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It should also be noted that match.com knows that it's business isn't "connecting people in stable relationships" but "luring people to pay for match.com by promising them connections that never work out."

OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

Match.com realizes that fundamental flaw. For their business to survive, they HAVE to be bad at the service they purport to provide. They don't want people to have long term relationships, they want people to use a dating site.

There are "societal good" functions that companies might provide, for which a profit motive is wholly un-applicable without destroying the function itself.

There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.

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While there are some perverse incentives, I think this is overstating it. Millions of people enter the dating market every year by aging into it or ending a previous relationship. That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business. Of course there is the temptation to increase the churn rate, but it doesn't have to be exploitative.

It literally does, if you're a publicly traded company.

It really doesn't, at least in the legal sense. Managers have wide legal latitude to run the business as they think best. However, in practice corporate boards tend to vote the short-term numbers, which combined with decreasing CEO tenure is a strong incentive for CEOs to do short-term, exploitative things. That's not always the case, though. Bezos, for example, built Amazon to its juggernaut status by ignoring the short terms numbers and doing a lot of long-term investment with a focus on increasing customer value. It's only lately that it's turned to exploiting its customers as well.

Regulations will catch up to it, maybe in 50 years. Look at cars, they started out as cobbled together death traps, but today they are very user friendly and safe (not the software, but the machinery). Those things didn't happen thanks to car companies being nice, but thanks to regulations.

No it bloody well does not. The "maximize shareholder value" thing has never been read that strictly by a court of law (otherwise, Apple would have been ripe for a suit when they told off an activist investor rep who was upset they were pursuing environmental goals at the expense of better ROI [1]).

Companies hollow out (or enshittify) their products because it is easy and because it guarantees results at least in the short term. There are other ways to grow, and they tend to require imagination and long-term planning. Don't blame the stock market for entirely voluntary choices of taking the easy way out.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/03/at-apple-shareholder...

Yes but it doesn't have to be upheld in a court of law. It just has to be what corporate officers are ordered, selected and incentivized around. It doesn't need to be legally required for people to do something.

For decades now bilionares have bought companies, improved numbers in the short term, and sold them for a profit

This stupid meme needs to die.

Unless it’s some utopian value-based family company, the goal of any company will ultimately become to maximize profit and/or growth because that is what shareholders want.

It does when one of, if not the only, important metric is growth. And for many publicly traded companies that act in the social/dating space growth tends to be a key metric. After some point the "natural" growth and contraction of the market will be a limiter. It's also arguably easier to handle a recurring user than having to spend time on acquiring new users to a platform.

>> That seems like plenty of space to make a profitable business.

Sure, but VCs and big companies want to maximize profit, not just be profitable. When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

> When a profitable startup sells out, that's the founders also saying "profitable isn't enough for me".

Or just "I'm done with this shit". It's remarkably difficult to run a small (software) business in the US. Section 174, multi-state income tax filings. It's a bloody pain if your goal is not just to operate the business and be overhead, but to actually do stuff. Regulatory/tax complexity thresholds depending on business size would be a welcome improvement.

The point is, even if it works, if you need 4 months for it to work instead of 1 month, that is 4 times the revenue for them.

So yes, it have to work, at least for their reputation, but it also have to not work that much.

Sorry to point out that whatever you could make helping your clients happily leave you forever, you can make 5x that making them suffer. It is simple math.

Also you'll be acquired by Match.com

This is not a convincing argument. If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it, just like any other product/service you pay for that doesn't work.

Casinos are very profitable.

A casino with no physical upkeep ?

Yeah I think this is the missing part. Even if enshittification is more profitable, people should still be able to just change services to a better one.

Change to what? Another match.com-owned service?

Yeah that's the part I haven't figured out. Why isn't there a offering for the market demand for something like old OKCupid? A dating site doesn't seem like an enterprise that needs a lot of startup capital or anything.

The user won't leave simply because the product doesn't work; they'll leave if they believe it won't work. For dating apps, tricking users is more profitable than trying to match them. Hence all the psychological warfare: fake profiles, new account boosts, fake likes, blurred out likes, paid boosts, swipe stack interface, etc. etc.

