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> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.

Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out.

After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.

OkCupid was great in those years. I remember how each person felt like a nuanced individual and not like the elevator pitch of a person.

Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.

I have not used any dating app in the past decade. OKC was last platform, while in graduate school. I LOVED the "percent match" but across multiple profiles (over a few years) I learned how "to game" their system by only answering certain impactful (but not damaging) questions.

If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis.

My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).

OkCupid was awesome. I met my wife there ten years ago. We were a 93% match! Had many of the same (or similar) answers to the personality questions.

Interestingly, a few months before meeting my now wife, I dated a girl I met on Meetup who also happened to be on Match. Our relationship only lasted a few months. We were a 72% match or something like that. Go figure!

> generic loser pile

Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.

Then there's the spam problem.

In my brief recent experience in the app world, spam wasn't a huge problem. Maybe it's worse for men, but the spam accounts and messages I saw were all vapid normies who I'd never click on. I got much less of that than weird (but unfortunately real) aggro dudes who wanted me to see their dicks. (Often by insisting we move to another messaging platform with less consent control)

+1 for OkCupid. I met a lot of the most important persons there who even stayed friends. It is one of the sad examples of MBAs destroying an app they don't understand saying the "UX ix too tedious".

There was a post on HN once by a former OkCupid person who, as I read it, took a more nuanced view along the lines of: the market moved to cellphones and that kind of long form entry (or reading) isn't viable on a few-inch screen with point and grunt input.

Beyond an insider sharing the view, I find it compelling because it didn't require anyone to have been an idiot. I've certainly seen other effects that look like the widespread usage of cellphones dumbing down the internet in disappointing ways. ... and it explains why someone doesn't just recreate the magic that OkCupid had: they can't. For classic-OkCupid to exist the public needs widespread access to a communications tool suitable for sending things more nuanced than dick pics.

I think what also people miss - is that by OkCupid requiring long form essays. the demographic would tend to be educated college folks - quirky gals studying humanities, chemistry etc.

so you literally have a crowd of people who like reading, and are critical thinkers etc & most likely to be high earners too.

but like every thing - the power of the lowest common denominator rules ie endless swiping on who you think is hot.

this doesn't end with apps -- with forums gone -- you can hardly find places online where civilized discourse happens.

now everything is just for the 'gram. or to go viral on tiktok.

Competition is supposed to give us choice. Instead, when one competitor discovers a cheap trick, the rest have to follow suit to stay alive, or at least believe they do. Hence there are a half dozen dating apps that all offer the same fucking swipe right garbage. OKCupid was pretty good, before the ubiquity of smartphones.

In case of dating apps, the issue is that match.com owns all of them.

The cheap trick is to buy your competitors

smartphones aren't the problem, it's that the same company owns all of them and has an incentive to milk their customers.

match.com doesn't own the local bar, and that's why it's probably a better way to get laid

OkCupid was great in the early 2010s when you used it mainly on a website and before it was bought and enshittified by the Match group just like all other dating sites.

It seems like it would be easy to recreate that magic -- it's just a website after all -- but getting the requisite network effects would be pretty much impossible. And if by some miracle you did succeed, Match group would just buy it and ruin it.

> sad examples of MBAs destroying an app

you should go get an MBA, it's the closest thing you'll ever find to surrounding yourself with more interesting OKCupid-from-back-in-the-day characters than you can possibly date through in 2 years!

Meaning, if you don't think MBAs understand OKCupid, they do. But they also understand match.com

Another +1 for okcupid. I met my wife through it.

Plenty of fish was the only good one. It sucked and did no matching at all. That meant there was an expectation that you basically exchange 2 messages and then meet in person. All the rest is bs: people are not the same in person as online, so the main job of a dating app is to get people in chairs in person asap

I tried that one in my last foray into online dating. It was how you describe: simple, no b.s. Only, it was pretty much dead and I quickly met up with the two active people on the site and abandoned it. (Slight exaggeration, I'm sure)

The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore.

I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.

Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.

The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered.

With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem

The time constant can be quite long, some people are on these things for months or years. It takes time to equilibrate.

I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far.

Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.

A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

> A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches

It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days?

Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!

Yeah they have no incentive to do that and actually have incentive to fake activity

I imagine there’s a relationship between this accumulation of singles and population growth rates. It would be interesting to compare the demographic flows of online dating in countries with aging populations vs populations that are trending younger over time.

