I mean 1) 'stable matching' is not how anyone would describe the experience of using IRL meetup apps
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble (not sure if they were subsumed yet) in which men are shown "likes" only as bait to purchase a premium product and only rarely show up as potential matches? If so, what is their monetization strategy? It is fairly clear that a successful result in a dating app means at least one less user, polygamy and "ENM" notwithstanding. I believe that some apps have used success and subsequent loss of user as marketing to "prove it works" but I haven't seen that tactic lately. How does Hinge work?
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
I can say that me personally found Hinge much more effective in finding someone than all the other apps. Among my friends is the one with highest success rate of long term relationships. I’ve gotten hookups or short lived stuff on Bumble, nothing I’d call luck off of tinder. We’ve all been trying to figure out what makes Hinge different and we think is that you get a lot of information when someone makes a comment on one of your posts (pictures, facts, whatever) that lets you select much faster than a simple empty match with no info.
> Has Hinge avoided the dark patterns of the Match Group and/or Bumble
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
I was talking to someone the other day who told me he was dating a woman he met on Match (I believe this was several years ago) and noticed her profile was still active after they had decided to be exclusive. He asked what was going on. She told him Match gave her a really good deal on a year membership, but only if her account remained active. Since it was still early in the relationship, she didn’t want to kill her membership if things didn’t work out. So when women aren’t responding, it’s likely they are in a relationship already and just leaving their account hanging out there to keep their deal. This gives guys the impression they have a lot more options on these sites than they actually do.
Can you imagine what it would have looked like if dating apps existed in the war ravaged nations of Eurasia post World War II? Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man, because they were hard to find after the world went to war with itself.
> Ladies would have been fighting tooth and nail for a good man
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
Dating apps are so bad, the ratio of men:women matches would impress a red-pilled 4channer.
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
Dating does suck! Though I'm not sure that dating apps suck more than what they replaced - pubs and bars really. I'm old enough to have dated before apps were the default and it wasn't exactly a less superficial time.
I think you don't understand that you cannot escape the consequences of human mating behavior by making dating online to offline. 80% of women will prefer top 20% of men. You can go to bar and get some beer goggles for a while, but it will wear down eventually. In Western world, 30% of the couples end up in affairs and 50% marriages end up in divorce. Ask why.
But this is natural because men like almost everyone while women like maybe a few men per day. It's not because their ratio is wildly out of balance, here in EU it is close to 50/50 and 60/40 in the U.S. In some countries like Peru, Tinder has considerably more women than men, and yet, men still get very few likes vs women there. It's not about numbers, it's about behaviour. It's never difficult for a woman to get laid vs man.
Note that this is inherent to the current dating app models. Everyone I have spoken to who uses dating apps, male or female, intuitively understands this. The best strategy for men is to spam matches and messages as much as possible and hope you grab someone's attention. The best strategy for women is to filter heavily and pick randomly from the ones who get through and hope they aren't a weirdo. But those strategies, while optimal for individuals, make the experience overall disappointing.
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
I get four matches a week on average. Converting those matches into dates is the hard part in my opinion. Even when I seem to be connecting and having a good conversation on text, it's always been so difficult to go beyond that.
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
Someone should build an app where women have to create an “application” form, and men have to fill it out. If women are the choosy ones, let them be upfront with their choosiness and adjust the level of friction that men have to go through to contact them.
> Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
Important to distinguish between matches and likes here. Women get a lot of likes but not 1 match every 15 minutes. Out of the people who like them, the viable matches are far lower than 1 every 15 minutes. Maybe a couple every week are actually decent matches they would like back. I don't find the difference between likes men get and women get surprising at all, it's the same for face to face meetings. Most of the men striking out on dating apps also strike out with face to face meetings probably at a higher rate if they were actually approaching all the random women they "like" at a glance. It isn't the general ratio of men to women that determines the like to match rate here, it's the ratio of desperate and frankly not attractive men to discerning and attractive women.
>"Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life."
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
> You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
>Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
I agree, but it is a surface level retort still in my opinion.
What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
There is a network effect of the critical mass of people who assume and use apps as the best way to date these days, and many of the traditional ways to date have eroded.
[+] [-] awinter-py|3 years ago|reply
2) at best gale-shapley is being used for ranking, not for preference inference; IMO they removed the 'have you met' feature (guessing because users found it invasive and hated it), but would be interesting to use it for scheduling meeting slots, a resource problem more similar to med school matching. The idea of using math to meet a mate goes back at least to kepler https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
3) gale-shapley is old science about how to rank given preferences, but the actual interesting question is how they're detecting preferences. What are the factors? Are some factors excluded? What can hinge (and their cousins at match.com and elsewhere) detect about a person from their profile + interactions? Are they using image analysis / NLP on profiles / chats?
(they're definitely not just using the user settings toggles for preferences; at minimum, they must have a global rank for showing popular profiles at the top of the stack. Also it makes sense this stuff is secret, it's a liability landmine)
[+] [-] jimmygrapes|3 years ago|reply
Aside and FWIW I just starting using Bumble/Tinder after years of refusing, which came after years of a (disastrous) relationship developed via friend-of-a-friend-of-a-relative and I can't fathom how things work anymore since I don't encounter anybody of the gender I'm into in contexts where it's appropriate to initiate contact. I know the tropes and standard advice (hobbies, church, etc) but it ain't working anymore.
[+] [-] culopatin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] postingawayonhn|3 years ago|reply
The way likes function on Hinge makes it a bit harder to implement those dark patterns.
