That no one rebuilt old OkCupid updates me a lot about how much the startup world actually makes the world better
The prevailing ideology of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech world, is that startups are an engine (maybe even the engine) that drives progress towards a future that’s better than the past, by creating new products that add value to people’s lives.
I now think this is true in a limited way. Software is eating the world, and lots of bureaucracy is being replaced by automation which is generally cheaper, faster, and a better UX. But I now think that this narrative is largely propaganda.
It’s been 8 years since Match bought and ruined OkCupid and no one, in the whole tech ecosystem, stepped up to make a dating app even as good as old OkC is a huge black mark against the whole SV ideology of technology changing the world for the better.
Finding a partner is such a huge, real, pain point for millions of people. The existing solutions are so bad and extractive. A good solution has already been demonstrated. And yet not a single competent founder wanted to solve that problem for planet earth, instead of doing something else, that (arguably) would have been more profitable. At minimum, someone could have forgone venture funding and built this as a cashflow business.
It’s true that this is a market that depends on economies of scale, because the quality of your product is proportional to the size of your matching pool. But I don’t buy that this is insurmountable. Just like with any startup, you start by serving a niche market really well, and then expand outward from there. (The first niche I would try for is by building an amazing match-making experience for female grad students at a particular top university. If you create a great experience for the women, the men will come, and I’d rather build an initial product for relatively smart customers. But there are dozens of niches one could try for.)
But it seems like no one tried to recreate OkC, much less creating something better, until the manifold team built manifold.love (currently in maintenance mode)? Not that no one succeeded. To my knowledge, no else one even tried. Possibly Luna counts, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that they spent substantial effort running giant parties, compared to actually developing and launching their product—from which I infer that they were not very serious. I’ve been looking for good dating apps. I think if a serious founder was trying seriously, I would have heard about it.
Thousands of funders a year, and no one?!
That’s such a massive failure, for almost a decade, that it suggests to me that the SV ideology of building things that make people’s lives better is broadly propaganda. The best founders might be relentlessly resourceful, but a tiny fraction of them seem to be motivated by creating value for the world, or this low hanging fruit wouldn’t have been left hanging for so long.
This is of course in addition to the long list of big tech companies who exploit their network-effect monopoly power to extract value from their users (often creating negative societal externalities in the process), more than creating value for them. But it’s a weaker update that there are some tech companies that do ethically dubious stuff, compared to the stronger update that there was no startup that took on this obvious, underserved, human problem.
My guess is that the tech world is a silo of competence (because competence is financially rewarded), but operates from an ideology with major distortions / blindspots, that are disconnected from commonsense reasoning about what’s Good. eg following profit incentives, and excitement about doing big things (independent from whether those good things have humane or inhumane impacts) off a cliff.
Basically: I don’t blame founders or companies for following their incentive gradients, I blame individuals/society for being unwilling to assign reasonable prices to important goods.
I think the bad-ness of dating apps is downstream of poor norms around impact attribution for matches made. Even though relationships and marriages are extremely valuable, individual people are not in the habit of paying that to anyone.
Like, $100k or a year’s salary seems like a very cheap value to assign to your life partner. If dating apps could rely on that size of payment when they succeed, then I think there could be enough funding for something at least a good small business. But I’ve never heard of anyone actually paying anywhere near that. (myself included—though I paid a retroactive $1k payment to the person who organized the conference I met my wife at)
I think keeper.ai tries to solve this with large bounties on dating/marriages, it’s one of the things I wish we pushed for more on Manifold Love. It seems possible to build one for the niche of “the ea/rat community”; Manifold Love, the checkboxes thing, dating docs got pretty good adoption for not that much execution.
(Also: be the change! I think building out OKC is one of the easiest “hello world” software projects one could imagine, Claude could definitely make a passable version in a day. Then you’ll discover a bunch of hard stuff around getting users, but it sure could be a good exercise.)
Mm I think it’s hard to get optimal credit allocation, but easy to get half-baked allocation, or just see that it’s directionally way too low? Like sure, maybe it’s unclear whether Hinge deserves 1% or 10% or ~100% of the credit but like, at a $100k valuation of a marriage, one should be excited to pay $1k to a dating app.
Like, I think matchmaking is very similarly shaped to the problem of recruiting employees, but there corporations are more locally rational about spending money than individuals, and can do things like pay $10k referral bonuses, or offer external recruiters 20% of their referee’s first year salary.
I’ve started writing a small research paper on this, using mathematical framework, and understood that I had long conflated Shapley values with ROSE values. Here’s what I found, having corrected that error.
