So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
Least they are using an algorithm that has the intended purpose of matching people. For profit dating apps are more interested in keeping you coming back then they are in creating successful relationships
This is an extremely common sentiment I see online - that there is some conspiracy to keep people single to reduce subscription churn. I have run two dating apps (my own apps, not working for a company), and what I found through trial and error was that no matter how many levers you pull and tweaks you make, a lot of it is simply user-behavior problems, not a tech or product design problem. There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example. The reason someone's matches aren't committal is because they don't want to commit.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
My take is that it isn't about serving non-committal matches and withholding promising matches or whatever, it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting. I can see how and app using the stable matching algorithm could really make you feel like you're getting the best match you're going to get, which I think could have a real impact on commitment.
"it has more to do with whether you feel like there are better matches on the app if you just keep lookin or waiting."
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningful improvements.
> There is no reliable way for a dating app to only serve users non-committal matches for example
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
I am interested in creating my own dating app/website, but the problem I foresee is getting users - a Catch 22 problem.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
Getting users to dating apps is probably easier than you think. Because men will go to where the women are so you only need to work on attracting female sign ups. It's actually that simple. The best way to launch is with a waitlist of warm users in 1 large city. I've seen a lot of people pining for the 2010-era OkCupid so you probably would have plenty of people willing to give it a try.
I think what you should be doing as a dating app — much more so if a government one — is some kind of RL based on length of actual marriage.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
the stated vs revealed preference problem is very big when it comes to dating, and it's made worse that a lot of people have confusion and even shame about what their preferences actually are. And a lot of preferences are mimetic, which means demand for certain things is always outstripping supply. So it's really not even worth it to figure out someone's preferences if there is literally no one out there to pair them to.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
The match is whoever wants to start on the journey with the user, at that moment, and the algorithm is there to give the potential couple a better starting point. I guess at any rate that’s better than leaving it to hope and chance.
Gale-Shapely provides the best possible stable outcome for the proposing side.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
Positive eugenics never stopped and there's nothing wrong about it. Also there's nothing wrong with the government promoting the creation of stable families with children born before DS risk exceeds 1/100.
Maybe part of the solution for any country dealing with low marriage rate is to ban all private dating apps and only government issued apps are allowed.
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
o__O my url bar doesn’t currently say Reddit? This argument feels red pilled and not curious nor productive.
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
Especially since populations are potentially in decline with fertility rates below replacement rates. It seems like an existential problem for the government if they want future taxpayers.
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
Imagine you are the proposer. You will start at the top of your list and work your way down only if rejected. So you are guaranteed to the best you could possibly do.
Imagine
A ranks X,Y,Z in that order
B ranks Y,X,Z in that order
C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match.
B will propose to Y and match.
C will propose to X and get rejected.
C will propose to Y and get rejected.
C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
(A,X),(B,Y) as the proposals is fine for the point being made. The issue is if we reverse which group is the proposer, we still end up with the same matching, because (A,X) strictly prefer each other.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY
B:YX
X:BA
Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
Begging economists and dating app designers to understand that the problems with the dating market are not a matching problem but a clearing problem. It's very tempting to think that if one could devise a sufficiently clever algorithm they could solve these problems but it's simply barking up the wrong tree.
Perhaps then the government could spend money producing propaganda to convince people to lower their standards. Maybe they could fund TV shows about unattractive people with no money having a good time together - I think China is doing something similar.
It's tempting to think of the problems of a dating market as a matching problem because men and women are almost equal in numbers so we just have to match them all up. A clearing problem occurs in markets, (even markets with ~equal supply and demand) when the reserve price of the transaction is not met. For example, the reason I don't own a Ferrari isn't because there isn't 1 Ferrari out there for sale, it's because I don't have enough cash to clear the transaction. Building a more powerful car sales website won't fix this problem. The reserve price is not met.
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
“A clearing problem” usually means a problem with settling or completing a transaction.
For example:
In banking/finance, “clearing” is the process of verifying and settling payments between banks. A clearing problem could mean a payment is delayed, rejected, or hasn’t been properly matched.
In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.
More generally, it can mean something is preventing an obligation or transaction from being finalized.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
I agree. I sure hope their government will not step in at that point and offer too many incentives to get married and disincentives to stay single, but I would not rule out this is exactly part of the plan...
It's also known as being one of the very few countries actually capable of using state capacity to overcome serious social and economic problems. Godspeed.
