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Hi, I Want To Meet (17.6% of) You!
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton wants to make online dating better. Here's how he wants to do it.
"Suppose you're an entrepreneur who wants to break into the online personals
business, but you face impossible odds because everybody wants to go where
everybody else already is (basically, either Match.com or Yahoo Personals).
Here is a suggestion that would give you an edge. In a nutshell:
Each member lists the criteria for people that they are looking for. Then
when people contact them, they choose whether or not to respond. After the
system
has been keeping track of who contacts you and who you respond to, the site
lists your profile
in other people's search results along with your criteria-specific response
rate: "Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her
criteria." Read on for the rest of his thoughts.
I realize that every time I write something along the lines of "They should
do it this way
instead of the way they do it now", whether for
search
engines,
spam
filters,
content
rating systems
or whatever, I leave some people shrugging and wondering why anyone should
switch
to my idea. So let me try something new: I want to prove
mathematically that this change
would result in some (in fact, most) of the participants being better off,
while nobody would be worse
off (what economists call a
Pareto
improvement). I am not necessarily saying that it would lead to a good
outcome for everybody;
basically, it will lead to better outcomes for most users (although
some of those
will still be bad outcomes), and will do so in a lot less time.
If as soon as you read the phrase "I can prove mathematically" you thought, "Oh well no wonder he gets such a low response rate if he talks like that all the time", then I humbly submit that (1) while I like my Slashdot persona of a pedant banging people over the head with what I think is a brilliant idea, I do have other programmable settings, like conversation about movies, and (2) for once, it's not just me. Sites like eDateReview.com list hundreds of reviews for the most popular sites like Yahoo, Match.com and eHarmony, all of which got an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Another site hosting reviews of online personals services, DatingSitesReviews.com, posted a message urging people to take the predominantly negative reviews with a grain of salt, since users with a bad experience are much more likely to post a review than users with a positive one, but that only generated comments from the site's users reiterating, "No, they really do suck." Most of the complaints from men are not just about the number of obviously fake profiles (which led to lawsuits against Yahoo and Match.com), but about the low response rate even from women who are ostensibly real.
Not that I blame the women. Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes, some of them get far too many messages to reply to (and even if they had time to reply, they'd only be leading on most of the correspondents, since there would never be enough time to actually meet all of them). Yahoo Personals formats your inbox so that you see each person's picture along with the first few words of what they wrote, so if you have too many messages, all you can really do is scroll through the pictures (yes, women do care about that). In fact, Yahoo has a feature that lets you see the users who have viewed your profile -- which may have revealed more than Yahoo intended, since sometimes after writing to 20 or 30 people, I find out that none of them even clicked through to my profile anyway -- so if you're a guy, take Yahoo's advice about "polishing your profile" with a grain of salt. (In fact, many users with Yahoo Personals profiles are not paid members, which means they cannot reply to the messages you send them except with boilerplate like "I liked your message", and Yahoo blocks you from sending them your e-mail address. So Yahoo is listing them as people that you can contact through their service, even though Yahoo knows those people won't be able to write you back. If this strikes you as something between bad site design and actionable fraud, then you are not a Yahoo employee.)
So, yes, there is a problem worth solving. For the purpose of describing the response-rate system, I'm going to dispense with political correctness and refer to the people sending the messages as the "men" and to the people receiving messages as the "women". I hear from the pilot episode of Sex and the City that after the "mid-thirties power flip", the odds shift the other way (due to women getting older and the men accumulating more money, although the show doesn't put it quite so bluntly), so if you're in that age bracket, substitute the appropriate genders in the discussion below.
Note that I when I talk about listing women's response rates, I am talking about their response rates to men who meet their criteria. If you only want to meet men aged 28 to 29 who are interested in paddleboating, then your displayed response rate is only affected by the percentage of messages that you respond to from men in that group.
The mathematical argument commences: If you're a man writing to women on a site, for every women there are two essential variables: the probability P that she will reply to you, and how much value V you would place on getting a reply from her (say, on a scale of 1 to 10). For any woman that you write to, if P = (probability of getting a reply) and V = (value of getting a reply), then then probabilistic benefit of writing to her is P x V. (And I swear I didn't notice this until after I'd written the article, but I do not want to hear anything juvenile about framing a discussion of men meeting women in terms of the "P" and the "V".) If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s may also be the ones that you have the highest chance of getting a reply from, since fewer other men are writing to them, and P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge. Unfortunately, if your tastes are fairly typical, then the women you consider to be 9s and 10s are also getting lots of messages from other men, and have the lowest probability of replying to you. So as V = (value of getting a reply) goes up, P = (probability of getting a reply) goes down, and the product doesn't vary as much as you would like. There's nothing that the response-rate system can do about that.
In any case, if you're allocating your time rationally, you would first write to the members where you estimate P x V to be the highest, and then write to the members where P x V was the next highest, and then based on the cost-benefit principle, you'd continue writing until P x V of writing to the next person is exceeded by the value of the time it would take you to do it. (The incremental value of each additional minute of your time is not constant -- after a long time spent sending messages, you might get bored, and would require a larger incentive to spend an additional minute of your time doing it.) All of this is basically intuition and common sense, even if people don't think of it in terms of these equations (except me!).
But here's the advantage of the response-rating system: With a conventional personals site, you're only guessing the value of P x V -- to be precise, you know the value of V (at least as well as anyone can possibly know it from reading someone's profile), but you're only estimating P, based on how many messages you think she's probably getting from other people. Because of that randomness, that means some of the time you are sending messages without the best possible P x V value, and probably some of the time you are even sending messages where P x V would not even be worth the effort of sending the message, if you knew how low P was. Whereas with a system that shows a woman's response rate to people who meet her criteria, if you're someone who meets her criteria, you know roughly the probability P of getting a reply. (Actually, the probability P for you of getting a response, might not be the percentage-response-rate displayed by the site -- if you have an especially attractive or unattractive face, but there's no way for the woman to specify that in her criteria, then your chance of getting a reply might be higher or lower than the displayed percentage-response-rate. But, then you could just scale all of the displayed response rates upwards or downwards to gauge your probability P of getting a reply. It would still be better than making a total guess on a conventional personals site that didn't display percentage response rates at all.) So this is an unambiguous improvement from the point of view of the men. Another reason why men would be much better off is a specific case of this: they would avoid the time sink of writing to women who do not or cannot respond to most of the messages they're getting. With a response-rate system, those women's profiles would gradually display lower and lower response rates until the percentage was low enough to dissuade all but the most optimistic (or handsome) suitors. Without a display of the response rate, those users continue getting ridiculously large numbers of messages for as long as their profiles are active (as some of my female friends with profiles could attest).
Then consider from the women's point of view. Suppose you're a woman interested in meeting people who meet certain criteria, and you're sincerely interested in replying to at least a significant portion of people who fit those criteria. The problem is that of the men who meet those requirements, some of their attention is still going to be siphoned off by them writing to other women who only have a low chance of responding. Even if you have very specific criteria, so the men who meet your criteria have a great chance of getting a reply from you, on a conventional personals site they might not realize that. But if your response rate were displayed by your profile, then when men searched for women whose criteria they met (and who met their own criteria as well), you would be listed as one of the people with the highest chance of replying, and you'd have a greater chance of hearing from men who met your requirements. (This is not a huge benefit for women, because most women get enough messages that there will usually be some who meet their criteria anyway. The response-rate system would mainly be beneficial to men; I'm just saying it would not be worse for women and would in fact be a little better for some of them.)
Now there's one group of people who would not be better off: Women who create accounts mainly for the ego boost of getting huge numbers of messages and not replying to them. I talked with a few women who used the personals sites for this purpose; some I knew in person, some of them I talked to back when Yahoo Personals would display a woman's Yahoo Messenger screen name, and if you sent them an instant message they would sometimes reply out of sheer boredom and admit that that was what they were doing. These people would not be better off in a system that displayed response rates, since after their response rates dwindled low enough, so would the number of messages. So this would not be a true Pareto improvement, since the definition of a Pareto improvements insists on nobody being worse off, and doesn't make judgments as to people's reasons. Fine, but I submit that people who use the personals sites for the ego boost of ignoring messages are going against the site's purpose, and any improvement that pisses them off but improves things for everybody else, is still a good thing.
You might worry that the ego-trippers would continue to game the system by writing trivially short replies to all the messages they got, in order to keep their "response rate" high and keep the messages coming. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be very common, because my impression from talking to the girls who do this is that the whole point of the ego boost is that the messages keep coming in without them having to do anything. If they had to exert themselves at all -- even long enough to reply to each message and say "yeah" -- then it wouldn't feel as much fun. Probably some would do this anyway. But of the men who kept getting responses like "yeah" and "I dunno", hopefully they would get the message quickly and stop wasting time. I could be wrong about some of these things, but my point is that it would not be any worse than the old system, where so many users already waste time writing to people who don't write back, and the new system would probably be better since it would eliminate some of the time-wasters.
There are some design decisions that I didn't specify here -- for example, do you display each user's response rate over their entire history on the site, or just over the last 24-72 hours, or both? A trickier question: Do you display the user's criteria that they have entered to specify what they're looking for, and which are used when the site calculates their response rate to all users who "meet their criteria"? Most sites do of course let users list what they are looking for. But suppose a woman is only interested in meeting men who make more than $75,000 per year, but she thinks it would be crass to list that on her profile. On the other hand, if she doesn't list it as a requirement, then her percentage response rate will be dragged down by all the men writing to her who make less than $75,000 but who she's not interested in replying to. One alternative would be that she could still have one set of public criteria displayed on her profile, and one set of "secret" criteria that included the $75,000 cutoff. Then men who made $75,000 or more would be steered toward her profile with the message, "You meet her criteria, and she responds to 50% of men who meet her requirements!" But you'd have the ticklish business of men who somehow find her profile, and meet all of her public criteria, but can't figure out why the system is telling them that they weren't a match for her -- and they contact the service to ask why, and tech support has to tactfully explain that sometimes you don't meet all of someone's secret requirements. In any case, a man would be able to reverse-engineer a woman's "secret" requirements by varying his own characteristics on his profile until the system said, "Ding! You're a match for her!" (But then what are you going to do, send her a message calling her a gold digger? Go ahead, it doesn't affect her percentage response rate anyway.)
In concluding that "everyone" would be better off under this system, I did make the type of assumptions that are common in mathematical/economic models, such as assuming that all participants are cold rationalists maximizing benefit to themselves. Such assumptions often do model human behavior pretty well, even in romantic pairings -- it explains why 10's usually end up with 10's, 9's usually end up with 9's, and so on. But these axioms may not take seemingly "irrational" preferences into account. For example, I've assumed that if it would be a waste of time for a user to write to 10 women who are not going to write back, then the new system is an improvement if it dissuades him from ever writing to those 10 women in the first place, because the end result is the same (nothing) and you've saved them the effort. But on a conventional personals site, after someone has written to 10 people and before they realize they're not getting any responses, they still have the hope that they might get answers, and that can be a good feeling. They'll be disappointed later on once they realize they're not getting any responses, but if they have a personality that is especially receptive to hope and especially resistant to disappointment, then it could average out to a better overall experience under the old system. Well, the old-style Match.com and Yahoo Personals would still be around for people who prefer to dream. I'm just saying the new-style system would better suit people looking for results.
The real problem with starting a competing personals site around this system (apart from pulling in enough users to reach "critical mass", but assume you had an ad campaign to do that), is that even if your system produced better matches for everybody in the long run, Yahoo Personals and Match.com would still be better at luring people in with the hope of getting a fabulous match-up. Even if Yahoo Personals got rid of all the fake profiles, and even if they gave anyone listed as a "member" a way to reply to people who send them messages (which among other things would bring them in line with laws against false advertising), their gallery would still be glittering with all the profiles of people who are getting too much mail to possibly reply to it all -- but as a new user, you wouldn't know that. On the other hand, with a personals site that listed criteria-specific response rates next to each profile, if you didn't have a good chance of getting a response from the most popular users, you'd know that from the beginning. You could then come back down to Earth and focus on the users whose criteria you met and who responded to most of their mail. But the site wouldn't be able to use its superstars to lure people in and string them along like Yahoo and Match.com can do.
