Rating Systems and Dating Systems
Zvi Mowshowitz on the design challenges
The central feature is that you list a guy with a first name, location and picture - which given AI is pretty much enough for anyone these days to figure out who it is even if they don’t recognize them - and ask ‘are we dating the same guy?’ and about past experiences, divided into green and red flag posts. You can also set up alerts on guys in case there is any new tea.
He is describing an app that women can use to try to filter the men they might date. He talks about the many ways that it could go wrong.
The app is very obviously ripe for abuse, all but made for attempts to sabotage or hurt people, using false or true information.
Because male-female relationships are so tense to begin with, this seems like a big issue. But it is actually present with Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, and other rating systems. If you and I own competing restaurants, then I have an incentive to post a review of your restaurant that says I saw cockroaches in my salad there. My guess is that it is easy for me to avoid punishment for doing that.
Reputation systems increase the importance of reputation. In theory, that is a great thing. A reputation system can act like crowd-sourced regulation. But the folks being rated will try to game the system to get unearned high ratings. And their rivals or enemies will try to game the system to give them unearned low ratings. So there is a higher-level problem of making the system resistant to gaming.
Think of Google Search. The idea of the original PageRank system was to crowdsource the reputations of web sites. But soon you had Search Engine Optimization, then Google needed ways to fight that, and then the SEO people were focused on ways to fight back, and so on. I don’t think that the game converges on a solution that gives you socially desired outcomes at low cost.
But that is how it goes in the world of human interdependence. As Thomas Sowell famously said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”
I'd just note that this particular reputation problem is in many respects the same top current social problem which is that of figuring out how to make institutions and expert authorities verifiably trustworthy after recent widespread abuse and resulting collapse in trust.
My assumption is it is difficult to fake hundreds of reviews. So if I see a restaurant with a 4.5 rating and 500 reviews than I have some confidence the rating is informative. When I see a restaurant with a 5.0 rating and 2 reviews or a restaurant with a 2.0 rating and 3 reviews my confidence in the rating is low, although I'm probably skipping the 2.0 restaurant on the basis that if friends of the owners can't bother to give a 5.0 review than it must be a bad restaurant!
As for applying reviews to relationships, I'm not sure I would have any confidence in any ratings. First, if a person had hundreds of ratings what am I to make of that? How would a person garner hundreds of reviews in a dating app? And if the person has only a couple of ratings that is not informative either.
I'm not in the dating arena and have not been for decades. So being old school I find the idea of leaning on relationship apps to meet people to be insane. I can see merit in learning about people via Facebook but I just think the more reliable way to meet people is via real social contact. A good friend of mine met his wife in the line at the airport. When it comes to meeting people, I favor random chance far above manipulated online profiles.