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Comment by vbtemp | Hacker News Reader

I had an idea for a dating app a while back, in which the basic idea is that you pay the service to message someone (above a free weekly limit of say 1 msg).

The pricing would be reactive - as popular attractive people get more messages, the more it would cost to message them, growing exponentially in order to limit incoming messages to approx a few a day. Unpopular people who got few messages would have a price that would go down to zero. This would hopefully solve the problem of women getting hundreds of messages a day, and men getting neither any incoming messages nor any replies to their outgoing messages.

It shouldn't be much of a problem to get women on board, as they rarely send messages anyway and it would always be free just to put up a profile and receive messages. And for men it would hopefully be a fair an transparent way to have confidence that their outgoing messages would be received and read (and have fewer immediate competitors), rather than just lost in the noise.

I don't have time for it now, but it's always been something on my mind.

Edit: Thanks for your comments. This is interesting. Lots of hypotheses worth experimenting.

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I can see where you're coming from, but I think in practice this is not a great idea. Even if it's not intentional, it's not going to be great publicity when you have an app that shows different women with different price tags.

I imagine it's not great either if, on current dating apps, the number of messages women receive becomes public information. The problem here is less that different women cost different prices to message. The problem is that it's visible. If you can overcome this there might be some merit to the idea. This is just me being open-minded though. It still feels like an icky idea.

You could probably also scale the price based on other variables as well. Like scaling on the sending side as well as the receiving side, or based on the likelihood the other side responds or something. I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.

> I would assume the main idea is to put pressure to limit low-effort, low-likelihood messaging from both sides, more than putting a pricetag on a person.

Exactly.

Yeah, this could help a lot. Scaling based on the past response rate of the sender and how many messages the sender has sent recently would make the pricing more relative, and thus prevent a basic enumeration of "prices of people".

It would also go a long way to not have these prices be listed on a catalog page, but only when clicked into an individual person, so it's less of a feeling of comparison shopping.

The psychology of these UI design things matters a lot.

On the other side it must be weird to think that the people reaching to you have gone through an auctioning system and were the ones willing to pay the most.

It would be all the weirder for first contact messages for instance.

Yes, I think this is by far the biggest problem here. I’m sure there are some women who would enjoy knowing that only those willing to pay the most, would be able to court them. But I would wager that most women would feel differently. Presumably a dating service finds potential mates who are good personality match, not just who are more willing or able to pay.

I don't think so.

The person would not know how much the sender "paid" for the "postage" for that message. From ANYONE's point of view, they are not receiving more than N messages per day, as N+1 would become exponentially, prohibitively more expensive.

This is not an info that you can hide from users for very long.

You will have people who start with a profile in both sides to see how it works. It’s done for fun on free platforms, it will done for research on any paying platform.

If they don’t do it personally they’ll ask friends that will spill the beans.

People will rant online on how much they paid for a single text sent.

It’s just endless, the service will need to be transparent and forthcoming about the system or it becomes a PR nightmare.

Also, the entitlement from men would be off the charts. Can you imagine how pissed someone would be if they paid $100 to have their message ignored?

They can always pay to express their displeasure—even better if a cut of the price is shared with the user (but that would introduce other issues).

Yep. I can already imagine The Guardian titles:

- Disgusting new dating app literally puts a price on woman. When will woman objectification stop?

- In this racist dating app it costs more to message white woman than black woman.

It will be a disaster, and the author will lose his job.

Ha! I like how these hypothetical complaints contradict each other...

as reported by Jessica Valenti (sorry I couldn't resist)

I loved The Guardian but it became "world misery and outrage daily, and BTW all men are terrible" in the last year or two.

I haven't been playing close attention but I did notice they seemed to have become more click-baitey over time. My brain has subconsciously moved them into the same category as "Huffington Post", fairly or not.

Those would be issues as well as enabling the higher bidder versus the best prospect (in her mind). I suppose it could be weighted based on both levels of desirability. I think a similar system without the social and implementation complexity would be to sell tiers of “super likes.” Like daily super likes, weekly (get only one per week, monthly, yearly. Essentially, you only get one yearly like a year, so using it conveys extraordinary interest on paper versus a daily like.