So, to the business that launches a personals site around this system, this is what I'd propose to do: Since your system really does work better, contact a bunch of single reporters (I mean, higher up than me) and tell them to sign up for an account with Yahoo Personals, an account with Match.com, and an account with your new response-rating site, and spend twenty minutes on each site writing to users that they're interested in meeting. Or sponsor a controlled study where dozens of users try the same thing. Your site will be the only one where the participants can find and write to the members with the highest response rate for people meeting their criteria, and if the system really does result in more efficient matches, then the reporters and the study organizers ought to be able to verify that. Then you have your new ad campaign!
It's easy to list all the problems that would occur in this system: People could lie on their profiles, you can't always judge someone from a profile even if they're honest, people could waste your time starting a conversation and then bailing on you, just because people meet through the site doesn't mean they'll be a good match in person, etc. But these are problems with any personals site. This system only addresses the specific problem of efficiency; I haven't come up with an algorithmic solution to all of the problems of dating and love. It's only Tuesday.
If as soon as you read the phrase "I can prove mathematically" you thought, "Oh well no wonder he gets such a low response rate if he talks like that all the time", then I humbly submit that (1) while I like my Slashdot persona of a pedant banging people over the head with what I think is a brilliant idea, I do have other programmable settings, like conversation about movies, and (2) for once, it's not just me. Sites like eDateReview.com list hundreds of reviews for the most popular sites like Yahoo, Match.com and eHarmony, all of which got an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Another site hosting reviews of online personals services, DatingSitesReviews.com, posted a message urging people to take the predominantly negative reviews with a grain of salt, since users with a bad experience are much more likely to post a review than users with a positive one, but that only generated comments from the site's users reiterating, "No, they really do suck." Most of the complaints from men are not just about the number of obviously fake profiles (which led to lawsuits against Yahoo and Match.com), but about the low response rate even from women who are ostensibly real.
Not that I blame the women. Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes, some of them get far too many messages to reply to (and even if they had time to reply, they'd only be leading on most of the correspondents, since there would never be enough time to actually meet all of them). Yahoo Personals formats your inbox so that you see each person's picture along with the first few words of what they wrote, so if you have too many messages, all you can really do is scroll through the pictures (yes, women do care about that). In fact, Yahoo has a feature that lets you see the users who have viewed your profile -- which may have revealed more than Yahoo intended, since sometimes after writing to 20 or 30 people, I find out that none of them even clicked through to my profile anyway -- so if you're a guy, take Yahoo's advice about "polishing your profile" with a grain of salt. (In fact, many users with Yahoo Personals profiles are not paid members, which means they cannot reply to the messages you send them except with boilerplate like "I liked your message", and Yahoo blocks you from sending them your e-mail address. So Yahoo is listing them as people that you can contact through their service, even though Yahoo knows those people won't be able to write you back. If this strikes you as something between bad site design and actionable fraud, then you are not a Yahoo employee.)
So, yes, there is a problem worth solving. For the purpose of describing the response-rate system, I'm going to dispense with political correctness and refer to the people sending the messages as the "men" and to the people receiving messages as the "women". I hear from the pilot episode of Sex and the City that after the "mid-thirties power flip", the odds shift the other way (due to women getting older and the men accumulating more money, although the show doesn't put it quite so bluntly), so if you're in that age bracket, substitute the appropriate genders in the discussion below.
Note that I when I talk about listing women's response rates, I am talking about their response rates to men who meet their criteria. If you only want to meet men aged 28 to 29 who are interested in paddleboating, then your displayed response rate is only affected by the percentage of messages that you respond to from men in that group.
The mathematical argument commences: If you're a man writing to women on a site, for every women there are two essential variables: the probability P that she will reply to you, and how much value V you would place on getting a reply from her (say, on a scale of 1 to 10). For any woman that you write to, if P = (probability of getting a reply) and V = (value of getting a reply), then then probabilistic benefit of writing to her is P x V. (And I swear I didn't notice this until after I'd written the article, but I do not want to hear anything juvenile about framing a discussion of men meeting women in terms of the "P" and the "V".) If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s may also be the ones that you have the highest chance of getting a reply from, since fewer other men are writing to them, and P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge. Unfortunately, if your tastes are fairly typical, then the women you consider to be 9s and 10s are also getting lots of messages from other men, and have the lowest probability of replying to you. So as V = (value of getting a reply) goes up, P = (probability of getting a reply) goes down, and the product doesn't vary as much as you would like. There's nothing that the response-rate system can do about that.
In any case, if you're allocating your time rationally, you would first write to the members where you estimate P x V to be the highest, and then write to the members where P x V was the next highest, and then based on the cost-benefit principle, you'd continue writing until P x V of writing to the next person is exceeded by the value of the time it would take you to do it. (The incremental value of each additional minute of your time is not constant -- after a long time spent sending messages, you might get bored, and would require a larger incentive to spend an additional minute of your time doing it.) All of this is basically intuition and common sense, even if people don't think of it in terms of these equations (except me!).
But here's the advantage of the response-rating system: With a conventional personals site, you're only guessing the value of P x V -- to be precise, you know the value of V (at least as well as anyone can possibly know it from reading someone's profile), but you're only estimating P, based on how many messages you think she's probably getting from other people. Because of that randomness, that means some of the time you are sending messages without the best possible P x V value, and probably some of the time you are even sending messages where P x V would not even be worth the effort of sending the message, if you knew how low P was. Whereas with a system that shows a woman's response rate to people who meet her criteria, if you're someone who meets her criteria, you know roughly the probability P of getting a reply. (Actually, the probability P for you of getting a response, might not be the percentage-response-rate displayed by the site -- if you have an especially attractive or unattractive face, but there's no way for the woman to specify that in her criteria, then your chance of getting a reply might be higher or lower than the displayed percentage-response-rate. But, then you could just scale all of the displayed response rates upwards or downwards to gauge your probability P of getting a reply. It would still be better than making a total guess on a conventional personals site that didn't display percentage response rates at all.) So this is an unambiguous improvement from the point of view of the men. Another reason why men would be much better off is a specific case of this: they would avoid the time sink of writing to women who do not or cannot respond to most of the messages they're getting. With a response-rate system, those women's profiles would gradually display lower and lower response rates until the percentage was low enough to dissuade all but the most optimistic (or handsome) suitors. Without a display of the response rate, those users continue getting ridiculously large numbers of messages for as long as their profiles are active (as some of my female friends with profiles could attest).
Then consider from the women's point of view. Suppose you're a woman interested in meeting people who meet certain criteria, and you're sincerely interested in replying to at least a significant portion of people who fit those criteria. The problem is that of the men who meet those requirements, some of their attention is still going to be siphoned off by them writing to other women who only have a low chance of responding. Even if you have very specific criteria, so the men who meet your criteria have a great chance of getting a reply from you, on a conventional personals site they might not realize that. But if your response rate were displayed by your profile, then when men searched for women whose criteria they met (and who met their own criteria as well), you would be listed as one of the people with the highest chance of replying, and you'd have a greater chance of hearing from men who met your requirements. (This is not a huge benefit for women, because most women get enough messages that there will usually be some who meet their criteria anyway. The response-rate system would mainly be beneficial to men; I'm just saying it would not be worse for women and would in fact be a little better for some of them.)
Now there's one group of people who would not be better off: Women who create accounts mainly for the ego boost of getting huge numbers of messages and not replying to them. I talked with a few women who used the personals sites for this purpose; some I knew in person, some of them I talked to back when Yahoo Personals would display a woman's Yahoo Messenger screen name, and if you sent them an instant message they would sometimes reply out of sheer boredom and admit that that was what they were doing. These people would not be better off in a system that displayed response rates, since after their response rates dwindled low enough, so would the number of messages. So this would not be a true Pareto improvement, since the definition of a Pareto improvements insists on nobody being worse off, and doesn't make judgments as to people's reasons. Fine, but I submit that people who use the personals sites for the ego boost of ignoring messages are going against the site's purpose, and any improvement that pisses them off but improves things for everybody else, is still a good thing.
You might worry that the ego-trippers would continue to game the system by writing trivially short replies to all the messages they got, in order to keep their "response rate" high and keep the messages coming. I'm not sure, but I don't think that would be very common, because my impression from talking to the girls who do this is that the whole point of the ego boost is that the messages keep coming in without them having to do anything. If they had to exert themselves at all -- even long enough to reply to each message and say "yeah" -- then it wouldn't feel as much fun. Probably some would do this anyway. But of the men who kept getting responses like "yeah" and "I dunno", hopefully they would get the message quickly and stop wasting time. I could be wrong about some of these things, but my point is that it would not be any worse than the old system, where so many users already waste time writing to people who don't write back, and the new system would probably be better since it would eliminate some of the time-wasters.
There are some design decisions that I didn't specify here -- for example, do you display each user's response rate over their entire history on the site, or just over the last 24-72 hours, or both? A trickier question: Do you display the user's criteria that they have entered to specify what they're looking for, and which are used when the site calculates their response rate to all users who "meet their criteria"? Most sites do of course let users list what they are looking for. But suppose a woman is only interested in meeting men who make more than $75,000 per year, but she thinks it would be crass to list that on her profile. On the other hand, if she doesn't list it as a requirement, then her percentage response rate will be dragged down by all the men writing to her who make less than $75,000 but who she's not interested in replying to. One alternative would be that she could still have one set of public criteria displayed on her profile, and one set of "secret" criteria that included the $75,000 cutoff. Then men who made $75,000 or more would be steered toward her profile with the message, "You meet her criteria, and she responds to 50% of men who meet her requirements!" But you'd have the ticklish business of men who somehow find her profile, and meet all of her public criteria, but can't figure out why the system is telling them that they weren't a match for her -- and they contact the service to ask why, and tech support has to tactfully explain that sometimes you don't meet all of someone's secret requirements. In any case, a man would be able to reverse-engineer a woman's "secret" requirements by varying his own characteristics on his profile until the system said, "Ding! You're a match for her!" (But then what are you going to do, send her a message calling her a gold digger? Go ahead, it doesn't affect her percentage response rate anyway.)
In concluding that "everyone" would be better off under this system, I did make the type of assumptions that are common in mathematical/economic models, such as assuming that all participants are cold rationalists maximizing benefit to themselves. Such assumptions often do model human behavior pretty well, even in romantic pairings -- it explains why 10's usually end up with 10's, 9's usually end up with 9's, and so on. But these axioms may not take seemingly "irrational" preferences into account. For example, I've assumed that if it would be a waste of time for a user to write to 10 women who are not going to write back, then the new system is an improvement if it dissuades him from ever writing to those 10 women in the first place, because the end result is the same (nothing) and you've saved them the effort. But on a conventional personals site, after someone has written to 10 people and before they realize they're not getting any responses, they still have the hope that they might get answers, and that can be a good feeling. They'll be disappointed later on once they realize they're not getting any responses, but if they have a personality that is especially receptive to hope and especially resistant to disappointment, then it could average out to a better overall experience under the old system. Well, the old-style Match.com and Yahoo Personals would still be around for people who prefer to dream. I'm just saying the new-style system would better suit people looking for results.
The real problem with starting a competing personals site around this system (apart from pulling in enough users to reach "critical mass", but assume you had an ad campaign to do that), is that even if your system produced better matches for everybody in the long run, Yahoo Personals and Match.com would still be better at luring people in with the hope of getting a fabulous match-up. Even if Yahoo Personals got rid of all the fake profiles, and even if they gave anyone listed as a "member" a way to reply to people who send them messages (which among other things would bring them in line with laws against false advertising), their gallery would still be glittering with all the profiles of people who are getting too much mail to possibly reply to it all -- but as a new user, you wouldn't know that. On the other hand, with a personals site that listed criteria-specific response rates next to each profile, if you didn't have a good chance of getting a response from the most popular users, you'd know that from the beginning. You could then come back down to Earth and focus on the users whose criteria you met and who responded to most of their mail. But the site wouldn't be able to use its superstars to lure people in and string them along like Yahoo and Match.com can do.
