So my question is: What is wrong with dating in 2022 and how much of the problems could be solved with tech? Or is it simply about socio-economic positions of individuals and their personalities?
Trying to “solve” human behaviors is effectively equivalent to trying to dehumanize humanity (even though it isn’t fun, of course , to be on the receiving end of some of the behaviors called out as problematic in the OP, it’s part of life).
The term “problem” has become so overused in the digital age, and, in fact, I think it causes engineers to ignore the reality of what they’re doing sometimes (e.g. in the case of building a dating app you’re solving the very small, already solved problem of giving people a communications platform, which is about 10% of what you are doing, the 90% of what you’re doing is making the nth dating tech company execs rich off a niche/fad by providing a slightly different flavor of stuff that already exists).
It’s easy to ignore the potential negative consequences of what you’re doing when you cast it as “problem solving” which is generic enough to suppress all your alarm bells and has an inherent tendency to bias you toward thinking you’re doing good (nobody like problems right? But that’s the problem with ‘problem’—what exactly are we designating to be a problem in the first place? It’s not always cut and dry).
Possibly the only thing that could help (I would never say fix) would be reputation, which is to say that you could learn about the behaviors of others. This person spams out hundreds of messages. That person never replies. This one ghosts. This one only talks to the top twentieth percentile of attractiveness, or income, or whatever.
Incentives are mis-aligned, to be certain. In a perfect world, you would have some kind of specific measurable goal and the service would be paid when that goal was met: perhaps marriage, perhaps a lot of one night stands, etc. As it is, they give you a hunting license and drop you off in the forest with a penknife. I am not certain that such a service could actually survive.
But that isn't enough. People's incentives are mis-aligned: some want to get laid, some want a free dinner, some want attention, some are looking for a Christian soulmate, and so on, and people cannot be counted on to be honest about their goals. Often, they aren't honest with themselves, so honesty with another person is simply too much to ask.
That honesty simply won't come to pass as long as we continue to hide the truth. Recall how OKCupid had a blog of statistical analysis and how some of the less comfortable results of those analyses vanished after Match.com took over. In our current political climate, the merest suggestion that men might be disadvantaged in some fashion will be met with hostility and a sarcastic "Boo-hoo, cry me a river!" attitude. It already happened in this thread. So, the idea that both men and women might have behavior that could be changed is simply ... no sale.
Some governments have tried to solve this by offering their own dating apps for their citizens, but another approach would be a community-run dating system, built on the Fediverse. Unfortunately searching across instances and stopping people from scraping all the profiles on an instance, are two hard problems with that architecture, although there are probably creative solutions to both.
Another approach that could be tried is limiting the number of introductions a user could make per week, to prove that someone is really prepared to invest time in a relationship. That might also discourage people from wasting their introductions on the most superficially desirable profiles they find, since those people are likely flooded with introductions anyway.
Finally, to add AI into the mix (and maybe generate some hype and investment offers), what about having "AI matchmakers"? A user could be required to converse with the AI for a few weeks, answering questions, taking personality tests, reacting to simulated date scenarios, and the AI could apply some super advanced proprietary algorithm (which might be just staff choice and a random number generator to start with) and then give one "match" per week for you to go and get to know properly. The feedback given by each user on their suggested match could also help refine the AI's matching process.
When you meet people "organically" through social events there is often at least some level of "social proof" that you get due to the nature of the situation. Eg, you were invited, ergo someone thinks you're a nice enough person to invite. Or, your friend introduces you to someone, ergo your friend is happy to be associated with you. If not social proof then at least being physically present means your body language is available to interpret, so when you crack a joke it's likely to be received as such.
When you first interact with someone on a dating app, you have no social proof and no body language. And the person you're talking to has probably had a lot of bad experiences on the app before. So trust is at an absolute minimum.
Without trust, communication breaks down incredibly easily and quickly, and is difficult or impossible to recover.
Online dating is now the most common way for people to meet in the US and Australia and probably most developed countries :
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-26/australia-talks-natio...
What's wrong with dating is that dating is hard for people.
Keep trying, go on lots of dates and find people you click with.
2 of these happened before the internet I am sure. The avg HN guy (generally men post these) are also more likely to be in location where the gender ratio is skewed. Bay Area, Bangalore, etc. This might add to the frustration for some. Apps or no apps this would remain.
