Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences (but they think they do), nor do the majority of preference categories actually matter.
This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
IMO the largest problem is that there is an enormous amount of friction to go from getting a match on an app to actually meeting them in real life. Which means it just doesn't happen that often. What we need is physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost. That eliminates the friction of actually seeing someone because they are already there in front of you.
This used to be the workplace: observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you. Are they kind? How do they treat others? Are they secure? Are they ambitious? Are they hardworking? What do they talk about on the lunch break?
Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).
I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.
I think safety has also taken a back step in modern dating. Previously you could ask around what a person was like and like you said, observe them passively. Now you are meeting a total stranger, you don't know anyone they know or anything about them.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.
When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.
In some ways it’s easier. In my 40s I was meeting ppl online and one mentioned that she knew my name, where I had gone to university, and from those starting points learned a lot about me. Not enough to sustain more than a few dates but at least she knew I was not a convicted mass killer. And nowadays reverse image search and such means you can scope out your prospective date’s background.
Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.
And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?
Clubs are still imo one of the best ways to meet people for all the reasons you give. You have at least one thing in common which is a conversation starter and there's opportunity to meet more people.
Also the average person could stand to socialise with strangers more in person.
You get closer, if necessary to the point your lips almost touch their face. What millions of people have done during decades. And that’s the point, yes.
Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.
Nightclubs are also pretty cool though. Especially ones that have chill-out areas a bit away from the music. But I'm biased as I live in Berlin at the moment.
Haha, yes. I just keep watching those discussions online it's really predictable how it would go.
The advice for some time was almost universally that one should "volunteer", join "hobby clubs", or even go do "women-centric activities" or even "women-centric events" and "feminist groups" to meet people. Often women would recommend that.
Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
The problem is people taking "Join a club" as meaning "The club is a source of women and nothing else"
Very dumb boys then go to the club meeting, immediately try to pick up women, and it doesn't work because that was not the recommendation.
You are supposed to get engaged with a club you care about, participate genuinely, meet new people and make new friendships, and like all of human history, that is very likely to randomly result in you finding someone you hit it off with.
Boys still tend to think they are trying to shotgun pickup lines as a good method.
Basically, the underlying problem is roughly the same in all those situations: You have to understand, respect, and treat the women in those groups the same way you treat anyone else. How often do you join a new tech related club and start hitting on the same sex members of that club for example?
You and the other replier are still pretending that this ridiculously horrible advice is defensible or justifiable by adding endless caveats, conditions and rationalisations to the recommendation.
Volunteering as way to eventually meet woman? It was a stupid idea 5 years ago, still is now.
The actual advice was to widen your social circle and become more well rounded individual. It is not surprising that a heterosexual guy who socializes exclusively in male only group will be able to pair with males only. That creates a situation in which you can create coupling like normal people do. Which incidentally did not used to be "hit at random girl you just encountered".
> Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
In here, you are avoiding the whole "observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you" thing. Which is the core thing that started the whole thread.
Part of the effect of spending time around other people is that you get to know them, discover which ones aren't creepy, and develop connections with them. And, over the age of 25, the personal connection starts to matter more and more for people than "Are they hot or not?"
I'm way too late to edit this post so I should be clear: I did mean "doing stuff" clubs not "loud music and dancing" clubs, though I'm sure they can work for some people too.
Also I wouldn't recommend joining clubs _just_ to try and meet potential partners. You should join a club that's for something you're actually interested in, if you would leave the club just because you failed to meet someone then it was a bad fit from the start.
I have the inverse experience - the last thing I would want is to hook up with some random in a club, I’m here for the music and dancing, please don’t shout in my ear on the dance floor or pull some other weird move
There was a point in relatively recent history where, once people met in the workplace, the woman would be expected to leave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar
Exactly. Using a dating app is just asking for being lied to.
Also, the whole concept of finding your significant other by ONLY going out on dates is... kinda broken in concept? It's not really that hard to pretend to be someone else for a few hours a week.
Indeed, a lot of people treat meeting a partner as a step on some planned self transformational journey, where they try and manifest "the new me" .. a recipe for misleading the other party.
That's literally the first time I've heard of that. I think that in reality there are not a lot of people who think as you describe, and I believe the most likely explanation for your conclusion is that you're in a bubble.
Same with getting a new job, moving house or having a child. Any "big commitment move" involves long term hopes and intentions that are often fanciful.
It's just another example of social change which was made for good reasons but has resulted in negative outcomes. Companies wanted to reduce the risk of accusations of workplace misconduct in the wake of #metoo. This reduced misconduct, but at massive social cost.
Another example is that most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services. Now survival requires two incomes instead of one. It was a massive net loss to society, but we also agree that women should be free to work if they would like, without barriers. We see similar things with women becoming educated. The more educated women become, the fewer children they have. That's really bad for society, but we also want women to be free to become as educated as they like.
Sadly I see no easy solutions here because it requires weighing individual and societ-wide rights. Companies aren't going to risk higher rates of misconduct to benefit society broadly. These are collective action problems, and unless we find ways of individualising the problem, they're only going to get worse.
Do you also think of all the things you could do if you didn't have to sleep with such seriousness? Unless you actually don't think women deserve those rights, why even spend time pondering such things? I don't go around annoyed I can't read books instead of sleep because I'll always need sleep.
This is easily refuted. [In 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure. Today is it 63.3%.](https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....) In 1950, 87% of family households were married couples, and only 21% of married women participated in the labour force. Today, 62% of cohabiting couples have both partners working. Households are earning more, but prices rose almost commensurately. If you were correct, the proportion spent on necessities would be far lower.
I will concede that luxury goods are far cheaper, and perhaps one could make an argument that cheap TVs are a reasonable concession for expensive food and housing. I would not agree with that.
You didn't compare apples to apples, housing in 1950 was radically different than housing in 2026. Homes today are significantly larger, better insulated, vastly more robust construction codes, more technology incorporated (not least of which is air conditioning, which was just starting to be a notable thing in the 50s, didn't become truly mainstream until the 70s).
Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.
Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.
The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.
Homes built today are being built with all corners cut, into a market that doesn't seem to care as long as there is a house. They may be big, but they're bigger than people actually need and there aren't any smaller ones, so that's a bit like saying phone users don't want headphone jacks. Better insulated, yes, probably. But was that ever a huge issue?
1. In many jurisdictions, many of the homes built in the mid-century can’t be built anymore due to modern code and zoning ordinances.
2. Building the same 1950s home, if it’s legal at all, is more expensive than it was back then. Materials and labor are more expensive.
3. Air conditioning is more of a necessity as global temperatures increase and as employment centers move south. If I can’t get a job in Detroit but I can get one in Arizona, then yes I need air conditioning.
4. Consumers are generally not in control of what housing is available on the market. Builders don’t build homes for lower middle class people because they’re not profitable. Nobody is forcing them to build the kind of homes the lower middle class can afford.
I don't disagree with your stats but the jump from "households have to work more" to "society is worse off" is a personal value judgement. Seriously would you rather spawn as a random person in the 1950s than random person now?
The housing is better. Square footage per person for example has approximately doubled.
Also, in Chart 1 on page 6, "expenditure share for non-necessities" in the US goes from about 32.5% in 1950 to fully 50% in 2002-2003.
It would be nice if you told us the page from which you got your, "in 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure." Searching for your text verbatim fails, which is not particularly surprising because PDFs cannot be searched reliably.
Also because 1950 is considered by some to be a particularly prosperous time in the US, some might accused you of cherry picking. For example, in 1918-1919, the "expenditure share for non-necessities" was about 22%.
That standard of living is more due to work-hours put in by people with a much lower standard of living. Often from what is sometimes condescendingly called "third world countries".
That's not how economics works. Everyone pretty much everywhere throughout history has worked, they've worked because if you don't work it eventually means you starve, so people in less wealthy countries didn't just start working since 1990. And yet, since 1990 the number living in extreme poverty globally fell from 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million, the big majority of those in sub-Sahara Africa.
>most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services.
Most economists emphatically do not admit or maintain that.
Most might believe however that compensation settled slightly lower because the economy's ability to create jobs lagged slightly behind the increase in the supply of workers.
#meetoo was about abuse and not wanting to pay the social cost of that. Complaining about it and stopping it is a social good. There is massive social cost to abuse, even if abusers and their friends like to pretend otherwise. There is no wide social benefit of males being able to abuse those around - whether women or other men.
Somehow your weighting of social weighing individual vs society-wide rights ends up with very self serving "other peoples rights are hindrance, I should be in positions to do whatever to them, that is social good".
I don't think you read my comment before you replied (or the comment I replied to). I encourage you to take another look. It's hard to meaningfully respond to a non-sequitur.
To reiterate, the social cost discussed is the inability for people to form relationships at work. I acknowledge all of the costs of people being harassed at work. That's bad. I hope you read this comment and understand that I am not disagreeing with you.
I did read it and my response was not non-sequitur.
1.) Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
2.) Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
3.) Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
4.) This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
You continue to soapbox without addressing the content of this discussion. I'll try one more time.
> Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
You are confidently incorrect. [People widely reported a stifling effect on office relationships.](https://legacy.vault.com/blogs/workplace-issues/2018-vault-o...) More than 1 in 4 said #metoo made them less accepting of workplace romance. 43% considered relationships between workers at different levels unacceptable - 15% higher after #metoo.
> Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
This has nothing to do with what we are discussing. I understand you have strong feelings about this but I need you to understand that from the bottom of my heart, I do not care about your feelings.
> Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
No one claimed it was the primary mode of forming relationships.
> This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
This is one step removed from, "men are stupid, am I right, ladies?" Your disdain for men, the users on Hacker News, or whatever villain you've concocted in your mind prevents you from having a normal conversation like a normal person.
This has been a thoroughly uninteresting waste of time. I suspect you became lost on your way to some protest or /r/Politics.
Workplace used to be where people mostly met their partners? It occasionally happened, but I do not think it was THE place for it. The place for it was that people socialized in person and your partner was part of extended friends group or otherwise originated as acquittance from some activity.
No, that became a norm in management thinking back when HR was just a back-office role processing time sheets and punch-cards.
Even today, the primary concern when I'm talking to other managers dealing with job applications from family members (including kids) and even friends of existing employees is "How does the existing employee react if it doesn't work out and we have to fire their spouse/kid/best friend?"
Better to avoid that drama entirely. (edit: EASIER to avoid that drama, I should say, but perhaps not always better)
And if you don't think management isn't at least 60% drama control between team members you've never been in management of a diverse set of people, which is why the best engineer, the best electrician, etc doesn't necessarily make the best manager, etc. Different skill sets, different universe of concerns.
I think that varies by experience. I had a few matches back in the day that took forever to get to a physical meet and greet but most folks weren't there to relive the AIM experience. I met my current partner of 10+ years within maybe six messages between the both of us? And I'd say less than a dozen messages was my median before we either met up or one of us unmatched
I knew a lot of dudes who just agonized over what to say next, as if there was an optimal response or something. Turns out, treating the person on the other side like a real human you want to get to know because you plan on soending a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this stranger that I'm so super cool or hot'
If you can get to that point, it doesn't matter what space you end up in. Like Frank Herbert once said, a place is only a place
> physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost
Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.
I disagree but a major factor is attraction and incentives.
Last year i was dating and could fill every day with a date. Keeping an initial convo that was personal but keeping it short hit the sweetspot and it was remarkable how little friction there was. This was most pronounced with one specific app though.
few years prior to that i was also in the dating game and it was a world of difference. Not only did i have notably fewer matches those same matches were very difficult to translate into real world contact. it really felt like i was both less appealing and was also fighting the apps trying to keep me in their pool of potential payers.
Part of this can be attributed to me changing but part of this also to the incentives of the apps.
If you could keep people matched up mostly within their bounds of non superficialy visible compatibility (life goals, kids, desired living location, etc) and also within their league as far as attractiveness goes to put it crudely (Don't have to be scanning faces the behaviour of the other sex does give these algorithms the required clues so good profiles do have an advantage) with no incentives to keep people in the cycle....
Then I think people would be remarkably quick to go out. Much of it can be boiled down to quantity and the same goes for active dates.
> This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
You're assuming that the people on dating apps want to form long-lasting relationships.
A lot of people (both men and women) use them for hookups, validation, entertainment, free meals, etc. Most of the people using them for these purposes care far less about compatibility because they don't plan on spending the rest of their lives with anyone they interact with.
I'm curious how much feedback traditional matchmakers actually get about whether their matches were long-term good or not. It seems like a "wicked problem" in which any feedback is delayed and unclear, which means even people with experience might just be developing superstitious habits/generalizations rather than truly learning from success and failure.
Why wouldn't they get feedback? They generally live next to each other as the marriage progresses. If anything too much blame: the relative of the matchmaker in the marriage blames the matchmaker for all the flaws and difficulties that everyone finds in their spouse as time goes on.
There's an asterisk on this, which is that the traditional approach would often be hired by and answerable to the parents, who would not necessarily want a love match but one of appropriate social and economic status.
It still happens that way today in certain communities.
It can also be a strong compatiblity signal. For example a person who likes to travel and a person who likes to stay home are not going to be happy together.
What would really be good is if more couples went through premarital counseling to help them figure out if they have long-term compatibility or if they are just currently infatuated with each other. Infatuation can go on for years by the way, with the conflict only surfacing after there are kids and then divorce gets messy.
A personal anecdote: I got married in Church and you must take a short pre-marital class, which is of course religious-centered but the dude who ran it was lay. I don't think it's particularly useful in general and I'm not very religious but I think mine was.
Among various things they made us fill out a "values wheel", a kind of spider web diagram with various dimensions like family, status, career, friendship, education, money, kids, religion, etc..
And then the guy pointed out if the wheels didn't look mostly similar it would be better to have a discussion nowz before getting married, rather than after.
One couple found out they had vastly different values, ignored it, and broke up within one year of marriage. Clearly problems pre-existed and counseling might have helped avoiding the mess.
My mom was a marriage councilor. Her marriage and the subsequent divorce were out of this world bad. She pretty much managed to hit almost every stereotypical negative behavior trait.
In general, my experience with counseling, therapy, social workers et al. were that you might be better off spending the money on a rollecoaster ride. At least it's guaranteed to end.
Especially the social workers. I have an impression that their exams have an inverted grading scale: you need to score below a certain threshold to graduate.
Just removing the "another five'll be along tomorrow" effect of the way most dating apps work might help.
25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!
As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.
I have met very few men for whom prospective partners' body counts is a red line. It might be a preference, but it's always in context of the larger picture.
I think there has been much topical research on this now, and from what I can glean, there are at least two forces working at the same time.
1. Gendered preferences didn't change, but society did. Women still prefer men who earn more than them (by a very wide margin). This would be okay if we still lived in the 1940s, but childless women outearn men now in most metro cities. Sometimes by a wide margin. Women are graduating in high-paying professions at ratios of 60:40, 70:30, and even higher, meaning this problem is getting much worse. Increasingly, the majority of women are focused on the top 10-20% of men who outearn them, to the exclusion of all other men. This is compounded because incomes are just one of many selectors. There is also height (which remains a surprisingly strong preference for women), attractiveness, many personality traits, social standing, wealth, political affiliation, etc.
2. Dating apps have made the above exponentially worse. It's very easy for a woman of average attractiveness (I say this in a academic sense, not derogatorily) to only swipe right on the most attractive men. Those men are perfectly happy to have a lot of casual sex with said women, but would never consider them for marriage. This has warped the perception of their "league." Many of these women end up 40 and alone and deeply unhappy. Or they "settle" for a man of average attractiveness and income and resent him.
This is almost impossible to untangle. We don't want women to be less educated, or earn less. We don't want them to feel like they're "settling." At the same time, there are many amazing men out there in their league, and they could have a happy marriage. I applaud Singapore trying something, because the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people.
>the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people
In the short term; longer term that culture will die out and the future will be evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and whatever other high-fertility subgroups migrate in in large enough number. Natural selection applies to culture just like it applies to genes, and cultures that don't produce enough children will be replaced by those that do.
You assume culture is unchangeable, like race. Right now their higher fertility seems to be balanced out by people leaving them, and this has been true for a while.
Religiosity is around 30-50% heritable (compared to 50-80% for IQ), and social conservatism is around 40-60% heritable. If the leaver culture remains low fertility, the personality traits that encourage leaving will be selected against.
Single women are basically the happiest demographic category.
The way our society developed with the immense pressure on women to marry and general lack of autonomy led to the situation that given a choice they would often prefer to avoid this.
Isn’t it the other way around, ie that you might be compatible with just anyone is more likely to be the idea of a naive 22-year old?
As you grow older you’re going to have your own values, boundaries, non-negotiables. Thinking that you can just jump into dating and “open-mind” the singles scene is a huge sign of someone who hasn’t fully developed their sense of self just yet.
Wrong, a relationship that will last over time has to presume those values and boundaries will change. What is non-negotiable for a 20 year old is almost always not the same for the same person at 30 and then 40 and on and on.
Sure there may be some things that don't change (religious preference, etc.) but they are fewer than most people think. And like OP said, compatibility is often not a checklist or algorithm to maximize
Huh? Why wouldn’t you want to maximize compatibility considering how expensive divorces can be, both financially and mentally?
Humans, no matter how unique and self-important they might be, can certainly be broken down into personality traits to come up with a model that projects the likelihood of a lasting marriage. It likely won’t be perfect or precise, but it can be done, so I’m not sure what your point even is. As people age, it’s just the fleeting expressions of themselves that whither away, but they have a core personality founded on their values and goals, which stand the test of time. That’s not the sort of thing that you can just mix with someone else who has a different set of values and goals.
Not in my experience. If anything, I don't see much or any difference between 50 and 30 y.o. profiles on dating sites (I haven't looked at anyone younger or older than that).
No matter how old, most people have zero introspection or analytical ability, and even if they do, they would not put it on display because that would put them in the "weird" category.
A typical women's profile will differ by country though. This is how most of this stuff looks:
* South-East Asia: women describe themselves as "simple", "down to earth", "family oriented".
* Western Europe: "like to travel", "love animals", "live off the land".
Sometimes with a mix of trivia, like whether they are divorced, how many children, smoking cigarettes.
I don't really know what makes people match, but if I have to guess, people go by non-verbal cues they find the the pictures. People reveal a lot about themselves in they way they dress, where and how they take the pictures.
If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway. And in Singapore, we have pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
For anyone who has spent a lot of time in Singapore (I lived there for 5 years, from 2012 - 2017) - the following snippet isn't doing justice:
> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
Israel (the part of it that is occupied by Palestinians)? That's where all the surveillance companies (which are mostly Israeli) try out their new tech before selling it to the rest of the world.
The UK? It doesn't have a special relationship with surveillance companies, it just has a population that seems to like being surveilled and always votes for more.
I would bet Taiwan could compete. In the news, I've frequently seen reports of some delinquent doing something bad and the police are able to use the security cameras to track the person down, even across several cities.
>
If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway.
Because of this reason, quite a lot of people
- don't actually own a mobile phone,
- formally own a mobile phone, but only carry it around if the likelihood is very high that they will need it
- if they need to be available via mobile phone for job reasons (and are thus survived), they prefer to use a feature phone or if it must be a smart phone, they don't install any additional apps or remove the additional surveillance functions from the operating system as far as easily possible
I'd argue that in many cases it's even the opposite. I've not just never had any interest in a partner that shares all my interests, but actively avoided it. Some shared outlook on things, sure, but I don't want (and have found) someone who will talk to me about entirely different things than the ones I spend the rest of my time on.
The OkCupid guys figured out that it was (potential) that best predicted stable relationships and everything else was just a proxy for that feature. Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income. Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
As somebody who met my spouse on there, I can confirm that their algorithm was amazing back in the day.
Though it definitely wasn’t income proxies as the only criteria, it probably was a decent part..
I also met a couple other people that I had good relationships with on that site. All in the 90%+ range of their compatibility scores. There weren’t many people in those tiers for me though. Any time a 90% match appeared was a big deal, there were only ever a few!
Anyone I met in the 80% range was usually also pretty great
Go much below their 80% match score and meeting in person didn’t usually go so well.
> Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income.
This clearly does not hold in Germany. There, you often can earn much more money with a vocational training than with a humanities degree, in particular in the current messed up job market.
On the other hand, people with different education levels often have very different psychometric traits (similarity here is very important for the relationship to work).
> Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
There do exist some hobbies that are somewhat correlated to social classes (think of who plays soccer/tennis/golf (replace "soccer" by a different sport if you live in the USA)), even though these associations are much less pronounced than in former days.
On the other hand, for example, a person who loves sports climbing or parachuting will likely have very different psychometric traits from people who are into stamp collecting.
Thus, in many cases, hobbies are thus rather a proxy for some psychometric traits.
In Germany, there is a reason why the term "akademisches Prekariat" (academic precariat/precarity) exists, meaning that people who stay in academia are often in a precarious job situation and are paid quite badly. But these people are very intelligent and well-educated.
Was my point really that hard to follow? I'm not saying "intelligence" in the strict psychological definition of the word. I mean, perhaps, the thing they claim was the independent variable was in fact a proxy for something else I hypothecated as "intelligence", by which I really meant some as yet undefined thing that on average leads to higher incomes, which could be intelligence in the colloquial sense, because that sort of has that trait and is pretty influential in attractiveness.
That doesn't really contradict what I said. This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it
> This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it[.]
I think those things have a lot to do with long term compatibility, the issue is they aren't at all stable for a 22yo and liable to change in 2 years. Those things are pretty stable for a 30 or 35yo.
