Never pay for online dating (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Never pay for online dating (2010)

web.archive.org

355 pointsskanderbm469 comments

OkCupid was bought by Match Group (who run almost all online dating sites, including Match, eHarmony, and Tinder) in 2011 and took down this post not long after.

EDIT: the purchase was Feb 2011 [1] and the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/03/133456140/The-Last-Word-In-Bu...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110113034228/http://blog.okcup... up

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup... down

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110301161329/http://blog.okcup... different post up

Match has turned all of its apps into tinder. That is, gambling-like "one more swipe" photo centric dating apps, where the artificial restriction of choice keeps every person starved. Tinder is casual hookups, okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships, Hinge is politically moderate tinder for traditionalists, and so on. Each is a different marketing segment, but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.

I would not say Hinge artificially restricts choice. You are limited in how many “likes” you can send each day, but it’s a different model where each like is actually a notification/puts you in someone’s “inbox”, so letting everybody like too much would make it too spammy to work.

That model is also quite good because you don’t need to pay for women to notice you. Those 10 people you like will notice you anyway, unlike other apps where you could like 1000 profiles and barely be seen by any of them.

I personally have found Hinge very effective compared to other apps without paying a cent. My like -> match -> date conversion rate was literally two orders of magnitude better than any other app.

Match rates where true for me as well in comparison to other apps. However, what I found interesting is that I’d routinely run out of matches on my last month of being “premium”. As soon as the paid gig was up, all of a sudden, profiles of potential matches in my area that I had never seen prior are numerous. BUT.. to like or match, I have to resubscribe… hmm…

Another obvious manipulation by Hinge (and the other apps) is I’m almost 100% positive they artificially limit who they show you by stacking the deck with a bunch of profiles of women they know haven’t logged into the service in awhile. Basically priming the pump with “possibility” to keep you engaged; diluting the active profiles and spreading any likely match possibilities out over time.

It’s things like these two realizations that made me decide these apps are not in existence to help you find a match. They’re incentive is the same as Facebook, engagement. You matching means you no longer using the app and that’s bad for business.

I also found Hinge to have a much higher hit rate of conversations-per-profile-seen, and dates, than the other apps.

Sounds like the same trend we se in other social media, which is that as soon as there's something new which against the odds has broken through, everyone rushes to copy it - the reason both YouTube and Facebook are pushing shorts so aggressively now.

> okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships

Your experience may have location bias? I.e. where did you use OKC?

I used it in Europe (2010--2011, mostly Germany and Italy) and Asia (2011-2013, Hong Kong) and Europe again (2014--now mostly Berlin & Hamburg) and my experiences were/are very different.

People are from the full political spectrum. Very right people are the outlier though, admittedly.

In Berlin there is a leftist bias but this is pretty newish (wasn't like this at all, when I started using OKC again in Europe in 2014).

Edit: spelling

> okcupid is leftist tinder for relationships

LOL

Some people are going to take this the wrong way, but I've never read a more true statement.

I'm a pretty liberal person (folks think I'm conservative because I think communism stinks), but my experience with OkCupid many years ago was that most of its users were self-proclaimed cultural Marxists or feminists with a bone to pick. My digital head was decapitated several times by women there just for introducing myself to them. I'd even been lectured a handful of times about how I was "misogynist" for the age range I specified on my profile included women 5 years younger than I was, which wasn't even low enough to include women of college age.

The day I saw an advertisement for OkCupid that actually used the initialism "DTF" was when I knew for sure I would never be returning to them ever again. It would surprise me if they still had any meaningful userbase since it was pretty much dead in the LA area the last time I used it.

> but the same basic idea that gets men to pay to meet women.

In which case men should just go to Seeking Arrangement.

>self-proclaimed cultural Marxists

(X) Doubt

"The term "Cultural Marxism" refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that Western Marxism is the basis of continuing academic and intellectual efforts to subvert Western culture" [0]

No one "self proclaims" that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

> the post was removed sometime between Jan 2011 [2] and Mar 2011 [3]. The rest of the blog was still up at the time [4].

Internet Archive is great for cases of self censorship like this. I assume that as part of the acquisition the author was compelled to take it down.

Spoke to the OKC co-founder when he was working out of a co-working location making fun side project, he said that even they thought this was a bit too pretentious and very correlation vs causality issues.

I read that as "carnality issues".

This is what motivates people to seek out other people.

Can’t wait to see all our old private messages get leaked by some hack of the parent organization now too. Or for it all to just get sold to advertisers

I wish! After I met my (now-)wife on OkCupid, we deactivated our accounts so that we'd stop getting notifications. A few months later we wanted to revisit our first messages to each other -- only to find that OkC had already deleted them. I was pretty shocked at how eager they were to discard a few KB of potentially priceless ASCII. :(

I can't speak specifically to this case, but it's certainly not about saving KB, it's usually specifically to prevent people from messaging the same person multiple times a year for many months/years.

IIRC, OkC also removed the ability to bookmark profiles, presumably for the same reason -- everything moving to a more "ephermeral" experience to prevent anybody getting "obsessed" with certain accounts because of how creepy that gets. Since spam, stalking, and abusive messages are by far the #1 problem with any online dating service. (Yes blocking works, but it's even better when people don't have to block in the first place. If you have to block too much, you quit the app.)

On the other hand, deleting potentially compromising stuff once it is no longer needed is really good for former clients' privacy. In case of a hack, no one will be able to dig in decades of old erotic penmanship and blackmail people.

Just because the enduser doesn't see the data anymore, doesn't mean the company doesn't have/use them anymore.

Luckily I was able to dump the SQLite db that Tinder used in the past when I met my SO

That probably makes sense, but I'm sad to find that out. I've been thinking of logging back in to see if I could read the first few messages between myself and my recently-deceased fiancée. But those were years ago and I'm sure they're gone.

I’m engaged now, and met my fiancée on a dating site. At the time, it made sense that I deleted my account, since we were exclusive, but now those first messages exist only as a memory. I’d love to have those again, but I’m happy that data is gone.

Match lets third parties access the extremely personal/private matching question answers from OKCupid.

Presumably this means advertisers.

I used OKC for years until the founders sold it (and my private data) to this shady company, then I was forced to delete.

Acquisitions are worse than breaches for end user privacy. GitHub sold your whole travel history (via client IP geolocation) to Microsoft.

What I used to love about OkCupid was how it would nudge you into writing a profile to tell who you are and what you care about. My profile had grown and it was a nice little place to present myself to the world and to talk to various women sometimes not even for dating but for the sake of an interesting conversation. Compare that with Tinder that won't even let you write more than small quantity of letters, come this is just text! There used to be an interesting thing where you would see who visited your profile and vice versa. Sadly the OkCupid website has been crippled into being unusable and the app is just a worse tinder now. Profiles are short, and mostly uninteresting.

So there's still a void for a dating service to be filled?

Im tempted to make a service where you "deposit" some fee to subscribe, I then return part of the deposit to you on a monthly basis UNTIL you find a match on the site. If/once you find a match, I keep the rest.

That should align goals for both the company and the partner seeker.

EDIT: I'll be getting interest from the remainder your payment every month, as part of my profit scheme.

That's basically how many old human-labor matchmaking services work, insofar as the matchmaker gets a lump-sum payment at the beginning, and then spends an unbounded amount of labor doing the matchmaking until it works out. The matchmaker is incentivized to make a good match as efficiently as possible, as their profit-margin decreases linearly with the amount of time they spend on each "case."

I like the alignment of incentives here, but "match" would have to be defined better. If it's a literal match (mutual like) it would effectively be a per-pay-like and wouldn't work. Maybe something along the lines of "matched, chatted, met, stopped using the app for X period of time"?

And if someone finds a match but doesn't inform the site you lose out, no? I expect a lot of people to be dishonest if it means getting a bunch of money back.

I know your idea is very theoretical but what happens when I exhaust the deposit? Do I stay around and earn money or do you kick me out?

Cheapskate users will keep dating (or even just looking) even after finding a good match.

From an end-user perspective? Desperately so.

I think the biggest obstacle to solving the Dating App problem is the onboarding.

I’ve been married since before Tinder so never used it. But I think the “Dating App problem” is something of a head scratcher. The reason the apps all have problems is because Dating is the problem. It’s hard. Always has been. Finding a lifelong partner, very hard.

