Ask HN: Who wants to build a better dating website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who wants to build a better dating website?

19 pointsamir734jj34 comments

I'm 30 years old and I have tried almost all dating websites. They are either trying to turn the dating experience into gambling by paying for swipes or filled with bots or people that are not there for dating. I'm a software engineer, not a psychologist but I think the only barrier to making a better dating website is customer acquisition but it's doable.

What motivates me I see my peers are also tired of dating apps and experience of dating. I think in the year 2022 when people mostly work from home and everything is online having a free and open-source dating website that works and is not biased or motivated by money is a human right. Current dating websites are designed to keep you hooked so it's not in their interest to find you a match.

Again, free and open source so privacy first and not motivated by money and no gamification.

Just my two cents.

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The problem with dating sites is that they will always favor the people that don’t “need” them.

Say you build a dating site with the goal of helping guys that have had bad luck on other sites meet girls. One of two things will happen:

1) there will be essentially no women on the site

2) the success stories will bring all of the successful guys from the plethora of other sites, diluting the whole process and ruining the novel concept

Hinge is currently the closest to a holistic dating site, where you can essentially like someone “for” something and they can see what you liked and how you messaged them all for free. It’s actually so much better than tinder that I’m not sure both why tinder still exists as well as how the make money when all of the usual “tinder premium” features are already included for free.

The secret to succeeding at dating apps is to just stop using them. The connections, by and large, are superficial at best and usually lead nowhere. Meanwhile, finding a girl by doing an activity and striking conversation is so much more successful and holistic.

If you are good at finding a partner for whatever activity you need to meet in real life (romantic or physical) you will probably do ok on a dating site for a number of reasons.

There are lots and lots of women on dating sites looking for romantic connections and just purely sexual satisfaction. I have had lots of experience in this area. I slept with easily over 250 women in one year. I lost count.

Dating is a numbers game. You have to be in it to win it. A rejection is not a rejection. You simply move on and keep looking.

Finding a girl by doing an activity or simply striking a conversation requires confidence, personality and being genuine in my opinion (there are other methods). That is indeed the key. If you can do that in the street to any girl you find attractive you can do the same online...

I've seen male friends who are great with women and getting dates offline - also having great success on online dating sites.

Likewise I've seen male friends who have difficulty getting dates offline have similarly terrible results with online dating.

Exactly. The medium is not the problem. That is not to say some mediums don't suit some messages better, they do. Dating women has got to be the easiest and hardest thing in the world. It needs to be approached the correct way for you. If you are happy in yourself, confident, genuine and non threatening you simply have to ask the girl if she would like to spend some time with you doing whatever. It is that easy or hard...

The secret sauce is creating contexts for relationships to form organically, in group settings. An app that emphasizes a safe, low-commitment environment that doesn't rely on first impressions, and mimics natural group settings instead of awkward 1 on 1s.

I have a few ideas for this and the chops to execute rapidly if you or anyone else would like to chat more.

When I used to go out on 1 on 1s, I had zero expectations, that way no matter how it went, I usually had a good time because I like meeting new people.

But I hope you can find someone to collaberate with and expand upon your ideas, and let us know back here if you all come up with something.

When you start the relationship or have sex is that in a group setting? Why are actual meetings with a girl awkward? It really helps to be happy with yourself and honest with the other person. If you meet a girl and are feeling awkward simply tell her this. Maybe she feels awkward also. Opening up and showing vulnerability can be attractive. You don't have to be the most handsome or confident guy. Just be you. That is always ok!

An idea I've juggled around in my head is a dating app that doesn't directly connect two people trying to date, but rather connect someone with a "matchmaker" who then goes out and tries to find a match.

Tried it a few years ago with the concept of having a picture blurred and profile information required. As you messaged back and forth the pictures became unblurred gradually to spawn more conversations. Hinge kinda had a more conversation based concept and exploded so gave up the dev on it.

I don't think it needs to be free for over-represented demographics, just open source so that it is clear that the algorithm is designed in the best interests of users.

I like Andrej Karpathy's (I think) idea of training something like GPT-3 on each person and using the derived personality to identify those that you would get on well with (if the objective of the site is long term relationships). I suspect that a large leap forward is possible with something like this, although the technology is probably not ready yet.

that's a pretty cool utopic idea, but also scary

so we're just here on earth to be matched by an algorithm and live happily ever after? idk

How would you use the "derived personality" to identify those that you would get on well with? Even if you can come up with some kind of meaningful distance metric, it's definitely not clear that that's useful for matching individuals. For one thing it's completely ignoring the most important factor in dating, which is initial mutual physical attraction. For another, many (I would conjecture most) people are attracted to people who are quite different from themselves.

Could let users pick what type of relationship they're looking for: "forever-marriage", "summer fling", etc. For long-term marriage you could find couples to train a model for true positives. For the others you'd have to find couples who self-identify.

Then determine not just "distance" but "vector"/"clustering" and identify which cluster combinations seem to be compatible for different types of relationships.

This would also entrench present-day dating and marriage regimes.

Then you could handle the physical attractiveness the same way Tinder does. Use the clustering model to pre-filter candidates, and present the user with photos for final thumbsup/down.

I've always been interested in this, but could never dedicate the time and energy to it. Every time I've tried to, people would think it's either a solved problem or that a new app would fix it.

