I can see where you're coming from, but I think in practice this is not a great idea. Even if it's not intentional, it's not going to be great publicity when you have an app that shows different women with different price tags.
I imagine it's not great either if, on current dating apps, the number of messages women receive becomes public information. The problem here is less that different women cost different prices to message. The problem is that it's visible. If you can overcome this there might be some merit to the idea. This is just me being open-minded though. It still feels like an icky idea.
There are probably ways you could make it manageable and less morally repugnant.
1) Let people set their own price. Then it's not the platform valuing you, it's how much you value your own time.
2) Provide "auto-pricing" as an optional feature. Use an imaginary unit - call it "stamps" and provide ways to earn "stamps" on the platform besides just buying them.
"How many stamps should it cost for somebody to send you a letter? Or you can use one of our auto-managers - do you want to receive lots of letters or only a few?"
You could still have some kind of invisible credit score under the hood even for users that don't use the auto-pricer - people with good credit get plentiful free stamps.
Then you'd have to get into a whole Google-style graph-based-ranking but for people, which I assume sites like Twitter are already doing under the hood.
Of course, the problem here is that you'd have a plethora of alts to farm free stamps, which would clutter the search list...
I like the idea (not that I'm in the dating market) but I think any purchase option is going to end up matching wealthy men with attractive women.
Instead, how about a different approach: You get say 10 stamps/day. There is no way to purchase them. Any message you receive can be replied to once with no cost. Also, the cost to send to someone is adjusted by the cost to send to you. (Another poster suggested ELO ratings, which makes sense.)
You have a choice between occasionally contacting the hot ones or fairly routinely contacting those at your level or below. It will make people much more realistic in who they choose to contact, taking long shots means not having any shot at the ones you might actually get.
The app should be tied to your identity (although I wouldn't require real name use in the prospect-facing side) so you can't just create a bunch of accounts to get extra stamps.
And also lots of guys would freak out and get very upset if they perceived someone's price is "too high," which would make the experience more hostile to women.
I've got a better idea. Have a swiping system, but also have a simple indicator to see how often people respond to messages after first swipe. There could also be an indicator for how long those conversations typically last.
Or you could just make it extremely simple: just have something saying "this person is X% likely to respond after a match."
Or an opaque "conversation score" which is hard to game, but indicates whether or not they're actually talking to their matches. You could categorize them as "great conversationalists!" and then allow people to filter out those who aren't.
Of course, that could be gamed too but it would be better than just matching over and over with people who have no interest in actually talking to you.
Pandering to guys who would "freak out and get very upset" and "make the experience more hostile to women" sounds crazy.
Better I would have thought to kick such guys off the platform, raising the level for women, which would in turn make it more appealing for more evolved males.
Women tiptoe around male anger about being rejected 24/7, especially on online dating. Lots of "evolved" males still become scary when turned down and don't handle rejection well. There is no way to filter them out because they all walk among us, they're our friends and brothers, and sometimes us.
Every woman who's gone on online dating can give you a list of stories of creepy, scary and/or off-putting experiences.
My point here isn't to start an online debate about gender equality, but to say: one of the main things that would help bring users to an online dating app is making it safer for women. If the women come, the men will follow.
This is a great idea for users, but the platforms would never go for it because it would decrease engagement. People would be dissuaded from sending messages to people who are rated as very unlikely to respond (and rightfully so), which would lead to less time on the platform.
I haven't been playing close attention but I did notice they seemed to have become more click-baitey over time. My brain has subconsciously moved them into the same category as "Huffington Post", fairly or not.
You could probably also scale the price based on other variables as well. Like scaling on the sending side as well as the receiving side, or based on the likelihood the other side responds or something. I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.
Yeah, this could help a lot. Scaling based on the past response rate of the sender and how many messages the sender has sent recently would make the pricing more relative, and thus prevent a basic enumeration of "prices of people".
It would also go a long way to not have these prices be listed on a catalog page, but only when clicked into an individual person, so it's less of a feeling of comparison shopping.
The psychology of these UI design things matters a lot.
> I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.
On the other side it must be weird to think that the people reaching to you have gone through an auctioning system and were the ones willing to pay the most.
It would be all the weirder for first contact messages for instance.
Yes, I think this is by far the biggest problem here. I’m sure there are some women who would enjoy knowing that only those willing to pay the most, would be able to court them. But I would wager that most women would feel differently. Presumably a dating service finds potential mates who are good personality match, not just who are more willing or able to pay.
The person would not know how much the sender "paid" for the "postage" for that message. From ANYONE's point of view, they are not receiving more than N messages per day, as N+1 would become exponentially, prohibitively more expensive.
This is not an info that you can hide from users for very long.
You will have people who start with a profile in both sides to see how it works. It’s done for fun on free platforms, it will done for research on any paying platform.
If they don’t do it personally they’ll ask friends that will spill the beans.
People will rant online on how much they paid for a single text sent.
It’s just endless, the service will need to be transparent and forthcoming about the system or it becomes a PR nightmare.
