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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

>>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...

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