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Comment by robrtsql | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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