I might be wrong but these types of conversations about how bad the apps are make me think y’all are expecting some sort of technological easy button. It will never exist. These companies are probably making it worse because of their profit motive but there’s definitely a reason nobody has “solved” dating.

Indeed. I met my girlfriend on a relatively novel dating site called The League.

It was recently purchased by Match.

More Orwellian still, they edited articles that contained data inconvenient to the politically correct narrative and elite ideology.

Edit: Here's an example.

“I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...

They presented the reality based on data, it's not subjective, it's revealed preferences. Match.com removed that section and updated the article with "This post has was originally published in 2010 and has since been updated to reflect OkCupid’s current values."

The bisexual thing was pretty stupid and pretty revealing how much this blog post was bullshit, there was a bunch of reason why you would pick one gender as a bisexual, especially if online dating was just to meet more of the gender you wanted.

But a bi dude, in 2010 you simply wouldn't get match with women if you write bi and plenty of gay dude would turn you down as well, so you just wouldn't bother and write gay or straight eventually.

Edit: removed today

Whats inconvinient to the pollitically correct narrative is people with 0 scientific literacy making bold claims about society based on surveys on extremely sampled social studies.

Doing a study on how "dateable" black women are based on a specific dating app in 2010 is like making claims on everyones eating habits based on a survey on a Burger king drive through. It will probably not be a very good survey.

They also took down the whole blog, people only remember the weird survey because it was an incel talking point seconds after it came out, specially in black pill groups arguing that giving up was the only alternative because OkCupid had "proved" that love was impossible for some and hypergamy or some other nonsense.

> “I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender

This isn't the slam dunk it appears to be. A dietary equivalent would be "X% of self-professed omnivores avoid vegetarian dishes". They are open to the idea, but still have preferences. Just because one is open to the superset, doesn't mean they assign each subset equal weight.

>"I’m bisexual.” REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

>People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

Yes, I remember this. It was sad to see such basic logic errors from OKC. It seems a little like saying that heterosexuality is a myth because all "heterosexual" people prefer some bodies over others. Bisexual means you are attracted to both masculine and feminine people. It does not imply a 50 / 50 split, or that you want to date everyone equally. The Match.com Orwellian activity aside - that critique was always very odd.

> People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect.

I don't think you can draw the conclusions from this people seem to be. Think about it. If you are genuinely attracted to both genders, then you can choose. If you're pursuing a goal (like a relationship) you're going to have some ideal you're going after, so you're probably going to pick a gender to look for for any particular period of time. I think it would be actually very uncommon to actively seek both at the same time, especially since there are cultural/societal considerations tied up with this. If you genuinely like both deciding to pursue a particular gender doesn't invalidate the fact that you could just as genuinely pursue the other. Society dictates that pursing one or the other are of varying difficulty, but this has nothing to do with the legitimacy of how you feel about the other. Bi-sexual people I've known follow this pattern -- they'll pursue one gender for 6 months to the year, and then re-bound with the other, then maybe stick with that one for a while, rinse and repeat. Since most people only use dating services for a short while, this would probably look as described above in aggregate.

I use straight dominated apps for straight dating and gay dominated apps for gay dating so my usage would basically agree with their majority statistic.

It's how I use the tools not who I am, though.

Bi isn’t an all or nothing thing. Men are well known to enter same sex relationships when in restricted environments long term such as sailing ships or prison, but not everyone is that flexible.

Women do the same with a lesser known example being elderly women swapping because of the shrinking dating pool.

So, self identifying as bi shouldn’t be taken as having zero gender preferences nor should we assume peoples preferences are static through time. People may be in a committed relationship and seek partners of the a different gender etc.

There are multiple reasons why someone would prefer to date only one gender while actually bisexual. I know a person who is bisexual and only dates the opposite gender because they don't want to deal with backlash from their conservative family and because they prefer to start a traditional family one day. I do feel like that may be a popular issue so I wouldn't expect that a bisexual person would message both genders equally, like this article absurdly claims.

I don't see how the bisexual statistic is politically incorrect.

It makes sense, considering the self-professed "bisexuals" I've known, which are well known as well in liberal-leaning circles:

1. Young women who pretend to be Bi to get more attention from Men

2. People who pretend to be Bi to avoid having to completely come out of the closet

There's actually a saying in the gay community for the latter, "Bi now, gay later!"

Yeah, I'm gay & bi guys in the gay community complain that they're not as accepted, which to some degree is definitely true. But the number of "bi" guys who want to bang guys on the side while looking for a "real" relationship with a woman is staggering. I try to avoid them at all costs; I'm not a fleshlight/something to discard.

I feel like the gay community needs to treat bi guys better but at the same time bi guys need to take a look at themselves and consider if they're romantically bi, or just sexually bi because they just want to fulfil their sexual needs (which is much easier with guys obviously).

That implication is not logical. It is unreasonable to expect bisexuals to seek 50/50 gender split.

First, even if the actual attraction is same for both genders, it would be reasonable to expect bisexuals to seek opposite gender partners way more. Pretty much anyone who wants bio children need opposite sex partner. Pretty much anyone who don't want to deal with stigma around gayness too kuch will prefer opposite gender partner.

Second, bisexuality does not mean the attraction is same. It it fairly normal for bisexual to be attacted toany people from one gender and few from the other. It is also fairly normal foe them to have periods where they go for one gender only (either as conscious decision or not).

Cool data. Isn't there something more up to date?

Any examples? Their blog post on the dating economy being skewed away from black women seemed to match with economic and social realities.

Where was this?

Related personal anecdote:

I am experimenting with Tinder subscription at the moment, and it feels incredibly exploitative. When you make a profile, matches are frequent and you can tell that you show up for people. However it gradually falls down with time, and the only predictable and obvious way to get back up is to pay for Boosts and/or Priority Likes.

Right now my 6-month old profile gets ZERO likes outside of the time it's Boosted ($3 a pop or something). I get plenty once I'm boosted, so the profile attractiveness doesn't seem to be a factor.

It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push you towards paid subscription options. There must be a huge invisible market of Tinder whales given how exploitative it is, gambling addiction, loneliness, and desperation for dates are correlated traits and I would absolutely bet on Tinder exploiting this heavily.

Agreed. It also seems extremely gross that you're initially pushed to buy Tinder Gold, but then only afterward realise there are still features locked behind Tinder Platinum, and even after that you'll probably spend still more buying packs of boosts and super-likes.

I know they're far from the only game in town, but this really feels like the behaviour of a monopoly entity that knows it can do basically whatever.

If I were an unethical data scientist working at Tinder, I would actually reserve the best matches until later in the period, after the initial flurry of "visibility" subsides a bit. That way you are less likely to immediately find a good date or two in the first few matches, helping to ensure that you will not just unsubscribe next month, while providing you with enough tantalizing options that you think it makes sense to keep going. "Great matches started coming up, I had better renew so I don't lose out!"

It's like a slot machine that actively adjusts the odds as you play, in order to keep you hooked as long as possible.

I'm pretty solidly mediocre when it comes to "algorithm design" tasks like this one, so I thought of it you can bet for sure that someone at Tinder did too.

There's certainly no doubt in my mind that they save your "top" match, based on your swipe history and whether or not they've already matched you, to show up right after you use your last free swipe. Wait 12h and hope they show up again? Maybe, or maybe I'll spend the $2 to get that super like. Very scummy.

One of the protagonists in the book Version Control works in customer service in a role a lot like you're describing, it's a great read for anyone into sci-fi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25733442-version-control

Back when I was on Tinder I'd delete my profile and make a new one once every three months or so, seemed to do the trick.

I am pretty sure they also boost you when you start using the app again after a period of inactivity, but not sure if the implementation/magnitude is different from the new-user bonus

I'm very suprised they are not using face tracking and/or device fingerprinting to thwart this.

It's all speculation, but they _seem_ to track a large amount of data to try and check for "new profiles" that are old users starting a new account, supposedly for 3 months after you delete your account. These are the ones I've seen commonly talked about.

- Phone Number

- IP

- Device IDs

- Email

- Photo hashes

- Photo exif

- Facial recognition

- Linked Facebook, Instagram, Spotify accounts

Honestly, I am ok with this system. Paying a couple dollars for a matchmaking service isn't a big deal. If you go to bars instead you will pay way more. An introduction to a potential partner is worth at least $50 in my opinion, if anything Tinder is too cheap.