There are probably ways you could make it manageable and less morally repugnant.

1) Let people set their own price. Then it's not the platform valuing you, it's how much you value your own time.

2) Provide "auto-pricing" as an optional feature. Use an imaginary unit - call it "stamps" and provide ways to earn "stamps" on the platform besides just buying them.

"How many stamps should it cost for somebody to send you a letter? Or you can use one of our auto-managers - do you want to receive lots of letters or only a few?"

You could still have some kind of invisible credit score under the hood even for users that don't use the auto-pricer - people with good credit get plentiful free stamps.

Then you'd have to get into a whole Google-style graph-based-ranking but for people, which I assume sites like Twitter are already doing under the hood.

Of course, the problem here is that you'd have a plethora of alts to farm free stamps, which would clutter the search list...

Everything is hard.

And also lots of guys would freak out and get very upset if they perceived someone's price is "too high," which would make the experience more hostile to women.

I've got a better idea. Have a swiping system, but also have a simple indicator to see how often people respond to messages after first swipe. There could also be an indicator for how long those conversations typically last.

Or you could just make it extremely simple: just have something saying "this person is X% likely to respond after a match."

Or an opaque "conversation score" which is hard to game, but indicates whether or not they're actually talking to their matches. You could categorize them as "great conversationalists!" and then allow people to filter out those who aren't.

Of course, that could be gamed too but it would be better than just matching over and over with people who have no interest in actually talking to you.

Pandering to guys who would "freak out and get very upset" and "make the experience more hostile to women" sounds crazy.

Better I would have thought to kick such guys off the platform, raising the level for women, which would in turn make it more appealing for more evolved males.

Women tiptoe around male anger about being rejected 24/7, especially on online dating. Lots of "evolved" males still become scary when turned down and don't handle rejection well. There is no way to filter them out because they all walk among us, they're our friends and brothers, and sometimes us.

Every woman who's gone on online dating can give you a list of stories of creepy, scary and/or off-putting experiences.

My point here isn't to start an online debate about gender equality, but to say: one of the main things that would help bring users to an online dating app is making it safer for women. If the women come, the men will follow.

I too fear the boogeyman.

Deep.

This is a great idea for users, but the platforms would never go for it because it would decrease engagement. People would be dissuaded from sending messages to people who are rated as very unlikely to respond (and rightfully so), which would lead to less time on the platform.

I like the idea (not that I'm in the dating market) but I think any purchase option is going to end up matching wealthy men with attractive women.

Instead, how about a different approach: You get say 10 stamps/day. There is no way to purchase them. Any message you receive can be replied to once with no cost. Also, the cost to send to someone is adjusted by the cost to send to you. (Another poster suggested ELO ratings, which makes sense.)

You have a choice between occasionally contacting the hot ones or fairly routinely contacting those at your level or below. It will make people much more realistic in who they choose to contact, taking long shots means not having any shot at the ones you might actually get.

The app should be tied to your identity (although I wouldn't require real name use in the prospect-facing side) so you can't just create a bunch of accounts to get extra stamps.

>but I think any purchase option is going to end up matching wealthy men with attractive women.

Isn't that how it normally works out anyway?

Then we deploy it without any computer interface and call it Earth!

> The problem is that it's visible. I don't want to be that guy, but it's usually already visible, if the service has photos and allows at least basic descriptions.

Humans are incredibly good at putting a price tag to potential mates. It takes milliseconds to form a base appraisal.

How about remove money and visible numbers and instead make people watch an ad, then have a lootbox style reveal of whether their message is sent. The retry rate is limited by ad playtime. The odds are set as described above. Still icky.

Can I buy options on sending a message in the future, and then sell those options on a derivative market?

Yeah what the world needs is an app where people can bet you'll age badly and short your "conversation tokens". Capitalism!

Sell those tokens in an ICO to fund the app development!

Desperate ugly men will crowd out handsome guys who can get laid on Tinder without paying for anything, and you will basically have a service for finding a sugar daddy.