So, to the business that launches a personals site around this system, this is what I'd propose to do: Since your system really does work better, contact a bunch of single reporters (I mean, higher up than me) and tell them to sign up for an account with Yahoo Personals, an account with Match.com, and an account with your new response-rating site, and spend twenty minutes on each site writing to users that they're interested in meeting. Or sponsor a controlled study where dozens of users try the same thing. Your site will be the only one where the participants can find and write to the members with the highest response rate for people meeting their criteria, and if the system really does result in more efficient matches, then the reporters and the study organizers ought to be able to verify that. Then you have your new ad campaign!
It's easy to list all the problems that would occur in this system: People could lie on their profiles, you can't always judge someone from a profile even if they're honest, people could waste your time starting a conversation and then bailing on you, just because people meet through the site doesn't mean they'll be a good match in person, etc. But these are problems with any personals site. This system only addresses the specific problem of efficiency; I haven't come up with an algorithmic solution to all of the problems of dating and love. It's only Tuesday.
Needy Nerds?
Nerds Needing Nelle?
Nerds R Us?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Okay, here's mine:
Divorced geek, uses Debian (and installed it with the original installer, natch), can code some perl, works as an IT geek for a small non-profit. Likes installing alternate OSes for fun and experimenting with various window managers. Cross platform and virus free.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Would rather meet 0% of you. No offense.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I think I speak for many slashdotters when I say; "No one cares, get a blog"!
I met my wife of 8 years now on y! personals back in 98... We dated for a few years and got hitched. At this point, she's ready to sue them for it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
We don't need YAUDSBSWWTMAMBOOOPM (Yet Another Useless Dating Site by Someone Who Wants To Make A Million Bucks Off Of Other People's Misery).
Really, just admit that you don't know how to meet other people, and that you figure if you're running a dating site, you'll get to skim all the ads, etc., AND make money without having to really work. Its not going to happen.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Women are afraid men on the internet are going to kill them.
Men are marginalized by men who only want sex.
Fix that and you're rich.
Damn, I was going to say that. I gotta meet you now.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
First off, if you want to get rid of the stupid membership fee structure of Yahoo! et al., try Plenty of Fish. I met my girlfriend on there.
Second, it is fairly trivial to work around your correspondent not being a member of Yahoo! Personals so long as you are. What I did was put up a web page with a captcha-ish image of my e-mail address and give them the link. Maybe they've closed that loophole by now, but just as with DRM, people will keep finding ways to break the system.
One site that has made it easier to get responses (because someone has to look at your profile and at least click reject if they don't like it) is chemistry.com. However, it's rather expensive, and you can run into the same problem where if your correspondent is not a member, you cannot communicate.
I agree, though, that it is depressing how many more messages the ladies get than the guys (or at least this guy).
You can't apply Math to Sexual Attraction.
Obligatory: http://www.xkcd.com/55/
What hasn't been thought out is the solution question: Will this complex system result in a resolution to loneliness/compatibility faster? Nutshell: More hookups?
I doubt it.
Has anyone actually read the entire article? No wonder they can't get any dates!
OKCupid! has a much better implementation. Users post questions, users answer them, and a percent match is calculated. Wow!
"...as soon as [I] read the phrase 'I can prove mathematically' [I] thought" I would then read a proof. It never materialized.
You could combine this system with a hot-or-not like rating system for the profile pictures. That way, women could screen for men that scored in the top 20% or something similar and the same for men. Maybe scoring a bunch of people could be a way to pay down your monthly rate to make people want to do it.
Of course, this gives people incentive to game the system, but once you look at the profile picture, it's easy to see if they were lying.
and let 'buyers' & 'sellers' leave feedback on each others' profiles... what could possibly go wrong!
-- the cake is a lie
93.473% of Internet statistics are made up on the spot.
Reinventing the wheel. I also think the methods used reflect a self selecting group.
/. poll "Do you use online dating services?"
Should have just bought a
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Go out, socialize, have friends, and meet the person of your dreams au naturale.
I met my girlfriend at a game night another friend invited me to. Believe me, this method gives you all of the advantages of these silly social networking and dating sites, but without having to do any of the work. This is because this is how human socialization works anyway. You meet people through people, and the more well adapted you are socially, the more people you meet and befriend, and the more you value your interpersonal relationships.
So, P and V (RTFA if you haven't already) both get much bigger, which is always more fun.
in soviet russia, the dating chat bot wants 96% of you (but will settle for your bank details)
for those who have not been following this story, look here..
http://www.betanews.com/article/Seductive_Russian_chat_bot_tries_to_steal_your_private_data/1197588297
sounds like this idea would make the malicious cyber bot more effective and being your perfect match.
My interest in those sites isn't in the math and machinery, more in the myth and fiction, the vagaries of self perception.
What I have found is Match.com is useless. Being an avant garde atheist three steps to the left of Rosa Luxembourg always makes me "matchless" on Match.com. Yahoo is better, but I find it oddly untrustworthy - there is something really brittle about it, like it's all fake. That they were sued for leading people on that way doesn't help the atmosphere. Also, on Yahoo, I find the self mythologies more dreary than most. It's all "I want someone from a class rung above me who is in perfect shape to go on long walks on the beach with me." Bleaaah. How. Fucking. Boring. Yahoo seems to have more of that drear than anywhere else.
Okcupid.com though seems to have much more imaginative people on it, and matches are by percentage and run by a variety of tests and systems that are devised by the users themselves. And the self-descriptions re better than Yahoo, for the most part.
Back to work.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
While I like to see computer systems help in solving problems, there's a much simpler solution. Use a niche personals site. The smaller the niche, the less people will be on it, the less bombarded the women are with initial messages, and the higher the response rate. The larger and more diverse a site, of course the less likely you are to see a response.
Also avoid the sites that are completely ad supported or ones with obvious fake postings.
Developers: We can use your help.
..here come stories about D&D marketing and computer dating. Damn.
- Have an idea
- Post idea to Slashdot
- ???
- Profit!
Don't worry the Slashdot hive-mind with have this done in couple of days!Hookers.
Because your ideas suck? Seriously, you needed 20k to explain yourself? People aren't "shrugging", they're fighting off a coma.
Having watched over the shoulder of some female friends scrolling through their Yahoo Personals inboxes.
And stop stalking your "female friends".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Facebooks platform is probably teh best place to experiment with this idea. Unless someone has done it already.
Actually, that's indeed along the lines of what I thought. Scanning the rest of your article, including your "mathematical proof", only strengthened my "no wonder he gets such a low response rate"-belief. Please, just let it go.
of a slut-o-meter! is 85% likely to put out (textically), says yourbestbuddyknows.com
You don't need to mathematically prove anything you are trying to sell. Think about it, does Match.com try to mathematically prove that their site is the best? Does Apple show the equations to prove that the iTouch is right mp3 player to buy? Yeah, they provide "statistics" -- but if you study the advertising, that isn't what they focus on.
You sell things through emotion and personality (which means a math heavy dating site might be a hit with math geeks, so maybe there you go).
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Have not used dating sites for a while, but anyway: with online dating, what matters most is photos and the stuff a person writes about him/herself in a free form. Also, it is stupid not to try to contact a person you like if he or she happened to reject 82.5 percent of people with your criteria.
My wife and I met on usenet in 1995.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
1.: Post business idea on /.
2.: ???
3.: Profit!
Would Mr. Haselton please elaborate on step 2?
Virus free? The individual or their computer?
The idea you're suggesting; namely listing response rate has already been implemented.
I'm a Debian developer, who is interested in kink. There are three big dating sites for that kind of audience:
These are the biggies. There are smaller ones in particular geographical locations, and focussed upon particular kinks.
I think all three suck. Alt.com & Bondage.com are commercial and hard to use unless you pay. Collarme is ful of trolls and fakes.
So, to experiment with different things I setup my own site. I put together a kink-themed website, with a geeky name, ctrl-alt-date.
Unfortunately I'm spoilt by the problem you note, and I didn't expect. Everybody goes to the big three. Sure they suck, but they are (undeniably) where the audience is. More audience == more chance of sex/hookups/relationship.
(I guess there is also something you don't mention. The audience for a dating site is very random. If you get a partner you never return - so you end up with millions of orphan accounts interfering with search results. Its a numbers game to a certain extent too - if site A has 10million members listed you go there over site B with 5 million members. Regardless of whether both have actually only got 3 million active users.)
My site is tiny <1000 users. But it does have some novel ideas coded, and more which I'd like to test if I had the numbers. For example you can simply mark your profile as unavailiable to Straight Men, and that way you never even show up on the search results for a man - perfect if you're a lesbian,for example.
It seems to me that if you're wanting to be found by a new partner you want to do two things:
I'm aiming more at the first point, but the second is interesting too. One idea is allowing random strangers to edit your profile, or leave suggestions on improving it in exchange for perks. THat ups the quality of the profiles at minimal cost.
I could write more about the subject, but I might be boring people - so I'll stop for now.
The question is, HOW? This seems easy for you, because you don't *notice* the hard parts, because they already come naturally to you.
You already have tons of friends who know tons of girls, who will be more open to you because they've already "screened" you, and getting dates is merely a matter of inviting one of a trillion invitations and letting the magic happen.
Any advice for the rest of us, who, say, are living in a city where they don't have trillions of friends? No? Okay then. Try again, and this time, don't suggest something where the problem is already solved.
Yes, I'll probably get modded down for this, but I'm willing to bet there are thousands of you in a similar position that don't want to admit it.
And no, it's not a simple matter of joining some organization. Every one that I've tried to join has been extremely suspicious of people who don't already come in with a recommendation from someone in the group. And then, one group that I tried to join was a total disaster. It was going well, and then one girl just suddenly flipped out and got a bunch of them to start giving me the cold treatment, and then invented a bunch of wild accusations to get them to ban me from the (large, great-for-meeting-women) group. Fun, fun.
You think the problem is easy because it's easy for you. What's obvious for you, is not obvious for others. One man's redundant is another man's insightful. Remember that.
(Before one of you says it, no, I don't act IRL like I did on the Ubuntu forums, think of another ad hoc rationalization.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
But it still is blind dating. No matter how your refine the online selection process, it cannot carry vital data. Refining the selection process may just lead to more false expectations and disappointment when you cannot explain why there is no chemistry on otherwise perfect matches. Which probably the limiting factor.
- Your system disincentiveizes (yeah, its not a word, deal with it) women from joining in the first place. By effectively telling women that they will be publicly graded and judged on their reply rate, you remove the ability to "just see". While this was kindof your goal, knowing that they cant "just see" will have a very negative effect on women joining the service in the first place. After all, as a woman, would you join the service that you can just watch passively and see if something great comes up, or would you join the one that makes it your job to reply to everyone or you fail?
- The system fails to address new members. What percentage is shown for women who haven't had anyone meeting their criteria reply yet? If the default is zero noone will message them in the first place. If the default is 100, see the next point. If the default is blank, how many messages do you require before it becomes a percentage (see next point).
- It provides major incentive for women to set artificially high secret criteria in order to boost their percentage. If they require someone who makes 500k a year and who is Jewish but was born in the Vatican, they can effectively expect to maintain a 100% listed response rate while only being "required" to respond to a handful of people a year, and can continue to be spectators on the sideline for everyone else.
I used to work for OkCupid, and they tabulate all of those kinds of stats and more. Only they get used behind the scenes in things like match calculations... the guys over there are all math grads and take a very scientific approach, but it mostly happens behind the scenes for the sake of usability. I remember coding their "Stranger Arranger" as something of a brute-force approach to the stable marriage problem, taking into account people's compatibility, some other minor stats, and yes, their likelihood of both initiating a conversation and responding to an initiation based on their messaging history.
(I'll take this opportunity to plug the fellas... they work hard to make what's just about the most awesome free dating site supported entirely through ad revenues... don't be stupid, use OkCupid!)
Dan.
Dating doesn't need more numerical analysis, it needs better analysis, which okCupid provides. Instead of providing an endless directory of unsorted profiles where members say things like "I can't be summarized in a paragraph" and "I like to have fun", okCupid lets people create, answer, and rank multiple-choice questions that are important to them. Then okCupid assigns percentage matches that lets you see the people who are most compatible, and read just those profiles. It works great, and is how I met my fiancee.
Feedback from: hotguy12234:
Great date!!! Recommended. A++++
Feedback from: geeky763:
Never returned phone calls after expensive dinner. Beware!