Rather I would say that Tinder is not hip any more, so the "normies" are out and the usual suspects of dating sites linger.

    The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline.

Yes, and they are probably being replaced with DMs in Instagram. I like to call Instagram the world's largest dating app.

Totally agree. An idealized journal of one's life over time on Instagram is way more interesting and revealing than any dating app could ever be.

Maybe for some people. Personally I don’t find it very interesting. From the people I know on Instagram, the pictures they take and the stories they write are extremely curated and artificial.

It’s like deciding to date a famous actress based on a character she played in a movie. She may look like the character but personality and interest-wise she’s unlikely to be anything even remotely resembling the character!

This really takes the artificiality of the dating profile and explodes it to an incredible degree. I’d much rather meet someone through a common interest and start dating organically. That’s basically what the article is saying is coming back.

    Maybe for some people.

I would say 95% of people.

>Tinder and Bumble are in decline

do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade

Match Group embraced, enshittified, and extinguished the entire online dating industry.

I've heard tinder users say they are picky because swiping yes on too many reduces your visibility (or something like that). That seems like a bad incentive to make people take chances on each other.

> Do you believe yours comes in first?

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it.

Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them.

But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.

ChatGPT, write an attractive dating app profile for me!

> Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf.

This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner.

Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.

> The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves.

I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.

Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.

> So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.

Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.

>over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience.

And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact.

I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.

> When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others.

Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone.

The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen.

There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.

there is a huge DEMAND, but whether you can take that to market and make it viable is a different story.

actually kinda shocked China or Korea haven't made this a state thing in order to help boost marriages and childbirths

The problem in Korea at least isn't with meeting people (well, for 80% of the population), it is young couples feeling they can't meet the finances required to satisfy social norms, and thus deciding to delay the marriage-kids sequence indefinitely.

Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.

Makes sense that most people would time out on child bearing age before they got there. especially now with 8% interest rates

Huh? You were the CTO of a dating app, you start a line with “more fundamental…” What was the ratio of active women to active men? That seems to be most important.

Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.

On our app we were about 60% women to 40% men. Nonbinary made up a small enough % to round to zero. DAU/MAU were roughly the same, though you might see seasonal swings toward one or another.

I have a hard time with this. For one, a dating site where there is 3 women for every 2 men is such an anomaly in itself, and then when word gets out that "hey, it's a dating site that isn't a total sausage fest" (to be blunt), then I can't see that ratio doing anything but skewing rapidly in the direction of every other dating site.

For the reason you describe we consciously chose to never talk publicly about gender ratios. Having predominately female users (or even close to 50/50 actives) tends to attract people for the wrong reasons.

> tends to attract people for the wrong reasons.

Like men wanting to meet women through an app?

By "wrong reasons" i am referring to the intentions of those new users.

Say your users are predominantly seeking long-term relationships, and your branding supports that. Then a bunch of men, fueled by gender-ratio marketing, flood your app seeking hookups. You will see short-term a bump in engagement and payments. A/B testing will suggest everything is great. But long-term your product loses value as your users lose faith in your ability to deliver on what they signed up for. The (in this case women) leave and the product becomes another graveyard.

I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former.

The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you.

With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images.

PS I'm half joking half not.

Can't help but interpret this take as a little disingenuous. Most dating apps seem to follow the trajectory of "new app launched" -> "new app grows and gets popular" -> "new app bought out by match.com" -> "new app turns to shit"

I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.

Agreed. GP's comment ignores the reality that dating apps are aggressively monopolized by a single company, and that many of their acquisitions have resulted in demonstrable drops in quality.

It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.

The problem is that getting to that point requires quite a bit of capital. The hard part isn’t building the app, it’s buying users, largely through advertising, and then filtering the assholes through moderation staffing. Both of that costs a lot of money, up front. To date, nobody has come up with a way to monetize dating apps in a way that doesn’t negate the benefits of the app.

Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.

There's also the fact people only have a somewhat accurate idea of what they'll actually like in a partner. Maybe you only think you'll like someone who's always direct, or who wants to be submissive in bed, or is financially responsible.

> I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.

Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app.

> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.

Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.

> the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person

What kind of things should I imagine here?

I imagine random but surprisingly shared tidbits like your favorite spongebob character being Plankton. Or remembering your most embarassing MySpace post. Or your favorite toy growing up being one of those super balls that you bounced into oblivion one day, never to be seen again (hey, it said "super" after all).

Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.