ROSE bargaining satisfies Efficiency, Pareto Optimality, Symmetry*, Maximin Dominance and Linearity—a bunch of important desiderata. Shapley values, on other hand, don’t satisfy Maximin Dominance so someone might unilaterally reject cooperation; I’ll explore ROSE equilibrium below.
Subjects: people and services for finding partners.
By Proposition 8.2, ROSE value remains same if moves transferring money within game are discarded. Thus, we can assume no money transfers.
By Proposition 11.3, ROSE value for dating service is equal or greater than its maximin.
By Proposition 12.2, ROSE value for dating service is equal or less than its maximum attainable value.
There’s generally one move for a person to maximize their utility: use the dating service with highest probability of success (or expected relationship quality) available.
There are generally two moves for a service: to launch or not to launch. First involves some intrinsic motivation and feeling of goodness minus running costs, the second option has value of zero exactly.
For a large service, running costs (including moderation) exceed much realistic motivation. Therefore, maximum and maximin values for it are both zero.
From (7), (3) and (4), ROSE value for large dating service is zero.
Therefore, total money transfers to a large dating service equal its total costs.
So, why yes or why no?
By the way, Shapley values suggest paying a significant sum! Given value of a relationship of $10K (can be scaled), and four options for finding partners (0:p0=0.03 -- self-search, α:pα=0.09 -- friend’s help, β:pβ=0.10 -- dating sites, γ:pγ=0.70 -- the specialized project suggested up the comments), the Shapley-fair price per success would be respectively $550, $650 and $4400.
P.S. I’m explicitly not open to discussing what price I’d be cheerful to pay to service which would help to build relationships. In this thread, I’m more interested in whether there are new decision theory developments which would find maximin-satisfying equilibria closer to Shapley one.
I don’t think one can coherently value marriage 20 times as much as than a saved life ($5k as GiveWell says)? Indeed there is more emotional attachment to a person who’s your partner (i.e. who you are emotionally attached to) than to a random human in the world, but surely not that much?
And if a marriage is valued at $10k, then the credit assignment 1%/10% would make the allocation $100/$1000 - and it seems that people really want to round the former towards zero
I mean, it’s obviously very dependent on your personal finance situation but I’m using $100k as an order of magnitude proxy for “about a years salary”. I think it’s very coherent to give up a year of marginal salary in exchange for finding the love of your life, rather than like $10k or ~1mo salary.
Of course, the world is full of mispricings, and currently you can save a life for something like $5k. I think these are both good trades to make, and most people should have a portfolio that consists of both “life partners” and “impact from lives saved” and crucially not put all their investment into just one or the other.
It’s possible no one tried literally “recreate OkC”, but I think dating startups are very oversubscribed by founders, relative to interest from VCs [1][2][3] (and I think VCs are mostly correct that they won’t make money [4][5]).
(Edit: I want to note that those are things I found after a bit of googling to see if my sense of the consensus was borne out; they are meant in the spirit of “several samples of weak evidence”)
I don’t particularly believe you that OkC solves dating for a significant fraction of people. IIRC, a previous time we talked about this, @romeostevensit suggested you had not sufficiently internalised the OkCupid blog findings about how much people prioritised physical attraction.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
I think it’s fine to lament our lack of good mechanisms for public good provision, and claim our society is failing at that. But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
I agree that more people should be starting revenue-funded/bootstrapped businesses (including ones enabled by software/technology).
The meme is that if you’re starting a tech company, it’s going to be a VC-funded startup. This is, I think, a meme put out by VCs themselves, including Paul Graham/YCombinator, and it conflates new software projects and businesses generally with a specific kind of business model called the “tech startup”.
Not every project worth doing should be a business (some should be hobbies or donation-funded) and not every business worth doing should be a VC-funded startup (some should be bootstrapped and grow from sales revenue.)
The VC startup business model requires rapid growth and expects 30x returns over a roughly 5-10 year time horizon. That simply doesn’t include every project worth doing. Some businesses are viable but are not likely to grow that much or that fast; some projects shouldn’t be expected to be profitable at all and need philanthropic support.
I think the narrative that “tech startups are where innovation happens” is...badly incomplete, but still a hell of a lot more correct than “tech startups are net destructive”.
