What they were thinking . . .
Recently the online dating blog eWooing.com posted an article discussing the question: “Why would PerfectMatch.com want the publicity generated by their placement in Must Love Dogs?”
From the article:
I understand the marketing and promotion idea behind getting your name out in a big screen flick with great actors like John Cusack and Diane Lane. Yet everybody in the movie is lying on his or her profiles or other people have set them up for them.
I thought PerfectMatch was similar to eHarmony or Chemistry.com but that is not what it looks like. You would think it was just like every other dating site out there after watching this movie. You surf through a bunch of profiles looking for someone to strike your fancy not that you are matched via some type of personality compatibility matching system.
Speaking of compatible none of her matches were. If I were PerfectMatch I wouldn’t have wanted to be portrayed in this way. Diane Lane’s character Sarah is signed up by her sister, so, hopefully the sister knows something about her. Otherwise where is the compatibility? Then when Sarah meets these people they are made up of every dating cliché out there. Like the guy who wants to date much younger or the weird guy who cries and can’t understand why he never gets any second dates. These are the matches she got from PerfectMatch. The ones she didn’t go out with were even worse.
To answer their concerns:
The impression that dating sites are filled with bad apples is already pervasive in our society. The demographic that this movie is targeted at (divorced baby boomers) has already made this assumption. Some of them have chosen to join a service despite this assumption, but this movie is really aimed at the millions of people who have not joined a service because they feel ‘they are not the type of person who would do that.’ They feel that they are different, better, or above the fray. These are the people that identify with the characters of Jake and Sarah. The movie affirms that, yes, you will have some quirky dates with oddballs, but in the end PerfectMatch.com will help you find the other ‘I dont fit in here, but will try it anyways.’ perfect partner. Everyone (especially Boomers) wants to believe that they are the exception and the unique one in the crowd and that they will be the ones who find the other ‘unique exception’. PerfectMatch.com benefits because people see themselves as being just like Sarah and Jake, who obviously benefited from using PerfectMatch’s service.
This paragraph from the article provides a good reflection point for the online dating industry:
The only good thing about the movie was John Cusack’s character Jake and his assertion that two people should just put a lot of the small talk by the wayside and be open and honest with their dates. Giving each person a chance to learn about and get to know the real person. If they don’t like it then “you shake hands after dinner and never see each other again.”
Perhaps a dating site could take this to heart and craft a service around openness, honesty, and getting to know a real person . . .
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How Shall We Survive Together?
Yesterday morning on NPR there was a segment about American Apparel in relation to immigrant rights and fair labor practices. American Apparel, located in Los Angeles, is the largest garment manufacturer in the US, employing more than 2,000 workers, all legal, 75% of which are Mexican. On May 1st the factory will close as CEO Dov Charney and all of his employees will take part in the national boycott for immigrant rights. This is just one element of what makes American Apparel's continual work for immigrant rights wonderful… All employees receive on-site medical treatment, life insurance, free ESL classes, health insurance, more than a living wage (almost twice the minimum). It seems as though the employees are really valued and appreciated.
Considering that the norm for other garment factories is highly exported sweatshop labor, we begin to see that American Apparel is amazing because it is abnormal. It is amazing because it recognizes and elevates the humanity of the lowest worker, and in the end the humanity of the wearer of their t-shirt. It supports the notion that we are all in it together, inextricably bound to and by the suffering, joy, embarrassment, success, humiliation, and varied life of everyone.
Dehumanizing labor practices in the clothing industry as well as many other industries has become pervasive. It is a part of us, whether we like it or not; it all up in our culture and world. Of course, if we choose not to like it enough, it may no longer be such an element. Thus if everything is somehow part of our nature (or there is no "nature" or "natural" way to act barring custom), we must be the change we wish to see in the world.
To change gears just a bit, we should look at online dating… In order to really understand online dating in its current state, as well as what it may be, we can't think about it in terms of something that is very distant that can be ignored, or something ephemeral that will dissolve like a fad. It is a way that people meet and attempt to find love, and that is huge. It is part of our life, so we should actively strive to make it better.
There should be more dating sites that take the stance of companies like American Apparel, and by that I mean challenging the way things are done on a human scale. Companies can be successful while being ethical, transparent, straightforward, conscientious, and socially responsible. For dating sites, for example, instead of purporting to be the best at matching people with a 'behind the curtain' approach, why not try to be the best at intruducing people into a comfortable environment, and helping them feel valued and appreciated.
Lots of people in the world are treated as commodities, and that sentiment is reported often from online daters. There are certainly many things that can be done to make this change, but first comes the realilzation that it should be changed, and that it will be.
