Duolicious – Open-source dating app | Hacker News Reader

Duolicious – Open-source dating app

github.com

101 pointsgewgelplex103 comments

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Oh no: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/duolicious-4chan-dating...

The Know Your Meme article, linked from the post page, is the best anti-review for this app.

> The Know Your Meme article, linked from the post page, is the best anti-review for this app.

Not the 4chan screenshots used as testimonials on the app's own web site?

It knows exactly what it is and who it's for, and I think that's great.

Helping ill-suited users self-select out before they download your product is rare and wonderful.

> What’s the gender ratio on Duolicious?

> Right now the ratio of active men to women is 7.32:1. The ratio can change a lot, depending on which online communities have been talking about Duolicious lately; The ratio’s previously been as high as about 20:1.

Admitting this was brave.

Technically, most here would care for the ratio of active-straight-cis-men to active-straight-cis-women, which I am afraid could be substantially more distorted. (No offense to any other groups, which hopefully will have better luck anyway.)

I suspect the others are (on average) too self-centered to be serious about dating although some might put on a show as if they were.

That's a big assumption.

Are you literally saying anyone that's not straight only pretends to want to date? Because they are self centered?

Seriously? Am I misreading this?

I take back any insinuation that gay, lesbian or bisexual people don't want to date, that's certainly wrong.

… so, trans people? That's a wild assertion.

Glad you are so open with being a bigot, Paul. Really good stuff.

What does this even mean?

I think only active-straight-cis-men and active-straight-cis-women are looking for things like open source dating site alternatives to the mainstream sites. Other groups aren't in this market, so to speak. Either they have apps & sites they don't need alternatives to, or they rely on the local community.

Can they charge women $1 to join and charge men $20 or something?

I can tell you that as a cis-male, there are many people that sign up for apps like Tinder that represent themselves either incorrectly, don't fit into the filters that are available, or gender themselves in a way that don't mesh well with cis-for-cis relationships. I hope that doesn't come off as harsh or hateful, because it absolutely isn't. I feel like a lot of non-cis people are subjected to a lot of unnecessary hate and/or miscommunication because of the way most apps work. I might be a cis-male, but I don't want to see anyone hurt or hated on for their sexual preferences. I'm not overly PC, but nobody deserves hate or violence, especially from a dating app that can't tailor itself to match with the right type of person.

I know I rambled, but my point was that charging women or men different fees is going to create even more confusion or outright lying to save a dollar. Things are already in a pretty grey area on dating apps as they already are.

Apparently peepeepoopoo# or whatever doesn't think I need to use "cis". I normally don't, but because I saw that's how the conversation was going, I did the same. "Straight-male," does that make my words make more sense, like they didn't before? I apologize if "cis" in a sentence triggers you, I didn't think it mattered either way, other than just matching the conversation. I'm guessing it doesn't, but I just haven't had a negative reaction like this before on HN. I'm used to it on most other websites.

You might be making a wrong assumption or something. Honestly, I couldn't make heads or tails of your post. There is a point where reality comes into play. For sure, it is controversial as to whether someone event accepts that three-letter prefix as meaningful but even insofar as that, this does not apply to many people, and that is just the hard truth. The vast, vast majority of dating sites are connecting men with women and due to many other realities of the marketplace, it makes more sense to charge women less, if anything, than males. I feel like this common sense so I won't belabor it.

I think structurally this is a good idea and would budge the numbers a bit.

Realistically, it's not a perfect solution, because things being what they are, even the women who themselves are:

> Duolicious is the dating app that helps you find your Discord-lurking, Reddit-updooting, Nigerian-basketweaving-forum-posting, chronically-online soulmate. Our fun personality quiz helps you meet like-minded people, and shows you a new match for every answer you give, thanks to our fancy matching algorithm.

Listen, creepy guys online are a thing. A huge thing, massive. If I was lady, even though I am a terminally online type of person, I would absolutely not use a site which specifically promised to data mine the comments section for people to date.

No, because that's illegal sex-discrimination.

I want to hear a better answer than this. Seems like by its nature that any dating app needs sex discrimination.

Every single dating app employs sex discrimination on the backend.