> This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course they do. What you're probably getting it is they have nothing to do with attraction. That's a completely different thing. But you need all three of the following for a long term relationship:
1. You are attracted to them,
2. They are attracted to you,
3. You are broadly compatible with each other.
From a male perspective, there are tons of people who satisfy 1 only. Far fewer satisfy 1 and 2, and fewer still satisfy all 3.
I write this in caps because people do not understand & believe. Its this part of your immune system that makes you high on someone. Then, far behind that, come whatever preferences/hobbies/specs.
And there is no dating app on earth built around this,because you cant - it would involve taking a genetic fingerprint from every user to build this metric)
(Source: Been in dating business for several years)
If things are that simple, how do you explain slow crushes? When you meet someone and initially don't feel any attraction, but when you repeatedly interact with them and learn more about them, you start enjoying their company more and looking forward to being with them and at some point you realize you're in love?
This exists and, from both my own experience and that of others, is not uncommon.
Both can coexist. Smell/compatibility might not be noticeable until you’re already initiating the romantic relationship (kissing, intercourse, sweat smell).
Can we add to that the effects of the birth control pill? Women on the pill have a different attraction profile than without the pill. Their body thinks they’re pregnant and they settle for men with lower testosterone.
Many women report that after stopping taking the pill they no longer like the smell of their husbands.
Important quote from this article concerning your point:
"Here are some things that are so obvious they sound like cheating:
Unless you’re bisexual, you probably care if someone is a man or a woman
Many people care whether their partner prefers polyamorous or monogamous relationships.
Many people want a partner of the same religion and level of religiosity.
Many people want a partner who matches their preference about whether to have children, and how many to have.
…because in practice, people end up very closely matched on some criteria
Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans
Only about 3% of high school dropouts marry a spouse with a college degree, compared to more than 80% of PhDs.
90% of whites marry other whites; 80% of blacks marry other blacks.
Husbands and wives’ social classes correlate at about 0.8
If 96% of Democrats are marrying non-Republicans, it seems like Democrats must have a strong preference against marrying Republicans, and ought to value having information about someone’s politics before they date them. Realistically, this underestimates the level of political sorting; I don’t think I’d be a good match for an extremely woke person, even if we were both technically “Democrats”."
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> Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course your claim "'We like the same things!' is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…" is correct, but I am very certain that there exist quite a lot of interests, hobbies and objectives that require a partner that is "compatible" with these (and in most cases, people who have such interests, hobbies and objectives know this very well). This obviously does not mean that the partner has to have the same hobbies and interests. :-)
For example,
- there do exist good reasons why in university time, sports climbing was basically a dating market
- a person who has hobbies that are associated with semi-legal activities (which clearly does not mean that he/she does anything illegal!) like hacking in the classical sense will likely not be a good fit for a spouse who works in law enforcement
- a person who is a climate activist will likely be a bad fit for a spouse who works in the oil/gas industry
- a person who is very into internet privacy topics (think cypherpunk) will likely not be compatible with a social media influencer
is nobody going to just say it out loud? we've all seen the online dating statistics: when women have unlimited choice, they are extremely picky. whether one thinks that is good or bad is irrelevant. but the observed data is very clear. it has a lot less to do with shared interests than society has led us to believe. Jeremy Meeks has entered the chat.
In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
Western governments don't seem at all concerned about this, unfortunately. They no longer represent the people, they represent the economy. And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand. Culture, stability, safety, happiness, long-term prosperity and survival be damned.
There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work.
Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.
Also, government incentives to have children usually stimulates immigrants and poor people anyway, if your argument is purely ethnoracial. You may as well take the 23-year-old Indian or Algerian dude. There is very little the government can do to make a white couple in Connecticut have babies.
>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
False. We have unknown numbers of illegal immigrants being ushered in by governments every day; rampant fraud by foreigners, especially students, working in unskilled positions for cash or using a friend's ID; and we have many "skilled" migrants with rubbish qualifications that reveal themselves to be a sham the moment they go to work (potentially at great cost or risk to others). Don't tell me we aren't importing unskilled foreigners when almost every Uber and delivery driver I've had for the last 15 years has been an Indian.
Absolutely no actual Westerner is making the arguments that you have, by the way. You have revealed yourself as a foreigner trying to subvert our way of life. We don't care about a baby's "lag time", we love our children and couldn't care less if economic metrics don't. We certainly don't believe we "may as well" take in millions of Indians or Algerians to meet arbitrary economic goals rather than maintaining a harmonious and prosperous homeland for our White children. You cannot put a price on that.
Illegal immigrants don't count, that's a law enforcement issue. The counterexample to "there is no country where murder is legal" is not a link to murder stats.
>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
That was exactly what govs did here in western europe for our mines (to strikebreak) and what they do for harbour workers and few other industries still.
It also incidentally makes up most of the migrants coming in even if they aren't technically imported. Sufficient open doors, incentives and looking the other way to form the expectation of likely settlement ends up amounting to the same though.
>The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work.
Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically like planting a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.
I can only feel utter disgust at that kind of rethoric. The idea that a state works for it's citizens and a nationstate advances it's nation(s) is anathema replaced with treating people like fungibles economic tokens.
It also doesn't hold up since the lifetime contribution of your average non-eu migrant ends up negative in more expansive studies. (With extreme variance between origins.)
What's next? Are we going to have shortsighted economists pushing citizens to emigrate again when they don't fill their desired economic roles (like the UK did during windrush times) and replace from abroad to maximise their average economic output?
I think it is hard to find many places right now in today's environment where people feel their government look after their interests. But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...
At the top of my head the only places I can think of where citizens get a comparably good deal are Switzerland, Dubai, Norway maybe Monaco (don't actually know on this one).
Most countries don't import (and naturalize) as many foreigners while expecting the locals to serve national service. There's also this quip from a minister some time ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37627269
And importantly because a lot of the opposition to immigrants is generally racial, Indian founders have founded something like 20% of all unicorns in the US while being only 1.5% of the population.
There are really fringe perspectives out there that imagine capitalism as a living entity of which we individual humans are simply parts of the whole. Governments that represent the economy over the people are exactly what you'd expect if that were true.
> And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand.
This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.
No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.
But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism
>In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses.
It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.
I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.
Mandated or not, degrowth of businesses would be disastrous for the people of any country. Your children won't have much of a future in your homeland if there are no economic opportunities for them when they are adults. They might even leave the homeland for good finding those opportunities elsewhere and becoming immigrants themselves. A tale as old as time for nearly every country whose economy hits the toilet the way you think the government should force it to
What aspect of that do you want them to be concerned about? The bigger concern was population growth, it is nearly impossible for living standards to keep rising if the population is growing exponentially - at some point the number of new mouths overwhelmed the ability to produce food and some sort of underclass has to form. We need at least stabilisation at some point and it seems the easiest way to achieve that is to wobble between growth and decay.
We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.
If they're concerned about fertility rate and labor force only, then they haven't put even a modicum of thought into this, as nuclear families have significantly better outcomes than single parents. It affects everything from employment outcomes to criminal rates and more.
So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?
It's under 0.8 in 2026 as their birth numbers declined by 12% in Q1. Doesn't really matter right now as they should be able to keep importing from the sinosphere for another 15-20 years.
Tinder doesn’t know if you stopped using it because you found a partner they recommended, found a partner in some other way, got frustrated and gave up trying, or got frustrated and tried a different app.
Also they won’t know who you started dating. It’s most likely not the last person you matched with or messaged. So any training data will probably be incredibly noisy, because romantic compatibility is not something that happens in the app.
Why wouldn't they? In this day and age, if we're them, I'd be buying all the third party advertising data I could, and correlate users in order to find the answers to your questions, so I know who to serve which advertisments to. Girlfriend posting angry things about boyfriend to Instagram? Perfect time to drop an ad for her to come back to Tinder.
I guess OP was using the user centric approach of measuring success, however naive or ir realistic it is nowadays.
That's the problem: ad based apps want to keep you there, not solve your problems.
I thought about a dating app where you pay for entry and that's it. Then the incentive is that you don't need it anymore ASAP, because the more time you spend there, the more costs.
Theres a network problem, where it must be high quality, successful, and with lots of people before people are willing to pay. Maybe it would need to start with a free trial in a small region to get some traction before, and rolled out slowly.
> Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.
Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).
Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.
Marriage records are often public. But usually two people don’t stop using a dating app and get married the next day. They will date for months or years after. And that info is not so easy to get.
As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.
It really can't be that hard to derive that data. If there's a match, keywords matching location names, addresses, etc as the last message followed by a large usage drop, you can probably identify 80%+ of longterm monogamous relationships forming
I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it
So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships
This is an extremely common sentiment I see online - that there is some conspiracy to keep people single to reduce subscription churn. I have run two dating apps (my own apps, not working for a company), and what I found through trial and error was that no matter how many levers you pull and tweaks you make, a lot of it is simply user-behavior problems, not a tech or product design problem. There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example. The reason someone's matches aren't committal is because they don't want to commit.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
Note that it's possible for dating problems to be user behavior problems in a way that is suits the profit motive of dating sites, without any conscious intent from anyone in the ecosystem.
Model a world where everybody's self-perception of their mating value is just a little bit higher than their actual value - in other words, one not too far off from reality. Some segment of this population will drop their standards in the face of repeated rejection, and then eventually find a partner because of this. Their "lowered standards" become an accurate self-perception of reality. But some segment of the population will be unwilling to do this. They have a problem - they cannot find a partner no matter how hard they look.
A problem creates a market. People who can't find a partner turn to dating apps to find a partner - some may pay, and a lot more will click on ads. There's a decent chance that dating app management isn't consciously optimizing for failure in dating and success in clicking on ads. However, all the apps that are good at finding partners for their customers find that their customers disappear, while the apps that are good at getting people to click on ads generate huge amounts of revenue and take over the market. Which is entirely composed of people who don't actually want to find a partner, anyway, because those people who care more about the outcome of finding a partner will usually drop their standards enough to find one.
The same dynamic applies in many other markets. Evolution and selection bias > intent and intelligent design. The market ends up composed of people who can't achieve the ostensible purpose of the market, largely through their own actions, because people who can drop out of the market. Happy people often go through life with very few transactions: they might change jobs a couple times early in their career before finding a boss and job they're happy with and staying there until retirement, or they date around a little and then find a partner they marry for life, or they might rent a couple apartments before buying a house, renovating once, and then staying in it for 40 years. The transactions are overwhelmingly composed of people who are dissatisfied, because that's why they're buying things.
You ran not one, but two, dating apps that were your own apps, and were not part of a company?
Which apps were these? What were your user metrics?
Seems somewhat suspect to extrapolate from your personal experience to what the large dating apps are allegedly doing if you are not approaching their scale. You've mentioned your personal experience as some kind of authority a few times now in this discussion, why not name the two apps directly? Apologies if I missed it but I don't see where you gave any indication that this appeal to authority is credible.
They weren't Tinder sized. They were only published in latam. The first (Mil Besos) flopped and my second attempt (MiAmor) got to a several hundred thousand downloads and I sold it for not very much because I was tired of the moderation. Neither exists anymore. This was more than 10 years ago. There used to be A LOT of dating apps around 2014-2018, I mean hundreds of them on the Apple and Play Store. There has been a lot of consolidation because almost the only thing that matters for dating apps is giving users optionality, which means having more user profiles the other ones.
I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.
I don't wish to belittle you but, if I were you I would certainly not be in this discussion saying things like "Source: I used to build and run dating apps" (you said this in another comment in this discussion) when making claims about the major dating app companies if these were the two apps in question.
Certainly not in the manner you conveyed your experience. The market dynamics and design problems of these apps are very well known. Given the scale of your experience, I would suggest your invocation of it as some kind of authority was superfluous at best.
Congratulations on your sale though. Have a nice day.
I think that source is fine. Not necessarily because running a small dating app gives you the same experience as running a large one; but because it also means you thought long and hard about the space, too.
Definitely more than your average armchair backseat quarterback.
I'm happy to hear from someone who's built 2 dating apps on the topic of dating app algorithms, they probably know more than I do. I appreciate the contribution, and don't think the gatekeeping is necessary.
I am interested in creating my own dating app/website, but the problem I foresee is getting users - a Catch 22 problem.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
Getting users to dating apps is probably easier than you think. Because men will go to where the women are so you only need to work on attracting female sign ups. It's actually that simple. The best way to launch is with a waitlist of warm users in 1 large city. I've seen a lot of people pining for the 2010-era OkCupid so you probably would have plenty of people willing to give it a try.
> There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
My take is that it isn't about serving non-committal matches and withholding promising matches or whatever, it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting. I can see how and app using the stable matching algorithm could really make you feel like you're getting the best match you're going to get, which I think could have a real impact on commitment.
"it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting."
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningfully improved outcomes.
Yeah, this seems to be a truism along the lines of "scammers intentionally use poor English to filter for stupid people". It gets repeated a lot because it resonates with people, but there's no evidence it's actually done deliberately. Sure, they're making UI and other decisions to maximize for time on the app, but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are, and still serve you only plausible, appealing matches that are somehow bad (if they were too bad, you'd quit using the app). I don't think they have this much insight.
*I came very close to falling for a scam that was written in perfect English, formatted convincingly, and appeared to come from an organization I was expecting to receive a message from at the time. Believing that scams will always be obviously stupid increases your chances of falling for one that isn't.
> but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.
I think we're talking about different populations. You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all but we are talking about people that get matches, but those matches never turn into relationships. To be fair, both populations of people have the same complaint that "dating apps don't work", but for extremely different reasons.
I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.
Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.
> You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all
No, I'm not.
> People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one
This is an assumption and one I believe is false. My belief is that people are more risk-averse rather than they are risk-taking [1]. People don't care to upgrade when they're winning.
> Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription.
Not matching with someone does not mean they have 0 likes. The platform just isn't incentivized to show you who likes you for free. Concretely we can take Tinder as an example. They will show you that someone likes you even when they won't show you who. Swiping enough to find the person who likes you usually takes countless hours.
> This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing
If you're extending this to anything past the first profiles shown, this is simply untrue. You just need to dangle a carrot in the form of "someone likes you," even when the person liking you is a bot account.
I agree with this. In my latest stint on dating apps as a woman looking for a man, I matched with dozens of profiles from guys average in terms of height and salary (when disclosed), and also in a niche of "attractive to me personally but not in the top 10% of conventionally-attractive dudes". So I know dozens of guys got at least one match, and most of the time they liked me first, I hadn't swiped in either direction when they were shown my profile.
Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.
I don't know... mid 2010's pre-match.com OkCupid and PlentyOfFish seem to get a lot of love. Not saying they didn't have problems but they did actually match a lot of happy couples and online dating didn't feel like nearly as much of a wasteland as it does today
the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
I think what you should be doing as a dating app — much more so if a government one — is some kind of RL based on length of actual marriage.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
Just to call out, you're implicitly assuming that strictly lower divorce rates is the correct end-goal. This may not be what you really want, eg you might find many abusive pairings where the weaker partner is too scared to leave. In the style of "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" [1], I'll claim that the optimal amount of divorce is non-zero.
The sentiment of the linked post is different than the one you describe. The post is explaining why it's ok to have a non-zero value for a metric seen as objectively bad (like fraud) if there's high confidence that the non-zero value can be traded for a disproportionately larger metric somewhere beneficial (user acquisition).
In this case the undesirable metric is divorce. If the parent comment's feature for measuring marriage lengths and estimating likelihood of divorce were implemented, what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring? The app wouldn't be enforcing whether divorces happen, it would just use the estimation of it happening as a matchmaking metric.
> what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring
I think one benefit would be the individual participants' self-determination (there may be others). It's ok if you don't find my previous example (abusive relationship) convincing, but in the absence of an objection I'll reuse that. If we could look through all the marriages with a 0% chance of divorce, my bet is that we'd find an abnormally high percentage of abusive relationships. I claim that if a match has _no_ chance of divorce, it probably indicates a lack of self-determination for one of the partners.
Taking a step back, it might be clearer to just argue that length / non-divorce is not what people really want from a marriage. I can't speak for everyone, but I want a happy and fulfilling life, and I seek a partnership to the extent that it supports my desire for a happy and fulfilling life. Yes, I do want the partnership to be long, and I don't want to get divorced. Of course I want my marriage to last forever. But this is not my primary goal in marriage. There are many boring or uninteresting people (apologies to them) who I'm sure I could live with forever, that I'd immediately discard as candidates. Alternatively (making the abuse angle more tangible), I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
> I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
I'm pretty sure in this specific case, they get an instant green card if abuse happens. So the incentives point in the opposite direction (pro-divorce)
That’s fair, but on the other hand they’re in a new country where they may not speak the language, and know almost nobody. To say nothing of religious/cultural views of divorce
Gale-Shapely provides the best possible stable outcome for the proposing side.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
I left another comment with the minimal example, but intuitively:
- proposers descend from their 1st choice, while recipients ascend according to their offers; the outcome can't be recipient-biased, because recipients ascend only when proposers are forced to descend
- a matching is stable if each pair contains at least one party that cannot find a strictly better match
- in particular there are multiple distinct matchings, and if proposer-biased, recipients have no recourse to break the proposer-favored pairs
I think it can be a bit easier to think of the algorithm in terms of job applicants (who receive job offers) and employers (who propose job offers). And then due to the algorithm, it must be the case that the number of applicants is equal to the number of employers, and each employer is only trying to fill one position.
An applicant (the receiver) will end up with a "worst" match in the sense that if you look at all "stable" pairings (there can be multiple configurations), the applicant is going to have the least favorable one among the different pairings.
There's an important concept of a "blocking pair", and the Gale-Shapley algorithm is trying to eliminate all blocking pairs, and you could say that pairings are stable when no blocking pairs exist. A blocking pair is a job applicant and employer who aren't matched together, but both prefer each other over their current match.
Suppose that after the algorithm is done with its work, Alice doesn't end up with a job offer from her top choice, Google. This must mean that Google never offered her a job because Alice was just too far down on their list, and Google made a deal with someone else they like better than Alice.
If Google’s top choice is Alice, and Alice’s top choice is Google, then what will happen in the algorithm is that Alice will see an offer from Google and lock it down. Alice could get multiple offers but she will take the best one which is Google.
When Alice and Google are not paired up, then they will always form a “blocking pair” in any matching where they aren’t together so that means any matching that doesn’t have Alice and Google paired is not stable.
I think the confusion is that Alice only has one possible stable employer and thus her worst one happens to be her best one.
If Alice’s top choice wasn’t Google, but some other company, then there might be multiple employers she could be matched with to form a stable pairing.
This algorithm is definitely weird too though because it’s possible for some candidates to be paired with a company they don’t really like, but it’s considered a stable situation because the other companies don’t want them more than their current employees.
I guess in real life, you could try improving yourself and then the matching becomes unstable again if preferences change.
Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.
Imagine
A ranks X,Y,Z in that order
B ranks Y,X,Z in that order
C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match.
B will propose to Y and match.
C will propose to X and get rejected.
C will propose to Y and get rejected.
C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
(A,X),(B,Y) as the proposals is fine for the point being made. The issue is if we reverse which group is the proposer, we still end up with the same matching, because (A,X) strictly prefer each other.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY
B:YX
X:BA
Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
Not sure if you're referring to the actual definition. It's basically "no two participants from different pairs in the matching would prefer each other to their current matches." It seems an elegant definition to me.
This obviously doesn't factor in most of the complexity of romantic relationships: not knowing your own preferences, evolving preferences, incomplete/imperfect information in general, etc. Plus it assumes a global 1:1 matching across two categories, and people can of course be LGBT or choose to be single.
To run gale shapley you need a fully ordered full list ranked by preference. If you have 10K people, asking every person to fully order a list of 10K items is not practical.
I don't see why not: once a user states their preferences you can use one of many sortings to order the candidates respecting that and use the result for the matching stage. If a user only gives "height" as criteria and gets a list of users sorted by height, the (probably terrible) results are not a result of applying Gale-Shepley wrong.
Otherwise we're in a "no true Scotsman" situation because no one, not even you, can never truly know what your preferences are.
There is a very simple solution to the problem. Just add a tax to single people and childless couples or reverse give huge tax break to married and couple with kids.
In past the motive for marriage was sex and companionship which was frowned in society if out of wedlock. Now it is not frowned upon. The old constraint is gone and we need to add new constraints if we want to solve the problem.
A very funny but evidence backed policy would be free GLP-1s for women. A recent study showed GLP-1 use resulted in a 29 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a woman finding a relationship. A woman converting to conservative Protestantism for comparison results in a 2.7 percentage point increase.
Korea is close to that with the looks/weight social obsession. Not free, but trivial to get with close to no checks -vs- required medical reasons in other countries. But on the other hand... it's fueling the looks/weight social obsession, which has its own downsides longterm.
My pet theory is that "in the past" the motive for having kids was having someone look after you in your old age and not simply starve to death. In the modern world we think we have money to take care of that problem. But money is useless without kids to give it to, so nothing has changed.
My solution is to make the age of retirement to be 90 years old, minus 10 years per kid.
The USA has a flavor of this: tax discounts for married couples and kids.
But your proposal really f's over people with real trauma and medical conditions that prevent them from having kids. I've met several people that don't want kids due to the trauma they endured as children or men and women that are just infertile.
Married filing separately (MFS) tax brackets are just MFS divided by 2, which is worse than Individual tax brackets.
Also various things get cut in half e.g. SALT cap phase-out income limit, mortgage deduction limit that MFS is almost never worth it except in a few niche situations and it acts as a last resort option if you are no longer on speaking terms with your spouse but haven't divorced yet, yet need to file taxes for the year.
How do they counteract sham relationships/marriages. I assume they have to live together for a certain amount of time or something similar? If the marriage falls apart do they need to return the incentives?
One of the best things you can do on this planet is not asking it to support another person, at least not with a comfortable lifestyle which I'm sure we'd all want. Why'd you try to soft-force people to have more children?!
