43 ms·

RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps

220 points by dvt 7y ago

Ancalagon 7y ago
How will a zero tolerance policy for harassers be enforced?
- seek3r00 7y ago
  Identity verification + Taking in consideration the tickets sent by users being harassed ?
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  legitimately don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. Is this not a fair question? Help me understand.
ravenstine 7y ago
> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app. Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last. > Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out. This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since. > Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets. I think I like this. > Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people. I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups. > Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms. At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology. > Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.). I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this. --- Here are some ways I think this could be made better: - People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio. - The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible. - If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.
- juped 7y ago
  >The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. [...] This is probably the top idea in this whole thread so far.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    While it's an interesting idea, that's a pretty big up-front cost per user.
    - the-pigeon 7y ago
      Kinda the point though. Granted I was married slightly before Tinder became big but from my reading it seems like the biggest issue with these apps is bots. Making people jump through a hop bots can't fixes that problem.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    Admittedly, the problem is that this limits the app to being regional. Either the company would need to open offices in major cities, or studios could contract with the company. I think it's feasible, but would limit the audience. The benefits for the user would be incredible, in my opinion. One of the reasons I quit online dating years ago was because I was already wasting tons of time on them, but I felt like I was having my face spat in every time I scrolled/swiped through photos and half of them were annoying instagram filters, or duckface, or people sticking out their tongues, etc. Of course there's people who don't look like their photos. Moderating this in-person eliminates these issues. It's also a revenue model for the dating service, as I'm sure there could revenue could be shared between studios and the service. I also like the idea because it would reduce the number of users who aren't serious. You'll always get people who use online dating because of ego-stroking or because they think it's "funny", but fewer of those people will bother if they have to get their photos taken.
toomuchtodo 7y ago
The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal closeness, to occur between two people. TLDR The problem is the app. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  I would second that. The only value I've ever gotten out of dating apps was back in the more freewheeling days when OkCupid and the like would promote in-person events. Enforcing a balanced gender ratio plus similar interests (to avoid purely scattershot approaches), and having an official host running each event, would go a long way. It also gives an obvious way to get users to pay for stuff in a way that directly corresponds to both the amount of work the company is doing and the number of singles the user is meeting: pay $X to get a spot at Y event. That could even include some simple cross-promotional bundling (get a ticket to the zoo / art museum / sportsball game / retro drive-in movie / whatever along with the group event).
- svachalek 7y ago
  There's a rule, wish I could remember the name of it, that says people will consistently choose convenience over satisfaction even though those choices will tend to make them less happy. I think this explains a lot of our modern societal dysthymia, but dating apps are particularly illustrative.
- philwelch 7y ago
  True, but hookups are that way, and you get more repeat users by optimizing for hookups than for romance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
fenwick67 7y ago
Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?
- crooked-v 7y ago
  There could well be an untapped market of women who aren't interested in the atmosphere that comes with the unbalanced gender ratio, even if it means being at a personal disadvantage in the process.
  - coralreef 7y ago
    Considering that we can't come up with a good reason or show how this alternate app is better/more useful, I'm going to cast some doubt that there is an untapped market of women who want to give up value for some intangible factor.
- vsareto 7y ago
  I'm actually on board with the idea of boutique dating apps that limit population and interactions in this way. I would try one that gave discounts and date ideas ("-$5.00 discount at this particular restaurant, oh, and there's 4 tables left for tonight, reserve a table for your date now through our app"). If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place. For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult. These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.
solatic 7y ago
It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me explain why. Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons. So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult. So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one. So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.
- rmtech 7y ago
  There's an implicit assumption in this comment that anyone who doesn't want a serious relationship isn't a valid use case. Tinder demonstrated that people seeking casual sex based mostly on looks is a legitimate audience. Grindr even more so.
  - um_ya 7y ago
    Grindr seems to be more successful than Tinder at hooking people up. Most of the problems I've seen from dating apps, revolve around the security a woman feels and an over supply of potentially suitable men.
    - cheez 7y ago
marcell 7y ago