That actually is illegal! Our local California restaurant has been (successfully) sued for having "ladies nights out" where they provided discount drinks for ladies: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/31/business/ladies-night-lawsuit...

you're probably right, but I think this is a bit different. You're effectively selling a gender "badge" on your profile. Either (real) gender can purchase that badge, but if you want to be marked as "male", it costs $20. and if you want to be marked as "female", its $1.

People will want to be honest about their gender identity, because being marked as the wrong gender would get messages from the wrong gender.

Some people would have different ideas about all that.

what do you mean?

There isn't a consensus on the meaning of gender.

You are just asking for trouble, to be sued, and will lose too.

Maybe you can pay $1 to access the profiles that paid $20 or you can pay $20 and access the profiles that paid $1.

I believe this is basically how seeking works

I think that this is a poor strategy in general if you actually want to "solve" online dating. From the women's perspective, men who are willing to spend money for a dating app are probably not more desirable than average, unless you raise the price so high (probably around $1k) it becomes a meaningful proxy for wealth, and even then that's a narrow market that is already saturated. The buzz about dating apps on male-dominated websites is that the experience for men there is bad (because few women), but a textbook microeconomic analysis insists that the experience must be worse for women, because otherwise they would use the app! The app UX is mostly a function of the opposite-gender userbase, so your options are constrained: you might restrict the pool of men by charging, but you consequently make the app less interesting to women, which foils your attempt to balance the gender ratio.

I could ramble further about how I think this happens and what to do about it, but there is one caveat: I have never — hopefully will never — used any dating apps. I rely entirely on what I've read from other people and my own limited understanding of economics and psychology.

> a textbook microeconomic analysis insists that the experience must be worse for women, because otherwise they would use the app!

"Worse" in the sense of providing less value to them, sure, but maybe women just don't want as much sex. And it's far from clear that having more men on the app increases its value to women (if anything it might be the opposite).

Also see

https://medium.com/@gettingfrankpodcast/kings-of-the-hill-ho...

and the problem that women often aren't attracted to men who will commit to them until it is too late, see

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

>you might restrict the pool of men by charging, but you consequently make the app less interesting to women, which foils your attempt to balance the gender ratio.

I think charging men could improve the experience for women, if men are denied a refund if they're banned for unwelcome behavior.

It's not a subscription fee. It's a deposit ;-)

I see this a lot in Japan for language exchange parties. Foreigners pay the least, then Japanese women, then Japanese men.

I'm surprised I wasn't as off as I thought. Expected a solid 8/1.

You can't really hit that ideal 1:1 on the internet without a huge mainstream surge. Even then there's a bunch of work after that to attract women.

Wow, I expected a lot more men

Duolicious: where the men are men and so are the women.

I like the open source aspect, I've been looking for an ethical dating app for a long time, and based on the README it looks awesome! But then I clicked onto the site, and things did a 180, based on the edgy marketing copy on the landing page I don't think this is the site I'm looking for, as 'normie' as that might make me.

> There’s plenty of dating apps out there: Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Boo, Hinge. We think they’re all great apps... For normies! But a terminally-online meme-enjoying degenerate like yourself needs something more. That’s why we invented Duolicious!

> Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Boo, Hinge. We think they’re all great apps... For normies!

Their business models need more transparency. Donations from couples who have achieved milestones on all apps as a means of sustaining the business, could realistically make the world a better place.

It's just extremely difficult to get any money (including donations) after you've hit the end of the "marketing funnel." People meet, are happy, and won't look back. Maybe a "first time is free," type of arrangement?

The only people who think like think those are "great" apps are successfully promiscuous people around big cities with vast dating pools.

I wonder how they get away from becoming prostitution as a service apps.

Prostitution means somebody pays for sex. Promiscuous people have many partners.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to ever be getting an ethical dating app. It may be ethical as far as not charging users to connect, or not trying to keep users constantly staying single so they are always using and checking the app. Without that "addiction" potential, I think even a completely open dating app would fail miserably. If people were able to connect and move on quickly, there would be little reason for the app-creators to continue developing.