As a secondary problem, people (traditionally women, but with a two-income household it could be either party) often already can't leave a relationship because they can't support themselves and their child(ren) without the other half and so they're stuck in relationships that might either not work for them or that are downright abusive. With a big tax on leaving your partner... oof, why in the world would you want more lock-in?! Is this a manosphere control thing that I'm not aware of?
How do you propose to solve the population crisis ? Given a choice people will always want the position of less responsibility. As a society we have agree to give sacrifices so that we can have next generation.
What population crisis are you referring to? Usually, the problem is seen as the population getting too high and humanity taking more resources than is good for the planet. The global population is still increasing.
But it's also self-evident that if we always need more young people than old, so that the old are taken care of, then we need an infinite amount of people. So long as we don't have a second earth (or asteroid mining or whatever), that seems like a much bigger problem than that old people have to wipe their own butts. Yes, I'm well aware that includes myself and that I might legit not be able to take care of myself properly. Getting old sucks either way. A stable population (or a slight shrinkage until we're at a sustainable level, insofar as we should want to manually steer that anyway) seems like a much better solution than to have old and young people suffer because there's not enough resources for anyone
The population crisis is that the current population isn't sustainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day (and most of those haven't a rich lifestyle yet; most people on HN are in the top 10% worldwide income). We need either to become more sustainable per capita, have fewer capita, or get more earths. Any solution is fine. Otherwise, we'll run out, and the remaining 90% of people get a lot of undeserved worldsuck
Note that we are already doing what you want: world population is projected to increase by 25% (!) in the next 75 years. At the same time, we're lifting people out of poverty (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...) which causes them to be able to buy more stuff, live richer lives, and be less sustainable (e.g. visible on a CO2 chart for the same countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...). Which is fair right? Why shouldn't they get to live like us. But we can't go on like this; something has to give.
More people isn't helpful for at least another century. Let's evaluate the baby-making situation in 2100 and work on the real problems we face today
> Good wages, enough free time, affordable housing, free child care, universal healthcare.
Nordic countries did this. Birthrates have been declining regardless. Even Gulf Arab countries which are an even more enviable welfare state, and have considerable religious-cultural emphasis on childraising, too, have seen declining birthrates.
Gulf Arab countries are not expensive for locals. They are provided with housing, a sinecure job. They drive multiple new-model cars. Nearly every family can afford a Filipino nanny, a cook and South Asian coolies for other labor. And food costs are some of the lowest in the developed world, much less than Europe.
The strongest indicator of declining birthrates isn't living expences, it's the education level of women in a society. Highly educated women, with good, high earning jobs have less children.
Highly educated women with high earning jobs don't really have fewer children. It's the women who are above average educated with above average earning. The first category would be graduate degrees/specialised degrees with an earning above 200K in most parts of America (well above it in the vhcol areas and lower in lcol areas) while the second is those earning 70-120K in most parts of America with a bachelor education or some less wanted graduate degrees (again a bit higher in vhcol areas).
Very high educated well earning women can offload their duties to others even the getting pregnant part these days. Educated women also tend to have a higher desire for large families, I know families with large amounts of engineers/lawyers/doctors where almost all get more than 2 children.
You might want to get out more. Climate-change concerns are amplified online like many other kinds of activism, but if you travel countries with declining birthrates, you'll rarely hear people IRL speaking of them.
A lot of this is just a difference in topics for conversations - local/global. See: us talking here about a Singapore dating app, when likely neither of us two is in Singapore and at least one is already married. On the other hand, people in my circle are worried about the climate change concerns and we're aware of that... but it's not often a topic of conversation. It's not the concern that's amplified, just the topic is more frequent. But it doesn't mean I'm not seriously worried about my kid having to migrate in later life due to local agriculture becoming not viable at scale, one of the dumb wars turning into ww3, or just dying due to one of the current climate effects turning into a feedback loop that we can't survive within the next few generations.
Not everyone is well informed about the realities of climate change, but many are and it's a concern I hear from normal people from the US, Europe, and Asia that I've met. Some bury their heads in the sand, and if you do you'll ignore others who haven't, but it's a very legitimate concern for people with a basic awareness of reality. Things have gotten far worse in my lifetime, probably older people are more concerned since we can see the changes more clearly, but not all young people are deluded or ignorant about the reality of climate change.
History will disagree. People used to have multiple children with far less resources and education. It is a well known phenomenon that more affluence lead to less children.
Because children were an economic good - a source of labor and something that could be exchanged.
Also most children died before adulthood.
If you are affluent with each additional kid the risks more rapidly outweigh the rewards. Since all of us are generally more affluent now it is quite sensible to avoid having many kids.
The history around childbirth is really very brutal and grim. We should be having less kids. It's a positive sign for our species, like having less blood spilled over religious conflicts.
People who have kids because they don't know what else to do with their lives are probably raising children that are going to turn into unpleasant adults. I'm not sure why I would want to incentivize more kids where I would not relish the parents undergoing mitosis either. If someone wants to reproduce have at it, but why should I be excited by this? If "hell is other people" then what are other people's kids?
Between all the excess in the economy (which will only grow as less people are born) and increasing levels of automation, I'm going to give that a hard no.
If you want to spawn children under the theory that they can sew my clothes be my guest. I assume you did not mean to confine this benefit to yourself given the other things you lumped it with.
I have no interest in bringing a soul into this world to satisfy anyone's economic interest. If you disagree that's your prerogative. Historically the only thing more dangerous than having kids is trying to control who has kids. So do what you will. Just don't ask I be excited for you to raise children under such a flimsy theory.
If we want to recreate those conditions, we need to: Cut the power and Internet for an unknown period, stop the sales of condoms, and give away alcohol.
First, I don’t think we can reduce past marriage motives in the way you describe as different cultures have had varying views of marriage and sex throughout human history.
Next, has it been proven that monetary incentives increase childbirth? I thought I’ve read things showing that it doesn’t do a lot to influence birth rates. E.g., Sweden has some pretty generous time off and support policies for having kids and their birth rate is really not much higher than other less supportive countries of comparable status (wealthy, developed countries).
Finally, I dispute the idea of a “problem” existing in the first place. I think the long-term survival of the human race is more likely with a smaller population than at present. When I see news about birth rates plummeting in third world countries as they develop, I feel relieved, not worried.
I think it’s easier to deal with population loss than it is to deal with overpopulation, too much carbon emissions due to high population, habitat destruction due to continued human habitat expansion, etc.
My mini-conspiracy theory would be that it’s mostly corporate interests that don’t want the population to go down. During the plague, the population was cut dramatically and as a result wages were higher for 100 years due to a labor shortage. Corporations just want more underpaid labor and more customers. I submit the idea that maybe individuals aren’t actually better off with a constantly increasing population.
I’ve also noticed that, at least in the US, the political cohort most concerned about solving low childbirth is doing the least to support higher childbirth. They disinvest in education and are against no-tuition community college and university, they are against universal no-tuition childcare, they are against paid parental leave (the US mandates zero days of paid parental leave on a federal level), they are against medically necessary abortions in emergency situations during child-rearing, they are against immigration which also increases US population and birth rate, they are against universal healthcare, they’re against sustainable population growth through urbanism, public transit, and renewable energy, preferring single family home car-dependent and environmental destructive sprawl development.
In other words, find your political representative in your jurisdiction that talks a lot about needing to have more babies and see if they’ve ever talked about raising the minimum wage or taxing billionaires to fund better access to education, nutrition, child care, time off, healthcare, public transit, etc.
It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
It's funny how the govt in Singapore tries to control and subtly orchestrate everything. from (i) mandating the racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing; to (ii) only providing huge housing subsidies to couples while discriminating the singles, to (iii) giving out S$70k in baby bonuses (from birth to 17), and (iv) banning vaping while convincing citizens its not an infringement of civil liberties. I mean many policies are smart and I agree with many of them, but there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
> there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
and they have not reached anywhere near that line.
Compare this to the land of the free, where ICE police can routinely jack an actual citizen they suspect of being an illegal alien, and face zero consequences. Where the president can declare an illegal tariff with zero consequences.
> racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing
Singapore is hella small, even Tokyo is bigger. Singapore population is also dense, diverse and it's not surprising they need to plan first before something bad happen
Nobody is obligated to use this service if they don't want to. For those that use a dating app to look for long-term relationships I fail to see how match group apps are better for the average individual and for society.
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
Positive eugenics never stopped and there's nothing wrong about it. Also there's nothing wrong with the government promoting the creation of stable families with children born before DS risk exceeds 1/100.
I mean, it sucks if you're a taxpayer over 35 that wants to use the service, especially considering that DS is easy to screen for using modern tests of a mother's blood and Singapore has a reasonable abortion policy
Well that's not really different from any other age-limited policy where the govt sees the biggest bang for the buck, like state-funded uni under 35, dental for kids etc.
Maybe they estimated the consequences of many 35+ getting married as negative, who knows. Maybe they just wanted better outcomes of the pilot to push on.
I really liked this analysis - it echoes a lot of the comments here - to wit, as an engineer it's tempting to think that this is an engineering problem, but the program might get better results from funding third spaces and events and letting people match by what they want to do, not by what they think they may like in a person. https://www.singapore-samizdat.com/p/how-singapores-governme...
Stable marriage algorithm or stable matching algorithm?
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
I was sure I had read of this year's ago on Wikipedia as the stable marriage problem (originally heard of it in a podcast), but a couple days ago I saw the wiki page said stable matching problem...
It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is better than a perverted and corrupt democracy. Democracy isn't the perfect be-all and end-all form of governance that will work well for everyone, a fact even ancient greeks recognized. Letting the masses decide the future of a country just because they're the majority is like letting the passengers fly the plane because they outnumber the crew.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Benevolent dictatorship is probably always the best form of government. I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
>I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
All true, but consider that most democracies today aren't really functional anymore. They impose more and more draconical surveillance and speech laws while failing to at providing livable economic condition to the next generations.
The issue is that it's very rare that a 'benevolent' dictatorship stays benevolent. There are plenty of examples through history where a good leader (either hereditary, elected or promoted through other means) did well for decades, only to see their efforts undone by an idiot or tyrant that came afterwards.
Also doesn't help that the people who most want power are those least deserving of it. See many CEOs, and many politicians in general.
Does Singapore work well so far? Sure, by some definitions of working well. Same with China.
But it definitely feels like they're rolling the dice with their systems of governance, and hoping the next leader is someone that actually cares about the health of society rather than a would be authoritarian ruler.
Corporations could just do the same thing. Henry Ford historically had doubled people's salary to get them to have families. This was contingent on a bunch of paternalistic rules and inspections (like participants weren't allowed to drink for example).
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
Australia, New Zealand, and the UK are all competing with each other on who can be the most authoritarian anglo nation. "Oi, you got a loicense for that opinion M8?"
The UK are at least vaguely equal opportunity authoritarians, and their police will arrest both the angry dad posting on Facebook about immigrants and the pensioner peacefully protesting in support of Palestine all the same
> basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
Until the stupid are in the majority and start curbing your rights. That's one of the main problems with freedom of speech and with democracy as well: they both contain the seeds of their own undoing.
Why not? If every society that embraces a right fails in a similar way, that right should be open to being debated. In a world with social media, I’m not convinced American First-Amendment style (in its ideal form) free speech is as unquestionably good as I once thought it was.
> which societies, which failures, which "every" are you referring to, exactly?
I'd argue American society is currently failing. We're losing wars. We're racking up debt. We're destroying our institutions. A decent fraction of the population not only expects civil war, but cheers it on.
Meanwhile, in Europe, a similar vein is consistently emerging across the continent. It's done better at resisting. But in part through policing speech.
Do you think Europe is being successful by those metrics?
They're racking up debt too, with worse means to pay it back, they've destroyed both their institutions and their culture via mass migration of unskilled and dissimilar peoples, and they couldn't even fight a war because they can't field the firepower of one US state's national guard base (much less "lose" it, in the ways that people mischaracterize the US's recent conflicts).
Europe is a distant third in an increasingly multipolar world that will be shaped by the US and China, reliant on the US's increasingly fickle protection from Russia; aging, fading, and losing identity. Their core industries like automotive have already lost to China, their power costs are skyrocketing, their technology (outside of some gifts from the US like ASML) lags the US across the frontiers, and there are deep divides across the continent.
But hey, at least they are protected from misgendering a "woman" with a beard or mentioning the identity of a criminal.
> net effect is ultimately positive. Societies are healthier in many ways when people are free to speak their mind
This is currently not empirically sustained. I hope it will be, in the long run. But if Americans and Europeans keep voting for far-right and -left wing idiots, and China and its similars take the mantle of technological and scientific development, there is a real argument that Enlightenment values don’t apply perfectly in a world with social media and AI.
France has a constitutional right to free speech since at least the 18th century, not sure what you mean. There is a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is still part of France's constitution. France is also bound by the EU Convention on Human Rights. Why would you compare France to Singapore in this regard? That's strange.
Google any of these terms to see examples of people who were actually fined for speech in France, after 1950, and well after the 18th century:
- Hervé Eon Sarkozy fine
- Éric Zemmour 3000 fine
- bardot degenerates 20000
- Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly fine
None of these were threats or incitement to violence. Just insults.
And you talk about a constitutional right to free speech since the 18th century, but mocking Catholicism could be prosecuted until 1881 (i.e. in the 19th century).
it's perhaps debatable, but the European (and French) legal frameworks do not recognize hate speech as protected free speech, so I suppose the concern (e.g. in the Bardot case) is if it was hate speech or not. Americans also do not support hate speech, though perhaps the way these are handled legally are different. I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote.
I said France does not have free speech, and gave an example of someone who was fined for holding up a small sign with the words "Casse-toi, pov'con" ("Get lost, you sad jerk").
If someone in France is not free to hold a sign that says "Get lost, you sad jerk" then France does not have free speech. That sign contains only words. It does not create any threat. It does not incite anyone to take illegal and/or violent actions.
Regarding the Bardot case you say "I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote" but:
- that's not the only case I cited, and
- even in the Bardot case, what's the rationale for suppressing speech expressing an opinion? it seems she was prosecuted because her expression of an opinion might cause others to adopt that same opinion. She wasn't inciting violence or illegal acts.
the kind of issues that Singapore has been fairly effective at, getting people to speak the same tongue or not spitting on the street, what you could put into a bucket of 'public discipline' measures I think is over-romanticized.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
It has achieved the highest global GDP per capita is just a couple dozen of years, starting as a small bit of swamp forcibly kicked out Malaysia. I think it's unfair to say that people are over-romanticizing these sorts of accomplishments.
Starting out at the second richest city in Asia after Shanghai, you mean.
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
Singapore started from an unusually favorable, but still genuinely troubled, Asian starting position. Their government then proceeded to get a remarkable number of important things right, and turned it into one of the richest countries in the world. That achievement does not require pretending Singapore was a fishing village in a swamp in 1965. The more accurate story is impressive enough on its own: plenty of countries and cities with comparable or better initial advantages failed to achieve anything close to Singapore's subsequent trajectory. Look at how Western former great powers are doing, or even closer countries like Japan.
I'd argue the way Singapore uses state capacity deserves substantial credit for that.
Correct - this isn't new, it's how it works there. Single new grads in the 80's & 90's were being offered government funded beach holidays on graduation where they were paired with selected dating partners.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
"In 1992, Deng exhorted CCP cadres to “learn from the world, especially from Singapore”, touching off a “Singapore fever” in PRC political and academic circles."
Maybe part of the solution for any country dealing with low marriage rate is to ban all private dating apps and only government issued apps are allowed.
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
I don't understand how a government app fixes the problem.
I've talked with women about this offline and they usually fire back with: "You expect women to lower their standards?"
Women would rather delay pregnancy until they find a suitable partner, than risk being with the wrong guy.
The only thing I _maybe_ can think of is governments could only show profiles in your 'tier' (looks, social economic class, etc), whereas private dating apps found that showing everyone pretty people keeps people coming back.
I think the main cause of this asymmetry in modern dating is the disappearance of social shaming for casual sex.
When casual sex is a possibility, many high value men will see it as a desirable option to commited relationships. And since for most men, their standards are very low for casual partners, they're willing to date far below their "level".
That puts women in difficult position because the most desirable partners are far more likely to be looking for only casual sex. But even if women adopt strict strategies to filter out the desirable men who won't commit, the men will naturally adopt deceptive strategies to evade detection as a "fuck boy".
When potential partners largely came from your real social network, the social cost was high for men for "using women for sex" and for women "being easy", so that prevented this problem to some degree.
Now that partners largely come from outside our social networks, there doesn't seem to be any good way to reproduce the social shaming for deceptive non-commitment.
Especially since populations are potentially in decline with fertility rates below replacement rates. It seems like an existential problem for the government if they want future taxpayers.
The implication that Western nations are different is fairly funny. I'd argue most of the governments in Asia are doing a lot more for the people than many Western governments.
I am not sure that is true. Japan remains closed to economy-saving immigration, Uyghurs have atrocities committed against them, several countries losing their collective minds due to social media-induced riots/panics.
Maybe Tibet and the GenZ revolution as a counterexample?
o__O my url bar doesn’t currently say Reddit? This argument feels red pilled and not curious nor productive. Women have plenty of valid frustrations with the dating pool. I don’t live in SF but the last woman whom I talked to there told me many of y’all just have mattresses on the floor and like no bed frame. There are places to improve fellas
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.
Perhaps then the government could spend money producing propaganda to convince people to lower their standards. Maybe they could fund TV shows about unattractive people with no money having a good time together - I think China is doing something similar.
It's tempting to think of the problems of a dating market as a matching problem because men and women are almost equal in numbers so we just have to match them all up. A clearing problem occurs in markets, (even markets with ~equal supply and demand) when the reserve price of the transaction is not met. For example, the reason I don't own a Ferrari isn't because there isn't 1 Ferrari out there for sale, it's because I don't have enough cash to clear the transaction. Building a more powerful car sales website won't fix this problem. The reserve price is not met.
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
I think this is just too finance brained and that the problem is not that everyone got too good for each other, but that everyone replaced in-person socialization with scrolling social media at home. So people simply do not bump in to each other to actually form relationships.
The nose dive in relationships kicked off when smartphones came in to society. I'm not sure the concept of dating apps is fixable. We need to get people out of the house again.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
> they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them
I don't know if the matching problem has been fully explored enough to ascertain this is the case.
In the western world, people will go out with someone they find undesirable with the intention of reaping the benefits of short term relationships. I think this sometimes sets unrealistic expectations on those undesirable people and further muddies the water. I wonder if there's a way to impose a cost on those who are not in it for the long term.
I agree. I sure hope their government will not step in at that point and offer too many incentives to get married and disincentives to stay single, but I would not rule out this is exactly part of the plan...
All dating apps are misclassified. They should be under contraceptives.
The same problem on every platform. 80% men and few women who get so picky that most men will never reach their standards.
I fear for most young men dating is over. And I fear what will happen when societies have large swathes of men with no connection to society, no jobs, no friends, no wives, no families.
I'm always surprised to hear online that it's so bleak. I know a very wide variety of men in real life who have eventually found someone just fine on dating apps (the people I know who haven't are mostly places with a small dating pool or there's a particular reason women don't like them when they get to know them).
So get out and talk to the lady at the bar? Didn't work out either for you? The problem isn't about too many man on dating apps.. it's about men believing society owns them a woman.
Where do you live? Because I've never, ever lived anywhere that this was true. I go to bars. They're always busy, unless it's a shit bar on a Tuesday night or whatever.
It's not rosy on the other side, dating apps sucks for women too.
The key problem is that dating apps have no interest in their user finding a long term partner (and leaving the app), they are maximizing engagement, making male pay, make sure people have enough matches to keep their ego afloat and make them addicted to the app, but at no point a stable relationship is a desired outcome for Match group (yeah, because despite having many apps, most of them belong to the same corporation).
The world would be a much happier place if dating apps took success fees instead of a monthly subscription (good luck making that work as a business though).
That's of course true. The dating apps goal is to make money. People who actually meet and have dates night leave the platform and no longer pay.
That being said the women's problem is the overabundance of availability of men whereas the men's problem is that they get nothing. So women at least CAN go out on dates if they just choose to.
It’s only a problem if those women don’t settle for the men they date. If they would, the balance would always be restored:
Top 20% of men settle with 20% of women. A new top of men takes over replacing the old one.
The main issue is that relationships don’t last. And that has to with the 20% of men not wanting to settle as they have free and abundant access to sex, which has been historically the primary reason for men to settle.
On top of that men are at their prime way longer than women: easily between 25 and 45. Women lose perceived value as sexual partners after 30/35 by many men.
As I said before, the problem is as bad for women as for men, it's just different: women keep getting matched with men that won't form stable relationships, because the app doesn't want to give a relationship to women either (even if they often don't have to pay, and as such are not income stream for the app, they are the product being sold so the app need them to stick as long as possible).
There's no objective “Top 20% of men”, but there is indeed a small group of men that is being pushed down every women's throat on apps because they are the easy going one that will not threaten the app's business by entering a long term relationship.
I bet any woman could just scroll down the list of their matches or make a new match with the guy who is not the best looking player guy and immediately have a chat a date lined up.
You know one the nice guys who are always other wise ignored.
Human matchmakers do take success fees sometimes and the business as a whole is widespread and successful. Those services can get expensive though, even at the low end. I would guess that the vast majority of dating app users would not be willing to drop thousands on matchmaking services.
Women can at least get something, which is a huge economic advantage these days in Western countries. They can split the bills, save more, use a relationship they aren’t happy in to leapfrog to a better one.
