VCs swipe left on dating apps | Hacker News Reader

VCs swipe left on dating apps

techcrunch.com

37 pointsjseliger46 comments

Let's be honest. Many "VCs" are just geeks who got a windfall on some deal they were involved in and suddenly find themselves in positions of power/authority. Just because a person suddenly as money/equity to invest doesn't mean they are Warren Buffett. Few people can truly determine the value of a product or company in the future (even WB). Just take a look at what post 2001 dot com era has done to the startup and tech world. Uber is still negative to an astounding degree, and countless other companies have been funded that have no clear path to profitability. And look at the SF real estate market. Briefly wealthy nerds have bought properties with little regard for their real value, artificially (or realistically-temporarily) driving up the prices. It means nothing to the few players involved because their salaries are significant compared to the masses and the properties available. It's the euphoria that has pushed the US into new and incredibly absurd territory which can, frankly, allow for the absurd political climate that we see now. This whole "VC" idea is bunk, because it is based on the "fake" (sorry to use the popular word) economics that have created never-profitable dot-coms that have been bought by barely-profitable dot-coms where the early players cash out while leaving the stupid average people to suffer the AOL sized losses.

I've started to get the same impression. It seems like VCs, as a result of one or two past successes, now attribute to themselves omniscience when it comes to choosing companies.

"Funding for the past year is down [to $47M] from $280 million invested during the prior 12 months. (Though to be fair,the lion’s share of that, $240 million, went to China-based dating app Baihe, a decade-old category leader.)"

In other words, when you throw out one outlier, funding actually went up from $40M to $47M.

Numbers ruin a good (or an entirely fabricated)story once again. ;)

There's presumably a good story -- Baihe -- it's just not the one they decided to tell.

Had to drill into the article to realize "swipe left" meant "interest declined". I met my wife right when Tinder and other dating apps took off so I missed the whole dating app wave.

You aren't the only one. It was not good form to write a headline that is only interpretable by a minority of the audience.

Considering it cause the GP to read the article i think it actually is a very good hook.

Counterpoint: I did not and have no desire to based on that headline.

I suspect people who understand the reference are not the minority of the audience. I've never even used Tinder and I'm familiar with the idiom just from reading tech news.

And now we have completed the circle.

> I suspect people who understand the reference are not the minority of the audience.

You might be right, because they've selected an audience that knows what they're talking about by using that headline.

I've never used the app. I knew it involved swiping but I never knew which direction was which.

C'mon, "swipe" was in top 10 words of the year 2015 according to Collins Dictionary

swipe (verb): to move a finger across a touchscreen on a mobile phone in order to approve (swipe right) or dismiss (swipe left) an image

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/05/binge-watch-20...

I wouldn't say Tinder usage and even understanding how the app works is a 'minority audience'

what percentage of the population do you think uses dating apps? And that is to say those who are not married, looking for relationships, and of the mind to use a dating app? Don't forget to include people happily married in their 60s, or with kids in that estimate. I would posit a guess in the very low double digit percentage, even in Silicon Valley.

To be fair, it's TechCrunch. It's not reasonable to look at the entire world population as a plausible audience. Heck, English speakers and people with access to the Internet are both minority groups worldwide.

It's worse than that. I'm a tinder user, and I understand the swipe. But I see the phrase "swipe right" so often, my brain automatically saw swipe right in the title. I read the on with a different expectation(that VCs were doubling down more dating apps).

Even those in the know missed it.

Left or Right? Why a Character's Lateral Movement On-Screen Matters in Film

http://nofilmschool.com/2016/02/left-or-right-why-characters...

These aesthetic theories are explored (finally, a film theory actually put through an official test) in a study conducted at Cleveland State University, in which participants were asked to, first, watch a scene where the characters' movements went from left to right, as well as from right to left, and then share how each video made them feel.

Their findings? The footage that showed right to left lateral movement made the participants feel -- bad. They responded that watching the footage made them have more negative feelings than the footage in which the lateral movement went from left to right. Why? It's not entirely or definitively clear, but if you think about it, our culture has trained our brains to view left to right movement as an indicator or progress -- of success.