There are too many guys on tinder and most of them are not serious, mindlessly swiping as a way of wasting time. If you filter out the free users and only match guys who pay for boost with girls, it's a much better ratio for those guys and a better experience for the women since guys who buy boost are more invested and more likely to follow through.

I don't mind paying something, but their goal of selling boosts, super-likes, etc runs counter to the goal of the customer which is to meet a compatible person IRL and then (presumably) stop using the site.

My experience with boosts is that they were counter-productive. While the boosts yield likes, but a lot of them would be profiles I'd already left-swiped on, should have been excluded by my filters, or just low-effort profiles. The same profiles would keep showing up in my feed too after I had swiped.

As for your second point, I think women do exactly the same thing. There's just more guys on the site so women are just getting a higher ratio low-effort likes. I'd say a good 50% of the profiles don't have anything written in them except a series of emojis or statements like "I don't know what to write here." or other really low effort content. Even the gold profiles sending messages would initiate a conversation with the dreaded "Hi." These interactions were always a complete waste of time, I just stopped responding to them after a while.

IMO if the business model is to pay for impressions, I wish they'd be up front and just state and charge price per mille (or hundred or whatever). Instead you get an ambiguous "boost" with no accountability/metrics about what even happened? They could literally show you to no one and say "Oops, guess your profile sucks!"

The match rate thing is also kind of a lark because you don't care about matches. You care about matches with people you want to match with... in fact that kinda understates the ultimate goal -- you care about matches with someone who would be good for you (and you for them)... everything else is just vanity.

I agree, but a honest model has a flat subscription fee instead of promising matches for free and upselling through nudging and manipulation.

I haven't online dated in a long time, but if I ever do again, I'll go with a service that has a transparent pricing model with no free plan.

unfortunately Tinder has become a lot less useful, and a rising number of OnlyFans creators are using it as a vehicle for advertising. They'll match with a guy, chat like normal, and then start dropping hints about their "spicy site."

it's really kind of depressing, honestly. Guys on dating sites are viewed as transactions. Tinder isn't alone with this - they're on multiple sites doing the same thing.

I've made a similar comment before[1] but this is exactly right. The price-to-benefit ratio for Tinder is incredible. You can literally fill your calendar with dates for months on a budget that would last a couple of decent drinks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30485955

Only if you've hit the genetic jackpot.

Well I'd rather go to a bar/pub anyway. Social, human beings, brawling to order a beer at the zinc, contact and all that? Not to mention you at least get the tipsiness/(more: drunk) if/when all else fails... 8>

Same here, I can look at, meet, and chat with 5-10 girls in one evening in a bar, and get a pretty good impression of them. Takes months to do the same on a dating app, with heaps of added toxic behaviour/people that you don't get in a bar. Gave it up a long time ago..

It's dishonest though, it should be clear that you get downgraded over time as well, and not just marketed as a "boost".

I am sure that is the case, their goal is to keep you swiping as much as possible and buying their upgrades. I had a Gold membership for about a year or so. Boosts didn't work for me, I found that the boots only yielded a lot of low-quality likes (ie: profiles, that my filters should have rejected). I also continuously had profiles showing up that didn't meet my filter criteria and that I'd already swiped left on just days before.

I ended up emailing support and making the case that the site wasn't working as advertised or even as support said it was supposed to be working. I ended up getting a full refund.

2-3 years ago you could use a GPS faker, stay somewhere random a week and then return and you'd have many matches again.

I experimented a lot with it because I used to work at a different online dating company (where I was also doing scummy things).

It IS exploitative, by design. If you don't have the paid service, they'll never show the people who liked you in your normal stack. But once you pay, they've identified you as willing to pay, so the incentives are at extreme odds (any time you get a match, it's a risk for Tinder that you won't pay again)

ya. I pay about $100 per month over a few apps and if you read the sales pages it's clear they deliberately disable useful features if you don't pay so you are paying to have an "enhanced experience". That alone should suggest they don't really have a value proposition for your life. Maybe that's because they don't want to be sued by promising to sell relationship success. But they keep user statistics secret and I suspect that is because the statistics would tell the truth about what they sell. I have had a bad experience but I don't think HN is the the place to talk about it.

I've only ever used ok cupid back in the day, not tinder, but - why do likes matter? Can't you still use the search function to find people you're interested, and begin interacting my messaging them?

No, not anymore. OkCupid is just a stack of people you swipe right or left on now, just like Tinder.

I wonder if for younger people now the best way to meet dates is off-line. Well, I suspect it's always been so, but the question is whether the culture for young people will be decidedly on the off-line side.

> It feels like the app's algorithms are rigged to gradually push you towards paid subscription options

I'd be extremely surprised if it happened to be otherwise.

The problem really happens when you do algorithmic price setting, which incentivizes you as the developer to get people addicted to the experience of swiping, regardless of whether or not the swiping has the desired outcome for the end user. A user base with just the right levels of dopamine from interactions and loneliness will probably end up buying one of the weekly promotional deals.

That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it.

Online dating is a tough problem to solve, tougher still when profit incentives misalign with user success incentives! I'm not even sure what an equitable but also successful dating service would look like, because there's this fundamental mismatch in values.

The problem is worse than that... The app/site developers interests are directly opposing the users interests.

The user (perhaps) wants to find a lifelong partner, and never use dating apps again.

The site developer wants users to never find a lifelong partner, and to spend months/years returning to the app to find new candidates.

In my experience, the developer usually wins - some users on dating sites have been there a decade or more, and active much of that time.

This model ignores a key incentive: dating apps that don't successfully match won't be used.

So at best, the developer is incentivized to have the user find someone to date in the short term and have the relationship fail in a manner that doesn't reflect poorly on the dating site. And it's not really feasible for the dating site distinguish between "will successfully date for a few months" and "will successfully date for a lifetime".

You could apply the same logic to any long term purchase. Dealerships only sell lemons because they want you to come back and buy more cars. Recruiters only match you with companies that you'll definitely want to leave because they want to match you again. Realtors only show you houses you'll hate because then you'll want to move again.

> dating apps that don't successfully match won't be used.

This isn't entirely true. A portion of the user base uses it almost entirely for entertainment and validation. I'd suspect it's a sizeable portion at that.

> it's not really feasible for the dating site distinguish between "will successfully date for a few months" and "will successfully date for a lifetime".

I think it is feasible for a dating site to figure that out, given enough data.

And I think the 'few months' figure is probably too high - they want to match people who will go on a few dates or a one night stand, then return to the app.

It's a pretty damn strong signal when a user matches with someone, exchanges phone numbers, then deactivates their account. The ML algorithms will be trained to do everything possible to avoid that outcome.

Have you considered the network effect? Users can't switch if there is no competitor with possible matches.

This isn't really the case though.

If an app isn't getting you decent dates every so often, you'll move to an app that does. And it's pretty clear within a couple of months if an app is working for you or not.

And then once you're in a relationship, the app has zero control over whether it succeeds or not!

So no, dating apps aren't working against your romantic interests, simply because a) there's too much competition and b) they're not even smart enough to identify your true love and then hide him/her from you.

They are trying to make a buck off of you though. Which they should, since they're a business.

But so no, the developer doesn't "usually" win. I have lots of friends who got married from an online date. The people you know who are still on the apps after a decade -- well it's not like they've settled down with anyone they met in real life either. It's probably not the apps' fault.

Most of the apps are owned by Match.com, and they've slowly migrated to the same mechanism, the only difference is the demographics they cater to.

But there is no competition. A single company controls all the main apps.

Sounds a lot like a casino. The house always wins, at the expense of their customers.

Maybe it’s worse than a casino - relatively few people walk into a casino expecting to win life changing money and never come back.

Many people use dating apps expecting to find a lifelong partner and never come back.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind paying $10K for finding someone who actually becomes my life partner, let's say due upon 2 years of stable marriage. In such a system, user incentives would be fully aligned with the business. However -- this would be hard to enforce.

My brother posted on FB offering several thousand dollars for anyone who referred him a wife. No dice though. He met his wife a couple years later via one of the apps.

I was thinking the money could be held in escrow. You could only get your money back if you end up marrying someone you didn't meet on the service.

Not sure I like that idea. What if I never marry because I don't meet someone {compatible, available, interested}?