What they have done is pull out the most attractive users and put them in a 'Standouts' section. These users can only be liked by using a 'Rose'. Uses get one Rose every 48 hours (I think) and need to purchase more if they want to like more of the Standouts.
[+] [-] cbhl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lewton|3 years ago|reply
You get a separate stack where you can see the full profiles of the people who liked or messaged you, the only thing is that you have to react (match, message, or reject)to the top profile in the stack before you can see the next (which you might be able to skip with premium?)
[+] [-] al_borland|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphabettsy|3 years ago|reply
How?
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dumpsterdiver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
They probably already were.
I have heard factoids that the emphasis on heavy makeup and dressing up among Eastern European women was as a result of the dearth of eligible young men post WW2.
[+] [-] whichfawkes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddorian43|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] armchairhacker|3 years ago|reply
Most men get somewhere like 0-4 matches a week and most women get somewhere like 100-1000. That’s a 25x difference best-case scenario and often it’s over 100x. Which is kind of insane considering there are about 50/50 men to women ratio in real life.
People say “the 20% top men get 80% of matches” but it’s worse than that. The 20% top men may get something reasonable like 3-4 matches a day, but your average women is getting something crazy like 1 match every 15 minutes.
Because a lot of men like to swipe right on nearly everyone and buy passes which get them unlimited swipes. And most women get extremely choosy and swipe right on only the super handsome nearly-perfect men, but you can’t even blame them when they have literally 1,000 matches.
On top of that, the bios suck. Even on Hinge. You can’t base someone off of 6 pictures and 3 quotes. If you’re not judging them on plain attractiveness / photogenics, you’re judging them on one random quote or minor character trait you relate to.
Online dating sucks. You’re much better off trying to meet people in real-life situations, where there is a more reasonable ratio of men and women, you can learn more about people then their favorite vacation spots, and the people have a lot more time to learn more about you too.
Or, you can try meeting people online but not in a surface-level dating-oriented site. Plenty of people formed couples through discord or their favorite video games. Unfortunately my understanding is that most online places are still male-dominated, but hopefully that’s changing as we are becoming a more tech-oriented and women-inclusive society.
[+] [-] mrwh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catsarebetter|3 years ago|reply
Ie. If there were a bunch of single women in any marketplace, men would naturally flock there, like any social media platforms dms
The users for online dating are women, men are the commodity/supply
[+] [-] subjectsigma|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if there is a way (in the game theory sense) to craft a strategy that is both optimal for individuals and the community, and then design an app around that.
[+] [-] abhaynayar|3 years ago|reply
I don't know, I must be doing something wrong I guess. I wonder what the match to date conversion rate is.
[+] [-] baron816|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cehrlich|3 years ago|reply
How is this statistically possible? Women getting way more _likes_ is plausible if men swipe right much more than women do. But each _match_ involves a man and a woman getting a match.
[+] [-] iepathos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|3 years ago|reply
Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.
[+] [-] bogomipz|3 years ago|reply
I always suspected something similar. Is this documented anywhere though that I could look? My response to this was to simply get rid of that app and quit. Why would anyone continue putting in the hours a week for something that led to 0-4 matches a week? How is the platform not a total failure based on this? Doesn't everyone of the guys not in that top 20 percentile turn around and tell everyone it is garbage?
[+] [-] jseban|3 years ago|reply
Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.
[+] [-] popularonion|3 years ago|reply
I think is a thought-stopping cliche that sounds right but just isn't true. People went to apps because real life situations have failed them. The hobbies that attract the most young people tend to be the most gender skewed (gaming is a great example).
[+] [-] jimbob45|3 years ago|reply
I think you're wrong. I've read that the main apps have done some work in the past years to make the "swipe on everything" strategy non-optimal. However, the fact of the matter is that the main apps could have been lying to me and you could be right and I could be wrong. It's so very difficult to draw conclusions from these dating apps when they're effectively black boxes to us common folk.
There's definitely a great deal of money and interest that could be had from creating an open-source dating app such that no one would be in the dark on what's being served to whom.
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
Hinge, for example, only shows you a limited set of people per day, and it filters those based on who it thinks you like who also would like you back.
[+] [-] bongoman37|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] catsarebetter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hikingsimulator|3 years ago|reply
What I find more insidious is the way people on HN deal with such statistics.
The HN typical person is a relatively well-off suburban CS employee. The rhetoric on HN when markets are talked about, e.g. the labour market, often revolves around free markets being good -- because it favors this typical HN's user position. They have never experienced any precariousness.
Now, comparing dating apps to a market is very slimey, but the analogy work to the extent where the focus is the HN user's expectation and how prevalent the market discourse seems to be here: like the worker offers their labour force to a company, a pretendent offers their social time and skills on a dating app. Except that the HN's user is experiencing the precariousness in the latter -- an unacceptable thing, apparently.
Except one is not owed this attention, time or privilege. Thinking the imbalance is unfair is a mark of expected privilege as they have in other space. It's a bit bonkers.
Thinking of it -- dating -- as a market is a bad thing, morally, ethically, and psychologically, but it remains the underlying tone I see in this thread.
[+] [-] 4gotunameagain|3 years ago|reply
Which sucks because smartphones have net negative effects imo.
[+] [-] newsclues|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pydry|3 years ago|reply
You're not forced in the same way you're not "technically" forced to get a job - the societal pressures are all 2nd order.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]