Don’t Swipe Right for Tinder! Tap for Facebook Dating!
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-dating-how-it-works/
Facebook has, recently, launched its dating feature in Colombia. Users will have to create their own profiles for the service where they can write general information about themselves and add photos and answers to provided icebreaker questions. Rather than swiping, Facebook Dating will just have users tap whether or not he is interested. Users will be able to specify what they are looking for in a potential partner when it comes to age, distance, and whether or not they have kids etc. Facebook’s goal is to have users create meaningful, serious relationships, in comparison to Tinder where users are known to just use the app to kill time. The only way to contact the other person is by commenting on the person’s photo or icebreaker question, in hopes that it’s in regards to a shared interest.
Online dating, in general, can be seen as a matching market. Now, let’s use the concepts of a matching market and apply it to Facebook’s dating feature. A bipartite graph can be made among the users of the dating feature. The seller in this market is Facebook. The goods Facebook has are its users who are signed up for the dating feature. The buyer in this case is the user who is looking to be connected with one of the other registered users. The edge between the seller and buyer in this case would be whether or not the people get matched up with each other. Since the users can specify certain qualities they are looking for in a mate that is similar to the idea of how each buyer has a value for a certain item. For example, if a person is looking for a woman without children he’s going to like the woman without children more than a woman with children. So, if a person isn’t interested in a person he can click not interested which shows that that person is at a low preference for him and that he should not be matched with her since there are other people he likes more.
A constricted set could occur in Facebook’s dating feature after a while when a person gets to know the people he is matched up with. This would occur when the person chooses who he wants to date in real life. The problem is that there could be other people that seriously want to date that same person too. A perfect matching will occur on Facebook’s dating feature, ultimately, in the end where after talking to different people the user gets matched up with one other person who they will seriously date exclusively.