Those would be issues as well as enabling the higher bidder versus the best prospect (in her mind). I suppose it could be weighted based on both levels of desirability. I think a similar system without the social and implementation complexity would be to sell tiers of “super likes.” Like daily super likes, weekly (get only one per week, monthly, yearly. Essentially, you only get one yearly like a year, so using it conveys extraordinary interest on paper versus a daily like.
How about remove money and visible numbers and instead make people watch an ad, then have a lootbox style reveal of whether their message is sent. The retry rate is limited by ad playtime. The odds are set as described above. Still icky.
> The problem is that it's visible.
I don't want to be that guy, but it's usually already visible, if the service has photos and allows at least basic descriptions.
Humans are incredibly good at putting a price tag to potential mates. It takes milliseconds to form a base appraisal.
It depends on what are the consequences for failure. In war, lack of preparation means death of your men at minimum, and the collapse of your nation at worst. In training, failure makes you stronger.
It's a good argument for managers to create a working environment where employees are not afraid to fail. I absolutely agree that starting early is the best and fastest way to learn. Too many people avoid it because of the negative consequences for making mistakes.
> In war, lack of preparation means death of your men at minimum, and the collapse of your nation at worst.
This is the fallacy that keeps people locked in over preparing. The way past it is to identify less risky goals that are still aligned with that particular objective. So in war your objective is to learn the enemy's weaknesses. So you could try trading with them, to survey their defenses. Imagine the Vikings at Lindisfarne, they are not going to go in blind. They first build a trading relationship, selling fish, and as friends they can see how strong the Abbey is, how many monasterial guards there are, or when the collection trays are the most full etc. Very little risk right? Similarly with sales, where your risk is your reputation. Say, you can't afford to jeopardize it with your one big connection because you spent a decade building the relationship. Well then you go in asking for advice on your idea, something low risk, instead of trying to make a yes-no sale.
(Over) Preparing in the context of war or business is where you keep working without engaging the enemy or the customer. The classic problem in startups, which i’ve been through myself, is where you keep working on making your product without developing your market. If you are doing sales interviews in a startup without a product yet, then you are engaging with the customer, and by coordinating with your product team, you will reduce the problem of over building the product. You need to partition the problem space (the goal space, the overall objective space) in terms of the separate essential pieces that need to be accomplished, once you have this partition of endeavors, then you start making progress in each channel. Over-Preparing is not defined (IMO) as a problem of inadequate rate of progress, rather it is that you can never succeed with your activities because you are not making any progress in a critical channel, and this weirdly magnifies the perceived difficulty of the missing piece, leading to more and more effort in the other channels. A bit like France overbuilding their defenses with the Maginot line when instead aggressive military action in some theater of war before WWII would have exposed the extreme inadequacy of their tank and soldier communication methods.
I feel like this would be a lot easier to explain by phone. My email is riazrizvi at gmail, if you want to set that up. I’m on Pacific Standard. Open invite to anyone.
But he's complaining about them only listening to top 40s music. And nothing else he's said implies that only generic mass consumption pop culture matters. Naming a band doesn't imply naming mainstream band, it just implies name A band, ANY band, and have a bit of preference or taste. Same for movies. Nothing jammygit has said implies that they need to like the same things he does. He is, however, implying that they don't like ANYTHING.
I don't deny chess is the game with the higher status, but I don't think that's what the term alpha was trying to get at. Alpha here is used in a social context, ie the leader of a pack. Some traits of an alpha, as opposed to a beta, include being aggressive, intimidating, capable of convincing others to join your agenda, and willing to lie for your benefit. It's hard to display alpha traits in a one on one game like chess.
I’m with you up until you associate alpha with being intimidating and willing to lie. Alpha implies leadership 100%. It is possible to be a strong and convincing leader without these negative traits. In practice, most leaders are in fact more ruthless as you portray. But look at the #metoo movement for one data point of how the balance of power is shifting.
All of that notwithstanding, it is very possible and in fact extremely common for alpha traits to be displayed in chess, both the Machiavellian style and the more “woke” for lack of a better term. In a one on one game, this is communicated in the non-game communication ie body language. In a club or team setting all of the usual social dominance tactics apply.
Apologies if I implied intimidation and lying are good traits. However, I do maintain that they are alpha traits. Lying, maybe not sure much, but intimidating, definitely. Being alpha isn't necessarily a good thing. Like all labels, and especially for a label as complicated as "alpha", there are good and bad parts to it.
Honestly I dislike using the term alpha, because it's so inflammatory. Its hard to talk about what alpha means without bringing up beta, and the moment you use those two words then it sounds like redpill-speak. However, there are certain kinds of people who are confrontational and very much extroverted, the kinds who don't back away when challenged. I see alpha as a way to describe these traits as they are, with no moral conclusions attached.
For sure Chess players can display alpha traits, but it's hard to see how Chess players are MORE alpha than Diplomacy players. An entire game of Chess can finish without a single word exchanged, and it's rare and unprofessional for violence to show up in Chess, though it does show up time to time. In diplomacy, violence, albeit only verbal, is the norm. A nonconfrontational person will never survive in diplomacy, but they can do well in Chess.
