When dating apps behave like this, users are simply shown more and more of the same type of person
Berman feels there's something fundamentally unromantic about the narrowing of options that's baked into collaborative filtering. It locks in what it thinks are your preferences early on, “which makes statistical sense but it doesn't necessarily lead to serendipity”. And as Joel explains, this sort of paring away of desire is the opposite of how attraction actually tends to work over the course of our lifetimes: we don't always know what we like until it's put in front of us. “So you meet someone and you know you want them, and then when you're asked in future what it is that you want in a partner you list their qualities.”
I tell Berman about Feeld, a newish sex-positive dating app that's been jokingly hailed as the official sponsor of ‘Hot Vax Summer' – it's famously buggy and shows scant regard for users' age and geographical preferences, but it's getting rave reviews
Is there anything that can be done? Rather than striving to create bigger and more sophisticated databases of single people, Joel wonders if developers should actually be doing the opposite. “There's a case to be made that the sheer number of options is a barrier,” she says. “Having endless possible matches can be quite inconsistent with the tools we're equipped with – it's cognitively overloading. And it's very frustrating trying to sift through dozens and dozens of profiles that don't give you the information you actually need. You wind up having to filter them using criteria you don't actually care about as much.” Perhaps, she says, “a completely different approach would be better” – something that more closely mimics the daten met facebook dating way people weigh each other up in real life, with profile features like voice and video clips, or even a virtual space avatars could interact in. המשך…