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Advertisement & Expectation
Any online dating site that purports to make dating easy is probably baloney. Now most dating sites wont say this outright, but it is clear that their actions reflect that desire, which is predatory in nature because it seeks to cash in on the vulnerability of its users. This is the same way that advertisements for pharmaceuticals approach their target audience. Take Allegra for example…
It is a decongestant, antihistamine, and apparently FUN! Not only will you be able to breathe easily, you will be able to surf on fields of wildflowers! Ahhh! Most all ads do this, showing a beautiful woman eating Doritos, a Hummer blazing through the Grand Canyon with its driver looking down at his son with a cowboy’s nod, “don’t worry, we’ll get you to soccer practice, Timmy.” These ads show nature being tamable, fatty food being not fatty, beautiful men and women being ubiquitous… this is nothing new, and most of us have grown accustomed to their presence. But people most often buy based on recommendation, use text messaging because their friends do, listen to The White Stripes because the other hipsters do, etc… and in regard to dating, people find dates most often through social social situations and by introductions by friends. So it is appalling to see the ad-work done by dating sites, some more illicit than others, that attempts to remove dating from the social sphere and place it on an unattainable pedestal. Even the ads that are sexually innocuous still portray only beautiful couples, and portray them at the peak of mythical romantic happiness, having just found their ‘soul-mate’. And that’s the only picture we get of ‘Marge and Jim, married June 2005’.
The real problem here is the setting of expectations. It is true that if you expect not much from someone, you will most likely receive ‘not much’, nor will you contribute much; and if you expect a lot from someone, you will mostly likely receive wonderful returns, and make a considerable investment yourself. But if you are an online dating site, and you are feeding people the notion that their expectations should be X (“I can find the love of my life here! This site makes it easy!”, for example), then you are being imperious, treating your clients as if they should be manipulated. Guess what, your clients should not be manipulated. If there are any expectations that you should try to encourage your users to adopt, they should be “I can be true to myself here,” and “I feel valuable here.” This not done through ads, and not through success stories, and not through press releases, but from the ground up, by a reputation rooted in genuine caring.
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A Few Slow Years
Dave Evans, who blogs about the online dating industry, made a comment on Tuesday that I find most insightful and astute:
Not much happening in the dating world this week
humph. Indeed. It seems as though this has been the situation for the past few years. If we were to take a look at how the online dating sites have evolved since internet bulletin boards, we would see that they have made practically no strides away from the back of the newspaper. This classified-ad dating, or database dating has come to be the standard , and no one has challenged it. The only innovations that have come up recently are tagging (Consumating.com), personality testing and matching algorithms designed by Oz-like pseudo-experts (eCacophony.com and a thousand others).
Tagging is baloney at a certain point. What if I were to tag the previous paragraph with a tag for every different word that was used? And then create some tags for its topic, create some tags for its abstract meaning and relevance, create some tags for the tags maybe… Pretty soon I would have more tags than words in the paragraph. How much more impossible is it to tag a real live person or yourself in a relevant way? (Wow IceOwl, I get it, you identify with hotcider, machinery, tea_earlgrey_hot… ME TOO!)
And the matching algorithms are obviously a sham. Users spend hours filling out these insane profiles and answering ridiculous questions because they believe that they will have a better chance of interfacing with the computer that will ‘match’ them with someone. When in reality, you can fill out the answers randomly as long as you keep the same demographic data, and get the same matches (see the quote in the previous post).
It happens often that people are matched together, and they go out on a date. Great. Lets say that the date goes poorly, and that’s fine in and of itself because it happens. But the problem is that both people have been matched by ‘experts’. The internal dialogue that usually arises after such a date is, “what is wrong with me? I filled out this rigorous questionnaire, presented myself well, trusted these professionals with my heart, got up the courage to make contact… and I failed, something must be wrong with me.” And that is so far from the truth. People put so much stock in these tests and questions that they often end up relinquishing their own ability to test and question the system, and thus begin to second guess themselves. They see the face of the experts, they see the happy couples, they read the success stories, they are encouraged to trust the science of it all, and finally they are tricked into thinking that the get-to-know-you process can be replaced by a series of forms chunked by a hidden equation. Well.
Not much happening in the dating world this week
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If we were to take a moment to reflect upon the living of any life, several disparate words might arise: beautiful, difficult, short, long, suffering, ugly, unique, wonderful… depending on temporal circumstances, beliefs, or how others are living and feeling. The idea that conflicting terms equally describe humanity either points to a beautiful paradox or to the idea of variance and complexity. Or to both. Life is infinitely complicated, bittersweet, and full of paradox. People are like clouds in this regard: everyone is incredibly different and everyone is incredibly perfect. A cloud cannot be imperfect; as humans, although flawed, error ridden, and often hurtful cannot be imperfect in terms of their ability to be a part of humanity. It’s difficult to explain ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ because they are subjective labels and are themselves paradoxical.
Life is complicated, in part, because it includes the vast possibilities and variations of living, none being more correct than another, except by moral views. Even a simple life in respect to a hurried life passing unawares is a variation of this complex nature, and is a choice among infinite choices. The notion that what is valuable is made valuable only because it is considered valuable to someone or many is endlessly confounding. It points to the fact that nobody can be alive for you, nor can you be alive for anybody else. When it comes down to it, to your own life, it is choice that empowers individuality, and the relinquishing of choice that ultimately dehumanizes. It is the active choice to break up with and leave your partner that makes you an individual. It is the active choice to commit to your partner that makes you an individual.
