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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

A non-profit dating platform probably means you don’t charge much- which initially seems good, but it probably also means you’ll attract a bunch of users who aren’t serious because they have nothing at risk. So the people who are seriously looking for a relationship will be lost in all the casual users. Sure, you could make people deposit a bunch of money to prove they’re serious but you’ll lose all your users.

If you can figure out how to select people seriously looking for a relationship without becoming a pay to play app then it would be popular. But so far nobody knows how to do that. Or maybe someone does know but they won’t do it because there’s no profit in it.

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Another idea I had to play a role in solving that issue (not that I’ve really thought too deeply about it yet) is, similar to how the free version of Hinge works, greatly limiting the amount of likes you can send in a day. Perhaps with greater limit for women since all data shows that men need to send many times more likes for much fewer matches. However, there is no paid tier where you get more like or anything like that, obviously. Because then it would be just like every other app.

Is it possible to root out everyone who “isn’t serious”? Definitely not, but I think there’s a lot more that can be done when you remove a profit motive.

You could charge a lot and only not have dark patterns :-). Nothing says you have to charge a little because you are open-source/foss.

Yes. Make it a one time payment that is sufficiently large and you remove the pressure to retain users. In fact, it would be the opposite; find a great match as soon as possible to get the user off your platform.

Also likely is attracting a lot of bots and scammers and not having the resources to keep the platform focused on real people.

Take a deposit and refund part of it when you prove you have a marriage certificate. Will you be my McBride?

Isn’t it the usual case that dating app users do not pay?

That is the case, but practically this entire comment section is about how the usual dating apps suck. GP was commenting about how they hoped they could build a better app, and I was pointing out an issue that is likely to keep it from being successful.

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