RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps | Hacker News Reader

RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps

dvt.name

220 pointsdvt368 comments

It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me explain why.

Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons.

So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult.

So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.

So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.

Wouldn't a simple rating system for dates help a ton?

Any rating system consumed by others is more useful for disinformation than information.

aka trolls and spammers will use this feature more than honest people will

If you rate someone positively enough you end up in a relationship with them and stop opening your dating app.

If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a negative signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or is excessively selective.

So a good signal is probably someone with few ratings. Which would seem to defeat the point of a rating system, as a five-out-of-five rating is now a bad sign.

Anecdotally, this does comport with my experience back when OKCupid would tell you how old someone's account was. It was far easier to make contact and have a conversation with a new account than with one months to years old.

An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

Truth is, an app isn’t going to solve for people’s insecure attachment styles and malAdaptive coping strategies.

Perhaps an app that matches based on symmetrical childhood traumas would be a hit.

> An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

What incentive does anyone have to keep using the service to provide such "feedback" if they find their match, leaving aside the creepiness factor of a service asking for such information? (And please, don't create such an incentive.) If they find their way back into the service, then (ignoring relatively rare cases) something didn't work out.

Communication within a relationship is a big deal.

So, a service that helped people gain awareness of their patterns and provided a mechanism for mutual feedback would be useful to someone who is interested in improving the skills of love and relationship.

There already exist apps that people use for feedback and communication in romantic relationship.

And, most relationships end (they all do eventually to mortality). How they end is very telling of the success of the next one.

The problem isn’t really the matching algorithms, it's that people lack the understanding and modeling of how to have healthy adult relationships, they carry a lot of unprocessed trauma, and they don't have a context or tools to work through those old patterns.

It's like making an HR app to match a lot of aspiring kindergartners to AI jobs or the space program.

> If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a negative signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or is excessively selective.

If someone is looking for a long-term relationship, two selective people who both find who they're selecting for in each other seems like a good thing.

(That said, ratings in this area would have a huge number of problems. Not least of which that outcomes would strongly influence ratings, and if both people are happy then they stop needing the service, so any rating will come from a match in which one or the other person wasn't happy.)

It's hard to have a reliable rating system for non fungible goods. Unless a person dated a hundred other people, it'd be hard to tell if the rating is accurate. I think it'd work if you want to find people to have sex with one night. I doubt its usefulness to find a partner

You mean like Amazon's rating system that's gamed and manipulated? :)

Edit: Now that I think about this more, I am not sure how a rating would work. "He's a 5 star! Would totally date him again!" Wait, what? Why would you stop?

I don't think it would, because you can't rank against a standard level of service, like "driver took me from point A to Point B successfully".

What's the standard when it comes to a date? People's expectations will vary greatly.

I think a rating system would be highly exploitable. Other than that, people seem to think in extremes. Either it's close to 10, or close to 0. Middle-tier doesn't move anyone, even though most are there...for example, how many times do you watch movies with 5.0 rating on IMDb

Additionally, I don’t think such a rating system would work absent some sort of collaborative filtering system. One person’s ten is another person’s zero. That said, if you had a date with a ten, would you want to share that information?

Rating systems don't really provide much value elsewhere for various reasons, so I wouldn't expect it to work well for dates, either. Especially not for dates, now that I think of it.

No. If someone was great, but not for me, do I rate them 0 stars? 5 stars? Am I feeding the algorithm or helping others? If I met someone, instantly fell in love, but they decided it wasn't a good match and didn't want to go on a second (or 5th, or 10th) date... then I can revenge-rate them to sink their future chances of being happy?

That's... an arranged marriage. You've invented arranged marriages, sans coercion.

Arranged marriages sans coercion is not an arranged marriage anymore, I guess it's a normal marriage?

The whole thing with arranged marriages is that the people in the marriage doesn't actually chose who they marry.

What solatic is describing sounds nothing like a arranged marriage. You can always say no and move on, no one is forcing you anything.

You're thinking of "forced marriage", which is a subset of arranged marriages.

There are arranged marriages where parents play the role of matchmaker and chaperones, with the kids having veto power. Or the converse, where the kids select partners from a professional matchmaker's rolls and the parents have veto power.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage

Right. All the arranged marriages I'm aware of were ones where the expected norm was for the children to acquiesce to the arrangement, but didn't force them to accept. They did so either to honor their parent's selection (or that of the matchmaker hired by the parents).

I also have colleagues that have declined the arranged matches. Their parents weren't happy, but they did it all the same.

No, I would say an accurate and succinct phrase would be "curated first dates."

So arranged first dates?

That's what a lot of religious community do.

> Alice and Bob are both bachelor and could start a family. Time for them to meet.

If you want your community to grow you have to resort to this. If not, don't come complaining when most of your male population starts enjoying their life while cat ladies resent them.

Isn't that what any community does? If you know two people who might be a good match, then you might suggest it. It happened in college, at work, at temples, etc.

Some communities do a better job of this than others.

Dating through work is pretty risky (for any kind of coupling) unfortunately.

Well... yes? I mean isn't this pretty much the feature of a dating app. I mean you still choose to go on the first date but you're there because you want the algorithm to curate your matches, right?

Yes, as is done routinely by mutual acquaintances today.

That's not an arranged marriage, it's an arranged pool of potential dates.

Same as how if you're on tinder, you're not going to magically swipe to a person not on Tinder.

It just so happens there's someone saying "This person isn't allowed to sign up for Tinder, they're emotionally scarred". Which will probably scar them more.

Add machine learning and it's eharmony

Can't say I am apart of it but doing it the way https://rayatheapp.com/ does make sense. Essentially, referrals from existing members. + looking a how many Instagram followers you have.

Using another app such as Instagram as gatekeeper seems to make a value judgement about people not interested in the gatekeeping app’s business proposition.

using instragram followers as a measurement of datability feels incredibly dystopian

Unless you used it as an inverse correlation. +15% if you're not on Instagram at all.

I wonder if having a public invitation tree like lobste.rs [ https://lobste.rs/about#invitations ] would help?

That way people would be less likely to give referrals to people they didn't know well - as you are vouching for them, and it makes it easier to identify sets of bad actors.

Because the number of instagram followers says so much about emotional maturity and mental stability.

Instagram influencer, paragons of healthy behaviors.

Part of me wonders whether dating is an education problem.

If we could make men* not be lemons, then maybe society as a whole would have better outcomes.

But how do you scale up "dating coaches"? (Would you even want to? People will pay easily pay four or five figures for such services right now.)

[* Gender is not binary, etc., but painting with broad strokes to make the example more concrete.]

Umm Why specifically men? How about we all learn a bit more about ourselves and about understanding and communicating with others, say in school... That comment makes as much sense as saying; ‘If we could make women not be lemons...’

i wonder if churches are historically one way of vetting matches

As someone raised and practiced Catholicism for a large portion of my life, this is hilarious.

Where I grew up, the Catholic Church (the only religion in town) didn’t really play the community-building role the Americans tend to ascribe to their churches, so I too find it baffling myself. However, I can’t help but notice that both my father and my best friend have met their wives on religious pilgrimage to holy site.

There _are_ social outlets in the church and sometimes ancillary to the church (e.g. Knights of Columbus) depending on how social your church is and how hard you're looking for social opportunities. However, I also get that Catholics can get weird about dating (at least anything on the premarital side).

Would you marry a non-christian?

Considering churches heavily encouraged people getting married for life before they were fully cognitively developed, I'd lean towards 'no'.

Humans are never fully cognitively developed.

And yet, there's distinct differences in around pre 25yo and post 25yo on average, to the point where childhood development psychologists use that as the current baseline.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194

i thought the same!

I think churches have often fulfilled this role historically; but now that job is served largely by colleges (especially those with a high-cachet brand-name). They're a modern 4-year debutante ball: the dating pool is filtered both by age and socioeconomic status, and most students are packed into tight living quarters, maximizing random social interactions and leading to emergent trust/reputation networks. There's a reason that "we met in college" is such a common answer from married couples.

Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson make sharp critiques against secondary-education institutions, arguing that signaling of grit and conformity is primary, while learning is secondary; but IMO the dating-pool petri-dish aspect of college (often subsidized by parents starting to think about grandchildren) goes under-examined.

That sounds like a damning indictment of STEM.

Both when dating and when buying used cars, I prefer to deal directly with the owner/person. There's no need to bring a middleman into either activity.

Clearly there is, as people like to buy certified pre owned used cars and meet people via acquaintances.

Perhaps some people don’t have the time or ability to evaluate a used car, or a life partner. Or they feel the broker reduces risk as they might offer some guarantee of the product.

Both when dating and when buying used cars, I require an intermediary to introduce me, as otherwise I am not willing to trust in the owner/person directly. My safety is paramount and requiring a 'middleman' drastically reduces the chances of malicious behavior by the owner/person.

Could you please explain this line of reasoning? It's not immediately clear why a middleman reduces chances of malicious behavior. Do you think the risk of malicious behavior could be reduced through individual confidence, judgement or leadership in the same way or differently?

Because the middleman is not just any middleman, it's someone in your network, who is vested in you having a good experience so that you continue to be valuable to them and vice versa. The middleman will do some due diligence before recommending two people to each other.

If my friend sets me up with a scam artist, they’re at risk of to losing a friend - and potentially be ostracized by their entire social network for it. So they’re a lot less likely to recommend a scam artist, because they have skin in the game.

Same if they set me up on a date with their friend who ends up being abusive.

This makes sense. Every person I have dated was via my social circle or someone we had mutual friends with. I don't date a complete stranger with zero connections.

> So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.

The reason young people use dating apps is to avoid this old world formalism.

I don't think your idea would get much traction outside of South Asia and the Middle East.

It's impossible to figure out real world numbers from hype, but my impression is that It's Just Lunch has made a ton of money in the US on exactly this business model.

Interestingly, their reputation seems to be again at similar risk because as they've scaled up across the country they've relied more and more on high cost being their gatekeeper over more direct contact with matchmakers. Or at least that's they way it seems from the many emails and calls I see to rejoin with "discounts" jumping an order-of-magnitude every few years from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars, to now thousands. It's rather extraordinary and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence to rejoin even if I was interested.

Young people. For people in their 30s, it's a different ball game. Lots of well-off career people panicking to pair up. I have no doubt there is a lot of money in that. Actually I'm bullish on 30+ arranged marriage apps. It seems like one of those megatrends that's going to hit like a tidal wave.

It's not arranged marriage by any means, it's just Blind Date As A Service.

I signed up in my 20s. They admitted I was young versus their median, but I wasn't alone and had plenty of dates in the few months I was a member.

There was a lot of appeal to the idea of not dealing with the usual grind of the average dating app, and getting something a bit more personal/high-touch.

(Though even then it seemed apparent that it was less high touch than it seemed for the cost, and the real gatekeeper was the cost.)

There should be ways to sell human-moderated dating apps (Blind Dates as a Service) to young people just on how dumb and how much work even the "swipe left/right" systems are. Figuring out how to scale that cheaply definitely seems to be the impossible problem.