> If a dating site can't get people to match, they're likely to stop using it

And if it succeeds in getting people to match, they definitely stop using it.

"Likely to stop using it" is the better outcome for them in terms of customer retention

Most relationships don't last forever; people come back to what they know worked before.

Unless you have competition.

A dating site could work sustainably if it was a site for planning date nights. Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do.

Revenue sources would include:

- Ads for local businesses, classes, and events.

- Annual subscription which is cheaper after the first year and gives you discount codes to events and restaurants.

Once you get the site to work for date nights, let people be open to getting matched based on similar activity interests. Then you can solve the problem of two users finding a specific joint activity.

Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex.

Would this solve the problem married couples have of picking a place to eat? Hopefully.

There did used to be one like this and I can't for the life of me remember the name of it.

My friend didn't meet her husband on it, but she did meet her future husband's roommate.

> Make profiles based on activities and swipe right or left on the activities you want to do.

Back in the early 2010s there was a dating site that was based around this premise. You would post a specific activity and see if someone wanted to join you for it. I didn't personally use it (as intended) but it was a great place to get fun date night activities with my partner. I think they realized that use case (date night planning) and eventually added this as a feature. I don't remember the name of the site unfortunately, someone else might. I would be surprised if it's still around.

edit: Found it! it was called HowAboutWe.com.

https://techcrunch.com/tag/howaboutwe/

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/1...

That's also similar to a service OkCupid had separate from the main site called Crazy Blind Date.

With this one, however, you defined the qualities you were seeking and the times and part of the city you were available for a date. They would match people up based on the time, location and OkCupid match rating (mostly, I think) and would ask if you wanted to meet the person. It gave you just their basic info and a distorted photo.

I used it for a while and don't remember why I stopped but it was one of the best dating apps I've used. None of the dates went anywhere, but it was a really simple and easy way to meet new people.

I ran a startup making something similar to this pre-covid, it wasn't just date night, it was "find something to do in under 5 minutes". Groups of 4 to 6, partnering with local businesses who hosted the events. You opened the app, said what you wanted to do and when, and you were automatically put into a group. You could select how many people you already had going with you (date, or just a group of 2 friends who needed a few more people for a cooking class or whatnot).

No photos until just before the event started, because photos turn things into a beauty contest and people start judging on looks, which is where, IMHO, all my competition in the same space went wrong.

Events were scheduled for as little as 4 hours out, and only up to 72hrs in the future. The entire app flow was designed to be as close as possible to a "I am bored, entertain me now" button.

Investors hated it, two sided marketplaces are apparently something they like to avoid due to difficulties around execution.

People were desperate for this type of service though, for one marketing campaign my user acquisition cost dropped as low as 15 cents per user.

(If any investor reading wants to throw me a million I'll start it back up again. ;) Solving the loneliness epidemic in America's cities is a huge chance to do some social good!)

You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

This is a fantastic project. I also briefly worked on something similar, but left when I learned more about my coworkers.

I agree the idea seems solid enough, but accommodating the increased complexity of scaling it up sounds quiet difficult. Out of curiosity what did you learn about your coworkers? Something about their motivations for creating such an app or what?

One guy liked to send dick pics, another was doing a lot of drugs and sent deranged messages for 48 hours straight to random people and the last was "just" a compulsive liar, who seemed to invite a prostitute to the office who then stole servers. I wasn't even sure why we even had the servers, since we barely bad any software written yet.

> You weren't able to scale enough initially to be profitable on your own operations, I presume? At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Bootstrapped, COVID hit right before the launch date.

Infra costs were ~$200 a month to support 10k DAU. I'd just come off of working on embedded, so I was used to writing really efficient code. :)

> At what scale would you be able to support your burn rate?

Just needed to cover my living expenses mortgage and salaries!

Obviously to scale money was needed for ad campaigns, but people are lonely and offering to solve loneliness has a high conversion rate!

Why did you shut it down?

$ and COVID.

I burned through my savings and was ready to launch in earl 2020.

Oops.

Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar pit.

> Theres a YC video that goes over tar pit problems. If i am not mistaken, this exact scenario is covered as a tar pit.