Maybe if I can delete my account from the platform at any time (even without marrying anyone) and get my money back I'd be OK with it. Ideally, the money in escrow should also earn interest or have the option to invest it in some generic index fund.

> That's why when you first start on any dating service, you're (typically) inundated with activity, so that you can always chase that high, and when you can't get it, you try to pay for it.

It's striking how the business model is indistinguishable from how cocaine dealers were described to us as kids in the 80s.

Only two industries call their customers "users" (-:

I'm so tired of this line. The reason they're called "users" in tech is because unlike in many industries, they don't pay anything for access to the platform/app. If they all paid, they'd be called "customers".

Implying that tech companies and drug dealers are birds of a feather based on this is silly. If you want to say tech companies make addictive products, say that. But don't pretend that calling people "users" is evidence in furtherance of this argument.

I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

All the options people have are using toxic apps which entire business model is to undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money. And then people wonder where the mental health problems and mass shootings come from.

I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere, it's a dangerous scam.

The government of Singapore has been active in this area since the 80's. Not only having run a dating site, but also subsidizing singles cruises, hosting mixer events, and grants to college programs to get people together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network

I am living in Singapore and never heard of anything like that. Would you mind giving some links besides another (purely declarative) initiative of ministry of youth?

One link is here (thanks to a poster downthread):

https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...

> I don't get it. Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

California kind of accidentally did so a few years. They thought they were simply running a public sex offender registry, but it occurred to some sex offenders it was also a state run directory of people that would be less likely to be put off by their own record and might even have at least one important shared interest to bond over.

The state was not pleased with this.

Wouldn't it have the same problem as dating sites of being male-dominated, except x100?

this is both awful and hilarious

> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money

Because its outside the scope & role of the government?

> I really don't understand how this stuff is still not regulated anywhere

This is a common theme I see in alot of discussions about everything. Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything.

And plus, we have the rules. Match group, who basically own the entire western world online dating market, should have not been allowed to buy all their competitors in the first place. This is a failure of the regulating bodies to do anything and now the users end up paying the price.

> Because its outside the scope & role of the government

Is it? Governments care very much about what their demographics will be in the future. Governments get involved in trying to modify birth rate. Hooking people up seems like an interesting idea, especially if the government thinks they're going to deal with massively bad demographic shift in the midterm future.

Yeah, tell the government of Japan that they shouldn't have been worried about young people dating for the last three decades.

> Because its outside the scope & role of the government?

That doesn't align with the fact that there are government funded programmes for things like mental well being, sexual health and education, and even music appreciation.

The government is concerned with whatever the heck we say it is. It's _our_ government.

P.S. No, I don't live in America ;)

> Do not confuse regulation with enforcement. Any regulation that is not enforced is useless, or it is used selectively (a.k.a "corruption"). Adding more rules wont solve anything.

This is such a weird take when you think about it. It's like saying "people can just run traffic lights; therefore, adding more traffic lights cannot prevent accidents." Okay, well, preventing people from running traffic lights is just a separate issue that should also be solved if it's a problem. The answer isn't to stop putting up traffic lights! And it doesn't follow that some people not following the rules means rules are worthless. Besides, different governments (and different agencies within governments) have vastly different levels of "teeth". I know it's easy to get jaded seeing all the regulatory capture in the U.S., but that's not the entire world. Even in the U.S. some regulations are rigorously enforced, e.g. FAA regulations.

It's like saying, "Some people keep running this traffic light but we don't have any traffic cops. What if we lowered the speed limit so they wouldn't be going so fast when they run it?"

Different governments have widely different scopes & roles. It's up to society to decide what government shall do.

It actually seems much more aligned with scope & role of the government than of any commercial entity.

Future demographics are probably a pretty serious longterm issue..

No, a country is nothing without its people.

I'm all for a lot of state-sponsored things, but a government run dating site sounds like one of the most dystopian ideas I can imagine.

Blaming online dating sites for mental health problems and mass shooting is a new one. I don't discount the feeling of despair that can occur on dating sites for men. However, the experience of a being woman on a dating app is absolutely harrowing, even if you have incredibly low standards and/or are incredibly desirable.

Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind.

To put it differently, I'm reading your argument as equivalent to saying that the existence of the USPS (which will deliver to remote rural areas, despite the fact that doing so isn't profitable) is more dystopian than the existence of UPS and FedEx (which will not).

>Current dating apps are designed to make money for their creators. A dating app made by the government could be made with completely different incentives in mind.

I once was a part of making a Facebook clone for the US military so service men and women wouldn't be on Facebook giving away secrets.

It was garbage and nobody used it but nobody cared because we weren't being paid to get people to use it.

The functions of the USPS and a dating site differ substantially. If we were talking about an email or file transfer service then we could at least compare the paradigm.

It's always weird to read how government-run XYZ is somehow "dystopian" when we currently already have MassiveUnaccountableCorporation-run XYZ. I'd rather not have either of them run things, but if I had a choice, I'd much rather it be an institution that at least in theory answers to voters, than a meagcorporation that answers only to a set of rich shareholders. Talk about dystopian!

At some level, a dating network needs to make recommendations.

In Plato's Republic, he proposed his vision for a utopian city-state. Essentially, citizens would be ranked into castes: bronze/iron for laborers and artisans, silver for soldiers, gold for leaders. When people came of age in this utopia, they would be paired off through what they would be told is a random lottery.

In reality, however, the city's leaders would decide on the couplings ahead of time, pairing like with like. Plato called this the "noble lie", and it neatly demonstrates what any government-run dating system would probably develop into: a systemic eugenics program.

If you leave it up to private companies, you'd still get an eugenics program, one that selects for creating the perfect little consumer.

In a future where dating apps (and technology in general) becomes the only way to meet potential mates, only those who successfully "engage" with the apps/tech in a way that the company approves of will be allowed to reproduce.

Those that either refuse to engage on principles, or don't "engage" with it the "right" way (let's say by not falling for dark patterns, etc) and end up banned are effectively prevented from reproducing.

Both options can end up dystopian, but I'll take a government-run scheme any day. Not only are governments at least theoretically accountable to their citizens, but they are also as slow as molasses and terrible at tech, so they'd fare much worse at eugenics than a private company.

You people take it to far. I am not talking about some dystopian government that forces marriages to create some kind of super-citizen.

I just want the incentive of making profit removed and provide a decent service that does what it promises. If that service can only be provided at a loss (which seems to be the case) then let the state do it. Nobody would force anyone to use it.

Sure, but it's a slippery slope, and there are other ways to reduce the profit motive, like grant/donation-based non-profits or public benefit corporations.

Well-intentioned government mandates have a nasty habit of being used coercively when authoritarian-minded administrations get their turn at the helm.

Oh wow. This is the first time we’ve heard about Plato’s political thought experiment, didacticos.

>Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

Sounds like a great idea. I nominate NSA as the host organization. You wouldn't even need to bother creating a profile, they will just use all the surveillance data to find you the best matches.

https://crossdysfunctional.tumblr.com/post/109024982557/fund...

Ha. The NSA or Amazon. Just log in through Amazon SSO and it matches your purchase history against a variety of candidates. Medical purchases excluded for a fee.

If you have more trust in a shady private company than your own government it's time to move to another country.

Well how about we start a non-profit dating app? I was just wondering how much it could cost to run the backend with todays cloud services. With what Tinder is charging for boosts and subscriptions I feel like they're raking it in. But I've never developed and deployed a fully cloud based app, just used a bunch of their services off and on.

I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.

It’s not non-profit afaik but doesn’t plenty of fish [0] essentially provide this service?

The problem is the population has already been divided and Match exists using predatory practices. You could maybe dethrone it using regulations or an organic campaign.

0 [ https://www.pof.com ]

https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa

Nice effort but I'm thinking more of a cloud-native app. Simply because if it's to be non-profit, it should be as cheap as possible. And RDS with MariaDB does not fit. Alovoa seems more aimed at self-hosting.

I've actually detailed an idea like this a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27474424

Singapore gov does that (to some extent):

https://www.msf.gov.sg/policies/Marriages/Pages/Finding-a-Pa...

I don't know about the mass shootings being linked to dating apps but I thought about this too.