I am reminded of a conversation with the CIO/CTO of an Au Pair matching service.

Their process at that time (2008) was to have a set of employees who were matchmakers. They would read hundreds/thousands of family requests and requirements and then hundreds/thousands of applications of the young people from various countries around the world. They would match them with prosperous US families that were looking for an au pair.

As he explained the process I began brainstorming ways to use NLP and earlier versions statistical analysis, machine learning or maybe genetic algorithms to take over or at least assist in what was a very manual process by those matchmaker employees.

He left for a different job not too long after and we never did more than a bit of brainstorming. And, I suspect that this matching is still being done largely through human reading and thinking including how humans "read between the lines" which can sometimes be so accurate and other times just reveal the biases of the matchmaker.

However, thinking about those kind of person to person compatibility and matching problems led me to reserve the domain name trupeer.me - the idea of helping professional career people find their tru peers in industry

I'm a young person (23) and I'd quite like the 'old world formalism'. Then again, I like going on traditional dates and getting to know a person. I don't really know any different.

I think that's what dating ring tried to do.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/

They were featured on a season of the startup podcast https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma

They shut their doors in 2018

I think rather than "lemons" dating apps have a very low signal to noise ratio.

Which isn't necessarily due to "players", violent men, etc.

This article demonstrates the same failings as the dating apps its author wishes to disrupt.

It does not discuss the safety concerns of dating, either online or offline. It does not discuss the cost of identity verification and other security measures. It does not discuss the revenue model at all.

Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar, assuming you're smart and invite them to meet at a public place first.

AM works [1] because it charges significant amounts of money and works very hard at background checks.

All other sites in-between fail because they want to be the 'Amazon/eBay of dating', wherein they stand up a classifieds site with profiles, refuse to charge enough money to perform background checks, and promptly turn into a lemon market populated by malicious actors who are represented as vetted and safe.

There is no mistaking what you're getting on Craigslist or Tinder for "vetted and safe". You're getting a complete stranger who you haven't seen in person yet. If that's your bag, you're set.

There is no mistaking what you're getting on AshleyMadison, either. It's what they say and they work very hard, and charge quite a lot, to ensure that you'll only meet safe and vetted people.

If you want to play the in-between market, you need to charge a lot of money for accounts and use most of that money to vet people's identity. You can charge less money than a specialist site like AM ("affairs only"), but you can't have any free users, or you'll just become a lemon market like all the rest.

It's unfortunate that AM is so focused on affairs, because their model is the only one that seems to be working as an alternative to the classified-ads approach. Safety and secrecy cost a lot more than Okcupid was ever willing to charge.

[1] Not that AM is any more successful, and in fact might be more fraudulent than the rest! e.g. https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...

Hahaha, I used to work for the parent company of AM and it is largely bullshit. I’d love to do an AMA about it sometime.

But, I mean, who would’ve guessed a company based on the idea of having affairs would have shady as fuck business practices? eye roll

Yeah, I’m super annoyed that no one else even tries. It seems like there’s not a lot of revenue in this model!

I'm sure I'm one of many who would love to hear all about it. Please do it!

As has been discussed multiple times here on HN, it is highly debatable that apps like Tinder work for more than a minority of men at one end of the age spectrum, and women at the other.

There are possibly therefore other gatekeeping opportunities to consider along with those you suggest and the brilliant parent "lemon market" comment, subject to the scale barrier noted.

>It does not discuss the revenue model at all.

This could be something that one could actually disrupt. Problem with Tinder is that its interest is not aligned with users who seek long term commitment. Tinder needs its users to stay in the swiping pool to create revenue. The users (at least some of them) on the contrary wish nothing more than finding the right partner and stop using Tinder.

An anecdote from Bumble app, whenever a user finds a partner and therefore stops using the app, the app notices this and starts to aggressively match the user with new partners. This sudden influx of new potential partners makes commitment hard for some users.

If the incentives would be aligned, the user would pay for finding the long term partner and for abandoning the app, instead of paying for super likes etc.

That’s what I mean about undercharging. If you’re charging enough for your service, you can deal with people finding a partner, you can make it dead simple to suspend/resume billing (automatically when they go inactive), you can do all these things that no one is willing to charge enough for because you’re charging enough to cover your costs regardless of whether you have many or few users that day.

Any kind of subscription payment misaligns incentives because the sooner they find you a partner, the less money they'll get.

Traditional matchmakers who charge a fee only after you decide to get married, have much better aligned incentives.

You pay for a month and find happiness and terminate service.

If they get one month of revenue and you are happy, they made a profit from you for one month and there are no drawbacks.

If they didn’t charge you enough to profit from one month of usage, that’s on them for undercharging.

What fee is profitable in this scenario, for running a short-term subscriptions business? $50/mo? $100/mo?

But if you don't find anyone - but meet enough reasonable people that you remain hopeful - then they could get two months of revenue from you ... or ten ... or a hundred.

With any subscription model, satisfying you immediately literally gives them the worst possible financial outcome - matched only by scaring you away immediately.

Incorrect.

The worst possible financial outcome is that no one pays anything.

The best possible financial outcome is dependent on your goals.

Do you intend to maximize profit for a 3 month period and then shut down and take your profits to the bank? If so, then you set up the app, sell 3-month subscriptions, and shutdown after 3 months. You will be reviled by all for your tactics, and you'll probably be sued for refunds, but you will have achieved the "best possible financial outcome" for your goals.

Do you intend to maximize revenue over a 10 year period by getting VC investment and going net-negative every month until someone buys you out for your customer database? If so, then you're competing with Facebook, and you will either succeed (because Facebook buys your dataset) or fail (because they don't need to buy your dataset). Your users will suffer the lemon market described upthread because you can't convince the VCs to spend enough money on human verification, and you'll find yourself mocked in the press when your cheapo validation AI rejects 5% of your userbase for having legal names the AI finds offensive.

Do you intend to profit by 15% from every customer for however long they are a customer, and continue profiting in this manner for as long as you have customers? If so, then you set up autoscaling, attract customers, and scale up or down as necessary based on their matchmaking successes.

What, precisely, is your "best possible financial outcome" for a dating site? If it is to maximize revenue growth, then you will fail, because as you pointed out succinctly, it's not possible to maximize revenue in dating without working against yourself.

Bumble is also really aggressive about showing you people who are new to an area. In theory this sounds nice. What this means in practice is that even though I live in a city with millions of people, about 1/4 of the people I see are just changing planes at the airport. On the flipside, you get more matches when you're traveling, so they're able to give you that dopamine hit when you're less likely to actually form a lasting connection with someone.

I always imagined the main benefit of AM was that “married” is an indicator of having passed some basic standards of behaviour - i.e. they are at least fit enough to have been married once.

It seems like a plausible business model too, since presumably cheaters aren’t expecting long-term relationships and will be back for more.

I think you're vastly over estimating the barrier of entry to marriage.

There’s noise as well as signal for sure but I maintain that marriage is absolutely a useful fitness filter. At the very least, at least one other person has agreed to enter into a long term relationship with them. It will filter out unsocialized basement dwellers, for example.

Sure, there are drunken Vegas marriages to strangers which fall apart 24 hours later, but I think those are the exception.

That's still a very low barrier to entry: sure, they managed to get married, but they apparently can't commit to a long-term relationship.

It’s a higher barrier to entry than a possibly-fake profile pic and a possibly-fake bio.

It’s a very high barrier relative to “no barrier”. (Also: remember that open long-term marriages do exist with the voluntary consent of both parties.)

What I mean is it only weeds out a few true negatives, but produces a ton of false negatives and false positives.

  Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar

Um, take a look at what Tinder demands in terms of device privileges.

Meanwhile, Craigslist dropped the dating categories a couple of years ago (in the US, anyway).

It might be a lemon market for older age categories, but that can't be the case for younger people. They've just entered the market, people born in 2000 are at least 19, if not 20.

Sub-180 munchkins are lemons too.

Lemon Market would be a great name for a dating app.

Gatekeeping could be done at scale with a web of trust model.

How about Lemon Party... oh wait

The lemon problem, as you highlight, is due to asymmetric information. The mechanisms you mention fix that: mechanics check a car before it is certified, the warranty as well as the value of the brand (reputational damage) shift incentives against cheating on that check. Similarly, in matchmaking, usually the matchmaker knows both parties, warrants that they are ok, and his reputation suffers if they aren’t.

A real innovation would be to solve this problem of asymmetric information in dating in a similarly robust, yet scalable fashion.

For example:

* Credible testimonies from ex-partners

* Certification of claimed characteristics (photos, age, weight, income, educational achievement, ...)

* ???

* profit

I don’t know how to achieve these - I’m pretty sure blockchain is not the solution, but something might be possible in that space.

Credible testimony is a big problem. People who’ve moved on won’t want to really talk about it much. Meanwhile those who haven’t moved on will replay every bad moment in their head and do their best to make that other person look like a demon, and some just outright lie because they want to take the other person down.

It’s hard to know if that person really was an asshole, or if the person writing the review was the asshole. The only way to know is to accumulate a bunch of separate reviews and maybe try some complicated ML algorithm on the intricacies of the messages/find trends in a person’s reviews (if everyone around them is negative, it’s probably not other people), but...if you start to get to a point where someone has an obvious trend, they’ve probably been through loads of partners, and people looking for dating and not hookups generally don’t want someone who’s churning through new partners constantly.

If you have a solution to this problem, divorce attorneys around the world would pay you for it. It’s way more valuable than a dating app.

If not even one of your exes would be willing to give a positive testimony, that in itself is a fairly powerful signal.

And for those that don't have exes?

This is a bootstrapping problem that must be overcome, much like with credit reporting or finding a job or renting an apartment, but I still think it's a bit far to say that even most people who have dated before are on poor or non-existent terms with every single one of their exes.

This certainly doesn't match my experience.

There's a very large number who simply cut ties entirely if it's possible. It's pretty much the most common advice given when breaking up.

Among the people I've known, people who don't mind interacting with previous partners are anomalies.

We should just offer unpaid dating internships so that people can build up a relationship rating before entering the market proper /s

A Bootycamp?

I can't imagine a world where exes get a say in my future dating prospects, positive or negative.

Jesus christ HN. Not everything is a datapoint to be gamified and exploited.

Not if you're VC-addled Silicon Valley drone!

A lot of people only have a number of exes that they could measure on one hand. It's not like credit reporting or playing fortnight where you can prove 'your references' multiple times a month.

Let's say you're just out of a divorce / long-term relationship that lasted for 15 years or more.

I wouldn't trust a testimonial from your ex-wife (because either she will hate you or, if you're such a great person as she says, why did she leave you after so long?)

And I wouldn't trust a testimonial from you previous exs, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, because you probably changed a lot since then.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, if I was looking for a long-term relationship, I'd be very wary of anybody providing me with many testimonials of ex-boyfriends from the last 2 years.