Tinder’s big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have to “like” the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages. I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company, the Match Group. I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.
- Jonovono 7y ago
  So, every other dating app is owned by the Match Group? (Bumble, Hinge, Hily, etc)
  - pageandrew 7y ago
    Hinge doesn't follow the double-opt-in pattern. When you "like" someone, you can immediately send them a message, even if they haven't yet liked you back. I guess that's a big enough differentiator to not violate Tinder's patent. I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.
    - Jonovono 7y ago
      Ah, true, it's been awhile.
      - zachkatz 7y ago
        However, Hinge is owned by Match Group :)
    - parliament32 7y ago
      No, you definitely can't. You can attach a comment to your "like" but then it disappears into the ether, and only reappears in your messages section if they "like" you back.
onetimeusename 7y ago
> on Tinder, men outnumber women by 9 to 1. > Women just aren’t using these apps Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed? Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  > The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. I would say there is a quite a bit of evidence that would corroborate this thesis. The majority of dating is moving online: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... (Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds) But female participants aren't finding what they want: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-gap-hook-up-culture-female-graduates https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 (Mismatches in the Marriage Market) referenced by: https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-men-who-make-as-much-money-as-they-do/ https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-m... (Women are struggling to find men who make as much money as they do) > “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educated-women-find-it-harder-to-meet-partner-1.3108512 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educat... (Better-educated women ‘find it harder’ to meet partner) > While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriving/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv... (The Cost Of Thriving) > While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things) The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.
wefarrell 7y ago
I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences. Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each other. Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem
philwelch 7y ago
> Does not limit sign-ups to keep a balanced M:F ratio. You see this in Vegas all the time: to make sure the ratio isn’t skewed too far female or (more likely) too far male, the hottest club in town is going to have a line. This isn’t just a balancing mechanism, it’s also a revenue model. I’m really surprised that “free for women, men must pay a weekly fee” isn’t more common.
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  > free for women, men must pay a weekly fee Would this be allowed in the US? In the EU it would probably be forbidden as discrimination.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I believe this would be allowed in the US. At least, I know that there are real-life clubs that charge covers to men, but women get in free...
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Particularly in Vegas, which was the original analogy.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    Depends on the state. It's barred in California, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act
    - why_only_15 7y ago
      Interesting that the supreme court ruled on this specifically > The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based prices at bars (ladies' nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40 Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.
yuhao 7y ago
There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot. Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.
- twostorytower 7y ago
  I loved Grouper. Met a lot of cool people and had a lot of fun. My guess is it was an operational nightmare to scale. There was a lot of manual effort on Grouper's end in selecting the venues, matching the groups, making the reservation, and paying for the first round of drinks (the model was you pay $20 per head to Grouper but it covers your first round).
- choward 7y ago
  This is the problem with these technology companies: they either provide whatever their app does for free and do who knows what with your data or they make you pay something crazy like $20 and you still don't know what they're doing with your data.
moosey 7y ago
While David Brooks and I don't agree on much, his discussion of "relationism" vs. "individualism" and his "weave" program is the ultimate disruption to the way families and communities are built today. IMO it is the actual disruption for dating and relationships in the US. I'd go further than what Mr. Brooks offers in his assessment of the situation, but like all things ideas exist on a continuum. I would much rather try to build a tribal group than try to find dating partners.
paulie_a 7y ago
This whole "disruption" simply sounds like someone who can't get a date on the current apps. Apps are simply a number game. You get to contact a larger amount of individuals than you could in person. Steps to getting a date: 1 - match with someone 2 - ask a question related to their profile 3 - have non creepy casual conversation. Every answer or statement you give should be followed by a question 4 - ask to Meetup for a drink or coffee in the new 3 days I don't know if that counts as a true date but it's a start. Step 3 is incredibly important
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lowercased 7y ago
Have the 'dating app company' organize small group dates, and broadcast on FB live or similar. Turn it in to a reality show. Well... not FB live - you could only watch if you're a service member (or perhaps paid?)
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Suddenly I'm imagining a 'Peloton for dating' VC pitch deck.
- soylentcola 7y ago