I think the fundamental problem is that more men always sign up on these apps than women. That would be true of a government app also. It seems like this ruins the experience for both men and women alike. I am speculating here because we don't really know much about how these apps work since no one releases their user data. But women I have talked to complain about married men, copy-pasted pickup lines, and men treating women like prostitutes. With my own experience men complain about fake accounts, having to do all the effort and getting nothing for it, and for both, meeting people, going on dates, and then after you've become attracted to each other you find out how deeply damaged and incompatible the other person is because they hid all their baggage.

A lot of this just seems like it's exacerbated by the use of an app. I think the apps drive decent people away. This is all speculation.

I somewhat think the whole proposition of online dating was doomed to fail. I don't know if a non profit/government office could fix this leaving aside how politics could affect it.

Have you seen the state of governments ?

They are so incompetent that famine/frost/nuclear apocalypse are serious possibilities..

If you think they look bad, you should check out some of their constituents.

Seriously though, this seems like an area where anti-trust and transparency regulation (service X has a Y rating for producing matches that meet standard Q) could play a useful role.

I kind of love this idea, take the skills of 18F https://18f.gsa.gov/ and put them into making the ultimate dating site! An awesome application of data science. Let's take it further -- Government-funded matchmakers! They can hire all the Korean and Indian aunties that are already doing this for free.

What an unfortunate name, though... 18/F/USA totes legit

Sharing your desires, sexual preference and all intimate conversions with the government doesn't seem like a good idea.

You could say they can tap into that currently, and that's probably true, but deliberately broadcasting it to them would probably be out of question for many people.

Also, consider what government run IT projects look like. Now mix that with a dating app, perfect recipe for a disaster.

You would always be able to switch to whatever service you like for further messaging, a non-profit the wouldn't care about keeping you on their app. Why would you have intimate conversations on a dating site anyway.

Some places do. Not gov. level, and probably not in the US, but your hunch has been followed-up in some european and asian towns where they’ll organize matching pools of local singles. It’s beneficial to everyone: the town keeps their working age tax payers, willing to build a family there, and the people get to find partners with high chance they share many values alredy.

> undermine the self-esteem of young men and scamming them out of their money

Your first mistake was thinking that culture actually cares about this.

The Singapore government does some matchmaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network

From what I heard it's mostly speed-dating stuff.

EDIT: Aand I got ninja'ed. Twice.

Interestingly the Chinese government does something similar:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/06/27/China-lau...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/comrade-me...

Seems like a waste of tax-payer money to me. Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.

> Why can't people just... meet others offline like they did 10+ years ago.

Because dating apps have distorted courting even if we elect to ignore them.

They alter expectations and make the proverbial sea seem much more filled with fish than it truly is.

And even if this distortion has no impact on us, we can't control whether or not it has had impact on our prospective date(s).

Why would your date willfully overlook a glaring fault of yours, for instance, if they have 999 likes in their pocket from seemingly-flawless suitors?

Hell, even if your date doesn't use dating apps either, then they likely know what's available from friends, relatives, etc.

People can meet each other offline like they did 10+ years ago. They (or some large proportion) might prefer to meet online though, as the evidence seems to indicate.

Bowling alone, pfft... why can’t they bowl with somebody?

Well, if the government wants to help people meeting offline, it's gonna cost a helluva lot more than a website... to the point it doesn't sound like a waste anymore. I don't see society going back to offline dating by itself.

Why would this need to be government run?

Businesses want to make money, and dating apps can make heaps of money by retaining users and making it pricier for them to find a relationships.

Users that want relationships want to find someone ASAP and delete the app.

Those two goals are completely incompatible.

Because monopolies

It could also be built using the Signal model.

Everything else so far seems to absolutely suck.

> Why does no government anywhere run a non-profit dating site from tax-payer money when this is becoming the most popular way people are meeting?

Popular does not mean effective. Online dating is the most toxic way of dating invented, so why would the governments contribute?

It’s very toxic to casually claim that something causes mass shootings without evidence.

ISIS kinda did that, minus app. But the whole process was absurdly abusive and exploitative.

You, as a user of a dating app, are forever in a Nash Equilibrium with the dating app. When you find the love of your life, you delete the app forever. Therefore, everything the app does to help you find that person works directly against their own goals (user growth, “engagement”. subscriptions).

> works directly against their own goals (user growth, “engagement”. subscriptions).

... success stories, marriages per day due to the app (as per Match.com's advertising material in the article), word of mouth advertisement for the app to your friends...? Again, from the article, even in 2011 match.com was proudly reporting that its active user base changed out every six months. So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect" narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.

On the other hand, plenty of people use dating apps like Bumble and Tinder to find hook-ups, not the love of their life. These people will keep coming back to the app as a result of being frequently successful.

> So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect" narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.

Tobacco companies are spending serious money to stop kids from smoking, because they really care about their health.

> So the "dating apps don't want you to find someone perfect" narrative strikes me as a little simplistic.

Read the article again; their explanation is that after 6 months, people either butt out, or pair-off and butt out.

I wonder if there is an alternative business model which would put users and the business on the same side.

Could you put a lien against someone's marriage, such that in order to marry someone you meet on HappyDating.com you had to pay the outstanding debt?

Anything less extreme?

For short-term incentives, you could have some kind of scheme where you monetize dates. Eg when you match someone the app proposes you a list of partner bars, restaurants, parks, etc.

In theory, this could create a perverse incentive for the app to set you up for matches that last just long enough for a few dates, but not long enough that you get off the app. In practice, I don't think matching algorithms are precise enough that the app could act on that incentive.

The bigger problem is that most users would completely ignore the monetized dates.

Good idea! I'm not entirely sure it helps though. You still need to keep people on the dating treadmill to make money, not get them off and onto the remainder of their shared life experience as quickly as possible.

Unless you interject before people get a chance to talk to each other. You might even be able to spin this as a safety feature, you matched with this person - Click here to join our dating even next Tuesday that they are going to...

> I wonder if there is an alternative business model which would put users and the business on the same side.

Hookup apps. Apps for non-monogamous people. You're looking for repeat customers.

The only other way is paying when the couple gets into something long-term, but the fee would probably be higher than people want.

Definitely hookups, but also not just hookups; I've found gay Tinder to be a really great way to meet people in my area from all walks of life and parts of town who have overlapping interests with me.

I definitely agree that if your service depends on a subscription model and is explicitly aimed at people whose goal begins and ends with finding a life partner and deleting their account, then there is really no easy way to reconcile this.

Heterosexual non-monogamy is difficult for those people who aren't, let's say, conventionally attractive.

The people I knew who could pull it off didn't really need an app!

Additional "relationship management" services? Anniversary reminders/suggestions to counseling to help on any possible angle of being a couple. Probably also access to lawyers (possibly paired with more dating).

A subscription that converts to free membership after n years.

At that point why not just sell lifetime memberships by default?

Honestly, I think this is a great idea. It would probably cost next to nothing but would work well as a marketing ploy.

This is why I had high expectations and hopes for Facebook Dating. They "have all the data" - and benefit from you being on the site, whether you get married and stop using dating, or not.

Unfortunately, they made a pretty shitty 'dating' system and left it to rot.

When you find the love of your life you move from user to free marketing. People constantly talk about how they met, early dates, etc. New users always enter the dating market, either by just younger people getting older or breakups, divorce, erc. So it seems like it wouldn't be in the best long term interest to keep users in the dopamine loop.

Sounds good in theory, but consider two dating apps: one with hockey stick user growth and high retention, and another with stagnant growth but high user churn. Which one would get the VC dollars? The story you tell would present itself in metrics as the latter app (high churn).

This here is the crux of the problem: approaching everything with the "would someone think of the VCs" mindset.

Can we for once build something good and useful, and leave the greedy gamblers out of it?

> When you find the love of your life, you delete the app forever. Therefore, everything the app does to help you find that person works directly against their own goals (user growth, “engagement”. subscriptions).

I'm not sure this is a fair modeling of how an app must work -- think of other industries that have extremely long sales cycles like, say, a realtor. Realtors are incentivized to match you to a home in such a manner that you might recommend them to others (and leave positive reviews), perhaps even use them again on the buy/sell side later on if their career is long.

Mind you Realtor is closest to professional match maker, but there's no reason an app couldnt take a middle ground between tinder and a highly involved match making service.

Tinder and OkCupid are not in the "I want to find a partner for life" demographic, they are in the "we give you a constant stream of hookup connections" business.