> basic freedoms, like free speech, freedom of the press, etc.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is better than a perverted and corrupt democracy. Democracy isn't the perfect be-all and end-all form of governance that will work well for everyone, a fact even ancient greeks recognized. Letting the masses decide the future of a country just because they're the majority is like letting the passengers fly the plane because they outnumber the crew.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Benevolent dictatorship is probably always the best form of government. I would even say a benevolent dictatorship is superior to a functioning democracy. The main (and unsolvable) issue is that there is no reliable mechanism to ensure they are and that they stay benevolent.
the kind of issues that Singapore has been fairly effective at, getting people to speak the same tongue or not spitting on the street, what you could put into a bucket of 'public discipline' measures I think is over-romanticized.
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
It has achieved the highest global GDP per capita is just a couple dozen of years, starting as a small bit of swamp forcibly kicked out Malaysia. I think it's unfair to say that people are over-romanticizing these sorts of accomplishments.
Starting out at the second richest city in Asia after Shanghai, you mean.
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
Correct - this isn't new, it's how it works there. Single new grads in the 80's & 90's were being offered government funded beach holidays on graduation where they were paired with selected dating partners.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
"In 1992, Deng exhorted CCP cadres to “learn from the world, especially from Singapore”, touching off a “Singapore fever” in PRC political and academic circles."
Stable marriage algorithm or stable matching algorithm?
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
A reminder that Singapore has plenty of history with government-sponsored dating, notably the Social Development Unit (SDU), aka "Single, Desperate and Ugly".
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
No, it doesn't. Because the value of a dating app is in its size. The bigger you are and the more options you can provide users, the better the experience is for everyone - paying and nonpaying customer alike. Given that most users of any dating app will be non-paid, making them miserable causes the largest portion of your users to leave, making the app a little worse and less competitive for everyone. Those paying and those not paying.
Further, customer psychology doesn't tend to reward paying to improve a bad experience. Users are more like to pay to upgrade an already good experience.
There is a very common idea that there is some conspiracy on dating apps to prevent coupling up as some strategy to reduce subscription churn, but it really just isn't true. The market is plenty large enough. Millions of relationships end every day. Millions of people turn 18 every day and enter the (online) dating world. The cold hard truth is that almost every complaint about the online dating experience is a complaint about human behavior, not about something remediable with better product design.
It's about prioritizing candidates for the costly initial audition, and breaking symmetry for the introduction, something particularly useful for people who can't just approach other at random in a social setting.
This could work for that purpose in a pinch. You do actually get other matches afterwards, you just don’t get an infinite feed of other candidates and can focus on having great time with the one you’ve got.
Meetup got enshittified years ago already, and the changes drove away the small communities that once made up so much of the site; the only groups which prosper on it now are mainly large for-profit ventures.
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
Trying to fix falling birth rates with an official government dating app shows they don't understand the problem in the slightest, as dating apps are one of the main causes of declining birth rates in the first place.
this is their third attempt at a government run dating service I think :/
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
3 months of leave or a small welfare payment are not sufficiently compelling alternatives to a career. Pay them at the level of a career and see if that changes the numbers - I feel like at least some people would be interested in that. (Say, median national income? Spitballing here)
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
Yeah the world is in a 60 year trend in declining births. An app isn't going to fix anything
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
The only new variable in the last century of humanity is birth control. All others (hypergamy, economic mobility, migration, etc.) are recurring and have not impacted birth rates significantly in the past.
Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
Yes, the FOMOism in dating app user psychology is extremely real, but this isn't a product problem, it's a human psychology problem. In theory, you could make an app with, say, a lifetime number of swipes to prevent infinite FOMOism, but it would fail to be a viable product model because the #1 thing that I found users wanted -- more than everything else -- was optionality. And if you don't offer it, they'll go to someone who does.
Hinge actually already uses Gale-Shapley and it doesn't seem to be producing meaningful improvements.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/30/hinge-and-its-...
While that certainly sounds difficult, it sounds feasible for e.g. Facebook.
> The thought experiment I usually pose is to ask what you think a free, open source, and community supported dating app would change. The answer is "not much".
That sounds more like a framing problem. If the ultimate goal is promoting long-lasting new romantic relationships, and it's developed without any profit motive, I'd imagine a general social network that primarily organizes in-person social gatherings.
I would like to create a service that opperated like OkCupid used to before they sold out. Visible compatibility percentages and being able to search profiles. No curation/algorithms or swiping.