Yeah the final end goal was either to make lots of deals with local businesses (hard to scale) or to license an ML personality matching model to companies.

The app had a handful of personality questions that I copied over from research done at one of the Nordic universities (I forget which one) on what makes people get along together in a casual setting. The American universities have mostly done research on group cohesion in corporate settings, which maybe hints at what is wrong with American society at large!

Cruise liners and casinos would pay a fortune to know what guests would vibe together.

I had a partner website that allowed for self onboarding, but of course b2b2c is never that simple. :)

The operating costs were so absurdly low (~$200 a month per city it was running in) that letting people create their own events for free was in the near term road map, no reason not to.

Your idea is exactly what I would like to have in an app, with a ML twist and also more on matchmaking people based on their traits, personalities, morals and values. Below is my comment on it. It an idealistic solution, but I have an outline of such an app, that might need some refining. I would love to talk about if its it's even doable or feasible, and you seem to the the best person for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37520545

Perhaps then it is better run as a feature of a city’s local newspaper. They already have the advertising department side of the marketplace. Does anyone at the Boston Globe want to buy your code?

Would this solve the problem of finding people to have sex with? No, but computers are bad at sex.

Are they? I thought hookup sites like Tinder and Grindr were very popular.

So is alcohol.

> There are some things that you simply CANNOT express in a "free market" because the measure of their success cannot be expressed in market terms.

Sure you can. If you want to measure the success of your matchmaking company in market terms, you could charge users for your matchmaking service and then return their money if they don't get married. You put your money where your mouth is by betting on the success of the couples you suggest.

I think companies don't try this strategy because it would be too expensive for the end user. You would need to charge thousands of dollars to make up for the hard work of matchmaking and the risk of bad matches. Not something an internet startup can do at scale.

And do they return the money in the case of divorce?

Probably not. If they got to the point of needing a divorce that means the relationship looked like it was going to work, so much so that the people involved agreed to marry.

No online service can possibly promise to be more thorough in their due diligence than the actual humans who chose to marry each other.

There's also the issue of having a bunch of cash on hand to pay out. Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over, specifically to limit the liability of payouts.

Also, if the relationship is abusive and the abused spouse is beaten into a marriage, are they owed a refund upon divorce? Death? Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

There's not really a way to do rent-seeking on matchmaking without breaking matchmaking, so maybe don't seek rent on the matching itself? Just let your revenue stream be advertising. It's fine.

Unlimited PTO is poorly worded and always felt like a scam to me

It’s not really unlimited and people tend to take less overall

> Plenty of companies do unlimited PTO or bar PTO roll-over

That's a good idea. In this hypothetical app, if a couple stays together for a couple of years they should forfeit the right to get their money back even if they later break up. This reduces the amount of cash the company has to keep, at the cost of merely promising years-long relationships instead of marriages.

> Incentivizing speedy marriages, as opposed to good matches, is unambiguously bad for individuals and society at large.

How is that unambiguous? It seems to me like an empirical question. Are people taking too many risks with their relationships, or too little? The answer is different for each person, or even for the same person at different stages of their life. Very ambiguous stuff.

Time spent dating, or in a long-term relationship, prior to marriage is positively correlated with enduring marriage. That is, people who date each other for 3 years or more prior to marriage are 50% less likely to get a divorce than those who don't[0]. Thus, it pays societal dividends to encourage people to take their time and really get to know each other before getting married. Saying "the sooner you get married, the sooner you get your money back" or worse still "stay together without getting married for too long, and you risk not getting your money back" specifically discourages the behaviors that prevent domestic violence (including child abuse). What I believe we want is marriages that uplift their members, and minimize spousal abuse. Making people feel like they can't afford to not get married is the exact same phenomenon that drove up domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns[1].

If you're telling me that more abusive marriages is better for society, I don't think we have enough common ground to discuss this.

0. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/...

1. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/covid-19-isolation-li...

Nope because this can easily be gamed, since getting married doesn't need to cost much.

Also the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs.

> this can easily be gamed

There are other online services like Uber and AirBnB in which it is much easier to cheat by communicating with your counterpart outside of the app, that way you don't have to pay commissions and so on. It's a serious problem for them.