Surprisingly I thought the same though there is more than one person I know who is married to his Tinder date. Somehow it works out apperantly (this is still anecdotal).

Don't tell anyone, I also met my wife on Tinder. But we are the exception, not the rule.

Isn’t it the same company now

You know how the big car companies have different brands (VW and Porsche, Ford and Jaguar, Toyota and Lexus), each for a specific market segment?

Same thing.

I've long had an idea for an app that helped you be a better boyfriend/husband by helping you plan dates and find good ideas for dates in your city like museums, great restaurants, concerts, etc.

only if they are the only dating app around. if not, then having a reputation for actually matching people well will bring more people to the app and generate more revenue than you would ever get from a small amount of desperate customers.

Of course, matching people well is hard - so any model that isnt good at that will be better off trying to game their customers and brute force their marketing. (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)

> Of course, matching people well is hard

I thought OKCupid did a great job. The second person I had a conversation with ended up becoming my wife.

I really liked how OKCupid had a seemingly never-ending set of personality questions. You could answer none of them, or you could answer 100 of them, and the more you answered, the more confidence it had in its matching. You would even flag the importance of each question, so you can tell it if something is an absolute deal-breaker (like your desire to have kids or stay child-free), or if something is a mild preference, like hair color.

> (for example, if their entire model is based on superficial values like how well they can take a photo of themselves - it may not be good at actually matching people)

IMO, Tinder ruined online dating. AFAIK, it makes zero attempt at actually matching people based on any metrics other than location and age.

Actually, I take that back. Tinder didn't ruin online dating, shitty men that send unsolicited dick pics or go ape-shit when they get rejected did.

Isn’t hinge addressing this

Seeing as how Hinge is also owned by the Match Group... probably not.

Is it?

To a complete outsider it feels as if Hinge is just becoming the new Tinder. Anecdotal of course (mostly from women friends), but partly supported by the growth of Hinge lately.

People looking for relationships don't want to be matched with people only looking for hookups, and people looking for hookups don't want to part of a club that accepts them. Apps have the incentive to make money so they don't really do anything.

From my friend circle hinge is completely different than tinder/etc and built for the purpose of finding long term matches. Most of my friends, along with myself, found their SO on hinge.

How are they doing it? Is it a poly app?

Nah, that’s Open.

can you explain more?

Not if you're poly or something (just saying)

> When you find the love of your life, you delete the app forever.

That's true only for users who have this goal.

McDonalds works against its interests by making its customers less hungry too.

I might be wrong, but people don't generally consume their date :o)

OkCupid used to have great engineering blogs often with an embedded and nuanced social commentary regarding the haves vs have-nots when it comes to the dating world. I believe at one point they divided users, or rather let them self-classify as A-team and B-team. Some would never even pass each other in the hallway based on this score and designation.

Their articles were really interesting too; its sad Match took all of them down. One of the ones I distinctly remember was about the right profile pictures. Its been years, but I clearly remember for men it was something along the lines of "full body, outdoor picture, while shirtless looking away from the camera"

Photofeeler did a post about trying replicate some of this and apparently some of okcupid's results were probably pretty questionable: https://blog.photofeeler.com/okcupid-is-wrong-about-smiling-...

Bumble will tell you which of your photos caused the most right swipes. In my case it was EXACTLY that: photo of me from behind shirtless while rock climbing, muscles on display.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying about A/B or how hallways fit into online dating.

I take it to mean people so different in socio economic status that they would never be in the same building in real life.

My girlfriend once got a message on OKCupid, that she was categorized into the group of especially popular people.

I contacted the staff, but never found out what this meant in the end.

Christian Rudder, the author of this article and many other great posts on the OKCupid blog, wrote a book with a lot of the same insights repackaged.

https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Christian-Rudder-audiobook/...

Counter-point: always pay for online dating (as a guy). (Everything that follows is anecdotal.) I used Tinder off and on for years. When I was active I’d swipe for 10-30 mns a day and I think I estimated I could get through 100 right-swipes (“Yes, I want to match”) per day. Even with that I would only end up with 1 or 2 matches a week. Which predictably when you include the chances of them being a bot, of them not responding, or not being serious about going out on dates meant I was basically going on at most 1 date a month with Tinder.

At this point, I had refused to pay for a subscription because it felt cringe/sad as a reasonably attractive guy who doesn’t have terrible luck dating in real life. At some point I got over my dumb ego and paid for the highest tier subscription—cause, hey, why not? I kid you not the number of matches I got went up 10x. I would swipe on someone and match within 30 mns vs 1 week 1 month later. I had multiple dates a week, more dates than I’d ever had in my life. And eventually met my current girlfriend.

My point: the game is clearly rigged. Nothing about me changed. My behavior using the app, my physical appearance, my bio were all the same. As soon as I gave them my money Tinder flipped a switch and my profile which was likely barely being placed in front of women was now pushed front and center.

Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26945413 - April 2021 (116 comments) Related:

Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265 comments)

Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 - Sept 2017 (1 comment)

Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 - Feb 2011 (80 comments)

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 - Oct 2010 (32 comments)

Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 - April 2010 (9 comments)

They also had an amazing blog post about how dating profiles came down to ~85% how attractive you are (both men and women).

Most people look at 3-4 images and pass, this probably was the inspiration for Tinder.

One example of this was personality score, which they ended up removing. "In short, according to our users, “looks” and “personality” were the same thing". In this example it was just a profile picture with no text...

Whole bunch of interesting knowledge from this:

https://archive.ph/QNCbf#selection-513.0-513.79

The inspiration for Tinder was Grindr, an app for gay men.

Gotta hand it to gay men, they're pretty honest about what they're looking for.

I find the bad attitude of "Must be: 6 foot, 6 pack, 6 figures" very minimal on Grindr. I'm guessing because if that's what you actually want you can find it easily, and after being rejected enough you're more likely to adjust your bad attitude.

Most gays I know don't use grindr anymore however.

Honest to who, others or themselves?

I think most dishonesty in dating is just lack of self awareness.

A profile picture with no text implies confidence and knowing how attractive you are (other than being a bot of course)

This is funny, I recently created a new Tinder profile and for lack of inspiration I didn't fill anything in except some pictures. I'm getting a lot more swipes than when I nerded up my profile. Unfortunately, I'm looking for interesting conversation which 80% of pic-based 'swipes' don't really provide.

>After we got rid of the two scales, and replaced it with just one, we ran a direct experiment to confirm our hunch — that people just look at the picture. We took a small sample of users and half the time we showed them, we hid their profile text. That generated two independent sets of scores for each profile, one score for “the picture and the text together” and one for “the picture alone.” Here’s how they compare. Again, each dot is a user. Essentially, the text is less than 10% of what people think of you.

Further down the page.

I think, OKCupid did rather well. They question approach was a bit broad, but if you just answered around 100 very niche questions, you'd get good matches.

But to be honest, I did online dating for almost 20 years and got like 10 dates from it, 2 of which turned into a relationship.

Some of my friends did much better, though. You know, the tall, buff guys with beards, etc. Had at least one date a month. So, even with the "show personally via questions" kind of stuff, looks are still king in online dating.

I did much better with offline dating. Talking to a interesting person is more exciting than just reading about it, I guess.

So, if you wanna go the online route, hit the gym and eat well.

If you're prepared to meet people offline and date at parties, meetups, etc. Then you can get away with a less helathy lifestyle, haha.

Paying for online dating was the reason I met my wife.

I had been using several dating apps and had paid subscriptions to all of them. I was getting burned out by the experience and decided to let my subscriptions expire and take a break from dating, so I wasn’t actively checking the apps anymore.

A paid feature of one of the apps I was paying for (Coffee Meets Bagel, for the curious) was that it notified me whenever someone liked my profile. One day I got one of those notifications, checked her profile and arranged a first date.

And now here we are, happily married :)

OkCupid was awesome.

Can someone please make another one? We need a site dedicated to Test Taking! OkCupid wasn't just about dating; it was about the tests you could create and take. It was awesome.

The dating was also based on tests and archetypes OkCupid created and they were pretty good. We need something pure like that from the early 2000s.

Could you elaborate on what OkCupid was like in the early 2000s? I've only known it for a few years.