So I think the term "alpha" is leading to a lot of confusion here. It could mean "person in charge who maintains control through deception and fear, much like a psychopath", or it could mean "leader". True leadership involves dealing with conflicts and confrontations, but doing it with integrity and respect at all times. That's how good leaders inspire others to follow them. Only charlatans need to rely on brute force methods like intimidation.
For that reason, I encourage you to stop conflating "alpha" with antisocial character traits. Words matter. The very idea that this is acceptable behavior for leaders, that sometimes violence is the answer, perpetuates the social norms that allow bullies to stay in power.
Also, your conception of diplomacy needs work. Again, anybody who is actually any good at diplomacy understands how it is possible to convey a firm position with minimal violence. Diplomacy is more of a dance. You don't want to be the kind of lead dancer who's violently swinging your partner around the room.
If you really believe that confrontation can't be resolved without violence, I recommend a meditation practice known as "metta" [compassion]. Reading the Art of War may also provide inspiration and guidance on this front.
That will never meaningfully happen, because it is contrary to third party doctrine and would make it impossible to do business with people.
If you tell me that you like bananas, and I bring you bananas, I'm not being unethical. The problem with online services is that you're baring your soul to the eye of sauron without realizing what it means. The only way to win is not to play.
You may want to look into the EU GDPR, which requires all companies to strictly manage all personal information, or face a penalty of up to 5% of worldwide turnover.
This is set to activate in a year, and it is a huge problem for software used in the EU because almost nobody is ready for it.
I think we're arguing about semantics here. I can see a valid reason for giving away my information if I know it will be used responsibly. I would like to let Google have my information if it helps turns my phone into a better assistant. I would like to extend segments of this information (namely location) to Uber and Lyft so that I can get rides easier. I would NOT like Google to sell my information to third parties that I have not agreed to, and this extends to Uber and Lyft as well. I want to choose which services get to use my data, and I want there to be consequences if those services leak my data.
Now you may say that you can't trust corporations with this responsibility, but what if there WAS something we could do to enforce that responsibility? How much control I have over my information should be left up to me, and it would be great if an entity I trust could enforce that. As of this moment, we don't have that option. However, it doesn't mean that such a future is impossible. If we argue about it enough, maybe the technology and the courts can find a way to make it happen.
I'm just starting out in my career, but what do they mean by "good enough to work for us"? Is there a way to measure this metric? And how do I know if I'm there?
My personal understanding (as a web developer) had always been, someone who is "good enough" is someone who can build a system from the ground up, with the capability to handle requests at high capacity and manage performance. BUT, this would just be an advanced CRUD app and I fail to see how that would reach a salary of $500,000 a year.
It looks like ShellyPalmer has a special focus on machine learning and data science. Perhaps their requirements are beyond what I am even aware of.
> someone who is "good enough" is someone who can build a system from the ground up, with the capability to handle requests at high capacity and manage performance
Being a good developer (usually) doesn't mean writing especially performant code, at least not beyond what's noticeable in terms of the end user's experience. It means creating products with:
- intuitive database schemas
- clean code architecture
- good overall readability
- simplicity and optionality
Being a developer isn't much different than being any other type of writer. The best way to figure out if someone is likely to be a good developer is to ask yourself whether they'd likely be successful as a contributor to the New Yorker.
I agree with all of this, these are the most important skills for a developer, but none of these things are tested for in the typical programming interview.
If you want to min/max your stats, all that matters is mastering the 'Cracking the Coding Interview' style. So many companies cargo culting Google interview style such that it's now pretty dominant, at least in NYC.
On one hand you'd think this would be self correcting, more nimble companies would find more effective ways of interviewing. On the other hand, software development is one of the most fad driven industries out there.
My takeaway from the article is that they are looking for someone who is famous, at least as far as fame among programmers goes. I gather they are not so much concerned with your ability to write good code or solve particular problems, but your ability to market their products/services to your fan base. The article emphasizes having a large following on GitHub, and wants to see your GitHub profile specifically (i.e. to measure your popularity).
Same reason famous actors, athletes, etc. are paid more than others doing the same job: Their marketing ability brings more customers to the theatre, stadium, etc. That brings added value and the leverage from that brings added compensation.
You actually just broke down quite a few skill sets that can be qualified by experience or interviews.
* Build a system from the ground up => Understands how to build custom solutions with or without frameworks and pre-established libraries in order to reach the optimal business solution for the company/client which may include time and resource constraints
* Capability to handle requests at high capacity and performance => Understanding of development operations including but not limited to linux, networking, automation, cloud solutions, databases
Now the extent to which a developer has trained those skills would greatly effect earning potential however having them at a basic level would certainly qualify one for most dev jobs.
Machine learning and data science are particularly valuable because their is simply so much unexplored territory and so few candidates. $500k could easily be the salary of some of the primo researchers working for Uber, Google, Etc.
I imagine it's not great either if, on current dating apps, the number of messages women receive becomes public information. The problem here is less that different women cost different prices to message. The problem is that it's visible. If you can overcome this there might be some merit to the idea. This is just me being open-minded though. It still feels like an icky idea.