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Comment by jumploops | Hacker News Reader

We built a dating app and saw these same metrics.

Our "twist" was that anyone could be a matchmaker, pairing other people (in addition to our recommendation engine).

An interesting thing happened: lot's of people just like using dating apps in a voyeuristic way, with no intention of dating.

Tinder eventually launched this feature, but it fell flat.

I still think there's merit to human-based recs over "AI" matchmakers.

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I daydreamed a dating app once where all the matching was done by tween girls at pyjama parties, and everyone signing up had to abide by the matches provided. I reckon the young ladies would have a very high hit rate of who was meant to be with who.

And while I’m here, OKCupid when it existed as mostly a website around 2013 was probably the best actual dating app and attempt to provide a decent enough platform for people to express themselves, and the question answering section where it would then deliver a compatibility rating was really good. But then the churn and being bought by Match completely killed it. OKC was the first dating platform that seemed like it was genuinely designed to work.

I second the part about OKCupid.

(For the first part of your post I think I am not qualified to comment).

That makes me think of the in-person introductions my older friends have tried to arrange for me. It was a thoughtful gesture but really not a lot of consideration of what I would consider attractive.

Yeah the idea was that peers could help bolster match acceptance, both parties would still need to agree, which is much different than a blind date where you aren't interested, but have to still have to go through the in-person charade.

Candidly, assuming your gender based on your username, it would have been a net positive compared to the stats ;)

Have you done any research on the type of users who use dating apps primarily?

The article is really good on the product decisions but light on what kind of life and situation these users have.

This was over 10 years ago, but iirc the primary demographic was what you might expect: 20s to mid-30s living in urban areas, skewing lower on that spectrum.

Our data was almost identical to the article, showing the same imbalances.

I don't mean the generic demographic categories but rather similarity in behavioural patterns. Were these people terminally online, more or less attractive on average, had rich social life?

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