  Thankfully not on dating apps anymore but this sounds horrifying (to someone like me at least). Between the narcissists and attention seekers of the "reality TV" crowd and the thought of having a potentially stressful and awkward (or, at best, intimate and personal) meeting broadcast on freaking Facebook sounds like something out of Black Mirror.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start monetizing their male audience more. With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough. You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date. Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.
- nexuist 7y ago
  Is this not just prostitution with extra steps?
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
    At no point you're paying for sex, no?
    - nexuist 7y ago
      High class escorts don't only offer sex. They have "Girlfriend Experience" packages where you can go out on dates, take them to restaurants, spend the day together, etc. For a lot of people this is more attractive than no strings sex. The OP proposal would basically be like this, maybe without the promise of sex but still with the implication that if your date is being paid for, you need to offer something in return.
- meristem 7y ago
  whatsyourprice.com Also asymmetric market.
jdelsman 7y ago
Why has nobody mentioned Grindr?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I don't think it fits with the narrow focus mentioned here.
- zelly 7y ago
  The gay community has flawlessly foreshadowed the culture of the general populace for hundreds of years. People ignore this for stupid ideological/emotional reasons. If you want to see what the future Tinder looks like, look at Grindr today.
  - nerdjon 7y ago
    I really really don't think that's going to work... Women have enough issues being harassed on the dating apps as it is... Grindr conversations are very... forward (and would be seen as harassment by most Woman I have chat with about Grindr) In reality the only reason the Grindr way "works" is because there is no societal power difference between everyone on it vs a hetero focused dating app.
    - zelly 7y ago
      If we were in the 1970s and I described Instagram & Tinder to you, you would be saying the same thing.
      - nerdjon 7y ago
        I mean... maybe. I just don't see societies impressions about gender roles changing anytime soon. Woman are still taught that they have to be hard to get and can't come off as "easy". And Men are largely taught that getting a Woman is a conquest or somehow contributing to them "being a man". Also I do feel the need to point out that on Grindr much of the same things that would be considered harassment on other apps is still there, it is just assumed to be part of the Grindr experience and not seen as harassment (by most at least). (Purposefully not throwing in Trans here since that further complicates what I am trying to say and makes the assumed power differences even more problematic) Also btw, if it isn't clear by now. I am saying this as someone on Grindr and other gay apps.
meristem 7y ago
...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group for a dating app. Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid? It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?
  - meristem 7y ago
    My understanding of OKCupid is that it caters to 'free for all'. The site choices they made was to increase TAM by stating their addressable market is 'YES' (this is not a dig on the choice). I have not heard about consensual non-mog/poly/name du jour had a TAM problem-- can you point me to sources? My sources of 'not a problem' suffer from geographic and socioeconomic biases.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-... 4% seems like it could be a difficult market to function in, especially since that cannot be assumed to be a random sampling from the background population. I'll assume that anyway, for the sake of simplicity. That limits you to a TAM of ~12 million Americans, of which you would do well to get 10% as users and 1% as paying customers. 120,000 paying customers isn't a vast customer base. That's an upper bound, meaning any app is going to come in well below that for a variety of geo-demo-socio-economic reasons. Or just because getting high market penetration is difficult. Again, I would love to know if there's something I've overlooked that changes this significantly.
generalpass 7y ago
How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options ahead of time. You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction. If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment. (Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.) One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?
rchaud 7y ago
Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to industry margins? It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you. No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc. So why would people pay for this?
golemiprague 7y ago
Two things he downplays but I think should get more attention. As someone who has been there way before dating apps it was pretty obvious to everyone that the 80/20% is pretty accurate. Every group of guys had those guys who would get most of the women, it is just the way it is. Dating app just made it even more extreme, maybe 90/10. The second thing is what he calls 2nd and 3rd tier apps. For all those 80% those apps give some alternative. If you don't get matches in Tinder you can still message people in POF for free and if you got good text skills it works much better than tinder for people who are average looking. So I wouldn't call it second tier but rather the solution to some of his complains. The solution he suggest is what society in more conservative societies always did, vetting by parents and family and a matching system that gave a chance to every male in society to find a woman by matchmaking with end result of one to one. All of that only works when you accept the scarcity of marriage and it is enforced socially by people, legally by the state and sometimes also by religion. I am afraid this is not going to work in our society of today unless we all accept on ourselves more conservative values.
zelly 7y ago
The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys have to spend money on advertising their profiles. If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is skewed in the favor of men already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1. I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)
- RickS 7y ago
