[jcc80]

I celebrate this. Two people found love and are getting married. I think it's great. He answered all questions truthfully but let the code determine the weight of each answer. It's not like he wasn't giving honest answers. And yes, he created two profiles, but then deleted one. He wasn't sure which group of women he'd match up with best. I guess you see this as fundamentally dishonest but I think the couple says it best:

“People are much more complicated than their profiles,” she says. “So the way we met was kind of superficial, but everything that happened after is not superficial at all. It’s been cultivated through a lot of work.”

“It’s not like, we matched and therefore we have a great relationship,” McKinlay agrees. “It was just a mechanism to put us in the same room."

[asnyder]

Yes, but he ONLY answered those specific questions that were deemed important to his target audience. The fact that he answered these honestly is great, but he left out the set of questions that was important to him which would give him differing results and be more honest for his date. Also, weighting is somewhat important, by having an algorithm maximize this defeats the purpose.

Yes, if the point was to get two people in a room I could possibly go with that argument, but he could've spent a fraction of the time answering questions and then following up with people and end up in the same room. This feels like a rube golderberg machine for a date.

In any case I'm of course happy for him, but it rubs me the wrong way that this lying, manipulation, and outright disregard for the other users is being celebrated.

[ryjm]

The article did not mention anything about skipping questions that were important to him; it specifically said that he had originally been picking questions "more or less" at random.

You're also assuming that the set of questions he had algorithmically selected did not overlap with the questions that were important to him. This seems unlikely.

The only dishonesty here is that by (presumably) determining the breadth and detail of his answers by order of importance to the cluster, he is in effect answering the questions /as if/ they are as important to him as they are to the average representative of that cluster. But if everyone else was also answering the questions "more or less" at random anyway ("He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user"), this doesn't seem so bad (and is probably why his algorithm gave him so many failed dates, since the relevant questions wouldn't have been answered).

Honestly all he did was make himself way more visible. You'd probably get a good amount of dates by making a sign and sitting in Central Park too. Sure, it's a bit distateful, but no less manipulative than that (and much more clever).

[jcc80]

Well, he did answer questions before but with thousands upon thousands to choose from it would be pure chance that he would answer the same ones as the type of women he was interested in. Is it wrong when a person does something they wouldn't normally do to get noticed? For example, is asking for directions when you're not really lost to strike up a conversation "lying and manipulation"? Literally, I suppose it is but I hope dating sites learn from him. The point should be to get more people together to have more chances for "success".

[girvo]

It's online dating. It means nothing until you're in the room with the other person. I don't see where your anger at this is coming from...