alt Hacker NewsI 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
But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.