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That leaves you essentially only dating people who are within ~10 minutes of you at some point. Anything more would be a big time sacrifice- a 5 minute coffee turns into 15 minutes with a 5 minute commute. If that person ghosts (as online daters will know happens ALL THE TIME) or is suddenly unavailable, or 5 minutes late or whatever, you're wasting extra time on someone you've never met and might never met.

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.

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If that person ghosts

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.

Nice pivot.

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_...

might have a ton of guys bombarding female users

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.

Yeah, but then the guys may be wasting a lot of time, waiting for women who never show up. Appearance is not everything.

Although this is why I continued that statement with "if it weren't for the AI being involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you."

Meaning no bombardment will be allowed cause the users (neither male nor female) won't be the ones sending first contact.

Agree, there will be some issues with what I'm proposing, but I'm mostly looking at it from an in-app time sink perspective. I'd like to remove any frustrations associated with using dating apps. If someone ghosts IRL, then that factors into the AI/ML as time goes on (maybe they can only go on 2 coffee dates per month for the next 3 months as penalty).

People have the right to change their mind about dating some random stranger. No reason to punish them for it. Its a fact of human nature, and we have freedoms. Best not to curtail this.

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