Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted dating sites to add features that had more behavioral annotations about users. I'd like to not get a high match score with people who don't even bother to read their messages, for example. Or who read their messages but don't bother to click on the person's profile. Or who do both and never respond. I'd like it to ask why you unmatched with someone and have options like "couldn't hold a conversation" or "too flirty too fast" or "wtf dick pics" and then use that data to boost people who aren't the examples of what everyone complains about on dating sites. In other words, I'd like to have some data-driven reputational info about people used in the matching.

And yeah, I agree with your final sentiment as well: dating sites should be more like people-meeting sites, but with a romantic focus. Aim for casual meetups that aren't dates but might lead to dates. Maybe collect small groups of people that might be compatible and send them out for drinks and then have them do some basic surveys about the people they met for future filtering purposes (again with the reputational concept).

While I agree that in person should definitely be a part of it, as a bit of anecdata I made a huge meetup push for two years (I went to meetups 2-3x a week, every week) in order to meet new people and date, and did get a few dates out of it, but mostly just new friends (that being said, I do know a few people in those same groups that ended up as long-term couples through it, and one of those couples got married eventually).

Meanwhile every relationship I had at that time came from OKCupid, including my wife.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the dating sites are now garbage thanks to them all being owned by Match Group, but at least back then they weren't terrible and I had good luck with it as an average-looking nerdy guy, much more than in-person.

I do credit going to meetups regularly with me becoming a bit more well-rounded and sociable of a person and more dateable as a result, though.

Good luck on your dating app personal project. I worked on one professionally for about six months a long time ago, and it was an interesting and fun project, for the most part (that never went anywhere, we treated it seriously but the client was a narcissist that got lucky in real estate that assumed he'd get 10 million users in a few weeks of release with no marketing, he eventually killed the project when he realized that wasn't going to be the case).

I've had ideas for different takes on dating/social apps since that time, and almost considered pursuing it, but it seemed to be too dominated by Match Group, especially post-Tinder, and I care more about games than apps anyway.

> as a bit of anecdata I made a huge meetup push for two years (I went to meetups 2-3x a week, every week) in order to meet new people and date

Meetups work really well if you're going into one that has a a good ratio of the sex you are interested in.

If you're a single guy, going to Meetups with a Maker theme, or a Star Wars theme, is not going to improve your odds of finding someone - for each girl there, there's 5 guys interested in her.

A good Meetup for single guys to go to is one that is almost completely populated by women (cooking classes used to have a very high ratio of women to men).

Even if these women are attached, they have friends, and IME, attached women are always ready to set up their single friends.

Yeah, I did a pretty wide variety of meetups. I did some more geeky meetups, but also did dinners, hikes, scavenger hunts, escape rooms, movie nights, karaoke, and some other things.

Out of curiosity I checked for cooking meetups just now, as I do a lot of cooking nowadays, and it seems like they're still almost entirely virtual, at least around me (there's a small local group not accepting new people right now also).

A dating site is like trying to solve an NP problem. It's provable that there's no correlation between information generated by users and outcome. For example the known factors that affect couple compatibility are things like attachment style. People are generally unaware of their attachment style.

So why wouldn't a dating site just put its users through trusted high-power psychological screening instruments, to determine that sort of stuff? They're just questionnaires, mostly; they can be done entirely through a web/mobile UI, and scored without any humans in the loop.

Do the developers of dating sites think that people will consider it too much of a bother to fill out such things, or consider such questions too invasive? I don't know why; people love personality quizzes.

(IMHO you could make the whole site just a BuzzFeed "what kind of person are you? take this quiz to find out!" site at its core, except through all the quizzes you're doing, it's building up a very thorough psychological profile of you; and when it's got enough, it opens up the ability for you to date through it.)

The whole concept of dating "websites" is bunk. We need a social video chat app where you can publicly ask questions or make statements, and people can make video replies which can be swiped through in a tiktok style, which also has geo-awareness and some basic personality profile information.

By being video only and gating it securely through the app you'd eliminate catfishing and a lot of the hard misrepresentation you see on dating sites. Having conversations be public by default and needing permission to DM would also help limit bad male behavior.

What you are describing sounds remarkably similar to the dating videos concept from the 1980's. I guess all that is old becomes new again!

(Did a quick search that turned up two low quality links to illustrate what I mean)

https://www.thrillist.com/sex-dating/nation/lessons-learned-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/found-footage-awkward-80s-vi...

The similarities are only superficial though. That is like a bunch of video job interviews, what I'm describing is more like a virtual pub where you can preferentially join conversations with other singles who share similar interests.

