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The Tyranny of the Marginal User - by Ivan Vendrov

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A friend and I were recently lamenting the strange death of OKCupid. Seven years ago when I first tried online dating, the way it worked is that you wrote a long essay about yourself and what you were looking for. You answered hundreds of questions about your personality, your dreams, your desires for your partner, your hard nos. Then you saw who in your area was most compatible, with a “match score” between 0 and 100%. The match scores were eerily good. Pretty much every time I read the profile of someone with a 95% match score or higher, I fell a little bit in love. Every date I went on was fun; the chemistry wasn’t always there but I felt like we could at least be great friends. I’m now quite skeptical of quantification of romance and the idea that similarity makes for good relationships. I was somewhat skeptical then, too. What I did not expect, what would have absolutely boggled young naive techno-optimist Ivan, was that 2016-era OKCupid was the best that online dating would ever

The Tyranny of the Marginal User why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time Ivan Vendrov Sep 14, 2023 959 83 128 Share A friend and I were recently lamenting the strange death of OKCupid. Seven years ago when I first tried online dating, the way it worked is that you wrote a long essay about yourself and what you were looking for. You answered hundreds of questions about your personality, your dreams, your desires for your partner, your hard nos. Then you saw who in your area was most compatible, with a “match score” between 0 and 100%. The match scores were eerily good. Pretty mu

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