- Dating apps are broken, and to prove it,
I made a dating simulation for soup.
- Sabrina, why have you done this?
- Now let me explain.
Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.
Hey there, I'm pretty sure you know this,
but dating apps are massive.
In the U.S. alone, online dating is the most popular method
for adults to meet, and that isn't going away anytime soon.
The industry is currently estimated
to be worth $4.4 billion, and it's still growing,
but with all those users and all that money floating around,
why do they suck?
Have you ever heard someone talk about dating apps
and say, "Yeah, I love dating apps.
There isn't any harassment or unsolicited Donkey Kongs.
I'm just constantly connecting
with people I enjoy being around
and having engaging conversations."
No, you don't, because that doesn't happen.
In this video, we are going to figure out why that happens
and hopefully how to fix it.
To the books.
You don't need to use that translation.
That was very weird.
Okay.
I started off with the usual Google search.
It sent me down a rabbit hole
of dating apps, horror stories, and statistics.
I even had the chance to talk with some college students
who are making their own dating app
because they also found that the current apps kinda suck.
- I think we were kind of looking at like
how people of our own age, like college students,
are actually using these dating apps.
They're pretty exhausting.
I think this like swipe left or right,
like hot or not model, is pretty overdone.
Monet is a new dating style app,
so dating/friend making
where you send a drawing to start the conversation.
But I think that what we like about drawing
is that you just can't not be yourself.
That's really what works and what we're encouraging.
- Shout out to Monet Dating
for taking the time to chat with me.
The things they said were a lot more meaningful
compared to a lot of the articles I read
that just made machine learning sound like magic.
Computer go boop, boop, boop, found your soul mate.
But overall, I got what I needed.
In order to understand why so many dating apps suck,
you first need to understand how dating algorithms work.
The most popular dating apps use machine learning
to find potential matches,
and when there's machine learning, there's data.
The most obvious is whatever information you volunteer,
like your name, gender, age, and location,
but they also have access to permissions you provide,
like social media sharing your favorite songs or interests.
Finally, they have whatever you do on the app,
your use of the service.
Companies can do multiple things with that data,
which, side note, it's always worth remembering
that dating apps are for profit companies.
They are also fallible to security concerns.
Your data is valuable
and you should always be cautious about what you share.
That being said, their primary use of data
is to inform their service, making matches.
So how do they do that?
At an individual level, they learn your preferences
by combining your filter settings
and your use of the service,
suggesting people who fit your stated preferences
and are similar to people you've matched with in the past.
So if you're attracted to people with tattoos,
there's a pretty strong likelihood
you'll see more people with them in the future.
But you know what they say,
there are plenty of fish in the sea.
Apps also need to decide who you get shown to
and where you sit in the deck of suggestions.
So they consider other users like you:
similar history, preferences, data.
The apps look at their matches
because if someone likes them they might like you as well.
This process of grouping similar users,
combining their preferences, and making predictions
is called collaborative filtering,
but that just sorts you into a group of people
you may be shown to.
What gets you to the top of the list?
Well, this is where dating apps
hold a surprising connection with chess.
The Elo rating system was originally designed
to measure the relative skills of players in a zero-sum game
like chess or dating.
In a 2016 article, Tinder revealed that they use
a variation of the ELO system to assign each user
with a desirability rating.
Instead of a chess game, it's you swiping on a stranger.
If they match with you, you win.
And just like in chess, if you win
against somebody who is known to be skilled,
if you match with somebody highly desirable,
your own ranking increases.
Now the system isn't perfect in a lot of ways.
There's imperfect data, and not to mention
anytime humanity and machine learning mix,
it's just asking to perpetuate, if not amplify,
harmful biases, usually about race.
That aside, it is very good at one thing:
maximizing your number of potential matches.
How any given app defines a potential match differs,
but that is usually their goal.
However, if your goal is to find the one
or two, or more, whatever floats your boat,
then we've got an issue because that is a mini max problem.