You started off by taking these matching profile tests that grouped you into an archetype based on your responses. The archetype test was also optional it wasn't required to use the site. (Not sure if it was based on orientation but it was certainly gender based.)

There were a series of archetypes that were your ideal matches and you could search by peoples archetypes if they shared it. (I believe you could keep it private, too.. I can't totally remember.)

Otherwise, the entire site was geared towards creating tests and taking tests. Their test creation system was awesome. I had several tests on tv shows and entertainment. You could get really detailed with the response types and question structures.

OkCupid themselves, as outlined in this thread, shared their data freely and collected it without a bunch of invasive coding. People were literally creating data collection tests and we took them for fun. That's how you collect data!

The entire site had a much more mellow approach to dating then the alternatives at the time, yet it was still geared towards matches not just sex.

Thanks for the insights!

In my experience, Okcupid's match percentage was a very good estimate for how good of a match you were with someone. So there was that.

Plus, the whole OKCupid experience wasn't a game of deception to trick you into buying subscriptions or IAP.

Aside: I'm in my late twenties and have used various of the currently popular dating apps on/off over the last few years. Whenever I see one of the old OKC blogposts around the internet, it's kind of striking how different the pictures look from what you'd see on the apps today. It's possible/not unlikely I'm overinterpreting based on the different style/fashion alone here, but it just all seems a lot less posed & staged, and like there's much more variance than with the pictures you see today, and even the extremely attractive examples seem much more natural.

If you are saying that the profile photos on dating sites seem a lot less staged, than you are right. Good quality cameras on cell phones were not nearly as ubiquitous in 2010 as they are now. I think it was better back then because you could get a good sense of the person's personality from their photos than you can now.

Also, it wasn't a given that you were only/primarily using it via a mobile app. I remember frequently browsing OkC and chatting with people on my computer during lunch. It was a lot more focused on saying things before they turned into another swipe/mobile-centric platform.

Probably because online dating/apps are mainstream now. OkCupid was most certainly not mainstream. Online dating still had a social stigma even in 2010 and OkCupid was the one that geeks used. It was generally full of unattractive people. Some people now intentionally take and curate pictures for their online profile and even some of the most attractive people use it.

Article from 2010. Instagram was created on October 6, 2010. I bet it's related.

I once googled the screen name of a Plenty of Fish date I had setup. Exact match comes up on a 'weird' forum, with city and state matching in the info under the username.

One fake account later (required to view attachments), I saw pictures of her dog doing her in... Uh... various ways.

I stopped online dating for like 5 years after that.

That's a nightmare. She should be sent to prison for that, tbh.

Not nearly as extreme, but last time I tried Online dating I messaged someone and found out she was only looking for someone to get her pregnant and be a father. Straight up, first thing, not interested in a first date unless I was interested in getting her pregnant.

I'm Christian so sex outside of marriage is a huge no-no for me anyway, so unmatching was not a hard decision even though she was attractive.

Be VERY glad she was upfront about it. That is a decently common tactic for women over 25.

My last relationship was practically begging to get her pregnant from the first 6 months. Eventually it didn't work out after 2 years.

Next guy met her, and got her pregnant within 2-3 months. Married 3 months later. He's set to inherit an 800 acre ranch on the coast of California very soon. He has no idea who he just married. The girl was a nightmare. I'm 38 and have serially dated for 20+ years, and I've never met a girl so mean and cold and unpleasant. I'm not sure if he's seen that side yet, and he's about to be a dad next month.

If someone reproduced what OKCupid was before the Match acquisition, that would disrupt the dating app market. Dating apps as a whole have been a race to the bottom thanks to Match.

I think onboarding users is the biggest problems. How does one approach that?

If I could have come up with a cheap solution, I would have done it already.

It would probably be worth it to pay Kim Kardashian her $250k featured post fee to get a bunch of women to join. Something along those lines.

I paid for OkCupid to get advanced filters to find my wife, shortly after this article was written.

I paid for a single month of premium back in the day. So this article is odd.

I like to read this that you were already married when you found your wife, and were trying to see what you needed to do to get OkCupid to recommend her.

Yup I paid for online dating around when this article was written and it was one of the best decisions of my life!

I also used OkC and some others around that time period, and they struck me as both less expensive and a little less cynically "pay to win" (to use the gaming terminology). I recall it was more like paying $5-8 for a month's worth of better filters and being able to see who checked out your profile - something fairly useful since it may show you someone who's already at least somewhat interested and hadn't already come across your radar.

When I did online dating again a year or so ago, it seemed both more expensive and more blatantly creepy (pay to "like" the most in-demand people! yech...)

The one nice thing was realizing quickly that what they were charging for in 2021 wasn't something I wanted to pay for, so I could safely skip it. Even without paying a dime, I found Hinge to be a useful way to meet people and go on dates that were largely fun and a mostly decent experience. Currently involved with someone I met there a year ago and haven't used the apps since then.

I am happy for you but I think if you met your wife in a car crash (I knew a person this happened to for real!) I don't think you would say a great way to meet people is car crashes. Also, maybe OKC was better than some.

I think dating apps would be creepy, but to be fair I am a person who married before they were that popular. I have a college age son who is in a committed relationship with someone he met through friends so I believe IRL meeting is still possible. The important thing is to build strong relationships so do what works for you.

You have a great response to the headline!

The article though gives details of what they see as the problem: forcing people to pay to allow communicating means that well over 90% of profiles on their systems are just filler and unable to communicate with you.

And had those filler profiles not existed maybe I wouldn’t have joined. But at least when I paid, specifically for OkCupid, the premium filters let me find real people.

n=1

n > 0 (never)

Personal anecdote:

Bought a Bumble Premium with a one time payment of ~120 EUR. In three months got only one match which led to a date. But what a date! We are in love now and I am quitting all dating apps I have used before.

My match was ONLY possible due to a Premium subscription. These 120 EUR were the best spent money of my live.

My fair warning / PSA is[1] never pay for "roses" (super likes, other premium ways of indicating you like them "more"). They don't work. And the worst of it as an antipattern they essentially work against you (because the app lets the recipient know they received a rose).

Here's why -- On average, matches are essentially trying to maximize the ELO score they match with, someone with a maximized score across many variables like social aptitude, wealth, future prospects, looks, (and many other attributes). Now, obviously people have their own weighing function for each aspect but some of them are simply universally valued -- for example healthy is near-universally preferred to someone who is critically ill. So What do you indicate to a match that you most likely _needed_ to use a rose to attempt to match with them ? You reveal that the app generated Elo score is actually too low to be presented them in normal swipes. (Especially in hinge which has a weekly rotation of people you cannot swipe/match with except if you rose, perhaps in other apps but I'm less well versed in their mechanics).

[1]: at least as a man, idk if a woman would ever send a rose to a man, and if they'd work even if they did. Women will get a match >50% of the time w/o a rose, so why pay?

I think the unstated issue is that there are predominantly hook-up apps that people also use to find life partners because good alternatives don’t exist.

With the assimilation of the ecosystem into Match some sort of alignment was inevitable, and a hook-up service is a ‘good’ SaaS service by classic metrics, while a matchmaking service does not fit the model well (at least yet).

If you liked this article I recommend the book Dataclysm by the same author.

There’s a good TikTok addressing why it’s impossible to escape paying for online dating. Basically, it comes down to the reward cycle. When you first sign up, you get a bunch of matches and success. Then it tapers off, giving you the option to pay for the initial success, which it happily gives you. Repeat.

That’s the core reason these apps print money.

So the main complaint here seems to be that eHarmony and Match.com only let subscribers talk to other subscribers? Is that still true? If so, that does indeed sound like a pretty terrible way of doing things. If I'm a paying customer I should be able to initiate a conversation with anyone who's willing. I don't want my prospective date to have to pay money just to talk to me!

In terms of the larger point about the overall incentive structure of dating sites, it seems to me there are a few possible solutions:

1. Sites should only allow "lifetime" subscriptions, eliminating the perverse incentive to keep people from having successful relationships.

2. Some sort of system for paying per successful match. Something like "I'll pay you $1k if I meet my wife through your service." That seems way harder to enforce, but would align the incentive structures almost perfectly if it could be achieved.

If you take the view that users should be paid for viewing ads via microtransactions (like through a browser like Brave), then isn't it reasonable to expect the same rewards for users using dating apps? Wouldn't it make sense to pay the user instead of the service for their time and attention?