Self-disclosure seems like easy low-hanging fruit. I respectfully ended a relationship with a poly individual long before she did anything that I would have considered cheating. It became a question I asked on every first date, and I am now engaged to a mono individual. You might be surprised how many individual would openly admit that they are mono, poly, casual or what-have-you, provided that they are not discriminated for admitting it. I'm incompatible with non-mono sexualities and being open about that spectrum allows me to avoid "cheaters" and them to avoid "clingy."

Apps can then strictly filter according to those preferences (some allow disclosure, all have fuzzy filtering at best).

I don't think the core idea in the post would work, though. Scarcity would only be present in the app, genders that enjoy a natural abundance of choice would probably open the other apps after swiping left on everyone in this one.

All apps already have "self-disclosure."

That's the algorithmic match and the human match. I am X looking for Y, etc.

I've never encountered I am "mono" looking for "mono" and I've used many of them.

Brb calling my monogamous dating app “mono a mono”

It means "monkey to monkey" in spanish, so... good luck, I guess.

https://help.okcupid.com/article/59-how-to-use-match-search

> Monogamy status

And then of course every single dating site lets you write custom descriptions. (Though IMO it's fair to assume monogamy since that is the overwhelming majority. [1])

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/18/695731314/the-new-sexual-revo...

> Though IMO it's fair to assume monogamy since that is the overwhelming majority.

My argument is that it is actually not (edit/evidence: the prevalence of cheaters), as identifying any other way is met with being a "cheater" or a "slut." Encouraging people to truthfully and shamelessly admit what they are will likely be better for everyone in the long run. Granted, this is a societal problem, but many apps have had an impact on society.

this may be a low emotional intelligence take, but I've often thought that dating and hiring are fairly similar problems. you're almost suggesting that people submit dating resumes and cover letters for consideration. on the one hand it seems strange that we don't use even the weakest signals used by hiring managers when we search for potential matches. on the other hand, this would obviously take a lot of the "humanity" (for lack of a better word) out of the process.

for what it's worth, I've never really encountered issues with people outright lying or seriously misrepresenting themselves on dating apps. the people I've met up with were more or less "as advertised". I think the problem is more that a couple pictures and a short bio just aren't a lot to go on for judging compatibility. also in my experience, people tend to have a list of things they definitely don't want in a partner, but don't actually know what they do want. all my successful long-term relationships have been with people I knew for a while before I ever considered dating them. I never considered them an obvious match upon meeting them.

They are similar. People who deny this are overly romantic and/or inexperienced. Fundamentally when you encounter a potential partner or employee/r you are trying to answer the question "will we work well together"

Then both sides are trying get to simultaneously evaluate the other person (aka "get to know them") while trying to make a good first impression (aka "just be your self" and "act confident")

There's nothing shady about this and there's nothing sad or inhumane or unromantic about this either. It's just human nature

"oh but there are so many companies where the employee/employer balance is totally skewed" I hear you say?

Sure Google will make you run some 6 month long gauntlet. Have you ever tried hitting on the hottest person in a bar when the ratio is already skewed against you?

What about if you are John Carmack or Peter Norvig? Do you think they had to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard?

Just as there is someone out there who will find you the perfect match for them (but they just haven't found you yet) so too is there the perfect company/team out there for you too.

The problem is discovery. Imo tinder was best in a lot of ways simply because by being the one most people used, you had the greatest diversity by virtue of pure numbers

So you could find that person who is a liberal but eats meat daily and knits while watching UFC

Generally the point of hiring is to determine someone's skills, which is a lot more standardizable across an entire industry than compatibility with a particular person is. This is how something like Triplebyte can exist.

Triplebyte is doing the dating app equivalent of criminal background checks. It abjectly failed to find a match for me (despite passing the programming eval with flying colors) because none of the matches resulted in any sparks, to use the dating term of art.

Good relationships also take skills, such as: romance, understanding your spouse's point of view and what matters to them, maintaining the right equlibrum of intimacy and independence, being reliable, clearly expressing your own needs and making it emotionally safe for your partner to express theirs, conflict resolution, facing unpleasant truths, teamwork, respecting consent not just in sex, sexual communication, compromising on life plans, attachment style, staying mentally healthy, keeping the magic alive, etc.

You can probably test for those skills. I'm curious how.

Of course, you also need compatibility. But I have a hunch that's both overrated and easier to check for on a date.

A certain fintech startup wanted to build a side buisness dating app that verifies credit score matches. The idea is still up for grabs if anyone can figure out how ot market it.

>I’m pretty sure blockchain is not the solution

That's true to just about every problem, to be honest

I don't think it is impossible but it is definitely hard to do it "everywhere". A lot of the sites allow for free users to create profiles and this simply attracts scams and bots. You need to make it expensive. You need to make messages cost above X per month. I think you need to start like Uber did at first, it is only people who make $Y+ and maybe it requires a W2. I imagine it like what The Ladders tried (unsuccessfully) to do. You can later slowly move down market but you will need the density of a large city for any matching to work.

Personally, the best part of dating apps/site for me was meeting people outside of my social circles or people 30 minutes away. It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute".

Your other point is valid though, most people just want sex. That isn't a new phenomenon but these apps make new targets easy to find and those targets feel more isolated emotionally than they did in the past.

Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free with paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.

Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free to message and had paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.

> It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute".

Sadly this has gotten worse with the post-2010 dating apps / sites. You used to be able to filter by all sorts of things, detailed looks, education, hobbies, smoking,... Now you can only sort by age, distance and by online status (and the last two don't even work properly). It's all looks nowadays, which is kinda annoying since I e.g. would really like to filter by education and smoking. But I guess that would be to superficial and judging...

I don't think I completely agree with the conclusion though I did chuckle at the analogy.

Still, taking the analogy to its conclusion, there is a market for used cars at reasonable value ( as in, not all used cars are lemons; some are driven to church on Sunday only ).

This is the space Carmax fills fairly well. They do their vetting though. That might be the secret. I have no doubt there is a market for a decent way to date.

Full diclosure: me and my wife met online ( eharmony I think ).

"who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly ("

Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market.

But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]

> people with a track record of dealing honestly

A track record is also a red flag. In theory, the ideal partner shouldn't need to date for very long.

Can you elaborate on your theory? I dont follow the connection between honest dealer and low number of attempts at dating.

I've dated lots of folks who I liked, but did not find "ideal". Or they the opposite with me. They weren't unpleasant dating experiences. My goal, though, wasnt to find the first "good enough" match - I can be happy on my own. My goal was to find the partner I couldn't live without. It seems odd to assume I was/am a dishonest dealer based solely on number of dating cycles.

Yeah — considering that statistically, educated people are getting married later than ever (and therefore spend more time dating around), and early marriages are far more likely to end in divorce, experience on the “market” doesn’t seem like a strong signal.

“If they’re so great, why are they still single” is an incredibly self-defeating approach.

Both of you are describing the same concept :)

> In economics, insurance, and risk management, adverse selection is a market situation where buyers and sellers have different information, so that a participant might participate selectively in trades which benefit them the most, at the expense of the other trader. A textbook example is Akerlof's market for lemons.

> The party without the information is worried about an unfair ("rigged") trade, which occurs when the party who has all the information uses it to their advantage. The fear of rigged trade can prompt the worried party to withdraw from the interaction, diminishing the volume of trade in the market. This can cause a knock-on effect and the unraveling of the market. An additional implication of this potential for market collapse is that it can work as an entry deterrence that leads to high margins without additional entry.

> Buyers sometimes have better information about how much benefit they can extract from a service. For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite and hence, the least profitable customers. The restaurant has no way of knowing whether a given customer has a high or low appetite. The customer is the only one who knows if they have a high or low appetite. In this case the high appetite customers are more likely to use the information they have and to go to the restaurant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

Would it be possible to Uber-ize the gatekeeping? Somehow find, train, and trust contract workers to vet candidates somehow.

How big would your legal team need to be??

No it's impossible to reliably identify the creeps, rapists, and abusers that way.

There's an implicit assumption in this comment that anyone who doesn't want a serious relationship isn't a valid use case.

Tinder demonstrated that people seeking casual sex based mostly on looks is a legitimate audience.

Grindr even more so.

Grindr seems to be more successful than Tinder at hooking people up. Most of the problems I've seen from dating apps, revolve around the security a woman feels and an over supply of potentially suitable men.

Because Grindr is two guys....

> clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly

"Honesty" isn't a binary attribute and it might not even be that important.

But let's suppose it is, and you had a 100% accurate honesty test. What then?

Reject the bottom 50% of users from the app?

Match people on percentile of honesty?

Make a score that's a balance between looks, wealth, age, charisma, health and honesty?

It might turn out that honesty correlates negatively with other desirable traits. What then?

I feel like that was the original point of having to login through Facebook to access Tinder, you could see whether your matches had shared friends. The idea being this was a potential indicator you might be a good match or not

Dating is absolutely not a 'market for lemons'.

Also, the most highly trained academics are woefully unqualified to make matches. Socially attentive individuals in the relevant age cohort fare probably a lot better. A lot of women, in particular, are half decent at guessing, among the people they know, who might make half-decent matches, partly because they actually know their peers.

If women in particular are good at this. And I'm thinking as I say this...wouldn't women be the sex that pursues? I'm not saying men do better at this because they pursue/initiate. This just seems like a false statement unless I misunderstand what you mean.

The numbers are worse than that. Under 20% of people on dating apps are "date bacon", and can get dates, and the other 80% are losers.

Online dating is mostly IAC, which has 130 brands in the business.[1] Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Meetic, Match Affinity, Meetic Affinity, Affiny, LoveScout24, Parperfeito, Twoo, Lexamore.nl, Amoreux, Neu.de, Partner.de, Secret.de, Gencontros, Divino Amor, e-kontakt, Sprydate, Datingdirect, OurTime, People Media, Pairs... are one company.

[1] https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz

Additionally Dating apps like to do as if they represent the world — the girls/guys available out there — but e.g. certain types of persons who you could date might never even sign up.

So if you are e.g. into art, going for into a gallery opening might give you more "potential matches" than swyping tinder for a whole day – plus you got to see art.

It’s is indeed very difficult to build a good dating experience. I was working on a project that essentially used your bank account (via OpenBanking) as a gatekeeper.

This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match.

The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive.

Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address.

Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.

That should have been an obvious problem. How would want developer seriously think that would be an acceptable user experience?

Well, it might have been obvious but it was certainly not a useless exercise. Some users were really interested and wanted to experiment with it.

Transaction data is read and never stored, just used to processing matches.

The flow was relatively simple, link an account during signup.

The regulation was hard and expensive.

How do you casually link your bank account to some app? Is it common for banks to have safe readonly APIs or so in your country?

Yes, take a look at the OBIE [0]. You are required to be registered/regulated as an appropriate 'Third Party Processor' (TPP) class, in this case an AISP.

Then you can use an API aggregator service such as SaltEdge, TrueLayer, Teller [1], etc. (I'm not associated with any of these). Or you can try to roll your own.

[0] - https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ [1] - https://www.truelayer.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.teller.io

Isn't the main problem that women are too picky, and men are not picky enough though? So the apps only work for decent women, and very good looking men.

The biggest lemon problems can be solved by the people by just being careful. I.e. making a video call first, before meeting in real.

> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners?

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio

OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking.

> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.

This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.

As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors?

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt.

In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.

> Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

As a woman, I would frankly be terrified of going to that. It's risky enough to meet up with one man from a dating app. I wouldn't risk meeting up with multiple unknown men.

As a woman, what would you want out of a better dating app?

I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...)

That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend:

"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."

I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.

In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.

There have been a few attempts at a life coach kind of app. None of them done well I think.

I don't think the parent would be asking for such an app based on the other content, and sometimes that's the most important answer in tech: to know where it isn't needed.

Survivorship bias dialed to 11

Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.

Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc.

But--bottom line--without getting myself on the path to being a better adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before anybody else was going to be interested.

There are no "survivors" that never leave their basement , play video games and watch porn all day. Take care of yourself is relevant.

Hold up.

1. "Doesn't work for some people" is subject to the same fallacy as "worked for me." Not letting you get away with that one.

2. Working on yourself is very obviously the best way to attract someone else. Statistically speaking we get the most attention from those who perceive our value to be slightly above theirs (people tend to aim for the best around that they don't think are "out of their league"). Increase your own value and you will get more attention from higher value potential partners.

There's a little bit of a catch 22 in that if you work on yourself just to try to be more attractive you probably won't succeed. Things like genuine enthusiasm for a hobby are very attractive and hard to fake, for example. But if you become a person anyone would be lucky date it's not going to be hard to find dates, provided you leave the basement once in a while.

Tinder’s big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have to “like” the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages.

I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company, the Match Group.

I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.

So, every other dating app is owned by the Match Group? (Bumble, Hinge, Hily, etc)

Hinge doesn't follow the double-opt-in pattern. When you "like" someone, you can immediately send them a message, even if they haven't yet liked you back. I guess that's a big enough differentiator to not violate Tinder's patent.

I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.

Ah, true, it's been awhile.

However, Hinge is owned by Match Group :)

No, you definitely can't. You can attach a comment to your "like" but then it disappears into the ether, and only reappears in your messages section if they "like" you back.

That's not true, we can the comment people leave when they like before we like/match them back. The thing is that they can only leave a singular comment/message.

The Beehive (Bumble) hasn't yet been swallowed by Match Group, but Match Group sure is trying.

Great... And I can't use Tinder because of one joke I made about the developers shipping code on drugs because of a weird bug I was getting...

They (Bumble, but all same company) threatened to ban me because I called them dirty thieves, after I pointed out some dark patterns that they introduced as new features, and they told me they had no plans to revert them. It sucks when there's no stiff competition.

So far, The Beehive (Bumble's company) has managed to avoid being swallowed into the black hole that is Match Group (Match.com, Tinder, OK Cupid, PoF, more...). Though yes, the point stands that competition is rare and thus far every competitor eventually gets swallowed into the black hole. (The assumption for Bumble is not if but when.)

What are some of these dark patterns? I have a subscription to them but am thinking about canceling. They often tell me somebody's matched with me, but when I go to open the app, there are no matches in my queue. I always wonder if it's just a bug or a dark pattern to get you to open the app.

Pretty sure this is just crappy microservice engineering where the microservices disagree with each other. I always see the match counter being wrong, matches I declined linger anywhere between an hour and a day...

I just disable all notifications from these apps.

They used to show me how many coins I had purchased at all times, and they used to have a round yellow button on my profile that I'd press to buy more coins when my balance was low. First, they removed the coin balance, and I can only see how many coins I have left for a split second when I spend a coin. Then, They replaced the button to buy coins with a button that looks almost the same (exactly the same at a glance) with the Spotlight button, which costs 2 coins. So, when I noticed that I was running low on coins (on one of the rare times I could actually catch the flash balance), I pressed the button to buy more, and had 2 coins deducted form my account instantly. Of course, considering muscle memory, that happened a couple of times. So, after a few messages explaining the situation and not getting any recourse whatsoever, I called them out and they didn't like it.

Could be they just unmatched you.

In an effort to disassociate Tinder with my Facebook, I use my phone number to create an account on it.

I wonder if it matters, since apparently they use Facebook's SMS verification system.

The "both people have to like" feature was on Hot-or-Not close to 15 years ago, Tinder didn't create it.

Hot or Not had a matching feature? I legitimately never knew this.

Then again I only spent enough time on the site to grok “ok this exists” and never going back.

The parent did not say that Tinder created this, only patented it.

Prior art (ie publicly published examples) invalidates patents, at least in the western world. To that end, if you invent something that you don't intend to patent you should publicly write about it if possible.

You can always review the claims of the Tinder patent. I suspect the application of the "both people have to like" concept is applied differently.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9733811

The parent literally called it "Tinder’s big innovation"...

The claims of the patent [0] are extremely specific. I doubt a competing company would be unable to get around this patent.

[0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9733811

I question the enforceability of such a patent - it seems like a mere technicality of phrasing. For example, on Facebook you send someone a friend request which has to be agreed to by them before additional functionality is unlocked. I don't see how applying such a standard interaction mechanism to a dating app in particular is in any way innovative; it seems analogous to the online shopping cart patent that Newegg invalidated back in 2013.

More likely, Tinder intends to use the mere threat of court proceedings to stifle any potential competition.

Edit: Another comment linked to the patent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408610), and it's... really verbose and complicated (as usual). It seems to revolve around having the aforementioned request-response procedure, while simultaneously using the requests and responses to determine other likely matches to present to the participants. I would summarize it as "Netflix ranking applied to dating app user requests", and remain highly skeptical of any supposed innovation. One thing is for certain though: paying a law firm to dissect this thing and argue it in court would cost you a small fortune.

What’s more unbelievable, is the fact that the US Patent Office actually granted them such a patent.

This is a good example of a bad patent.

Now, this will actually encourage shell companies to file all kinds of fake patents, as defensive patents, and thus block anyone from using them.

So for example, the next time another medium, like VR or AR, comes around, then someone enterprising enough will try to think through all the scenarios, and file all kinds of fake patents.

Like for some random example, someone files a patent to recognize your eye blinking, to trigger, a control reaction like clicking a box. Or maybe if you roll your eyes, this will signify that you declined something.

Perhaps someone should create these types of patents just to troll the Patent Office. That way, maybe someone in a position of power, can actually enact change to end this patent nonsense.

> on Tinder, men outnumber women by 9 to 1.

> Women just aren’t using these apps

Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?

Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.

> The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app.

I would say there is a quite a bit of evidence that would corroborate this thesis.

The majority of dating is moving online:

https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... (Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds)

But female participants aren't finding what they want:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 (Mismatches in the Marriage Market) referenced by:

https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-m... (Women are struggling to find men who make as much money as they do)

> “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educat... (Better-educated women ‘find it harder’ to meet partner)

> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv... (The Cost Of Thriving)

> While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things)

The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.

> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners

Possible? Maybe. Interested? Hardly.

That’s not what the data shows.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/mar/02/evolution.ge...

Have you tried? I'm in my 30s having the easiest dating life and I can totally understand the results if that one study pointing out that men peak in attractiveness at like 36.

If you aren't finding dates in your 30s, then I doubt you were ever successful with women, assuming you didn't just let yourself go.

> Have you tried?

Not sure what other response is appropriate here other than "lol yes."

> I doubt you were ever successful with women

Arguably true, at least in that there doesn't seem to be some program of personal activity I can follow that reliably results in dates leading that lead to a relationship.

Arguably false, in that periodically something just happens (sometimes through my efforts, more often not) and there's a strong connection and it grows into a months or years long relationship.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not saying I find it impossible. I'm saying I find it so hard to relate to "an “endless supply” of possible partners" that I'm inclined to look on it pretty skeptically. If it were just me, then I'd consider the likelihood that I'm a bit of a niche good with some niche tastes, or I just need to work through some dating equivalent of _Cracking the Coding Interview_, but I know from conversations with my friends over the last 10 years that I'm far from the only one who's perceived their mid-to-late 30s dating life through a lens of non-abundance.

Girls who’d never talk to me at 22 are stalking me at 32. You gotta work out tho

Lifting gains convert to dating gains in my experience. Property owner, stable job, financially secure, in shape in your 30s and you’re punching above most of the unpaired competition.

My anecdata was that I found a great many women on Tinder and other sites where I live (Washington, DC). Not fake profiles; I had plenty of dates. I like to think that I'm a good catch, but I don't think I'm exceptionally physically attractive, and am certainly not wealthy. (I was working for a startup and often made no money at all.) I don't believe I was doing anything other men couldn't replicate.

I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)

Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.

> Washington, DC

DC-NoVA area is known for having a surplus of women relative to men.

Basically, every dating mechanism works for men in that area.

This, of course, points out that it's simply the availability ratio that changes the behavior of women.

DC is a great place (for heterosexual men) to find dates - I found the ability to get dates via apps to be highly variable depending on the city (maybe M/F ratio, but probably a bunch of factors).

If you want to see this for yourself just change your city in the apps from SF to NYC or DC and swipe. It's pretty obvious and dramatic.

I'm curious if this imbalanced market effect happens with gay demographics anywhere? Are certain cities known to be 'bad' for certain gay demographics other than for homophobia reasons. Like not homophobic, but still bad for some reason?

well, that is awfully low bandwidth in an internet-connected world. you may only be exposed to 500 potential mates that way. in a market like NYC, merely being on tinder would probably expose you to orders of magnitude more than that! makes sense to leverage tech to parlay your assets (e.g. attractiveness/mating value) to reach a wider audience in order to get highest possible match you can.

I believe this is the root problem of all dating "apps" or websites, assuming the goal is for two people to find each other and settle down.

Without computers, databases, and the internet, you might only have so many chances to meet someone, and so you are mentally ready to accept someone that may be a few bands "below" you. And you might grow to like them.

But with so much of the cost and friction gone, and a seemingly infinite number of chances to meet someone, especially in bigger cities, that mentality is gone. Why accept someone who might be okay for you when you can aim higher? And if everyone has this mentality, then you can see where the market goes.

I also think there is an issue with wealth/income gap and easy availability of data rendering certain people who aren't seen as able to be economically viable mates to have a value so low as to not be worth dating period.

If one’s goal is to settle down, why spend time dating someone who has any deal-breaker (whether religious, smoking/drugs, economic, or any other)?

Because you have to compromise? That’s my point, is that the infinite selection offered by online dating makes it seem like you don’t have to compromise, whereas the years go by and you keep losing value as you age.

Not that there’s anything wrong with dealbreakers, and maybe they are warranted, but it all depends how much you want to get married.

This gets a little into the 'things you can't say' territory, but online dating just isn't very good for most heterosexual men due to selective pressures (it's probably better when the population is closer to an even split, but even then there are problems). This does change as men get older and there's less competition (online dating is bad for men in their 20s and good in their 30s).

Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data you can look at to see some of the problems.

One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages (making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the response graph itself.

There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around 4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.

For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.

For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills required for success.

For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression. These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).

If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part is less important.

