Why doesn't big data match people up?

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I'm much better at finding books than at meeting people. I used to think that the main reason was that I simply spend much more time thinking about books and reading them than I spend thinking about people and being with them. I thought it was just a matter of experience and acquired skills: I had just got good at filtering out bad books, and was still lousy at filtering out toxic or uninteresting people; I had a good radar for books, and a bad one for people. But now I realise that when looking for books, we really have a lot of external aids, like bibliographies, book recommendations, book reviews and ratings, etc. (so that a chimpanzee and two trainees could find a good one) whereas for people, we mostly depend on serendipity and personal impressions. There are no "guides to people" out there, and people don't walk about with blurbs, tables of contents and sample pages for all to explore.

What is annoying is that big data can tailor ads to your personal profile (though, in my case, it still goes massively wrong, judging by the recommended pages I see on Facebook), but it doesn't seem to be helping with getting to meet people like you. You still have to "search manually" for such people, and it takes a lot of time, and usually does not get anywhere. For me, my main "method" is looking for book reviewers that I find interesting and that have similar reading profiles to me (though on GoodReads, a lot of those have set their profile to private, so that one promising book review gets me nowhere.) I discovered two people this way, but they had both stopped posting years before, and since they had been writing under a pseudonym, I have no way to locate them.

There also used to be a feature on Facebook that enabled you to look for people who liked certain things. So I tried combinations of things I like to find soulmates, such as "People who like Star Trek and Thomas Aquinas" or "people who like veganism and Asperger's" ("liking Asperger's" may sound weird but that was the syntax you had to use.) But to my knowledge, that option no longer exists, though you can still join groups focusing on certain special interests.

So I guess the only "strategy" for finding soul mates is to post stuff out there, and hope somebody someday will resonate with what you have written, and of course, reading what other people post until something really clicks with your mindset. But so far, that has not proved very effective for me.

I know the Pandemic complicates things, but...there are also people in the "real" world.

Certainly it is reasonable to search online but it could be a good idea to also search offline.

Not a bad idea, in theory. FB doesn’t seem to know that I don’t want to buy sexy underwear, though. I’m not sure I want them choosing a partner for me. Maybe.

I'm guessing you'd be delighted to buy sexy underwear...if you had something appropriate around the house to remove it from.

I took a different approach and it worked for me. I traveled to the other side of the world and proposed to a girl who did not even speak my language. AND IT WORKED FINE. We have been married for over 45 years and she is my second half. We are direct opposites. I am an extreme introvert and she is an extreme extrovert. Together everything came together.

Social media companies like Facebook and others (big data) could effectively match people up. Connecting people is actually a really Good use case for social media, but there's no money in that so it doesn't happen. Think about it. The more connected you are to people in real life, the less time you'll spend on social media and the less data they can collect on you. It's bad for business. It's technically possible to design Good social media platforms that strengthen the social fabric, but that's not profitable.

Much more profitable to make people addicted, shrink their attention span to a few seconds long and make them be always emotional so they keep engaging. Who cares if it destroys the social fabric? The CEOs are making record profits.