Tokyo dating app to promote marriage, keep out phonies
asahi.com
asahi.com
1. price: a number to be agreed upon
2. liquidity: availability of a willing buyer and a willing seller to transact at some price
A seller can set a price for her item very high; even if there are many otherwise willing buyers, no one will buy the item due to the unreasonable price. Conversely, even if the price is fair (by some common metric), sellers and buyers may not transact due to the opaqueness of the market: the sellers and buyers may not know the availability. This is why auction houses/farmers' markets exist: to make the information more available and make the market less opaque.
In a dating market, a dating app solves the problem with (2) liquidity, but it does not help with (1) price. In fact, it makes the problem with (1) price worse by giving people the illusion of choice and availability, inflating their egos and thus asking for unreasonable prices. In other words, expectations for romantic partners are higher than ever, but both economic and social factors contribute to people not meeting these requirements. Japan's NEET phenomenon is a classic, well-studied example of a problem with (1).
Worse for who? The dating app's goal is to keep you as a long term paying customer, not help you find THE ONE quickly. So if people are constantly mismatching due to inflated egos, but staying on the platform due to the illusion of overabundance, it's a slam dunk for the dating app's shareholders' bottom line. People finding their mate quickly is bad for business.
It seems that dating, just like with housing and healthcare, if you turn it into a private business for shareholder to rentseek on, it's guaranteed to be turned to shit for most people as they're now seen as cash cows to be milked for all they're worth rather than human being with human problems.
Couples still could use apps to help coordinate their dates, etc. find suggestions of places to go, meet other couples for double dates, find couples events nearby etc...
Why rock the boat? It seems to me like the strategy is for the match group to buy off competitors and then slowly but surely turn these into tinder clones once they start gaining traction.
Dating apps are already incredibly profitable with all the value being provided by users.
And pretty much every initiative to make them more profitable amounts to selling one segment of users to another.
See Tinder Deluxe.
A recent news story on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/business/dating-apps-tind...
The problem is that they're losing young people, who seem to feel a lot less pressure to go meet somebody and pair off. They see the existing dating apps as having been designed for a Gen X sentiment, and that doesn't apply to them.
They're still fumbling about for a new hook. They may well find it. But for the moment I don't think it's accurate to say that they're "doing fine".
Tinder was also fun and cool in the early years when it was a niche app few people knew about, but it kept getting worse and worse over time: paywalled subscriptions and features, bots, women got a lot more flaky, men got a lot more creepy leading to a feedback loop of enshitification.
It's kind of like the early days of online internet chat versus the internet of today. It was safer, cooler and more fun when only a few geeks were on it, anyone you met online was an experience not a fear, but once all and sundry moved in along with profit motives of big corporations, it became shit with ads, dark patterns, bots, trolls and weirdos everywhere.
The same thing happened to Couchsurfing. It started off as a cool, niche, geeky way to travel and meet people, and over time it turned into a dating app where dudes from Paris/Barcelona/etc are renting their couch to young travelers form North America in exchange for sex. Same with the dozens of meetup apps for "making friends and meeting new people" which inevitably devolve into unofficial dating apps for creeps and weirdos who aren't there for any friendships.
IMHO, it seems that on the mass market for-profit internet where everyone is allowed (and encouraged) to join, we just can't have nice things. To whit, the best online communities I found are now either in public places that are devoted to super niche things which don't attract trolls or big corporations to monetize, or on stuff like private torrent trackers where getting in only happens through personal referral.
But what I described doesn't appeal to all users. It appeals to a subset of the exact same demographic using dating apps, it just also appeals to them beyond finding their first match.
You join the app and still have to find a match (or join with your partner; admittedly, a different demographic) to access any additional features. It's not some app you hop on to find a good grocery shop for Manuka honey or booking a flight.
If the matching aspect works fine, adding additional features shouldn't reduce use of or interest in the app, unless they're coupled with an annoying UX ("Hey, we took time to add this so you must use it").
It's not an "everything" app, it's about providing additional value to the existing audience that extends beyond just matches.
I don't think we can definitely say something like that does or doesn't work until we see enough of them crop up and fail. From what I have heard, niche dating apps (or "singles apps", more appropriately[1]) do okay in localized regions.
I would bet they probably would do okay on a larger scale, just that real life dating probably is a different game from city to city and so you can't just ship the exact same experience as you might for Vancouver to Springfield
[1] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
What if, birth rates are a much more complex topic that can't be reducted just to one cause or the other but a cumulation of multiple factors.
Personally from where I'm standing (EU urbanite), I see the falling birthrates seem to be mostly caused by unaffordable housing in the big cities where most young people live, which seems to plague most of the developed west, as that's where all the jobs the young generations are taking, but there's no affordable space to raise a family in.
Sure, you can move out of big cities to the countryside with affordable land, but you'll either have to give up your white collar job and social circles you worked so hard for, or spend hours per day commuting (no, fully remote work isn't an option for most employees unfortunately). So middle class couples are struck between a rock and hard place where they're constantly waiting for the winds to turn in their favor till their biological clocks run out.
To me it seems that mass urbanization, as in the move from rural to urban, is a huge factor in killing birthrates across the world, not just the west, but also in places like China who in their rural poverty days had too many people that they had to cap the max number of children by law and now when a lot of it is urbanized and developed, they have the exact opposite problem.
This isn’t a factor for the very poor or very wealthy, because financial security was never a possibility for the former to begin with and the latter already have it. Everybody in between gets tied up trying to become the latter because it seems possible, even if it’s not probable.
Japan is basically where we'll be in 30 years if we are extremely lucky
My understanding is that Japanese men work ridiculous hours, and they are expected to go out drinking with their coworkers after work, and by the time they get home, they can only get sleep before they have to return to work the next day. The relentless salary man focus cannot possibly lend itself to proper dating, courtship, marriage, and children.
More generally I'm wondering if there are more reasons as to why the Tokyo government is pursuing this other than declining birth rates. Wouldn't broader reform be more effective over a dating app? I guess a dating app would be "way easier" to design and manage (if this isn't just two programmers and a parrot in some basement somewhere), but by that metric wouldn't you view this as a half-baked solution to a much larger problem? Declining birth rates is a pretty big reason to look into implementing or passing something that isn't low effort, comparatively? One advantage here is that this wouldn't have misaligned incentives like the dating apps people here are already familiar with. The housing market, financial security, loneliness, work/life balance; this idea is interacting with many themes.
Can only imagine the unintended consequences here.
1. Secularism. Secular populations are less fertile than highly religious populations.
2. Infant survival (low infant mortality).
3. Mechanisation particularly of agriculture.
4. Urbanisation.
5. Credentialism, the social requirement for people to spend an increasing fraction of their fertile years in pre-employment education. Simple literacy is also pretty important in causing early fertility decline in developing countries.
6. Universalism together with a tolerance for inequality. Universalism is applying the same rules to everyone, so women can enter the workforce and make their own life decisions just as men do. Tolerance for inequality I hope I don't have to explain. (I am split whether this is one factor or two.)
There is some interlinkage in these, they are not all totally orthogonal, but they are all fairly distinct dimensions of the problem.
Japan (and South Korea, and China) max out on credentialism and tolerance for inequality but also score highly in all of the others.
Finally this is a great example of one of Iain Banks's "Outside Context Problems".
More than a black swan, it's a problem that governments are simply not equipped to understand or in some cases even see, so they can't do anything to solve it.
1. https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-...