Consider this. Imagine there is an online dating site that works nearly perfectly. It was coded in a garage by a couple of college dropouts. You open an account, you answer some questions, and within three days it matches you with the love of your life. It is amazing!
It is so amazing that it attracts investors. The garage becomes an office. Now the coders are surrounded by men in suits. Now the service that was once free requires a subscription; now the terms of service are quietly altered, and the data the site gathers is sold to corporations that do who knows what with it. Money changes everything!
A man in a suit says to a whiz kid: "People who visit this site find true love in three days. But after this, they become less interested in the site: they stop updating their profiles, and when they log in it's only to observe, not participate. Stale profiles are unreliable for our own data-mining purposes, and of less value when sold to others. Information is money, and we are leaving money on the table. What if you made a slight alteration to your algorithms, so that the site matched people with their soulmates in an average of five days instead of three? What would be the harm? In fact, it's clear that we are deeply undervaluing true love here. Is active participation on our site for seven days, or ten days, or six months, too much of a price to pay for what we offer?"
When the possibility of profit enters the situation, the engineering problem changes. It is no longer: What is the best way to introduce people to strangers with whom they are highly likely to fall in love? It becomes: How can we best maximize revenue?
And yet: imagine an online dating site that never matches people together successfully. Customers log on to the site and open profiles; they visit the site for some period of time; they lose interest because it offers no hope of providing the service it promises. Word of mouth spreads; revenue falls; the site dies because it is too inefficient. So the goal is not maximum efficiency in pairing mates, but optimal inefficiency.
The site maximizes revenue when it takes as long as possible to make matches without taking so long that its members give up and stop using it. And once you realize that inefficiency is coded into the design, that the site's true purpose is not to match you with a mate, but to keep you actively participating in the site for as long as possible, then you can take steps to mitigate that inefficiency.
The key to success, I think, is to treat the site as your opponent, not your facilitator: it's like the house in a casino. You should strive to take any communications off-site as soon as possible, for one thing: when routing them through the site both parties continue, to be susceptible to the phenomenon known as choice overload.
Now, choice overload works like this: Imagine that I offer you a choice of one of three delicious cakes for dessert. You will say, "What good fortune," and select one. But what if I offer you a choice of one of eleven cakes? You will become temporarily paralyzed by the magnitude of the choice; you will realize that selecting any one of them deprives you of the potential experience of ten others. It will take you longer to choose; you will choose more inefficiently.
Now, notice that every page loaded by Lovability features a reminder of how many members are on the site. Hundreds of thousands of members! Think of all that choice! Notice that next to a profile picture are links to eight other profiles, of people who are similar but not the same. Surely one of these other eight must be better than the profile you're reading now. The promise of a more suitable mate is only a click away, perhaps with an unexpected interstitial survey to deal with, a minor nuisance at best.
You see? The mediator that promises you a valuable service does not in fact have your best interests at heart. Best to cut it out of the chain of communication as fast as possible; best to move quickly to meet in person. Which is what we have done. We have outsmarted the house by leaving the casino. I'm very happy to see you!