...because 70 characters of feedback is used so intuitively.
(yes, I caught your sarcasm, and I agree completely)
This is what I think we should do to fix the problem.
First identify the problems: 1. Mass mailings. Some guys just send out a ton of emails. Not that hard to fix. Limit each guy to no more than 10 emails/week to people that have written an email response to you already. These are called 'first contacts'.
2. Non-responses. Most women never reply. Sure, they often get a ton of emails (see #1 above). So what? It is just as rude to not reply as it is to send out thousands of email. Again, Not hard to fix: If you have more than 5 unreplied emails 'first contact' emails, you get no additional emails (of ANY kind), all are blocked with an auto-reply saying "not currently replying to emails". Offer a set of standard replies including "Not interested", "I may get back to you in the future.". Using thses does not count as a 'real reply', any emails he sends to you still counts as 'first contact'.
3. Lieing. Everyone lies on the sites. People lie about their age, their weight, their height, their job, their money, how shallow they are, everything. When you actually meet a person, you can click a "met, but rejected" when you do that, you can click one of several reasons for rejecting them, worded to be as polite as possible, but honest. They also get the same form (for you) which must be filled out to get any additional emails. Possible options would include things like "Not ambitious enough", "Physically did not live up to my high standards", "Did not click, but was really nice", etc. etc.
These third party verifications do not become visible until at least 3 people have filled them out for you. Then they become visible with TO YOU you with NO NAMES attached. You have the right to either delete all current feeback results, or make all current feedback results visible to other people, if you so choose.
This gives you personal feedback about what your dates truly did not like. If you get really nice feedback, you can let others see it, so they KNOW you are honest. If you don't, you simply have the issue of not having feedback availble on you.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"If you have non-standard tastes, such as a preference for "Big Beautiful Women", that's great, since the women that you consider to be 9s and 10s ... P x V for those women will be -- in a manner of speaking -- huge."
I know you wanted to have an intelligent discussion regarding your idea, but taking that one sentence out of context was just too good to pass up.
mathematical dating.
http://www.okcupid.com/faaaq.html
Deleted
I find it hard to believe that Haselton has ever had a date, much less any experience with dating sites. The value that you get from such sites is entirely proportional to the effort that you put in to pictures, profiles, and interactions. Hey, it's where I met the love of my life.
I have been told though that the experience is entirely different for women, and that even an empty profile will be bombarded with not so subtle messages from guys looking to get their rocks off.
A lot of people, esp. boomers are using these sites, and there could be refinements, but overall they tend to beat hanging out in bars or joining random clubs looking for companionship. Or reading dating advice on Slashdot...
Three Squirrels
Ten kilobytes of ``how to improve online dating so I will finally have a girlfriend''.
Uh huh, inadequate online dating software is what is standing in your way.
... but you can't ignore the human element.
"Criteria-cheaters".
What is suggested will seem to only work if there are lots and lots and lots and lots of parameters/criteria, so the system can attribute that rejection to some other criteria instead of that criteria. ie. If someone whose criteria was "goth" were rejected by someone who selected "bouncy", then the "goth-and-bouncy" pair's probability should be lowered. However if you don't have enough criteria, you'll end up lowering "bouncy-and-bouncy"'s probability, which doesn't make much sense since we're hoping that people with similar criteria match. This is sort of what Hebbian learning is.
If I were to create a system for matching people, I would pose a number of questions to everyone that would require at least a 500-word response. "What are some of the things you enjoy at work?", "What do you enjoy doing in your free time?", "How did you come to like the kind of music you listen to?", "What are your favourite types of food?", "Do you lead an active lifestyle and how does it make you feel?", etc etc. These responses would be visible to nobody except their authors.
Applying some fancy math and matching based on what they type, you'll get many more higher-quality matches, and fewer "criteria cheaters" who purposely try to match criteria with people they like. When the system spots a match, invitations are sent to both to invite them to talk with each other. It is then they are allowed to look at each others responses and have something common to talk about. If you have a "criteria cheater" who just pasted random keywords into their responses, the other person can flag them as a "criteria cheater" or something. Then, his responses will be automatically erased, and the probability of that person participating in a future match will be lowered.
This isn't perfect, but I would say it would be a significant head start and offer much more than what's out there now. Obviously, this type of system encourages big and long responses to the questions by offering a much larger set of criteria to be extracted from each response by the match-making part of the system. And the best thing is, these criteria are naturally user-supplied and not confined to the limited set like all those other dating sites use.
To keep things fresh, you can reset your system and regroup everyone on response-similarity one a week or month or whatever, because inevitably... more people would have joined and added responses of their own.
This type of system would pretty much work the way Google's "similar pages" link works. Clustering pages (in your case, people) together that share similar text. There are a number of different algorithms you can use for clustering. My personal favourite is "Stochastic Proximity Embedding" http://www.dimitris-agrafiotis.com/Papers/jcc20078.pdf for its simplicity and relative speed. You won't need the "absolute bestest zomg!" clustering algorithm because matchmaking itself is very subjective and non-exact.
Heck, you can even do some fancy things with the results and have people browse everyone else on a huge huge map!
Here are some visuals from little tests I did using grouping blogs on Xanga:
Xanga Galaxy
Zoom in
Zoom in some more
And even more
And yes, even more
In your case, each dot would represent a person instead of a blog entry.
Anyway, that's
There is a common trend in both situations though. It is "someone else's" fault. Step back and look at what happened again, in both situations. Tell me, whose fault is it really? You obviously have some traits of an abrasive personality, so you should think about how that might affect your social interaction with people.
...you need a girlfriend.
I think the mathematical model has (at least) one flaw:
Woman A gets too many mails and responds only to few (=>small response rate P)
=> because of low P you expect less men talk to A to not waste their time
=> indeed less men now talk to her
=> A can now reply more, P increases again
=> more men write her (GOTO start)
the system oscillates (the period depends on the update interval P)
I tried them all; eHarmony, SinglesNET, Plenty of Fish.. they all suck. The women you meet there are women that cannot meet a man in real life. I was on there because I have an uberbusy schedule, and I am not a bar hopper. Fortunately, I met a gal the old fashioned way.... by accident. Good luck out there, since dating is hell!
http://www.htcherocentral.com
(*) you're looking for the perfect partner so you don't care if you have 1 million choices or 20 choices, you are only
interested in how relevant those are to you.
(**) Also you have to deal with the economic model of virality for dating websites. You want your users to tell their friends about your site.. but probably they are single and their friends are the same gender and if they join the site it will reduce the available pool of opportunities.
I am an entrepreneur and looked at the dating problem, it's big and there is definitively a market for it, but so far haven't seen anything disruptive.
-lsw
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
-People lie. Spend a month on an online dating site and you'll figure out how to spot most of them.
-Fuck secret criteria. Listing an income requirement *is* somewhat crass. It's also completely legitimate, but be upfront about it. There's nothing in the world worse than a gold digger who thinks he/she isn't.
-A lot of these problems are trying to solve a problem (low response) the wrong way. People don't respond for a reason, and trying to give someone a poor rating because they didn't respond to someone who matched them on abstract criteria is silly. According to every female I've ever talked to who used an online dating site, most of the guys come on *way* too strong. Are you going to count every email someone gets against their rating, when the person who emailed 3 hours ago emails again to ask why you haven't responded? And then again tomorrow to say it's rude to ignore people? And then the next day to say if you don't respond soon you risk losing them?
-All the boilerplate stuff is just to try and narrow the field. There are plenty of times when someone who meets it isn't a good match, and plenty of times when someone who might fail on 2 or 3 items is a great match.
-Trying to apply scientific formulas to dating is a recipe for failure. The *only* one that works is: the more contacts you send out, the more you get back. However, if you're an asshole, illiterate, contact people who you blatantly aren't right for (if someone lists a desired age range as 25-30, and you're 45, don't waste your time), or feel the need to make blatant sexual overtures in the first email, sending out 50 vs 20 emails may just mean getting 2 responses vs 1. Quantity helps, but quality matters.
-Fake profiles are *not at all* hard to spot if you're not a moron. Guys - if you see 7 profiles with the same picture, consider them all fake. If some poor girl got her headshots stolen, sucks for her. Even if it's a unique profile, if it reads like it was written who bought the cheap english-russian dictionary, and they don't mention having just moved here from eastern europe, it's fake. People who grew up in a small town in PA don't frequently say they're "looking for the man who is caring and wants to make the serious relationship"
-There are two types of fake profiles: Those put up by services to entice people to joining, and those put up by scammers looking to hit you up with a hard luck story and get you to send them money. The former may someday be pressured out of existence. The latter never will, because scammers pay the same monthly fee as everyone else, and there's no reliable way to spot them until after they've already hit up dozens of people. (Psst....Bennett: they'll sign up for your mythical site too)
*rolls eyes* Online dating is not, and never will be perfect. If you go to a reputable site, however, it's pretty good, and improving all the time. Too much math will just confuse people and scare them away.
"Wants To Make A Million Bucks"
Aha, but there is the reason why nobody uses his system. His system is designed to reduce effort and increase results. This means that the users will have to visit the site less, and stop using it earlier. This means fewer page hits, fewer users, fewer subscribers. This means less profit. The dating services are not in the business of hooking people up, they are in the business of selling subscriptions and advertisements. You get more page hits (more ads) and more subscription fees by _not_ doing a good job of hooking people up.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Or, y'know, seek out what you're looking for in a system specifically designed for it. I get annoyed when people say "just go out and meet someone" like it's so incredibly easy. Some of us do socialize, quite a lot, in the real world, and yet all our preferred-sex friends are either with someone already or engaged or what-have-you. Not to mention that a well-designed matching system can make the whole process much quicker and find you someone who will love you for who you are, with less risk of finding out you're incompatible later than a random meeting.
Different strokes for different folks. If meeting people through people works for you, great. It doesn't mean we're wrong for using a more scientific system for finding happiness.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Why does "Bennett Haselton" get to use the Slashdot front page as his personal blog? At least Roland submits interesting articles most of the time. Does Mr. Haselton have incriminating pictures of CowboyNeal or something?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Its a not bad idea, but it definitely still needs a lot of work.
The issue is that guys "don't take a hint", if a women puts up a profile with the hottest picture EVER (or even just showing a moderately sexy shot of her ass), and has a 0% response rate, she will STILL be getting hundreds of messages every single day. Most guys look at it like its a free lottery, it doesn't cost anything to play and he could win one million dollars!
The key is the women.
You need to figure out how to get the "ego boosters" to actually engage in using the site, and you also need to figure out how to weed out the loser guys so the ones that DO message the women are at least moderately decent, not married and not on there looking for a woman with low self esteem so they can get an easy lay.
How do you do this? You need to take into account the opinions of OTHER women of course!
I think you are on the right track, but instead of using just response rates you need to take into account response QUALITY. Have the receiving party rate the quality or type of response, for instance: Rejection, Boring, Creepy, Funny, Intelligent, Sexy. Not only that, but rate the quality of profiles (descriptions/interests ONLY, no images involved so that doesn't affect the rating), ie: Boring, Lame, Creepy, Funny, Intelligent, Sexy, etc... And also rate the images (separate from anything else) in the same manner and NOT between 1-10 like most sites do.
If done properly and combined with actual response rates, I think this type of system would work extremely well. The women on the site for a ego boost usually have a profile that reads like licking salt, so it will be rated low, and if they don't their responses (or lack thereof) will cause their profile to be rated poorly. It will work the same way for the men, ones who constantly send creepy emails to any female with a picture trying to get laid will be rated poorly extremely fast. Women can then filter their incoming messages to only those that are coming from men who have historically sent: Funny, Intelligent, or Sexy messages.
Men can then also filter out the womens profiles to only those that have RESPONDED to other men in Funny, Intelligent, Sexy or "Accepting" ways. Or women who respond to the type of messages that you historically send, either Boring, Funny or whatever they may be. Combine this with a mathematical formula showing response rate to men with certain profile attributes and I think you will have a great solution.
A system like this would essentially make any guy that can send "Funny/Intelligent" emails a rock star and give them the pick of the "litter". But thats pretty much exactly what women are looking for, a guy that "can make me laugh".
Finding a mate is way too hard now, can't we go back to arranged marriages? It works for India! Maybe we can outsource the arranging too!
