Open Thread February 25 - March 3

Scott Garrabrant

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

There seem to be perverse incentives in the dating industry. Most obviously: if you successfully create a forever-happy couple, you have lost your customers; but if you make people date many promissingly-looking-yet-disappointing partners, they will keep returning to your site.

Actualy, maybe your customers are completely hypocritical about their goals: maybe "finding a true love" is their official goal, but what they really want is plausible deniability for fucking dozens of attractive strangers while pretending to search for the perfect soulmate. You could create a website which displays the best one or two matches, instead of hundreds of recommendations, and despite having higher success rate for people who try it, most people will probably be unimpressed and give you some bullshit excuses if you ask them.

Also, if people are delusional about their "sexual market value", you probably won't make money by trying to fix their delusions. They will be offended by the types of "ordinary" people you offer them as their best matches, when the competing website offers them Prince Charming (whose real goal is to maximize his number of one night stands) or Princess Charming (who really is a prostitute using the website to find potential clients). They will look at the photos and profiles from your website, and from the competing website, and then decide your website isn't even worth trying. They may also post an offended blog review, and you bet it will be popular on social networks.

So you probably would need to do this as a non-profit philantropic activity.

EDIT: I have an idea about how to remove the perverse incentives, but it requires a lot of trust in users. Make them pay if they have a happy relationship. For example if the website finds you a date, set a regular payment of $5 each month for the next 10 years; if the relationship breaks, cancel the payment. The value of a good relationship is higher than $5 a month, but the total payment of $600 could be enough for the website.

You could create a website which displays the best one or two matches, instead of hundreds of recommendations, and despite having higher success rate for people who try it, most people will probably be unimpressed and give you some bullshit excuses if you ask them.

I think that's the business model of eharmony and they seem to be doing well.

13Luke_A_Somers12y

That sounds a lot like really wanting a soulmate and an open relationship.

9Alexandros12y

I wouldn't jump to malice so fast when incompetence suffices as an explanation. Nobody has actually done the proper research. The current sites have found a local maxima and are happy to extract value there. Google got huge by getting people off the site fast when everyone else was building portals. You will of course get lots of delusionals, and lots of people damaged enough that they are unmatchable anyway. You can't help everybody. But also the point is to improve the result they would otherwise have had. Delusional people do end up finding a match in general, so you just have to improve that to have a win. Perhaps you can fix the incentive by getting paid for the duration of the resulting relationship. (and that has issues by itself, but that's a long conversation) I don't think the philanthropic angle will help, though having altruistic investors who aren't looking for immediate maximisation of investment is probably a must, as a lot of this is pure research.