----

Which Way Did He Go? Lateral Character Movement in Film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys8-a0yD-MM

What's the difference between moving left to right or right to left? The difference is everything. Let's talk about movement, and why it means more than you'd think.

[partial transcript:] The answer comes from time and language. In Western culture left to right indicates the progression of time. Our language reads from left from right. Books begin from the left and finish once we get to the right. In video games players start on the left side and finish the level on the right. On any line graph, time increases as we move right. In our everyday life, movement towards the right indicates time, progress and normality. And movement towards the left indicates moving back in time, abnormality and regression. From this thinking came the thinking among film scholars that people will interpret left to right movement as more natural or normal than left to right movement because of how our brains naturally process moving images.

----

Which Way Did He Go? Directionality of Film Character and Camera Movement and Subsequent Spectator Interpretation

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228448619_Which_Way...

Matthew L. Egizii, James Denny, M.A., Kimberly A. Neuendorf, Ph.D., Paul D. Skalski, Ph.D., Rachel Campbell, School of Communication, Cleveland State University.

Abstract:

Elements of on-screen motion hold specific meanings and contexts depending on their usage. This study focuses on how a film viewer interprets lateral motion from left-to-right and from right-to-left. A posttest only experimental design used previously existing footage from a short film to test movement in one of these two directions. Participants answered a short questionnaire after watching the sequence and answered items concerning affective and perceptual evaluations of the sequence. Data were also collected about factors the researchers suspected were possible causes for the effect, including religion, psychometrics, recall, media use, and handedness. After performing a factor analysis, an ANOVA showed a significant relationship between viewer evaluations on the Negative Affect factor and the two experimental conditions, such that right-to-left motion was perceived more negatively. Additionally the study found no support for explanations by religion, handedness, recall or the psychometric items (except for psychoticism).

VCs have never really had an interest in dating startups. They summarize it nicely here: "Often they’re strategically mismatched. VCs look for a loyal, active, long-term user base, and dating apps tend to attract periodic, short-term users. Monetization is also a challenge, as paid apps have to compete with free ones. There also are few deep-pocketed acquirers with interest in the space."

There's probably room for a service that doesn't just match people up, but helps to manage the relationship indefinitely into the future. A sort of dating plus relationship coach. I am also reminded, more cynically, of letter writing in the movie Her.

This is why I think Facebook is ultimately "just" the most successful dating site/app. It matured from facilitating college hookups to sharing baby photos with family. It's the definitive place to find out that your co-worker got divorced, that your high school crush is single again, or that your ex moved across the country and got in amazing shape.

The "relationship coach" is your audience of friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances who see quite clearly how successful your romantic life is by what you (or your partner) share (or don't).

I can't imagine many "matching" services/features that would make very good businesses. Unless exclusively focused on hookups, cheating, or escorts, but then naturally a harder pitch to investors.

There was an article awhile back about how ruthless the dynamics were for running a business. Basically whenever a user succeeds in finding a long term partner, they exit the platform, thus ending your revenue/engagement for that user. The better you are at matching, the worse your churn will be. This creates perverse incentives for paid apps which take a monthly revenue to keep users on a never ending treadmill.

Past articles[1] have gone into detail about how bad the churn and cost of customer acquisition is with dating sites. At best if you succeed at bringing a couple together, you've lost two customers at once.

[1] http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/

A whole season of startup podcast is devoted to following a dating startup and there's much discussion of the dynamics of the space: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/origin-story-season-2-1-2-3-...

The dating app I'd like to see/make is the one that figures out how to ban/deal with lewd men scaring away so many women.

I've heard from so many women how they tried for a few days and just got DTF (down to f*ck?) messsges they left discussed. I'm surprised any women actually say on the sites.

Unfortunately no good ideas spring to mind.

How about a way to report, "I don't like receiving this type of message" and "I like this type of message", along with an ML system that can learn which type of users send lewd messages, and which people either like or dislike receiving them?

The men who send DTF messages eventually only get paired with women who are interested to receive them. With smart ML, the site is what each person wants it to be. Beyond categorizing users, perhaps you can categorize the sentiment of messages themselves using unsupervised learning on the messages and user responses.

