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Coscott comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong
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The problem with dating sites (like social network sites or internet messengers) is that the utility you can gain from it is VERY related to how many other people are actually using it. This means that there is a natural drift towards a monopoly. Nobody wants to join a dating site that only has 1000 people. If you do not have a really good reason to think that your dating site idea will get off the ground, it probably wont.
One way you could possibly get past this is to match people up who do not sign up or even know about this service.
For example, you could create bots that browse okcupid, for answers to questions, ignore okcupid's stupid algorithms in favor of our own much better ones, and then send two people a message that describes how our service works and introduces them to each other.
Is this legal? If so, I wonder if okcupid would take stop it anyway.
Awesome -- that will fit right in between "I'm a Nigerian customs official with a suitcase of cash" emails and "Enlarge your manhood with our all-natural pills" ones.
P.S. Actually it's even better! Imagine that you're a girl and you receive an email which basically says "We stalked you for a while and we think you should go shack up with that guy". Genius!
It's spam and very likely violates the TOS.
The chicken/egg issue is real with any dating site, yet dating sites do manage to start. Usually you work around this by focusing on a certain group/location, dominating that, and spreading out.
Off the cuff, the bay strikes me as a potentially great area to start for something like this.
How can there be a monopoly if people can use more than one dating site?
Unless OkCupid bans you from putting your profile up on other sites, you can just as easily put a profile on another site with less people, if the site seems promising.
It's still more work to put a profiles on multiple sites.
Hi Eugine,
I don't mean to be nitpicking, but a monopoly is a very specific thing. It's quite different than it just being inconvenient to switch to a competitor. In very many cases in normal market competition, it's inconvenient to switch to competitors (buying a new car or house, changing your insurance, and so on), but that doesn't effect the quality of the product. Similarly, for a monopoly to effect the quality of OKCupid's service, it would have to be a very specific situation, and different than what currently exists, which seems to be quite normal market functioning.
Coscott was talking about a "a natural drift towards a monopoly".
Unless OKCupid is hiring the government or people with guns to threaten other websites out of existence, there won't be a drift towards a monopoly.
A monopoly isn't created by one company getting the overwhelming majority of customers. A monopoly is only created when competitors cannot enter the market. It's a subtle distinction but it's very important, because what's implied is that the company with the monopoly can jack up their prices and abuse customers. They can't do this without feeding a garden of small competitors that can and will outgrow them (see Myspace, America Online, etc), unless those competitors are disallowed from ever existing.
You can keep downvoting this, but it's a very important concept in economics and it will still be true.