But this hypothetical online service marries people. Fraud is much riskier there, because divorce can be extremely expensive if your partner-in-fraud doesn't cooperate.

> the free market still needs a central authority for any proofs

Isn't marriage a relatively centralized institution? The central authority that marries people can easily provide proof that they indeed married some people.

In a free market an inefficient model loses market share and gets bought out. Then it’s converted to the efficient model.

That said, firms exist with that model.

Somehow I re-read your post like 4 times and still thought you were saying "get married AND your money back", not "get married or your money back".

So here I am, downvoting my own posts.

I will say that your idea is trivially gamed. What startup is going to keep the legal staff on retainer to sue every person who "breaks up" with their partner, gets their refund check, and uses it to buy an engagement ring?

> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

This wasn't necessarily true. I actually met my wife on OkCupid, all the way back in 2007 originally, and she wasn't even the first long-term relationship I ended up off of the site, which was back in 2004. OkCupid used to have social features, allowing you to maintain a personal blog and follow other user's blogs. A whole lot of us had a pretty nice community, couchsurfing, visiting each other when we traveled for work. That was even how I met my wife, through the blogs, not by direct solicitation of a date. We didn't even live on the same coast when we met, but eventually moved to the same city by chance and ended up together.

When Match Group bought the site, they killed these features and there was no longer any reason to stick around, but a lot of us had stuck around long after pairing off and marrying. For a long time, we even stayed in touch via other means and continued meeting up in person when we had the chance. Unfortunately, Facebook was the main place they all settled, and I did not want to stick around on Facebook, so mostly I've lost touch with these people now. But we had a nice community for a long time, even a nearly global community, with people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Heck, even the reason I originally joined OkCupid wasn't with the intention of finding dates. It was because of an old vBulletin forum I was on for Armenians in Los Angeles where a bunch of people took the personality tests and compared results, so I joined to do that. But things were different enough in 2004 that I didn't need to seek out dates. Women just messaged me and asked me out because they weren't yet overloaded with spam and jaded from the Internet turning to shit.

The Internet was different in a lot of ways back then. OkCupid was founded by nerd grad students that mostly wanted to prove they could apply math to romance. But then they discovered math could actually make them rich, and Match Group never gave a shit and only cared about money from the start. I suspect much of what eventually became shit started that way. Larry and Sergey were probably legitimate math nerds, too. Mark Zuckerberg probably just wanted to hot-or-not his classmates. But then they all discovered they could get rich and investors killed the fun.

Ding ding ding, I met my current partner on OKCupid 9 years ago, don't think I will ever need to return. (fingers-crossed, knock-on-wood, [insert-platitude-here)

Seeing as I have a "face for radio", I doubt I would ever manage to date seriously on "swipe right/left" platforms.

I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore.

The logic goes for a lot of service type situations like auto-repair post-warranty period.

Which is, of course, an argument for single-payer healthcare. (Or even semi-centralized, insurance based healthcare, for that matter). A $BIGORG has both the firepower and the incentives to ensure that your bodyparts stay healthy at minimum expense.

An anecdote: Ads like "your dentist hates this simple trick" don't work at all in a single-payer system. People are just baffled as to why a doctor wouldn't want you to be healthy!

It's an argument for having dentists compete, as they do, and picking the one who does a good job.

It's not like a layman can have a good idea of whether a dentist has done a good job, except in cases where the job was clearly botched. People can't realistically make an informed choice based on dentist competence, so soft metrics like patient comfort and general bellyfeel dominate. Moreover, people hopefully don't need dental services very frequently, so gathering enough data takes a long time.

OK. But a single payer addresses none of those issues.

Single payer has many, many more data points from which to draw conclusions.

Well, it tries to. Whether or not it succeeds is the subject of lots and lots of debate, but single payer systems I'm aware of have accountability models driven by (usually public-sector) audits and quality controls that try to optimize for health outcomes. The rationale being that the payer (government) spends less overall, and is more likely to be supported (voted for), if the population has good health outcomes in areas that the government can influence via the healthcare system.

Paying and quality assessment don't need to be coupled. The government doesn't need to be paying for the healthcare in order to make recommendations aimed at improving health outcomes. It would probably be happy to swell its ranks by starting up a dental review board.