Because online dating sites make no effort to affirm the complexity of life, they continue to fail miserably. Instead of encouraging their users to practice the exploration of who another person is, they encourage their users to read endless profiles detailing this-and-thats of what another person might be. People are more complex that profiles allow. People are not “sometimes artistic based on a scale from 0 to 10”, nor can they be reduced by questions such as “Do you feel that you are Practical? Pleasure Seeking? Generous? or Strong-silent? (chemsitry.com)”. These questions are infuriating and ultimately hurtful. A newcomer to online dating might think that this industry is all about creating arranged marriages, or turning people into data to be chunked and sorted by an algorithm ‘designed by experts’, or that its users are just meat in the market.
Well heads up, online dating sites, your days as the slithering manipulators of valuable people are numbered. Let’s end with a review of eHarmony.com by John in Massachusetts:
Boooogus! I created two accounts (easy to do with a couple spare email aliases). For one I took 2-3 hours to complete (really thinking about the answers). For the other I consistently filled in all the multiple-guess boxes in a diagonal pattern, i.e. start at the upper right of a block and proceed down to the opposite corner across the block. When you get to the far side, reverse direction on the opposite diagonal, etc. I GOT THE SAME MATCHES ! "29 dimensions" my -ss!
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Life with Alacrity: Collective Choice: Rating Systems is an article examining the mechanics, implementations, and ultimately failures of rating systems online. While I appreciate the effort towards education and improvement, for me the article created more questions than it answered (which of course, is the hallmark of a good article).In the article, eBay’s rating system is held up as an example of a failure :
Unfortunately, as one of the first in this field, eBay made many mistakes which now leave their ratings system only slightly helpful. However, its failures can also provide us with insights in creating new rating systems on the Internet.
According to the article, eBay’s Feedback system is a failure for the following reasons:
Overall, eBay has a few major problems with their rating system:
- It’s non-granular, with only two options (positive/negative), or more recently three (positive/negative/neutral).
- It’s non-distinct, with no useful guidelines on what behaviors should result in each rating.
- It’s non-statistical, and thus ends up showing only a gross number of sales, not a real subjective measure.
- It’s bilateral, with buyers and sellers rating each other simultaneously, and thus people are afraid to give bad ratings lest they get them in return.
- It’s meaningless, because there are no good tools to control who bids on an auction based on Feedback numbers. (Technically it may be legitimate to ban low feedback bidders from an auction, then cancel their bids if they enter the auction, but this is neither obvious, automatic, nor simple.)
True, sort of. eBay’s Feedback system certainly has these ‘flaws’. But I think to characterize it as a failure is missing the point. The Feedback system tends to produce many more positive than negative ratings. This serves to give people a sense of security when making eBay transactions. When eBay was first struggling to get a foothold consumers were only just beginning to get a taste of conducting business transactions online. Many people still felt like giving a credit card number to a website would almost certainly lead to $1000s of dollars of illegal charges, or worse. For people to trust a website and another, anonymous person to represent their item truthfully, and actually ship it or to actually provide payment was quite a leap of faith. It still is and this is after many people have figured out that not everyone on the net is a criminal trying to game you. Having lots of positive feedback ratings was probably a large reason that eBay was able to work at all.
So am I saying that it is good to give people a false sense of security? No, but Im not sure what eBay is doing is false. For example, can you imagine what ratings might look like if eBay made them granular, distinct, non-bilateral and statistical?
ebayuser123: Item: bowl Rating 6.3(+ or – 1.5 points); cause: 2 days late shipping, marginal packaging, item had a few scratches. Buyer Comment “I was scared to death I was never going to get my item. When it arrived I was like, ‘This package is so ugly.’ Also, the item had some scratches on it, not what I wanted.”
Lets put this rating into perspective looking at the beginnings of eBay. You have people that are already really suspicous and freaked out about doing business transactions over the Internet. Also, many of these people are only used to dealing with brick and mortar merchants or with online retailers and their expectations for shipping promptness, packaging quality, item quality etc. have been formed based on those experiences. So when an eBay user views this review, what are they going to think? Something along the lines of: “Oh my God! This guy could have a rating as low as a 4.8, he sounds really sketchy, he basically sent the woman a damaged product in a horrible looking package. etc. No way.”
From using eBay, we all know that it is a used marketplace and we also know that this behavior isnt really all that horrible. We expect a used product to possibly have a couple of scratches (depending on the description) and the packaging is probably going to be a little homebrew. Two days late? Maybe that wasnt even the fault of the seller. Of course you can say my sample review doesnt resemble the ideal review, maybe you could have checkbox categories instead of freeform descriptions, etc.
My point is, by making a binary rating system that scews towards rating positively, eBay’s Feedback system acted as a sort of Valium for an over anxious user base. Most people are good and have good intentions. When you ‘open the floodgates’ and allow people to pick apart the eBay experience, people will tend to heavily criticize and forget the true value of 1) being able to sell their stuff online and 2) being able to bid on used stuff for cheap.
Now that eBay is established, perhaps they can begin to think about making some changes, but I believe that back in the day the Feedback system could have generated a super-paranoid user base, which is to say, no user base at all. Despite eBay’s ‘failed’ rating system, eBay is a success; I suppose the question is “To what degree does eBay owe its success to its rating system?”
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