It seems to me that microtransactions and dating apps are a perfect match, and I wonder why no one has done this yet? Is it because it's too closely associated with ideas of prostitution? It's only a stone's throw from the concept of OnlyFans, but instead you pay for attention instead of exhibitionism. Why should Tinder/OkCupid get paid for "boosts" when you're really just buying the attention from your target demographic? Seems like crypto would fit nicely into this sector.

Interesting idea but already now people swipe purely out of boredom or, even worse, get addicted to swiping – what would that look like if they also got paid for swiping?

Yes, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. On some level, people do get paid for seeing ads in the sense that the real content they want is being subsidized, so on some level, even if someone is "bullshit" swiping, they are still giving their time and attention so there is some benefit for the person be swiped in the aggregate.

That said, I imagine the actual thing that would need to be paid for is someone's time, so posting a kind of smart contract crypto bond that someone gets for showing up in person to a coffee date or something like that. Yes it would still be abused, but there would be a equalibrium reached between price and time sacrificed. Maybe you make it so that you can only go on a certain number of coffee dates per week or something like that.

I honestly view online dating as a low-yield random effort. My last gf was on Match. I’ve been on dates from the other sites, though Hinge seems to trend too young.

The cost isn’t prohibitive to me so I just go with it.

The one thing that should be clear to everyone is that no matter what, the most important aspect of dating is to be as geographically close to your perceived dating pool as possible.

So figure out the two or three basic requirements you have (politics, culture) and try to live where those things are common. No amount of effort online or not is going to improve your chances of meeting viable partners if you live too far away. I think you really need to be within 15 minutes or less. As a man, I firmly believe this is a top filter for women when looking at profiles.

Remaining single is actually a realistic and wise option for many men out there.

A funny anecdote: back in the day there was an app called Flamite that used the now defunct tinder api and you could use it to automate matchmaking. what i did is to yes everyone and then i waited a week. i had 200 matches. I then checked all profiles and removed 120 that i didn't like. i wrote to the remaining 80. i had good chats with 20 of them, met 3 of them and now I'm happily married to one.

You absolutely should pay for dating apps. They barely work otherwise.

You're probably better off without them.

Do they work any better after you pay though?

Yes. If you don't pay they barely show your profile so you won't get matched much.

To add my own personal experience (and to echo the headline),

I met my wife while using PlentyOfFish. We have been married for 12+ years. I would never pay for a dating app/site.

If you can't find somebody on the free sites, join a forum where you might find somebody with similar interests/hobbies/skills. Be a kind, polite person and once you have developed a friendship, then see if it can expand into more.

Most of these other apps are more geared to hook-ups, (hump-and-dump); and not towards long-term relationships anyway.

This may have been true 12 years ago, but years later OkCupid added "last active", which was a search criteria to weed out old profiles. At least, was there in 2015 when I met my current partner.

The gist of the article seems to be combining two different things: why you should pay for online dating, and false advertising. I don't think the OP joins those arguments very well. Plus, again, this was 12 years ago. I think today OKC might be guilty of the same thing they are pointing fingers at back then.

OKC was bought by Match - they were no longer the same company after being acquired as they were before. All these articles were written before they were acquired.

Ah, good point. Didn't know that. The second paragraph still holds tho: mixing two arguments.

Nice article but not sure I follow the argument here. The problem of messaging into the void can be solved by changing the settings to only show you paid members. If they don't give the option then don't use them. Paying members are more serious so it makes sense to not spend your time on non-paying members. BTW, at least on Tinder I know that everyone can message back regardless if they are paid members. Maybe in 2010 things were different and the article made more sense then.

One way to make it align is to run dating platform voluntarily instead of for profit. This way you really want your effort to be helpful to the community.

This reminded me about a fun talk done by Amy Webb - how she played with dating.

Just posted it for everyone to - enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt3LAaq8XKY - discuss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33164287

Met my wife on OKCupid, we have kids now and have been happily married. I thank God for OKC and it's impact on my life.

eHarmony told me I was unmatchable and match.c was worthless- I agree with this article reply rate was nil. OKC reply rate was awesome and people were much more chill to just IM for a bit and have real exchanges. I met my wife in under two months on the OKC platform.

Relatedly: Has there been any new dating apps that haven't been acquired by Match and are trending upwards? I feel like just as Hinge was getting popular and people were talking of its success - it fell off hard due to acquisition by Match in the following couple years.

It seems like you have to always go to a newer app to find success before Match ruins it.

Apps like Tinder and Happn kind of escaped this by being places more suited to hookups and One Night Stands than the place someone goes to find a long-term partner.

By focusing on quick relationships too, both Tinder and Happn can be more liberal about message limits for free tier users, at the same time making sure that man derive value from a paid subscription.

>As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt.

I really appreciate this kind of self-awareness, and find it incredibly lacking from a lot of things that founders, CEOs, et. al. post, whether it's on a blog, an HN comment or on Twitter.

I used to be play Magic the Gathering with Christian back in NYC. He was a smart, down-to-earth guy. I didn't realize he was an OkCupid cofounder until several months after meeting him.

He got canceled a few years ago for saying off-color things at an academic conference... hope he's doing OK these days.

app idea: if anyone watches Indian Matchmaking, the matchmaker gets "paid' during the wedding (or through other gifts and influence). so there is a huge incentive to marry (if that was the only end goal to dating). also you don't really get many choices (maybe only 3 over a few months) so there is a lot of hopefulness, openess, compromises (and expectations, that makes for the drama in the show. )

if traditional matchmaking has worked, why not just apply new tools to what humanity has been doing?

Who wants to build a better dating website? Free and open source without any bots run by donations. Dating website is a human right. People are lonely and this dating websites are taking advantage of the situation.

The fact that incentives of online dating platforms and their users are not aligned is anything but new. But it makes me wonder: Maybe a not-for-profit organization would be a better model to run an online dating platform?

Amazing how, even 12 years later, this is even more true than it was back then.

This is partly explained by match.com buying and removing competitors, to keep active dating sites in this pattern.

Don't pay, network! Livejournal was free for me (early 2000s, what do I know about it today), and via friends of friends feature I met my wife. Of course those relations came from people I met on IRC...

Actually with Seeking paying works out to filter low income men. You can pay $100-300 a month and the quality and responsiveness of women there is superior to any other platform right now.

... unless you live in a place in which your dating prospects are few or non-existent, in which case you pay for the "travel mode" feature.

Or just use a GPS mocking app on your phone.

Here's an interesting probable side effect of the spread of dating apps:

> "According to Rhode Island's Department of Health, the numbers for STDs rose drastically between 2013 and 2014. Syphilis cases increased by 79 percent, newly identified HIV infections increased by 33 percent, gonorrhea cases increased by 30 percent — and it's mostly young adults (along with African-Americans and Hispanics) who are becoming infected at these higher rates."

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/55888/20150527/tinder-dat...

Now if we look at the majority shareholder ownership of say, Gilead Sciences (a major provider of STD pharmaceuticals) and Match Group (owner of Tinder) on Yahoo Finance, the overlap is fairly large. (This of course is true for most corporations in the USA, so it's perhaps not as much of a plot as it might seem).

But still... it makes one wonder about investment capitalism. It's always finding a way to create value and improve people's lives. A nice square deal. Make money promoting risky sexual behavior when they come in the front door, make more money treating the resulting STDs when they leave via the back door. Rather similar to pushing the soft drinks and junk food on the kids, and then reaping profits from the high hospital bills a few decades later. Gifts that keep on giving, right?

This was brutal. What a teardown.

Why don't we have dating AI? well, it would be unprofitable, but maybe ..

Does anyone know if this applies to Child Care matching sites as well?

so this begs the question... in 2022, are there any apps/sites actually worth using?

meetup.com internations.org Facebook Events

Go out and talk to people with similar interests in real life.

The biggest problem with current dating apps is that they limit swipes behind a paywall.

Sure, you can pay to get the opportunity to swipe on more profiles, but you can't pay to give everyone else the opportunity to swipe on yours. That means paying for more swipes doesn't really get you more matches.

Dating is a numbers game, and Tinder/etc. are rigged not to play.

(2010)

Over 60% of the way past the filter on /r/AskHistorians . . . Agreed we should be a touch more timely!

oof maybe they should have taken their own advice

Reply on news.ycombinator.com