I don't know... I'm absolutely nowhere near the top 10% of male attractiveness, but I've had good luck getting dates on dating sites. From talking with many women about their experience on such sites, I think that attractiveness is far less important than behavior -- the vast majority of men that women hear from, it seems, are very poorly behaved.

Where do you live? I think city is highly variable. It also gets easier as you get older (for heterosexual men) which could be a factor.

This is the kind of thing where you can’t trust what people say since what they say and how they act are very different (the dataclysm book is good for this).

For the matching case if you get zero matches you can’t progress to dates (or even chat). The selection happens prior to that.

You're probably right though that it's not only attractiveness, there's also a selective pressure where men are generally okay dating 'down' economically and women are generally not. While more women become economically successful (good thing) it further constrains the availability on the dating market. The only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.

Diana S. Fleischman (evolutionary psychologist) and Julia Galef discuss some of this and other things on this podcast which I thought was pretty good: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-216-diana-fleis...

My experience has covered a number of different areas (in the US), and I've used such sites occasionally for a couple of decades now. I've not noticed a significant difference between areas or age ranges.

But I'm working with male sample size of one (me), and a female sample size (women I've talked about this stuff with) of a few dozen, so this isn't anything like a reliable study. It's just anecdotal.

> The only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.

Pictures of exotic vacations and the gear they’re wearing are plenty evidence of economic strength. You have time to go on far flung vacations and money to spend on them and the gear.

Similar here. Nowhere near the top in attractiveness; had pretty good experiences on match; ended up meeting my wife playing beer league level softball, but match absolutely “worked”.

In spending time with female friends who were doing online dating, it became fairly clear to me how easy it was to be in the top 10% of articulate and interesting in correspondence.

How do you know you're not near the top in attractiveness? Maybe you actually are since your experience tends to be good/positive.

> it became fairly clear to me how easy it was to be in the top 10% of articulate and interesting in correspondence.

So much this.

Or, as a friend of mine once quipped (about a different thing): it's not that we're so great, it's that the bar is so low.

How do you know you're nowhere near the top 10%?

By talking with women. According to the majority of them, I'm very average-looking. Fortunately, most women don't really prioritize physical attractiveness -- they tend to value personality-related things instead.

I suspect that’s actually not a good indicator. What people say and how they act are not the same for this.

You may not be in the top 1%, but could still easily be in the top 10% - 20%. If the selection only happens in that range then I could see someone on the lower end of the top 10% being called “average” (if the selectors only consider the top % as the entire range).

For online dating the data doesn’t really agree with the prioritization on personality for initial contact. Though this is still highly variable depending on age and the city you’re in.

If you don't look that bad from a quick glance, it's generally still possible to get dates. But while a guy might be excited about that date he has next Wednesday night, there are definitely plenty more women who can meet up with different people most nights of the week if they wanted to.

So from that data, which I have no reason to doubt, women have the edge, especially more attractive women. Men have a distinct disadvantage which was also apparent from the gender skew.

If women have an edge there, especially more attractive ones, I would expect more would join to gain that advantage. Likewise, men having such unfavorable odds, I would expect they would drop out. But AFAICT, the gender skew has remained pretty static across time and across apps.

So why don't women (especially more attractive ones) join to get the advantage and why do men keep joining if the odds are against them? Do the apps repel (attractive) women? Do they even need the advantage? I would expect attractive women don't have the problem of needing to find dates but maybe not.

Maybe attractiveness is just a relative thing and you need to have such a gender skew for women to filter out who is attractive and who isn't.

Purely speculative and something I haven't thought that much about, but my immediate answer is that men are more desperate and trying everything they can.

Women have an easier time getting attention/dates in general so fewer of them bother with online dating at all.

> I would expect more would join to gain that advantage. Likewise, men having such unfavorable odds, I would expect they would drop out

The issue is inelastic demand, especially in the serious dating/non-hookup category.

Most people are looking for 1 mate; there's little desire to continue past finding one, and little desire to quit when not finding one.

So point-in-time membership of dating sites tends to amplify existing skews.

> Do the apps repel (attractive) women?

The stereotype is that men are attracted to beauty and women to power. The former is inherently more readily represented on a dating app.

> bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC)

Really? Considering the continual emphasis on social issues I hear out of the Bay Area, I thought it would have been far more evenly distributed than other parts of the country.

Or maybe that's just a HN bubble.

Tech industry is male skewed and immigrant friendly, so there is a constant import effect of economically attractive men with usually not as good social skills.

The Tech Industry is the big industry of the bay area, like Hollywood in LA, Finance, Journalism & Fashion in NYC, Law & Non-Profits in DC or Oil in Houston so that causes an issue in the singles market.

On top of that, a large amount of the hiring is in the South bay, while the singles tend to live in SF or the north east bay.

NYC is known for being female skewed, because fashion & journalism is probably female skewed and finance is neutral. DC is probably female skewed because law is neutral and non-profits are female skewed and so on.

If you look at maps of female/male ratios of various age cohorts, you will also notice that the entire west coast is male skewed in the author's age cohort.

Thanks for explaining! Makes sense.

So many words to say the simple truth, women are not interested in technology and don't want to work at those jobs.

Also, the immigrants got perfectly good social skills, the only problem is that American women, especially from the left side of the political map, are racist. Men don't really care and will date anyone, conservative women usually grow up in lower socio economic parts of the country and are less judgmental. But good luck finding a white lefty woman to date if you are Indian or Asian. Not saying it never happens, but it is pretty rare.

I think your reading too much into what I said.

I was saying immigrant friendly to denote that the industry imports a lot of people, more than a less immigrant friendly industry, say hollywood. It creates a constant inflow of new single people more than other industries.

Us software people in general have bad social skills on average compared to say, hollywood or fashion people.

And I brought up how other industries that are more gender skewed in the other direction create an imbalance in the other way on the dating market. It wasn't passing judgement about the why of the gender skew.

My focus was about explaining the simple supply/demand math that causes issues on the west coast.

http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/

women control natural selection since birth control, of course they don't need these apps. It is the same for night clubs etc... no entry fee for women, some dating apps do the same, you have to pay if you're a dude, but it is free if you're a female.

An average looking women will never have any issue finding someone to date, an average looking guy on the other hand...

I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating, the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely broken.

It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - at minimum - compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two.

It's the only business model worse than cigarettes.

I lay out some more detail in a post here: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem?

Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.

That only matters if the management looks beyond the next quarterly report.

> Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem?

I don't think you can extrapolate the case for a dating site to all businesses, especially to cases of tangible goods. A car salesman doesn't make a dime until I buy a car.

Dating sites are an interesting business because a happy customer is one that is no longer using their product. So how do you monetize that?

If you charge a one-time up-front cost, and a paying customer uses the site for months and never has success, then you end up with a disgruntled customer.

If you charge a monthly subscription, then you get a perverse incentive to not please your customer, or only please them enough to keep paying, because as soon as they enter a relationship, they stop paying.

Only charging after some sort of measurement of success (Like marriage) would be impossible to enforce.

Here's an idea.

Give users an option to put $1,000 in limbo. The condition being, if you date/marry someone for 2+ years that you met on the app, the app gets to keep that money.

In return, you get a badge on your profile. It's a certified stamp that your "money is where your mouth is" and that user either as plenty of disposable income, or is intent on long term commitment.

^ Both are positive signs for the prospective market.

From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps.

> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate.

I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.

This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users.

The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education.

At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.

Agree this is one of the most critical points after a lot of thought about this industry.

I think I’ve pretty much solved it, and am looking for a mobile engineer to partner with. I’ve got a lot of functionality mapped out.

Shot in the dark to find someone, but if anyone is interested, email is in profile.

Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?

There could well be an untapped market of women who aren't interested in the atmosphere that comes with the unbalanced gender ratio, even if it means being at a personal disadvantage in the process.

Considering that we can't come up with a good reason or show how this alternate app is better/more useful, I'm going to cast some doubt that there is an untapped market of women who want to give up value for some intangible factor.

I'm actually on board with the idea of boutique dating apps that limit population and interactions in this way. I would try one that gave discounts and date ideas ("-$5.00 discount at this particular restaurant, oh, and there's 4 tables left for tonight, reserve a table for your date now through our app").

If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place.

For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult.

These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.

Not sure “let’s go to this restaurant, I’ve got a coupon!” is a great look for a first date.

The app would offer the coupon to both simultaneously, so it’s a incentive to actually meet (fancy dinner for 2 for $30? Heck I’ll give you a shot)

There already are plenty of exclusive dating apps.

You just arent cool enough to have been invited to one yet.

Clearly 99% of the population isn't either... Why make this an app or a startup or something if you're only going to invite 500 people? Why not just play matchmaker yourself in whatever city?

Even with a 1:1 ratio, 20% of the men would attract 80% of the women. In any dating pool, online or otherwise, the math is just generally bad for the vast majority of men attempting to attract a partner. See:

https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t...

I am skeptical of this much pessimism from the male point of. view. In the op’s post, there is a graph showing women peaking at 60% marriage rate in their 30’s, where as men leave them behind in the 40’s and 50’s. So a good 40% of women aren’t getting their pick of even the bottom 80% of men. i think it’s more like the top 60% of men and women compete for each other and are largely successfully. The bottom 40% of each hold out for as long as they can for the top 60%, and some of them finally succeed (mostly men with accumulated power in middle age).

Also there are pressure release valves. Some people settle for a sexless marriage and simply get sex via prostitution. Men can sometimes find women from poorer countries.

Finally I think what should happen is, make a #singleAndLooking hashtag on twitter and set it on when you are in the market. Let twitter make the hashtag searchable and filterable by city.

How do you explain the rise of men being married? Is it men dying earlier than women or is it older men being able to marry a younger woman? In the latter case, men are at a disadvantage in the market because some men will take two or more women off the market.

More financial stability with age. They only marry one woman at a time so I don’t understand your last concern.

Easy: the dating app pre-screens the men.

I hate the implication that only men are bad actors here though.

Yeah, exactly. I've had a few experiences with women who misrepresented various things and were clearly not acting in good faith.

I’m not saying they are, I’m saying they’re surplus.

Not only that. How does he select the men who are allowed to use the app?

If the app does a good enough job selecting the men, that screening process delivers value to the women.

What does "good enough" even mean in this case?

Filtering out the same men the women themselves would choose to filter out.

But women don’t filter out the same people.

The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.

If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.

I'm skeptical that an atmosphere where men generally get more attention will make them put more effort forward.

Well, it may well get them to put effort into using VPN or other means to circumvent the per-account limits.

Theres a dating app kind of like the idea you are proposing: Once. You get one (!) suggestion per day and you can decide whether to like or dislike. The basic idea is quality over quantity. But as such an app is not good at guessing what you like, you mosten often just press the dislike button.

The chance that you'd want to date a given randomly selected person, or even an algo-selected person, is small. The "Once" app sounds like navigating deep space in hope of one day reaching a habitable planet.

If you don't expect 30 matches a month to include a reasonable flow of date-worthy people, I think you've encountered exactly the problem the app is trying to solve. Your standards have been skewed unreasonably high by the constant availability of one more match, and some of the people you're not willing to date would make you perfectly happy if you did.

