Reciprocity is a simple dating site, created by some friends of mine. You sign up and see a list of all your Facebook friends who also signed up. This seemed like an obvious great idea. Later I asked her out in person, and she said yes and we had a great time.
I always figured Alice was just a jerk who was ruining the system for everyone else. After all, the whole premise was to incentivize honesty. Checkmark the names of people you honestly want to date. If they do want to date you, the system will let you know, and you can arrange a date. A few months ago, someone asked me out on a date and I said yes. This caused a crisis of self-loathing. Why would I go against my own incentives and ruin things for everyone else?
I asked a friend, who admitted she had done the same thing. Her theory was that asking someone on a date with all of its accompanying awkwardness and difficulty was a stronger signal of interest than ticking a checkbox. This argument rings true to me. The dating situation seems similar. Pain is the active ingredient.
You can create clever dating sites that remove the pain. Sometimes it will work: lots of people have gotten great dates on Reciprocity.
Why is the system telling third parties when two people match? This looks like an obvious anti-feature. It only tells everyone in this hypothetical because the user checked the box of every user, thereby giving the system permission to tell everyone separately. After all, it then basically broadcasts that you have low standards and thus are yourself of low quality.