  > I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already are. I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market-efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas, in order of extremity. 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free) 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient) 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception). I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you mostly don't care about. Which is the source of my pet hunch: All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for everyone. Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable, uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting experiences. IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area. In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean into divergence.
jeromebaek 7y ago
As a LGBTQ person this article is so creepy
- fenwick67 7y ago
  "are the straights okay?"
balls187 7y ago
From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps. > dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate. I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle. This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users. The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education. At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.
- bryanmgreen 7y ago
  Agree this is one of the most critical points after a lot of thought about this industry. I think I’ve pretty much solved it, and am looking for a mobile engineer to partner with. I’ve got a lot of functionality mapped out. Shot in the dark to find someone, but if anyone is interested, email is in profile.
devit 7y ago
The problem is that current dating apps consist of choosing people whose in-person behavior (as well as resources in some cases) you care about based on self-selected photos and their ability to write text messages, so it's pretty obvious it doesn't work very well.
scottlocklin 7y ago
Imagine thinking the answer to a vast societal problem involves making yet another app for your ipotato. A vast societal problem more or less directly attributable to apps on the ipotato. Put your imbecile phone down, leave the house and talk to people, you gibbering goons. Pay attention to others, not your nerd dingus: you might notice things. Better yet, leave your dystopian shit hole American city hellscape and find people who don't require a nerd dildo for self validation.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Woof.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  So how do you do this then? My circle of friends obviously consists of people similar to me, I would have to go two or three hops to find any women. To visit the Philippines seems a bit drastic.
shakura 7y ago
Badoo and Bumble are made by the same company, lol
chrissnell 7y ago
I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...) That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend: "Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_." I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts. In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.
- jetpackjoe 7y ago
  There have been a few attempts at a life coach kind of app. None of them done well I think.
  - adjkant 7y ago
    I don't think the parent would be asking for such an app based on the other content, and sometimes that's the most important answer in tech: to know where it isn't needed.
- asiachick 7y ago
  Survivorship bias dialed to 11 Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.
  - chrissnell 7y ago
    Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc. But--bottom line--without getting myself on the path to being a better adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before anybody else was going to be interested.
hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.
- ska 7y ago
  They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least, that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells us something about both that signal and the sustainability.
  - hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
    If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system vs the one Bumble provides.
    - ska 7y ago
      It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that they move to this one and then find it superior and stay it's a pretty strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.
caseysoftware 7y ago
I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating, the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely broken. It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - at minimum - compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two. It's the only business model worse than cigarettes. I lay out some more detail in a post here: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem? Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.
  - pferde 7y ago
    That only matters if the management looks beyond the next quarterly report.
  - Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    > Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem? I don't think you can extrapolate the case for a dating site to all businesses, especially to cases of tangible goods. A car salesman doesn't make a dime until I buy a car. Dating sites are an interesting business because a happy customer is one that is no longer using their product. So how do you monetize that? If you charge a one-time up-front cost, and a paying customer uses the site for months and never has success, then you end up with a disgruntled customer. If you charge a monthly subscription, then you get a perverse incentive to not please your customer, or only please them enough to keep paying, because as soon as they enter a relationship, they stop paying. Only charging after some sort of measurement of success (Like marriage) would be impossible to enforce.
hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves. Thats the root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.
- zabana 7y ago
  that is the correct analysis.
- kubanczyk 7y ago
  > how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program You've laid out the problem. You say you don't see a solution. It's a non-sequitur to claim that no technical solution exists. > A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold. Looks like we can't have an ideal world, here and now?
AlphaWeaver 7y ago
