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Obviously there are many improvements to be made, but honestly I think they are mostly "good enough" and there are far bigger issues to worry about. As an example re the cities category, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff to use the limited dev time budget to improve the UX for the majority who do live in a single city at the expense of those who do not.

@jack I think this is a failure of cost-benefit analysis. The benefit of changing the questions may be relatively low, but the cost is trivial; it would take <10 minutes to rewrite them all to make sense.

And I can say that personally these questions are a big turnoff. The education question is personally insulting/discouraging. (I didn't finish high school, so it was impossible for me to sign up while being truthful, and makes it seem like I'm not wanted on the site.)

And in general it's very frustrating to be on a website this poorly designed. The concept of "ask a single question at a time, and if it's a multiple-choice question, provide people with all the possible options" is such an incredibly simple idea that I really have no idea how it's possible to screw it up this badly. This website is to a stereotypically autistic person what geocities is to a graphic designer; at best a joke to make fun of, at worst causes actual mental distress.

Mostly agree with isaac. I think the free response questions are worse though.

Biggest issue: can they at least do something to make more people answer the free response questions, and in more depth? Matchmakers have nothing to go off of for like 70% of profiles.

And even when answered free response questions themselves aren't very informative. "If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?" - that's an icebreaker or an opportunity to give a cute answer, but it's not great alpha for third party matchmarkers.

And I can say that personally these questions are a big turnoff. The education question is personally insulting/discouraging (I didn't finish high school, so it was impossible for me to sign up while being truthful, and makes it seem like I'm not wanted on the site.)

Wait, that's one of the useful questions! It's both strongly correlated with actual merit in general population and something people directly value in partners. Now I agree people overvalue degrees for themselves and seem to "stick" to legible signs of merit like degrees more than they should, but it's still valuable information.

@jacksonpolack I have no objections to the site asking for educational attainment. My claim is that there should be a "didn't finish high school" option. (Or if the intention is actually that those people aren't welcome, it should state that explicitly. But I'm guessing that was just an oversight due to the writer being so out of touch with reality they forgot that lots of people don't complete high school.)

The weird part is that, if this is all working reasonably well, then you have an unusual amount of human intelligence pointed at figuring out the match percentages. You don't have to coerce everything into neat legible categories. Just allow lots of "check all that apply", user-submitted questions, multiple choice options, free response options, and so on, and then let the matchmakers have it. Screw the data model, just give us info. Humans and LLM-assisted bots can sort out the details.

@EvanDaniel Human intelligence isn't magic, we still need information about the users if we want to place meaningful bets.

Also several of these are likely to be insulting and make people not want to sign up at all, like the trans and education questions.

@IsaacKing Yeah! We definitely need lots of info, it just doesn't have to be mandated to fit a particular data model. (And also the existing data model is bad, strongly agreed on that part.)

@EvanDaniel Neat legible categories allow people to filter the data to operate on it more effectively. It's absolutely critical to give the humans better tools, because the problem of matchmaking is already hard enough. As an example, if there is a freeform location box instead of a neat legible location box, it means you have to look through orders of magnitude more people. There is obviously a tradeoff here for those who don't fit into a neat legible location, and my claim is it's a good tradeoff.

And almost everything is already "check all that apply" so I think they are already doing things relatively well there.

@jack Location is definitely one of the ones that's more amenable to being legible. And "mark where you currently are, change as applicable" works pretty well and is well accepted.

>The minimum age for a partner is 18, excluding anyone under 18 who's looking for a relationship.

I am shocked they had the self-preservation instinct to do this

@CodeandSolder Maybe I'm old fashioned here but I think they should just mandate everyone be 18 and require 18 for minimum partner ages and people can deal with that.

@EvanDaniel yes, of course, but this is the bare minimum to not dive head first into a wall and i'm somewhat surprised we got it

@CodeandSolder I'd have said "don't let anyone sign up while claiming to be under 18" was that minimum, but honestly both are probably required.

How does this resolve? Is it if any issues are fixed? All issues are fixed? Most issues are fixed? What defines "fixed m" for each issue?

@t3ss If the questions seem generally reasonable, it resolves YES, even if there are still a small number that are a little weird.

Seeing these questions updates me downwards on Manifold.love's future. Very little thought seems to have been put into making it appealing or even usable to anyone outside of a tiny silicon valley bubble.

(It's also strange even within that bubble. The maximally-accommodating way of handling the gender questions for example is to ask about each trait individually: "what is your gender identity", "what is your biological sex", "what gender identity do you want in a partner", and "what biological sex do you want in a partner", with options for "male", "female", "other", and "prefer not to say" for each. (Really none of these questions should be required, and "prefer not to say" can just be to leave it blank.) This is straightforwards information theory; why include a bunch of redundant and overlapping answers, while leaving some combinations of bits unable to be specified at all? This is such a strange way to ask questions, and I'm confused at how a bunch of programmers would have arrived at such a system.)

@IsaacKing I think the bubble you're accusing us of being in is actually among people who understand what 'cis' even means. Most people in the US would be confused. No other dating app I know of does it the way you are suggesting, by the way.

We are serving our users the best we can. What do you think users want when they filter to women? Having two filters is ok (biological sex and gender identity), but still more complexity than one.

That said, we have moved pretty quickly on these questions and can try to improve them.

I guess we should add a 'Some high school' option for the highest completed education level.

We are adding a free-form section where you can put other information that you want to include.

@JamesGrugett I haven't looked into this deeply, but I think at this point most Americans know what the word "cis" means, though they may object to its usage. If that's a concern you could say "not trans" instead.

Left-leaning people are more likely to care about the gender identity of their partner than their biological sex, and right-leaning people are more likely to care about biological sex than gender identity. (I don't mean that left-leaning people are over 50%, just that they're more so that right-leaning.) Manifold's demographic likely has a lot of overlap between those two camps, and it doesn't seem hard to implement a system that supports all preferences.

(Gender identity and biological sex are both pretty reductive categories and have started breaking down in recent years, so I think an ideal system would be more granular and cover more categories like "looks/voice", "genitals", "can have kids", "submissive/dominant personality". Almost nobody actually cares about chromosomes.)

Adding a "some high school" option would support a larger number of people, but still exclude those who have completed no high school. I don't understand why Manifold seems to be insisting on excluding some people rather than adding answers that cover 100% of the possibility-space.

Thanks for the freeform section, I think that'll be useful.