Though I'm not optimistic about either its ability to fund healthcare or assess its quality.

> I've always had the same feeling about dentists. If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore.

Dental problems are two fold, genetic and habitual.

There are people who brush and floss 2x a day and have miserable teeth, their personal biome and genetics have screwed them.

Then there are people like me, I skipped the dentist for 2 years and when I went the dentist said my teeth looked perfect. (Though being on a keto diet for that time might have helped, one dentist I had said keto is the perfect diet for dental health! :) )

This makes sense as things like bread, if left in your teeth, eventually turn to basically sugar, and start working to dissolve your teeth.

> This makes sense as things like bread, if left in your teeth, eventually turn to basically sugar, and start working to dissolve your teeth.

This was in the early days of keto, back when you couldn't find any keto products at the store and it was just a small subreddit that spread by word of mouth.

I described my diet to my dentist (no carbs at all, no sugar, lots of green veggies, healthy meats and fats, all home cooked), and she instantly approved of it.

IMHO Keto has gone off the rails, no true scotsman and all of that. In the early days keto shared a lot of dietary stuff with paleo in regards to no processed ingredients, everything from scratch, and I think that made a real difference in how effective it was.

Before if I wanted keto ice cream I had to make keto ice cream. Now I can just buy it at every local grocery store. Well excess calories are still excess calories...

Also the prepackaged keto stuff isn't as satiating as from scratch keto food, and half of the benefit of keto is the food is supposed to be more satiating.

/rant

>If they really fix your teeth, you wouldn't need their services anymore.

Not really. A dentist fixing your dental cavity doesn't stop you from gettinga new one in 10 years.

This type of logic doesn't really hold for healthcare providers, at least not in the US. The licensing restrictions is how they make their money. The demand for service so far outstrips the supply of providers that they don't really need individual repeat business. They'll do just fine with positive word-of-mouth. In the specific case of dental care, there is also the problem that "fixing" the immediate problem generally can't fix the root cause, which is some combination of bad genetics and people constantly drinking loads of nearly pure sugar. As long as those things don't change, you'll keep coming back with new problems even if they fix the old ones.

> They'll do just fine with positive word-of-mouth.

Sometimes you don't even need that.

If you ever want to feel depressed, go to your city's subreddit and search for "what business will you never go to again?" I remember one popped up on my city's sub recently, and it made me incredibly thankful for my dentist. The sheer amount of shit some get away with (while having ritzy offices in expensive neighborhoods) is incredible. And sure, such a thread is bound to attract people who have had negative experiences, but the sheer quantity of complaints some places had (with nobody chiming in to defend them or say something to the effect of "I've never had any problems like that") spoke for itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37022911

That's silly. Do you also have the same feeling about carpenters, electricians and plumbers? If they fix something poorly you hire a different one next time.

> OKCupid had a model that increases the likelihood of matching with someone and ...never using OKCupid again.

That was OKCupids claim, but was this claim ever proven through data that directly affirmed that as an outcome?

Often these websites have tiered profit schemes that can milk a user for $100+/m. Sometimes they gamify it, like loot boxing, to make it more lucrative. I don't remember OKCupid being any different.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100821041938/http://blog.okcupi...

Slow release may not be a bad thing. Modern dating seems so dehumanizing...if the NPC you're matched with doesn't check all of your preference boxes, reroll them.

But if OKCupid drags this process out so you only get n matches per month, they maximize revenue while maybe encouraging people to appreciate each other's differences.

Like getting a "crappy" CD from Columbia House...might as well listen to it. Maybe it'll grow on you!

You absolutely could do market based dating where people can bid how much a date with the other would be worth and you match everyone every few days based on the highest sum of bids, collecting the difference.

So if A wants to date B and bids 60 and B will pay 40 to date A the match will cost A 20 plus fees.

This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?

Sorry but I have quite a viscerally bad reaction to such a proposal. Sure it could work in some sense of finding value price pairs or whatever where people's preferences aren't clear.

But it also seems extremely dystopian and horrifying, particularly applied to the dating market. It would be similar with finding friends. People do this naturally and normally on their own for free no problem if you put them in a big room together. It neeeds no incentive

"or, and hear me out, we could actually not make dating into a finacialized instrument?"

