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Silicon Valley Singles Are Giving Up On the Algorithms of Love (washingtonpost.com)

The Washington Post: Melissa Hobley, an executive at the dating app OkCupid, hears the complaints about the apps [being unable to find good matches] regularly and thinks they get a bad rap. Silicon Valley workers "are in the business of scalable, quick solutions. And that's not what love is," Hobley said. "You can't hurry love. It's reciprocal. You're not ordering an object. You're not getting a delivery in less than seven minutes." Finding love, she added, takes commitment and energy -- and, yes, time, no matter how inefficiently it's spent.

"You have a whole city obsessed with algorithms and data, and they like to say dating apps aren't solving the problem," Hobley said. "But if a city is male-dominant, if a city is known for 16-hour work days, those are issues that dating apps can't solve." One thing distinguishes the Silicon Valley dating pool: The men-to-women ratio for employed, young singles in the San Jose metro area is higher than in any other major area. There were about 150 men for every 100 women, compared with about 125 to 100 nationwide, of never-married young people between 25 and 34 in San Jose, U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016 shows. That ratio permeates the economy here, all the way to the valley's biggest employers, which have struggled for years to bring more women into their ranks. Men make up about 70% of the workforces of Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, company filings show.

4 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Best way to get laid in Silly Valley by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

    Write a heartfelt but rather naive memo explaining that you value diversity but want your company to enhance it in ways that don't 'incentivize illegal discrimination'.

    Get promptly fired by your Ivy League Communist wannabe management.

    Go on the paid speaker circuit and start a Patreon. Sue your company.

    Meet blonde alt right hottie with rich conservative parents on the paid speaker circuit.

    "Value her diversity" HARD. Start a family and write a book.

    It beats slogging away knocking out boilerplate code in a single sex environment.

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. Re:Here I am reading slashdot at 5:30 PM Saturday by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Get married so you have an excuse like us winners.

  3. Trying to ignore the actual issue? by Nemyst · · Score: 5, Insightful

    None of this is even remotely of the same magnitude as the core issue of online dating: men outnumber women on all these sites by a factor of 10:1, if not worse. Women get overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive and either drop out of the service or become extremely picky. Men end up with an extremely low positive response rate and so turn towards a "shotgun" approach of just sending identical messages to dozens or even hundreds of women, further exacerbating the issue.

    As long as the gender imbalance isn't solved, online dating is going to remain a game of chance and a mess for both genders. Right now, all it's doing is taking the already fairly dated (but still very widespread) social norm that men should be the ones initiating romantic advances (and therefore take on the numerous refusals and the emotional toll that goes along with them) and push it to a ridiculous limit.

  4. Their algorythms don't work because they are BAD. by gurps_npc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It has nothing to do with love being hard, it's because their algorithms SUCK. Mainly because they look for "desireable" traits rather than excluding 'deal breakers'.

    This a 'one night stand' mindset - you end up finding the desirable/attractive but damaged people, not the acceptable ones.

    Example:
    OKCupid asks people if they have cats or dogs. Then they let you look for someone that already owns a cat or a dog. They do NOT let you exclude people that have cats or dogs.

    That is a one short term relationship system. If you only date people that already have a cat or a dog, you are looking for someone that won't have to change their life style to fit with yours. Perfect if all you want is a couple of months of fun.

    However, let's say you want to get married. If they love you, they will grow to love your cat or dog. It will not be a 'deal killer'. But if you are allergic to a cat or a dog, you NEED to exclude those people. You can't ask them to give up their pet just to date you. If you tried that, your success rate plummets.

    Same thing with many other such factors. If you are a short man WITHOUT a complex, then you are perfectly willing to date women, regardless of their height. You have no problem asking out someone a foot taller than you. That's healthy, non-discriminatory thinking. But if you try to ask out most tall women, you will be wasting your time, because most such women only want to date tall men.a

    The truth is short men do not want to search for short women. Short men want to search for any woman that is willing to date men their size. Guess what - OKCupid knows which women are not willing to date short men but OKCupid will not let you exclude those women from your search..

    The dating web sites are all seriously flawed by their 'show me a 10' mindset, rather than a "no deal breakers" mindset.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com