Here is one improvement to OKcupid, which we might even be able to implement as a third party:
OKcupid has bad match algorithms, but it can still be useful as searchable classified adds. However, when you find a legitimate match, you need to have a way to signal to the other person that you believe the match could work.
Most messages on OKcupid are from men to women, so women already have a way to do this: send a message, however men do not.
Men spam messages, by glancing over profiles, and sending cookie cutter messages that mention something in the profile. Women are used to this spam, and may reject legitimate interest, because they do not have a good enough spam filter.
Our service would be to provide an I am not spamming commitment. A flag that can be put in a message which signals “This is the only flagged message I have sent this week”
It would be a link, you put in your message, which sends you to a site that basically says. Yes, Bob(profile link) has only sent this flag to Alice(profile link) in the week of 2/20/14-2/26/14, with an explanation of how this works.
Do you think that would be a useful service to implement? Do you think people would actually use it, and receive it well?
I wonder if a per-message fee for a certain kind of message would be a good business model for this. My suspicion is that it would work very well if all your users had that reluctance to ever spend anything online (people are much more willing to buy utilions that involve getting a physical product than to pay for things like apps)), but it breaks down as soon as someone with some unused disposable income realizes that spamming $1 notes isn’t that expensive.
Only being able to send a certain number of messages per week of a special type might be enough for indicating non-spam, as long as you could solve the problem of people making multiple profiles to get around it. Having a small fee attached to the service might help with tracking that down, since it would keep people from abusing it too extremely, and cover the cost of having someone investigate suspicious accounts (if more than one is paid for by the same credit card at around the same time, for example).
OKcupid solves the multiple account problem for us. It is probably better to not send a virtual rose than to make an account that you then have to answer all the questions to.
Our service would be to provide an I am not spamming commitment. A flag that can be put in a message which signals “This is the only flagged message I have sent this week”
Where will your credibility come from?
Alice receives a message from Bob. It says “You’re amazing, we’re nothing but mammals, let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”, and it also says “I, Mallory, hereby certify that Bob only talked about mammals once this week—to you”.
Why should Alice believe you?
Things like that are technically possible (e.g. cryptographic proofs-of-work) but Alice is unlikely to verify your proofs herself and why should she trust Mallory, anyway?
I think if we had a nice professional website, with a link to a long description of how it all works that people won’t read anyway, they will tend to trust us.
Seconded—once you get as far as people trusting you enough to post their personal information and possibly pay you for the service, they’re not still suspecting you of letting people spam you with “certified” non-spam.
OK Cupid has a horrible match percent algorithm. Basically someone who has a check list of things that their match cannot be will answer lots of questions as “this matters a lot to me” and “any of these options are acceptable except for this one extreme one that nobody will click anyway.” The stupid algorithm will inflate this person’s match percent with everyone.
So, if you look at people with high compatibility with you, that says more about their question answering style, than how much you have in common.
This is why the algorithm is horrible in theory. In practice my one example is that I am getting married in a month to someone I met on OKcupid with 99% compatibility.
A good website design could change the answering style. Imagine a site where you don’t fill out all the answers at once. Instead it just displays one question at a time, and you can either answer it or click “not now”. The algorithm would prioritize the questions it asks you dynamically, using the already existing data about you and your potential matches—it would ask you the question which it expects to provide most bits of information.
Also, it would use the math properly. The compatiblity would not be calculated as number of questions answered, but number of bits these answers provide. A match for “likes cats” provides more bits than “is not a serial killer”.
Very consistently people that I know and like, when I see them on okcupid, have a high match percentage. When I meet okcupid people with a good match percentage, I usually like them. This seems to imply the algorithm is a lot better than your theoretical worst example of it. I think your situation is much more of a problem if you don’t answer enough questions.
Perhaps the way people tend to answer questions does not change very much from person to person, so this problem does not show up in practice.
However, if you are willing to change your style for answering questions, it is probably possible to game OKcupid in such a way that you get 90+% with anyone you would care about.
Selfdefeating The entire point of OKcupid is to find someone you will actually click with. Inflating your own match percentages artificially just makes OKCupid worse for you. Of course, this doesnt help if the site just isnt very popular in your city.
Eh. Radical: Have the government do this. Literally, run a dating site, have sex-ed classes teach people how to use it, and why gaming it is bloody stupid. That should result in maximum uptake, and would cost a heck of a lot less than a lot of other initiatives governments already run trying to promote stable pairbonds.
Now, how to get this into a political platform…
Still pointless! There is no upside to having a bunch of people you are not actually compatible with think the mirage you constructed is a good match. If they are not a match with your honest profile, you do not want to waste theirs or your own time.
If your actual goal is to have a bunch of one night stands, then make a profile that out and out states that so that you will be matched with people of like mind. Dishonesty in this matter is both unetical and nigh certain to result in unpleasant drama.
Proper use of this kind of tool is an exercise in luminosity—the more accurately you identify what you are truely looking for, the better it works.
Also, see radical proposal: If a site of this type is run by the government, sockpuppets are obviously not going to be an option—one account per social security number or local equivalent, because that is a really simple way to shut down a whole host of abuses.
So how would it be different from OK Cupid, for example?
