Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

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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!

>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.

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.

  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).

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