The problem is no one in the 25th-75th percentile thinks of themselves as being in that band.

And those that do, don't want to date someone in that band.

Said more crassly: if I'm a 7/10 on the looks scale, why would I want to date someone who is a 3/10?

Another point--you stated desirability. Other than good photos and well crafted bio, how do you indicate your desirability?

Thank goodness you are completely incorrect on all of your points.

As a self-admitted solid 5/10 average-as-it-gets human, not only do I acknowledge my own existence, but I've also managed to, somehow, get dates.

Said more crassly: Perhaps not everyone is as shallow as you.

I'd like to know more about your specific circumstances, as there is a lot that you have not said.

Are you getting dates via dating apps, and are those dates with people who's looks* rate lower than yours?

And lets take that further--have you found a long-term relationship through these dating apps, or is your goal casual dating?

Of your dates, how many of them lead to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th dates with the same person?

The original comment was creating an app for people who are effectively 3-7 out of 10 on desirability scale, because presumably dating apps only cater to 8-10/10.

* Looks being a proxy for desirability.

Dating apps cater to men ~9-10 and women ~4-10. Many women would rather have sex once every two weeks with a polygamous man they consider a "9" than sex every night with a monogamous man they consider a "5". This has always been true but dating apps have enabled it at scale in society-transforming ways.

This isn't just speculation, it's from data that OKCupid blogged and then un-blogged when they were acquired by Match.

The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal closeness, to occur between two people.

TLDR The problem is the app. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.

I would second that. The only value I've ever gotten out of dating apps was back in the more freewheeling days when OkCupid and the like would promote in-person events. Enforcing a balanced gender ratio plus similar interests (to avoid purely scattershot approaches), and having an official host running each event, would go a long way.

It also gives an obvious way to get users to pay for stuff in a way that directly corresponds to both the amount of work the company is doing and the number of singles the user is meeting: pay $X to get a spot at Y event. That could even include some simple cross-promotional bundling (get a ticket to the zoo / art museum / sportsball game / retro drive-in movie / whatever along with the group event).

There's a rule, wish I could remember the name of it, that says people will consistently choose convenience over satisfaction even though those choices will tend to make them less happy.

I think this explains a lot of our modern societal dysthymia, but dating apps are particularly illustrative.

True, but hookups are that way, and you get more repeat users by optimizing for hookups than for romance.

I had a good friend who said he thought dating apps only work for people who are attractive. Looking at my own friends in my life who have had successful relationships from dating apps and those who are frustrated by them, I'd say my friend was wrong. Dating apps only work for _very_ attractive people, 7 out of 10 guys and up (6/10 and up for women).

The market graphs in the article are really apt.

"It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men."

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study)

I've tried speed dating probably 3 or 4 times. It's one of those horrible things I really shouldn't keep doing, but when there's nothing else out there...

Even in such events, I've only had one time where it wasn't 0 out of 0. With that one person we only went on two days. I dunno if meeting out in meatspace has that much of an impact really.

Speed dating is a horrible thing, but social events don't have to be speed dating.

...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group for a dating app.

Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.

Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid?

It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?

My understanding of OKCupid is that it caters to 'free for all'. The site choices they made was to increase TAM by stating their addressable market is 'YES' (this is not a dig on the choice).

I have not heard about consensual non-mog/poly/name du jour had a TAM problem-- can you point me to sources? My sources of 'not a problem' suffer from geographic and socioeconomic biases.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-...

4% seems like it could be a difficult market to function in, especially since that cannot be assumed to be a random sampling from the background population. I'll assume that anyway, for the sake of simplicity. That limits you to a TAM of ~12 million Americans, of which you would do well to get 10% as users and 1% as paying customers.

120,000 paying customers isn't a vast customer base. That's an upper bound, meaning any app is going to come in well below that for a variety of geo-demo-socio-economic reasons. Or just because getting high market penetration is difficult.

Again, I would love to know if there's something I've overlooked that changes this significantly.

This study was done 8 years ago. The numbers have probably changed alot since then

Well, I trust the Kinsey folks at IU, the origin of the data set. That TAM could be valid and indeed a problem specially if wanting to set up a very large user base. I do wonder about the relationship between quality and quantity in this space.

The study is only 2 years old,(pub data 2018) but the data set is indeed 'old' (2012). The survey is muti-wave, would be interesting if they ran the data from 2014-18 through the same statistical tests as this paper.

It is very hard to believe the findings in this abstract based on my connections with US therapists serving alternative communities, primarily in the East and West Coast. Maybe the center of the country is very different (possible and probable). I have no comment on the 4%, although one model change I'd suggest is that, contrary to monogamous dating, non-monogamous folks will come back to the app for more partners even when successfully dating. Here the number of total partners is not the limit, but the allocation of free time and personal energy.

I've noticed that a lot of alternative lifestyle communities cluster aggressively, so I also wonder how evenly distributed the demo here is.

As for ongoing usage, that's an excellent point! If you could grab a solid quarter of the potential userbase willing to pay and keep them paying $10/mo forever, that puts you at $300,000 MRR ($3,600,000 yearly). That's enough to cover AWS bills, a small office (think Regus), and probably a handful of employees in the SF Bay. Or Bay-grade pay for a 100% remote company. Get the 120k number and you're grossing 12 mil / yr. Nothing to sneeze at for sure.

I think it would be a challenge to make much more than a lifestyle business out of this, though.

That sounds like a dating service selecting for the market that best benefits the dating service: people most likely to keep using the service rather than stop when they find someone.

There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot. Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.

I loved Grouper. Met a lot of cool people and had a lot of fun. My guess is it was an operational nightmare to scale. There was a lot of manual effort on Grouper's end in selecting the venues, matching the groups, making the reservation, and paying for the first round of drinks (the model was you pay $20 per head to Grouper but it covers your first round).

This is the problem with these technology companies: they either provide whatever their app does for free and do who knows what with your data or they make you pay something crazy like $20 and you still don't know what they're doing with your data.

> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.

Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last.

> Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out.

This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since.

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets.

I think I like this.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.

I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups.

> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology.

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this.

---

Here are some ways I think this could be made better:

- People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio.

- The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible.

- If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.

>The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. [...]

This is probably the top idea in this whole thread so far.

While it's an interesting idea, that's a pretty big up-front cost per user.

Kinda the point though.

Granted I was married slightly before Tinder became big but from my reading it seems like the biggest issue with these apps is bots.

Making people jump through a hop bots can't fixes that problem.

Admittedly, the problem is that this limits the app to being regional. Either the company would need to open offices in major cities, or studios could contract with the company. I think it's feasible, but would limit the audience.

The benefits for the user would be incredible, in my opinion. One of the reasons I quit online dating years ago was because I was already wasting tons of time on them, but I felt like I was having my face spat in every time I scrolled/swiped through photos and half of them were annoying instagram filters, or duckface, or people sticking out their tongues, etc. Of course there's people who don't look like their photos. Moderating this in-person eliminates these issues. It's also a revenue model for the dating service, as I'm sure there could revenue could be shared between studios and the service.

I also like the idea because it would reduce the number of users who aren't serious. You'll always get people who use online dating because of ego-stroking or because they think it's "funny", but fewer of those people will bother if they have to get their photos taken.

It's only gotten worse since.

I understand how this might sound appealing to men in a sea of bots, but it sounds more likely to dissuade real women than entice them.

>The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio.

That'd be Hard but it's probably easiest to just require passport-compliant photos as your top photo in your profile. Users can upload their own photos lower down, but make the main one follow a standard set of rules. Yeah they're going to be ugly, but everyone will look ugly, so it's a level playing field.

> If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out

I'd lean more like 7 days, but good idea regardless.

>If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time

Just lump it into the same timer as "active" above.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.

I’m not convinced group dates solve anything useful (setting aside just making new friends). No reason they wouldn’t just replicate the same imbalance people are complaining about all over this thread (80% of the women chasing 20% of the men), except in person. If you’re the kind of guy who can easily turn a group meetup with total strangers into a “real” date, you probably don’t need much help meeting people to begin with. And if you aren’t that guy, a group of strangers is probably not where you’ll shine (romantically, at least).

That said I can see how a group setting could be more appealing to women, mostly from a safety point of view. That’s definitely a plus.

> > Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out.

> This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers.

This, to me, is a tragedy. About 4 years ago I figured out the secret to online dating, which was to have no expectations and just have a good time. I wish I could somehow convey to the many, many bitter men out there that this is the key. Go meet someone you don't think is "hot" but who turns out to be absolutely gorgeous and just takes lousy pictures. Go meet people who are so much fun you're attracted to them. Go meet people who you don't end up being attracted to but who can hold good conversations over a couple drinks and be ok with that. Here's why: when you aren't invested in the outcome, and are just along for the enjoyable ride, you become more attractive. Challenge yourself to meet up with people you are kind of "meh" about and you will surprise yourself.

Unfortunately, you can’t isolate your app from the broader environment of dating apps. For instance, take the “No ELO” suggestion. Implementing this feature means you’ll attract a lot of users who don’t like ELO (typically, less attractive users) and won’t gain any users who benefit from the ELO system (attractive users). If you can’t get attractive users, you can’t get any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?)

Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.

What is ELO?

> What is ELO?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

In this instance, it's presumably a measure of a person's holistic attractiveness - say the average willingness of prospective partners to accept another date.

Thanks - I've learnt something today.

Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to industry margins?

It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you.

No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc.

So why would people pay for this?

How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options ahead of time.

You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction.

If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment.

(Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.)

One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?

Here's a random idea I find interesting:

Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.

Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.

But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.

Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.

There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.

I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.

I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.

These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch.

In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed.

OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility.

In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot.

In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context.

I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much.

From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is.

I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.

I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences. Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each other.

Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem

What if - dating apps are not the answer?

We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature).

Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people.

My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people.

I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it.

If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.

I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start monetizing their male audience more.

With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough.

You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date.

Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.

whatsyourprice.com Also asymmetric market.

I believe it's from the same founder who did seeking.com, right?

Paying someone to go on a date with me just seems weird. Either you're keen to go on a date or you're not, but if I have to pay someone then I'm not even interested.

Is this not just prostitution with extra steps?

At no point you're paying for sex, no?

High class escorts don't only offer sex. They have "Girlfriend Experience" packages where you can go out on dates, take them to restaurants, spend the day together, etc. For a lot of people this is more attractive than no strings sex. The OP proposal would basically be like this, maybe without the promise of sex but still with the implication that if your date is being paid for, you need to offer something in return.

> allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line

Women might not be happy about being "bought" in this way, it might feel too close to prostitution. Also, some men might feel entitled to "get something for their money", leading to situations of emotional pressure up to outright rape. I would not expect the women I know to be interested in a platform that makes them feel like a product that's bought and also putting them at potentially more risk than other platforms. I could very well be wrong.

Agreed, prostitution aside, there's a whole grey area here of what's societally acceptable to pay for and what's not, and I don't believe anybody is a true moral arbiter of where that line is.