This is very interesting from pairwise comparison perspective. Infact, humans are better at pairwise preference scoring rather than estimating a score from single input [1]. In regular dating apps, the profiles are presented one by one which makes it more recurrent comparison based on the experience rather than in pairs.
In the news, it is not detailed but what would be interesting is to profiling automatically, given a somewhat larger pool of participants. Where certain number of pairs during the setup is presented to the new user and asked to make pairwise choices to build the preference profile over.
It's about prioritizing candidates for the costly initial audition, and breaking symmetry for the introduction, something particularly useful for people who can't just approach other at random in a social setting.
This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.
Meetup got enshittified years ago already, and the changes drove away the small communities that once made up so much of the site; the only groups which prosper on it now are mainly large for-profit ventures.
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
One note on the OP is that the NRMP doesn't use Gale-Shapley, it actually uses the Roth-Peranson algorithm which is a slight modification of the original Gale-Shapley one.
I know there's a cold-start problem for adding a new competitor to dating apps, but I wish one would show up. Maybe I'm naive, but I think I would like this. To be fair, I think Hinge is already pretty good. Not sure why it feels so much better than Tinder.
This quote shall really resonate with all of you who use Tinder similar dating apps: "Commercial apps need you to keep swiping but this app is designed to get you off the platform. Singapore built the first dating app whose success metric is deleting its own users".
I don't really like the idea of the state having access to the data of a dating app but there is a part of me that things it should exist in an accelerationist/realist sense. I don't think online dating is going away, and the incentives of the dominant players are clearly not great for users or society. Government has a very strong incentive for people getting hitched.
The problem with this will be something like my preference would be a person who makes home a peaceful place. This isn’t something that can be put on preferences. As if a potential partner is going to tick yes to “incessant nagging” so I can avoid them.
A cute example of the idea that the state provides basic services, and individuals/companies are free to make money out of doing it better. Water, Comms, transport & housing anyone?
The algorithm is mathematically optimal ("no two people exist who would both prefer each other over their assigned matches"), but the matching is a function of what exactly?
Revealed preferences? What's being asked here? Preferred noise level? Preferred number of children?
The article said some people called it dystopian. I don't think so.
But we can lean into that! If the government buys your data from data brokers (like some governments are already doing), the matching algorithm suddenly has a lot more data points to work with.
Related: I've been wondering since 2008 why there isn't a "recommender engine" for friends.
this is their third attempt at a government run dating service I think :/
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
1/ lower housing costs. Singapore has the same chinese mindset when it comes to marriage: boyfriend needs a house (and car?) before he is suitable.
19 year old Singaporeans within a year of dating must sit down with their partner's families to put a $200k sgd deposit on a house to join the 7 year waiting list so they can get married by the time they are 27.
2/ Singapore does a decent job at this, but further normalize domestic workers. Domestic workers drastically soften the blow women experience in their careers, especially with kids.
If they can push costs down further (like housing a worker is expensive), this would enable more Singaporean women to have more free time to date, get married, etc.
3/ Male Singaporeans have a mandatory 2 year service, which detracts from their time to date. Potentially offer more benefits to marriage or more time off to date.
this is pretty much exactly what I would have said too. they could fix these things but it would cost a lot of money and/or impact the economy and defense and they just dont want to boost the birth rate that badly.
only thing I would add is the size of HDBs - they've been shrinking which I'm sure puts psychological pressure on young adults to not have kids.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
3 months of leave or a small welfare payment are not sufficiently compelling alternatives to a career. Pay them at the level of a career and see if that changes the numbers - I feel like at least some people would be interested in that. (Say, median national income? Spitballing here)
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
In what way? Pay them a six figure salary to stay home with kids for a few years?
>seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work
Where would that money come from? How high would the taxes have to be? Why would anyone start a business to hire in that country with such a massive cost for them they can't afford?
The welfare state only works if it's a safety net, not a 1:1 replacement for working wages.
In the US you might need it to be a five figure salary, sure. 50k? We could probably figure out the math on it.
Working out the logistics of paying for it is another matter, but if it's too expensive then you can't really complain about the low birthrate - either the state pays or the people do for all that time spent on raising kids. People who rationally choose to skip that time to work or do other things need to be motivated somehow if you want the kids, right?
So ultimately it depends on how seriously you want to take the birthrate crisis. This is the simplest way I can think of to tackle the two income household obstacle though.
I know a fuckload of women who would happily bear children if you gave $15 an hour for 40 hours a week for it. The only thing stopping me personally from taking that deal is a lack of a uterus, and I don't even want to have kids.
Reagan spent years screaming about "Welfare queens" who were supposedly doing just that for a pittance in comparison, so it sure is funny how many people now insist that it can't even be possible, since so many people were so convinced it was happening for $400 a month in food stamps, at scale.
I also know a lot of women who wanted kids but couldn't afford it without, essentially, a tech industry husband. Or people like my sister, who has made raising kids her life's work since she was 16 but couldn't afford to have kids herself until she fell ass backwards into a nearly free house, from her now husbands family.
Everyone in my large friend group who wanted to start a family, literally wanted the traditional family structure and setup and "being a dad", had to wait a decade to get a home and a career that supported it. This includes the fact that having a child without good enough healthcare to support it or getting unlucky means medical bankruptcy.
It's not culture that people with lower understanding of finances and risk have kids still when having a kid is a serious drain on your finances. It's "duh".
If you want people who have an educated and mature understanding of risk to take that risk, it has to be worth it. Suck it up. You don't get to benefit from an uneducated populace anymore.
Unironically Mao/Nixon and Henry Kissenger almost put us into a hilarious world where we (the USA) would have "imported" ~10 million Chinese women. Mao unironically proposed this and his argument about why it would have hurt us is that they "have too many children!":
"Chairman Mao: (Laughing) Those are honest words.
Dr. Kissinger: This is our position.
Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)
Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.
Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter)
[Page 132]
Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it."
Yeah the world is in a 60 year trend in declining births. An app isn't going to fix anything
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
The idea is interesting, of course, but I think the user experience won't be much different from a classic dating app, plus it inevitably requires an analysis of many nuances
What annoys people about Singapore is that it's an incredibly right leaning society with single party rule and "outrageous" social policies like "get divorced, lose your home", "10 grams of meth and we'll hang you (and we mean it)". And yet it's incredibly successful, and the people there are happy.
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates
Most of the drop occurred in the late 50s to mid 60s. Fertility in the US peaked at over 3.5 births per woman in the 50s before falling below 2 by the late 60s. It then stabilized for 40 years and even recovered to the low to mid 2s in the 90s and 2000s before falling post-2008 from 2.2 to 1.7.
Humans are naturally polygamous like the other great apes and mammals. When men (as in, male humans) realised this, they concluded that women were entirely to blame for it and sought to control their behaviour. This eventually got woven into their religions and for some time women's behaviour was controlled, or at least became shameful and taboo. Many things have happened more recently:
* Feminism,
* Decline of religion,
* Rise of state and law, particularly around male responsibilities towards children,
* Effective contraception,
* Dating apps.
Take all of this together and we're basically reverting back to our natural polygamy, but without all the pregnancies.
The only new variable in the last century of humanity is birth control. All others (hypergamy, economic mobility, migration, etc.) are recurring and have not impacted birth rates significantly in the past.
Population density and infant mortality had changed a lot too in the last 100 years. Income disparities, working hours, and climate too in the last 50.
Trying to fix falling birth rates with an official government dating app shows they don't understand the problem in the slightest, as dating apps are one of the main causes of declining birth rates in the first place.
A reminder that Singapore has plenty of history with government-sponsored dating, notably the Social Development Unit (SDU), aka "Single, Desperate and Ugly".
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences (but they think they do), nor do the majority of preference categories actually matter.
This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
IMO the largest problem is that there is an enormous amount of friction to go from getting a match on an app to actually meeting them in real life. Which means it just doesn't happen that often. What we need is physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost. That eliminates the friction of actually seeing someone because they are already there in front of you.
This used to be the workplace: observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you. Are they kind? How do they treat others? Are they secure? Are they ambitious? Are they hardworking? What do they talk about on the lunch break?
Meeting people from dating apps is quite literally the opposite of that: one person at a time, extremely short period of time, they can pretend, no or little interactions with third parties (how they treat a waiter maybe).
I honestly believe that making workplace dating something frowned upon (or even a terminable offence sometimes) was a huge disservice to society. People spends most of their adult life going to work but are supposed to squeeze the search for a partner into the little time and energy that remains outside of work.
I think safety has also taken a back step in modern dating. Previously you could ask around what a person was like and like you said, observe them passively. Now you are meeting a total stranger, you don't know anyone they know or anything about them.
An awful person gets to just reset their reputation every time, and in turn, people assume the worst by default.
Isn't that always been the case for people you met at a bar/club/cafe?
I'm sure a lot of couples met through friends of friends but the date with someone you barely know has always been a thing, I believe.
As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.
When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.
Even "meeting at a bar" would usually have been among friend groups, not atomic individuals meeting in isolation.
Kind of but things were more local back then so degrees of separation were smaller.
In some ways it’s easier. In my 40s I was meeting ppl online and one mentioned that she knew my name, where I had gone to university, and from those starting points learned a lot about me. Not enough to sustain more than a few dates but at least she knew I was not a convicted mass killer. And nowadays reverse image search and such means you can scope out your prospective date’s background.
Around the same time I met my now wife online and it turns out I knew several of her neighbours (she knew them all), had visited some of them, yet she and I had never met. So community cred isn’t automatic.
And I have friends who met in a bar 30-odd years ago, both who were there alone. So…?
Clubs are still imo one of the best ways to meet people for all the reasons you give. You have at least one thing in common which is a conversation starter and there's opportunity to meet more people. Also the average person could stand to socialise with strangers more in person.
How do you speak over the loud music though?
You get closer, if necessary to the point your lips almost touch their face. What millions of people have done during decades. And that’s the point, yes.
LOL.
Just in case you were serious I think they meant clubs like a sewing circle, crown green bowling, tennis, the local brass band, civic action groups, etc. In other words associations of one kind or another, in tech. terms special interest groups.
Nightclubs are also pretty cool though. Especially ones that have chill-out areas a bit away from the music. But I'm biased as I live in Berlin at the moment.
Just be attractive though. Otherwise it's "eww women go to clubs to enjoy their hobbies, not to be approached by creepy men"
(I'm gay, but I listen to and observe a lot of straight people in their natural habitats).
Haha, yes. I just keep watching those discussions online it's really predictable how it would go.
The advice for some time was almost universally that one should "volunteer", join "hobby clubs", or even go do "women-centric activities" or even "women-centric events" and "feminist groups" to meet people. Often women would recommend that.
Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
The problem is people taking "Join a club" as meaning "The club is a source of women and nothing else"
Very dumb boys then go to the club meeting, immediately try to pick up women, and it doesn't work because that was not the recommendation.
You are supposed to get engaged with a club you care about, participate genuinely, meet new people and make new friendships, and like all of human history, that is very likely to randomly result in you finding someone you hit it off with.
Boys still tend to think they are trying to shotgun pickup lines as a good method.
Basically, the underlying problem is roughly the same in all those situations: You have to understand, respect, and treat the women in those groups the same way you treat anyone else. How often do you join a new tech related club and start hitting on the same sex members of that club for example?
You and the other replier are still pretending that this ridiculously horrible advice is defensible or justifiable by adding endless caveats, conditions and rationalisations to the recommendation.
Volunteering as way to eventually meet woman? It was a stupid idea 5 years ago, still is now.
The actual advice was to widen your social circle and become more well rounded individual. It is not surprising that a heterosexual guy who socializes exclusively in male only group will be able to pair with males only. That creates a situation in which you can create coupling like normal people do. Which incidentally did not used to be "hit at random girl you just encountered".
> Well, naturally the people doing those activities wouldn't enjoy being approached, and you'd have this parallel online universe where women complain about people approaching them in hobby groups.
In here, you are avoiding the whole "observing a big group of people over long periods of time when they don't pretend to charm you" thing. Which is the core thing that started the whole thread.
> not used to be "hit at random girl you just encountered".
Heard that one too, and the corresponding "eww he only pretended to be my friend because he wanted to make a pass at me".
Part of the effect of spending time around other people is that you get to know them, discover which ones aren't creepy, and develop connections with them. And, over the age of 25, the personal connection starts to matter more and more for people than "Are they hot or not?"
step out for a smoke
I'm way too late to edit this post so I should be clear: I did mean "doing stuff" clubs not "loud music and dancing" clubs, though I'm sure they can work for some people too.
Also I wouldn't recommend joining clubs _just_ to try and meet potential partners. You should join a club that's for something you're actually interested in, if you would leave the club just because you failed to meet someone then it was a bad fit from the start.
I have the inverse experience - the last thing I would want is to hook up with some random in a club, I’m here for the music and dancing, please don’t shout in my ear on the dance floor or pull some other weird move
There was a point in relatively recent history where, once people met in the workplace, the woman would be expected to leave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_bar
Exactly. Using a dating app is just asking for being lied to.
Also, the whole concept of finding your significant other by ONLY going out on dates is... kinda broken in concept? It's not really that hard to pretend to be someone else for a few hours a week.
Indeed, a lot of people treat meeting a partner as a step on some planned self transformational journey, where they try and manifest "the new me" .. a recipe for misleading the other party.
That's literally the first time I've heard of that. I think that in reality there are not a lot of people who think as you describe, and I believe the most likely explanation for your conclusion is that you're in a bubble.
Same with getting a new job, moving house or having a child. Any "big commitment move" involves long term hopes and intentions that are often fanciful.
It's just another example of social change which was made for good reasons but has resulted in negative outcomes. Companies wanted to reduce the risk of accusations of workplace misconduct in the wake of #metoo. This reduced misconduct, but at massive social cost.
Another example is that most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services. Now survival requires two incomes instead of one. It was a massive net loss to society, but we also agree that women should be free to work if they would like, without barriers. We see similar things with women becoming educated. The more educated women become, the fewer children they have. That's really bad for society, but we also want women to be free to become as educated as they like.
Sadly I see no easy solutions here because it requires weighing individual and societ-wide rights. Companies aren't going to risk higher rates of misconduct to benefit society broadly. These are collective action problems, and unless we find ways of individualising the problem, they're only going to get worse.
Do you also think of all the things you could do if you didn't have to sleep with such seriousness? Unless you actually don't think women deserve those rights, why even spend time pondering such things? I don't go around annoyed I can't read books instead of sleep because I'll always need sleep.
>It was a massive net loss to society
Yeah if you totally ignore the unprecedented crazy high standard of living developed over trillions of work-hours.
This is easily refuted. [In 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure. Today is it 63.3%.](https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending....) In 1950, 87% of family households were married couples, and only 21% of married women participated in the labour force. Today, 62% of cohabiting couples have both partners working. Households are earning more, but prices rose almost commensurately. If you were correct, the proportion spent on necessities would be far lower.
I will concede that luxury goods are far cheaper, and perhaps one could make an argument that cheap TVs are a reasonable concession for expensive food and housing. I would not agree with that.
You didn't compare apples to apples, housing in 1950 was radically different than housing in 2026. Homes today are significantly larger, better insulated, vastly more robust construction codes, more technology incorporated (not least of which is air conditioning, which was just starting to be a notable thing in the 50s, didn't become truly mainstream until the 70s).
Real estate is a very local thing, so I can't speak to your area, but 1950s equivalent homes in my area are still impressively cheap. Why? People aren't interested in a 900 to 1000sqft home with no central AC. There's cities in this country that will give a run down property like that to you for free if you agree to live in that little town for a certain number of years, or at least there used to be. Those things come and go.
Also, because that's not what they want, the neighborhood becomes a meth lab. But if people actually wanted those homes that issue would resolve itself.
The data doesn't all support this common misconception. Really, it's an intentional deception on the part of many people who know better.
Homes built today are being built with all corners cut, into a market that doesn't seem to care as long as there is a house. They may be big, but they're bigger than people actually need and there aren't any smaller ones, so that's a bit like saying phone users don't want headphone jacks. Better insulated, yes, probably. But was that ever a huge issue?
Some reasons why your dismissal may not hold up:
1. In many jurisdictions, many of the homes built in the mid-century can’t be built anymore due to modern code and zoning ordinances.
2. Building the same 1950s home, if it’s legal at all, is more expensive than it was back then. Materials and labor are more expensive.
3. Air conditioning is more of a necessity as global temperatures increase and as employment centers move south. If I can’t get a job in Detroit but I can get one in Arizona, then yes I need air conditioning.
4. Consumers are generally not in control of what housing is available on the market. Builders don’t build homes for lower middle class people because they’re not profitable. Nobody is forcing them to build the kind of homes the lower middle class can afford.
I don't disagree with your stats but the jump from "households have to work more" to "society is worse off" is a personal value judgement. Seriously would you rather spawn as a random person in the 1950s than random person now?
The housing is better. Square footage per person for example has approximately doubled.
Also, in Chart 1 on page 6, "expenditure share for non-necessities" in the US goes from about 32.5% in 1950 to fully 50% in 2002-2003.
It would be nice if you told us the page from which you got your, "in 1950, food, transport, and housing consumed 70.3% of median working household expenditure." Searching for your text verbatim fails, which is not particularly surprising because PDFs cannot be searched reliably.
Also because 1950 is considered by some to be a particularly prosperous time in the US, some might accused you of cherry picking. For example, in 1918-1919, the "expenditure share for non-necessities" was about 22%.
That standard of living is more due to work-hours put in by people with a much lower standard of living. Often from what is sometimes condescendingly called "third world countries".
That's not how economics works. Everyone pretty much everywhere throughout history has worked, they've worked because if you don't work it eventually means you starve, so people in less wealthy countries didn't just start working since 1990. And yet, since 1990 the number living in extreme poverty globally fell from 2.3 billion to roughly 831 million, the big majority of those in sub-Sahara Africa.
https://ourworldindata.org/end-progress-extreme-poverty
Random citation, I think the situation is actually a little better than they do, but that'll do since they present some data in an easy to read way.
The standard of living went up because productivity and value creation went up significantly. That's the only way that happens.
>most economists admit that as women entered the workforce en masse, prices settled higher for the same goods and services.
Most economists emphatically do not admit or maintain that.
Most might believe however that compensation settled slightly lower because the economy's ability to create jobs lagged slightly behind the increase in the supply of workers.
#meetoo was about abuse and not wanting to pay the social cost of that. Complaining about it and stopping it is a social good. There is massive social cost to abuse, even if abusers and their friends like to pretend otherwise. There is no wide social benefit of males being able to abuse those around - whether women or other men.
Somehow your weighting of social weighing individual vs society-wide rights ends up with very self serving "other peoples rights are hindrance, I should be in positions to do whatever to them, that is social good".
I don't think you read my comment before you replied (or the comment I replied to). I encourage you to take another look. It's hard to meaningfully respond to a non-sequitur.
To reiterate, the social cost discussed is the inability for people to form relationships at work. I acknowledge all of the costs of people being harassed at work. That's bad. I hope you read this comment and understand that I am not disagreeing with you.
I did read it and my response was not non-sequitur.
1.) Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
2.) Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
3.) Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
4.) This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
You continue to soapbox without addressing the content of this discussion. I'll try one more time.
> Meetoo did not meaningfully changed peoples ability to "form relationships" in work.
You are confidently incorrect. [People widely reported a stifling effect on office relationships.](https://legacy.vault.com/blogs/workplace-issues/2018-vault-o...) More than 1 in 4 said #metoo made them less accepting of workplace romance. 43% considered relationships between workers at different levels unacceptable - 15% higher after #metoo.
> Meetoo did not even meaningfully changed ability to abuse, abusers even had their own backslash.
This has nothing to do with what we are discussing. I understand you have strong feelings about this but I need you to understand that from the bottom of my heart, I do not care about your feelings.
> Pre-metoo, while people sometimes formed relationships at workplace, it was not the primary way to form relationships. Plus, companies did not wanted the drama from predictable breakups anyway (which is the primary source of issues with workplace dating).
No one claimed it was the primary mode of forming relationships.
> This is triple funny on HN, where most men work in male dominated or male only teams.
This is one step removed from, "men are stupid, am I right, ladies?" Your disdain for men, the users on Hacker News, or whatever villain you've concocted in your mind prevents you from having a normal conversation like a normal person.
This has been a thoroughly uninteresting waste of time. I suspect you became lost on your way to some protest or /r/Politics.
Workplace used to be where people mostly met their partners? It occasionally happened, but I do not think it was THE place for it. The place for it was that people socialized in person and your partner was part of extended friends group or otherwise originated as acquittance from some activity.
> This used to be the workplace ... making workplace dating something frowned upon
because the owner of the business do not want relationship frictions to affect people's work.
That has nothing to do with it. It's due to legal liability.
No, that became a norm in management thinking back when HR was just a back-office role processing time sheets and punch-cards.
Even today, the primary concern when I'm talking to other managers dealing with job applications from family members (including kids) and even friends of existing employees is "How does the existing employee react if it doesn't work out and we have to fire their spouse/kid/best friend?"
Better to avoid that drama entirely. (edit: EASIER to avoid that drama, I should say, but perhaps not always better)
And if you don't think management isn't at least 60% drama control between team members you've never been in management of a diverse set of people, which is why the best engineer, the best electrician, etc doesn't necessarily make the best manager, etc. Different skill sets, different universe of concerns.
No, sexual harassment laws in the 80s and 90s changed the workplace dynamic because the company is liable for the behavior of their employees.
Yet another example of capitalism eroding the social fabric.
Kinda funny that the three YCombinator startups I worked at had founders who hired their significant others.
Capitalism for thee but not for me.
> the three YCombinator startups I worked at had founders who hired their significant others.
Often, this is done for tax reasons.