Very few people are going to find someone right away. This is a good thing, is a feature not a bug.
I like what Lex has done - it's a queer dating app that's designed to look like those old personal ads in papers. There's no images, and you're limited to four posts in a month to encourage higher quality posts.
One person told me that they've had way better success meeting people through their professional life or hobbies, because you get to know someone better by working on tasks or playing games together. She said that she wishes she could just play a game with a stranger and then have the option to chat with them after - there's an app or two I've seen in development that take a similar approach. Not sure how viable it is, but it's interesting.
Ultimately I think that there's a lot of dating issues that can't be solved with technology (say, racism) but a well-designed app can influence behavior to mitigate some issues (e.g. bumble).
With freedom to choose the frame, in less than an hour you should know an awful lot about the other person and since you got them to talk about to talk about themselves about subjects they want to talk about you: (1) you haven't been stressing it about presentation of self and (2) they probably like you more than they did before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqldQzGV-lY
One take is that online dating is going to be bad for most people (particularly men) because with a large number of matches going by people (particularly women) are going to make a rough cut on physical attractiveness.
Almost all of the men participating in online dating are interested in hooking up or a longer term relationship but a lot of young women sign on just to get an ego boost from getting a lot of matches, then they ghost them all.
I’d guess you could build a site that tries to break down the various harmful dynamics (e.g. make guys pick at most 15% of girls, make girls pick the top 20% guys without looking at any pics, kick out girls who don’t go on any dates, …)
People might really resist any of these changes even if the changes are for their own good.
Another answer to online dating is ‘burn it down’.
I checked out a kink dating site this weekend and it was astonishingly cringe, I never thought I would go find some site that makes me feel superior but there it is.
Anyhow I am a student of love, relationships, attraction and seduction and you know you want to click on my profile and send me an email to compare notes on this.
Got any data to back up this assertion?
So far as 'me' I can say in person there is a good chance I can give somebody I meet (e.g. regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, whether or not I am interested in them sexually...) a memorable experience. I can't do that through Tinder, not at all.
IIRC from that OKCupid research, women only rated 20% of men as attractive, but then their attractiveness rating didn't actually affect who they responded to, so it didn't really matter.
Also, women know better than men that attractiveness is a thing you do not a thing you are.
[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
> But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
One of my favorite concepts from the Dune series is from a Benne Geserit mother. She’s tasked with working with someone closely who she hates. Upon realizing she hates this person she feels some relief. “Because hate and love are such close opposites one can relatively quickly be converted to the other feeling.” I think it was understood she meditated to flip herself from hate to love. Probably focusing on any and all useful aspects of the person to her goal or something.
So that’d be my suggestion to anyone considering another social media or dating site. Perhaps a site that emphasized forgiveness and letting go of self destructive attachments could act as a fulcrum in the needed direction.
let's say you have x meaningful relatinoships and y is your desired minimum number of meaningful relationships. Ignore that I'm overlooking here the very real possibility of having more connections than you'd like.
- you're all good if x / y is about or more than 1
- you're lonely if it's noticeably less
That y is kind of a function of many influences though. In particular social media encourages you to form more connections. y value goes up, so x/y probably goes down, because you probably aren't making connections as fast as you desire greater connection. Because social media technology can't magically convert your wish for greater connection into actual valuable human relationship, it just makes you lonelier. The wider a net you desire to cast, moreso. And dating apps.. you are probably swiping like on dozens if not hundreds of people before meeting up.. that x/y value is gonna hit the floor
But you know what I'm just realizing? What if there were apps that made you less lonely by making you set your y=x.. can't tell if it's bleak or healthy to reduce your expectations for connection in that way, lol..
Online isn't real, tech is not life, and probably industrial forms of economies hinder your ability to meaningfully spend sufficient amounts of time not directed towards economic output so that you could increase that x value without making a disciplined effort if it's quite low to start with.
- Social media has pretty much ruined everyone's capacity to sit down for more than 5 minutes with another person and get to know them. I know that a lot of people harp on this, but as the attention economy expands and streamlined doomscrolling platforms like Twitter and TikTok threaten to take over more of our lives, I really believe it's the main component.
- COVID-19 obviously has left people socially averse, for better or worse. Not much else to add here, besides the fact that our idealized precepts of love are pretty obviously incompatible with a pandemic.