I'm interested in helping people, not taking their money.
At least, you should have some algorithm estimating marriage length / likelihood of divorce based on your (non-app) statistics, and then use that as one factor for your in-app calculations.
The productive question would be to figure out how far outside someone's preferences they can go while still settling happily.
You’re never going to match with people who aren’t actively looking.
You’re only ever going to match with the people who are looking at the same time as you.
Your criticisms are true of real life without apps. That’s why we have this thing called “divorce”.
Comments like these always seem to miss the point. They aren’t trying to solve marriage. They are trying to create social lubricants to get young people more interested in dating. This algorithm tries to ensure that at the very least your core values at the time match up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#In_Singapore
It certainly doesn't help that the app conveniently targets those between 21 to 35 years of age, which is just before advanced maternal age (also the age where single Singaporeans qualify for public housing).
Private ones will always prioritize profit which means they want you to keep using the app which means they don’t want you to find a partner.
Modern dating apps makes it so that an average woman will have unlimited choices but the average man will have next to none. Before dating apps, they could have been a good match. But with dating apps, the woman has unlimited higher value men. How could these average women marry an average man if she’s being taken on dates constantly by top 5% men?
The problem is that these higher value men will not commit because they also have unlimited options.
Even if she marries an average man later in life, she will feel resentment towards him. Therefore, these women just choose to stay single. This is especially viable now because women often are more educated and have good income.
Now we can see why young men are increasingly becoming far right and longing for far more conservative world.
Modern dating apps are just manifesting natural instincts on steroids. I don’t blame either party. Just an observation.
Yeah, dating apps are problematic. No, nobody here is going to fix that with another stupid app. But I think a lot of these “meet with a group of strangers at dinner” biz concepts are cool and gonna try some soon.
And doesn't something of the same kind happen in real-life, in some societies or countries or cities male-optimal and in others female-optimal ?
Imagine A ranks X,Y,Z in that order B ranks Y,X,Z in that order C ranks X,Y,Z
X, Y, Z rank A,B,C in that order.
A will propose to X and match. B will propose to Y and match. C will propose to X and get rejected. C will propose to Y and get rejected. C will propose to Z and match.
Y will never get a proposal from A. Z will never get a proposal from A or B.
Edit: I think I fixed it.
Maybe 4 participants is too few to clearly see what happens.
The minimal example with 4 participants is if each person P has unique preferences and P's 1st choice has P as 2nd choice. So in this case just flip X:
A:XY B:YX X:BA Y:AB
If A,B propose you get AX,BY. If X,Y propose you get BX,AY. Both are stable because the proposers are getting their first choice.
The dating market is similarly full of people who would like to clear transactions (economist speak for form a relationship), yet cannot because they do not meet the reserve price of those they want to date.
I hope my Ferrari analogy helps to illustrate the core concept, but you have realize that dating markets are even tougher than car markets, because dating is a barter market. For a transaction to clear, there needs to be a double coincidence of wants -- you can't simply use a medium of exchange like dollars to cut the transaction in half. Imagine if to buy a Ferrari you had to find a seller who also happened to need $350k worth of Linux sysadmin work done.
Is it fair to say a clearing problem is a missmatch of expectations?
It seems to me that people are simultaneously becoming more specific and demanding, while simultaneously seeking risk aversion and comfort
“A clearing problem” usually means a problem with settling or completing a transaction.
For example:
In banking/finance, “clearing” is the process of verifying and settling payments between banks. A clearing problem could mean a payment is delayed, rejected, or hasn’t been properly matched.
In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.
More generally, it can mean something is preventing an obligation or transaction from being finalized.
> In markets, it can mean buyers and sellers aren’t being matched at the expected price/quantity.
More specifically, they would rather be single than pair with any of the options that are realistically available to them. Hence, the market fails to clear.
https://github.com/abhchand/stable-matching
It’s an effective yet simple algorithm. Also widely used in North America to match medical students with their residency of choice.
How is that going for us in the west?
Like, I believe in these rights. But I also think we should be open to questioning them when we’ve got anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers finding popular purchase among an increasingly and proudly illiterate population.
While many countries in the west have a two or multi party system due to historical reasons, on certain issues they often just function as controlled opposition, making your vote worthless anyway, with political battles between parties now being mostly and ideological circus to keep the unwashed masses distracted and divided while they get robbed blind, rather than focused on actually fixing things for the working class.