I think that varies by experience. I had a few matches back in the day that took forever to get to a physical meet and greet but most folks weren't there to relive the AIM experience. I met my current partner of 10+ years within maybe six messages between the both of us? And I'd say less than a dozen messages was my median before we either met up or one of us unmatched
I knew a lot of dudes who just agonized over what to say next, as if there was an optimal response or something. Turns out, treating the person on the other side like a real human you want to get to know because you plan on soending a lot of time together is a much better frame than 'How do I convince this stranger that I'm so super cool or hot'
If you can get to that point, it doesn't matter what space you end up in. Like Frank Herbert once said, a place is only a place
> physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost
Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.
I disagree but a major factor is attraction and incentives. Last year i was dating and could fill every day with a date. Keeping an initial convo that was personal but keeping it short hit the sweetspot and it was remarkable how little friction there was. This was most pronounced with one specific app though.
few years prior to that i was also in the dating game and it was a world of difference. Not only did i have notably fewer matches those same matches were very difficult to translate into real world contact. it really felt like i was both less appealing and was also fighting the apps trying to keep me in their pool of potential payers.
Part of this can be attributed to me changing but part of this also to the incentives of the apps. If you could keep people matched up mostly within their bounds of non superficialy visible compatibility (life goals, kids, desired living location, etc) and also within their league as far as attractiveness goes to put it crudely (Don't have to be scanning faces the behaviour of the other sex does give these algorithms the required clues so good profiles do have an advantage) with no incentives to keep people in the cycle....
Then I think people would be remarkably quick to go out. Much of it can be boiled down to quantity and the same goes for active dates.
> What we need is physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost.
Does Singapore lack these spaces? The last time I was there I saw lots of people hanging out in hawker centers, malls, and their pubic gardens.
Singapore isnt exactly a cheap place to have a lot of hobbies or have anythihg at all outside of a job.
Malls are very much illusion of socialization since businesses there have no incentive to keep you around - spend the money and go away.
> This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
You're assuming that the people on dating apps want to form long-lasting relationships.
A lot of people (both men and women) use them for hookups, validation, entertainment, free meals, etc. Most of the people using them for these purposes care far less about compatibility because they don't plan on spending the rest of their lives with anyone they interact with.
This is why matchmakers are actually a good idea. You need experienced grownups who understand what kinds of people are compatible.
I'm curious how much feedback traditional matchmakers actually get about whether their matches were long-term good or not. It seems like a "wicked problem" in which any feedback is delayed and unclear, which means even people with experience might just be developing superstitious habits/generalizations rather than truly learning from success and failure.
Why wouldn't they get feedback? They generally live next to each other as the marriage progresses. If anything too much blame: the relative of the matchmaker in the marriage blames the matchmaker for all the flaws and difficulties that everyone finds in their spouse as time goes on.
That means the only feedback you get is crazy relatives yelling at you, which probably isn't that useful.
Most people won't go out of their way to provide detailed feedback.
There's an asterisk on this, which is that the traditional approach would often be hired by and answerable to the parents, who would not necessarily want a love match but one of appropriate social and economic status.
It still happens that way today in certain communities.
"You need experienced grown ups" has been true for a lot of problems that we've very successfully automated.
And problems we think we've automated but actually made worse with automation.
Reality check: considering the domestic violence rates, no, they did not understood who is compatible.
That is caused by the normalization of domestic violence in those cultures.
It can also be a strong compatiblity signal. For example a person who likes to travel and a person who likes to stay home are not going to be happy together.
What would really be good is if more couples went through premarital counseling to help them figure out if they have long-term compatibility or if they are just currently infatuated with each other. Infatuation can go on for years by the way, with the conflict only surfacing after there are kids and then divorce gets messy.
A personal anecdote: I got married in Church and you must take a short pre-marital class, which is of course religious-centered but the dude who ran it was lay. I don't think it's particularly useful in general and I'm not very religious but I think mine was.
Among various things they made us fill out a "values wheel", a kind of spider web diagram with various dimensions like family, status, career, friendship, education, money, kids, religion, etc..
And then the guy pointed out if the wheels didn't look mostly similar it would be better to have a discussion nowz before getting married, rather than after.
One couple found out they had vastly different values, ignored it, and broke up within one year of marriage. Clearly problems pre-existed and counseling might have helped avoiding the mess.
That's a difference in extraversion levels. A big five personality test is all you need to determine compatibility of personalities
My mom was a marriage councilor. Her marriage and the subsequent divorce were out of this world bad. She pretty much managed to hit almost every stereotypical negative behavior trait.
In general, my experience with counseling, therapy, social workers et al. were that you might be better off spending the money on a rollecoaster ride. At least it's guaranteed to end.
Especially the social workers. I have an impression that their exams have an inverted grading scale: you need to score below a certain threshold to graduate.
excellent hacker news comment. trite, condescending to the world in general, smug and self assured, while also probably wrong. keep up the great work
It greatly turned me off but then again as Dang has stated in the past, we need some of those to start up the discussion.
Just removing the "another five'll be along tomorrow" effect of the way most dating apps work might help.
25 years married, so pardon my knowledge of modern dating being what I've heard on social media (which is always from people complaining about it, of either gender) as I'm not on any!
As I understand it, for a lot of young men, one of their preferences for settling down is that their partner's list of ex-partners is not longer than their own. (If so, there's is no point debating the gender-political rights or wrongs of their preferences because you're not going to be able to argue someone into falling in love or wanting to marry someone.) On swipe-dating apps, that creates an incentive for neither party to settle down. One party is so successful that the app keeps signalling they should keep their options open (here's more matches, why settle for this one). The other finds that matches pass their visible preferences for dating but not their invisible preferences for settling down with (because not being too successful at the dating game was one of their hidden preferences). The vitality of the market for dating kills the market for marriage.
I have met very few men for whom prospective partners' body counts is a red line. It might be a preference, but it's always in context of the larger picture.
I think there has been much topical research on this now, and from what I can glean, there are at least two forces working at the same time.
1. Gendered preferences didn't change, but society did. Women still prefer men who earn more than them (by a very wide margin). This would be okay if we still lived in the 1940s, but childless women outearn men now in most metro cities. Sometimes by a wide margin. Women are graduating in high-paying professions at ratios of 60:40, 70:30, and even higher, meaning this problem is getting much worse. Increasingly, the majority of women are focused on the top 10-20% of men who outearn them, to the exclusion of all other men. This is compounded because incomes are just one of many selectors. There is also height (which remains a surprisingly strong preference for women), attractiveness, many personality traits, social standing, wealth, political affiliation, etc.
2. Dating apps have made the above exponentially worse. It's very easy for a woman of average attractiveness (I say this in a academic sense, not derogatorily) to only swipe right on the most attractive men. Those men are perfectly happy to have a lot of casual sex with said women, but would never consider them for marriage. This has warped the perception of their "league." Many of these women end up 40 and alone and deeply unhappy. Or they "settle" for a man of average attractiveness and income and resent him.
This is almost impossible to untangle. We don't want women to be less educated, or earn less. We don't want them to feel like they're "settling." At the same time, there are many amazing men out there in their league, and they could have a happy marriage. I applaud Singapore trying something, because the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people.
>the future of the West looks like a lot of angry, bitter, single, childless, lonely people
In the short term; longer term that culture will die out and the future will be evangelicals, ultra-orthodox Jews, the Amish and whatever other high-fertility subgroups migrate in in large enough number. Natural selection applies to culture just like it applies to genes, and cultures that don't produce enough children will be replaced by those that do.
You assume culture is unchangeable, like race. Right now their higher fertility seems to be balanced out by people leaving them, and this has been true for a while.
Religiosity is around 30-50% heritable (compared to 50-80% for IQ), and social conservatism is around 40-60% heritable. If the leaver culture remains low fertility, the personality traits that encourage leaving will be selected against.
I find this oddly comforting :)
All of those cultures involve restricting women's rights.
Single women are basically the happiest demographic category.
The way our society developed with the immense pressure on women to marry and general lack of autonomy led to the situation that given a choice they would often prefer to avoid this.
Isn’t it the other way around, ie that you might be compatible with just anyone is more likely to be the idea of a naive 22-year old?
As you grow older you’re going to have your own values, boundaries, non-negotiables. Thinking that you can just jump into dating and “open-mind” the singles scene is a huge sign of someone who hasn’t fully developed their sense of self just yet.
Wrong, a relationship that will last over time has to presume those values and boundaries will change. What is non-negotiable for a 20 year old is almost always not the same for the same person at 30 and then 40 and on and on.
Sure there may be some things that don't change (religious preference, etc.) but they are fewer than most people think. And like OP said, compatibility is often not a checklist or algorithm to maximize
Huh? Why wouldn’t you want to maximize compatibility considering how expensive divorces can be, both financially and mentally?
Humans, no matter how unique and self-important they might be, can certainly be broken down into personality traits to come up with a model that projects the likelihood of a lasting marriage. It likely won’t be perfect or precise, but it can be done, so I’m not sure what your point even is. As people age, it’s just the fleeting expressions of themselves that whither away, but they have a core personality founded on their values and goals, which stand the test of time. That’s not the sort of thing that you can just mix with someone else who has a different set of values and goals.
They probably can't, because there are a lot of cultural/financial factors as well. Pure personality compatibility isn't the only factor.
Not in my experience. If anything, I don't see much or any difference between 50 and 30 y.o. profiles on dating sites (I haven't looked at anyone younger or older than that).
No matter how old, most people have zero introspection or analytical ability, and even if they do, they would not put it on display because that would put them in the "weird" category.
A typical women's profile will differ by country though. This is how most of this stuff looks:
* South-East Asia: women describe themselves as "simple", "down to earth", "family oriented".
* English-speaking Africa: "god-fearing", "faithful".
* Western Europe: "like to travel", "love animals", "live off the land".
Sometimes with a mix of trivia, like whether they are divorced, how many children, smoking cigarettes.
I don't really know what makes people match, but if I have to guess, people go by non-verbal cues they find the the pictures. People reveal a lot about themselves in they way they dress, where and how they take the pictures.
Indeed, it seems modern dating is more about the interrelations between different personality disorders.
Yeah but they now have all those interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. tied to an email address once they forward that information on.
If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway. And in Singapore, we have pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
So not much of an extra loss in privacy.
For anyone who has spent a lot of time in Singapore (I lived there for 5 years, from 2012 - 2017) - the following snippet isn't doing justice:
> pervasive CCTV and face recognition.
I'm willing to wager there is no country on the planet that comes within an order of magnitude in terms of their awareness of precisely where any given resident is to within a few meters.
In fact - I think we would struggle to find a country within 2 orders of magnitude - the combination of incredibly high technology, super density, lack of much in the way of "countryside" (and the jungles/parks have lots of camera's near the entrances) and a general societal consensus that omnipresent surveillance is worthwhile exchange for the world's safest country all come together to create a system in which you don't need to worry about obscuring who you are dating with/sleeping with/associating with.
The Government already knows, always has known.
Israel (the part of it that is occupied by Palestinians)? That's where all the surveillance companies (which are mostly Israeli) try out their new tech before selling it to the rest of the world.
The UK? It doesn't have a special relationship with surveillance companies, it just has a population that seems to like being surveilled and always votes for more.
I would bet Taiwan could compete. In the news, I've frequently seen reports of some delinquent doing something bad and the police are able to use the security cameras to track the person down, even across several cities.
> If you have a phone (or other device that connects to mobile networks), your government knows your daily routine anyway.
Because of this reason, quite a lot of people
- don't actually own a mobile phone,
- formally own a mobile phone, but only carry it around if the likelihood is very high that they will need it
- if they need to be available via mobile phone for job reasons (and are thus survived), they prefer to use a feature phone or if it must be a smart phone, they don't install any additional apps or remove the additional surveillance functions from the operating system as far as easily possible
Yes, those weirdos exist. They don't seem to be a large part of the population in most places.
(I use 'weirdo' as a technical term here. These people have my sympathies; I just mean that they are far from the average or normal person.)
Define “quite a lot” here?
Right, so if your hobby is overthrowing the government it’s probably better to put that on your Tinder profile only.
Smell is most important for most people ...
Maybe you could get a proxy for that using DNA?
Sure, but you have to live in the reality of people's irrationality.
There's no practical way to discover someone's "secret true preferences", baring seeing them enraptured by someone who happens to meet them.
I'd argue that in many cases it's even the opposite. I've not just never had any interest in a partner that shares all my interests, but actively avoided it. Some shared outlook on things, sure, but I don't want (and have found) someone who will talk to me about entirely different things than the ones I spend the rest of my time on.
> “We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
What signals do you suggest? Regardless of whether it's feasible to put them in the dating app.
The OkCupid guys figured out that it was (potential) that best predicted stable relationships and everything else was just a proxy for that feature. Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income. Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
As somebody who met my spouse on there, I can confirm that their algorithm was amazing back in the day.
Though it definitely wasn’t income proxies as the only criteria, it probably was a decent part..
I also met a couple other people that I had good relationships with on that site. All in the 90%+ range of their compatibility scores. There weren’t many people in those tiers for me though. Any time a 90% match appeared was a big deal, there were only ever a few!
Anyone I met in the 80% range was usually also pretty great
Go much below their 80% match score and meeting in person didn’t usually go so well.
> Similar/compatible education level? Just a proxy for income.
This clearly does not hold in Germany. There, you often can earn much more money with a vocational training than with a humanities degree, in particular in the current messed up job market.
On the other hand, people with different education levels often have very different psychometric traits (similarity here is very important for the relationship to work).
> Similar/compatible hobbies? Guess what, also a proxy for income!
There do exist some hobbies that are somewhat correlated to social classes (think of who plays soccer/tennis/golf (replace "soccer" by a different sport if you live in the USA)), even though these associations are much less pronounced than in former days.
On the other hand, for example, a person who loves sports climbing or parachuting will likely have very different psychometric traits from people who are into stamp collecting.
Thus, in many cases, hobbies are thus rather a proxy for some psychometric traits.
Or income is a proxy for, say, intelligence.
> Or income is a proxy for, say, intelligence.
It clearly isn't.
In Germany, there is a reason why the term "akademisches Prekariat" (academic precariat/precarity) exists, meaning that people who stay in academia are often in a precarious job situation and are paid quite badly. But these people are very intelligent and well-educated.
It is, if you define intelligence as "how to do well in life" and not as "here are 5 ways how Germany could have won the war in 1943".
> It is, if you define intelligence as "how to do well in life"
"Intelligence" is a term that is defined very precisely in psychology (psychometrics):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
Was my point really that hard to follow? I'm not saying "intelligence" in the strict psychological definition of the word. I mean, perhaps, the thing they claim was the independent variable was in fact a proxy for something else I hypothecated as "intelligence", by which I really meant some as yet undefined thing that on average leads to higher incomes, which could be intelligence in the colloquial sense, because that sort of has that trait and is pretty influential in attractiveness.
> really meant some as yet undefined thing that on average leads to higher incomes, which could be intelligence in the colloquial sense
What you are looking for are "dark triad traits", i.e.
- machiavellianism,
- (sub-clinical) narcissism, and
- (sub-clinical) psychopathy.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
These are quite correlated to higher incomes and higher-status jobs.
That doesn't really contradict what I said. This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it
> This definition of intelligence can be useful in some contexts, but on average neither women nor capital are particularly attracted to people who have it[.]
This is actually a reformulation of the point that I made in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920421 that income is not a proxy for intelligence. :-)
I think those things have a lot to do with long term compatibility, the issue is they aren't at all stable for a 22yo and liable to change in 2 years. Those things are pretty stable for a 30 or 35yo.
> This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course they do. What you're probably getting it is they have nothing to do with attraction. That's a completely different thing. But you need all three of the following for a long term relationship:
1. You are attracted to them,
2. They are attracted to you,
3. You are broadly compatible with each other.
From a male perspective, there are tons of people who satisfy 1 only. Far fewer satisfy 1 and 2, and fewer still satisfy all 3.
What do you think mature compatibility signals are?
A response with "cute" as the first sentence is a strong signal of its own.
...because "chemical compatibility" is SOLELY detected & managed by the HLA system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_leukocyte_antigen
I write this in caps because people do not understand & believe. Its this part of your immune system that makes you high on someone. Then, far behind that, come whatever preferences/hobbies/specs.
And there is no dating app on earth built around this,because you cant - it would involve taking a genetic fingerprint from every user to build this metric)
(Source: Been in dating business for several years)
If things are that simple, how do you explain slow crushes? When you meet someone and initially don't feel any attraction, but when you repeatedly interact with them and learn more about them, you start enjoying their company more and looking forward to being with them and at some point you realize you're in love?
This exists and, from both my own experience and that of others, is not uncommon.
Both can coexist. Smell/compatibility might not be noticeable until you’re already initiating the romantic relationship (kissing, intercourse, sweat smell).
Can we add to that the effects of the birth control pill? Women on the pill have a different attraction profile than without the pill. Their body thinks they’re pregnant and they settle for men with lower testosterone.
Many women report that after stopping taking the pill they no longer like the smell of their husbands.
Someone hasn’t watched High Fidelity ;)
Enlighten us
> neither do people know their preferences
Some people do, and have been wisely guided to know what to look for.
> Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences
Scott Alexander disagrees:
> https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-d...
(see also the follow-up article https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...).
Important quote from this article concerning your point:
"Here are some things that are so obvious they sound like cheating:
Unless you’re bisexual, you probably care if someone is a man or a woman
Many people care whether their partner prefers polyamorous or monogamous relationships.
Many people want a partner of the same religion and level of religiosity.
Many people want a partner who matches their preference about whether to have children, and how many to have.
…because in practice, people end up very closely matched on some criteria
Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans
Only about 3% of high school dropouts marry a spouse with a college degree, compared to more than 80% of PhDs.
90% of whites marry other whites; 80% of blacks marry other blacks.
Husbands and wives’ social classes correlate at about 0.8
If 96% of Democrats are marrying non-Republicans, it seems like Democrats must have a strong preference against marrying Republicans, and ought to value having information about someone’s politics before they date them. Realistically, this underestimates the level of political sorting; I don’t think I’d be a good match for an extremely woke person, even if we were both technically “Democrats”."
---
> Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
Of course your claim "'We like the same things!' is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…" is correct, but I am very certain that there exist quite a lot of interests, hobbies and objectives that require a partner that is "compatible" with these (and in most cases, people who have such interests, hobbies and objectives know this very well). This obviously does not mean that the partner has to have the same hobbies and interests. :-)
For example,
- there do exist good reasons why in university time, sports climbing was basically a dating market
- a person who has hobbies that are associated with semi-legal activities (which clearly does not mean that he/she does anything illegal!) like hacking in the classical sense will likely not be a good fit for a spouse who works in law enforcement
- a person who is a climate activist will likely be a bad fit for a spouse who works in the oil/gas industry
- a person who is very into internet privacy topics (think cypherpunk) will likely not be compatible with a social media influencer
> Only about 4% of marriages are between Democrats and Republicans
Part of that might be because only 4.2% of the population of the world lives in a country that has both democrats and republicans.
Every country has comparable parties and usually a few more, such as a left-wing party, a libertarian party, and a "green" party.
is nobody going to just say it out loud? we've all seen the online dating statistics: when women have unlimited choice, they are extremely picky. whether one thinks that is good or bad is irrelevant. but the observed data is very clear. it has a lot less to do with shared interests than society has led us to believe. Jeremy Meeks has entered the chat.
In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
> given the social cost of divorce
I think they're more concerned about their fertility rate and labor force. A 0.87 total fertility rate for 2025 [1] is pretty bad.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/singapore-low-fertili...
Western governments don't seem at all concerned about this, unfortunately. They no longer represent the people, they represent the economy. And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand. Culture, stability, safety, happiness, long-term prosperity and survival be damned.
>importing millions of unskilled adult migrants
There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work.
Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.
Also, government incentives to have children usually stimulates immigrants and poor people anyway, if your argument is purely ethnoracial. You may as well take the 23-year-old Indian or Algerian dude. There is very little the government can do to make a white couple in Connecticut have babies.
>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
False. We have unknown numbers of illegal immigrants being ushered in by governments every day; rampant fraud by foreigners, especially students, working in unskilled positions for cash or using a friend's ID; and we have many "skilled" migrants with rubbish qualifications that reveal themselves to be a sham the moment they go to work (potentially at great cost or risk to others). Don't tell me we aren't importing unskilled foreigners when almost every Uber and delivery driver I've had for the last 15 years has been an Indian.
Absolutely no actual Westerner is making the arguments that you have, by the way. You have revealed yourself as a foreigner trying to subvert our way of life. We don't care about a baby's "lag time", we love our children and couldn't care less if economic metrics don't. We certainly don't believe we "may as well" take in millions of Indians or Algerians to meet arbitrary economic goals rather than maintaining a harmonious and prosperous homeland for our White children. You cannot put a price on that.
> Don't tell me we aren't importing unskilled foreigners when almost every Uber and delivery driver I've had for the last 15 years has been an Indian.
Indian people are the richest ethnic group in the US.
Maybe your anecdotes and perceptions aren't the sum total of reality
How is that related to my observation?
>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
Well, there's at least one getting ready to send them back.
https://www.restorebritain.org.uk/pp_mass_deportations_legit...
Illegal immigrants don't count, that's a law enforcement issue. The counterexample to "there is no country where murder is legal" is not a link to murder stats.
>There is no Western country importing unskilled immigrants.
That was exactly what govs did here in western europe for our mines (to strikebreak) and what they do for harbour workers and few other industries still. It also incidentally makes up most of the migrants coming in even if they aren't technically imported. Sufficient open doors, incentives and looking the other way to form the expectation of likely settlement ends up amounting to the same though.