I think there's a bad product fit. People who really need a dating site aren't good at dating. People who are really good at dating don't need a dating site. Monetization is terrible too - most of these make money the more they date, but a perfect dating site should only be used once. So there's a lot of serial daters. There's weird stuff you see going on in r/tinder, where both men and women are great at pickup lines, but somehow can't hold a relationship.

I think what's missing is somewhat improving dating skills. Less focus on icebreaking, more on cutting deeper and finding couples that can live together forever. What are your values, life goals. Like a scammer once said, if you want to build trust, you agree with their religious beliefs, then agree with their political beliefs. If you can find people with matching values, they'd be likely to stick through things. Of course, you can't always ask that up front, you have to somehow work it into the tempo of the conversation.

> I'm a software engineer, not a psychologist but I think the only barrier to making a better dating website is customer acquisition but it's doable

I think this might be the underlying problem with existing dating apps.

Eh, Facebook Dating [1] had as good a network as you can have, but still seemed to have flopped after release!

Or are you referring to Software Engineers trying to solve problems they don't understand ?

[1] https://www.facebook.com/dating

IIRC Coffee Meets Bagel piggybacks on your Facebook connections network. Or did, I don't know if they still do.

The second option.

Forcing a technological solution to a poorly understood social 'issue' doesn't end well.

Actually, that's a good idea. An OS dating app will be amazing, but I don't see a clear way to monetize its development than pure love of the devs. No pun intended.

Perhaps a better dating website could be a dating aggregator, call it the Kayak of dating. When I was single and searching in small radiuses for locals to meet, I remember seeing the same people on multiple dating sites. I think having a site like this would have at least saved me some time and allow me to focus on only the dating sites that had singles that appealed to me.

If I'm understanding what you're getting at, I believe all the main dating sites already share user profiles between themselves to flesh out their "stock" of potential paying customers.

So using a specialty site like Kayak Dating, or some such, owned by this dating site group would still get you some non kayaker profiles.

I discovered this because I like round women and I'd have profiles on a few specialty sites, and I'd still get thin women profiles occasionally because other qualifiers I'd listed were close to theirs.

I paid $15k for a failed dating startup's customers. I spent 6mo building it out before eventually canning it. My go to market strategy was to develop it as a freemium social app w dating features coming in once the user base took off.

The primary gotcha was something for syncing your instagram, spotify, audible, and a handful of other services and generating a graph based recommender engine whereby people could share their "snapshots" and engage in a micro-community of people sharing their "feeds".

The music side of things had a reactive element whereby you could enter two artists and it'd give you 5 suggested options you might also like between them to make the data input side of things exploratory but informative. In my testing, my friends were able to add 250 artists in under 5 min w each finding 3-5 new daily-listen artists the first time through.

I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with current dating websites. They provide a service and you choose to pay for the service or not. Whether dating sites are a good way for you to find a partner or a sex hookup is another matter and a much more complicated problem. I consider the two objectives to be entirely different. You do not need a website for either. My advice would be to make a strategy that works for you and can be applied in real life. Start there. Both are totally doable.

If you want to know more just ask me..

Algorithmic matchmaking is a mistake. Yes filtering the pool makes sense but frankly beyond a point there is not going to be a difference vs randomly chosen. Let a real human do the matchmaking.

The problem with dating services is - if they're honest - are out to do only one of two things:

- enable hookups

- go out of business because all their customers end up happily together

Those customers who end up happily together are making new customers. The supply chain lag is long, but it's been filling itself without software assistance for many millions of years.

Meantime, it takes quite a while to find that partner who would take you off of the app permanently. If anything, your app also encourages them to break up just by existing: there will be constant fear-of-missing-out that somebody better is waiting.

I don't believe that any app is in serious jeopardy of succeeding itself out of business, and they don't have to go out of their way to design it in. Humans are difficult and getting them together is far from a solved problem.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Agreed

Best wishes with developing that idea, and I believe there is already a FOSS dating site template out there somewhere, I saw it a few years ago but didn't have the emotional energy to persue it.

I'm older and I've tried multiple ways to meet a partner, and haven't dated in nearly 10 years, but finally am building a primitive website for myself, it still needs more work but I'm getting there.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to spread the word, since I don't participate in "normal" social networks.

It's kind of daunting to be putting myself out there like this.

https://julietnull.me/

Your last page „begin“(tellme.htm) throws a 404 error. Please fix it or else nobody can get in touch with you :O

Yes, Working on it, trying to figure out an email contact form, I don't know PHP.

Respectfully you are wrong.

Maybe you just live in the wrong place. Dating apps can't solve the ratio problem. When you live in the Bay Area/Seattle area/Bangalore etc that is so overwhelmingly tech then there are simply more men than woman. That doesn't mean you can't get a date but yes statistically it is going to be harder.

No app is going to fix this. Many devs on HN seem not to understand this every time a "how dating apps are bad" thread is posted.

The other part is their own dating profile is mediocre and they need a little help with the art of non tech small talk.

There is a lifestyle business in helping male tech workers make better profiles and dating coaching.

Also no dating app company is going to succeed outside small niche with no money incentive for the devs and marketers.

Just adding after reading my comment, not trying to be negative just realistic so you consider if it something worth your time.

Tried almost exactly this years ago, couldn't get users. Any ideas?

keeper.dating

not mine.

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