Christian Rudder
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Christian Rudder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Exactly. Theoretically. You could ask these sort of components of that value, right? And kind of get... Insofar as you can approximate the observed, like the real truth behind whatever this person is saying. Because most people probably will say family or whatever because they think of themselves as a good person. And generally that's kind of how society works, right?
And then you can kind of have the sort of true value ranking underneath the hood. And then you'd also have a third measure. And now you'd know how well that person knows themselves too. You'd have what they say their values are. what their kind of inferred values are, and then how well those two things match. It would be an interesting way to understand somebody.
attracted more matches and more people messaging for the most part it was like a gentle curve in a way and then when the picture blew up all of a sudden the attractive people got way more interest yeah they get like more leverage on the pixels so to speak I mean it's definitely affected it I think in a lot of ways focus on photos on dating apps for sure is the negative thing like we've said a couple times here there's so much more to a person than I don't know just their face like a headshot basically right
At the same time, we've discovered we actually tried to turn the pictures off of OkCupid for a day just to see what would happen. You turned the pictures off? Off, like totally off. This was like 2013 maybe, really as an experiment. Shut them all down, all the thumbnails, everything went away. And as you'd expect, the messaging environment was actually a lot healthier.
Definitely attractiveness wasn't a component because you couldn't tell what the person looked like that you were trying to talk to. At the same time, people hated it. And we got so much feedback that day. We knew we were going to turn them back on, but people were just freaking out. Even though we explained it wasn't broken, we were doing this on purpose.
And I just, people are visual and they kind of have, yeah, they have to have the photo. So it's like, you kind of got to meet them. You have to meet them. Like a dating app can only meet people where they are, right? Like we can't force people. We actually tried another adventure into this world. Yeah.
we tried to launch, this was, this was what we tried to launch a blind dating app, like where we would take a photo and we would scramble it digitally. Right. This is so stupid in retrospect, but, but like, you know, we thought that you could have a scrambled photo and you, people could browse and, you know, you could, you would learn a lot more about people and you could set it.
It was, it was very slightly pretender. So it was like a little bit more immediate. You could see this scrambled photo and somebody, and maybe even go see them that night, meet them that night. It was a total bomb. Like,
you had like what 10,000 people I think who tried it yeah we had a quarter million downloads and it was like 10,000 dates or something like that it just was terrible and yeah people just don't They're just not up for it, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was like the lights coming on at last call or whatever, where everyone's like, oh, oh, oh.
Exactly. No, it was, you would see...
Right, a clean mind. Yeah. I mean, that might work. Something that gets very hard is when the app tries to do something, tries to change people's behavior. And actually, we got a lot of criticism or commentary, I guess I'd say, about this in the wake of publishing the racial data that we were talking about at the very beginning.
And be like, well, why can't you guys do more to make, again, Asian men more attractive to white women or whatever it is, you know? And the fact is, there's very little you can do to like... move people because first of all, they've had whatever, however many years of their life or however many hours scrolling through Instagram, super hard to undo that.
And also if you don't deliver to people what at least they think they want, they're just going to leave. It's not like you have to use a dating app or Tinder or whatever. You just do something else. And so, like, if you're showing some guy's been on Instagram hardcore and is looking for that look, and you're like, hey, man, check this out. This is better. However you want to frame that.
This is different. Which you may also find attractive. I think you'll really like her. Some people might be up for that kind of thing, but a lot of dudes are just going to be like, with all the girls in here are ugly, I'm out. You know what I mean? And, like, it's hard. It's very hard to... You kind of have to let the users drive what you give them, which can be bad.
Obviously, you're reinforcing some negative shit that way, right? But otherwise, you just end up with a situation where people are gone.
Oh, I think that's definitely true.
But it's like almost in unpredictable ways. Like I think – I don't know any of the founders of say Twitter or Facebook. But I think if you had asked them in 2006 or whatever, is Facebook going to make people really angry and is it going to become the world's like greatest propaganda tool of all time? Mark Zuckerberg probably would have been like, what are you talking about? I don't want that.
I just want to like have – he probably genuinely wanted friends to meet friends or whatever or make money, you know, and be powerful, which a lot of people are like that. Yeah.
apps definitely change the world so I definitely wouldn't say that they change behavior but there has to be some component of them that is delivering what what those people want yeah they like amplify the crap that you already bring to the table culturally we already are like it's you know don't go anywhere because we got more what now after this
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