In other words, your goal is to cull that list
of potential matches down to people
you have an actual chance with.
But as apps become more popular,
there are more people using the app.
Naturally, this means more potential matches
which can make your job a whole lot harder
due to choice overload.
This is defined as a cognitive impairment
in which people have a difficult time
making a decision when faced with many options.
And mind you, it's not that options themselves
are a bad thing.
It's just that you could have too much of a good thing.
You see way back in 2005,
the psychologist Barry Schwartz
put out this banger of a TED Talk.
Let me just zoom in for a second
'cause y'all need to see his face.
Look at this icon.
Look at this, do you see this?
I could never.
Anyway, it is astoundingly relevant 16 years later.
More potential matches increases
the likelihood of decision paralysis.
That means getting overwhelmed at the idea
of talking to a bunch of people
and going on a million first dates
so you burnout and give up.
Luckily the way I see it, there are two potential ways
to counteract choice overload.
Simplify making comparisons between the choices
or reducing the number of choices altogether.
Which one should you try?
Well, there are two options and I have two friends,
so naturally it's time to do experiments on them.
Okay, so basically I need to simulate a scenario
where Melissa and Taha can experience choice overload
followed by one of the potential solutions.
However, this channel isn't about our dating lives.
Drawing a strong boundary between public and private
is incredibly important.
(imitating pistols firing)
So instead we're gonna use a pretty natural metaphor
for potential romantic interest.
Soup.
Yep.
Why?
It's because when I asked Melissa how we can find the one
without using human beings, she said.
- (coughing) I love soup.
What if we found my favorite one?
- And to that idea, Taha said.
- Soup is a fun word.
- My friends are weirder than I am.
Anyway, I'm gonna make a dating sim.
(laughing)
This video is taking very weird turns very quickly.
Basically while I was figuring out
how to simulate a dating scenario,
I played the only dating sim that I know of:
"Hatoful Boyfriend".
Otherwise known as the pigeon dating game.
Are they just birds or are they all pigeons?
I've just come to realize
that I don't know what a pigeon is.
There's no ending point.
Now there's so many choices.
Maybe I should have paid attention.
It went pretty poorly,
mainly because I got really overwhelmed at the beginning.
Was it because I'm illiterate
or because of choice overload?
(girl speaks in foreign language)
So I'm gonna use a dating sim
to simulate choice overload with Melissa and Taha.
I'm gonna throw a bunch of soups at them digitally.
To get the soups, I asked you guys on Twitter
what your favorite soup is
and a shocking amount of you replied.
It got over 100 responses.
Some of y'all listed more than one soup in your response.
Didn't realize we were so passionate about soup.
Am I a boomer?
Anyway, I grabbed the 7 most popular soups approximately,
but now how are we going to solve
the choice overload problem?
Well, I'm going to customize the ending of the game.
Melissa is going to get
the simplified comparisons treatment,
so she will have to make choices
that will lead to one specific soup.
Taha will get the choice reduction treatment.
I'll need to make some sort of game mechanic
that reduces the number of soup options to like 3,
which is less than 7.
Let's go.
I spent the next two full days writing, designing,
and coding up this terrible, terrible game.
I'm somehow ahead of where I expected to be at this point.
But also, I don't even know if it's good anymore.
I blinked and it was 1:30 am.
I'm losing my marbles.
I've drawn all the characters
and now I'm putting them onto my computer
and seeing them here.
It just makes it feel so much more real, gang.
Look at this!
It's done.
(giggling)
This is the hardest I've ever worked for a video,
and that includes the time that I read
a whole bunch of penal codes.
Anyway, may I present to you
"I'm At The Soup In Your Heart", a dating sim.
Anyway, I'm gonna send this over to Melissa and Taha now,
and I hope they stay friends with me.
- It's so cute.
- It's very "Ratatouille" so far.
Eh, what are you doing here?
- Cereal? Who gave that suggestion?
- Feels like misogyny, but it isn't.
- What's it like not being the thickest soup on the shelf?
