The top dating apps are designed such that photos are literally all that matter. What's worse is all of the popular cultural ideas we have about photos are wrong.
Photos don't just show people accurately -- in fact, you need some level of skill just to look as attractive as you do in real life. So no, that unsmiling selfie you took in your basement isn't "just what you look like" or "authentic."
Not to mention, people think and do. Images are still. This creates a situation where humanity can be easily lost. And where the need to brand yourself and put a lot of effort into showing hobbies etc. is paramount.
It's sad to see so many young guys tie their identities to the good or bad performance of their profiles when it's not really them being judged but the pictures they chose.
I really love the idea of photofeeler, and I want it to work.
Just to share my 2c: I can't get over how strange the pricing structure for photofeeler is. I've come to the site a few times with my credit card ready, willing to drop a few dollars to get results.... but the abstraction of your pricing model is just confusing enough that I've dropped off the funnel each time.
Ok, so I need credits or karma to run a test. So I answer a few photos, get my karma to medium, and leave the test over night. The results are often inconclusive - my photos are consistently rating as "meh->ok" across the board. Ok, that's fine, I'll try another. Upload another, get more karma, leave that over night. Ok, this photo has +.8 attractiveness, but -.6 smart. Ok, not sure what to do with that information, but it's intriguing. The results are close enough, that I'm curious what the margin of error is if each is getting ~10 votes.
Ok, well maybe this is just the downside of the freemium model. Let's take a look and see what I can buy. 40 credits for $10. Ok, so 1 credit is .25c. Cool. What's a credit get me. A CREDIT GETS ME ONE VOTE! Ok, hold on, that can't be right.
Let's think about this backwards. How many credits do I need? So I probly want 15-20 votes on any one photo to get enough data to be conclusive about the results. Sure. And I'll want to run at least 3 photos. So, I'm looking at $15 per test to know which of 3 photos is preferred.... but realistically if I want to get rid of my own biases, I'd be testing 5-10 photos... Hmmmmm.
At this point I do some work to get some free karma (note: if there were hotkeys for voting it would make a WORLD of difference).... leave the test over night. Look at it the next day, say "meh, results are inconclusive based on sample size" and forget about the site for 8 months.
You probably have already thought about this—and it is a bit of a derail—but it seems to me that a "veriface" service that provides attestations, or some combination of verifications, as to the accuracy with which a photo represents someone could be useful.
Thanks for sharing. This looks interesting, and I might end up using it in the future. (Right now I'm holing up due to the pandemic, and not venturing out; later, I plan to get on the various online dating apps that are out there.)
Some feedback:
1. When I click "Get Started", I'm presented with bright blue "Sign up with Facebook" and "Sign up with LinkedIn" buttons, and a small faint "Sign up with email" which I can barely read. Why is this?
I feel like Facebook is selling everything I do to the Russians. Or... something. :) In any case I don't trust social login, and by extension I tend not to trust websites which push me to social login.
2. Out of curiosity I created an account, didn't upload any photos, but started rating other people. Immediately afterwards, I'd love to see how others rated the same photos. I'd learn something interesting about how people present themselves.
3. After rating 20 or so photos I got accused of "poor vote quality", with "Our AI has detected randomness or patterns in your votes." Ummm... huh? By definition, any data will always either be random or have patterns. Anyway, I got chided for doing something-or-other wrong, with a request to vote better (how?).
I recognize there's a problem here -- you don't want people to just give everyone top ratings on everything, because they just want to increase their own credits. Nevertheless, at this point I got discouraged and stopped.
Not all poor quality voting is conscious/malicious. An individual with alexithymia, for example, might give unuseful feedback despite their best effort.
Proper photography is important, and a sense of personality is needed to start a conversation.
There are differences in the way men and women are expected to behave on Tinder and elsewhere, but a critical step is getting past "your photo is worth a swipe" to having something to say to each other. Many women will delete you if you have nothing better to open with than "hi". You are expected to actually look at the photos (and read the text) so that they feel you are actually interested in them.
They want to know something about you, too. Action shots, backgrounds, even just your smile says a lot. Taking the time and thought to get a good photo will attract more interest than just a random selfie. But it's more than just being the best approximation to ideal maleness. It's a sense that you are a person worth hanging out with.
If you can teach this to men, awesome. I would say that I found some of the portraits on your front page a little stiff. One had a purely black background, and while an attractive photo in itself it was a blank about personality.
The top dating apps are designed such that photos are literally all that matter. What's worse is all of the popular cultural ideas we have about photos are wrong.
Photos don't just show people accurately -- in fact, you need some level of skill just to look as attractive as you do in real life. So no, that unsmiling selfie you took in your basement isn't "just what you look like" or "authentic."
Not to mention, people think and do. Images are still. This creates a situation where humanity can be easily lost. And where the need to brand yourself and put a lot of effort into showing hobbies etc. is paramount.
It's sad to see so many young guys tie their identities to the good or bad performance of their profiles when it's not really them being judged but the pictures they chose.