>The "yield" from crying babies is not 100%. Some will die before their productive years, some will succumb to disabilities, addictions, delinquency, or simply choose not to study and work. Importing an immigrant cuts away all that "shrinkage", at zero cost to the receiving country (their country of birth bore that cost). It's such a good deal it's a no brainer, basically like planting a tree that grows money. Not to mention it's immediate. Crying babies have a 18-22 year lag time.
I can only feel utter disgust at that kind of rethoric. The idea that a state works for it's citizens and a nationstate advances it's nation(s) is anathema replaced with treating people like fungibles economic tokens.
It also doesn't hold up since the lifetime contribution of your average non-eu migrant ends up negative in more expansive studies. (With extreme variance between origins.)
What's next? Are we going to have shortsighted economists pushing citizens to emigrate again when they don't fill their desired economic roles (like the UK did during windrush times) and replace from abroad to maximise their average economic output?
Believe me, if you ask the locals there they would mostly say the same thing about their government too.
In Singapore?
I think it is hard to find many places right now in today's environment where people feel their government look after their interests. But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...
At the top of my head the only places I can think of where citizens get a comparably good deal are Switzerland, Dubai, Norway maybe Monaco (don't actually know on this one).
Most countries don't import (and naturalize) as many foreigners while expecting the locals to serve national service. There's also this quip from a minister some time ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37627269
> But you can definitely do a lot worse than what citizens of Singapore actually get...
People who have a pronounced anti-surveillance stance will strongly object this claim.
It's sad and hard to admit that we're shaped by our government and the result is 1984-ugly.
The same immigrants that started 50% of all American unicorns?
People forget that e.g. Andy Grove, Intel founder, was a refugee from the Nazis.
And Elon Musk is an illegal immigrant from South Africa.
And importantly because a lot of the opposition to immigrants is generally racial, Indian founders have founded something like 20% of all unicorns in the US while being only 1.5% of the population.
Unicorns that are now destroying America, its democracy and threated to take rest of the world along. So, it might not be all that great argument.
You think successful tech companies are destroying America?
There are really fringe perspectives out there that imagine capitalism as a living entity of which we individual humans are simply parts of the whole. Governments that represent the economy over the people are exactly what you'd expect if that were true.
> And the economy is far more interested in importing millions of unskilled adult migrants from developing countries who are immediately eligible for debt, rent, mortgages, and low-paying jobs to prop up the GDP, rather than a crying baby that will leech on public services for 18 years beforehand.
This is such a wrong idea about immigration and the economy and how it grows that it's almost more funny than sad.
No Western government is growing its economy through sectors primarily staffed with low wage workers. The US, for example has seen much of its growth in the tech sector. And as it's had huge numbers of immigrants to meet the demand caused by tech growth, real wages in that sector have risen for nearly a decade. And they outpace wage growth in many other sectors over that time.
But regardless of that, when an economic sector grows it's able to convert human productivity into returns beyond the pay of those humans. And often that growth allows the return rate over productivity to increase over time, making it more attractive for a business to hire more and raise wages. In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses. That's worse than communism
>In such a market, when a population doesn't grow, there needs to be workers from either outside the country or imported in. You can't just have mandated degrowth of growing businesses.
It's not mandated degrowth, it's natural. The people do not exist, no government is mandating that. You do not just get to import millions of foreigners to grow your slop app.
I would far sooner have natural highs and lows in economic metrics as our population naturally adjusts to its environment than to have a corporatist multiethnic hellscape that holds "line must go up" as its founding truth. My children deserve a homeland, not an arbitrary economic zone surrounded by strangers in which to pay taxes.
Mandated or not, degrowth of businesses would be disastrous for the people of any country. Your children won't have much of a future in your homeland if there are no economic opportunities for them when they are adults. They might even leave the homeland for good finding those opportunities elsewhere and becoming immigrants themselves. A tale as old as time for nearly every country whose economy hits the toilet the way you think the government should force it to
What aspect of that do you want them to be concerned about? The bigger concern was population growth, it is nearly impossible for living standards to keep rising if the population is growing exponentially - at some point the number of new mouths overwhelmed the ability to produce food and some sort of underclass has to form. We need at least stabilisation at some point and it seems the easiest way to achieve that is to wobble between growth and decay.
We have all the tools for population decline to work out fine. The economy is run mainly by capital and it seems like we're decoupling military power from number of soldiers.
If they're concerned about fertility rate and labor force only, then they haven't put even a modicum of thought into this, as nuclear families have significantly better outcomes than single parents. It affects everything from employment outcomes to criminal rates and more.
So, I think I'd need to see some evidence they're that stupid, or this is kind of an insane claim. Like, what are you basing the idea on that they just don't give a shit if the children they bring into the world are even useful citizens?
This is an insane leap of logic
Almost as insane as assuming a government only coldly cares about bodies and not citizens.
It's under 0.8 in 2026 as their birth numbers declined by 12% in Q1. Doesn't really matter right now as they should be able to keep importing from the sinosphere for another 15-20 years.
> Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.
what do you mean? if you stop opening the app, they were not successful. any seas founders here who want their users to stop using the service?
Tinder doesn’t know if you stopped using it because you found a partner they recommended, found a partner in some other way, got frustrated and gave up trying, or got frustrated and tried a different app.
Also they won’t know who you started dating. It’s most likely not the last person you matched with or messaged. So any training data will probably be incredibly noisy, because romantic compatibility is not something that happens in the app.
Why wouldn't they? In this day and age, if we're them, I'd be buying all the third party advertising data I could, and correlate users in order to find the answers to your questions, so I know who to serve which advertisments to. Girlfriend posting angry things about boyfriend to Instagram? Perfect time to drop an ad for her to come back to Tinder.
I guess OP was using the user centric approach of measuring success, however naive or ir realistic it is nowadays.
That's the problem: ad based apps want to keep you there, not solve your problems.
I thought about a dating app where you pay for entry and that's it. Then the incentive is that you don't need it anymore ASAP, because the more time you spend there, the more costs.
Theres a network problem, where it must be high quality, successful, and with lots of people before people are willing to pay. Maybe it would need to start with a free trial in a small region to get some traction before, and rolled out slowly.
Apps like you describe exist. They usually show you tons of fake profiles and "15 hot women want to message you - subscribe to read messages!"
> Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.
Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).
Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.
Marriage records are often public. But usually two people don’t stop using a dating app and get married the next day. They will date for months or years after. And that info is not so easy to get.
As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.
It really can't be that hard to derive that data. If there's a match, keywords matching location names, addresses, etc as the last message followed by a large usage drop, you can probably identify 80%+ of longterm monogamous relationships forming
I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it
Huh? The target variable is revenue.
So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships
This is an extremely common sentiment I see online - that there is some conspiracy to keep people single to reduce subscription churn. I have run two dating apps (my own apps, not working for a company), and what I found through trial and error was that no matter how many levers you pull and tweaks you make, a lot of it is simply user-behavior problems, not a tech or product design problem. There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example. The reason someone's matches aren't committal is because they don't want to commit.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
Note that it's possible for dating problems to be user behavior problems in a way that is suits the profit motive of dating sites, without any conscious intent from anyone in the ecosystem.
Model a world where everybody's self-perception of their mating value is just a little bit higher than their actual value - in other words, one not too far off from reality. Some segment of this population will drop their standards in the face of repeated rejection, and then eventually find a partner because of this. Their "lowered standards" become an accurate self-perception of reality. But some segment of the population will be unwilling to do this. They have a problem - they cannot find a partner no matter how hard they look.
A problem creates a market. People who can't find a partner turn to dating apps to find a partner - some may pay, and a lot more will click on ads. There's a decent chance that dating app management isn't consciously optimizing for failure in dating and success in clicking on ads. However, all the apps that are good at finding partners for their customers find that their customers disappear, while the apps that are good at getting people to click on ads generate huge amounts of revenue and take over the market. Which is entirely composed of people who don't actually want to find a partner, anyway, because those people who care more about the outcome of finding a partner will usually drop their standards enough to find one.
The same dynamic applies in many other markets. Evolution and selection bias > intent and intelligent design. The market ends up composed of people who can't achieve the ostensible purpose of the market, largely through their own actions, because people who can drop out of the market. Happy people often go through life with very few transactions: they might change jobs a couple times early in their career before finding a boss and job they're happy with and staying there until retirement, or they date around a little and then find a partner they marry for life, or they might rent a couple apartments before buying a house, renovating once, and then staying in it for 40 years. The transactions are overwhelmingly composed of people who are dissatisfied, because that's why they're buying things.
You ran not one, but two, dating apps that were your own apps, and were not part of a company?
Which apps were these? What were your user metrics?
Seems somewhat suspect to extrapolate from your personal experience to what the large dating apps are allegedly doing if you are not approaching their scale. You've mentioned your personal experience as some kind of authority a few times now in this discussion, why not name the two apps directly? Apologies if I missed it but I don't see where you gave any indication that this appeal to authority is credible.
They weren't Tinder sized. They were only published in latam. The first (Mil Besos) flopped and my second attempt (MiAmor) got to a several hundred thousand downloads and I sold it for not very much because I was tired of the moderation. Neither exists anymore. This was more than 10 years ago. There used to be A LOT of dating apps around 2014-2018, I mean hundreds of them on the Apple and Play Store. There has been a lot of consolidation because almost the only thing that matters for dating apps is giving users optionality, which means having more user profiles the other ones.
I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.
I don't wish to belittle you but, if I were you I would certainly not be in this discussion saying things like "Source: I used to build and run dating apps" (you said this in another comment in this discussion) when making claims about the major dating app companies if these were the two apps in question.
Certainly not in the manner you conveyed your experience. The market dynamics and design problems of these apps are very well known. Given the scale of your experience, I would suggest your invocation of it as some kind of authority was superfluous at best.
Congratulations on your sale though. Have a nice day.
I think that source is fine. Not necessarily because running a small dating app gives you the same experience as running a large one; but because it also means you thought long and hard about the space, too.
Definitely more than your average armchair backseat quarterback.
I'm happy to hear from someone who's built 2 dating apps on the topic of dating app algorithms, they probably know more than I do. I appreciate the contribution, and don't think the gatekeeping is necessary.
I think the claims were about behaviors for 10s of thousands of users of the dating apps, which limits the range of actions a company could take.
Considering that population size, wouldn't millions of users have the same behaviors?
And how big are your dating apps?
I am interested in creating my own dating app/website, but the problem I foresee is getting users - a Catch 22 problem.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
Getting users to dating apps is probably easier than you think. Because men will go to where the women are so you only need to work on attracting female sign ups. It's actually that simple. The best way to launch is with a waitlist of warm users in 1 large city. I've seen a lot of people pining for the 2010-era OkCupid so you probably would have plenty of people willing to give it a try.
> There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
Facebook has a dating app and it's completely free. There are no subscriptions or paywalled features. It works about as good as all the other ones.
Except your dating pool is limited to Facebook users.
My take is that it isn't about serving non-committal matches and withholding promising matches or whatever, it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting. I can see how and app using the stable matching algorithm could really make you feel like you're getting the best match you're going to get, which I think could have a real impact on commitment.
"it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting."
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningfully improved outcomes.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/30/hinge-and-its-...
Right, FOMO is a human psychology problem...
...that many businesses exploit for profit.
But a business model taking advantage of it and causing it are two different things.
Yeah, this seems to be a truism along the lines of "scammers intentionally use poor English to filter for stupid people". It gets repeated a lot because it resonates with people, but there's no evidence it's actually done deliberately. Sure, they're making UI and other decisions to maximize for time on the app, but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are, and still serve you only plausible, appealing matches that are somehow bad (if they were too bad, you'd quit using the app). I don't think they have this much insight.
*I came very close to falling for a scam that was written in perfect English, formatted convincingly, and appeared to come from an organization I was expecting to receive a message from at the time. Believing that scams will always be obviously stupid increases your chances of falling for one that isn't.
> but in order to avoid serving you the best matches for a long-term relationship, they'd have to know what those are
No? With modern dating apps they can just serve you people who have already swiped left on you. Even if they made it a random presentation of candidates, they will never be incentivized to matchmake for free. If you're not paying then you'll get shown people in the area and that's it. That's all they need for their ad-revenue.
I think we're talking about different populations. You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all but we are talking about people that get matches, but those matches never turn into relationships. To be fair, both populations of people have the same complaint that "dating apps don't work", but for extremely different reasons.
I don't think that dating apps are showing users profiles that have already swiped left, and if they do, it's not an attempt to get users to convert to a paid subscription. Consumer psychology doesn't work that way. People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one. Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription. This means that user will churn almost immediately after 1-2 months of paying for something that doesn't work. They typically don't stick around paying for years while getting zero matches all the while.
Dating apps DO derank unappealing profiles, but rather than doing it to try to get them to convert, it's instead done to try to prevent high bounce rates. Imagine a user downloads a dating app and is shown profiles in completely randomized order. This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing. This rigged ranking may sound like its reducing relationship formation, but they never would have swiped on the unappealing profiles anyway; the counterfactual is they simply uninstall the app in frustration.
> You are talking about someone who gets zero matches at all
No, I'm not.
> People are far more willing to pay to upgrade a good experience than they are to pay to try to improve a bad one
This is an assumption and one I believe is false. My belief is that people are more risk-averse rather than they are risk-taking [1]. People don't care to upgrade when they're winning.
> Further, an unappealing profile that gets zero likes will continue to get zero likes after they upgrade to a paid subscription.
Not matching with someone does not mean they have 0 likes. The platform just isn't incentivized to show you who likes you for free. Concretely we can take Tinder as an example. They will show you that someone likes you even when they won't show you who. Swiping enough to find the person who likes you usually takes countless hours.
> This user is far more likely to get frustrated and uninstall after a few minutes than if they were to download the app and be shown profiles that are appealing
If you're extending this to anything past the first profiles shown, this is simply untrue. You just need to dangle a carrot in the form of "someone likes you," even when the person liking you is a bot account.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory
I agree with this. In my latest stint on dating apps as a woman looking for a man, I matched with dozens of profiles from guys average in terms of height and salary (when disclosed), and also in a niche of "attractive to me personally but not in the top 10% of conventionally-attractive dudes". So I know dozens of guys got at least one match, and most of the time they liked me first, I hadn't swiped in either direction when they were shown my profile.
Upwards of 90% of matches did not convert to dates, because many did not respond to messages at all, did not or could not carry on a brief "normal human" conversation, or if they did the first two things, never proposed meeting irl. I think you are correct in your assessment that the median user on a dating app is very non-committal.
I don't know... mid 2010's pre-match.com OkCupid and PlentyOfFish seem to get a lot of love. Not saying they didn't have problems but they did actually match a lot of happy couples and online dating didn't feel like nearly as much of a wasteland as it does today
That's before they were acquired by Match Group.
the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
I think what you should be doing as a dating app — much more so if a government one — is some kind of RL based on length of actual marriage.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
Just to call out, you're implicitly assuming that strictly lower divorce rates is the correct end-goal. This may not be what you really want, eg you might find many abusive pairings where the weaker partner is too scared to leave. In the style of "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" [1], I'll claim that the optimal amount of divorce is non-zero.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
The sentiment of the linked post is different than the one you describe. The post is explaining why it's ok to have a non-zero value for a metric seen as objectively bad (like fraud) if there's high confidence that the non-zero value can be traded for a disproportionately larger metric somewhere beneficial (user acquisition).
In this case the undesirable metric is divorce. If the parent comment's feature for measuring marriage lengths and estimating likelihood of divorce were implemented, what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring? The app wouldn't be enforcing whether divorces happen, it would just use the estimation of it happening as a matchmaking metric.
> what disproportionate benefit would allowing more matches with a nonzero likelihood of divorce bring
I think one benefit would be the individual participants' self-determination (there may be others). It's ok if you don't find my previous example (abusive relationship) convincing, but in the absence of an objection I'll reuse that. If we could look through all the marriages with a 0% chance of divorce, my bet is that we'd find an abnormally high percentage of abusive relationships. I claim that if a match has _no_ chance of divorce, it probably indicates a lack of self-determination for one of the partners.
Taking a step back, it might be clearer to just argue that length / non-divorce is not what people really want from a marriage. I can't speak for everyone, but I want a happy and fulfilling life, and I seek a partnership to the extent that it supports my desire for a happy and fulfilling life. Yes, I do want the partnership to be long, and I don't want to get divorced. Of course I want my marriage to last forever. But this is not my primary goal in marriage. There are many boring or uninteresting people (apologies to them) who I'm sure I could live with forever, that I'd immediately discard as candidates. Alternatively (making the abuse angle more tangible), I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
> I also have a lot of international friends and family that would happily find me an international bride who would never divorce me, and would be happy to marry somebody with a US passport. In fact this is a somewhat common offer, though of course they never say it in those words. You can decide for yourself whether that is abuse, but at least I wouldn't feel comfortable with it.
I'm pretty sure in this specific case, they get an instant green card if abuse happens. So the incentives point in the opposite direction (pro-divorce)
That’s fair, but on the other hand they’re in a new country where they may not speak the language, and know almost nobody. To say nothing of religious/cultural views of divorce
But if the abuser can be obligated to pay legal fees, there could be incentives for lawyers to seek these kinds of cases out
Gale-Shapely provides the best possible stable outcome for the proposing side.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.
I don’t think you are legally bound to marry. And if it stops working, divorce before resentment.
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
The article also mentioned that, but I don’t understand it. Receivers are also making choices, so why do they end up with the worst match?
I left another comment with the minimal example, but intuitively:
- proposers descend from their 1st choice, while recipients ascend according to their offers; the outcome can't be recipient-biased, because recipients ascend only when proposers are forced to descend
- a matching is stable if each pair contains at least one party that cannot find a strictly better match
- in particular there are multiple distinct matchings, and if proposer-biased, recipients have no recourse to break the proposer-favored pairs
You have to accept the best offer you get, if there's someone that you would like, you only match with them if all their better options are exhausted.
I think it can be a bit easier to think of the algorithm in terms of job applicants (who receive job offers) and employers (who propose job offers). And then due to the algorithm, it must be the case that the number of applicants is equal to the number of employers, and each employer is only trying to fill one position.
An applicant (the receiver) will end up with a "worst" match in the sense that if you look at all "stable" pairings (there can be multiple configurations), the applicant is going to have the least favorable one among the different pairings.
There's an important concept of a "blocking pair", and the Gale-Shapley algorithm is trying to eliminate all blocking pairs, and you could say that pairings are stable when no blocking pairs exist. A blocking pair is a job applicant and employer who aren't matched together, but both prefer each other over their current match.
Suppose that after the algorithm is done with its work, Alice doesn't end up with a job offer from her top choice, Google. This must mean that Google never offered her a job because Alice was just too far down on their list, and Google made a deal with someone else they like better than Alice.
> configurations), the applicant is going to have the least favorable one among the different pairings.
I don’t understand why this would always be true. In your example, Google may indeed like Alice, so they both get their top choice.
If Google’s top choice is Alice, and Alice’s top choice is Google, then what will happen in the algorithm is that Alice will see an offer from Google and lock it down. Alice could get multiple offers but she will take the best one which is Google.
When Alice and Google are not paired up, then they will always form a “blocking pair” in any matching where they aren’t together so that means any matching that doesn’t have Alice and Google paired is not stable.
I think the confusion is that Alice only has one possible stable employer and thus her worst one happens to be her best one.
If Alice’s top choice wasn’t Google, but some other company, then there might be multiple employers she could be matched with to form a stable pairing.
This algorithm is definitely weird too though because it’s possible for some candidates to be paired with a company they don’t really like, but it’s considered a stable situation because the other companies don’t want them more than their current employees.
I guess in real life, you could try improving yourself and then the matching becomes unstable again if preferences change.
Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.
Imagine A ranks X,Y,Z in that order B ranks Y,X,Z in that order C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match. B will propose to Y and match. C will propose to X and get rejected. C will propose to Y and get rejected. C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
Edit: I think I fixed it.
Why will B propose to X first if their first choice is Y?
You’re absolutely right. I’m on my phone trying to imagine the scenarios in my head and trying to find the simplest possible example.
Maybe 4 participants is too few to clearly see what happens.
(A,X),(B,Y) as the proposals is fine for the point being made. The issue is if we reverse which group is the proposer, we still end up with the same matching, because (A,X) strictly prefer each other.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY B:YX X:BA Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
I find this algorithm to have a curious definition of the word "stable."
Not sure if you're referring to the actual definition. It's basically "no two participants from different pairs in the matching would prefer each other to their current matches." It seems an elegant definition to me.
This obviously doesn't factor in most of the complexity of romantic relationships: not knowing your own preferences, evolving preferences, incomplete/imperfect information in general, etc. Plus it assumes a global 1:1 matching across two categories, and people can of course be LGBT or choose to be single.
The big assumption here is that people are either proposers or receivers and never switch roles.
Which may be largely true for many people but it's definitely not a fixed thing!
When I was dating, I initiated with a lot of women, but the woman I wound up marrying messaged me first.
This assumption is built-in for Gale-Shapley algorithm.
Is it necessarily so?
And doesn't something of the same kind happen in real-life, in some societies or countries or cities male-optimal and in others female-optimal ?
It is necessarily so if you're using Gale-Shapley for heterosexual matching, yes.
it's proposer-optimal but the receivers gets the best of those who haven't already found a better match
they could just swap the direction for each matching
To run gale shapley you need a fully ordered full list ranked by preference. If you have 10K people, asking every person to fully order a list of 10K items is not practical.
Whatever they're running, it's not gale shapley.
I don't see why not: once a user states their preferences you can use one of many sortings to order the candidates respecting that and use the result for the matching stage. If a user only gives "height" as criteria and gets a list of users sorted by height, the (probably terrible) results are not a result of applying Gale-Shepley wrong.
