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ta12653421yesterday at 4:11 PM3 repliesview on HN

By far absolutely _not_ true:

- i have worked in the space for some years for two of the biggest platforms in my country

- dating sites track a lot KPI and discuss them and test them thoroughly

- the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.

And here comes why: the most important thing to form a relationship are "technicals" which can NEVER be introduced into an app. There may be some advances in genomic matching, but no body deployed this so far and it wont happen unless Apple watch as a gene encoding module.

There are one night stands, there some marriges (we had a "winners board" in our office), but 99% of all cases when people met, its going to be "failure" (in a sense "no match")

Regardless how good your algo is - it doesnt matter when it comes to a reality check.

Therefore, Dating apps have absolutely no fear of you signing off because you fond someome - its very likely that you will come back soon, second: From operators perspective it would be a good thing if people would tell "i found my match on XYZ", but sine this does happen only super rarely, there are only few such stories.

So - NO: Dating sites do fear someone deleting the account.

(except: you are a startup and have to keep every profile to gain some size)


Replies

svvyesterday at 10:41 PM

> - the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.

What labels do they use for training their algos though? What is their definition of a successful match, is it a date, a recurring date, or something closer to a long-term relationship?

If matches predominantly result in "failure" they might just not have enough "long-term success" labels to go by, and their proxy labels will be biased towards short-term successes.

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voidmaintoday at 12:52 AM

The good dating apps just naturally made less money than the horribly destructive ones and got bought out and converted into destructive ones.

thomastjefferyyesterday at 6:16 PM

And yet, the premium features are overtly aligned against user success!

I believe you that these app devs think they are optimizing for user success, but that doesn't change the incentives that frame their work.

The greatest utility of a dating app should be that it provides a higher number of opportunities. This feature is explicitly broken by the most popular dating apps. Often, it is put behind a paywall, which has the same effect as being broken.

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