Fair point that I had not considered. However, I would not necessarily say desperate but may be risk-taking, strategic thinking, and/or wealthy (enough to handle congestion prices) men

The issue I see is that women would not find guys who had to pay attractive because it implies desperation. So the only women who would go there are specifically the ones looking for a sugar daddy.

Don't worry about that, men already have to pay for dating and it's a non issue.

> The issue I see is that women would not find guys who had to pay attractive because it implies desperation.

Every single mid to high end restaurant, every single successful lounge and a nightclub and the likes of LVMH disagree all the way to the bank.

Women still have absolute standards so, no matter how much the desperate ugly guy pays, his odds of success are still low, so the optimal strategy would still be to date around your level, right? Also, maybe the messaging cost goes down for men with high response rates (proving they are attractive).

The issue is not desperate ugly men. There's lots of handsome and wealthy men with poor morals and/or bad personality.

There is a reason movies don't price based on popularity. Because it sends a subtle (and not so subtle) signal of popularity.

People would rather do without than do something unpopular.

The people with the low prices would still not get messages, because who wants to message someone so unpopular that you're the only one interested in them?

I've always wondered about why popularity based pricing doesn't exist in everyday life. This explanation makes sense. Thank you.

Hah, just like in that Black Mirror episode, where the main character avoids interacting with the waiter with a 3.x rating for fear of being judged by others as someone of lower status (score).

Alain de Botton has an illuminating documentary about status (2h30m version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g, 5m version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iipn6yM43sM)

Yeah, one of the last signals you ever want to be sending out in the dating world is how undesirable other people find you.

"My idea of a dating app: Literally enforces class based social ranking"

It really doesn't take much to realize that this pricing scheme would exclusively benefit the rich and white, right?

Like for a successful, white, male, software engineer like myself I could afford to reach out to whomever I would like anytime I want, this would be heaven! But for someone in a worse social position they would be basically blocked from talking to more than one person, regardless of their looks, personality, or ambitions.

Soounds like OP just wants to formalize the existing process. Dating is expensive!

maybe its cuz i live in the country and not silicon valley, but my last date was a walk which cost nothing :) our second date we made a dinner together which also cost roughly nothing. we just like each other's company <3

That doesn't mean they're not expensive in other ways - It's enjoyable, but actively dating can be both emotionally taxing and just time-consuming, especially in the initial stages when you're working out if you like someone, or just looking for someone at all.

Not always. People find inventive ways of going on interesting dates. It will certainly put off those who are looking for someone who likes to spend money on them, but that’s an additional benefit.

Where did “white” come into it? I can see how such a system would benefit the rich, but would it benefit a rich white more than a rich black? No. Why are you bringing race into it?

Whites are favored on dating apps (e.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3244459) and the model proposed would make that division pretty explicit

how would it make the division explicit? Be specific. How would the pay to play messaging system benefit a rich white more than a rich black?

That’s the very specific point we are discussing, and my claim is that race is irrelevant in this discussion. If you have evidence to the contrary on exactly that point then I’d like to hear it.

Not some hand wavy vague generalisation on a tangential point, how would a pay to play messaging system benefit a rich white more than a rich black?

I don't think a rich white would be benefited more than a rich black in terms of sending messages on an individual level. (After all - if net worth is the same then a $ is a $) However - the part where they're responded to would be favored to a rich white instead of a rich black... but I don't think that would be any different than a non-pay system. And that's not correlated to rich white vs rich black - that's correlated with white vs black. :/

However, one could start arguing that because there are more rich white people than rich black people then the system favors whites more because whites hold more money to message people. Therefore, because of that, then the people who are messaging the most desirable will more likely be white (even if split of race in the country was 50/50 white/black - whites will be messaging more because their wealth on average is higher).

I don't think such a pay to message system should exist (even though many dating apps do implement a roundabout way of doing this - lol - they all implement some throttling mechanism that you can get around if you pay $$$).

I know, and I know. I was calling him on the “Rich white guy” racist trite.

