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Comment by corybrown | Hacker News Reader

"The problem is a better product is not necessarily a good business"

Hear, hear. This gets lost oftentimes when you hear the whole "build something people want" mantra.

Yup. It'd be trivially easy to make a better dating app than what's available - all the incentive issues for guys to spam girls go away if you have each side rank the other for who they'd like to meet, then pair everyone up with their highest ranked person that can't find a better match. Dating is a classic matching market, and there's excellent mechanism design for making good matching markets.

Unfortunately, good mechanism design is one of the least important factors for whether or not a dating app succeeds - what is important is whether or not you can convince people to use it.

ThrustVectoring is referring to the Gale-Shapley algorithm, also used to match medical residents to hospitals and in a few other places. One of the more interesting days of Algorithms class.

I've played around with dating apps, but never found one that was even close to being useful.

Finding someone you want to be around is such a complicated thing. Speaking as a dude, what these dating apps all get wrong is I don't want someone like myself. Yea, I verbalized I want this quality, and this, but in the end; I really don't know what I want. People change. People are not their profile.

The long term relationships, I had, were with people who were my exact opposites. People I thought I would have nothing in common with.

When I walk into a room, I just know who I'm drawn to. It has nothing to do with looks. It's just feeling I get. I don't think an app will ever replace this evolutionary mechanism.

Plus, some people just photograph horridly. I'm a Photographer, and there's people who photograph well, and there's people that don't. If I'm doing a free photo shoot, and the model is only going to pay for sent head shots. I always ask for a candid picture of the future client before I shoot them. Before I waste a day shooting them, I want to see if they have a chance in hell of getting a job in the future. (I make money off the sent head shots. Free studio time, but they don't get the negatives/RAW files.) Some beautiful people in person--just photograph horridly.

>The long term relationships, I had, were with people who were my exact opposites. People I thought I would have nothing in common with.

You are an outlier as far as research on attraction. Studies show that people are attracted to very similar people on all dimensions, except for the opposite sex.

Maybe there needs to be "The Opposite" dating app:

George Costanza Does The Opposite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUvKE3bQlY

The point isn't to put a huge amount of investment into finding someone - that's dating's job. The point is to quickly and efficiently schedule things that have a better chance of going well. There's an additional knock-on effect from being able to treat the dates lightly: if you're not a good match, you've lost something like ten minutes of scheduling and a half hour of date prep.

> I don't think an app will ever replace this evolutionary mechanism.

I don't know, we could probably get pretty close with machine learning and enough data.

Agreed, along those same lines: A business that requires you to execute at a scale you can't to be successful is a bad business.

Which is what I think when I hear $2B in Priceline advertising per year, etc.

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