- Dating apps, like all technology, are a race to the bottom. Most people use it as a conduit for hookups and one-night-stands, and there's very little you can do to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ironically, trying to fragment the space has only seemed to make this problem worse (in my experience).
- People in general are behaving less inclusively. Kinda tying back into my first point, if people can't get instant gratification from sharing everything they love with another person (or disagree with one or a few of their opinions), many people see it as irreconcilable and press the button on their ejector seat and ghost you.
YMMV though, I don't date the opposite sex so I can't speak for everyone here. Those are just a few of my observations on matter, and I don't even know if it's necessarily worse than it was, say, 5 years ago. Just different, and you gotta find different ways to reach out to people meaningfully in order to connect in a way that might stick.
I’m surprised none of the existing comments contrast the unproductive on-line dating of today with the very successful OKCupid model of the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s. Practically everyone I know ( myself, siblings, and more college friends than I can count on one hand) met their spouse on OKCupid during this time period. The old OKCupid where people filled out quizzes and the software just gave them a compatibility score ( based on their answers ) worked exceedingly well.
OKCupid got sold to the match group around this time, and they started aggressively removing features, such as search and messaging. This made it effectively a tinder clone, which works for nobody.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldne...
I think a better feature would've been teaching people how to take better selfies with 2000s cameras.
Success for the user = not having to use the app anymore.
Success for the company = user retention.
I think everything follows from that. The things you mentioned could be solved, but there's really not a good incentive. That + a lack of real compitition to Match Group.
I think part of the problem is that dating complete strangers sucks because, well, you simply don't know them or know anyone they know. It's basically selecting at random hoping for a good fit. Similar hobbies and interests can only take you so far.
I originally wrote a longer reply on why swipe apps don't work for me but it wasn't particularly insightful (the "20% of men get all the women" issue).
When I was using dating apps, I had the best results with OKCupid and I hope those profile based sites make a comeback.
Secondly that most dating apps business model is based on time being online in the app which gives app-makers wrong incentives according to the makers of Breeze. The makers of startup Breeze get paid for each face-to-face human meeting https://breeze.social/en/FAQ people have instead.
Well, likely not nearly for the first time, Darwin is on the case and working on a solution, in this case, likely just a routine application of some old, well proven techniques.
The U.S. fights the ruined culture through: (1) immigration and (2) little stigma for single motherhood. Modern places where women are forced to uphold traditional values to raise kids are in free fall.
or, if that's too short a TL;DR, I'll let Carlin explain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk
Politicians, dating pool, same mess.
Also relevant:
Tech in dating should increase participation, access, reduce friction and assist with creativity and social engagement.
All of these are being worked upon and likely a lot of opportunity exists for more creative ideas (which may or may-not be "vc type" scale)
Dating markets are a two-sided market (but in reality, they are sets of multiple intersecting two-sided markets as there's a wide diversity of preferences and identities related to gender, sexuality, race, political tribe etc), two-sided markets are hard to make work because if you want to improve the UX of one side of the market, it's often at the cost of the UX of the other side of the market. It's really hard to build features or improvements that improve the experience for everyone. EG: make height filter a free feature and you've improved the straight woman's experience but hurt men's experience. Increase a man's access to inbox of a higher tier attractiveness woman and you've improved his experience but you've hurt hers.
If you build a dating app that tries to enforce people making fewer matches but spending more time messaging or getting to know or going out on a date with them, even if your 'quality > quantity' model would lead to better social outcomes for society writ large, as long as there's an alternative dating app that lets someone sit there and swipe for 30 mins straight and chat with 5-10 new matches each time (or uses gamification and cheap tricks or re-enforces hookups/ghosting/etc), your artificial constraints or protections you put in place to try to de-commodify humans are just overwritten by your user opening up that competing dating app. Most dating app users use 2+ apps. It's not enough to build a good app, it has to fit into the broader context of the market of services.
Photos and text are not a good way to become attracted to someone. Real life is a better form of "rich media" than online and we are often attracted to a wider range of people in person than we'd be if we just saw a few photos of them in a profile, but it doesn't facilitate the efficiency of online, its more socially risky and embarrassing or requires more courage. Leading to people making tons of matches in online dating, but most or all of the conversations becoming stale or fizzling out, or first dates leading one or both people to discover they lack physical or romantic chemistry. The future of dating likely involves combining the best aspects of real life dating and online dating.