This is not funny at all.
I'm not sure why I'm laughing.
- I am, how you say, French.
- Why is that clam chowder?
- I'm pretty sure I'm dead.
- I thought I wasn't dying.
- If this was the last moment of my dying brain,
I think I deserve to die.
- Cool, so I got chicken soup.
Don't know what I'm supposed to do with that information.
- So I picked tomato,
but I didn't feel like I made any choices.
Okay, so now we're gonna go talk to Sabrina and the crew
and see what happens.
- Hello, gang.
- Why?
- What soup did you guys get?
- I got chicken noodle.
I don't know how though.
The first question was do you like meat in your soup?
And I was just like, I mean, I do, I guess sometimes,
but I hit no for that answer.
So how did I end up with chicken noodle soup?
- That might just be me making a mistake.
- Your questions were about the soup?
- Yeah.
- So here's the thing,
you guys got different versions of the game,
and I will say that Taha got the weirder one.
- The PA rang and was like
it's time for The Hunger Games,
and it was like, well, 4 of your classmates
just passed away.
There are only 3 left. Choose between these 3 soups.
I picked tomato soup.
The only one I cared about was tomato
because it's the only soup I have had.
- Wait.
- Because it's the only soup I have had.
- Was this a waste of time?
- Why couldn't we have just made a normal video?
So.
- And cut.
That was a failure.
Maybe it was sleep exhaustion that made me think
that this experiment designed at 2:00 AM
with sample size 2 and generalized ability 0 would work,
but for a second there, I really thought it would.
However, believe it or not, we can take a few lessons
away from this dumpster fire of a situation.
One, you might be like Taha and inexplicably
have only ever tried one soup in your life,
but that's okay because you like that soup.
If you know, you know, and you shouldn't subject yourself
to a bunch of unnecessary options for no reason.
- What was the reason?
- Two, you might be like Melissa
and be extremely dissatisfied with my soup-based questions.
You can see those soup-based questions
if you subscribe to our newsletter
'cause I'm gonna make this game an exclusive.
Anyway, her dissatisfaction was probably
because romance and soup are deeply personal things.
You can define your own framework
based off things that you care about,
and so just like organizational systems
you need to dedicate some time
to understand what you care about
and define a framework that works for you.
Finally, number three.
If you want some dating advice
that is not based on my soup struggle,
here's what Helen Fisher,
the chief scientific advisor for match.com, had to say.
- The brain is not well-built to choose
between hundreds if not thousands of alternatives,
so what I would recommend is that you stop.
If you're a dating person, after you've met nine people,
the brain doesn't deal with more than about nine,
stop and get to know one person more.
So if your dating app experience sucks,
maybe just slow down for a second.
Put more effort into getting to know people
rather than just swiping back and forth forever.
And if it's still sucks after that,
well, it's because unfortunately
dating itself kind of sucks,
but at least we'll always have soup.
I hope you liked that video.
If you did, you might enjoy this playlist
that can help you understand technology
using other silly experiments,
like NLP inventing pasta
or facial recognition on K-pop stars.
But stick around for a second,
because we are thanking Squarespace
for sponsoring this video.
I'm also putting a surprise at the very end.
Anyway, if you didn't know,
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build
a beautiful online presence and run your business.
It's how Melissa, Taha and I are running ours.
How many times do I need to say it?
The Answer In Progress website was built on Squarespace
long before they sponsored us
because I do not have the time to learn how to code
such a beautiful mobile optimized website.
I genuinely don't even know how to do that.
Their templates are gorgeous and super simple to set up,
but if you ever get stuck, there's a ton of guides online,
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So whether you run a blog, an e-commerce storefront,
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Head on over to squarespace.com for your free trial,
and when you're ready to launch
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But either way,
wait, I offered you a surprise.
If dating apps and algorithms have got you down,
you can always rely on a good old fashioned pickup line.
May I recommend my personal favorite,
"Girl, are your parents beavers, 'cause dam."
And have a lovely day.
(casual music)