[fsargent]

The problem with dating isn't lack of meeting people, it's lack of heuristics. Speed dating just makes it faster to judge, but it doesn't actually do any work for you. One of the big benefits to OkCupid is that the heuristics are relatively good. Improve on that, and you're golden.

[draugadrotten]

one of the problems with good heuristics is that almost all the desire is sent towards the 9's and 10's. Yet obviously most of the site users are 8 or less. So the 9-10s gets swamped, and leave early. The remaining users gets bored because nobody replies.

The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad. It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be where they are.

OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.

[charlesdm]

Not the dating market, just the online dating market

People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot in the real world.

[tome]

Does anyone know of any other analysis of the dynamics of online dating sites besides the OKCupid ones?

[lev99]

It's called speed dating, but it's actually much slower per decision than popular places like Tinder and Bumble. I imagine ML can be built to decide who should talk to each other. (push a button, wait in a queue, ML decides who to pair up)