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Comment by there | Hacker News Reader

is anyone still trying to innovate in the online dating arena? i thought okcupid has had it pretty much locked for a while.

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3 years ago I built branddating.nl for a client; it was pretty innovative but not particularly successful (which was okay because it was intended to appeal to a niche). And right now the company I work for is building another innovative dating site for a different (bigger) client. So yes, I'd say there's still innovation in this space, just perhaps not at the scale of OKcupid, or necessarily with the same amount of attention startups in the US get (the above two are both Dutch).

OkCupid still has a bunch of problems. Less experienced men don't get any replies, experienced men get replies but often struggle to find interesting women and women, especially attractive ones get so many messages (many of them really disturbing) that they just can't keep up with them. In fact, a very attractive female friend of mine went back to one of the paying dinosaurs sites after trying out OkCupid for a week because no matter how many messages she got, she couldn't find any men she was even remotely attracted to. It seems that there's an awful lot of potential in creating a dating site that alleviates these issues, although it is a hard problem to crack.

Anyone tried a dating site that works more like a deal-a-day site? I've had that on my list for a while. Figured that if you give people 100+ prospective partners, they will hunt for the best (who might be out of their league) and get nowhere. If you show them one at a time, they might make a "would I go on a date with this person" choice.

HotOrNot tries throwing people at you in a sequence, but do you really make a proper decision when you know there are countless more around the corner?

Could work. Okcupid actually offers this feature.

On the other hand if the person is picky enough, they'll just be rejecting everyone they see and give up on the site after a few days.

i am! i was pleasantly unsurprised to see dating as number one! (read as "i thought it would be, and laughed when i saw it was"). the reason most dating sites fail is that people keep building the same site again and again but with different branding. i think the problem can be solved by completely changing the experience. that's what i'm staking my savings on anyway.

I've tried a few niche dating sites. I think a new dating site can work. However, you will always have the problem in the beginning of not having enough profiles.

For a dating site to be successful, you need to have lots of startup capital for marketing.

From what I can tell old dinosaurs like Match.com continue to dominate this field. OkCupid was the last site I heard of that people found unique in approach, but even that was mostly used for the fun tests and quizzes rather than dating.

I'm shocked that OkCupid hasn't been more in the discussion here. It's one of the sections on the OP's list. OkCupid not only found traction, but success in a vertical long thought dead. I have absolutely no doubt that something else will come along and do the same

The idea that just because a category has competitors means it's "dead" is quite wrong on a lot of levels. That's the beauty of the internet really. New ideas will come along and trample the old, and usually on a much shorter timescale than anyone expects.

Dozens of major dating sites have launched post-okcupid.

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