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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a lot of explanation from a business-y POV as to why dating startup is hard, but I'm curious from a different POV: does dating company/apps actually solve any problem that people are having? To be more precise, dating is hard, but the difficulty is multi-facet, and I can't see an app potentially solving any of them for me. I'm a single 20s-something, so firmly in the target audience for most dating app. And I fail see the benefits of using almost any dating service from a startup out there.

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I am not exactly in the target market at 37 years old but I definitely see it as solving a problem.

If you live in a Rural area for instance, and work near your home your chances of finding a mate are pretty slim. Especially in those small towns where everyone pairs up in their late teens and stays together. There are people who can go for months at a time without meeting anyone new.

Then there are the people who just can't strike up a conversation or pick up on people. I don't say this disparagingly, approaching someone of the opposite sex can be downright terrifying. Hitting on a taken/married person is not only a bit embarrassing but it's a subtle reminder that you are alone and everyone else is taken (at least that's what you tell yourself).

Finally, on the other end of the curve are those folks looking for casual sex. Dating apps like Tinder are fast and easy, they become a buffet table of human beings you can peruse anytime you want. Without laying any judgement on it you have to admit that it is a problem being solved.

Your first point is a very good one. I live in a rural area and while those FarmersOnly.com ads are funny, there's also a lot of truth to them. It would be pretty difficult to meet someone in such an isolated, low density region. I can also see how someone who doesn't understand farmers and their responsibilities would have difficulty getting along with one.

I've been married for many years, but I can easily see myself using Tinder back in my single days. Once you get out of school, meeting people is a lot more difficult.

All online dating does is give you a huge channel to meet new people that you'll know you have some baseline compatibility with. It doesn't replace most aspects of dating, but if are having trouble meeting people you are interested in, online dating is a good way to augment the pool of people you meet in your normal life.

My experience with online dating wasn't that it "solves" dating, nor does it make dating fun all of the sudden, but the people I met via online dating were better matches than the people I was meeting elsewhere. I've had friends who had the opposite experience. I'd say online dating is worth trying if you are single just to see what it is like.

And, in SF at least, there is certainly no stigma associated with it. Most people I know who are actively dating at least casually use one dating site/app.

> some baseline compatibility

ie. willing to and expecting to data

    does dating company/apps actually solve
    any problem that people are having?

Yes. Meeting people you're potentially compatible with. I met my current girlfriend on OKCupid a couple months ago. I'm in my early 30s, never married, and have an increasingly stringent set of requirements for a potential mate[1]. Meeting people I find interesting is challenging.

[1] Half-jokingly, you could summarize this as a rabidly liberal ivy-educated tenure-track professor, as those are the people with whom I've had the most chemistry.

Rabidly liberal = professes to care a lot about the poor and disadvantaged, but finds the prospect of sleeping with one of them unthinkable.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but it sounds kind of like an unnecessary personal attack.

It's not really a personal attack. Many people wish to date only within or above their social class. I'm just questioning whether this attitude is compatible with being "rabidly liberal".

(Unless what you're saying is that while you personally are not rabidly liberal, you want to date someone who is.)

I'm still not clear on what your original reply to me was supposed to mean, except that you seem to be making some unfounded assumptions about someone (or two people) you don't know.

I'm just going with what your post says. Your criteria, even making allowances for half-exaggeration, clearly rule out anyone who is poor or disadvantaged as a potential partner. And although you don't explicitly say that you regard yourself as rabidly liberal, it's reasonable to assume that you do given that you want to date someone who is. (But of course, you may be a conservative who wants to date a liberal, in which case, feel free to correct me.)

> even making allowances for half-exaggeration

You might want to loosen that allowance a little bit. I'm sure they meant "intelligent", not literally a professor.

I was going more with the "Ivy-eaducated" part, but sure, if none of that was meant at all literally, then my point doesn't apply.

How is it a personal attack if he likes their 'rabid liberality' (to paraphrase Seinfeld)?

Please don't make acerbic swipes at other users. If there's a general point you want to make about dating and social class, that's easy enough to formulate without being snarky or personal.

My experience showed that online dating still is a numbers game.

Even with OKCupid. Women get >10 messages a day and men maybe 10 a year if it's a good year.

I think Tinder is the most innovative one in this sector, because it acknowledges the number-game thing and doesn't bother with unneeded fluff.

This is exactly it. It's fundamentally a numbers game, and then there's a lot of romanticizing from people who prefer to believe otherwise.

That, and Tinder understands that people prefer being shallow. So it optimizes for that.

