alt Hacker NewsThis assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
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I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with?
Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
> This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
From what I’ve heard, OkCupid used to be really good at finding compatible people, then it got deliberately nerfed when sold to Match Group.
I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications.
My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms.
Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up.
Example metrics: - time spent on the site
- times they “swipe right” or whatever
- messages sent
- money spent