pandemonium at bookbear station

MATCHMAKING INFO PLEASE READ

Georgia Gardner Gray, Supermarket, 2021 (me rn)

TL;DR IF YOU PARTICIPATED IN THE MATCHMAKING EXPERIMENT PLEASE CHECK SPAM IN CASE YOU’RE MISSING ANY EMAILS

Hello! Happy July. Lots of fun things are happening with the Substack, with my writing in general, and in my personal life. As a result I’m running around like a headless chicken. The first thing I want to announce is that there will be a Bookbear Readership Demographic Survey. Please fill this out so we can all learn exciting things about each other and I can share the data with you. Personally I am desperate to understand you guys better!!

Second: the matchmaking experiment has commenced. The first 1000 people have all received matches. And it has already been very exciting. For those of you who didn’t participate, here’s how the matching worked:

People either get zero, one, or two romantic matches (based on the pool of people we had and your preferences) and two platonic matches. You may appear as someone else’s match a maximum of four times. Your job is to contact the people you have been matched with, who will be revealed in this email. You may also be contacted by someone who’s been matched with you. Complicated, I know, but: send emails to the people who are revealed in this email and know that you might receive emails from one or two others.

I also encouraged people to do it sight unseen:

Evidence suggests that dating works better when you don’t know what the person looks like until you meet them!! So our explicit goal is for you to meet the person for either a Date or a Friend Date sight unseen. Now, I’m sure you guys are all perfectly capable of googling your matches using their email and first name. I’m asking you to please not do that.

Sophia’s explanation of how the matching occurred:

“Romantic matches were made by first filtering for certain demographics (age, location, race, platonic, religion, etc.) for baseline preferential alignment. Afterward, for each respondent, all potential matches were ranked in terms of how strongly aligned their answers were with the respondent, with weights assigned for responses based on question importance. These weights were tuned relative to the general distribution of each response. Platonic matches were made similarly but with different response weights, filtered only for location, and without specifically romantic questions.”

Now, everyone in the first batch was warned that they were a guinea pig. And yes, hilarious mistakes have already occurred. Here’s a quick breakdown of the shenanigans:

1. I realized that a large percentage of people have their photo pop up when they send emails. Some of you even used work emails, which really defeats the whole anonymity thing. I need to figure out a way around this for the next batch.

2. The age filter had a bug, so around 30% of people were matched romantically with people outside their age range.

3. When I sent a correction email remedying this, Mailchimp glitched so the replacement match appeared blank. As you might imagine, even though I sent another email within 3 minutes of this, I immediately got about 57 emails being like “MY MATCH IS NOT IN THIS EMAIL.”

4. Some people entered their gender wrong. Some people got into a relationship in between filling out the Typeform and receiving their matches. At least one person is not based in San Francisco or New York (???) and at least one person seems to have moved to Thailand in the interim or was always in Thailand???

Pandemonium. But I love chaos, so it’s all good. Here is some information that may be helpful to you if you participated in the matchmaking:

1. Check your spam. Matches may have reached out to you or I may have sent you some kind of update.

2. If your match has moved or ended up in a romantic relationship in the meantime, reach out to me and Sophia and I will see if we can rematch you. If you’ve already reached out to me, rest assured that I have received your email! Our first priority is naturally fixing any mistakes we are personally responsible for, and then after that we will move on to fixing everything else. Sophia, who is wonderful, is a grad student who also has a day job, so she’s doing the best she can. We want to make sure everyone can get a romantic match, but we can’t control things like matches not responding or their relationship status having changed, so bear with us. We’ll do what we can but we may not be able to fix some things. We encourage you to reenter in a future batch if we can’t.

3. Please feel to email me updates whenever you want.

Some fun reader emails:

A nice reminder that we should all check our spam.

Thank you guys for quickly alerting us about the issue.

But hey: maybe love really does transcend age.

I will be on customer support all week so please feel free to reach out to me!!