This is hilarious.

Because white people are more wealthy than those of other races. That is a hardcore socioeconomic fact in the US. In pure mean and quantity.

How is that any different than current dating reality? White rich males (and females) are the cream of the crop on dating systems. Attractiveness is another huge driver, as a derivative of the prior two attributes combined with other more subtle ones.

This idea is simply an admittance of what we're all already collectively doing. Only difference is the blame is centralized to the app, versus spread out to each user.

If you don't believe me, take a look at statistics on dating app success for unattractive minorities versus the aforementioned "cream of the crop". We're all pretty blatantly <something>-ist when it comes to dating.

I absolutely love this idea. Do it. Ignore the grumpies suggesting objectification or privilege. It's a market for attention. Nothing more, nothing less.

Don't you think women would just not use the dating app though? I think most of them enjoy not having to risk approaching guys. It's also known that many women like the ego boost of getting all the attention. I have a hard time seeing how you could convince them to pay to get less attention and force them to make the first move.

They would not have to make the first move -- at least not the attractive ones anyway. They would just be fewer, higher-quality messages. All the cruft and messages that came from guys "firing from the hip" would disappear.

The idea seems like an engineer's misreading of women.

A woman getting dozens of low-effort messages knows that the next message she receives could be from her next amazing relationship. Great people are less common than low-quality pussy-beggars. That's just life.

Charging for messages just optimizes for the sort of loser desesperados who are even open to the idea. It really is just a sugardaddy-finder.

IMHO, a flat membership fee with manual verification would work better. Why do rich folks pay 200k/year for a golf club membership? Becayse they want access to a high quality crowd of their peers.

Yes this is indeed what some dating apps do.

Other users are free to message if you two are a "match", or directly - unless they are new or receive too many messages, to "protect their inbox". This information is hidden from the popular users themselves, who often have no idea that others have to pay (directly/in-app virtual tokens/premium subscription) to message them.

Sometimes there is also the mechanic that if you are popular enough yourself, you can message other popular users, working around the problem of the people you most likely would want to connect with being drowned out by the crowd.

Edit: I should mention, this was about paying for the _ability_ to message someone, not paying per message. I think paying per message is largely avoided by legitimate dating apps because it is mostly employed by scam "hookup" sites.

i mean it does solve that problem of excess of messages, but i think as a woman or man you would want the app to give you the best possible match or through some "magic" find someone who you might not have found through conventional means, not just the person who paid the most.

I would argue the "magic" is that someone considered the risk and cost of messaging you, and feels confident they found something to connect about

> feels confident they found something to connect

“I’ve got a lot of money and you’re young and have great tits”

piggybacking on saynay[0], you could make it cheaper to message people you're better matched with. that also helps negate the negative signal that jedberg points out[1].

not sure pricing messages is a good idea, but it's a fun thought experiment.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629467

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629401

Purely a thought experiment here: what do you think would happen if rather than making "ugly people" free to message, you incentivized the message? Pay $1 per message to a hot person, get paid $1 per message to an ugly person.

I wonder if that market would find equilibrium.

Edit: I guess the "purely a thought experiment" disclaimer got dismissed by everybody looking for a little outrage today. This is not a business plan, I just think it's interesting to think about these things.

Interesting idea, the floor does not have to be zero.

I swear half the people on this website are social automatons.

"Hey, you're so ugly people get paid to message you! Thanks for using our service!" There is no way this would go over well.

But only for a short while. If people message you (even if they are paid to), the algorithm will determine that you're not so ugly.

Paying people would just incentivize them to message people that they have no interest in dating anyways.

Yeah probably. I'm wondering if there isn't a way to incentivize actually taking the time to have a conversation with someone you're not immediately attracted to. Maybe like a conversation-length gate or rewards based on message recipient ratings of the message you send?

Alternatively something like a monthly allowance of credit and then an auction style messaging system would be interesting.

That's so easy to game this system - people will send "hey" to 10 non-hot people, just to be able to afford a proper message to one attractive person

I think the Tinder mutual swipe before message requirement solves this - women’s messages are limited by who they swipe right on (presumably restricting messages to people they’re interested in).

