news matches when people sign up or come back, dating is very seasonal.
I'm actually surprised Tinder and co haven't started selling an option to bid money to have your profile be seen first in your city. Same as any other real time bidding in advertising. Have users try to outbid each other to be within first x swipes in the city, instead of "potential match in position 10574" that nobody will ever swipe to.
I realize it might mess with their products' Aha! Moment of seeing only super attractive members within your first few minutes of the user journey, but there's likely a ton of money in it, and a way to strike a healthy balance. I know I would probably end up using something like that.
On an unrelated note, seeding your app with "fake users" siphoned from your peer companies sucks if you're charging for the service. You end up having your users spend hours swiping or paying money to connect with fake profiles. Can't be ethical.