Yes.

But I think Tinder could be optimized for real (long-term?) dating.

I mean 90% of the women on Tinder have nice pictures. But My experience has shown that I have a specific taste, that doesn't have much to do with looks. So if I first choose by photo and later by, lets say, character similarities, Tinder is wasting my time.

Something like the matching of OKCupid would be nice. So I don't "like" 90% of the women there just to find out that only 5% of them were what I wanted.

Attempting to do so creates a system that incentivizes dishonesty and spamming. It's what happened to OKCupid.

Plus, as OKCupid demonstrated pretty well, people really choose almost entirely based on photos. Add in decision paralysis and an overwhelming number of choices, and optimizing around anything but incredible shallowness starts to seem silly.

Incidentally, I've tried a series of other dating sites that try to optimize around different things. In general, the userbases are quite small.

Sure, I wouldn't choose people with "bad" photos, but as I said, the amount of women with good photos is much much bigger than the amount of women with a good match.

I've seen all the Tinder-Swipe Apps, because of this. "Just swipe all women in your area right and choose afterwards"

At the end you sit there and have to talk with 20 women just to find out that only 1-2 of them don't think you're a weirdo. :D

That's much better than the alternative scenario. There, you talk to five women just to find out that all of them think you're a creeper weirdo.

They didn't think I was creepy, just weird :( ;)

I didn't have the impression that people I talked to cheated on the OKCupid questions.

But I had the impression that most questions are irrelevant.

Tinder brings to the mainstream what the gay population had since 2002 [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020903191409/http://www.adam4a...

Edit: changed to reflect actual date of a4a going live.

Probably merits a NSFW.

Totally agree. What I found to be most effective with OKC was spending the money on A-list status and only messaging women who favorited my profile (or liked, or whatever the terminology is). The response rate I saw was well above 50%.

Spending money on A-list isn't even really necessary -- OKC bumps those who have liked you to the top of your "Quickmatch" queue -- from which you can like them back (or not) and discover if you are a match.

Huh, interesting. Thanks for the info. Hopefully I never need it :)

It seems to be an engagement issue. Populations that don't message or participate or show interest should be encouraged to in some way - like "your profile will only be viewable for x number of days unless you start messaging other people"

Unengaged users are an immensely valuable asset. Show a guy that there are three thousand women in his city, and he'll be very interested. Show him that only three of them have logged in in the past week, and he'll be a lot less interested.

Finding dates is a near-universal problem. If you're relying on people you know, you're limited to your social circle - professional contacts (which can be fraught with peril), blind dates set up by friends, blind dates set up by your mother...

The fact that dating apps were one of the first popular uses of the internet for ordinary people (the big players mostly date back to the dotcom era) says a lot about the value proposition. The problem is, it's very hard to increase the value beyond what the current players already offer.

edit: The "blind dates from your mother" strikes home with me. My own kids are 21 now. It's very tempting to set them up! I was really excited when my daughter got her first professional-in-her-field job recently, just on the off chance she'd meet someone who really shares her interests. Sigh.

I've tried various dating apps and websites throughout the years. Result: I haven't even made a friend from any of them. Every experience with one of these apps I had was kind of depressing and humiliating. (I also have a very small potential dating pool anyway, so that certainly doesn't help.)

Here's an idea for a dating app: Successfully identify what people want in a relationship, match based on that. Alice might be looking for a monogamous relationship, Bob might be looking for a one-night stand. The system should not match the two together unless one of them changes their minds.

OKC does just that -- if you take the time to answer the match questions they offer.

For example, regarding a relationship vs. one night stand, there are the questions "About how long do you want your next relationship to last?" and "Say you've started seeing someone you really like. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?". Assuming both parties have answered those questions (and done so honestly) it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what each side's intentions are.

Also, I believe that if you pay for their A-list feature, you can actually filter out profiles based on answers to these questions, rather than needing to compare answers manually.

I answered over 1000 questions honestly on OKC and the matches were all pretty terrible. That could be simply that there is nobody I'm compatible with.

A lot of the questions are pretty terrible, it forces one to cram their opinions into 2/3/4 choices. The moral quandries with "this is wrong / this is right" are the worst

Your described feature sounds like something that isn't too hard to find. In okcupid people can specify a subset of something like friends, long term dating, short term dating, and casual sex, then filter on what others are looking for.

I don't mean what they'll lie and say they want, I mean detect what they actually want. It's not nearly as easy. ;)

Maybe it's just Orlando, but most of the gay folks I've talked to were very NOT monogamous, but many pretended to be for the sake of managing perceptions and increasing their chances of being contacted.