You're asking Slashdotters for their advice on something like online dating?!?!
Dibs on yaudsbswwtmamboopm.com!
now you see why nobody ever RTFA?
I actually did exactly that 3 years ago, met a really nice girl too. Then I sold the site to a porn company based in florida. (dotmate.com)
MABASPLOOM!
Your example is lacking in so many ways too. First, not all tariffs are to prop up inefficient companies. Some set to equalize the monetary differences while others intend on compensating for the difference in living conditions, (Read sweat shops and slave labor). You can hardly claim that it would be because of inefficient businesses when the labor costs are below not only a minimum wage in the US, but the level of poverty in the US. You also can't claim the company is inefficient when currency values take a relatively similar economy and deflate the purchasing parity on one or the other.
Voters would baulk at it because it is insane. First, even removing tarrifs is one thing, even though it would cause a loss of jobs in some cases, second, the government can't just pay people. They have to take taxes in to cover their expense. To truly compensate for the effects of tariffs, you would bankrupt the country with pay outs.
Now that being said, I'm not in favor of tariffs. But there are some things that need to be done in order to stop every job from going to india or China just to see the currency and living conditions reverse after a while and end up being a hostage to their whims without any manufacturing or what be it on the main land. That is why other countries have tariffs on our goods, Because we can market a dependency on their economy that they aren't willing to have. In order for there to be a true tariff free environment, there have to be a universal prevailing wage system and economic parity across the borders other wise in only benefits one side for the short term and the other in the long term. But the composed benefits aren't near equal. And you think IQ and age has something to do with understanding or rejecting your idea. It has more to do with sanity, IE sane or insane.
The map is not the territory. Long-term relationships in matters of the heart are established (and torn asunder) by the chaotic, irrational, and essentially unknowable forces of genes and memes in an ever-changing (and often hostile) environment. On the other hand, the idea that a new social-networking statistic will change anything displays just the type of naivete that some women find attractive in an IT professional.
My parents were married for over 60 years when my Mother died, so long-term you could say that it didn't work out.
Say hello to my little sig.
... about pay-membership on-line dating sites : any site that claims to be able to link you up with a prospective mate, companion, love-of-your-life or Mr/Ms RightNow *AND* wants to get paid for the privilege has no incentive to actually DO what they claim to DO.
... whoops ! You've found someone now ! No need for this silly dating site thing, right ? Definitely no need to send them anymore money, since you no longer require their services. In that instant of decision, you go from the dating site's paying customer to a lost account ... and the accompanying lost income that you would have provided to then to keep at the whole on-line dating thing going for another month, or three, or six, or twelve, or ...
... here's the question I never see asked of a pay-membership dating site : what possible incentive do they have to successfully match you up with ANYONE if, after you successfully "bond" with that someone, you cease to be a source of income for them ? From a business perspective, it's in their best financial interest to keep stringing you along with imperfect matches for as long as your patience (and your wallet) holds out. Why would they willingly abandon a source of regular, predictable income by actually PERFORMING the SERVICE for which they've been contracted ?
Here's how I see it : you pay for a term of service, during which you can enjoy the full benefits of membership. As you search for your match, you rely heavily upon the results returned by the site's search engine, trusting that the hits the search returns to you really do match the criteria you've input.
Assuming you actually locate someone you want to contact, then contact them, then chat and email and then eventually meet, eat, get into heat
So
Hmmmm ?
Why is there never a listing for IQ?
Or, for that matter, weight?
Those two numbers alone would drastically increase the value of the search criteria of internet matchmaking services.
Not always true. The week I went off to college my mom decided she was going to learn how to use her newly available computer. I started receiving calls day and night from her, asking how to do this or that, or that she broke something. Every weekend I'd come home and remove spyware and show her how to do things like create folders or scan pictures.
Then I started getting calls from my younger sisters. Mom's an internet addict. Quite the shocker, as this was the same woman who used to dream about throwing the computer out the window when my dad was alive. So now she's flying off around the country meeting men and having dirty phone conversations with them and she bought a webcam. So I decided maybe I should talk to mom and let her know that people on the Internet are RARELY who they seem to be, especially the trolls you find on yahoo chat. Of course it didn't faze her. These guys were way too smooth to be cock-blocked by some punk college freshman.
She abused her relationships with every one of us kids in order to please some short fat little illegal hispanic from Houston, 10 years her junior, and now he's taken every dime she had and now that he's got his green card, looks to be planning his escape. Judging by what all of his brothers have done, it would be the rule rather than the exception. Unfortunately for my mother she STILL doesn't see it coming, even after he wiped her bank account out, and now demanded they have seperate bank accounts since he got a nice paying job.
True not every relationship formed from online 'dating' could or would end up this way, but I don't think either of them got what they bargained for. It's too easy to lie online, they're both guilty of it, and now they're going to pay the consequences. He will run off with his new citizenship card, and she will have to try to repair all the damage she's done to her family in the hopes that someone will take her in.
You're nothing; like me.
You're assuming that users will continue to come back to a service that doesn't do a good job of hooking people up. Though some certainly may, others may not, and a poor system will not garner more New users.
Would you keep going to a mechanic that fixes the problem completely or only fixes it temporarily, requiring you to come back in 1 month and fix it again? By your logic, that's what the mechanic shoudl do to gain more revenue. Now imagine you have 2 dating services; 1 has high success rates, the other not so much. Which will you go to?
If this guy develops his system, and it increases success, people will flock to his system and increase his ca$h flow.
You lose at game theory. Yes, match.com and Yahoo won't switch to his system, but if a startup or fringe player switches to it, and it actually works better, then their profits will still go up.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
It would only be "leading on" if they responded "Hi I like you"? They have the option of sending a response of "Sorry, but I don't think we are a match." But, they don't bother to do so. I am not sure, but there may actually be a canned response available.
One of the reasons that women get so many responses to their ads is because men don't get many responses to their own ad. Also, the men may get few, if any, replies to their responses. They resort to sending responses to any ad that catches their eye, after all, what do they have to loose? Want to fix that? Women should make the first move. They should try contacting guys first instead of just sitting there. Oh, wait, that would mean they would have to risk rejection and we all know women are generally not brave enough to do that. They prefer to pick and choose and then whine about their choices.
I would suggest making a site where only the women could contact the men, but then that site would fail because women are not willing to risk making the first contact.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As a Charter Member of Match.com (that means I joined before they charged, and I have a lifetime membership - gratis - and I have occasionally offered them advice^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htold them the obvious, some observations... I use 'men' and 'women' here as described in posting, though the rols fit the sexes fairly well.
- At birth, match.com was instantly rife with fraud, misrepresentation, and disappointed women.
- You will never fix the problem of men lying on their profiles. How will this affect women's response rates over time?
- What about this idea improved the quality of profiles? If it's just about improving feedback, consider this; I corresponded with a very interesting woman who, after a week of emails, politely informed me that she could 'never date a Republican'. This appeared on her profile immediately thereafter. Mind you, we got along well in emails until she asked me my political affiliation. I suspect she figured that offering up a profile that descrbed her as 'fun-loving', 'NPR listener', and 'social activist' would deter Republican men. Which it did not. Oh, neither did her photo, of course. So your method will change that how, again?
- One bright spot in the proposal; dating sites that just want to list millions of profiles and let you sort with increasing granularity are just more of the same. Adding more feedback like response rates, limiting the gaming of profiles, and making it easier for women to sort the flood of responses is a start.
- And remember, sperm are cheap. Eggs are precious. One is in virtually unlimited supply, indiscriminate in dispersal, and easily replaced. The other is a finite resource, with a shorter shelf life, more discriminating in granting access, and not as highly motiviated to share. Oh, this does change over time, but guess what... Egg purveyors without eggs are generally less desirable. Strangely, sperm purveyors without actual sperm are often MORE desireable. How wierd...
Oh, and I met lots of interesting, normal-ish, and desireable women through match.com. Including my wife.
My profile is alive, but should be hidden, even if I haven't touched it for 4 years. Sorry, I'm taken, but having it is just a stupid status symbol. Don't tell my wife, ok?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Use a pay-per-contact or credits based system.
The real problem is that almost every personals site allows people to contact others with no specific investment. That means that there's no reason for someone to actually target their messages, which has the obvious effect of giving women on the site a disproportionate pile of crap to wade through just for using the site.
Subscription-based services are just a waste of money and also a clear conflict of interest for the site operator, since they want you to subscribe rather than to actually send/receive useful messages.
I appreciate the free sites (and OKCupid.com should be your target, not crap sites like Yahoo or Match), but they have exactly the same problem. I can see a credits system that didn't need to be money based, if being free was important, but basically sites need to accept that people really only can send a few useful messages in a day, if not in a week. They need to start being more honest about the search process and helping people find good *likely* people to contact, rather than just putting a little up there and then trying to amuse people with toys and such.
If you want to improve a personals site, you need to improve the experience for women. *Then* information like how much someone replies to messages might be of some use (although pretty easy to falsify if someone wanted to...).
The old school dating agencies are much better simply because a real live human has screened every candidate. This hugely cuts down on the fake profiles (of course, candidates can be expected to lie about themselves but this is trickier at a face-to-face interview with an agency employee - they can usually sense when they are being handed a load of bull). Also, that each candidate is being charged much more money than most on-line sites do forces the candidates to be that much more serious. This hugely cuts down on the time wasters who are too securely ensconced behind their computers and in the final analysis, simply can't bring themselves to meet anybody.
I'm not saying on-line dating sites can't pay off, but MATHEMATICALLY speaking, if you want to save time and hassle, old school brick and mortar dating agencies are the way to go.
I joined match.com and found success. I was skeptical at first of the prospect of online dating, believing the "natural" way to be a better/more ideal way to find someone meaningful. It didn't help that I read reviews from men about online dating outlining their frustrations with paying a lot of money to get ignored by women.
/. nerd out there. And I will grant that I live in a pretty big metropolitan area, which might make it a bit easier to meet somewhere... not NY. But my point is this:
That said, I was surprised. Not just by the number of beautiful sophisticated intelligent women on the site (I'm from NYC so there's no shortage of beautiful women around), but how responsive they were to me. I've sent out 15 messages. 12 of them were answered, 3 turned into conversations I (not they) wanted to continue and now I'm seeing one of them regularly. I only signed up for the service for one month; haven't needed to worry about it again.
I'm not suggesting I'm a particularly attractive person or even know what the hell I'm doing dating - I'm as socially inept as any
The notion that women are going onto these sites for the "ego boost" is a myth. Even if a girl signs up for a dating service with no expectation of meeting someone, if you come across as an interesting person with similar tastes they'll be receptive to the idea of meeting you. Then it's just a matter of if you're actually compatible or not. Write a nice message. Write something interesting about yourself in your profile. Be confident in whatever it is you write, for God's sake.
Finding a match on these sites has more to do with the effort you put into it, not the mathematical compatibility probability.
No, it means that you deserve not to be fucked. Wordplay aside, I well understand your situation and found your response well taken.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The social aspect comes back into play, though.
What do these numbers mean to humans?
5%? She's a snob. Or she doesn't describe her ideal mate well enough? Or she has been on vacation for a week?
95%? She's a slut. Or she answers every email because she is polite? Or she is trying to keep a good ratio?
What does 40% really tell me about someone, versus 60%?
The problem is that P in your P*V formula isn't a targeted enough metric to have enough meaning in terms of match making or dating.
Although I think I'm going to toy around with the idea a bit for other non-dating situations.
But. . .
There's a sub-system running beneath all of the various ways to meet people. It works like this. . .
When you are ready to enter a time of your life where a relationship is the best suited thing to teach you more about yourself and life in general, you'll know it. Then, all you do is put your intention out there; "I want to meet somebody!"
And then make yourself open to scenarios where there are other people. Listen to the inner pull. If it tells you to travel, then travel. If it tells you to move, then move. --And remember, do not judge the person by the package they happen to inhabit. Bodies are far less important than souls. --Also, remember that the patterns which put two people together do not necessarily have to culminate in classic sexual adventures or the official 'relationship' for them to be powerful and valuable.
