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Comment by doctorwho42 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately okcupid has trended away from what it was 5+ years ago. My last SO was through okcupid right before they changed the incentives in the system. Now it has been driven towards the same swipe culture as all the other apps. Though you can still answer questions and write detailed profile... The system doesn't seem to promote that as much. My key gripe right now with how it is setup is that the only discovery is through one of 5-6 swipe categories and your filter criteria no longer impacts any of those swipe decks.

So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective

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I really want to call out the technical founders here, Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, because they've done nothing but leave a legacy of abandoned products in the hands of untrustworthy companies: in the case of OkCupid they sold to Match.com which devastated the site committing it to the same wastebasket as Match.com's portfolio of other predatory dating products.

Then they created Keybase, which was fantastic, before selling out to Zoom. Development has all but stopped.

This style of hit and run get what's mine is endemic to SV. Nobody takes responsibility for the lasting legacy of the things they build.

OkCupid was a safe haven for people who really wanted something genuine. It had a culture-wide effect the same way that Tinder cemented hook-ups as the New Normal of dating. We need to start taking responsibility for the things we make that touch millions of people.

Chris' Twitter [1] professes his love for making things. Yes but you don't love being a good steward of the things you build.

[1] https://nitter.42l.fr/malgorithms

Building new things is fun, maintaining what you've built not as much. I suspect most software people would agree.

Leaving aside the fun, maintaining them is also often not economically rewarding compared to building the next new thing. I dare say the founders of these sites will be happy enough with their decision even if they are called out once or twice in comment threads by critics with no skin in the game.

You could call okcupid feature complete. Keybase however still had plenty of exciting greenfield work to do (IMO) - my friend and I emailed them asking to pay for KBFS but the founders declined!

And thus why most software is utter crap too. When people first talked about holding software development to the same standards as professional engineering I thought it was crazy, but the longer I've been in this the more I think it is absolutely required - for this reason if nothing else. It's called work for a reason and the un-fun stuff is often as or more important than the fun stuff.

The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.

Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.

>>Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.

And that, right there, is probably the key principle for a solid matchmaking app...

I wrote it in another older thread: Make a service that asks you for say $1000 USD upfront and then pays you back partially every month until you find a match.

Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.

If you found a match, how would the site know that you matched successfully if you didn't want the site to know (so you could recover the full amount)?

They would continue to setup dates and if you stopped showing up they could treat that date as the new relationship date.

Then wouldn't the app have an incentive to send you on dates with the most obnoxious and/or dangerous people possible, so that you refused to attend any more?

The incentives for marriage in society today (atleast here) make this less of a financially viable thing:

- less social pressure to get married than for my grandparents

- less financial incentive through tax benefits already applying if you live together here (to not prefer any religous belief system)

edit: formatting

In the US many dual earning couples actually pay a tax penalty to get married...

> The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.

Ironically, OKCupid wrote about this exact issue, explaining why membership incentives were bad, etc.

Then they were bought by Match.com, went to a membership based subscription model, and deleted that post.

Yep, it's basically useless now. Are there any decent dating sites?

That's very sad news... I think it'd already started to mutate back then in 2015-2016, but it was still possible to make and to discover a detailed user profiles, that actually allowed to get interested in a person.

On the other hand my internal entrepreneur says that it could be a great opportunity to launch okcupid2.0 given that there's an actual demand for this kind of site.

Has anyone found an alternative to OkCupid? Now that you can't search it has become basically worthless.

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