Well, I don't use one personally but if I were dating I'd consider using an app because it does automatically does one big thing for you: lets you know whether someone is actually looking for a relationship.

It's difficult enough to meet people for me, but even after that you have to find out if you're single and if they're looking to date at all.

On the other hand, I also like the idea that relationships should be natural, but I can definitely see the appeal of using a dating app if you have already decided you want to be in a relationship.

> I also like the idea that relationships should be natural

I find this really interesting, as it's a meme that I think most adults still share. I'm interpreting your use of 'natural' as meaning something like 'meeting someone by some degree of chance, in-person, in a scenario where finding a relationship is not, nominally at least, the primary reason for being there.

Looking to meet complete strangers on the internet with the intention of starting a relationship vs looking to meet complete strangers in-person, be that at a bar, work, night-class, sporting activity etc, with the same intention is fundamentally the same concept. Only the implementation details differ.

But there's a big, obvious, cultural difference. I wonder if that difference stems from the fact that one cannot mask one's ultimate intention when going the online route. In the in-person scenario, you always have the convenient social get-out that you were just there to enjoy whatever the activity is, and it's just a happy coincidence that you happened to meet someone whilst doing it. It's coy, relies on chance, and fits in with a traditionally romantic narrative.

With online dating, you admit straight up that your sole intention is to meet people and find a relationship - it's therefore explicitly implied that there's a degree of trial and error, and from the outset it's acknowledged that it's a numbers game with certain attributes - shared traits, hobbies, interests - feeding into a formula that defines whether or not we think a relationship is worth pursuing. I think it's simply this directness, and this exposure, that's seen as course and not fitting with our social/cultural model of how romance 'should work'.

I wonder if it'll always be this way? I'd propose that in the future it will be to some degree, but we'll just be somewhere else on the curve. Perhaps with tomorrow's dating services, we'll look back on today's online dating apps and view them as quite lo-fi and quaint - with their low-accuracy matching algorithms leaving so much to chance, making you do so much of the work, etc - i.e. just how we compare online dating vs meeting people in bars, today.

I guess we'll see how that concept of a 'naturally occurring relationship' evolves over time as societies and cultures shift.

While I see what you are saying and find it interesting, I find the idea of going anywhere with the sole intention of meeting strangers for romance to be very unnatural as well.

My reasoning has little to do with romance and more to do with practicality. To me, people end up in good relationships because they can't imagine themselves without that person. On the other hand, people who are only looking to cure their loneliness usually end up with poor relationships.

I speculate this is because people who are lonely are more likely to "settle" whereas people who aren't looking but happen to find someone can always just leave the relationship with little difficulty and so if the relationship lasts it's due to compatibility.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, I have no issue with people going to bars or whatever to meet other people. This is just the way I like to live my life.

So don't settle. Just because you're using online dating to find a partner doesn't mean you have to take the next remotely viable candidate that comes along.

Personally, I find the lack of ambiguity about intentions to be a plus to meeting people through dating sites.

"So don't settle."

That's much easier said than done. Maybe it's easy for you, but from most of the people I've seen, including myself, when you have emotional involvement with something it's difficult not to be biased. It's easy to make excuses and convince yourself that you are doing the right thing. I think it was Stephen King who said it best, "We lie best when we lie to ourselves"

Maybe I'm just being stupid right now and misinterpreting something you said, but how is that different from in "natural dating"?

I'd actually say that you're way more likely to settle too early for someone you met "naturally" in real life than someone you matched with online or met due to dating purposefully. By purposefully dating you'll meet and "discover" many different people too find the one you're super-compatible with, by waiting to meet someone naturally you're more likely to settle with the first one that you "click" with.

Hey you are definitely not being stupid; it's my fault for not being more clear.

Indeed this is also possible with "natural dating", if we consider natural dating to be the equivalent of online dating. I was trying to say that I'm against the idea of people thinking "I feel like I need to be in a relationship so I'm going to attempt to find someone to fulfill that need."

I think I am just against the idea that everyone needs to find someone or get married. From my experience, when two people who were not even thinking about relationships decide their lives are just much better if they are partners, they have a much higher chance of a lasting relationship or marriage.

Of course, I am fortunate because I am still young, and for people who are sure they want to start a family and are older, I can see why they would feel pressured to find someone, and all the power to them.

Hopefully that made sense. I actually agree that if someone were looking for a relationship, doing it online is much more efficient, especially with all the sites that use some scientific means of pairing people.

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