I say this as someone that has spent the last few years wading through various dating apps, looking for a monogamous relationship. The best luck I've had with dating (after using Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Facebook Dating) has been finding local Facebook singles groups, and just chatting. I can be nervous and awkward, but I'm able to fake it in person, and online it's easy for me to have conversations with others about interests.

Also, instead of trying to be a "normie" (although you didn't say you were doing this, so this may not apply), lean into what makes you unique and try to find the same or something compatible in someone else. Going through apps is not fun, but I have met a ton of different people that I don't think I ever would have interacted with if I hadn't gone through dating apps or chatting with strangers.

To be clear, the language isn't "fun" for anyone that has dealt with any of the things they mention!

> If people were able to connect and move on quickly, there would be little reason for the app-creators to continue developing.

If an open-source piece of tech is working as advertised, why would its devs continue working on a finished product?

Security, the world outside of the app is constantly changing, would not want a known exploit used to obtain access to my responses to a subset of the 2000+ questions

i.e., software is never finished

Ethical dating sites are possible and have existed. But they dfintiely can't exist in this current landscape. Like you said, an app who's goal is ultimately to stop people from using the app is not one that will get the funding needed to stand out from all the Match.com shell companies.

> lean into what makes you unique and try to find the same or something compatible in someone else.

This part is cultural though, and the fact is most people (regardless of gender) are not looking for "unique". Quite the contrary. I suppose that is a bit of why the "normie" nomenclature is not as far off as you first think.

I'm not sure what would constitute ethical versus not ethical exactly, but increasingly I've wondered if some governments will start supporting dating apps, if birthrates decline enough. Is that better than a private corporation app? Maybe or maybe not but it seems like it might change the "ethical issue landscape".

Or maybe dating apps per se will fade away and dating functionality will just get folded into more general purpose apps and sites.

I define ethical as an app that is designed to do its job as effectively as possible. That is to say, match the most compatible individuals without stupid retention games. The problem is, this isn’t a good business model. I would fully support a state funded dating app (so long as the dating app wasn’t actually controlled by the state because then it would just be weird)

The Tokyo government is trying. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15292637

I know this is a mostly software forum but the thought that you can successfully achieve long lasting romantic relationships with an app is so HN. A more economic policy would be to subsidise low-impact team sports that have lower fitness requirements than soccer or basketball.

I think Russians hinted at something like that being in the works over there. Might not be a bad idea for a rapidly aging country to do something like that.

> It may be ethical as far as not charging users to connect

Actually, I think "charging users to connect" is the only way to make an ethical dating app. The key thing is, everyone pays the same amount, and gets the same abilities within the platform. No freemium, no free riders. Everyone helps keep the platform sustainable.

You do still have to deal with the perverse incentive to keep people on the platform, but I have an even crazier idea for that: one-time single payment. Now the platform is incentivized to get people off the platform while still being satisfied enough to recommend it to incoming users. I suspect that could go badly in different ways, and might not be necessary if it's generally acting in the users' favor (possibly because of my craziest idea, having it be user-owned). I'm still thinking about it.

That or someone needs to run it as a charity. I'm not sure if that's more or less crazyb than the previous ideas.

It could be run by the government, since they're the ones who need to worry about demographic decline.

Oh yeah, dating.gov will really bring in the singles.

The government is allowed to hire a marketing team.

fertilize.us

Back in the day if you really wanted to hook up there were the Bachelors and Spinsters Inseminators Balls.

The burning cars and ferals weren't for everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH_RWBSQ9ic

Admit it. You just don't want people to know you're into Nigerian basket weaving.

Duolicious openly mocks its own users on Twitter. Calling them “chuds” and such. I guess if the shoe fits, wear it.

But what a childish company to advertise on 4chan and market itself as being for that audience, to then sit there using condescending and derogatory slurs about them.

Nice of them to open source everything so you can go make your own Duolicious with blackjack and hookers I guess.

> But what a childish company to advertise on 4chan and market itself as being for that audience, to then sit there using condescending and derogatory slurs about them.

Lol. It's just bants, no-one in that community minds. On the contrary, a company that tried to appeal to the 4chan audience without insulting them would be an obvious astroturfer/poser.