I like to cut out digital step and cut right to the face to face element. If two people are really following their intuition, and are brave enough to do the sometimes seeming illogical things they are being directed to do by that inner force, then they'll meet. --After that, it's up to them as to whether or not they'll act on what has been given to them.
I don't like the on-line dating thing. It seems set up to create sadness and frustration. --Here's a story. . .
I was minding my own business, and then I get this email out of the blue from some girl who had been cruising through Facebook. (I'd set up an account on that damned site just to make all my friends stop pestering me. I almost never check the thing; I find Facebook irritating for a variety of reasons.) This girl said she was intrigued by yours truly and gave me a link to a profile she'd posted on some dating site. She seemed fairly normal and interesting, and she asked me to get in touch with her.
Okay. That's nice. So what the heck? I'd not been in the head space of looking for a relationship, and was enjoying a period of being very solitary. It's nice to take time off from the rest of the world for a while and just do some reading and thinking and creative stuff, but when somebody goes out of their way to connect with you, that is, when the world knocks on your door, it's an open invitation to an adventure which can often be a good thing. So I wrote her back, anticipating an interesting conversation, but heard nothing back.
And I'll be damned if I didn't start thinking, "Huh? Was it something I said? Why doesn't she want to talk with me? Wow. I feel bad."
Then I shook my head and remembered, "Oh yeah! I forgot. There's a reason I can't stand internet dating." --And promptly let it go.
The real world works better. If you meet a person in the flesh, within a very short time you know whether or not they're for real, and vice-versa, and you know whether or not you can expect and benefit from further contact. --And if you have your senses running effectively, then you'll also know WHY. All of that is lacking in the digital realm, and people, (meaning primarily women), seem to play it in a manner where fishing for and then ignoring most contacts is standard practice. Credit card companies do the same thing, begging you to apply and then turning you down at their leisure if they find you wanting. --And I'm not saying that people who behave in this way are bad people who need to learn courtesy. It's more that the medium itself is at fault; breaking off contact by sending a message to say you're not interested is just clumsy and painful, so just ignoring somebody actually seems like the better idea, even though it sucks too. --In the real world, though, this is not a problem, since these decisions can be easily and instantly communicated through simple body language.
The answer? Get out there and meet real people. It's way more fun, and you're involved in life in a much more direct way, and whether or not you end up with a girl/boyfriend, you'll at least have the benefit of having collected a variety of real experiences.
-FL
Frequent /. reader. Recently bored to tears by 3,483-word post.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Don't worry, only the beta version will be efficient. When it goes live the whole thing will have you spinning in circles, in a mathematically sound fashion.
pi % of our users match your criteria, click here to continue.
LIES! This is only partially true. Dating services are in it for the love... The love of kittens, rainbows and money.
Sounds exactly like the system already used at CouchSurfing. Then again, having not read all the posts, this might sound exactly like someone who already mentioned this.
"Weight = IQ * 1.5".
Indicates proportions are reasonable, and the IQ part is hinted at.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You're forgetting that women care a lot more about appearance than usefulness. A woman won't *want* a high reply perecentage, because then she might appear desperate/slutty/fat/whatever. You'll end up with women spending a lot of effort trying to make sure their reply % is in the correct range (generally meaning within a few points of the score shown by [insert popular person here]).
And why does /. keep putting him on the front page?
Seriously, these essays suck. The first one I read was about how he hated vista because he could not look at facebook on it, which it turns out was a facebook ipv6 configuration problem and not the fault of vista at all. None of the others are better.
These essays are written by somebody who apparently has a mediocre understanding of technology and enjoys making broad, unfounded statements based on the technology rumor/fad du jour. They belong in a journal entry or the comments section, that's it. If I wanted this kind of drivel I would read C|Net.
I met my girlfriend at a dance. We actually talked. face to face! I've heard so many stories of people getting screwed over by these websites and the people that inhabit them. Sure, you see the commercials: "i met my husband on match.com..." but I think these are the exceptions, rather than the rule. If online dating is what it takes these days, I'm concerned about the future of the human race.
tl;dr diggest please @_@
Well said. I have a pretty large group of friends, and get out quite a bit. However, all of my friends, and their friends' friends, are engaged or already married. Despite generalized "wisdom" from xkcd cartoons about dating pools growing until middle age, I find that most everyone I meet is already in a serious relationship. Instead of hunting for the rare single guy (with whom I might not even be compatible) in an ocean of couples, I've decided to make my life a lot easier by looking in places where I know the men I meet will be single.
... is that the number of men who sign up for these services typically largely outnumber the amount of women... so girls will still get swamped and have lower response rates.
another trick with these statistics would be to compute a weighted average of response rates of the people who replied vs the people you solicit so that you got feed back to show if you were more or less desirable then average. If you typically send messages to people who respond 50% of the time and you receive responses 40% of the time it would tell you somethings up with your profile...
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
You know the guy who invented the pet rock? That guy made a million dollars. A million dollars!
Who wants to only meet people that are their exact clone, or meet specific requirements? If you want to do that, you can just sit at home and masturbate. Half the fun of life is meeting and interacting with people who are different then you, and you rarely plan who you fall in love with.
It seems like something that OkCupid might be interested in. Compared to (my non-user's perception of) Match.com, eHarmony, and some of the other big players, they (seem to) cater to a younger, slightly geekier clientèle. There's a big emphasis on 'compatibility' matching through online quizzes and the like, and I assume you can set hard-and-fast criteria as well. They also don't use a subscription-based business model, or pay-to-contact.
If Match and Yahoo are making money hand over fist as-is, they really have no reason to do anything, and I suspect any major improvement would be a hard sell. But a site like OkCupid that depends on a constant flow of new members, rather than squeezing membership fees out of existing ones, might be more receptive. Anything that improves 'match quality' and overall user experience is going to help them dramatically.
I'm not sure that a Slashdot FPP was the appropriate venue for this essay, but I think the idea has a certain amount of merit.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
good point
Any "geek" woman should be able to find *A* date. I do understand the important qualifier that large swaths of hopeful guys will simply not be your type.
After this thread, you likely have a new batch of leads to work with. Most of us are probably in the wrong state though.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I burn't out on inernet introductions 10 years ago. I realized that the ony way I was going to meet anyone was to get off my ass, away from the TV, and get out there. There are a multitde of things to do if you are creative. And if you are just looking for friends try Meetin.org. Here in Portland we have 8000 members. There might be 10 things going on in the same night. But this is not a pickup scene. The emphasis is on fun.
Another good method of meeting people is doing charity work or some other activity you like that requires other people- like bowling or volleyball.
In other words, stay out from in front of the phosphor god. Computer can bring people together but they also can keep them apart. Its just too safe and comfotable when you can hit the "off" switch
then it's not about you. This sounds like it's all about guys getting more replies so they can try for the next step.
So what's in it for her?
in New Zealand. nzdating.com
What I have yet to see is one that gives you matches that are actually interested in *you* as well, at least in any of the systems that doesn't try to ream you big time. When 99% of what you get specifically states they aren't interested in you, there's not a lot of point in using the system, and I'm not wasting $20/month for something that's likely a waste of time even then.
> I've been out of the dating game for years and years, but I find how people represent themselves interesting: personal mythologies are truly bizarre. So I look at these sites as exercises in digital anthropology.
:-)
[...]
> Being an avant garde atheist three steps to the left of Rosa Luxembourg always makes me "matchless" on Match.com.
It seems you can use Slashdot for that, too...
They've got an interesting compatibility metric, and I think it's run by the sparktests guys. I'd double-check on that, but I'm already running late for class. In any case it's worth having a look.
"The only consistent feature of all your unsatisfying relationships is you."
:P
Sorry, I had to use that somewhere in this story, and you happened to be the first post that fit.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Lol.. Well actually, the steel issue you mention has been going on a lot longer then Bush bing in office. And no, they weren't a big vote payoff to dinosaur West Virginia steel companies with stupid business models. They are in the essence of equalizing differences in currency and liver conditions that is making foreign steel attractive. We used the idea if subsidy to justify it to one of our treaties but the simple plane truth is that the treaty which got the WTO's attention is just a bad treaty and we didn't anticipate the effect of currency evaluations and what amounts to slave labor by US standards effectively undercutting market price. Now notice that I have said nothign about the American steel industry need to fix up it's act or not. They would probably benefit from a thorough makeover but that isn't the issue at hand currently.
But additionally, I took your original comment out of context because of the definitive tones in the statement. Tariffs are for seem that you think that is the only reason for tariffs.
As a wise geek saying goes-- "The odds are good, but the goods are odd. "
I've had luck with consumating.com. I'm surprised more single slashdotters don't use it. it's advertised as the place where "indie rock girls meet geeky boys" that site is based on intellect rather than statistics. It's very personal.
Does that sound like anyone at /. to you, asshole?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Man, you know what I would do if *I* had a million dollars? Nothing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A girl I'm currently seeing met her ex-fiance online and we met at a Tori Amos concert -- she'd made an out loud comment about how the guitarist was creating both melody and harmony by looping what he'd just played. She'd gone by herself, since while both geeky, her then fiance always had a horrible time at any remotely social event, and really, she likes nothing more than moshing to a psychobilly band or seeing Tori.
My personal experiences have been similar -- a lot of people I meet online are nice enough, but outside of their computers, they feel paralyzed in social situations and seemingly have no desire to overcome that fear -- even in the most accepting crowds.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Not only that, but frequently, women in these countries don't even realize how overrated the U.S. really is. They come here thinking that everyone has a maid, their own house, etc.--not realizing that half the shit most Americans "own" is actually mortgaged or on credit (unheard of in countries like the Ukraine).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The idea of word-of-mouth advertising doesn't mean much to you, does it? If some geek uses a great online personal ads service, they're a lot more likely to recommend it to their geek friends. Let's also not forget that with a better "hit ratio" if you will, you can charge more for listings since they tend to be more effective.
Stop thinking in CPM.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are all cops.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
IANAL, but I *AM* an owner of a dating website (PolyMatchMaker.com), so I have an almost qualified opinion (which means I probably shouldn't be allowed to reply).
Note: The current software is showing it's age, so go easy on it. There is a new version coming in near future. But I doubt I'll get much of a slashdotting as it's very much a niche market dating site.
Whether you go mathematically or go with simple searches, it boils down to members wanting a magical "Find me a hook up now" button. Everyone has their own perception and experiences of dating sites and how they should work.
Here is the life cycle of typical members when they are left to their own devices with search features:
So even on non-mathematically-based sites you end up using a type of math; the more emails I send out, the better my chances of getting a reply.
On the other hand, for sites using mathematics to work, there needs to be a huge amount of questions. And when all is said and done, it's still just a guess as to compatibility. My idea and your idea of "well read" can be completely different (Star Wars fan-fics don't count in my opinion in case you're wondering). There are questions that are yes/no on the quiz, but is a huge shade of grey in reality. There are questions people will lie about because it 'sounds better' or they think will give them a better chance at matching. So it's very possible you're more compatible with someone you only match 29% as opposed to the 75% person.
There is no perfect way to do build a dating site. I have my own ideas and have moderate success. On my site, despite the name, there is no matchmaker feature. There is only a basic search and a quick profile form. Instead, members are encouraged to use the forum software and express their true self so other members can learn about the real person.
Keep hunting for the rare single person, if that's what you're really after. On the other hand, you might re-examine your "ocean of couples" as potential partnerships. My primary partner and I are not opposed to one or the other (or both) of us being interested in someone else; we are secure enough in our relationship to not be threatened by new playmates, or even "serious" relationships with other people. Some of the most interesting turned out to be long-term friendships, as well.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, the status quo is not necessarily the be-all-end-all of ideal situations - don't get caught up in someone else's morality. As a paraphrase of someone else's sig, "monogamy is silly belief system wherein you throw away the good thing you have to find out if something else is just as good".
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Blogged about this a while ago: "A really bad idea is to apply a really BIG algorithm to find out who matches with whom. Often, in online dating such an algorithm is based on what psychologists think or found out or think to have found out. This is the second step in the ivory tower idea that you know better for your users. It is an arrogant idea and it will not work because you compete with evolution. Humans are trained by evolution to find the right partner. They will beat any algorithm conceived by psychologists and computer scientists." -- http://viibee.com/ online dating is fun again
This will sound bitter, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
OkCupid is the shittiest dating site I've ever had the misfortune to use. Because it is free, my experience is that many people use it as a blogging site, and have no intention of dating at all. At least with match.com, etc. people have PAID to sign up and should be half-serious about actually dating.
