= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Viliam_Bur comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (345)
1) Perverse incentives. Make your customers happy: lose them. Keep your customers hoping but unsatisfied: keep them.
2) There already exists a separate "dating coaching" industry, called PUA. Problem is, because of human hypocrisy, you cannot provide effective dating advice to men without insulting many women. And if a dating website loses most female customers, it obviously cannot work (well, unless it is a dating website for gays).
However, neither of these explains why dating services don't offer false coaching, one that wouldn't really help customers, but would make them happy, and would extract their money.
Maybe it's about status. Using a dating website can be a status hit, but it can be also rationalized: "I am not bad at attracting sexual partners in real life. I just want to use my time effectively, and I am also a modern person using the modern technology." It would be more difficult to rationalize a dating coaching this way.
On the other hand, there's a win for the dating site if there are people who met there are in good relationships and talk about how they met.
I think the innate nature of dating is such that if you want success stories your incentive is to optimize as much as possible for success and the failure rate and single population will take care of it itself
If you don't mind waiting 18 or so years for your new potential customers...
You seem to have completely missed my point. Let me try an analogy: If reliable cars sell better, car manufacturers are incentivized to make their cars more reliable for the cost than their competitors ad infinitum. If a car is infinitely reliable, they never get repeat purchases (clearly they should start upcharging motor oil like printer ink). However, we're so far from perfect reliability that on the margin it still makes sense for any given car developer to try to compete with others to make their cars more reliable.
That doesn't take into account damage to cars or relationships from car accidents. It also doesn't account for polyamory or owning more than one car.
If okcupid's saturation level was 90 percent of the single population, that would be one thing, but there's WAY more marketing to do before that could ever happen and having a good algorithm is basically their entire (theoretical)advantage.
Apparently I did. But either way works.