ByPovilas S
Three likes "tinder"
3 years ago
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Idea
Povilas S Oct 13, 2022
A feature that lets you boost your dating app's profile based on suggestions from users of the opposite (or same) sex
Image credit: https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/dating-app-swipe_8272652.htm
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A feature for dating apps that provides the opportunity for any user to get their profile improved by making other users of the opposite (or/and same for homosexual and bisexual people) sex vote and give suggestions on how to do it.
Why?
- It's arguably the best approach for improving your profile and getting more matches, especially if plenty of users would review it since those users are the ones who deal with similar profiles on the app and know what they prefer. It's like getting feedback from your "customers".
- Make people enjoy dating apps more by giving them more matches and boosting their self-esteem.
- Increase the quality of the platform and attract more (or more serious) users.
- Earn income by charging a fee for the reviewing process.
- Give reviewers temporary access to the premium version of the app as a reward - this way they get to try it and might decide to buy it.
How it works:
The user who wants to improve their profile this way pays a one-time fee for the app, and those who review get benefits, for example - the availability to some of the features of the app's premium version for some time (they might have to review a certain number of profiles to get the reward).
The app would offer users to review some profiles from time to time similarly as it now suggests upgrading to a paid subscription, just the subscription would be a reward and it would be temporary unless you reviewed a lot of profiles, then you'd get a permanent free upgrade.
Reviewing process: the app would first display a number of different, common aspects of how can one improve his/her profile, for example: "add more pictures", "profile too empty, add something more than just pics", "mistakes in your text", "write in English if you can", "use different pictures", etc. The reviewer would check the profile and select those he/she thinks would be useful for that person.
Some of those options would have a drop-down menu for you to specify and include additional aspects, for example: "use different pictures" would allow you to further choose from the following: "better quality pictures", "pictures where your face is more clearly visible", "don't use smartphone selfies", etc. You could also type in your own suggestions.
The typed-in suggestions would be an important part, so the reviews would have to then undergo a moderation phase from staff working for the app. This is, first of all, for the user not to receive inappropriate or insulting remarks and second, to be able to take account of similar remarks and give a percentage of the reviewers suggesting that. An alternative would be to use an AI-powered NLP system to read, group, and estimate the typed-in suggestions. the staff or a GTP-3-like algorithm would then converge similar suggestions into one best output that the user would see in his profile review summary.
After the reviewing period, the user gets a summary of the most important suggestions and the percentage of reviewers making them along with the total number of reviewers. The more users will review the profile the more effective this will be that's why the platform should use good incentives to encourage people to participate.
Since people likely wouldn't care (or wouldn't care as much) about feedback from users they don't want to match, the algorithm could select only those users as reviewers whose profiles approximate those you often swipe right on.
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Creative contributions
Emphasis on originality
I found a publication that deals with Tinder profiles and the effect of their originality on user perception . What they concluded is that "text originality positively affects perceptions of intelligence and sense of humour, which improve impressions of attractiveness and boost dating intention...profile texts which were stylistically original (e.g., include metaphors) and contained more and concrete self-disclosure statements were considered more original."
Since I questioned the effectiveness of your idea in boosting the company's business and user's number of matches, this kind of answered my question. Yes, I think your idea should definitely work, but it's important to give constructive feedback and suggest to people that they need to fill up their profile with more information, at the same time, empower their way of expressing themselves through original sentences, expressions, ways of writing, etc.
Just a side note, dating apps could be easily turned into social and soft skills practising/enhancement tools.
[1]van der Zanden T, Schouten AP, Mos MBJ, Krahmer EJ (2022) Originality in online dating profile texts: How does perceived originality affect impression formation and what makes a text original? PLoS ONE 17(10): e0274860. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274860
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Similar system can be used for other (not dating) platforms where you "sell" yourself
A similar method can be used to improve profiles on other platforms where people try to represent themselves in the best possible way to gain desired results.
First thing that comes to mind is job search platforms such as Linkedin. Just, in this case, it might be a bit complicated when it comes to incentivizing the process. To get good results here the reviewers would have to be potential employers or people working in similar fields and having a higher rank/followers database than you - those are the ones who can help you improve your profile. But those people are likely not to have time/interest for reviewing profiles and small incentives are unlikely to work for them.
On second thought, people from your contacts list (given they know you to a certain extent) who have higher success/popularity might be interested to help you for additional rewards from the platform.
Can you think of more ways how to make this work in a job-market field? Also, what other platforms (apart from work, education, and dating apps) could make use of a proposed feature?
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
Another way of incentivizing in freelance job markets that process payments too, so not LinkedIn, is to give the reviewer a percentage of earnings the person who got reviewed gets.
So if you help improve a graphic designer's profile on a freelancing site like Fiverr or Upwork, and they get a job in a span of a week, 5% of their earnings go to the person that helped them present themselves well.
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Povilas S2 years ago
Miloš Stanković I like it, but with one condition - it shouldn't be a permanent share of income, so just from a few next jobs or maybe better - a percentage from the increase of that freelancer's income over time.
A better profile should help them earn more, the system would compare their future earnings with their average past earnings (before the upgrade of the profile) and deduct a percentage from the increase which would be paid for the "mentor" or mentors for some time.
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
It could be incentivized by LinkedIn awarding the reviewer a "mentor" badge, or "team player" or something like that. Make it seem as a clear positive for the person giving their time to improve others. So that their potential future employers can see their own value in people management.
But a discount on LinkedIn premium could be an extra incentive too.
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Allow providing feedback even after meeting the person
Feedback on the online profile is one part of the process. The more important part is to make an impression when they meet. Feedback could be given on how the person presented themselves, communication, personality, etc. Using the feedback, the users could not only improve their online profile but also their actual one.