Think about new technologies; then think about where they were developed. That process can ever happen end-to-end within a startup, but more often I think innovative startups are founded around IP developed while the founders were in academia; or the startup found a new use for open-source tools or tools developed within big companies. There simply isn’t time to solve particularly hard technical problems if you have to get to profitability and 30x growth in 5 years. The startup format is primarily designed for finding product-market fit—i.e. putting together existing technologies, packaging them as a “product” with a narrative about what and who it’s for, and tweaking it until you find a context where people will pay for the product, and then making the whole thing bigger and bigger. You can do that in 5 years. But no, you can’t do literally all of society’s technological innovation within that narrow context!
(Part of the issue is that we still technically count very big tech companies as “startups” and they certainly qualify as “Silicon Valley”, so if you conflate all of “tech” into one big blob it includes the kind of big engineering-heavy companies that have R&D departments with long time horizons. Is OpenAI a “tech startup”? Sure, in that it’s a recently founded technology company. But it is under very different financial constraints from a YC startup.)
But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
Neither of those, exactly.
I’m claiming that the narrative around the startup scene is that they are virtuous engines of [humane] value creation (often in counter to a reactionary narrative that “big tech” is largely about exploitation and extraction). It’s about “changing the world” (for the better).
This opportunity seems like a place where one could have traded meaningfully large personal financial EV for enormous amounts of humane value. Apparently no founder wanted to take that trade. Because I would expect there to be variation in how much funders are motivated by money vs. making a mark on the world vs. creating value vs. other stuff, that fact that (to my knowledge) no founder went for it, is evidence about the motivations of the whole founder class. The number of founders who are more interested in creating something that helps a lot of people than they are in making a lot of money (even if they’re interested in both) is apparently very small.
Now, maybe startups actually do create lots of humane value, even if they’re created by founders and VC’s motivated by profit. The motivations of of the founders are only indirect evidence about the effects of startups.
But the tech scene is not motivated to optimize for this at all?? That sure does update me about how much the narrative is true vs. propaganda.
Now if I’m wrong and old OkCupid was only drastically better for me and my unusually high verbal intelligence friends, and it’s not actually better than the existing offerings for the vast majority of people, that’s a crux for me.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
Manifold.Love is going into maintenance mode while we focus on our core product. We hope to return with improvements once we have more bandwidth; we’re still stoked on the idea of a prediction market-based dating app!
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
The market is much more crowded now. A new old okcupid service would be competing against okcupid as well as everything else. And okcupid has a huge advantage in an existing userbase.
And, OKCupid’s algorithm still exists, sort of. And you can write as much as you like. What aspect of the old site do you think was critically different?
I just don’t think there’s barely a cent to be made in launching yet another dating app. So you can’t blame people for not doing it.
I think the biggest advantage of old OKC was that more people used it; now people are spread across hinge and bumble as well as Tinder.
The fact that there’s a sex recession is pretty suggestive that tinder and the endless stream of tinder clones doesn’t serve people very well.
Even if you don’t assess potential romantic partners by reading their essays, like I do, OkC’s match percentage meant that you could easily filter out 95% of the pool to people who are more likely to be compatible with you, along whatever metrics of compatibility you care about.
OKcupid is certainly a better product for hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of unusually literate people, including ~all potential developers and most people in their social circles. It’s not a small niche.
I didn’t say Silicon Valley is bad. I said that the narrative about Silicon Valley is largely propagnada, which can be true independently of how good or bad it is, in absolute terms, or relative to the rest of the world.
That no one rebuilt old OkCupid updates me a lot about how much the startup world actually makes the world better
The prevailing ideology of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech world, is that startups are an engine (maybe even the engine) that drives progress towards a future that’s better than the past, by creating new products that add value to people’s lives.
I now think this is true in a limited way. Software is eating the world, and lots of bureaucracy is being replaced by automation which is generally cheaper, faster, and a better UX. But I now think that this narrative is largely propaganda.
It’s been 8 years since Match bought and ruined OkCupid and no one, in the whole tech ecosystem, stepped up to make a dating app even as good as old OkC is a huge black mark against the whole SV ideology of technology changing the world for the better.
Finding a partner is such a huge, real, pain point for millions of people. The existing solutions are so bad and extractive. A good solution has already been demonstrated. And yet not a single competent founder wanted to solve that problem for planet earth, instead of doing something else, that (arguably) would have been more profitable. At minimum, someone could have forgone venture funding and built this as a cashflow business.
It’s true that this is a market that depends on economies of scale, because the quality of your product is proportional to the size of your matching pool. But I don’t buy that this is insurmountable. Just like with any startup, you start by serving a niche market really well, and then expand outward from there. (The first niche I would try for is by building an amazing match-making experience for female grad students at a particular top university. If you create a great experience for the women, the men will come, and I’d rather build an initial product for relatively smart customers. But there are dozens of niches one could try for.)
