3 ms·

i've had a thought on how to run an online dating site rattle around in my head for a while. always wanted to give it a shot, but i'm still busy working on som

• mindcrime 16y ago
  It's an interesting space that's for sure. The "chicken and egg" problem is a challenge, but so is the idea (if you buy it) that men and women want fundamentally different things and have different drives and motives when it comes to dating; and different approaches to how they date. Since I started reading a lot of evolutionary psychology stuff, I've reshaped a lot of my views on how dating and relationships work. Now, granted, EP is a controversial science, and I'm not sure that those guys are spot-on about everything... but I strongly believe that the ideas coming out of that world do reflect some underlying truths about our world. If that's true, then my questions would be "how do you build a dating site that's optimized for both men and women? Or can you? And if you can't, which do you optimize for? Or does that even make sense?"
  • noodle 16y ago
    indeed. beyond that, i think that a dating site that is truly effective inherently means that you're constantly losing good customers as they no longer need the site (though perhaps the natural attrition rate is lower). its also hard to tell if free sites have come to a weird nash equilibrium, or if their current state is actually optimal and the "best" way to do online dating just sucks. would something more fundamentally different be less successful despite being proven more effective simply because of how it works?