As an aside, wasn’t the original motivation for Facebook Zuckerberg’s desire to meet girls..? :-D
Here is one improvement to OKcupid, which we might even be able to implement as a third party:
OKcupid has bad match algorithms, but it can still be useful as searchable classified adds. However, when you find a legitimate match, you need to have a way to signal to the other person that you believe the match could work.
Most messages on OKcupid are from men to women, so women already have a way to do this: send a message, however men do not.
Men spam messages, by glancing over profiles, and sending cookie cutter messages that mention something in the profile. Women are used to this spam, and may reject legitimate interest, because they do not have a good enough spam filter.
Our service would be to provide an I am not spamming commitment. A flag that can be put in a message which signals “This is the only flagged message I have sent this week”
It would be a link, you put in your message, which sends you to a site that basically says. Yes, Bob(profile link) has only sent this flag to Alice(profile link) in the week of 2/20/14-2/26/14, with an explanation of how this works.
Do you think that would be a useful service to implement? Do you think people would actually use it, and receive it well?
Scarce signals do increase willingness to go on dates, based on a field experiment of online dating in South Korea.
I wonder if a per-message fee for a certain kind of message would be a good business model for this. My suspicion is that it would work very well if all your users had that reluctance to ever spend anything online (people are much more willing to buy utilions that involve getting a physical product than to pay for things like apps)), but it breaks down as soon as someone with some unused disposable income realizes that spamming $1 notes isn’t that expensive.
Only being able to send a certain number of messages per week of a special type might be enough for indicating non-spam, as long as you could solve the problem of people making multiple profiles to get around it. Having a small fee attached to the service might help with tracking that down, since it would keep people from abusing it too extremely, and cover the cost of having someone investigate suspicious accounts (if more than one is paid for by the same credit card at around the same time, for example).
OKcupid solves the multiple account problem for us. It is probably better to not send a virtual rose than to make an account that you then have to answer all the questions to.
Where will your credibility come from?
Alice receives a message from Bob. It says “You’re amazing, we’re nothing but mammals, let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”, and it also says “I, Mallory, hereby certify that Bob only talked about mammals once this week—to you”.
Why should Alice believe you?
Things like that are technically possible (e.g. cryptographic proofs-of-work) but Alice is unlikely to verify your proofs herself and why should she trust Mallory, anyway?
I think if we had a nice professional website, with a link to a long description of how it all works that people won’t read anyway, they will tend to trust us.
Especially if we use math.
Seconded—once you get as far as people trusting you enough to post their personal information and possibly pay you for the service, they’re not still suspecting you of letting people spam you with “certified” non-spam.
OK Cupid has a horrible match percent algorithm. Basically someone who has a check list of things that their match cannot be will answer lots of questions as “this matters a lot to me” and “any of these options are acceptable except for this one extreme one that nobody will click anyway.” The stupid algorithm will inflate this person’s match percent with everyone.
So, if you look at people with high compatibility with you, that says more about their question answering style, than how much you have in common.
This is why the algorithm is horrible in theory. In practice my one example is that I am getting married in a month to someone I met on OKcupid with 99% compatibility.
A good website design could change the answering style. Imagine a site where you don’t fill out all the answers at once. Instead it just displays one question at a time, and you can either answer it or click “not now”. The algorithm would prioritize the questions it asks you dynamically, using the already existing data about you and your potential matches—it would ask you the question which it expects to provide most bits of information.
Also, it would use the math properly. The compatiblity would not be calculated as number of questions answered, but number of bits these answers provide. A match for “likes cats” provides more bits than “is not a serial killer”.
Very consistently people that I know and like, when I see them on okcupid, have a high match percentage. When I meet okcupid people with a good match percentage, I usually like them. This seems to imply the algorithm is a lot better than your theoretical worst example of it. I think your situation is much more of a problem if you don’t answer enough questions.
Perhaps the way people tend to answer questions does not change very much from person to person, so this problem does not show up in practice.
However, if you are willing to change your style for answering questions, it is probably possible to game OKcupid in such a way that you get 90+% with anyone you would care about.
Selfdefeating The entire point of OKcupid is to find someone you will actually click with. Inflating your own match percentages artificially just makes OKCupid worse for you. Of course, this doesnt help if the site just isnt very popular in your city.
Eh. Radical: Have the government do this. Literally, run a dating site, have sex-ed classes teach people how to use it, and why gaming it is bloody stupid. That should result in maximum uptake, and would cost a heck of a lot less than a lot of other initiatives governments already run trying to promote stable pairbonds. Now, how to get this into a political platform…
Not if you have an honest account too so you can check compatibility while still broadcasting higher compatibility than you actually have.
Still pointless! There is no upside to having a bunch of people you are not actually compatible with think the mirage you constructed is a good match. If they are not a match with your honest profile, you do not want to waste theirs or your own time. If your actual goal is to have a bunch of one night stands, then make a profile that out and out states that so that you will be matched with people of like mind. Dishonesty in this matter is both unetical and nigh certain to result in unpleasant drama. Proper use of this kind of tool is an exercise in luminosity—the more accurately you identify what you are truely looking for, the better it works.
Also, see radical proposal: If a site of this type is run by the government, sockpuppets are obviously not going to be an option—one account per social security number or local equivalent, because that is a really simple way to shut down a whole host of abuses.