Technology

What do I think about this?

Well, going off of what I'm going to call 'internal heuristics reinforced by 35 years of raw data':

The author is very likely female and Chinese.

They use more harsh, accusatory, and direct language when describing men, and they use more soft, explanatory, and indirect language when describing women.

The various grammatical oddities sound extremely similar to ESL, native Mandarin and Cantonese speakers I've known personally.

Ok, from my 'career as a data analyst' perspective?

AB Testing

...

This is the only actually useful part from a 'how do you actually make a good dating app' perspective. It is difficult to AB test the algorithms of the feed because the change usually has an impact on the user that gets a specific variant but also users that he likes that are on any variant. Other than that, you can gain 10 points of retention just with AB testing and finding the best things that work.

It is actually pretty easy to create a dating app that works in terms of retention if you use extensive AB testing.

Yes, yep, AB testing works.

Too bad the vast majority of the analysis is devoted to explaining how things don't work or aren't that impactful or at best, prevent retention from falling.

The word 'retention' appears 72 times in this post, and that blurb I quoted there is literally the only time it is mentioned within a context of doing something to change the algorithm, the underlying nature of the app, that improves retention, by a specific amount, across the board.

That means AB testing is the actual secret sauce, and well, there aren't any details because then the sauce wouldn't be secret any more.

I have some background in economics.

In econ, specifically hedonics, attempting to determine a consumers actual preference for one basket of goods vs another, you've got the core concept of cardinal preferences and ordinal preferences.

I've also got a background in poli sci.

The same basic concept underlies ranked choice vs first past the post voting.

Long and short of it is: To get a result that does a far better job of actually understanding preferences, and matching them with outcomes... you have to de-abstractify decisions and make people actually think about them, pains-takingly match up and rank all their preferences against each other.

You can either do that brute force, all at once, as with a ranked choice voting slate, or you can build the same result, doing AB testing, one at a time, until you actually construct a consistent preference structure.

An example in a dating app would be: If you match on someone who has something you've indicated as a red flag, but pass on someone who doesn't... you have the app tell the user what they did, and ask the user why they did that.

The 'good' way to proceed with this would be to inform the user when they are being inconsistent, to actually help them figure out what they actually want, explain their inconsistencies to them, have a way of suggesting underlying preferences that they may have, because they similar to other users who had the same problem and later had success, present the user with analytics on all their preference evolution, etc.

The 'bad' way to proceed with this would be just track this kind of 'hypocrisy' score in the background, and not help the user become less of a hypocrite. Then, you sprinkle (or firehose!) peoples feeds with hypocrites who have a decent enough chance of matching, but you know have a high likelihood of having a it not working out after some weeks or months, thus creating a perpetual soul grinding machine that keeps you coming back.

I'll leave it to anyone who reads this to guess which of those two choices best resembles what most dating apps are doing, actually helping people learn what they want in a partner, or consistently and intentionally matching you with dates that seemed promising, but fall apart after a bit.

Your own little AB test!

PS: You may also note that OkCupids old model of having the user just be able to answer hundreds or thousands of questions, and rank their importance, without needing to pay for anything, and also having an unlimited number of likes/dislikes/dms is the closest to the 'good' way of doing AB testing, and that basically everything every modern dating app does, is some flavor of the 'bad' way of doing this, with varying levels of monetization, limiting, and obfusucation.

In game theory, it is almost always the case that a player with incomplete information will lose to a player that has complete information.

The app has complete information.

Do you?