Otherwise we're in a "no true Scotsman" situation because no one, not even you, can never truly know what your preferences are.
Gale–Shapley doesn't care how you generate preferences, nor how you represent them. All it needs is a comparator.
Presumably they will use approximations like factor analysis that are already commonly used in data science.
Presumably the rankings are on personal qualities, not individual people.
There is a very simple solution to the problem. Just add a tax to single people and childless couples or reverse give huge tax break to married and couple with kids.
In past the motive for marriage was sex and companionship which was frowned in society if out of wedlock. Now it is not frowned upon. The old constraint is gone and we need to add new constraints if we want to solve the problem.
A very funny but evidence backed policy would be free GLP-1s for women. A recent study showed GLP-1 use resulted in a 29 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a woman finding a relationship. A woman converting to conservative Protestantism for comparison results in a 2.7 percentage point increase.
GLP-1's are so good for society we should be giving it out for free on every street corner.
Korea is close to that with the looks/weight social obsession. Not free, but trivial to get with close to no checks -vs- required medical reasons in other countries. But on the other hand... it's fueling the looks/weight social obsession, which has its own downsides longterm.
GLP-1s, while being pretty miraculous as a whole, do come with risks like every other drug. There’s plenty of 1 in 10k or 100k side effects.
Kurtzerkag has a good video about it: https://youtu.be/TYhNHX372ek?si=5ESz3ykXykyUcmYg
1 in 100k risks (0.001%) aren't an argument against something that would benefit double digit percentages of the population.
Your spelling reminds me of the old Benedict Cucumberbatch jokes
Obesity has 1 in 1 side effects.
GLP-1 has the tradeoff of hindering enjoyment of the food you do eat, which is understandably a dealbreaker for many.
My pet theory is that "in the past" the motive for having kids was having someone look after you in your old age and not simply starve to death. In the modern world we think we have money to take care of that problem. But money is useless without kids to give it to, so nothing has changed. My solution is to make the age of retirement to be 90 years old, minus 10 years per kid.
The USA has a flavor of this: tax discounts for married couples and kids.
But your proposal really f's over people with real trauma and medical conditions that prevent them from having kids. I've met several people that don't want kids due to the trauma they endured as children or men and women that are just infertile.
In the US, if both partners earn similar wages, they pay more taxes once they marry. So it's a tax penalty.
I don't think you're forced to file jointly?
Married filing separately (MFS) tax brackets are just MFS divided by 2, which is worse than Individual tax brackets.
Also various things get cut in half e.g. SALT cap phase-out income limit, mortgage deduction limit that MFS is almost never worth it except in a few niche situations and it acts as a last resort option if you are no longer on speaking terms with your spouse but haven't divorced yet, yet need to file taxes for the year.
You’re not forced to file jointly, but you don’t get the same benefits of 1 high earner and 1 home maker experiences.
Singapore already does this! There are huge housing and tax incentives.
How do they counteract sham relationships/marriages. I assume they have to live together for a certain amount of time or something similar? If the marriage falls apart do they need to return the incentives?
One of the best things you can do on this planet is not asking it to support another person, at least not with a comfortable lifestyle which I'm sure we'd all want. Why'd you try to soft-force people to have more children?!
As a secondary problem, people (traditionally women, but with a two-income household it could be either party) often already can't leave a relationship because they can't support themselves and their child(ren) without the other half and so they're stuck in relationships that might either not work for them or that are downright abusive. With a big tax on leaving your partner... oof, why in the world would you want more lock-in?! Is this a manosphere control thing that I'm not aware of?
How do you propose to solve the population crisis ? Given a choice people will always want the position of less responsibility. As a society we have agree to give sacrifices so that we can have next generation.
What population crisis are you referring to? Usually, the problem is seen as the population getting too high and humanity taking more resources than is good for the planet. The global population is still increasing.
The problem in most first world countries is that there are not enough workers to take care of the aging population
But it's also self-evident that if we always need more young people than old, so that the old are taken care of, then we need an infinite amount of people. So long as we don't have a second earth (or asteroid mining or whatever), that seems like a much bigger problem than that old people have to wipe their own butts. Yes, I'm well aware that includes myself and that I might legit not be able to take care of myself properly. Getting old sucks either way. A stable population (or a slight shrinkage until we're at a sustainable level, insofar as we should want to manually steer that anyway) seems like a much better solution than to have old and young people suffer because there's not enough resources for anyone
The population crisis is that the current population isn't sustainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day (and most of those haven't a rich lifestyle yet; most people on HN are in the top 10% worldwide income). We need either to become more sustainable per capita, have fewer capita, or get more earths. Any solution is fine. Otherwise, we'll run out, and the remaining 90% of people get a lot of undeserved worldsuck
Note that we are already doing what you want: world population is projected to increase by 25% (!) in the next 75 years. At the same time, we're lifting people out of poverty (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...) which causes them to be able to buy more stuff, live richer lives, and be less sustainable (e.g. visible on a CO2 chart for the same countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...). Which is fair right? Why shouldn't they get to live like us. But we can't go on like this; something has to give.
More people isn't helpful for at least another century. Let's evaluate the baby-making situation in 2100 and work on the real problems we face today
That’s how you get loveless marriages and kids whose purpose is being a tax break.
Good wages, enough free time, affordable housing, free child care, universal healthcare.
That’s the better way.
There plenty of people who want to marry and get kids but they don’t have enough time and money.
> Good wages, enough free time, affordable housing, free child care, universal healthcare.
Nordic countries did this. Birthrates have been declining regardless. Even Gulf Arab countries which are an even more enviable welfare state, and have considerable religious-cultural emphasis on childraising, too, have seen declining birthrates.
Birthrates decline is unrelated process which is just stronger than those incentives.
Do you aware how expensive Nordic countries are to live in and have social life even counting all the free stuff?
And gulf arab countries are basically even worse in this regard.
Gulf Arab countries are not expensive for locals. They are provided with housing, a sinecure job. They drive multiple new-model cars. Nearly every family can afford a Filipino nanny, a cook and South Asian coolies for other labor. And food costs are some of the lowest in the developed world, much less than Europe.
The strongest indicator of declining birthrates isn't living expences, it's the education level of women in a society. Highly educated women, with good, high earning jobs have less children.
Highly educated women with high earning jobs don't really have fewer children. It's the women who are above average educated with above average earning. The first category would be graduate degrees/specialised degrees with an earning above 200K in most parts of America (well above it in the vhcol areas and lower in lcol areas) while the second is those earning 70-120K in most parts of America with a bachelor education or some less wanted graduate degrees (again a bit higher in vhcol areas).
Very high educated well earning women can offload their duties to others even the getting pregnant part these days. Educated women also tend to have a higher desire for large families, I know families with large amounts of engineers/lawyers/doctors where almost all get more than 2 children.
It's simpler than that. People need to have hope for the future. With the climate going to shit, who wants to subject a child to that?
What better way to solve challenges by getting rid of the generation that created it and letting new generation come and build a better world.
You might want to get out more. Climate-change concerns are amplified online like many other kinds of activism, but if you travel countries with declining birthrates, you'll rarely hear people IRL speaking of them.
A lot of this is just a difference in topics for conversations - local/global. See: us talking here about a Singapore dating app, when likely neither of us two is in Singapore and at least one is already married. On the other hand, people in my circle are worried about the climate change concerns and we're aware of that... but it's not often a topic of conversation. It's not the concern that's amplified, just the topic is more frequent. But it doesn't mean I'm not seriously worried about my kid having to migrate in later life due to local agriculture becoming not viable at scale, one of the dumb wars turning into ww3, or just dying due to one of the current climate effects turning into a feedback loop that we can't survive within the next few generations.
Not everyone is well informed about the realities of climate change, but many are and it's a concern I hear from normal people from the US, Europe, and Asia that I've met. Some bury their heads in the sand, and if you do you'll ignore others who haven't, but it's a very legitimate concern for people with a basic awareness of reality. Things have gotten far worse in my lifetime, probably older people are more concerned since we can see the changes more clearly, but not all young people are deluded or ignorant about the reality of climate change.
History will disagree. People used to have multiple children with far less resources and education. It is a well known phenomenon that more affluence lead to less children.
Because children were an economic good - a source of labor and something that could be exchanged.
Also most children died before adulthood.
If you are affluent with each additional kid the risks more rapidly outweigh the rewards. Since all of us are generally more affluent now it is quite sensible to avoid having many kids.
The history around childbirth is really very brutal and grim. We should be having less kids. It's a positive sign for our species, like having less blood spilled over religious conflicts.
People who have kids because they don't know what else to do with their lives are probably raising children that are going to turn into unpleasant adults. I'm not sure why I would want to incentivize more kids where I would not relish the parents undergoing mitosis either. If someone wants to reproduce have at it, but why should I be excited by this? If "hell is other people" then what are other people's kids?
Because somebody needs to grow your crops, sew your clothes, lay your fiber optic cable, synthesize your medication and cut your hair?
Between all the excess in the economy (which will only grow as less people are born) and increasing levels of automation, I'm going to give that a hard no.
If you want to spawn children under the theory that they can sew my clothes be my guest. I assume you did not mean to confine this benefit to yourself given the other things you lumped it with.
I have no interest in bringing a soul into this world to satisfy anyone's economic interest. If you disagree that's your prerogative. Historically the only thing more dangerous than having kids is trying to control who has kids. So do what you will. Just don't ask I be excited for you to raise children under such a flimsy theory.
In history having children wasn’t decision based like it is now.
Now it‘s easy to have sex without the risk of getting pregnant unwanted.
So know you have to provide the right environment so people want to have children.
Back then the choice was much more limited.
If we want to recreate those conditions, we need to: Cut the power and Internet for an unknown period, stop the sales of condoms, and give away alcohol.
That would raise the birthrates but I don’t think women would be so happy about it.
brute force scales a lot better than nuance
you need a very high tax at the start, and a huge discount for it to be interesting, since raising children is a big time and money sink.
A few things:
First, I don’t think we can reduce past marriage motives in the way you describe as different cultures have had varying views of marriage and sex throughout human history.
Next, has it been proven that monetary incentives increase childbirth? I thought I’ve read things showing that it doesn’t do a lot to influence birth rates. E.g., Sweden has some pretty generous time off and support policies for having kids and their birth rate is really not much higher than other less supportive countries of comparable status (wealthy, developed countries).
Finally, I dispute the idea of a “problem” existing in the first place. I think the long-term survival of the human race is more likely with a smaller population than at present. When I see news about birth rates plummeting in third world countries as they develop, I feel relieved, not worried.
I think it’s easier to deal with population loss than it is to deal with overpopulation, too much carbon emissions due to high population, habitat destruction due to continued human habitat expansion, etc.
My mini-conspiracy theory would be that it’s mostly corporate interests that don’t want the population to go down. During the plague, the population was cut dramatically and as a result wages were higher for 100 years due to a labor shortage. Corporations just want more underpaid labor and more customers. I submit the idea that maybe individuals aren’t actually better off with a constantly increasing population.
I’ve also noticed that, at least in the US, the political cohort most concerned about solving low childbirth is doing the least to support higher childbirth. They disinvest in education and are against no-tuition community college and university, they are against universal no-tuition childcare, they are against paid parental leave (the US mandates zero days of paid parental leave on a federal level), they are against medically necessary abortions in emergency situations during child-rearing, they are against immigration which also increases US population and birth rate, they are against universal healthcare, they’re against sustainable population growth through urbanism, public transit, and renewable energy, preferring single family home car-dependent and environmental destructive sprawl development.
In other words, find your political representative in your jurisdiction that talks a lot about needing to have more babies and see if they’ve ever talked about raising the minimum wage or taxing billionaires to fund better access to education, nutrition, child care, time off, healthcare, public transit, etc.
thats already the status quo in the US and it isn’t curbing a decline in marriage
It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
Oh we still want to mate and fuck like rabbits, and we do, but we now have contraceptives widely available and culturally accepted.
You may be overestimating how much people actually want to fuck nowadays. There are much easier and less intimidating forms of entertainment available
It's funny how the govt in Singapore tries to control and subtly orchestrate everything. from (i) mandating the racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing; to (ii) only providing huge housing subsidies to couples while discriminating the singles, to (iii) giving out S$70k in baby bonuses (from birth to 17), and (iv) banning vaping while convincing citizens its not an infringement of civil liberties. I mean many policies are smart and I agree with many of them, but there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
> there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
and they have not reached anywhere near that line.
Compare this to the land of the free, where ICE police can routinely jack an actual citizen they suspect of being an illegal alien, and face zero consequences. Where the president can declare an illegal tariff with zero consequences.
> racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing
Singapore is hella small, even Tokyo is bigger. Singapore population is also dense, diverse and it's not surprising they need to plan first before something bad happen
Human? Nah, more like human resource.
Those all sound really positive. Banning poison, supporting children, supporting families, encouraging racial diversity rather than segregated blocks.
Nobody is obligated to use this service if they don't want to. For those that use a dating app to look for long-term relationships I fail to see how match group apps are better for the average individual and for society.
The pilot targeting only government workers reminds me a lot of Lee Kuan Yew's various eugenics policies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#In_Singapore
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
The aesthetics of it are definitely the case, but I don't see what else you would choose for a seed group for a project by government services.
Positive eugenics never stopped and there's nothing wrong about it. Also there's nothing wrong with the government promoting the creation of stable families with children born before DS risk exceeds 1/100.
I mean, it sucks if you're a taxpayer over 35 that wants to use the service, especially considering that DS is easy to screen for using modern tests of a mother's blood and Singapore has a reasonable abortion policy
Well that's not really different from any other age-limited policy where the govt sees the biggest bang for the buck, like state-funded uni under 35, dental for kids etc.
Seems pretty different. What is the incremental cost for additional users? I assume it aproximates to zero in this case.
Maybe they estimated the consequences of many 35+ getting married as negative, who knows. Maybe they just wanted better outcomes of the pilot to push on.
I wonder if it's made by the same people behind
https://aphrodite.global/
The project was partially started by some students/scholars from there.
I really liked this analysis - it echoes a lot of the comments here - to wit, as an engineer it's tempting to think that this is an engineering problem, but the program might get better results from funding third spaces and events and letting people match by what they want to do, not by what they think they may like in a person. https://www.singapore-samizdat.com/p/how-singapores-governme...
Ideally you'd have both - match folks up and then provide a spot for them to meet and see if they vibe.
This is tangential but I wrote a Go utility a while back to implement this stable matching algorithm
https://github.com/abhchand/stable-matching
It’s an effective yet simple algorithm. Also widely used in North America to match medical students with their residency of choice.
Stable marriage algorithm or stable matching algorithm?
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale–Shapley_algorithm
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching_problem
It is in fact known as the stable marriage algorithm. It's not known as the stable matching algorithm.
I was sure I had read of this year's ago on Wikipedia as the stable marriage problem (originally heard of it in a podcast), but a couple days ago I saw the wiki page said stable matching problem...
Wikipedia renamed the article on April 26, 2025. They are always vigilant for thoughtcrimes.
the Singaporean government is often described as having a "parental" approach. I guess this move would be on brand
It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
It's basically a benevolent dictatorship due to one party being in charge for the last 67 years.
Not just one party, but one family.
The current prime minister is unrelated to the Lee family, and none of the third generation Lees seem particularly interested in politics.
Sounds like a step in the right direction, then.
Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him.
The Singaporean president gets paid USD$2M a year.
small price to pay to circumvent being bought off by big business at every possible opportunity.
Well worth it so far.
Hardly benevolent. I'll take every social problem America has 10x to avoid being an extremely boring "utopia" like Singapore.
It's literally the antithesis of "cool", whatever your definition. The most square people on earth.
Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is better than a perverted and corrupt democracy. Democracy isn't the perfect be-all and end-all form of governance that will work well for everyone, a fact even ancient greeks recognized. Letting the masses decide the future of a country just because they're the majority is like letting the passengers fly the plane because they outnumber the crew.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Benevolent dictatorship is probably always the best form of government. I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
>I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
All true, but consider that most democracies today aren't really functional anymore. They impose more and more draconical surveillance and speech laws while failing to at providing livable economic condition to the next generations.
The issue is that it's very rare that a 'benevolent' dictatorship stays benevolent. There are plenty of examples through history where a good leader (either hereditary, elected or promoted through other means) did well for decades, only to see their efforts undone by an idiot or tyrant that came afterwards.
Also doesn't help that the people who most want power are those least deserving of it. See many CEOs, and many politicians in general.
Does Singapore work well so far? Sure, by some definitions of working well. Same with China.
But it definitely feels like they're rolling the dice with their systems of governance, and hoping the next leader is someone that actually cares about the health of society rather than a would be authoritarian ruler.
Corporations could just do the same thing. Henry Ford historically had doubled people's salary to get them to have families. This was contingent on a bunch of paternalistic rules and inspections (like participants weren't allowed to drink for example).
From an organizational perspective, really cunning managers understand this: if your reports have kids, they probably aren't going to job hop for more money or better work. It gives significant leverage over employees.
So I don't see why the public sector would need to do this, either the public or private sector could do it. If you lump the US government in with the corporations as two agents which punch down, life in the US could actually be seen as more oppressive than other places. It really depends. The US could accomplish a relatively totalitarian end result with the same form of government just by creating a couple strong economic incentives for corporations. Generally the US govt in its current form prefers delegation to the private sector
>Henry Ford historically had doubled people's salary to get them to have families.
Ford was the only major mass produced car company of its day. The global economy of today is way different than the one Heny Fordo operated in.
Singapore is the case when you can just rely on your government to do its job and they will do the job properly!!!!
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing
It's also known as being one of the very few first-world countries actually without basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
Australia doesn't have those either, despite many people assuming we do (including most people who live here).
They have much more than Singapore tbh
Australia, New Zealand, and the UK are all competing with each other on who can be the most authoritarian anglo nation. "Oi, you got a loicense for that opinion M8?"
The UK are at least vaguely equal opportunity authoritarians, and their police will arrest both the angry dad posting on Facebook about immigrants and the pensioner peacefully protesting in support of Palestine all the same
> basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
The stupidity of some shouldn't be an argument against the rights of everyone.
Until the stupid are in the majority and start curbing your rights. That's one of the main problems with freedom of speech and with democracy as well: they both contain the seeds of their own undoing.
Why not? If every society that embraces a right fails in a similar way, that right should be open to being debated. In a world with social media, I’m not convinced American First-Amendment style (in its ideal form) free speech is as unquestionably good as I once thought it was.
> If every society that embraces a right fails in a similar way
which societies, which failures, which "every" are you referring to, exactly?
> which societies, which failures, which "every" are you referring to, exactly?
I'd argue American society is currently failing. We're losing wars. We're racking up debt. We're destroying our institutions. A decent fraction of the population not only expects civil war, but cheers it on.
Meanwhile, in Europe, a similar vein is consistently emerging across the continent. It's done better at resisting. But in part through policing speech.
Do you think Europe is being successful by those metrics?
They're racking up debt too, with worse means to pay it back, they've destroyed both their institutions and their culture via mass migration of unskilled and dissimilar peoples, and they couldn't even fight a war because they can't field the firepower of one US state's national guard base (much less "lose" it, in the ways that people mischaracterize the US's recent conflicts).
Europe is a distant third in an increasingly multipolar world that will be shaped by the US and China, reliant on the US's increasingly fickle protection from Russia; aging, fading, and losing identity. Their core industries like automotive have already lost to China, their power costs are skyrocketing, their technology (outside of some gifts from the US like ASML) lags the US across the frontiers, and there are deep divides across the continent.
But hey, at least they are protected from misgendering a "woman" with a beard or mentioning the identity of a criminal.
The net effect is ultimately positive. Societies are healthier in many ways when people are free to speak their mind.
> net effect is ultimately positive. Societies are healthier in many ways when people are free to speak their mind
This is currently not empirically sustained. I hope it will be, in the long run. But if Americans and Europeans keep voting for far-right and -left wing idiots, and China and its similars take the mantle of technological and scientific development, there is a real argument that Enlightenment values don’t apply perfectly in a world with social media and AI.
Humans are messy but long-term nothing good has ever come from repression.
UK? France? Germany?
France has a constitutional right to free speech since at least the 18th century, not sure what you mean. There is a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is still part of France's constitution. France is also bound by the EU Convention on Human Rights. Why would you compare France to Singapore in this regard? That's strange.
Google any of these terms to see examples of people who were actually fined for speech in France, after 1950, and well after the 18th century:
- Hervé Eon Sarkozy fine
- Éric Zemmour 3000 fine
- bardot degenerates 20000
- Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly fine
None of these were threats or incitement to violence. Just insults.
And you talk about a constitutional right to free speech since the 18th century, but mocking Catholicism could be prosecuted until 1881 (i.e. in the 19th century).
it's perhaps debatable, but the European (and French) legal frameworks do not recognize hate speech as protected free speech, so I suppose the concern (e.g. in the Bardot case) is if it was hate speech or not. Americans also do not support hate speech, though perhaps the way these are handled legally are different. I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote.
I said France does not have free speech, and gave an example of someone who was fined for holding up a small sign with the words "Casse-toi, pov'con" ("Get lost, you sad jerk").
If someone in France is not free to hold a sign that says "Get lost, you sad jerk" then France does not have free speech. That sign contains only words. It does not create any threat. It does not incite anyone to take illegal and/or violent actions.
