"Informative from a UX design perspective and cripplingly blackpilling from a human perspective"

From Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don't Succeed by Zvi Mowshowitz.  Cultivating of an old codger, the dating app of my youth was a face-to-face invitation, or, if necessary, by phone.  I cannot speak to the experience of dating apps today but given the universality of complaints, they don't seem to be much of an improvement.  

Mowshowitz has a long piece, built on data and it is interesting throughout.  I did like this observation because it goes back to one Gerald Weinberg's (author of General Systems Thinking) most famous sayings:

No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

Mowshowitz notes:

JP interviewed 27 NYC women about their dating ap usage, which he called ‘informative from a UX design perspective and cripplingly blackpilling from a human perspective.’

Basic conclusion was there was no good options. Attempts to foster artificial community or otherwise use social graphs did not work. The women were universally unwilling to invest up-front time on optimization, preferring scrolling and expecting things to fall into place for them, so even though they expressed preference (like everyone else) for ~2012 OkCupid, they wouldn’t have used it if it was offered. Then on the actual dates and in the interactions, he reports the women didn’t express or go for what they actually wanted.

The constraint ‘people who want an exceptionally unusually strong match among many choices in a lemon market are unwilling to invest any upfront time’ does not have any clear solutions. I am hoping that the solution is that AI will be able to infer those preferences within a few years, perhaps?

If Weinberg is correct, and he almost certainly is, then AI won't solve this problem.  Ot, at least, not until AI is able to help people reconcile that which they think they want and that which they actually want and then reconcile that with what they actually need.