Possibly. I tried to follow along but didnt get it/couldnt hang.

That's just them playing into being "terminally online" - and, I'd wager, being really terminally online, but also presenting it as a joke, for it to be more palatable publicly.

https://alovoa.com/ is open source.

We thought for a while to use it to start our own dating up. But it is so hard to get off the ground...

Oooh I like this one much more, I wonder how active it is..

I like "Duolicious checks first messages for originality, and asks people to avoid overused openers like 'hey' and 'sup'."

I've been thinking a social network ought to be more opinionated. You need a god if you want to tell true or false, but a very simple AI model can detect infectious negative emotions.

Social media sites ought to ask you "are you sure you want to post this?" when you lose your shit. If somebody is getting dogpiled the whole conversation should be suspended for some time.

BERT + RNN models can eat that problem for lunch, the hard thing is that somebody with real emoptions has to make the training set.

Tinder does have an “are you sure you want to send that?” popup if you send something with certain keywords. Unfortunately that does nothing to filter out negging or harassment.

4chan marketing aside, it looks like the basic idea here is to reinvent what OKCupid used to be once upon a time, before Match Group bought it out and holled it out into yet another Tinder clone.

If you can find their old datascience blogs (that have since been purged), there's some interesting stuff in there. Iirc, one of the saddest revelations is the feature that best predicts outcome was income, and that hobbies/interests that looked like good predictors were just correlated with income. To use an extreme example, are two people a good match because they both like Polo or was it because they're both from the same social strata where Polo is a thing.

I agree with this, but funnily enough, this makes the system work, just not for the reasons at face value. So, people don't match because of they like similar hobbies, they match because they look for the same proxies of values and status.

Yup. I should've used education in the example, are you really interested in the fact that the other person has a master's degree itself or is it a signal that they come from a certain societal background or lifetime earning potential.

Oh yeah, that's another good proxy. But the one you brought up, polo, is also a good one, because I remember about a statistics example, hopefully not made up - where a correlation was found between keeping horses and good health, and horses just turned out to be a proxy for wealth.

Hehe yes, much like how one glass of red wine a day is just so beneficial for your health.

I worked for a dating website years ago and the business model is completely broken. More fun, a few years ago I was putting together a talk related to this blog post and searched for "best dating site" and hit the "top 100 dating sites" which implies there are at least 100. Yikes.

Anyway, here's some talk of the business model and mis-matched motivations:

https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

You're blog post basically confirms the questions in a recent FT article about dating apps:

> Dating apps already face allegations from users that they hide the best potential mates to keep people swiping — theories that have led to entire forums online devoted to “gaming” the apps. While these accusations are denied by dating companies, they are grounded in “the very real lack of transparency” about how matching algorithms work, says Sharabi of Arizona State University.

I agree with the mismatched incentives. Healthcare is a bit similar, one doesn't pay to be healthy, but to be treated. I'm not sure how to fix this, though.

"Duolicious has a question bank containing over 2000 thoughtful and unique questions designed to help us gain authentic insight into your personality"

And then do a clustering in n-dimensional space. Forget it, won't work. I am not looking to date a clone of myself.

But this clustering approach might work well with resumes for hiring. People hire people with similar resumes.

I don’t know how Duolicious does it. With okcupid you could not just answer the question, but also mark which answers you would “accept” in a potential partner and how much you care about that question from “not at all” to “very much”.

For example if the question was “Do you do drugs?” i can answer it with a “no” but also mark that I’m willing to meet people who marked either “no” or “only soft stuff, like weed”, and that it is a “somewhat important” question for me. But as an other example about the question “What does wherefore mean in Wherefore art thou Romeo?” I would mark that I accept all answers and care about others answer not at all. But if someone else cared about this they could still see that my answer was “why”.

Well, I am not especially found of tattoos. But if there is one thing I dislike in dating profiles, then it is a long laundry list of what I have to be and what I don't have to be. Nothing makes you look older and unavailable.

> But if there is one thing I dislike in dating profiles, then it is a long laundry list of what I have to be and what I don't have to be. Nothing makes you look older and unavailable.

Then surely an app that allows people to do the filtering they want without writing these things on their profile is a good thing?

