Ask HN: OkCupid, Online Dating, Machine Learning, the Future, Etc.

The things that people claim are dealbreaks ("She's a Republican!", "He lives with his parents!", "I would never engage in casual sex!") tend not to be in practice, once the opportunity presents itself.

But when asked point-blank? Oh yeah, I totally couldn't date somebody who supported cruelty to animals in lab test (one sec, gotta adjust my makeup), or who voted conservative (hold on, lemme claim my tax exemptions), or who's a virgin (well, everybody's gotta learn sometime).

There's AI and control theory that seeks to reason about an uncertain world--but in dating, it's active delusion and misinformation. People don't know themselves, and even if they do know themselves, they invent bullshit reasons why obviously good pairings aren't.

That's before you even get into the economics of those sites and why helping people date successfully isn't profitable.

There are lots of interesting machine learning or other features that smart people could come up with to better group people who have similar personalities or are interested in common things, but I think they'd all be missing the main point of dating. How much stuff you have in common or whether you share a couple of personality traits are nice to have but really don't matter. It all still comes down to attraction.

Don't take that hipster vegan socialist seriously online who swears they won't date a Trump-loving meat eater. If there's attraction there, they won't care about their nonsensical list of "must-haves".

Rule #1: be attractive. If you think you're not attractive: shut up and lift and work on your life so you get towards making yourself more attractive. Don't let any dang folks spin you the politically correct Disney version of reality that you just haven't met the right person yet or some other nonsense.

From this regard, the core of Tinder is probably the closest to accurately quantifying the real human experience, though the number of spammers and bots on there make it not really worth the time.

However, the outcome of a first date with any particular person also seems to have high variability (if you were somehow able to repeat it!). There are so many small factors that make a "great" date, e.g. both people's mood, their openness, the date activity, confidence/actions, other options at the time, etc.

Even if you are both wildly attracted to each other, some people are only looking for the novelty of new people. Others have high standards for a date that are only rarely met. Nowadays, many people line up so many dates that the odds of a single one working out are low. They've lost those "butterflies" that are often needed to even be open enough to match with someone.

So, given all of this variability, there is unlikely to be a "perfect" matching algorithm.

Taking anything people say in their answers at face value is a mistake at best, naive at worst.

These are not technical specs. These are people describing themselves publicly. They'll most likely be inaccurate either by design or unconsciously and rightly so. Yes, rightly so. You can have a PhD woman who drinks wine in her bath tub while she reads Sartre and dissecting Stravinsky who'll be wanting to get her head banged against the head board at that particular moment. Do we think she'll put that thought on her profile? No. She'll refrain from saying that because society likes clear cut labels and will reduce that complex human being to one tiny aspect of her humanity.

That's one reason.

The other reason building all that AI for "online dating" isn't a worthy endeavor is because the point of online is discovery and initial contact. That's it.

Discovery is when you notice a human being you didn't know before. Initial contact is exactly what it says: making contact.

Once you discover their existence, you make contact. You chat for a bit and hopefully you like each other to a certain degree. Then you go to another platform, namely Skype, and have a chat to get a feel of each other's vibe, voice, body, etc. Yes, people are willing to get naked but only for people who're used to get other people naked.. One of those "free for those who can afford it" things that are thrown at those who aren't starving for it.

But maybe they're listening to some music they find cool (sometimes really cool music) and they want you to listen with them.

Then from Skype to exchanging phone numbers. Skype and not Facebook because Skype is a better firewall than Facebook. It's easier to eliminate someone from your life after a Skype chat than after a Facebook one because if you stumble on an unstable person, now they have access to your friends and your real name and can stalk you or cause a scene. Also, Skype is more discreet. It avoids them the questions from other people about you. Maybe it's too early to parade you in front of their friends. Maybe they're afraid their friend steals you. Maybe they're engaged. Facebook adds degrees of freedom people would do without at this stage.

After exchanging phone numbers, you meet. People decide if they want to have sex with another person during discovery and contact and if they're going to have sex with another person during a Skype session. In other words, you can in most cases directly meet somewhere suitable for this (taking a room) for you both want each other.

And there you have it, the beginning of a relationship.

From this, you see that the actual time spent with each person on the discovery/contact platform is tiny and doesn't justify building "an AI" for it because it'd be like building "an AI" for football locker rooms when the game is played on football fields. A better example would be building an AI to handle powering up a computer and finding the best ways to push the power button. The problems in software don't exist because people don't know how to turn on a computer, it what happens next.

Similarly, the problems in "dating" don't exist because people don't "find" other people.. It's because they lack the skills to take it from there to add to their lives and to the lives of those they meet.

As I said, you seem like a qualified person. If I had your skills, I wouldn't be doing that.