But it seems like no one tried to recreate OkC, much less creating something better, until the manifold team built manifold.love (currently in maintenance mode)? Not that no one succeeded. To my knowledge, no else one even tried. Possibly Luna counts, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that they spent substantial effort running giant parties, compared to actually developing and launching their product—from which I infer that they were not very serious. I’ve been looking for good dating apps. I think if a serious founder was trying seriously, I would have heard about it.
Thousands of funders a year, and no one?!
That’s such a massive failure, for almost a decade, that it suggests to me that the SV ideology of building things that make people’s lives better is broadly propaganda. The best founders might be relentlessly resourceful, but a tiny fraction of them seem to be motivated by creating value for the world, or this low hanging fruit wouldn’t have been left hanging for so long.
This is of course in addition to the long list of big tech companies who exploit their network-effect monopoly power to extract value from their users (often creating negative societal externalities in the process), more than creating value for them. But it’s a weaker update that there are some tech companies that do ethically dubious stuff, compared to the stronger update that there was no startup that took on this obvious, underserved, human problem.
My guess is that the tech world is a silo of competence (because competence is financially rewarded), but operates from an ideology with major distortions / blindspots, that are disconnected from commonsense reasoning about what’s Good. eg following profit incentives, and excitement about doing big things (independent from whether those good things have humane or inhumane impacts) off a cliff.
Basically: I don’t blame founders or companies for following their incentive gradients, I blame individuals/society for being unwilling to assign reasonable prices to important goods.
I think the bad-ness of dating apps is downstream of poor norms around impact attribution for matches made. Even though relationships and marriages are extremely valuable, individual people are not in the habit of paying that to anyone.
Like, $100k or a year’s salary seems like a very cheap value to assign to your life partner. If dating apps could rely on that size of payment when they succeed, then I think there could be enough funding for something at least a good small business. But I’ve never heard of anyone actually paying anywhere near that. (myself included—though I paid a retroactive $1k payment to the person who organized the conference I met my wife at)
I think keeper.ai tries to solve this with large bounties on dating/marriages, it’s one of the things I wish we pushed for more on Manifold Love. It seems possible to build one for the niche of “the ea/rat community”; Manifold Love, the checkboxes thing, dating docs got pretty good adoption for not that much execution.
(Also: be the change! I think building out OKC is one of the easiest “hello world” software projects one could imagine, Claude could definitely make a passable version in a day. Then you’ll discover a bunch of hard stuff around getting users, but it sure could be a good exercise.)
I think the credit assignment is legit hard, rather than just being a case of bad norms. Do you disagree?
Mm I think it’s hard to get optimal credit allocation, but easy to get half-baked allocation, or just see that it’s directionally way too low? Like sure, maybe it’s unclear whether Hinge deserves 1% or 10% or ~100% of the credit but like, at a $100k valuation of a marriage, one should be excited to pay $1k to a dating app.
Like, I think matchmaking is very similarly shaped to the problem of recruiting employees, but there corporations are more locally rational about spending money than individuals, and can do things like pay $10k referral bonuses, or offer external recruiters 20% of their referee’s first year salary.
(Expensive) Matchmaking services already exist—what’s your reading on why they’re not more popular?
I’ve started writing a small research paper on this, using mathematical framework, and understood that I had long conflated Shapley values with ROSE values. Here’s what I found, having corrected that error.
ROSE bargaining satisfies Efficiency, Pareto Optimality, Symmetry*, Maximin Dominance and Linearity—a bunch of important desiderata. Shapley values, on other hand, don’t satisfy Maximin Dominance so someone might unilaterally reject cooperation; I’ll explore ROSE equilibrium below.
Subjects: people and services for finding partners.
By Proposition 8.2, ROSE value remains same if moves transferring money within game are discarded. Thus, we can assume no money transfers.
By Proposition 11.3, ROSE value for dating service is equal or greater than its maximin.
By Proposition 12.2, ROSE value for dating service is equal or less than its maximum attainable value.
There’s generally one move for a person to maximize their utility: use the dating service with highest probability of success (or expected relationship quality) available.
There are generally two moves for a service: to launch or not to launch. First involves some intrinsic motivation and feeling of goodness minus running costs, the second option has value of zero exactly.
For a large service, running costs (including moderation) exceed much realistic motivation. Therefore, maximum and maximin values for it are both zero.
