Tariq's Tumble

When years from now I remember this sparsely lettered time when I didn’t make time for whole books, when I only read poetry for pleasure, and only two poets at that, that it was the biggest, most meaningful commitment I could keep in the the monsoon of my early adulthood.

Dear OKCupid,

Yours is a brilliantly conceived and well executed product. That said, there is a dynamic on OKCupid that makes it unlikely that serious, eligible people will engage each other successfully, whether for the purposes of a romantic relationship or something more casual…

Some high percentage of messages sent through your site are discourteous, offensive or generally low quality and minimal effort. This is especially and emphatically true of messages from men to women.

As a result, (1) women’s inboxes fill up quickly and they are overwhelmed by the number of low quality messages, eventually causing them to become disgusted and leave the site, and (2) thoughtful messages from genuine, courteous guys get lost in a sea of asshole mail, causing them to become frustrated and leave the site.

The ability to block/report offensive users doesn’t help much because disengagement and attrition among women will begin after only a couple of bad messages and they won’t take the time to report the rest. It’s time for a systemic reset.

This problem could be solved elegantly by creating a “courtesy economy” where courteous, high-quality messages earn you the right to send more messages.

The key mechanism of this economy is a feature whereby users can assign a quality score to each message they receive (perhaps composed of two or more message dimensions e.g. courtesy and effort). It should be clear that these ratings have nothing to do with whether the recipient is actually interested in the sender.

The cumulative “courtesy” score achieved by each user should dictate how many people they can message. E.g. If over the course of a month, a certain user’s message quality is rated as 1/5 (based on at least ten messages), they can only send messages to ten new contacts in the next month. If it is 5/5, they can send messages to fifty new contacts in the next month.

This would have the dual effect of drastically cutting down on messages across the board such that message volumes are more manageable for users, and increasing the quality and choosiness of messages (given a limited supply of messages, people will only message people they are really interested in) so as to improve the likelihood of a successful match.

Just a thought,
Tariq

p.s. Also, get rid of the ‘wink’ feature, it’s creepy and nobody likes it.

The woman working the deli counter at the Safeway today decided that I should sample of all of the meats. She was quite kindly and seemed more invested in my sampling the meats than I was in not sampling them, so I sampled away, all but the ham, about a quarter pound total, off of wax deli sheets with her standing there beaming at me. “You like?” She was middle-aged, Ethiopian, high-cheekboned, with her hair done up in beautiful braids. She reminded me somewhat of my mother and so I surmised that perhaps I reminded her somewhat of her son.

It’s plain to me in retrospect, that I was drunk off the abundance of you. The fact that you were the most wonderful person to find me worthy in so long opened my mind to the possibility that I could meet and be loved by women as beautiful and intelligent and kind as you. That, bizarrely, was part of our undoing. In my youthful un-wisdom, knowing you introduced the possibility of finding someone more wonderful, even, than you. Years later I struggled for the words to tell you this - that you were perfectly worthy of my love, that we didn’t end because of your crazy but because of mine. I was young and hungry and stupid and inebriated with the idea that I might have even more of a good thing.

When I read Friedman’s piece “One Country: Two Revolutions”  my response was as follows:

Interesting piece. Friedman is giddy about the potential of a new wave of technologies to empower and connect individuals and groups, helping them to create value for themselves and society more broadly while avoiding the old middle-men and traditional barriers-to-entry. I share that same hope, and am cautiously optimistic (on a 10-year time frame).

That said, it seems problematic that he doesn’t commit even one sentence to acknowledging that the record of Silicon Valley in the past 10+ years, has been mixed at best. I suspect that the net effect to date of many of the technologies and trends he cites, has been job loss and significant wealth concentration.

And as many commenters on the op-ed point out, Silicon Valley’s most successful ventures (almost by definition) create very few net jobs compared to their valuations (even when you consider their broader value-creating ecosystems).

Maybe we need to go a little bit beyond the “salvation through entrepreneurship and tech” mantra, and actually put some parameters around what sorts of entrepreneurial activities are “socially productive”, perhaps even going so far as to account for the robbing of talent and mindshare by things that are frivolous (as many Silicon Valley produced products are) from things that are essential.

Reading Rodnitzky’s piece in Tech Crunch today “Here In Silicon Valley, Are We Killing Jobs And Making The Rich Richer?”, I couldn’t help but think that, like Friedman, he comes across as a little out of touch in his exuberance. To his credit he spends half his words outlining how the businesses that have made Silicon Valley rich have, so far, mostly destroyed jobs and concentrated welath:

Think about it. The success of most tech companies’ products is predicated on delivering scale and efficiency, also known as the ability to do more with less. That “more” typically means more wealth generated. And that “less” typically means with less and/or less expensive labor. In other words, the primary export for many Silicon Valley companies can be simplified down to labor substitution. In the near term, there are a variety of unfortunate ways in which this is manifesting itself as a social fabric-eroding, wealth-concentrating job killer.

In the second half of the editorial, however, he sounds much the same note as Friedman does, arguing that in the longer term these companies decentralize, dis-intermediate and put more competitive, wealth-creating power back in the hands of individuals and small businesses over large corporations. This paragraph sums up the core of his argument:

Professionals whose jobs were eliminated due to automation and outsourcing can now outsource themselves on automated marketplaces. Many of these skilled professionals are finding new homes as independent knowledge workers connected to a broad base of smaller organizations via evolved crowdsourcing marketplaces like oDesk and Trada. Once again, this is creating employment and redistributing wealth back into more hands.

The problem is that in the short term, these technologies and business models empower some narrow swatch of pretty highly educated/skilled knowledge workers (people like me and Rodnitzky) but leave the broader American workforce out. And the “short term” is probably something like five or ten years, which leaves a lot of people struggling for a long time. Further, in the long term, it is not at all clear that we’re preparing workers to compete in this new economy.