I'd like to highlight: this is a problem that's on topic for us at VC3 (https://vc3.club https://vc3.club). We're a group of contributors seeking to produce actionable research in the area of technology for social connection. If this sort of thing interests you, we would love to have you join the discussion!
jakequade 7y ago
>> Let's Disrupt Already vomiting in my mouth.
Razengan 7y ago
Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that actually hinder matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.) A true match-making service would automatically match people based on their criteria, preferences and shared interests. Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no longer need it. :)
blunte 7y ago
Even if you build the perfect dating app, ultimately it will be sold off to Match or some other monstrosity, and then it will go (more) downhill.
greggman3 7y ago
It feels like there are a bunch of irreconcilable issues. I had a discussion about improving dating sites at a local dev meetup. I was told by the 30 something women in the group the only thing important is the person's face. Nothing else matters on a dating site. Of course that's only a few data points (small meetup) but was very frustrating to hear and if true then all this is pointless. It's certainly not true for me personally though. Random thoughts * video: In the 80s there was video dating. You'd go into the dating service office, look through notebooks of profiles, then ask for the videos of the people you were interested in. Is that just not possible anymore? I get that people were shy of the internet before but in 2020 with Instagram and TikTok are videos not viable? * AI video interviewer: could you make some interview system where a selection of pre-recorded videos of an interviewer asking questions asks you interview questions so you actually get a reasonable interview out of the user? (vs just having a "record button" and leaving it entirely up to the user) * Encouraging better profiles: Similar to the AI video interviewer, how can you encourage users to create an interesting profile? I have no idea for the men but for women, making these numbers up but it feels like 30% write nothing. They just put their picture (Tinder, OkCupid, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel). 65% write something so generic as to have no value like "I do yoga, like travel and eating out, dancing, and movies". I have no idea how to fix this. One is use TalkToTransformer.com to make up a random profile and tell them to fix it or else. another might be text-to-speech from the AI video bot (yes I know that's not likely to work). I also know most people or at least some large percent of women don't want to put in the time to fill out a profile. They just want to sign up and look around. Maybe their profile should stay private until they've added enough content. Maybe some deep learning could rate how unique their profile is and they stay private below some threshold or tell them it sucks and they aren't going to get any good matches unless the level it up with lots of suggestions. * Better Interests: One service (probably patented) lets users create public interest groups. An interest group = name of group and single photo (icon). Example of groups "Raspberry PI Lover", "Fan of George Clooney", "Chocolate is the 5th food Group", "Seeking Soulmate", "Dad jokes are hilarious", "Zelda Love", "Dogs > Cats", ... The plus is a user can just select 5 to 500 of these interests which many find easier than writing a profile. So, on the user's profile a list of these icons show up. Clicking an icon also shows all the other profiles that added that interest. Most dating sites have a boring and useless set of 10 to 50 categories. The user created ones are much better at helping find people with similar interests. I suspect this feature would need serious moderation though so people don't make trolling or rude interests. * separating services into DTF, LTR, etc...: Right now it feels like on all the major systems everyone is mixed together, both the people that just want something for tonight and the people looking for a soulmate. The mix doesn't work IMO because the DTF men disgust the LTR women and so the LTR women leave. How to fix that I have no idea. One idea is if you're on the LTR site and someone asks DTF you can flag them and get them moved to the DTF site (with enough flags and/or moderation). * better activities: There was a service "How about we..." were your profile was just suggestions of activities "How about we go to disco bowling together". "How about we try stinky tofu"... etc. How can that be expanded? Partner with AirBnB experiences to sign people up to local event? Partner with entertainment venues for live performances? There's a service called "Dine" which was supposed to be "pick a restaurant, one of 3, from a person's profile, which then automatically sends them a message, so-and-so would like to take to you (name of restaurant), choose a time..." In my experience the site lacked any women even close to my age but it did seem like you could charge a premium and potentially partner with restaurants to try to making actually meeting in person in a safe venue as frictionless as possible. * group activities? I know match.com had their stir.com initiative. I don't know if it went anywhere. I tried a couple of events. Too few people. Not good matches (odds of matches low). Still many people say they really only have had relationships with people they've known for a while so how do take that feedback into account? * How to get people to pay and take it serious and still get users. Most of the dating services are free or free for women. This fills the site with non-serious people which is not actually helpful for those that actually want to meet someone. On the other hand any paywall = no users? Although I know that's not always true. The #1 site in Japan is pay only, $120-$180 a year, at least for men.
caublestone 7y ago
I kind of think that agreeableness is a major factor in seeking intimacy that isn’t captured well enough in online dating. People are afraid to meet people that disagree with them and actively ridicule people with differing values/opinions/lifestyle. Religions, sports teams and other mass clubs obfuscated a lot of the concern away. But without those people need other groups and tools to trust a stranger to agree with them over time.
jariel 7y ago