From (7), (3) and (4), ROSE value for large dating service is zero.
Therefore, total money transfers to a large dating service equal its total costs.
So, why yes or why no?
By the way, Shapley values suggest paying a significant sum! Given value of a relationship of $10K (can be scaled), and four options for finding partners (0:p0=0.03 -- self-search, α:pα=0.09 -- friend’s help, β:pβ=0.10 -- dating sites, γ:pγ=0.70 -- the specialized project suggested up the comments), the Shapley-fair price per success would be respectively $550, $650 and $4400.
P.S. I’m explicitly not open to discussing what price I’d be cheerful to pay to service which would help to build relationships. In this thread, I’m more interested in whether there are new decision theory developments which would find maximin-satisfying equilibria closer to Shapley one.
I don’t think one can coherently value marriage 20 times as much as than a saved life ($5k as GiveWell says)? Indeed there is more emotional attachment to a person who’s your partner (i.e. who you are emotionally attached to) than to a random human in the world, but surely not that much?
And if a marriage is valued at $10k, then the credit assignment 1%/10% would make the allocation $100/$1000 - and it seems that people really want to round the former towards zero
I mean, it’s obviously very dependent on your personal finance situation but I’m using $100k as an order of magnitude proxy for “about a years salary”. I think it’s very coherent to give up a year of marginal salary in exchange for finding the love of your life, rather than like $10k or ~1mo salary.
Of course, the world is full of mispricings, and currently you can save a life for something like $5k. I think these are both good trades to make, and most people should have a portfolio that consists of both “life partners” and “impact from lives saved” and crucially not put all their investment into just one or the other.
I wonder what the lifetime spend on dating apps is. I expect that for most people who ever pay it’s >$100
It’s possible no one tried literally “recreate OkC”, but I think dating startups are very oversubscribed by founders, relative to interest from VCs [1] [2] [3] (and I think VCs are mostly correct that they won’t make money [4] [5]).
(Edit: I want to note that those are things I found after a bit of googling to see if my sense of the consensus was borne out; they are meant in the spirit of “several samples of weak evidence”)
I don’t particularly believe you that OkC solves dating for a significant fraction of people. IIRC, a previous time we talked about this, @romeostevensit suggested you had not sufficiently internalised the OkCupid blog findings about how much people prioritised physical attraction.
You mention manifold.love, but also mention it’s in maintenance mode – I think because the type of business you want people to build does not in fact work.
I think it’s fine to lament our lack of good mechanisms for public good provision, and claim our society is failing at that. But I think you’re trying to draw an update that’s something like “tech startups should be doing an unbiased search through viable valuable business, but they’re clearly not”, or maybe, “tech startups are supposed to be able to solve a large fraction of our problems, but if they can’t solve this, then that’s not true”, and I don’t think either of these conclusions seem that licensed from the dating data point.
If this is true, it’s somewhat cruxy for me.
I’m still disappointed that no one cared enough to solve this problem without VC funding.
I agree that more people should be starting revenue-funded/bootstrapped businesses (including ones enabled by software/technology).
The meme is that if you’re starting a tech company, it’s going to be a VC-funded startup. This is, I think, a meme put out by VCs themselves, including Paul Graham/YCombinator, and it conflates new software projects and businesses generally with a specific kind of business model called the “tech startup”.
Not every project worth doing should be a business (some should be hobbies or donation-funded) and not every business worth doing should be a VC-funded startup (some should be bootstrapped and grow from sales revenue.)
The VC startup business model requires rapid growth and expects 30x returns over a roughly 5-10 year time horizon. That simply doesn’t include every project worth doing. Some businesses are viable but are not likely to grow that much or that fast; some projects shouldn’t be expected to be profitable at all and need philanthropic support.
I think the narrative that “tech startups are where innovation happens” is...badly incomplete, but still a hell of a lot more correct than “tech startups are net destructive”.
Think about new technologies; then think about where they were developed. That process can ever happen end-to-end within a startup, but more often I think innovative startups are founded around IP developed while the founders were in academia; or the startup found a new use for open-source tools or tools developed within big companies. There simply isn’t time to solve particularly hard technical problems if you have to get to profitability and 30x growth in 5 years. The startup format is primarily designed for finding product-market fit—i.e. putting together existing technologies, packaging them as a “product” with a narrative about what and who it’s for, and tweaking it until you find a context where people will pay for the product, and then making the whole thing bigger and bigger. You can do that in 5 years. But no, you can’t do literally all of society’s technological innovation within that narrow context!