In addition, OkCupid's freeness seems to give it a male:female ratio of about 5 billion to 1. This means that females' accounts (with pics) tend to receive HUNDREDS of messages a day (I'm not exaggerating), and males' accounts usually receive none.
Don't waste your time with it, unless you don't give a shit about finding a date.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Disagree about OkCupid.
:) She since upgraded to someone even more compatible with her.
My girlfriend is on it and she's having a great time. What works for her is IMs.
Well, she was my girlfriend for a few months.
Moreover, I have quite a few messages in my mailbox as well.
We've met elsewhere, but I am impressed at what kind of selection of women I see on OkCupid. Chances are pretty high that I'll probably find my next girl on that site than any other.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
First, as others have already pointed out, the goal of any online personals business is to sell memberships and/or online advertising space, not to successfully match people up. When people finally find a good relationship, they don't need the site anymore, so they stop coming back, which is bad for business. So the goal of the online personals business is to keep people desperate, unmatched, signed up, and trying.
Second, this guy isn't solving the right problem. Writing up a detailed solution to the wrong problem is no help to anyone.
One serious problem with online personals is the gender gap: 95% men, 5% women. Most of the men are pissed off because they can't get women to respond to them. Most of the women are pissed off because they are bombarded daily with hundreds of messages from desperate men. When faced with something that isn't working, women tend to just give up while men tend to obsessively keep trying in hopes that it will work. So the women get frustrated and leave the site, while the men get frustrated and keep trying even more desperately. The gender gap widens and persists.
Plus, women are generally less open than men to the idea of trying online personals in the first place. Most women tend to see introvert, antisocial men as somehow flawed or undesirable, and since they figure that's the type of man who would mostly have to use an online personals site, they conclude that there are no desirable men to be found in online personals. Most women also tend to be unreasonably paranoid, believing (incorrectly) that their odds of meeting a serial-killer rapist are automatically 1000x higher online than in real life.
Another serious problem with online personals is the spam: 95% of female profiles are fake, posted by spammers to advertise pornographic web sites.
The only way to make a personals site work is to address the real problems. You have to eliminate the spam by having real human site operators review every single profile that gets posted. And you have to close the gender gap by attacking two fronts: permit fewer men to try the site, and get more women to try the site. The first one is easy: don't let a man sign up for the site if it would make the site "man-heavy". But the second one is extremely difficult: I don't have any idea how you'd convince women that their paranoia is excessive and that their preconceived notions about shy or antisocial men are wrong.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Yah, it WAS six years ago but... Match.com worked well for me, put me in contact with a woman I'd likely never have run across in my social circles then. Turns out to be one of the best things to have happened to me, and we've been married four years. But the key was to be open to being approached by someone who was intrigued by my profile but who I might have avoided otherwise. That's where math etc. goes out the window- sometimes you have to trust your gut.
And where are you, geographically? I have a theory that people in New England and California curiously seem to have vastly better returns on OkC than those in most other areas of the world...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Go here: Askromeo.com and learn to meet people the REAL way and ACTUALLY get results. Worked for me, as a 25y/o virgin. Now meeting women and dating and getting girlfriends is easy.
Based on the number of posters on
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
There are already personals websites that do this, they just don't cater to mainstream interests. Bondage.com has done this since at least 2002.
I must be a true geek.
My first thought was what dating has to do with semaphores.
But then, at second thought, I Got It.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Why should we compensate for different living conditions? If Indians choose to live in sweatshops and make steel at a price half ours, why shouldn't we buy it and allocate the resources we were going to use toward making the steel somewhere else?
"You can hardly claim that it would be because of inefficient businesses when the labor costs are below not only a minimum wage in the US, but the level of poverty in the US."
Yes I could. The definition of an inefficient company is one that produces things at a cost far higher than competitors. Labor is much cheaper in other countries than it is the US. As a consequence of our well developed infrastructure, workers of a certain skill set are more productive then workers elsewhere. Because of this, workers in other countries make much lower wages. Correspondingly, it's efficient to outsource labor intensive tasks to other countries, and devote our labor supply to more productive works.
"You also can't claim the company is inefficient when currency values take a relatively similar economy and deflate the purchasing parity on one or the other."
Yes I can. I can't blame the company for such an inefficiency, but electric lights were not the fault of candle makers either. Companies that are inefficient because of currency shifts are still inefficient.
"But there are some things that need to be done in order to stop every job from going to india or China just to see the currency and living conditions reverse after a while and end up being a hostage to their whims without any manufacturing or what be it on the main land."
Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage .
"Voters would baulk at it because it is insane. First, even removing tarrifs is one thing, even though it would cause a loss of jobs in some cases, second, the government can't just pay people. They have to take taxes in to cover their expense. To truly compensate for the effects of tariffs, you would bankrupt the country with pay outs."
Without Tarrifs, country A has $X. With Tarrifs, country A has Y$, it's a standard result in economics that Y The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.
"And you think IQ and age has something to do with understanding or rejecting your idea. It has more to do with sanity, IE sane or insane."
I wouldn't say it's a function of IQ, it has more to do with knowledge of Economics. Frankly, you will have trouble finding anyone with post-undegraduate economics training who does not believe in free trade for economic reasons.
"Lisa has responded to 56% of people who contacted her who meet her criteria."
That slut!
P x V = BB
Well,
As for the chance that someone will try to reverse engineer the search, then before the searcher is sent responses, the system could make sure that 2x or 3x as many applicants hit their profile and then it dumps the less promising, plus x% of randoms that still are not in the "upper crust".
This way, the searcher who is tweaking his/her profile still might not reliable reverse engineer the search criterion. Why? Well I think the searcher would have to let the system present numerous responses, over a period of time. This also makes the pool of viable candidates seem larger than it really is. Back in 1999/2000 I used to wonder about this about FriendFinder...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Like other above commentators, I recommend OKCupid. At one point when I was using it I tweaked my profile and filters. The top match didn't have a picture, but upon reading her profile and essays she seemed to be the girl of my dreams. I got very excited, but by the end of the profile alarm bells started going off with respect to how familiar the answers seemed, and I suddenly realized she was my ex-girlfriend. Six months later, we got back together, and are now happily married. So I guess OKCupid was smarter than we were.
However I see it being free as a flaw rather than a benefit. People who aren't paying for a site tend to not take it seriously. I had to set a hard filter restricting the minimum age of my matches to 23. I was 26 at the time, and didn't have any objection to dating 22-year-olds, but it just wasn't worth my time to dig through the profiles of all the college girls who obviously weren't looking for a real relationship.
Try www.tgpixel.com and www.tgpersonals.com instead! Best stuff there is. ;)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I think you overestimate the rationality of people.
Guys tend to write the hot chicks, no matter what. And they get rejected by the hot chicks. Eventually they get bored and stop writing.
Nobody writes the homely chicks except those who think the homely chicks are hot chicks. (They are the people who get luckiest, I think.)
Match never showed enough distinctive about the person to make me know what would be a good thing to write them. OKCupid seems a lot better since you can learn quite a bit about people from their various tests, quizzes and questions.
D
My finance (Yes, I met her on OKCupid) never got that many messages in her account, and she's the kind of girl that has guys hound her in public until she gives up a phone number. I will admit that the barrier for entry is certainly non-existent and that my results aren't to be expected by everyone. But you have to remember that the site's main purpose is to calculate how well you match someone and provide that info for you to use; free-will still plays a large part in who's going to contact you or find you interesting enough to respond to.
And from what I've heard about the data mining they do server side, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they've already implemented the ideas from the article.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Another reason these kinds of sites rarely make a decent match (what percentage of people find their true love through these sites? I'd guess it's way below 0.1%) is that people describe 1) who they'd like to meet, and 2) what they're like.
Let's look at these two points a bit more:
1) Describing who you'd like to meet can be a tricky thing. Just because you like reading SF, hacking kernel drivers and maintaining your fanzine website doesn't mean your best match has the same interests. Or do you really want a 5'8" blond bombshell with a uni degree living within 30 minutes of your house? Maybe the person you're best suited to (ie, whom you'd both be happiest with) is very different from what you suspect. This leads to the next point.
2) Do you really know what you're like as a person? Sure, pretty much everyone has some idea, but describing yourself as a kernel hacker who likes C++ and Perl might (in some people's minds) not convey the fact that many geeks are very good at conversation and often have a brilliant sense of humour. Or maybe you think you are quiet but in reality with the right partner you'd be a very outgoing kind of guy.
Perhaps if you knew yourself a bit better you'd be more open to meeting someone outside your initial preconceived ideas of what you'd like and you could be pleasantly surprised.
In some ways facebook with it's little tests is more objective, but then you still don't know if you're best suited to someone with similar test answers. I'm sure there's been psychological testing done on couples to determine factors that make a relationship work. I recall recent news items on tests for how people manage conflict was a strong indicator on whether they got divorced in the following years or not - something like that is needed.
And just as a footnote: this is exactly what happened to me. After fruitless online dates for quite a while I met someone who really didn't match my criteria (in some ways I'd never dared to match with someone so attractive and in other ways she was way outside what I would consider - ie school dropout (though now has more qualifications than me!), not from the same city, v widely travelled, age difference too great etc). The result is 7+ years of bliss and getting better by the day, married and still enjoying our differences (and often learning and growing because of those differences). In short, allow the unexpected to happen and it just might. The corollary being if you're not ready for something unexpected then maybe you're not ready period.
pithy comment
As a Facebook user and highly available young man, I think I can accurately say: OH DEAR GOD PLEASE NO!
So basically, a normal intellect with nice measurements?
I'm desperate.
/.ers the problem is not that women don't find me attractive. In fact, the opposite is very much the case: frankly, I'm desperate to find a woman who is my match. I hate to put it so bluntly, but I am smart (IQ about 160), interesting (study AI but also music and art, aerodynamics for sailing, physics because it's cool, history of martial arts, woodworking, cycling, kayaking, climbing...), independently wealthy as well as having done rather well during the tech boom, quite attractive/fit, and have most everything that many women are looking for. Do I get laid constantly? No. Why not? Because I am looking for something meaningful and significant and I'm not finding it. There just aren't many women who can keep up with me, and those who can are usually already married.
;)
Like plenty of other
No, arrogance isn't a problem. Anyone who can keep up with me is arrogant as well
What does it say when someone is desperate, anyway? It could just say that zie lives somewhere where meeting intelligent members of the relevant sex is difficult.
Parent is +1, win.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Reading through the posts it seems that some people swear by some websites, and others apparently swear at them! It just depends on how much time you invest and if you have some luck on your side.
Here's 2 examples i tried (the only two =( )
Some new dating website my buddy found. He, myself and a bunch of other irc friends signed up. I think i put the most honest ad, "looking for a friend!" Well guess what, no one contacted me hahaha. But my buddy who said "i want to have fun with you" was hit up so much it was ridiculous! This is when i learned that nice guys usually do finish last!
I wanted to get back into roller blading and since i was living in a new town i didn't know what was up! So i go to an exercise web site and sign up. I describe myself (honestly) and guess what, not 1 person was interested! hahaha!
Sure, maybe i'm hideous but my looks or physical appearance doesn't seem to be a problem in person. Maybe it's my personality? I get along with everyone. Hmm, maybe it's just that my profile isn't what people are looking for. Either way it's pretty weird (to me at least).
At least on the exercise web site 1 person voted me 5/5 stars for nice smile! lol
Oh also worth noting, a person who i'm no longer friends with (that rat bastard!) ended up using craigs list successfully. But i think it was a problem because the intimate encounters ended up wasting all his money! He was single and traveling for work so everywhere he went he had "a hook up." I'm sure some of you nerds might think that's a good thing, but i dunno, kinda sad how it's worked out for him. But then again i am a Catholic! Maybe a hater? hahaha
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Or not. A girl always gets modded WAY up, sort of the Slashdot equivalent of a free drink. But you do make a good point.
In my experience with dating sites, about fifty percent of guys are looking for a one night stand, and fifty percent of girls are looking for compliments and self-image reinforcement, either until they get back with their emotionally abusive boyfriend or they run in terror from the horrific messages.