These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch. In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed. OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility. In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot. In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context. I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much. From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is. I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.
dilippkumar 7y ago
What if - dating apps are not the answer? We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature). Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people. My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people. I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it. If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.
nailer 7y ago
The apps are asymmetric because dating is asymmetric: most women do not want to date most men. Likewise subtle prostition is common because it's part of heterosexual dating: men are expected to provide resources. You may disagree with the morals of this, but it is very clear this is how dating works, not a new thing created by the existence of apps.
rmtech 7y ago
> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms. Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners? > Enforce a 50:50 ratio OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking. > Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app. This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why. > Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people. As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it. But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors? > Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.). This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt. In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.
- thebucketbot 7y ago
  > Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it. As a woman, I would frankly be terrified of going to that. It's risky enough to meet up with one man from a dating app. I wouldn't risk meeting up with multiple unknown men.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    As a woman, what would you want out of a better dating app?
rmtech 7y ago
If I was going to try to disrupt dating, I would look at ways to please the women on the site. The women are the limiting factor, it's important to get more of them. I think this will look like harsher and more invasive prescreening of the men. Make an app that watches a man do 50 pressups. Work out how get the mens' financial info. Work out some AI-based test of confidence that's really hard for the man to fake. The problem with this approach is that unfit, loser-ish men are the profit centre for these apps, so the app wants to string these guys along just enough to get money out of them. Still, it might work as a nonprofit or something. Another angle that might work is trying to provide a credible commitment mechanism for people who want commitment. Marriage used to fulfill this, but it has its problems. A sort of "digital marriage" system that punishes people for going back on their commitments, particularly men stringing women along or women divorcing men later.
peter303 7y ago
Unhappy incels
jl6 7y ago
I looked through 302 comments on this thread and couldn’t see a single commenter identifying as a woman. I can’t help but think if we could get women more involved in the design of dating apps we might have a chance of creating something that works.
elil17 7y ago
Unfortunately, you can’t isolate your app from the broader environment of dating apps. For instance, take the “No ELO” suggestion. Implementing this feature means you’ll attract a lot of users who don’t like ELO (typically, less attractive users) and won’t gain any users who benefit from the ELO system (attractive users). If you can’t get attractive users, you can’t get any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?) Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.
- gadders 7y ago
  What is ELO?
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > What is ELO? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system In this instance, it's presumably a measure of a person's holistic attractiveness - say the average willingness of prospective partners to accept another date.
    - gadders 7y ago
      Thanks - I've learnt something today.
RickS 7y ago
Here's a random idea I find interesting: Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions. Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase. But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever. Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan. There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter. I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.
- kart23 7y ago
  I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.
rafiki6 7y ago
The stats I remember reading about dating apps show that conventionally unattractive men fail miserably at using them and conventionally attractive men tend to reap tall the spoils. I think this was a study done by okCupid based on their data. Overall, this is generally true in the real world. The problem with scaling dating apps actually lies in the fact that the majority of the population, particularly the male population, will not succeed. They lose interest and leave the platform eventually. There are many intangibles in a relationship that you miss when you using dating apps. Maybe you make up for your lack of a chiseled jaw line by being hilarious or good at something. Maybe you end up being attracted to someone because you have a really deep connection due to similar interests. I actually think dating apps are generally doomed to repeat the same mistakes because they just don't allow you the important element of organic real life connections.
htrp 7y ago
we had similar experiences in this market for a company now nearly a decade ago.... the problem is that most of the potential features identified by the OP exist in the form of community organizations / adult sports leagues / social clubs as a start-up, it's nearly impossible to scale the hyper-local focus (partnering with coffee shops/bars) across multiple regions
prawn 7y ago
From the half-bakery, but what if you could get an indication of how many messages each user was receiving? And the number of users you could message was limited each day?

