I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like 'fate' or 'chance' than overly engineered).
That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up.
The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %.
Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.
+1 - one of the biggest things we found actually, is externalizing the potentially uncomfortable elements of dating generally helps people be more authentic and focus on getting to know each other. A few examples:
- As you said, dating apps, everyone is there to date, so you don't have to feel awkward about approaching someone not knowing if they're not single or interested in you or even if they are in the mood for conversing with a stranger
- Hinge did a good job forcing Q&A. Before that people often thought it was uncool / signaled trying too hard to add a bio so people often had less info to go on.
- On our app - we helped facilitate where people went on their first date (generally tried to pick more affordable / neutral options) - this took the pressure off of worrying if the person picking made a bad / too crowded choice - blame it on us!
Not saying dating apps can remove everything uncomfortable about dating, but they can definitely help!
There are statistics studies both endorsing and invalidating this concept.
Some OkCupid / Tinder data suggest that "likes" are not evenly distributed, which has been extrapolated out to mean that dating is unbalanced. On the same token, unmarried rates are pretty equal across genders in the US suggesting that from an outcomes perspective people are achieving their relationship goals (at least in terms of marriage there are other goals).
In our app, which was much more heavily skewed toward actual dates than likes, I would not characterize the pattern of people who went on dates heavily skewed toward a small portion of men - so it may be real from a liking perspective (I can't claim to refute data directly from the dating apps) but may be more of a myth when it comes to actual dating.
I could see it for sure - it'd at least be worth experimenting with. Beyond the functionality itself, I'd be most curious about how the idea that its a non-profit influences perception of the app and the people using the app. Profit or non-profit, it'd be nice to see apps talk more openly about how they approach matching - I think Coffee Meets Bagel did this a while back.
tl;dr tons of spam / offensive messages. I actually think that with advances in NLP and content moderation since then, you could re-introduce a paradigm like this with potentially less spam.
"something you just can’t short-cut with technology" - totally agree - it can be a helpful part of the process provided the service is in service of the customer's goals, which often isn't the case.
That said, there are definitely things products can do to improve the experience for users - this paper is a bit old, but was eye opening to our team when thinking about designing our product https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersUpside/People...
Great qs - As for why apps don't show profiles more randomly - I think because the space is so competitive, perceived quality is so important and frankly its "easy" for apps to leverage who they show to who and when in order to make users most likely to keep swiping and/or upgrade. I do think apps generally want you to find a partner, but are generally okay with making the experience valuable to them (even if that means gamifying and playing with who gets to see who and when) along the way.
I'd say (assuming by the way you phrased the question you're referring to men who are generally interested in women, women who are generally interested in men) there are certain factors and preferences that trend across genders which do influence dating behavior and outcomes for these populations. Based on survey data we collected a few years ago - some are shared across genders (e.g. political views) others are not (e.g. height). But I wouldn't say there were glaring different "goals" by gender, so much as some difference in how important certain factor were.
Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA
High level though, there's a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps.
At it's core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interactions that lead to nothing is much higher and more quantifiable than IRL (you've all seen the r/tinder sankey diagrams)
Two "solutions" I believe would generally benefit dating
1. Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don't bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived "quality" and shadow-hide show profiles that aren't liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.
2. Daters set some type of routine that works for them - say "I'll try to go on ~1 date per month". Being intentional about this helps minimize the feeling that each date is so fatalistic / it's the end of the world if the person who seemed awesome when messaging is actually a jerk. It'd be nice if an app facilitated this type of routine and figured out a feedback mechanism to reward users who were generally pleasant / respectful on their dates.
That said, I don't fully agree with the idea that there's a uniform concept of x/10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up.
The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like / lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %.
Additionally, on the point of weight / body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and > 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1/2 of daters it isn't.
The point I'm trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you're describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.