Or maybe just a star rating for messages, Uber style. Drive everyone who wants to send DTF messages to another site.

> and which people either like or dislike receiving them

That's key. Don't turn people (data) away - re-purpose them (it).

Bayesian classifier should be able to correctly categorize these simple overused messages, right?

The problem is, sometimes they work. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657508. One of the reasons OkCupid didn't ban duplicate messages is that often they led to successful exchanges.

There actually is, it is an app called The League.

They solve this problem by putting up barriers to entry, and aggressively banning people.

You either wait for months to get on the app, or pay a bunch of money to skip the line.

And if you behave badly, well there goes your 150$ yearly, prepay membership.

The disadvantages of this app, are, well, those same barriers to entry.....

High barriers to entry to a dating app would seem to select for desperation.

They do.

The League selects people based on their career, education and physical attractiveness.

Leaving a small pool of people who have all those things, and are still desperate, due to overwhelming personality flaws.

It is not people who are "desperate". It is women who hate getting message like "DTF", or hate receiving unsolicited dick pics.

Tinder, and other dating apps suck. So it is reasonable to want to have a more high quality experience, especially for rich professionals who can easily afford to throw a mere 100$ or so for a high quality experience.

Or maybe if all the other apps suck?

Its called going to a place where there are more women than men.

Bumble forces women to initiate contact, which greatly cuts down on the nasty messages from men. http://www.xojane.com/sex/feminist-dating-app-bumble

> The best thing about Bumble is that regardless of who I swipe right on, and who swipes right on me, I easily avoid those horrendous first Tinder messages that ask me for threesomes or whether I like dragons, and if I do, whether I want “these balls dragon” across my face

>I've heard from so many women how they tried for a few days and just got DTF

Women are DTF, but only if you're a guy who is in the top 20% of good looks. Check out our friend David (upper left hand), and notice how responsive women are: https://i.redd.it/2ci850jos81y.jpg

"Oh fuck yeah whenever you want"

"You had me at no ambition"

"Come over. Doors open."

However, when a guy who isn't in the top 20% of the gene pool opens up with those DTF lines, then women find it creepy, offensive, and turned off.

IAC seems to be doing just fine with Tinder. IAC had Ask Jeeves, now Ask, one of the early search engines, and they run About.com, Vimeo, and some similar sites. They keep lumbering along with those. In dating, they're #1. They own Match, OkCupid, Tinder, Meetic, Twoo, PlentyOfFish, OurTime, BlackPeopleMeet and FriendScout24.

IAC is a spinoff of Barry Diller's Home Shopping Network, moderately large, somewhat boring, and profitable. Not a bad place to end up.

Someone to approach if you have a working online business and want to sell out.

VCs also swipe left on Blockchain. I think we are going to see more "spaces" being abandoned left and right as we are entering the end of low interest rate capital.

The blockchain model is able to self fund itself. What is called 'traditional' is undermined by blockchain projects, so every body trying to be an intermediary blockchain service simply subsidizes the building of tools that accelerate their obsolescence along with the industry they were trying to disrupt.

The VC model is a round peg for a square hole in the blockchain space.

As a single datapoint: Melonport's offering was crowdfunded in two minutes today, and that was on top of the Ethereum blockchain. And you should watch what is dubbed the "ICO" space.

I'd like to see one vaguely like OkCupid, but with validation for everything.

A few things can be automatically checked, so they are free. Validating that you can send/receive email at a particular address is such a case.

Other things cost money to check, so there is a charge, and of course a markup. (this is the profit; nothing else to annoy people) For example, a credit score could be validated for a few dollars. For more money, they can fly somebody out to measure how big you are. Common things get standardized prices, but there is no limit to what you can ask them to verify. They can check property records, DNA, police reports, stock ownership, body parts, ancestry... the sky is the limit, from the mundane to the offensive.

Lots of exceptions to the rule though. This startup just raised a massive (private) round: http://mashable.com/2017/02/02/hater-dating-app/

Dating apps are kind of like social networking sites. They both take a tremendous amount of money to get off the ground and are very difficult to monetize.

Tinder was different because the goal is not to have a long-term relationship (and leave the app).

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