I have used Photo Feeler. I think it may not actually be terribly helpful in improving dating outcomes. Photo Feeler might get more people to respond to your messages or message you. But that does not necessarily translate to increased success in dating, if the goal is to find somebody who makes for a good life partner. The good life partner would presumably be a good enough match that they would respond to you or message you regardless of whether you had good or bad photos, within reason. Using Photo Feeler was also kinda rough on me emotionally, getting all my photos judged like that. Not to say I wouldn’t use it again, but still.
To answer the more general question, maybe dating is just an extremely hard problem because it doesn’t have general solutions. Everybody is different and is looking for something different in a partner and has their own quirks and preferences. And there’s no simple algorithm to match them up. That seems like kind of a cop out response to me, it seems like enough effort should be able to solve the problem. But it’s my best guess.
My second guess is more cynical. The dating apps actually benefit from people failing at dating. Because once people succeed at finding a life partner, then, (assuming they’re monogamous, which is still the dominant norm) they no longer need the dating apps. So for instance, maybe Match actively made OKCupid worse after they bought it, because it was too good at matching people and kept them from making as much money off the more lucrative Match.
That last paragraph has some merit. Plenty of folks need some help, guidance, or oppertunities in some form or another, but all the largest providers of such help have a perverse incentive to keep people dating longer—it’s the only way they retain customers. To the extent someone tries to run such a business on recurring charges, customer retention will inevitably become a KPI and of course you get what you measure… Obvious fix to that is flat fee, pay only if successful pricing model (or similar). At minimum, we need to stop incentivising these services to be as terrible as they can get away with at what is obstensively their main function.
It seems the same incentives exist to a lesser degree with self help books, especially at the publisher level. If the problem actually gets fixed the customer no longer needs self help books.
I have used Photo Feeler. I think it may not actually be terribly helpful in improving dating outcomes. Photo Feeler might get more people to respond to your messages or message you. But that does not necessarily translate to increased success in dating, if the goal is to find somebody who makes for a good life partner. The good life partner would presumably be a good enough match that they would respond to you or message you regardless of whether you had good or bad photos, within reason. Using Photo Feeler was also kinda rough on me emotionally, getting all my photos judged like that. Not to say I wouldn’t use it again, but still.
To answer the more general question, maybe dating is just an extremely hard problem because it doesn’t have general solutions. Everybody is different and is looking for something different in a partner and has their own quirks and preferences. And there’s no simple algorithm to match them up. That seems like kind of a cop out response to me, it seems like enough effort should be able to solve the problem. But it’s my best guess.
My second guess is more cynical. The dating apps actually benefit from people failing at dating. Because once people succeed at finding a life partner, then, (assuming they’re monogamous, which is still the dominant norm) they no longer need the dating apps. So for instance, maybe Match actively made OKCupid worse after they bought it, because it was too good at matching people and kept them from making as much money off the more lucrative Match.
That last paragraph has some merit. Plenty of folks need some help, guidance, or oppertunities in some form or another, but all the largest providers of such help have a perverse incentive to keep people dating longer—it’s the only way they retain customers. To the extent someone tries to run such a business on recurring charges, customer retention will inevitably become a KPI and of course you get what you measure… Obvious fix to that is flat fee, pay only if successful pricing model (or similar). At minimum, we need to stop incentivising these services to be as terrible as they can get away with at what is obstensively their main function.
It seems the same incentives exist to a lesser degree with self help books, especially at the publisher level. If the problem actually gets fixed the customer no longer needs self help books.