Show HN: Early version of a Speed Dating Community
fast-bayou-74365.herokuapp.com
fast-bayou-74365.herokuapp.com
Answering why is also important, but it's incorrect to assume online dating isn't a thriving market.
https://www.statista.com/outlook/372/109/online-dating/unite...
In the background, the AI matches you and sets you up for a quick coffee date at a location that's not far from either person. Twist: every single person actively looking for a relationship in each particular city must be on the site (aside from self-reporting, I haven't figured out how this will be done).
Essentially, you don't peruse the app, you just receive when & where notifications and then go have a 5-minute coffee to see if you have chemistry, which no current app can actually tell you.
As an example, I haven't been actively dating in a bit, but when I last was it was in a big city with lots of public transit, and my radius was ~10 miles. If I started talking to someone I liked it was no problem for us to work out a time to meet, but I was constantly interacting with people who were never within "random meetup" distance of me.
To get around the ghosting problem you could use GPS to see if the person is actually where they're supposed to be for the speed date. Essentially, people would get a notification when >x people are available in the area and they could go to a coffee shop and flip a toggle which instructs the app to start sending people to speed date them. If they leave the coffee shop or turn off their phone or anything else then the app would toggle off their availability and stop sending dates.
It could be similar to the way Uber manages driver availability in an area. Except instead of sending you fares, it sends dates.
The beauty of a system like this is that you could go to a coffee shop and read or do work on your laptop and toggle on your availability. If people don't show up to date you it doesn't matter because you're not wasting time anyway.
I'm imagining a toggle to alter your visibility too, between showing your general location within a venue, to something more playful (I'm wearing a green shirt, when there are two others in the room with green shirts), or even just 100% visible (here's my picture, I'm sitting exactly here).
Though, I'm now reminded of two r/dataisbeautiful posts [1,2], where - despite both having faulty graphs - the OP shows how s/he got the most dates when the women messaged first. Meaning, this imaginary app we're discussing might have a ton of guys bombarding female users, if it weren't for the AI being involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you. A search of 'dating' in the subreddit shows a lot more results.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7oqygb/my_...
2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7p73ch/my_...
Then perhaps the solution is to make guys be the ones to sit in the coffee shop and have the women decide who they want to drop in on.
The really beautiful thing about this is that the woman could see the guy and decide whether she thought it was safe to approach him or not without him even knowing she's there. She could just use the bathroom or buy a coffee and leave or anything else, just like any other customer.
Meaning no bombardment will be allowed cause the users (neither male nor female) won't be the ones sending first contact.
Basically, 60 seconds give you just enough time to really see if the guy/girl at the other end of the screen is cute enough for your standards. What those guys are saying is: "don't loose a whole date on someone who use a photoshopped profile pic"
Speaking about chemistry ... I'm hoping for an app that can use pheromones to match people. Or genotyping, or both (I suppose pheromones correlate with DNA somehow). Am I the only one who finds smell most important?
I just had an idea whilst thinking about how I was going to respond to this -- perhaps I could do e-mail signup but instead verify the user through the clearbit/fullcontact api. Need to look into that
The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad. It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be where they are.
OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.
People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot in the real world.
Like when a group of people decides to have some fun by laughing at other people who are hoping for a date. This could happen even on a "genuine" account, because intentions of people can change. And people don't act the same when alone versus with friends.