(Part of the issue is that we still technically count very big tech companies as “startups” and they certainly qualify as “Silicon Valley”, so if you conflate all of “tech” into one big blob it includes the kind of big engineering-heavy companies that have R&D departments with long time horizons. Is OpenAI a “tech startup”? Sure, in that it’s a recently founded technology company. But it is under very different financial constraints from a YC startup.)
Neither of those, exactly.
I’m claiming that the narrative around the startup scene is that they are virtuous engines of [humane] value creation (often in counter to a reactionary narrative that “big tech” is largely about exploitation and extraction). It’s about “changing the world” (for the better).
This opportunity seems like a place where one could have traded meaningfully large personal financial EV for enormous amounts of humane value. Apparently no founder wanted to take that trade. Because I would expect there to be variation in how much funders are motivated by money vs. making a mark on the world vs. creating value vs. other stuff, that fact that (to my knowledge) no founder went for it, is evidence about the motivations of the whole founder class. The number of founders who are more interested in creating something that helps a lot of people than they are in making a lot of money (even if they’re interested in both) is apparently very small.
Now, maybe startups actually do create lots of humane value, even if they’re created by founders and VC’s motivated by profit. The motivations of of the founders are only indirect evidence about the effects of startups.
But the tech scene is not motivated to optimize for this at all?? That sure does update me about how much the narrative is true vs. propaganda.
Now if I’m wrong and old OkCupid was only drastically better for me and my unusually high verbal intelligence friends, and it’s not actually better than the existing offerings for the vast majority of people, that’s a crux for me.
From their retrospective:
It sounds less like they found it didn’t work, and more like they have other priorities and aren’t (currently) relentlessly pursing this one.
I worked at Manifold but not on Love. My impression from watching and talking to my coworkers was that it was a fun side idea that they felt like launching and seeing if it happened to take off, and when it didn’t they got bored and moved on. Manifold also had a very quirky take on it due to the ideology of trying to use prediction markets as much as possible and making everything very public. I would advise against taking it seriously as evidence that an OKC-like product is a bad idea or a bad business.
I would guess they tried it because they hoped it would be competitive with their other product, and sunset it because that didn’t happen with the amount of energy they wanted to allocate to the bet. There may also have been an element of updating more about how much focus their core product needed.
I only skimmed the retrospective now, but it seems mostly to be detailing problems that stymied their ability to find traction.
Right. But they were not relentlessly focused on solving this problem.
I straight up don’t believe that that the problems outlined can’t be surmounted, especially if you’re going for a cashflow business instead of an exit.
That’s a PR friendly way of saying that it failed to reach PMF.
Shreeda Segan is working on building it, as a cashflow business. they need $10K to get to the MVP. https://manifund.org/projects/hire-a-dev-to-finish-and-launch-our-dating-site
Yep. I’m aware, and strongly in support.
But it took this long (and even now, isn’t being done by a traditional tech founder). This project doesn’t feel like it ameliorates my point.
The market is much more crowded now. A new old okcupid service would be competing against okcupid as well as everything else. And okcupid has a huge advantage in an existing userbase.
And, OKCupid’s algorithm still exists, sort of. And you can write as much as you like. What aspect of the old site do you think was critically different?
I just don’t think there’s barely a cent to be made in launching yet another dating app. So you can’t blame people for not doing it.
I think the biggest advantage of old OKC was that more people used it; now people are spread across hinge and bumble as well as Tinder.
How sure are you that OKcupid is a significantly better product for the majority of people (as opposed to a niche group of very online people)?
The fact that there’s a sex recession is pretty suggestive that tinder and the endless stream of tinder clones doesn’t serve people very well.
Even if you don’t assess potential romantic partners by reading their essays, like I do, OkC’s match percentage meant that you could easily filter out 95% of the pool to people who are more likely to be compatible with you, along whatever metrics of compatibility you care about.
What is the sex recession ? And do we know it is caused by tindr ?
OKcupid is certainly a better product for hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of unusually literate people, including ~all potential developers and most people in their social circles. It’s not a small niche.
There is a problem I want solved.
No-one, anywhere in the world, has solved it for me.
Therefore, Silicon Valley specifically is bad.
I didn’t say Silicon Valley is bad. I said that the narrative about Silicon Valley is largely propagnada, which can be true independently of how good or bad it is, in absolute terms, or relative to the rest of the world.
May you possibly be underestimating how hard it is to build a startup?