For example, buying "ad space" (basically Tinder Highlights or Bumble Spotlight, or beyond) with your face on it would be considered not "buying" someone, it would be acceptable. It's just you paying to put your face on a digital billboard, in the hopes to be seen by someone.

Sending someone super-likes, that's again paying for signaling interest, in the hopes that she matches with you.

Paying 20 bucks for extra digital flowers in Coffee Meets Bagel, when liking someone, isn't buying that person, that's again paying to signal interest.

Sending someone $1000 worth of actual roses with your number on a card. That's paying to get someone's attention and signal your interest.

None of that is forcing anybody to do anything, but of course the more you pay, the more they're likely to feel like they need to reciprocate.

And yes, of course some men will feel entitled to get something in return, just like some men will feel entitled to get sex because they paid for lobster dinner. There will always be a scummy, entitled and exploitative portion of the male dating population that will require education or flat out avoidance. They're there, with or without dating apps.

Maybe the key here is that the money doesn't go to the woman. Maybe someone can bid $1000 on a date with someone they really desire, but the money would go to a charity if she accepts and actually shows up. Make the patriarchy pay for important charitable causes :)

> There will always be a scummy, entitled and exploitative portion of the male dating population that will require education or flat out avoidance. They're there, with or without dating apps.

Taking a stance that is essentially equivalent to "rapists exist, there is nothing we can do to discourage them" is another reason women might feel unsafe using a dating service designed by you.

The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys have to spend money on advertising their profiles.

If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is skewed in the favor of men already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1.

I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)

> I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design.

I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already are.

I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market-efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas, in order of extremity.

1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free)

2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient)

3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception).

I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you mostly don't care about.

Which is the source of my pet hunch:

All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for everyone.

Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable, uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting experiences.

IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area.

In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean into divergence.

> 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free)

> 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient)

> 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception).

These are all great suggestions. Yes, they should be implemented. Yes, they will increase the female:male ratio and bring in more dollars.

The economics of it is to find a balance between selectivity and availability. You can make the world's most exclusive dating app, but then you have no users. You can make the world's easiest dating app (extreme example: people automatically match at random), but then you can't monetize the male users and female users leave. These constraints create the vanillaness of popular dating apps you mentioned. They all converge to the same business model.

I don't think it is completely efficient though. One thing to optimize for would be reducing the chance of a failed date. I would suggest additional next gen screening mechanisms like potentially a full 3D reconstruction of a person's body/skeleton, maybe some AR, use your imagination, there's a lot of ways to go with this with varying levels of dystopianism. For one mild example, if someone's height in person is a dealbreaker, then the AR ghost would reveal this in spite of a likely frauded height stat.

> This is good for companies, but bad for individuals

I'm speaking from an business/marketing perspective. Obviously this is not "good" for the users. The objective is to get more men to press the Pay button--there is literally no other reason to make a dating app. The "good" thing for people is to not use dating apps, get married young, and have children. You have leave your morality at the door, like AAA game dev or high frequency trading. Nobody should waste their life playing video games or gambling in financial markets, but if they do, let's oblige them and do business.

I kind of think that agreeableness is a major factor in seeking intimacy that isn’t captured well enough in online dating. People are afraid to meet people that disagree with them and actively ridicule people with differing values/opinions/lifestyle. Religions, sports teams and other mass clubs obfuscated a lot of the concern away. But without those people need other groups and tools to trust a stranger to agree with them over time.

Why has nobody mentioned Grindr?

I don't think it fits with the narrow focus mentioned here.

The gay community has flawlessly foreshadowed the culture of the general populace for hundreds of years. People ignore this for stupid ideological/emotional reasons. If you want to see what the future Tinder looks like, look at Grindr today.

I really really don't think that's going to work...

Women have enough issues being harassed on the dating apps as it is...

Grindr conversations are very... forward (and would be seen as harassment by most Woman I have chat with about Grindr)

In reality the only reason the Grindr way "works" is because there is no societal power difference between everyone on it vs a hetero focused dating app.

If we were in the 1970s and I described Instagram & Tinder to you, you would be saying the same thing.

I mean... maybe.

I just don't see societies impressions about gender roles changing anytime soon.

Woman are still taught that they have to be hard to get and can't come off as "easy".

And Men are largely taught that getting a Woman is a conquest or somehow contributing to them "being a man".

Also I do feel the need to point out that on Grindr much of the same things that would be considered harassment on other apps is still there, it is just assumed to be part of the Grindr experience and not seen as harassment (by most at least).

(Purposefully not throwing in Trans here since that further complicates what I am trying to say and makes the assumed power differences even more problematic)

Also btw, if it isn't clear by now. I am saying this as someone on Grindr and other gay apps.

We should post screenshots so people get an idea.

My profile isn't necessarily shy, but all of these things have happened and yes, it is expected to be part of the territory.

1. People calling me by my name in the first message. Because they know me and think its funny, despite them having no profile picture nor identifying themselves, etc.

2. Nudes. Lots. Unsolicited. Every angle, every sight, no crevice left un-illuminated.

3. A level of straight-forwardness that I'm not even comfortable fully describing here, as an example, on a throwaway. Near-interrogations about interest in fetishes, positions or play-by-plays of what is going to go down on a given meetup.

4. Calculation. Every gay man on Grindr knows the game. "You interested?". If the answer is "yes", then the answer is "maybe" - they're talking to someone hotter and seeing if it will work out. If it was going to work out, you'd have swapped numbers or one person would be on the move. There's games here too.

5. Bluntless. Such a time saver when someone says "not interested, good luck hunting". Rudeness. Some people have less tact when doing it.

6. Invasive questions. Are you clean (a bad way of asking if STD free), are you clean (a somewhat fair question about your ability to receptively bottom), how big is your penis, how fat are you, etc. Though I have never been asked how tall I was...

Anyway, I know lots of men that are completely turned off by this and I can fit more fingers in my nose than it takes to count the number of women (whom I know) that would opt into this experience. And yes, these aspects are integral to the Grindr experience, it wouldn't be Grindr and it wouldn't be popular without it.

Grindr is cool, but I feel like Tinder has already lowered the barrier for casual sex for straight people.... and uh, that's not solving any of the long-tail issues being discussed in this thread.

It has always amazed me how well Grindr works, and yet every dating app catering to lesbians is a complete trainwreck. No hetero power dynamics on Her either but everyone on there seems more than a bit unhinged (as compared to the crowd on Tinder/Bumble) and the entire user experience is terrible. But on apps that allow hetero dating there are sooooo many men posing as lesbians by changing their gender settings or "bicurious" women who aren't actually looking to date women but changed their settings to show their profile to women just for fun because they like swiping and there's such a low barrier to entry. In case anyone reading this works there: I know I'm not the only one who really wishes Grindr would create a women-only clone of their app!

The same type of technical app may still turn out quite differently if it's for a vastly different demographic; it may be worth comparing outcomes to some relevant baseline metrics, such as the female divorce rate being >2x that of the male divorce rate in homosexual marriages in most countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same-sex_couples

Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious" relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very much:

1. meet girl you like

2. almost immediately become exclusive

3. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue casually dating other people

4. break up

5. repeat

My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay male couple would even get married in the first place.

It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a bit like a dating anthropologist.

Care to elaborate?

As someone who accidentally met their partner of 6yrs while looking for casual sex on OkCupid, and someone who is and was just on Grindr earlier... no. No.

Grindr's great. I'm proud of us queer folk for eschewing the shame and ironic "pomp and circumstance" of sex culture in the US, but, in my opinion, Grindr is NOT an example of how to fix dating apps for the masses, or for straight people.

(Though, and I don't say this to be mean or directly to who I'm replying to... I can certainly see why a straight man looking for sex would envy Grindr. At the same time, talk to any queer therapist or psychiatrist in the [large city] metro area and ask them about the mental effects of Grindr/Scruff on the LGBT community. It's a double-edged sword. What does it mean when there are literally thousands of horny men around you and NONE of them are talking to you?)

That all having been said, while reading this thread and seeing the number of men saying "I get dates and I'm not attractive", I'm realizing that either (1) the bar really just is lower for gay men on Grindr or (2) I'm better looking than I give myself credit for...

Also, I can't +1 enough what `nerdjon` said. Really condenses it down nicely.

Grindr is male dominated just like Tinder.

Perhaps we just need to accept that men's drive is higher than women's, and that no app is going to change that.

Which makes perfect sense, because for woman reproduction/sex is a high-investment affair, whereas for men it's not. You see this all across the animal kingdom where males do all sorts of stuff to poach females.

Humans are really no different, and you can't just override billions of years of evolution with some anti-conception and an app.

> you can't just override billions of years of evolution with some anti-conception and an app

Why not?

The influence of evolution here is only relevant insofar as it affects decision making i.e. brain chemistry. It's reasonable to assume that the combination of (1) cultural memes, (2) evolutionarily novel experiences created by tech, (3) visual stimulation on screens, (4) learning there are no consequences, and (5) a literal drug that you take every day, also has an influence on brain chemistry. Maybe to such an extent that it overcomes some inborn tendencies.

There's no practical difference between a brain state caused by a gene versus by something else, for example, a drug. People have all sorts of brain states that betray evolutionary advantageous behavior--just look at a mental hospital. Or what about people from different tribes all taking the bus together without breaking out into warfare.

The fact that some behavior has its origins in evolution does not make it impossible to manipulate.

Observational evidence does not suggest this is happening. Otherwise this article and discussion thread would not exist (or look very different).

The article did say that it as a straight male he was not going to talk about LTBTQ+ apps.

That being said, Grindr by its very nature removes the balance issue in this particular sense. But Grindr is also a "dating" app by App Store description alone and is really not its primary use.

Have I had dates off of Grindr? Yes... But they are the exception. So looking at Grindr as a fix is not the way to go, it was very clearly not designed with that in mind (If when I talk to any of my straight male friends about Grindr is any indication)

That and... Grindr has its own major issues fueled by how its designed to be very much not a dating app.

Grindr has been moving more and more into the "dating app" territory. As of last month they introduced the ability to pin multiple Spotify songs to your profile just like on Tinder. That doesn't aid hooking up, that aids self expression and find other users you relate to.

Yeah they have added some features that are more tied to friends or dating. But those are by far the exception after of years calling themselves a dating app.

It wasn't that long ago that they added the "Accepts NSFW" profile option. Expiring photos (if you do ultimate).

The Spotify one actually took me off guard when I saw that added, struggled with seeing the point until I remembered that some people do actually use it for another purpose.

My biggest issue with calling Grindr a dating app though is its focus on superficial (great for hooking up). But your profiles have a severe limitation on how much information you can put on them. Compared to something like OKCupid that makes me think of old myspace pages which could have a near unending amount of information.

An update or 2 ago they finally added tags which has been a bit helpful, but still only good for quick things.

I still haven't figured out what tags are useful for tbh. Are we able to filter by tags? Are there any common sets of tags besides the three they suggest (e.g. #sayhi)?