I dunno. I kinda look forward to the news stories about the Economic Collapse of 2035 being due to the market finally realizing that too many supposedly AAA Date-Backed Securities were actually Non-Investment Grade Junk Dates, and the subsequent revaluation of the Date Market caused the entire banking system to become insolvent because all the dates they were holding on their books as marked to maturity are in fact never going to be anything but immature, and consequently must be marked down to their actual market value of Zero.

I mean, it's a pretty realistic economic threat. Who doesn't have a story of something they anticipated being a AAA Rated Date turning out to have junk date status? Definitely a lot of mismatched incentives all the way around.

A lot of people don't seem to do it in today's society. Hence the need for these sites.

> This would cut to the chase amazingly fast, which isn’t what people want.

I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it more icky?

The main and big problem with this if anyone would consider it for dating for real, which probably they wouldn’t so no big worry, is what is in the price? So A just paid 20 dollars for the pleasure of having a date with B. What did A buy? Does B have to stay at the date for a set time? Is B obligued to listen enthusiastically to A? Does B have to laugh at A’s jokes? Even if they are lame? And then of course what happens when A thinks they paid for sex and B thinks not?

> I think you just reinvented sex work, but somehow made it more icky?

Or possibly expensive engagement/wedding rings in non-jewellery form.

On a separate point, some of my socialist (and in a few cases literally communist) friends assert that the issues at the intersection of sex work with consent also apply to all other work under capitalism; I don't have a strong counter-argument to this.

Money is fundamentally unnatural, so it's not surprising that it feels wrong and icky in a lot of situations.

Yeah. I think the problem is with an underlying assumption in GP's post: that because dating as a system sometimes behaves game-theoretically it is therefore equivalent to a system of economic transactions.

I think that is only sometimes true, usually in situations where relationships are mainly economic decisions. As prosperity increases and pay/power differences between genders shrink, it is becoming less frequently true, and less true on a per-relationship basis, over time.

So prostitution with extra steps?

It sounds like a build-to-flip startup idea is to create a dating service geared towards creating LTRs and growing it to the point where you get on Match's radar.

Nationalize it. 'partner.gov' here we come.

given trajectory of birth rates, plumetting sex amongst youth, and various governments ratcheting up incentives to have children, this may be more likely than you think...

Singapore has a government dating service, SDU, right? They try to do eugenics on top of that though, so the long term relations might not have the highest priority as well.

I think this is going to start in East Asia if anywhere

Contracts can help. Knowing that marriage is at least somewhat likely for happy couples, site users could sign an agreement that they'll pay the site $1k in the event that they become married to someone they meet through the site. Of course this could lead to freeloaders who try to avoid triggering the agreement, but that just means the contract may need optimization. Freemium models can work.

People are avoiding marriage these days and experimenting with noncontractual arrangements like polyamory. Even before the fraud materializes, the proposed system would be a total failure based on societal changes.

Always get paid upfront. Net-anything just gives others time to find a way to cheat you.

I think 40-60% of people are still seeking escalator-style relationships that would result in marriage (even if they're not seeking such relationships immediately), which is an enormous number of people

Alternatively hear me out you could have people who actually care about other people make a website that treats people like they want to be treated charges a modest per month fee to users looking to do a good job and turn a profit. Unless you've already signed a deal with the devil with people who don't give a fuck about other people it doesn't have to be a maximal profit per user it just needs to be more than the cost to run the site.

If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and message like minded users.

A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics of not making people sick so you can cure them they have agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of them do.

I think many of the dating sites started that way. That's why they were better in the beginning. But eventually, they go public, or get acquired, and end up getting run by people who are bottom line focused.

Generally, the things that are valuable to society, but can't be delivered by corporations who are only interested in maximizing their own wealth and power are good candidates for something that would be better run by government.

Maybe a dating site actually would make for a good social service... Assuming that what we'd gain in terms of the stability and happiness of the population is worth more than what it would cost to run the service it might not be a bad idea. Especially in areas where dating is uniquely difficult like Iceland where apps exist to make sure you're not dating someone closely related.