Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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I found the best thing about Tinder when I used it was that by stripping down information and interaction to the bare minimum, it gets people face-to-face quickly with few established expectations, which is the best way to get to know anybody. There is so much about a person you can't learn through a web site or an app, and conventional dating sites worked very hard at getting you to invest a lot of time and work into interactions that only gave you a false sense of knowing someone. With Tinder you just showed up thinking literally only "I have seen a couple of okay pictures of this person and they thought my pictures and two lines of text seemed acceptable as well" which really set expectations appropriately and let you schedule a lot of dates without feeling disappointed about the outcome.

I can see that making a lot of sense for parents. The last thing they need is another high-pressure, high-judgment thing in their lives. Much better to meet someone and feel like it's no big deal if something doesn't click on either side. At least that sounds plausible to me.

It doesn't work with the reality of being a parent. There's no such thing as low-stress, low-commitment way of meeting people when you have an infant or toddler. At the very least, you need to arrange for a spouse to take the kid or deal with their retinue (car seat, stroller or baby carrier, snacks, water, milk, bib, baby wipes, and diaper). At worst, you need to arrange for a sitter, schedule everything, communicate all the baby's needs to the sitter, and be available in case anything goes wrong.

The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come." You're at a playground anyway, so if nobody shows up it's an ordinary Saturday morning with the kid. It's time-boxed so you can often get away without the snack/milk/diaper/mealtime accouterments. Scheduling is what you'd have to do anyway, and similar to what other parents have to do. This is how my wife actually meets and hangs out with most of her mom friends. They're usually organized over Facebook though; there's no need for a separate app for it.

Facebook is the Excel of social. It's the bare minimum that everyone uses, can be used as an MVP for any community, but can be beaten in a specific niche by a specific app.

> The closest to a low-stress outing for parents is "I'm going to be at this playground in this park for an hour on Saturday morning, and whoever wants to join me is welcome to come."

That's perfect. I don't think the perspective is as different as maybe I made it seem. On Tinder I always met people for a drink someplace where I knew I liked the drinks, or that I was curious to try anyway. If the person was a dud or a no-show, at least I didn't invest much effort and got something out of it anyway.

Another way of putting it that might resonate better is that finding someone you click with is an intrinsically low-yield process. At first glance, it seems smarter to try to improve the yield (% of good matches) rather than volume (sheer number of people you meet), but services that try to do that don't accomplish much if anything. At best, they produce small increases in yield while increasing your time investment and/or emotional investment significantly. I don't know if that describes your situation, but if it does, it might turn out that the best strategy is to accept that the yield will be low and optimize to make high volume as painless (logistically and emotionally) as possible. The equivalent of Tinder would be an app that provides you with a steady stream of new people to invite to the park. If they're not your next BFF, or your kids don't get along, or even if they're bad people, bad parents? Well, that's the kind of person you have to be prepared to encounter when you go to the park anyway, so no biggie.

I have a different perspective as an immigrant and parent of a toddler: Americans make it a lot harder than it needs to be. My friends in Europe do all kind of things with their little kids, constantly meet friends... Americans have a LOT of excuses but at the core they just don't prioritize social life above other considerations.

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