If Singapore can skip this expensive time consuming circus and just get shit done, then good for them, but I don't want our western leaders to take the wrong lesson and move us to a dictatorship as the promised solution to fix things, which is what I feel they're trying.
Can't remember when it was last time you could rely on western government to do the right thing
The country has been effective at it but so was Prussia or England. Singapore has increasingly complex social issues you aren't going to solve with a cane, and government organized marriage likely will go as well as government cheese
The PAP likes its "fishing village in a swamp" trope, and post-war Singapore certainly had its share of problems, but it was already a wealthy trading entrepot long before Lee Kuan Yew came along.
China is a cultural and diaspora behemoth. Completely apples to oranges comparison.
What about countries similar to Singapore's size and wealth? An interesting thing to look at: how many US electeds are Singapore, Israel, Hong Kong or Taiwan 1st-generation heritage or born? I like this number because you cannot fake it (unlike so many things, like statistics reported by countries that are not free), you cannot buy an election or run a PR campaign to pretend you had a successful election, and it measures a real notion of power (something the CCP aspires to have): Singapore 0, China 9, Taiwan 11, Hong Kong 4, Israel 7.
Anyway I don't really buy into this line of thinking but it is interesting to me to look at a place that isn't really free, like Singapore, and figure out how it affects me.
https://jamestown.org/fortnight-end-singapore-model/
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/607615/summary
https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/construction-singapore-mo...
https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-...
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/singapores-success-cont...
https://www.fpri.org/article/2019/12/the-odd-couple-singapor...
> In mathematics, economics, and computer science, the Gale–Shapley algorithm (also known as the deferred acceptance algorithm,[1] propose-and-reject algorithm,[2] or Boston Pool algorithm[1]) is an algorithm for finding a solution to the stable matching problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gale–Shapley_algorithm
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_matching_problem
https://aphrodite.global/
The project was partially started by some students/scholars from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
Created appropriately enough in 1984, it had explicitly eugenicist goals (discussed at length in Wikipedia), since Lee Kuan Yew was quite worried about the Idiocracy scenario where the lower classes out-procreate top talent and lead to societal decline.
Basically all dating apps are optimized for enabling casual hookups at this point.
>All the apps I know suck.
Do ALL the apps suck, or are you maybe not appealing enough for being picked for casual hookups by the users on the app?
Dunno, @beeforpork sounds hawt
Further, customer psychology doesn't tend to reward paying to improve a bad experience. Users are more like to pay to upgrade an already good experience.
There is a very common idea that there is some conspiracy on dating apps to prevent coupling up as some strategy to reduce subscription churn, but it really just isn't true. The market is plenty large enough. Millions of relationships end every day. Millions of people turn 18 every day and enter the (online) dating world. The cold hard truth is that almost every complaint about the online dating experience is a complaint about human behavior, not about something remediable with better product design.
Source: I used to build and run dating apps.
If they don't have your interests, feel free to start a new group?
In places where there is a healthy ecosystem of casual, non-rapacious meetups, that is overwhelmingly organized via Facebook, not Meetup.
Rapacious
ADJECTIVE
1 given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed.
2 inordinately greedy; predatory; extortionate.
a rapacious disposition.
grasping, voracious,
Synonyms:
ravenous
Antonyms: generous
3 (of animals) subsisting by the capture of living prey; predacious.
Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.
it's low key kind of funny how they keep reaching for the quick fix to their collapsed birth rates instead of changing the things that would cost real money or make them less desirable to foreign investors.
Because most countries aren't actually trying anything nor can the government do much in that regard when the issues are cultural and emotional.
The low-birthrate couples who can't/don't want kids aren't suddenly gonna want them if you give them 3 months of paid maternity leave and a monthly stipend or other such welfare perks.
And those who do have kids because of government welfare perks, were having kids anyway, they're now incentivized to have even more.
The countries that do try seem to fall short of actually replacing even a few years of serious career work and offer no way to go back to that career after taking care of children for a while, so you just need to do that.
Increase women's education, labour participation, reduce infant mortality, have good access to birth control, and make life expensive...You're not going to get babies
Crash the economy and reduce people's purchasing power
Make them poor, and the birth rate will rise (Japan birth rate is rising) =)
Edit:
Share of all likes received according to ChatGPT
Top 1% 16.4%
Top 5% 41.1%
Top 10% 58.0%
Top 50% 95.7%
Bottom 50% 4.3%
Historically they were compelled