Sadly you can't filter by it, but it does kinda make sense since it is freeform so not sure how valuable search would be for that. I just have #gaymer and #geek for mine

The stats I remember reading about dating apps show that conventionally unattractive men fail miserably at using them and conventionally attractive men tend to reap tall the spoils. I think this was a study done by okCupid based on their data. Overall, this is generally true in the real world. The problem with scaling dating apps actually lies in the fact that the majority of the population, particularly the male population, will not succeed. They lose interest and leave the platform eventually. There are many intangibles in a relationship that you miss when you using dating apps. Maybe you make up for your lack of a chiseled jaw line by being hilarious or good at something. Maybe you end up being attracted to someone because you have a really deep connection due to similar interests.

I actually think dating apps are generally doomed to repeat the same mistakes because they just don't allow you the important element of organic real life connections.

If I was going to try to disrupt dating, I would look at ways to please the women on the site. The women are the limiting factor, it's important to get more of them.

I think this will look like harsher and more invasive prescreening of the men. Make an app that watches a man do 50 pressups. Work out how get the mens' financial info. Work out some AI-based test of confidence that's really hard for the man to fake.

The problem with this approach is that unfit, loser-ish men are the profit centre for these apps, so the app wants to string these guys along just enough to get money out of them. Still, it might work as a nonprofit or something.

Another angle that might work is trying to provide a credible commitment mechanism for people who want commitment. Marriage used to fulfill this, but it has its problems. A sort of "digital marriage" system that punishes people for going back on their commitments, particularly men stringing women along or women divorcing men later.

The problem is that current dating apps consist of choosing people whose in-person behavior (as well as resources in some cases) you care about based on self-selected photos and their ability to write text messages, so it's pretty obvious it doesn't work very well.

Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that actually hinder matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.)

A true match-making service would automatically match people based on their criteria, preferences and shared interests.

Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no longer need it. :)

> Does not limit sign-ups to keep a balanced M:F ratio. You see this in Vegas all the time: to make sure the ratio isn’t skewed too far female or (more likely) too far male, the hottest club in town is going to have a line.

This isn’t just a balancing mechanism, it’s also a revenue model. I’m really surprised that “free for women, men must pay a weekly fee” isn’t more common.

Women would leave fast, because it turns into "that dating app filled with guys desperate enough to pay for matchmaking". Even with Hinge/Tinder there's a huge stigma associated with paying for premium; very few people will openly admit to doing it on a date.

Hmm, interesting.

> free for women, men must pay a weekly fee

Would this be allowed in the US? In the EU it would probably be forbidden as discrimination.

I believe this would be allowed in the US. At least, I know that there are real-life clubs that charge covers to men, but women get in free...

Particularly in Vegas, which was the original analogy.

Depends on the state. It's barred in California, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act

Interesting that the supreme court ruled on this specifically

> The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based prices at bars (ladies' nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40 Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.

I'd like to highlight: this is a problem that's on topic for us at VC3 (https://vc3.club). We're a group of contributors seeking to produce actionable research in the area of technology for social connection.

If this sort of thing interests you, we would love to have you join the discussion!

Have the 'dating app company' organize small group dates, and broadcast on FB live or similar. Turn it in to a reality show. Well... not FB live - you could only watch if you're a service member (or perhaps paid?)

Suddenly I'm imagining a 'Peloton for dating' VC pitch deck.

Thankfully not on dating apps anymore but this sounds horrifying (to someone like me at least).

Between the narcissists and attention seekers of the "reality TV" crowd and the thought of having a potentially stressful and awkward (or, at best, intimate and personal) meeting broadcast on freaking Facebook sounds like something out of Black Mirror.

From the half-bakery, but what if you could get an indication of how many messages each user was receiving? And the number of users you could message was limited each day?

Even if you build the perfect dating app, ultimately it will be sold off to Match or some other monstrosity, and then it will go (more) downhill.

we had similar experiences in this market for a company now nearly a decade ago.... the problem is that most of the potential features identified by the OP exist in the form of community organizations / adult sports leagues / social clubs

as a start-up, it's nearly impossible to scale the hyper-local focus (partnering with coffee shops/bars) across multiple regions

While David Brooks and I don't agree on much, his discussion of "relationism" vs. "individualism" and his "weave" program is the ultimate disruption to the way families and communities are built today. IMO it is the actual disruption for dating and relationships in the US.

I'd go further than what Mr. Brooks offers in his assessment of the situation, but like all things ideas exist on a continuum. I would much rather try to build a tribal group than try to find dating partners.

I looked through 302 comments on this thread and couldn’t see a single commenter identifying as a woman. I can’t help but think if we could get women more involved in the design of dating apps we might have a chance of creating something that works.

How will a zero tolerance policy for harassers be enforced?

Identity verification + Taking in consideration the tickets sent by users being harassed ?

legitimately don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. Is this not a fair question? Help me understand.

Badoo and Bumble are made by the same company, lol

As a LGBTQ person this article is so creepy

"are the straights okay?"

It feels like there are a bunch of irreconcilable issues.

I had a discussion about improving dating sites at a local dev meetup. I was told by the 30 something women in the group the only thing important is the person's face. Nothing else matters on a dating site.

Of course that's only a few data points (small meetup) but was very frustrating to hear and if true then all this is pointless. It's certainly not true for me personally though.

Random thoughts

* video: In the 80s there was video dating. You'd go into the dating service office, look through notebooks of profiles, then ask for the videos of the people you were interested in. Is that just not possible anymore? I get that people were shy of the internet before but in 2020 with Instagram and TikTok are videos not viable?

* AI video interviewer: could you make some interview system where a selection of pre-recorded videos of an interviewer asking questions asks you interview questions so you actually get a reasonable interview out of the user? (vs just having a "record button" and leaving it entirely up to the user)

* Encouraging better profiles: Similar to the AI video interviewer, how can you encourage users to create an interesting profile? I have no idea for the men but for women, making these numbers up but it feels like 30% write nothing. They just put their picture (Tinder, OkCupid, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel). 65% write something so generic as to have no value like "I do yoga, like travel and eating out, dancing, and movies". I have no idea how to fix this. One is use TalkToTransformer.com to make up a random profile and tell them to fix it or else. another might be text-to-speech from the AI video bot (yes I know that's not likely to work). I also know most people or at least some large percent of women don't want to put in the time to fill out a profile. They just want to sign up and look around. Maybe their profile should stay private until they've added enough content. Maybe some deep learning could rate how unique their profile is and they stay private below some threshold or tell them it sucks and they aren't going to get any good matches unless the level it up with lots of suggestions.

* Better Interests: One service (probably patented) lets users create public interest groups. An interest group = name of group and single photo (icon). Example of groups "Raspberry PI Lover", "Fan of George Clooney", "Chocolate is the 5th food Group", "Seeking Soulmate", "Dad jokes are hilarious", "Zelda Love", "Dogs > Cats", ... The plus is a user can just select 5 to 500 of these interests which many find easier than writing a profile. So, on the user's profile a list of these icons show up. Clicking an icon also shows all the other profiles that added that interest. Most dating sites have a boring and useless set of 10 to 50 categories. The user created ones are much better at helping find people with similar interests. I suspect this feature would need serious moderation though so people don't make trolling or rude interests.

* separating services into DTF, LTR, etc...: Right now it feels like on all the major systems everyone is mixed together, both the people that just want something for tonight and the people looking for a soulmate. The mix doesn't work IMO because the DTF men disgust the LTR women and so the LTR women leave. How to fix that I have no idea. One idea is if you're on the LTR site and someone asks DTF you can flag them and get them moved to the DTF site (with enough flags and/or moderation).

* better activities: There was a service "How about we..." were your profile was just suggestions of activities "How about we go to disco bowling together". "How about we try stinky tofu"... etc. How can that be expanded? Partner with AirBnB experiences to sign people up to local event? Partner with entertainment venues for live performances? There's a service called "Dine" which was supposed to be "pick a restaurant, one of 3, from a person's profile, which then automatically sends them a message, so-and-so would like to take to you (name of restaurant), choose a time..." In my experience the site lacked any women even close to my age but it did seem like you could charge a premium and potentially partner with restaurants to try to making actually meeting in person in a safe venue as frictionless as possible.

* group activities? I know match.com had their stir.com initiative. I don't know if it went anywhere. I tried a couple of events. Too few people. Not good matches (odds of matches low). Still many people say they really only have had relationships with people they've known for a while so how do take that feedback into account?

* How to get people to pay and take it serious and still get users. Most of the dating services are free or free for women. This fills the site with non-serious people which is not actually helpful for those that actually want to meet someone. On the other hand any paywall = no users? Although I know that's not always true. The #1 site in Japan is pay only, $120-$180 a year, at least for men.

There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves. Thats the root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

that is the correct analysis.

> how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program

You've laid out the problem. You say you don't see a solution. It's a non-sequitur to claim that no technical solution exists.

> A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

Looks like we can't have an ideal world, here and now?

Imagine thinking the answer to a vast societal problem involves making yet another app for your ipotato. A vast societal problem more or less directly attributable to apps on the ipotato.

Put your imbecile phone down, leave the house and talk to people, you gibbering goons. Pay attention to others, not your nerd dingus: you might notice things. Better yet, leave your dystopian shit hole American city hellscape and find people who don't require a nerd dildo for self validation.

So how do you do this then? My circle of friends obviously consists of people similar to me, I would have to go two or three hops to find any women.

To visit the Philippines seems a bit drastic.

Two things he downplays but I think should get more attention. As someone who has been there way before dating apps it was pretty obvious to everyone that the 80/20% is pretty accurate. Every group of guys had those guys who would get most of the women, it is just the way it is. Dating app just made it even more extreme, maybe 90/10.

The second thing is what he calls 2nd and 3rd tier apps. For all those 80% those apps give some alternative. If you don't get matches in Tinder you can still message people in POF for free and if you got good text skills it works much better than tinder for people who are average looking. So I wouldn't call it second tier but rather the solution to some of his complains.

The solution he suggest is what society in more conservative societies always did, vetting by parents and family and a matching system that gave a chance to every male in society to find a woman by matchmaking with end result of one to one. All of that only works when you accept the scarcity of marriage and it is enforced socially by people, legally by the state and sometimes also by religion. I am afraid this is not going to work in our society of today unless we all accept on ourselves more conservative values.

Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.

They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least, that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells us something about both that signal and the sustainability.

If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system vs the one Bumble provides.

It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that they move to this one and then find it superior and stay it's a pretty strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.

Unhappy incels

The apps are asymmetric because dating is asymmetric: most women do not want to date most men.

Likewise subtle prostition is common because it's part of heterosexual dating: men are expected to provide resources.

You may disagree with the morals of this, but it is very clear this is how dating works, not a new thing created by the existence of apps.

This whole "disruption" simply sounds like someone who can't get a date on the current apps.

Apps are simply a number game. You get to contact a larger amount of individuals than you could in person.

Steps to getting a date: 1 - match with someone 2 - ask a question related to their profile 3 - have non creepy casual conversation. Every answer or statement you give should be followed by a question 4 - ask to Meetup for a drink or coffee in the new 3 days

I don't know if that counts as a true date but it's a start. Step 3 is incredibly important

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