Ok, I signed up for Hinge and have a date this weekend with a cute chick, so that's cool. I look forward to it being an awkward and humiliating experience. Maybe next week I'll publish a whiny manifesto and shoot up a theater.
Let's talk about what we hate about Hinge, which is mostly just the whole concept of "learning AI." The woman I matched with had a profile that said she was Catholic (I'm an atheist) and not white (I could stunt double for Powder). These were not reasons I chose to match. They were the least important and least interesting parts of her profile. It was my first match, and now my feed has been almost exclusively filled with every black Christian woman within a 100 miles. This despite the fact my match isn't black and I have "atheist" in my profile. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, some of these women are pretty cute, but I pick ONE PERSON and suddenly The Algorithm goes apeshit, funneling exactly one type of woman like I have a fetish. All I could think of was Patton Oswalt's bit about Tivo.
20 years later and no progress has been made.
It also reminds me of how years ago I was dumb enough to buy a Nest thermostat because the learning aspect seemed convenient. Just dial in the temperature whenever you want, and it will learn your schedule and automatically adjust for you! Neat. So, I installed it, went online to set up an account, and then saw a section in the account setup where I could manually set the schedule. I'm a big boy so I knew when I was home and when I wasn't, so I just entered it in. Then I sat dumbfounded as to what the fuck was the point of paying for AI learning when it was 10x easier to just set up your own schedule. I mean, I could spend a month of constantly fiddling with the thermostat and needing to remember to set it so the stupid thing could "learn," or I could set it up in 5 minutes.
This is how I feel about Hinge. Ooooooh! It's going to *~learn~* my preferences! Or I could just enter it in. Like, when I match, they could just ask, "Why did you match," and I could type something in or select an option. But no, a bunch of autistics with CS and statistics degrees have got me covered with some shitty code that has never produced adequate results since the concept of psychologically profiling people with computers was invented.
80 years ago market research and focus groups were invented where businesses just went to people and said, "YOU tell US what you want and that's what we'll give you." Now they've thrown away that simple idea and have instead entrusted their future to a gaggle of fatbeards that are neurologically incapable of relating to human emotions and desires, so now all my suggested dating profiles read, "The key to my heart is... accepting Jesus Christ as lord and savior, and tacos." In unrelated news, New Surgeon General Advisory Raises Alarm about the Devastating Impact of the Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States