Regarding the Bardot case you say "I don't think this kind of exception is fairly applied to discredit what I wrote" but:
- that's not the only case I cited, and
- even in the Bardot case, what's the rationale for suppressing speech expressing an opinion? it seems she was prosecuted because her expression of an opinion might cause others to adopt that same opinion. She wasn't inciting violence or illegal acts.
the kind of issues that Singapore has been fairly effective at, getting people to speak the same tongue or not spitting on the street, what you could put into a bucket of 'public discipline' measures I think is over-romanticized.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
It has achieved the highest global GDP per capita is just a couple dozen of years, starting as a small bit of swamp forcibly kicked out Malaysia. I think it's unfair to say that people are over-romanticizing these sorts of accomplishments.
Starting out at the second richest city in Asia after Shanghai, you mean.
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
Let's put it this way.
Singapore started from an unusually favorable, but still genuinely troubled, Asian starting position. Their government then proceeded to get a remarkable number of important things right, and turned it into one of the richest countries in the world. That achievement does not require pretending Singapore was a fishing village in a swamp in 1965. The more accurate story is impressive enough on its own: plenty of countries and cities with comparable or better initial advantages failed to achieve anything close to Singapore's subsequent trajectory. Look at how Western former great powers are doing, or even closer countries like Japan.
I'd argue the way Singapore uses state capacity deserves substantial credit for that.
Correct - this isn't new, it's how it works there. Single new grads in the 80's & 90's were being offered government funded beach holidays on graduation where they were paired with selected dating partners.
Before Xi, Singapore is what China aspired to become. Totally onbrand
Makes little sense.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
"In 1992, Deng exhorted CCP cadres to “learn from the world, especially from Singapore”, touching off a “Singapore fever” in PRC political and academic circles."
https://jamestown.org/fortnight-end-singapore-model/
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/607615/summary
https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/construction-singapore-mo...
https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-...
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/singapores-success-cont...
https://www.fpri.org/article/2019/12/the-odd-couple-singapor...
well, it turns out deng was wrong...
Wrong about what? IMO Deng, Jiang, and Hu were right. Xi is wrong.
Maybe part of the solution for any country dealing with low marriage rate is to ban all private dating apps and only government issued apps are allowed.
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
I don't understand how a government app fixes the problem.
I've talked with women about this offline and they usually fire back with: "You expect women to lower their standards?"
Women would rather delay pregnancy until they find a suitable partner, than risk being with the wrong guy.
The only thing I _maybe_ can think of is governments could only show profiles in your 'tier' (looks, social economic class, etc), whereas private dating apps found that showing everyone pretty people keeps people coming back.
I think the main cause of this asymmetry in modern dating is the disappearance of social shaming for casual sex.
When casual sex is a possibility, many high value men will see it as a desirable option to commited relationships. And since for most men, their standards are very low for casual partners, they're willing to date far below their "level".
That puts women in difficult position because the most desirable partners are far more likely to be looking for only casual sex. But even if women adopt strict strategies to filter out the desirable men who won't commit, the men will naturally adopt deceptive strategies to evade detection as a "fuck boy".
When potential partners largely came from your real social network, the social cost was high for men for "using women for sex" and for women "being easy", so that prevented this problem to some degree.
Now that partners largely come from outside our social networks, there doesn't seem to be any good way to reproduce the social shaming for deceptive non-commitment.
Especially since populations are potentially in decline with fertility rates below replacement rates. It seems like an existential problem for the government if they want future taxpayers.
The current belief seems to be that the future is going to need a lot fewer people.
Governments shouldn't "want" anything. If people want more taxpayers, so be it.
While technically correct for Western-aligned nations, not all governments are for the people and by the people.
The implication that Western nations are different is fairly funny. I'd argue most of the governments in Asia are doing a lot more for the people than many Western governments.
I am not sure that is true. Japan remains closed to economy-saving immigration, Uyghurs have atrocities committed against them, several countries losing their collective minds due to social media-induced riots/panics.
Maybe Tibet and the GenZ revolution as a counterexample?
o__O my url bar doesn’t currently say Reddit? This argument feels red pilled and not curious nor productive. Women have plenty of valid frustrations with the dating pool. I don’t live in SF but the last woman whom I talked to there told me many of y’all just have mattresses on the floor and like no bed frame. There are places to improve fellas
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
It’s just reality when all the internet virtue signaling is turned off.
I’m not blaming anyone. I think all parties are behaving as they should.
I see a party here who is not behaving as they should and it's the one I am replying to.
How dare someone not agreeing with you.
Yeah that’s definitely my issue here
Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.
Perhaps then the government could spend money producing propaganda to convince people to lower their standards. Maybe they could fund TV shows about unattractive people with no money having a good time together - I think China is doing something similar.
What's a clearing problem? (A quick Google did not turn up an answer.)
It's tempting to think of the problems of a dating market as a matching problem because men and women are almost equal in numbers so we just have to match them all up. A clearing problem occurs in markets, (even markets with ~equal supply and demand) when the reserve price of the transaction is not met. For example, the reason I don't own a Ferrari isn't because there isn't 1 Ferrari out there for sale, it's because I don't have enough cash to clear the transaction. Building a more powerful car sales website won't fix this problem. The reserve price is not met.
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
I think this is just too finance brained and that the problem is not that everyone got too good for each other, but that everyone replaced in-person socialization with scrolling social media at home. So people simply do not bump in to each other to actually form relationships.
The nose dive in relationships kicked off when smartphones came in to society. I'm not sure the concept of dating apps is fixable. We need to get people out of the house again.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/marriage_rate_2018/marr...
https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
Marriage rate declines started in the 1980s, maybe even before.
Seems to line up with women gaining financial independence, and no-fault divorce.
Related, divorce rates have declined since the 1970s:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/divorce-in-decline-about-40-of-to...
Seems like there were a lot of partnerships of necessity before, and once that necessity goes away, so does the incentive to partner up.
Well, also the dating market is illiquid, with high transaction costs and incomplete information.
This seems to raise the question of why there is a clearing problem.
Is it fair to say a clearing problem is a missmatch of expectations?
It seems to me that people are simultaneously becoming more specific and demanding, while simultaneously seeking risk aversion and comfort
I think they meant post-match personal incompatibilities exist that can't be accounted for in even the most thorough profile
So why, in your opinion, do people not finalise the deal?
They do not want to.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
> they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them
I don't know if the matching problem has been fully explored enough to ascertain this is the case.
In the western world, people will go out with someone they find undesirable with the intention of reaping the benefits of short term relationships. I think this sometimes sets unrealistic expectations on those undesirable people and further muddies the water. I wonder if there's a way to impose a cost on those who are not in it for the long term.
I agree. I sure hope their government will not step in at that point and offer too many incentives to get married and disincentives to stay single, but I would not rule out this is exactly part of the plan...
too kiasu
All dating apps are misclassified. They should be under contraceptives.
The same problem on every platform. 80% men and few women who get so picky that most men will never reach their standards.
I fear for most young men dating is over. And I fear what will happen when societies have large swathes of men with no connection to society, no jobs, no friends, no wives, no families.
I'm always surprised to hear online that it's so bleak. I know a very wide variety of men in real life who have eventually found someone just fine on dating apps (the people I know who haven't are mostly places with a small dating pool or there's a particular reason women don't like them when they get to know them).
Do you fear that for most young women dating is over? Because one can't happen without the other.
Young single women do not have the geopolitical consequences that young single men do, for reasons that I cannot pretend to know.
So get out and talk to the lady at the bar? Didn't work out either for you? The problem isn't about too many man on dating apps.. it's about men believing society owns them a woman.
Nobody goes to bars and approaching women in public has been labelled creepy behaviour.
I’m so glad I’m not single. It’s worse than the job market.
> Nobody goes to bars
Where do you live? Because I've never, ever lived anywhere that this was true. I go to bars. They're always busy, unless it's a shit bar on a Tuesday night or whatever.
It's not rosy on the other side, dating apps sucks for women too.
The key problem is that dating apps have no interest in their user finding a long term partner (and leaving the app), they are maximizing engagement, making male pay, make sure people have enough matches to keep their ego afloat and make them addicted to the app, but at no point a stable relationship is a desired outcome for Match group (yeah, because despite having many apps, most of them belong to the same corporation).
The world would be a much happier place if dating apps took success fees instead of a monthly subscription (good luck making that work as a business though).
That's of course true. The dating apps goal is to make money. People who actually meet and have dates night leave the platform and no longer pay.
That being said the women's problem is the overabundance of availability of men whereas the men's problem is that they get nothing. So women at least CAN go out on dates if they just choose to.
It’s only a problem if those women don’t settle for the men they date. If they would, the balance would always be restored:
Top 20% of men settle with 20% of women. A new top of men takes over replacing the old one.
The main issue is that relationships don’t last. And that has to with the 20% of men not wanting to settle as they have free and abundant access to sex, which has been historically the primary reason for men to settle.
On top of that men are at their prime way longer than women: easily between 25 and 45. Women lose perceived value as sexual partners after 30/35 by many men.
Pretty sad to read incel narrative on HN…
As I said before, the problem is as bad for women as for men, it's just different: women keep getting matched with men that won't form stable relationships, because the app doesn't want to give a relationship to women either (even if they often don't have to pay, and as such are not income stream for the app, they are the product being sold so the app need them to stick as long as possible).
There's no objective “Top 20% of men”, but there is indeed a small group of men that is being pushed down every women's throat on apps because they are the easy going one that will not threaten the app's business by entering a long term relationship.
I bet any woman could just scroll down the list of their matches or make a new match with the guy who is not the best looking player guy and immediately have a chat a date lined up.
You know one the nice guys who are always other wise ignored.
Human matchmakers do take success fees sometimes and the business as a whole is widespread and successful. Those services can get expensive though, even at the low end. I would guess that the vast majority of dating app users would not be willing to drop thousands on matchmaking services.
Women can at least get something, which is a huge economic advantage these days in Western countries. They can split the bills, save more, use a relationship they aren’t happy in to leapfrog to a better one.
This is very interesting from pairwise comparison perspective. Infact, humans are better at pairwise preference scoring rather than estimating a score from single input [1]. In regular dating apps, the profiles are presented one by one which makes it more recurrent comparison based on the experience rather than in pairs.
In the news, it is not detailed but what would be interesting is to profiling automatically, given a somewhat larger pool of participants. Where certain number of pairs during the setup is presented to the new user and asked to make pairwise choices to build the preference profile over.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016816992...
Nice! But is there an app with this algorithm/strategy/design for finding good matches for casually having fun together? All the apps I know suck.
> finding good matches for casually having fun together?
Basically all dating apps are optimized for enabling casual hookups at this point.
>All the apps I know suck.
Do ALL the apps suck, or are you maybe not appealing enough for being picked for casual hookups by the users on the app?
> Do ALL the apps suck, or are you maybe not appealing enough for being picked for casual hookups by the users on the app?
Dunno, @beeforpork sounds hawt
The app has an incentive to suck unless you pay
Go recheck your calculations, you'll notice something about their incentive in the case where you pay.
Think more platonic hanging out. Hiking, game night, grabbing a drink.
Why would you need a pairwise matching algorithm for finding friends? Friends are generally not exclusive nor rivalrous
It's about prioritizing candidates for the costly initial audition, and breaking symmetry for the introduction, something particularly useful for people who can't just approach other at random in a social setting.
This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.
meetup and other related apps have always been best for finding people with related interests.
If they don't have your interests, feel free to start a new group?
Meetup got enshittified years ago already, and the changes drove away the small communities that once made up so much of the site; the only groups which prosper on it now are mainly large for-profit ventures.
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Thank you, I just learned a new word.
Rapacious
ADJECTIVE
1 given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed.
2 inordinately greedy; predatory; extortionate.
a rapacious disposition.
grasping, voracious,
Synonyms:
ravenous
Antonyms: generous
3 (of animals) subsisting by the capture of living prey; predacious.
FYI, Meetup got acquired by Bending Spoons and it seems it's being de-enshittified.
>Meetup got enshittified years ago already
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
One note on the OP is that the NRMP doesn't use Gale-Shapley, it actually uses the Roth-Peranson algorithm which is a slight modification of the original Gale-Shapley one.
I know there's a cold-start problem for adding a new competitor to dating apps, but I wish one would show up. Maybe I'm naive, but I think I would like this. To be fair, I think Hinge is already pretty good. Not sure why it feels so much better than Tinder.
This quote shall really resonate with all of you who use Tinder similar dating apps: "Commercial apps need you to keep swiping but this app is designed to get you off the platform. Singapore built the first dating app whose success metric is deleting its own users".
I don't really like the idea of the state having access to the data of a dating app but there is a part of me that things it should exist in an accelerationist/realist sense. I don't think online dating is going away, and the incentives of the dominant players are clearly not great for users or society. Government has a very strong incentive for people getting hitched.
Link to the website: https://firstdate.sandbox.gov.sg/
Which side do they screw over (the choosers get their worst possible match and the bidders get their best possible match)
The problem with this will be something like my preference would be a person who makes home a peaceful place. This isn’t something that can be put on preferences. As if a potential partner is going to tick yes to “incessant nagging” so I can avoid them.
A cute example of the idea that the state provides basic services, and individuals/companies are free to make money out of doing it better. Water, Comms, transport & housing anyone?
The age limit shows this is only about encouraging reproduction and is an FU to lonely people.
Anyone tried this algo to match co-founders?
The algorithm is mathematically optimal ("no two people exist who would both prefer each other over their assigned matches"), but the matching is a function of what exactly?
Revealed preferences? What's being asked here? Preferred noise level? Preferred number of children?
The article said some people called it dystopian. I don't think so.
But we can lean into that! If the government buys your data from data brokers (like some governments are already doing), the matching algorithm suddenly has a lot more data points to work with.
Related: I've been wondering since 2008 why there isn't a "recommender engine" for friends.
this is their third attempt at a government run dating service I think :/
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
What things could Singapore change to fix their birth rates? Empirically, nothing that any country is trying is working.
1/ lower housing costs. Singapore has the same chinese mindset when it comes to marriage: boyfriend needs a house (and car?) before he is suitable.
19 year old Singaporeans within a year of dating must sit down with their partner's families to put a $200k sgd deposit on a house to join the 7 year waiting list so they can get married by the time they are 27.
2/ Singapore does a decent job at this, but further normalize domestic workers. Domestic workers drastically soften the blow women experience in their careers, especially with kids.
If they can push costs down further (like housing a worker is expensive), this would enable more Singaporean women to have more free time to date, get married, etc.
3/ Male Singaporeans have a mandatory 2 year service, which detracts from their time to date. Potentially offer more benefits to marriage or more time off to date.
this is pretty much exactly what I would have said too. they could fix these things but it would cost a lot of money and/or impact the economy and defense and they just dont want to boost the birth rate that badly.
only thing I would add is the size of HDBs - they've been shrinking which I'm sure puts psychological pressure on young adults to not have kids.
>nothing that any country is trying is working.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
3 months of leave or a small welfare payment are not sufficiently compelling alternatives to a career. Pay them at the level of a career and see if that changes the numbers - I feel like at least some people would be interested in that. (Say, median national income? Spitballing here)
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
> Pay them at the level of a career
In what way? Pay them a six figure salary to stay home with kids for a few years?
>seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work
Where would that money come from? How high would the taxes have to be? Why would anyone start a business to hire in that country with such a massive cost for them they can't afford?
The welfare state only works if it's a safety net, not a 1:1 replacement for working wages.
In the US you might need it to be a five figure salary, sure. 50k? We could probably figure out the math on it.
Working out the logistics of paying for it is another matter, but if it's too expensive then you can't really complain about the low birthrate - either the state pays or the people do for all that time spent on raising kids. People who rationally choose to skip that time to work or do other things need to be motivated somehow if you want the kids, right?
So ultimately it depends on how seriously you want to take the birthrate crisis. This is the simplest way I can think of to tackle the two income household obstacle though.
>In the US you might need it to be a five figure salary, sure. 50k?
People on a six figure lifestyle in High-Col cities, will see a 5 figure welfare pay as a life downgrade and will not be incentivised to have kids.
The only ones incentivise will be those for whom 5 figures is an upgrade, I.E. the poor, who are already having kids regardless.
I know a fuckload of women who would happily bear children if you gave $15 an hour for 40 hours a week for it. The only thing stopping me personally from taking that deal is a lack of a uterus, and I don't even want to have kids.
Reagan spent years screaming about "Welfare queens" who were supposedly doing just that for a pittance in comparison, so it sure is funny how many people now insist that it can't even be possible, since so many people were so convinced it was happening for $400 a month in food stamps, at scale.
I also know a lot of women who wanted kids but couldn't afford it without, essentially, a tech industry husband. Or people like my sister, who has made raising kids her life's work since she was 16 but couldn't afford to have kids herself until she fell ass backwards into a nearly free house, from her now husbands family.
Everyone in my large friend group who wanted to start a family, literally wanted the traditional family structure and setup and "being a dad", had to wait a decade to get a home and a career that supported it. This includes the fact that having a child without good enough healthcare to support it or getting unlucky means medical bankruptcy.
It's not culture that people with lower understanding of finances and risk have kids still when having a kid is a serious drain on your finances. It's "duh".
If you want people who have an educated and mature understanding of risk to take that risk, it has to be worth it. Suck it up. You don't get to benefit from an uneducated populace anymore.
Importing lots of white dudes. WMAF literally is extremely pro-natalist (massively higher WMAF babies than other pairings per-capita):
https://www.reddit.com/r/aznidentity/comments/1s184vi/cdc_da...
Unironically Mao/Nixon and Henry Kissenger almost put us into a hilarious world where we (the USA) would have "imported" ~10 million Chinese women. Mao unironically proposed this and his argument about why it would have hurt us is that they "have too many children!":
"Chairman Mao: (Laughing) Those are honest words.
Dr. Kissinger: This is our position.
Chairman Mao: Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (Laughter, particularly among the women.)
Dr. Kissinger: The Chairman is improving his offer.
Chairman Mao: By doing so we can let them flood your country with disaster and therefore impair your interests. In our country we have too many women, and they have a way of doing things. They give birth to children and our children are too many. (Laughter)
[Page 132] Dr. Kissinger: It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it."
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v18...
Not often countries want to degrade their culture like that by importing other cultures to have children with their women
Maybe the europeans are an exception
At this point it's as much of a fetish as it's a religion.
Yeah the world is in a 60 year trend in declining births. An app isn't going to fix anything
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
What would you do if you were the Singaporean government?
Japan is doing it well
Crash the economy and reduce people's purchasing power
Make them poor, and the birth rate will rise (Japan birth rate is rising) =)
Bigger HDBs
Yeah, so, who are the proposers and who are the receivers?
The idea is interesting, of course, but I think the user experience won't be much different from a classic dating app, plus it inevitably requires an analysis of many nuances
What annoys people about Singapore is that it's an incredibly right leaning society with single party rule and "outrageous" social policies like "get divorced, lose your home", "10 grams of meth and we'll hang you (and we mean it)". And yet it's incredibly successful, and the people there are happy.
Well, apart from the people hung for meth possession or the people trapped in abusive marriages.
Do they still not allow men with long hair?
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
Yes, dating apps turbocharge hypergamy. It is not a secret that the top 10% of men get a huge share of the likes received.
Edit:
Share of all likes received according to ChatGPT
Top 1% 16.4%
Top 5% 41.1%
Top 10% 58.0%
Top 50% 95.7%
Bottom 50% 4.3%
Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates
Back then you could have 10 wives and start a population of people named Khan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_City%2C_Arizona
>you could
Could you? Are you part of the 1%?
The second factor is access to birth control, most women just dont want to have children unless in very specific circumstances
Historically they were compelled
This explains the drop from 50s not the 2000s.
Cell-phones. Noone’s having sex because they’d rather watch Tik-Tok; it’s got lower friction than going outside.
perhaps religious and moral pressure not to excersize the choice available has decreased between 50s and 2000s
Most of the drop occurred in the late 50s to mid 60s. Fertility in the US peaked at over 3.5 births per woman in the 50s before falling below 2 by the late 60s. It then stabilized for 40 years and even recovered to the low to mid 2s in the 90s and 2000s before falling post-2008 from 2.2 to 1.7.
I too have the same skepticism here. If you're using dating apps then you're at least motivated to seek physical relations.
However, I'm surprised nobody has bought up porn yet (and other equally addicting digital habits).
Like which cultures?
Humans are naturally polygamous like the other great apes and mammals. When men (as in, male humans) realised this, they concluded that women were entirely to blame for it and sought to control their behaviour. This eventually got woven into their religions and for some time women's behaviour was controlled, or at least became shameful and taboo. Many things have happened more recently:
* Feminism,
* Decline of religion,
* Rise of state and law, particularly around male responsibilities towards children,
* Effective contraception,
* Dating apps.
Take all of this together and we're basically reverting back to our natural polygamy, but without all the pregnancies.
It was practiced by the literal 1% of men, unless we talking about Khan specifically, it's a insignificant number.
This is the kind of thing that really needs a primary source instead of ChatGPT.
They are well kown many years old okcupid numbers
The only new variable in the last century of humanity is birth control. All others (hypergamy, economic mobility, migration, etc.) are recurring and have not impacted birth rates significantly in the past.
Population density and infant mortality had changed a lot too in the last 100 years. Income disparities, working hours, and climate too in the last 50.
Seoul government also has a similar app/program and potentially a similar algorithm
This assumes everyone puts their preferences and dealbreakers faithfully and not so as to score best/most chicks. I wonder what comes out of this.
Trying to fix falling birth rates with an official government dating app shows they don't understand the problem in the slightest, as dating apps are one of the main causes of declining birth rates in the first place.
A reminder that Singapore has plenty of history with government-sponsored dating, notably the Social Development Unit (SDU), aka "Single, Desperate and Ugly".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
0-worlding
HN:
- new python library: 3 comments
- relationships article: 244 comments