> I am not especially found of tattoos

How much? Is it an “all things considered equal i prefer someone without tattoos” or a deal breaker for you? Because that is the beauty of the system. Depending on the weight you put on the question it might not show you anyone who answered “yes I have tattoos”. Or just rank them lower. Or if you marked this question totally unimportant to you it won’t even count in the ranking.

> I dislike in dating profiles, then it is a long laundry list of what I have to be and what I don't have to be

I agree with that. But that is not what we are talking about.

OKCupid had a clever way to handle this back in the day.

Whenever you answered a question, the site would also ask how your ideal partner would've answered. (I think you could specify multiple different answers as acceptable.)

So you're free to specify that your ideal partner would answer differently than you yourself.

Prediction, from the home page, and the OSS branding: This will be heavily skewed male.

Prediction, from the fact that it is a dating app : This will be heavily skewed male.

Hah yes. But I think we have a few orders of magnitude to contend with...

People looking for "an ethical dating app" are usually incel or incel adjacent. Dating is a zero sum game. Most men don't understand women. I'm saying this as a top 10% guy (IRL and on apps). It's best to acknowledge this and take this into account.

is it really "inceldom" to not want an app to literally rig my matches to not be the best matches until I put X time into it?

Look into some of the dark patterns used today compared to 2010 before making an assumption on people wanting an "ethical dating app". Especially in a community skewed on tech.

Sure, it's just that sometimes when people talk abou "ethical" dating and dating apps they are mostly talking about limiting the top guys from taking most of the women or keeping most of the women busy. Usualy via forced monogamy or some sort of forced "fair play". I'm of the opinion that top guys should have a bigger piece of the pie than the avg dude but there should be a limit, something in-between "winner takes all" and monogamy.

Maybe on a general forum. But "software ethics" is a topic of increasing interest as of late, and a community like HN would point to dating apps as exhibit B of dark software patterns that enshittify society as a whole. That's my first and best interpretation of such a comment on here.

Social dynamics after these dark patterns are resolved is a whole other topic. And honestly not a topic I'm interested in talking about.

You already know there is an overlap between the two.

In the same way there's an overlap between video gamers and school shooters, sure.

Ethical here means "please don't sell my data or abuse my profile", not "everyone on the app is happy and farting rainbows." A person with third-grade reading comprehension could understand this from the linked article, so I guess you really must have spec'd entirely into charisma

sure

Take a look at this boys. Some real BDE here on HN. We’re blessed today

I can assure you than my D is slightly smaller than the average.

We know

"We" you and your...? Ah nevermind

I don't think it's zero sum. Not everyone is into the same parameters. Or at least we don't weigh them the same. Supposing I don't know anything about women, I would at least venture to say that nerd guys like myself value intelligence in women more than the average person.

But even supposing it was zero sum, and supposing I'm a "low value" male and I deserve a "low value" female. The dating sites could fail to show us to each other, leaving a lot of people single or dissatisfied because they matched too low.

Problem is that the top guys are also after your "type" of women. All type of women.

Edit: Also a lot of intellectual women tend to stay away from men seeking intellectual women cause most of the time it is a red flag, cause if you probe deeper a lot of these guys are looking for nerd girls for unhealthy reasons, like they have an unhealthy image of a "nerd girl" in their minds, other times is it just coping, they would be with the sports illustrated girl or "go with the flow" art girl if they could.

What does this have to do with being zero sum?

I get what you are saying but "incel" is a pejorative that is not generally associated with the type of person that would use the phrase "an ethical dating app" but the point is taken that they may be "involuntary celibate", sure. Typically, someone using phraseology associated with hyper-politically-correct people would not be thought of as incels.

Top 10% guy... Are people really saying crap like that about themselves? Weird.

People usually do this for validation or just the fact is the opposite, often times these kind of people couldn't get partners just because they have this "I'm top __% guy so my partner should be ___" mentality and keeps complaining.

Where do you get "ethical"? Word not found on github, or their frontpage.

I also don't understand what the incel accusation, and then the announcement of incel-adjacent narratives add this conversation. Do you suggest people don't take rivalry into account?

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