Monetization and engagement is often at odds with the success criteria of the user.
It's incredibly hard to start a new service or app because its value is correlated to the size of the network, meaning its not very useful in the beginning. So the hardest part is the start.
Interestingly, governments may eventually start to subsidize this industry as birth rates continue to plummit. Or to make their own nationalized attempts. It's a smart investment for them economically. Japan already is doing this.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/japan-ai-singles-dates
https://businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-servi...
I find that most first dates end with mutual ghosting, I'm not even sure if it's appropriate to call it ghosting if it's mutual. In many of the cases there probably isn't long term relationship potential, but in some cases there could be if the effort was put in by both parties. But why put in the effort when you have someone who you've already fantasized to be better that you can go out with in a few days? If people had fewer choices they'd be more willing to put an effort into making a connection with those choices and see if a relationship can blossom.
I don't really know what's better. Few choices that you put a lot of effort into, or a multitude of choices that you wait until you have instant chemistry. For me personally I've done a lot of app dating and it's only ranged from hookups to short term dating. All of my long term relationships have been through people I've meet in real life.
Tech's a big part of the problem as the only variable is how photogenic you are. Real life and real relationships are based on knowing/experiencing somebody, and the best way to do that is be around someone in person.
There’s plenty wrong with dating apps. Each of these apps are designed to be toxic. As in the company puts an effort to make the experience toxic and sluggish. You have to spend hours uselessly. You have to get frustrated.
Limits are usually designed in such a way that it hurts one sidedly.
In in person dating at least to some extent you could expect “you take a step, I take a step”, but on dating apps you’ve to do everything - especially in the beginning and this pressure is almost entirely on one gender.
Usually you’ve one shot and that too for a fraction of a minute of just few seconds to pitch your deck.
You have to be a funny person, a stoic, a wise person, playful, mature, all probably in one message; while coming across as athletic, well groomed but not full of yourself, maybe homely, and down to earth as well in your pictures. You’ve to take the initiatives and also develop a radar to read minds.
This is more gender specific than usual: if you’re lucky enough to meet people you are supposed to be a feminist who believes in equality but also a chivalrous person who opens doors and shit.
Then you get some response and it is so limited that you try to trudge along with whatever you get but sooner or later realising “fuck, all this effort for such low quality interactions?” and then the disappointment and rut sets it with a fatigue where you don’t want to do it anymore but you keep doing it anymore.
They do nothing for spam, harassment pretty much. Quality and veracity of profiles is deliberately left unchecked to increase the volume.
Tricking and messing with users with dark patterns (in some cases even fake profiles).
Among things listed ghosting is the only one I consider something that has remained almost same from the non-dating app dating (and tbh it just needs to be dealt with in one way - that there’s nothing worth doing anything there). Everything else is either new with this trend or much worse.
From my personal perspective this pandemic made it worse when too much audio and text started happening without meeting in person and you started building connections (sometimes breaking) without interacting with the other person physically/in person.
All this just pushes the two groups apart and slowly it spreads as the dating is moving more and more to the online world.
I think limiting the number of matches (at a time), not just daily matches can be a good start - you only get more if are done with your current matches - aye or naye, but that would look bad on the PMs’ clickstream dashboards.
Biggest drawback is - designed to be completely opaque in everything! And that too after having so much of your most personal data.
The problem of finding the perfect partner doesn't seem so intractable if you recognize it is completely unreasonable to expect one person to satisfy 100% of your needs for 30 years+.
It's expected to be rare, and the searchers don't have the same feeling of single desperation.
Because they are always hunting, they have a high profile.
Other poly people are pretty boring and have pretty normal ideas about love except that they believe (and know) you can love more than one person at a time. Such a person tends to keep a low profile and is going to get confused with bigamists, cheating monogamists, etc.
Thus it is more like cheating among mono people (who also use online dating) which is not exceptionally rare. The difference is that you aren’t cheating.
The poly community isn’t much of a community because there are big moral differences between the participants: unicorn hunters are a running gag but you have many sad couples where somebody was cheating and then forced the other to accept it. If you fly the poly flag you’ll attract a lot of people you don’t want to know so some think it is like ‘Fight Club’.
On the other hand if somebody has gotten 200 matches it's also fair to say they need to see somebody in order to keep getting matches and probably possible to enforce that.