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Comment by godwinson__4-8 | Hacker News Reader

You ran not one, but two, dating apps that were your own apps, and were not part of a company?

Which apps were these? What were your user metrics?

Seems somewhat suspect to extrapolate from your personal experience to what the large dating apps are allegedly doing if you are not approaching their scale. You've mentioned your personal experience as some kind of authority a few times now in this discussion, why not name the two apps directly? Apologies if I missed it but I don't see where you gave any indication that this appeal to authority is credible.

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They weren't Tinder sized. They were only published in latam. The first (Mil Besos) flopped and my second attempt (MiAmor) got to a several hundred thousand downloads and I sold it for not very much because I was tired of the moderation. Neither exists anymore. This was more than 10 years ago. There used to be A LOT of dating apps around 2014-2018, I mean hundreds of them on the Apple and Play Store. There has been a lot of consolidation because almost the only thing that matters for dating apps is giving users optionality, which means having more user profiles the other ones.

I'm not claiming I'm an expert, but just sharing personal insight. It doesn't take many users before statistical observations of behavior make themselves apparent. Start producing 5-10k matches per day on your platform and you will see what people want and don't want really quickly.

I don't wish to belittle you but, if I were you I would certainly not be in this discussion saying things like "Source: I used to build and run dating apps" (you said this in another comment in this discussion) when making claims about the major dating app companies if these were the two apps in question.

Certainly not in the manner you conveyed your experience. The market dynamics and design problems of these apps are very well known. Given the scale of your experience, I would suggest your invocation of it as some kind of authority was superfluous at best.

Congratulations on your sale though. Have a nice day.

I think that source is fine. Not necessarily because running a small dating app gives you the same experience as running a large one; but because it also means you thought long and hard about the space, too.

Definitely more than your average armchair backseat quarterback.

I'm happy to hear from someone who's built 2 dating apps on the topic of dating app algorithms, they probably know more than I do. I appreciate the contribution, and don't think the gatekeeping is necessary.

I think the claims were about behaviors for 10s of thousands of users of the dating apps, which limits the range of actions a company could take.

Considering that population size, wouldn't millions of users have the same behaviors?

And how big are your dating apps?

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