What other aspects of a person could be used to provide feedback? In what way could they be presented on the app? Multiple-choice answers are probably the best since they consume the least amount of time while providing feedback. For example, while rating the conversation skills, the choices could be excellent/ could not complain/ could be improved/ dull/ had a lot of awkward pauses.
Disadvantage: The feedback would not be anonymous since the user will know who the reviewer is based on the time of the feedback and the examples provided. To overcome this, the feedback could be kept anonymous and incorporated into the feedback on the online profile.
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Povilas S2 years ago
In my idea, those who review the profile would be the people you never matched with (at least didn't yet match with), the algorithm would select only such people as reviewers. That way the reviews would be truly anonymous.
The problem with getting reviews from people with whom you already interacted is that they will rate you as a person, not only your profile. This is what you propose with the contribution, but that is a big problem. Why? Because, people don't want to be judged for who they are and they would likely have something to say back, like "oh you didn't like the way I talked with you, well you weren't that great either..", etc. It could be a never-ending thing that doesn't lead to any improvement.
Even if they didn't know exactly who the reviewer was, they might suspect, they would know that it's someone they already interacted with and that's already bad enough. Most likely the user wouldn't want to receive reviews from people he/she already interacted with, if they did, they could ask themselves directly.
That's why I think reviewing only the profile is the best approach because it's rather impersonal, it's about how you present yourself not about how you should change yourself. I think it's best to leave the suggestions that touch the user personally out of this.
Even when reviewing only the profile, moderation would be necessary so that the user wouldn't receive suggestions such as "lose weight" or "you have bad taste in clothes", etc. In principle, some personal suggestions can be used, but they have to be thought through very well and presented in a nice, friendly manner so that they wouldn't do more harm than good.
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General comments
jnikola2 years ago
Interesting idea! I was thrilled to see what kind of flavour you will add to dating apps to make them more interesting and, as a consequence, more successful in their purpose of finding matches.
On the one hand, I think the solution is really clever. If I understood correctly, users would have to engage and spend their time rating other profiles in terms of completeness. It would definitely increase the time users spend on the dating platform and engage them in something else except date-finding. It would also make them improve their profiles, too.
Ways how this is already being done on other platforms
Because of the LinkedIn example that you mentioned, I remembered how they take care of your profile. Besides the easy-to-follow guide that appears when you sign up and leads you through the profile creation process thoroughly, there is always an "account completion" bar that shows you how much your profile is complete. This serves as a great reminder to improve your profile. Maybe you could use this on Tinder, for example. Some platforms such as Tinder also have (or had) a face recognition option which didn't allow you to put a picture with no face in it as your profile picture. Also, when you sign up for some financial or trading platform, they ask for photos of your documents. If you take a bad photo or cover some parts, they recognise it and don't allow you to continue with further validation steps. This could be used, too.
Would enhancing your profile be in the interest of the company that owns the dating platform?
But, in the end, although you could use a lot of cool, already existing stuff, I am not sure dating platforms are about profiles so much. As you said in the LinkedIn example, it depends on you (what you want from this platform) and the viewer (what he/she will prefer to see on your profile). They are great because they allow you to be whoever you want. People who want to go for something deeper than a one-night stand probably want to read about a person, while the ones who just look for it will check a few photos and decide. Having an empty profile can therefore send a strong message to people of the same opinion (a way of attracting a certain type of people). That's why I am not sure any of this would necessarily enhance the number of matches. You would switch focus of the user from dating and swiping to account grading, which could easily backfire since these platforms are not for professional purposes, but they give you the freedom to choose who you want to be. In that way, they are very similar to reality.
What do you think? Do you agree with me? Do you think there is a way how you could make sure that every improved account gets more swipes from people who they really want to attract?
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Povilas S2 years ago
J. Nikola First thing I want to clarify is that the idea is not about making the profile more complete, but about making it better (getting more people to like it). Completeness is just one aspect and for some, a "stuffed" profile might be a con and as you rightly noted yourself, there are automatic tools to take care of it. In fact, there are some automatic tools to even target the quality aspect, I've seen some automatic suggestions on tinder about what pictures to use/not to use and why.
However, I think nothing can help improve the profile as efficiently as other users, in particular, the ones on the "other side". Human interactions/opinions are very important in this that's why I created this idea.
I liked your point about an empty profile sending a particular message to others, never thought about this before, but it might be true in some cases, in other cases it might just mean that the person is lazy to put more effort, or they don't think it's worthy/necessary (cause you'll talk about it when matched, etc.).
I don't agree that this wouldn't necessarily increase the number of matches. An improved profile will increase the number of matches. Even if you take just the pictures and just the "for fun" intention, there's still room for improvement.
The feature would only be relevant for those who truly want to improve their profile, so are aware of the value of that, you'd have to pay for this after all, and on top of that it would take some character strength to take the suggestions of others constructively and make use of them for your own benefit, so it's clear that not everyone will do it. The same with the reviewers, not everyone will want to do that, so I don't think this would shift the general direction of the platform or the focus of its users.
"A way how you could make sure that every improved account gets more swipes from people who they really want to attract": I wrote about this in the idea description, the algorithm could select only those users for reviewers who somewhat match "the type" of the person who's profile they will try to enhance. Those would be the type of people that user often swipes right on.
I also had another idea regarding the latter problem, which I left out because I thought it might be too extreme or/and ineffective, but the reviewers could also be selected by the algorithm as the type of people on whom the user often swipes right, but they never swipe right on that user - there's a reason why they don't like them back, so maybe they are the ones who can help improve their profile best. The sad-sounding problem with this is that they might simply not like that person no matter how good their profile would be.
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