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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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