I suppose this leaves out the potential for unswiped men to differentiate themselves with an interesting initial message, but I suspect the success rate for that is pretty low.

> I suppose this leaves out the potential for unswiped men to differentiate themselves with an interesting initial message, but I suspect the success rate for that is pretty low.

Tinder kind of offers something like this: super likes which cost a small amount of money (users get one free one per day) which notify the target that they've been super liked and highlight the super likers profile.

It's basically a way to pay to stand out from the crowd. There are also other things like boosts which maximise the number of people seeing your profile for a short amount of time.

I honestly can't see anything replacing Tinder for the next few years. Besides the matching thing being a really clever, its biggest asset is how socially acceptable it is. It's made online dating "cool"

Just admit that looks are the only thing that matter on dating apps that push casual encounters. It's not hard to comprehend; sure it's a tough reality to swallow but once you realize where you are and why you aren't getting dates on these apps its almost cathartic.

I think it's an interesting model, one of the issues I see is that unpopular users who are almost free to message would seem "cheap" which could make them even less attractive.

This is what Luna was doing (https://www.meetluna.com/) if I recall correctly, with the added bonus that it would also pay out when you read and reply to messages. So, that would incentivize attractive people to actually use the app. In theory. They seem to have failed-to-launch, unfortunately (fortunately?).

You can't control people's affectional preference. People have a right to be attracted to the person of their choice. In a dating app, any consenting other who wants to be messaged should be able to receive it. Nobody's going to 'settle' for someone they're not attracted to just because it's a bargain.

Well, such mechanism exist in Badoo. I am not sure if it present in US and West Europe, but it's present in East Europe.

Beside classic like/dislike/match there is possibility to look who is around and directly message person. Depending how person is popular it could be free to start conversation or you will have to use "coins".

I thought about similar ideas, but I think it solves a problem (women want to get fewer messages) while ignoring the main goal (women want the messages to be from the guys they would like to meet). Once messages start costing a significant amount of money, only the truly desperate and/or predatory will be sending the messages.

A simple method of filtering that occurred to me a long time ago -

Make the service completely free, but require a credit rating above a certain threshold. Possibly apply that to men but not women.

If you insist on treating every man who wants to use your service like a john I'm not sure you're going to like the men you get.

It's obviously something that would upset people, but the point is that it's very significantly different than making men pay (like a john) and much more aligned with what people really want.

You don't need or want a filter to determine who is desirable; you just want to eliminate everyone who is completely unacceptable and provide a fairly large number of options that are all decent.

It might also be necessary to provide some sort of clever cover, so it didn't seem like the business was doing what it was doing. From a marketing perspective, I don't think it would sell, but from a results perspective, I think it would.

You assume that financially responsibility is the primary or strictly required characteristic women are looking for. I am a man, so I am not going to offer an opinion, but it seems like a very bold assumption.

Besides the challenges mentioned in other comments. This will probably have troubles with ranking new users, how to rank new users before they get tens or a hundred messages?

Little known fact about dating apps is that the churn is pretty high. Users try and leave within a few weeks, or a few months for the most persistent.

Or perhaps just remove profiles from search results once such profile received X number of messages per day/week/month. Or maybe based on unresponded/unreacted messages. Or something along that way where limit realistically allows to process messages.

> This would hopefully solve the problem of women getting hundreds of messages a day, and men getting neither any incoming messages nor any replies to their outgoing messages.

The former might be solved, but I highly doubt the latter would be.

That would just make it harder for attractive guys who primarily message women in their own league, which could actually result in a worse experience for women.

Or, make it a silent auction like in charities auctioning off dates. That way the current bid is shown just to message the woman.

How is this different from pimping?

I'm not sure what the benefit the service you are proposing is to the attractive, popular people.

Wouldn't this create a scenario where the most attractive people only end up talking to the wealthiest courters?

Women use those apps to boost self esteem, not find a date.

also put in blockchain, everything needs blockchain :O

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a bit better here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218608

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