Personally, I have grown tired of the entire dating scene online. I'm hitting the gym until the girls start hitting on me.
From one of those two :)
Near San Francisco in California (zip 94552)
It's probably based on market penetration. Geeks love the site so they tell other geeks. Hence, the effect is more pronounced in high-tech areas.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Because we would be essentially applying incentive for slavery. That's what we equate it to in our country when the same unsafe, overly long workdays, and I'm really at a loss for more adjectives because I had a few too many shots of wild turkey. But you get the idea. If the only way we can get cheaper products or increase profit is to force people to work below the standards for our own workers, we are in trouble. We shouldn't be doing it by proxy by allowing it to be extremely profitable for our companies to do it in other countries. I think we might have gone overboard in the US a little but it is the way it is, like it or not.
Umm, maybe you should look up the definition of inefficient up again. Inefficient has to do with productivity and time. The word your looking for is profitable. You seem to have it corect later but your drawing conclusions that don't exist. There is nothing about a foreign worker that makes them less productive then an American worker. There may be a learning curve when you change someone's job skills but given enough time they can be just as efficient as we are. The lower wages come from inequalities in living conditions, domestic economies, and currency evaluations. Not because they are slow and retarded. I would like to meet whoever put that idea in your mind.
I think your seriously attempting to define efficiency to broadly. I think we are on a lack of terminology more then a disagreement. I think the word your looking for here is again is profitable.
Do you understand what the link is saying? I'm not really convinced you are. Especially, when it mentions very specific factors like full employment and perfect competition which simply isn't present.
No, it is equally difficult to determine who has gained and lost. You see, your just focusing on the specific trade in and of itself without taking into considerations the economic impacts. And seeing how your specified countries, how do you account for lack of employment, lack of payroll taxes, lack of or deteriorating property taxes when factories sit empty and commercial property goes vacant, lack of social security contributions, the need for increase citizen services like unemployment, employee reeducation, welfare programs, medical costs and so on. Now remember, the comparative advantage assumes a lot of things are equal or set, but is isn't when jobs go overseas. Also, the trade idea presented breaks down when you take the government out of the picture and apply it to companies. You see, it isn't the
I can definitely see your point, and obviously I didn't mean my OP to be the "one size fits all" solution to everyone.
I do respectfully disagree with some aspects of your opinion on the simplicity of joining groups. You are right that groups are suspicious of new people. This is absolutely true. They will always wonder about your motives. Every group I have joined has initially made me feel sort of like they didn't trust me. That's fine, though. It just takes a long time for adults to become fully integrated and accepted into a new group. It can take months. It's not a simple matter of joining a group. It's a complicated matter of joining a group and waiting for them to warm up to you. Only once they are very accustomed to you being there will they start to accept you. You might just be joining the group for the end purpose of meeting women, but you can be assured that the women in the group are likely not there for the end purpose of meeting men.
Advice for people in a city without "trillions" of friends? Absolutely. It is difficult to be terribly specific without knowing anything about you, but allow me to go on the assumption that you are the type that tends to have fewer, but closer friends (this is me, believe it or not). This is a huge amplifier of V for you, but it impedes P just by virtue of the fewer number of opportunities.
First, here is where a wingman (wingperson, really) helps incredibly. If you and one of your closer friends join a group together, that is 100x better than joining one alone. It demonstrates that at least one person has accepted you, and that you have at least some degree of social skill. Even better is if your friend is your opposite sex, and the platinum prize is if your opposite-sex friend is attractive. A guy who shows up to a group with an attractive woman with whom he is just friends will generate respectful envy among the men and curiosity among the women.
Second, joining a group centered on a topic with which you do not have mastery knowledge is better than joining one centered on a topic on which you are already expert. If you enter the group as an interested party and look to them for advice and guidance, you will be reinforcing their expert status while at the same time learning something new. This enriches your cultural experience and expands your pool of possible friends by exposing you to people different than you. You are also providing an avenue for the group members to enrich their cultural experience and knowledge, so you are more likely to be approached by curious people.
Third, another option is to join a group where _nobody_ has mastery knowledge. You instantly have something in common with everyone else. A good example is a foreign language or musical instrument class. They are repetitive, so you are guaranteed multiple interactions with the same people. You also share the same expertise level as everyone else (save the instructor), so you are in a better position to help each other.
Finally, be patient! It takes a long time to be accepted into a group, especially as adults. I have two examples I can share with you.
6 weeks ago, I joined a new running group (solo, without the inside recommendation). We run once every week, and every other week is beer and pizza night after the run. I have gone every week, and I am still not "tight" with anyone there, but people are starting to talk to me more and more now that I have been there a while. They are only starting to believe that I am "for real" and not there for some disingenuous motive.
Second, I started taking a foreign language class last fall. There are about 10 students in the class (not that many, right?). Most of them have nothing in common with me, but as the class has continued for the past 20 weeks or so, the smallness of our group has lent itself to start to grow personal relationships between the people in the class. There has also been the opportunity to learn many new things due to the differences between all of us. We have had a couple of social events
Not quite.
Only someone with a moderately above-normal IQ would even make a statement like that; but the 133 IQ comes with a Pizza-addict physique.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hans Reiser.
Agreed! The current dating site platform is designed to keep you on that site for as long as possible. That is why they return 800 million matches everytime ( and watch, they start to repeat profiles to make it seem like more matches). The longer your on the site, the higher the chance that you will purchase a membership. I review tons of online dating sites at http://www.datinghelp101.com/ and trust me, there are a lot of poorly constructed sites that do just that! On the other hand, this would be an interesting idea for a free service that relies on adsense and other ads for revenues.
How is anyone being forced at any point in this process? Slavery is exceedingly rare in the world(I realize it exists, but as a percentage of overall workforce, it's minuscule). These people are extremely poor, and would vastly prefer low wages to nothing. And how exactly are we in trouble? They build capital through the development of businesses that exploit their low wage labor, until the infrastructure builds as to make their work more valuable. This is how we got rich, how Japan got rich, etc.
"here is nothing about a foreign worker that makes them less productive then an American worker. There may be a learning curve when you change someone's job skills but given enough time they can be just as efficient as we are. The lower wages come from inequalities in living conditions, domestic economies, and currency evaluations. Not because they are slow and retarded. I would like to meet whoever put that idea in your mind."
Thank you for constructing strawmans and accusing me of racism, please re-read what I wrote and apologize. All of those variables you have just mentioned: Inequalities in living conditions, the state of domestic economies, and currency evaluations, are all fundamentally dependent on worker productivity. In the long run, wages are dependent on worker productivity as well.
Workers in the third world are overall less productive then American workers. This has absolutely nothing to do with their personal worth or ability, but simply because they do not have the same infrastructure as Americans. Their machines are worse, their computers are older, their electricity grids are unreliable.
"Do you understand what the link is saying? I'm not really convinced you are. Especially, when it mentions very specific factors like full employment and perfect competition which simply isn't present."
There are plenty of models which extend past those conditions. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_general_equilibrium#Overview if you would like to read more about it. The old comparative" advantage theory is over a hundred years old. The math is now quite a bit more complicated, but we've extended it past those conditions.
"No, it is equally difficult to determine who has gained and lost. You see, your just focusing on the specific trade in and of itself without taking into considerations the economic impacts. And seeing how your specified countries, how do you account for lack of employment, lack of payroll taxes, lack of or deteriorating property taxes when factories sit empty and commercial property goes vacant, lack of social security contributions, the need for increase citizen services like unemployment, employee reeducation, welfare programs, medical costs and so on."
Yeah, hence why I said "The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.".
"Also, the trade idea presented breaks down when you take the government out of the picture and apply it to companies. You see, it isn't the country doing the trade, it is the companies doing business that is doing it."
So? I don't see how that breaks anything.
"And with a trade deficit, it is obvious that the process collapses on itself. Hence the need for tariffs."
No, the dollar loses value and the deficit disappears. Where do Tarrifs come into this?
"Especially when you consider that a lot of the trade items is economically handicapped by regulation on one side of the isle. If all things were equal, you wouldn't have to worry about it. But that simply isn't the case so it breaks the model."
No! That's my entire point. Regulation is interpreted as an exogenous productivity decrease, the model does not break at all.
Women (and men) get to specify height and weight and even income bracket. Fine. Then you meet the girl. And the next one. And the next one. They are all OBESE. Rather than go home to porn, after she's gotten you drunk and horny by thrusting her cleavage into your face, you take one for the team and wake up with either a very cute albeit scale-busting fling, worth another dozen goes at least...OR you wake up with a multiple-crash-diet disaster blob of disgustingly amorphous and stretch-marked flesh, the worst being a lack of highly arousing nipple definition, as in even ice cubes wont help much. I even like curvy girls better than I like anorexic ones, but it was too much to have to wade through the seductive and sexy vs. seductive and revolting ones, both of which look great in a support bra and form-altering underwear. So I make the simple suggestion that a site appears, that is *not* a "hook-up" site, in which people must submit a face shot and a full frontal nudity shot. Oh, this would not go down well with co-workers. Idea needs tweaking. How about just a perkiness/paunchiness scale of -5 to +5? Then I could find my somewhat overcurvy soul mate. Ah, body type! Android vs. those others: http://www.weightcontroldoctor.com.au/index.php?page=bodytypes I would then avoid the L's who make up the VAST majority of online women under 5'4" tall (who usually scream out in all caps DO NOT BOTHER RESPONDING IF YOU ARE NOT AT LEAST 5'9-6'3"!!!) and find me some G ("booty") girls. They are healthier too, abdominal fat indicating insulin resistant Metabolic Syndrome X. By my first sentence reveals the central problem of online dating: women are forced to use logic to choose which men to meet, very much unlike in the real world in which a man's non-verbal, non-logical first impression "vibe" utterly dominates. Likewise, online, introverts (like me) seem to be overly "talkative" extroverts and visa versa, so when they meet in person, both are oddly confused, even though complementary introvertion/extrovertion is a great match between lovers! The biggest problem I find with MySpace (but not Facebook) is that all the cute Hispanic girls have 120+ friends who are thuggish looking ganster wannabees with sideways baseball caps on, who snarl while making weird gestures with their fingers.
You see, allowing companies to profit simply because they can evade our standards of living and work regulations why doing business in the US creates an incentive to work people at lower wages and standards then we have. Now when we take a portion of the in tariffs, it gives incentive to increase their wages in the foreign county which equalized some of the effects. As for slave labor, I meant that generically in that is what we consider people who are paid under our minimum wage and so on. This is the effect of allowing then to goto other countries, Once you adjust for differences in currency and purchasing parity, you will find that a lot of foreign workers still don't meet our minimum wage guidelines. That is why a tariff is used to equalize the differences instead of forbidding the trade at all. And your right, given the choice, they probably would want some pay instead of non at all. But when things equalize and their standards more closely match ours, the tariff can be lowered.
Well, I will apologize for making it appear that you a racist, that wasn't my intent. My intent was to simply state that efficiency, which I now think we were using in different contexts, isn't inherent in national or ethnic origin. And even more to your rather well explained point, I still don't see it. I have worked with many foreigners from countries like these and for the types of tasks being asked of them, they are just as if not more productive then normal people here.
Of course we have extended past those conditions. When it was created, the government and politicians didn't attempt to impress social and environmental regulations and standards onto business. These are just two of road blocks that stop this principle form being accurately applied. You see, if we have a free econemy in the first place with fair market competition within our own system, the you could apply it. But that isn't the case and it doesn't fit. Something as simple as deriving taxes based on pay scales and forced overtime payments tilts is all off because now your not seeing the effect of trade but the effects or artificial restrictions. This is what validates tariffs. I kow two wrongs don't make a right, but it doesn't negate a necessity either.
Well, not only is it difficult, it is near impossible to account for the losses when so many things are dependent on taxes brought in from the lost work to pay the damages out. It might be an entirely different story if we had a flat tax, co
Yeah, that's what I thought. Let the rest of us know when you have real answers.
The site is free, yes, but it is poorly designed and hideous. Try OkCupid.com, they have a completely free, quality site with matching based on tests and questions, etc. It could always use more users.