Also regarding cost: I have yet to hear how a dating app solves the paradox that success means losing a customer. The incentives of the company and customer are not aligned and actually quite the opposite.
The company wants you to stay and spend as much as possible on the platform (optimizing to keep you just engaged enough to stick with it), whereas the ideal outcome for the customer means not needing the app in as little time as possible.
Oh they solved it alright. They just make it harder to find matches. Could you imagine the fuckery that goes on with their algorithms. Some engineer dialing back the chance of falling in true love. The executive is like, “We need to turn down finding true love to .0007% because we are losing too many customers!”
Also regarding cost: I have yet to hear how a dating app solves the paradox that success means losing a customer. The incentives of the company and customer are not aligned and actually quite the opposite.
The company wants you to stay and spend as much as possible on the platform (optimizing to keep you just engaged enough to stick with it), whereas the ideal outcome for the customer means not needing the app in as little time as possible.
Oh they solved it alright. They just make it harder to find matches. Could you imagine the fuckery that goes on with their algorithms. Some engineer dialing back the chance of falling in true love. The executive is like, “We need to turn down finding true love to .0007% because we are losing too many customers!”
I meant success in the context of what a dating app should achieve: Matching suitable partners.
But you are of course right that for the company success is profit and the rest are just variables to be optimized towards that goal.
Yeah that conflict runs deep.
There’s the open source Alovoa, but of course it’s still far away from mainstream.