Sounds like a video chat version of clubhouse. On paper it looked great but devolved into people mostly trying to build/sell/promote their brand which resulted in most conversations turning into something like low quality crowd sourced podcasting.

There will always be people trying to do that for various reasons, but I think optional geofencing and the ability to have the feed algorithm focus on potential romantic partners would make it a bad platform to invest energy in.

I think the big difference is that now we have technology that allows it to be more than an awkward canned VHS sales video you made 6 months ago and close-to-realtime point-to-point interaction.

This idea is crazy genius. I imagine that shy people will not try it though...

If someone gave me a big bag of money then working on a better dating site would probably be what I'd do with it. I think it's very hard pull off as a "personal project" though, because a dating site needs people to be useful and attracting people is neither free nor easy. And you also need some form of "content control" to weed out the dickpics and other assorted assholery, which is also neither free nor easy.

> Of course, the whole premise of dating sites is wrong. The best way to make connections is in person, by going places regularly and seeing the same people frequently... building some non-romantic connections first which may grow into something more. Dating sites assume that if "I think I like you" and "you think you like me" then we are a match!. This sets up big expectations too soon...

In principle, I guess, but my experience is that many social spaces of all types are overwhelmingly male. There are probably some commentaries to be made about that, but I'm not sure what.

And while it can set up certain expectations, I don't think that needs to be a bad thing, necessarily.

If you want a "good dating site", it doesn't really seem like it's possible.

But the job to be done of a dating site is to either get you more or better dates. I therefore suggest making a site that's just a page of text telling you to move somewhere with more opportunity, get outdoor social hobbies, and become a millionaire.

I wonder how far you'd get with running on donations. If you're successful in connecting people who fall in love and all that, they're probably thankful and might donate. It'd also kind of be "pay for the result, not for the try". Would you pay $50 to get with the love of your life? I would. Would you pay $50 so you can message people on a site where you don't know if anything will come of it? Meh, depends on how desperate I am, I guess.

Good luck, hitting critical mass is probably even harder than in other areas. You can grow a community or meme site with a few users who are really active, but that doesn't really work for dating.

The problem is that the guys that send dick pics to complete strangers and women that are just surfing for free meals are still out there. They pollute the entire experience by having a large number of low-effort interactions, and in the donation model they are just going to be a net sink of resources and good will.

I don't think online dating gets any better until someone devises a means to bias against people that aren't acting in good faith. Of course the challenge here is that you're going to be hard pressed to find a strong consensus on what actions do or do not constitute good faith in a dating app.

I have no experience in running a dating site, and barely any in using them. Are unsolicited dick picks common even for the pay sites? I've assumed that it's mostly an anonymity issue that goes away when you tie it to identity (via payment or otherwise), but then again I've never felt the urge to send anyone dick picks, so I wouldn't put much weight on my assumptions.

From what I understand, these days it's not just the dick picks but also love scammers, which aren't low-effort and are welcome by the recipients until the scam begins. These are harder to combat, but shouldn't tying it to identities help?

Niche sites probably work better in that regard because e.g. Christian Dating sites have less trouble getting a strong consensus on what's appropriate, wouldn't they?

>Are unsolicited dick picks common even for the pay sites? I've assumed that it's mostly an anonymity issue that goes away when you tie it to identity (via payment or otherwise)

I don’t know from personal experience but from people I know and the woman I’m dating now, the answer is yes. Common enough, and the guys sending them don’t seem to care that their face and name is plastered all over. I was on a hike with my girlfriend and we bumped into a guy that recognized her. They chatted for a bit and after leaving she said he sent her a dick pic a while back.

Scammers are also a major issue, yes. Not sure if tying to identities would help as they presumably could just buy them.

Niche sites don’t really help because most of the time you can’t vet if someone is Christian for example. An acquaintance tried finding a date on Christian Mingle and was almost immediately propositioned in ways certainly inappropriate for the site. And you can’t really message for free on that site, so the men in question were paying.

I think the problem is based on hit rate the number is a lot higher than $50. If you're charging $10/month the average user lasts 12 months and the number of users who marry is 10% then you're charging $1200 for a successful match to get equivalent revenue, not $50.

That's true, but are you getting the same amount of users when you're charging them $10/month for messaging?

I'd assume that payment adds a hurdle that's somewhat welcome to keep out problematic users, just like rent does. Pay 30% more than the market and you'll only have neighbors who can afford that as well, which are much less likely to be unemployed alcoholics with behavioral issues.