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Comment by EmilyHughes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

this is both awful and hilarious

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

> 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.

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

Future demographics are probably a pretty serious longterm issue..

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

> 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?"

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).

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.

>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.

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.

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.

As if non-profits wouldn't have any agendas...

Publicly-run (= by government) open source script would be most transparent I guess. Otherwise some sort of algorithm would sneak in sooner or later.

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

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.

>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 ]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

Why would this need to be government run?

Because monopolies

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.

It could also be built using the Signal model.

Get funded indirectly by the NSA to undermine effective cryptosystems?

Sorry, what? Source?

We’re not still confusing bypassing encryption by compromising device security with “[undermining] effective cryptosystems” like those articles when everyone was leaving WhatsApp?

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.

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