220 points by dvt 7y ago

Ancalagon 7y ago

How will a zero tolerance policy for harassers be enforced?

seek3r00 7y ago
Identity verification + Taking in consideration the tickets sent by users being harassed ?
Ancalagon 7y ago
legitimately don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. Is this not a fair question? Help me understand.

ravenstine 7y ago

> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app. Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last. > Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out. This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since. > Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets. I think I like this. > Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people. I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups. > Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms. At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology. > Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.). I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this. --- Here are some ways I think this could be made better: - People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio. - The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible. - If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.

juped 7y ago
>The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. [...] This is probably the top idea in this whole thread so far.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  While it's an interesting idea, that's a pretty big up-front cost per user.
  - the-pigeon 7y ago
    Kinda the point though. Granted I was married slightly before Tinder became big but from my reading it seems like the biggest issue with these apps is bots. Making people jump through a hop bots can't fixes that problem.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Admittedly, the problem is that this limits the app to being regional. Either the company would need to open offices in major cities, or studios could contract with the company. I think it's feasible, but would limit the audience. The benefits for the user would be incredible, in my opinion. One of the reasons I quit online dating years ago was because I was already wasting tons of time on them, but I felt like I was having my face spat in every time I scrolled/swiped through photos and half of them were annoying instagram filters, or duckface, or people sticking out their tongues, etc. Of course there's people who don't look like their photos. Moderating this in-person eliminates these issues. It's also a revenue model for the dating service, as I'm sure there could revenue could be shared between studios and the service. I also like the idea because it would reduce the number of users who aren't serious. You'll always get people who use online dating because of ego-stroking or because they think it's "funny", but fewer of those people will bother if they have to get their photos taken.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal closeness, to occur between two people. TLDR The problem is the app. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.

crooked-v 7y ago
I would second that. The only value I've ever gotten out of dating apps was back in the more freewheeling days when OkCupid and the like would promote in-person events. Enforcing a balanced gender ratio plus similar interests (to avoid purely scattershot approaches), and having an official host running each event, would go a long way. It also gives an obvious way to get users to pay for stuff in a way that directly corresponds to both the amount of work the company is doing and the number of singles the user is meeting: pay $X to get a spot at Y event. That could even include some simple cross-promotional bundling (get a ticket to the zoo / art museum / sportsball game / retro drive-in movie / whatever along with the group event).
svachalek 7y ago
There's a rule, wish I could remember the name of it, that says people will consistently choose convenience over satisfaction even though those choices will tend to make them less happy. I think this explains a lot of our modern societal dysthymia, but dating apps are particularly illustrative.
philwelch 7y ago
True, but hookups are that way, and you get more repeat users by optimizing for hookups than for romance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

fenwick67 7y ago

Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?

crooked-v 7y ago
There could well be an untapped market of women who aren't interested in the atmosphere that comes with the unbalanced gender ratio, even if it means being at a personal disadvantage in the process.
- coralreef 7y ago
  Considering that we can't come up with a good reason or show how this alternate app is better/more useful, I'm going to cast some doubt that there is an untapped market of women who want to give up value for some intangible factor.
vsareto 7y ago
I'm actually on board with the idea of boutique dating apps that limit population and interactions in this way. I would try one that gave discounts and date ideas ("-$5.00 discount at this particular restaurant, oh, and there's 4 tables left for tonight, reserve a table for your date now through our app"). If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place. For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult. These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.

solatic 7y ago

It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me explain why. Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons. So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult. So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one. So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.

rmtech 7y ago
There's an implicit assumption in this comment that anyone who doesn't want a serious relationship isn't a valid use case. Tinder demonstrated that people seeking casual sex based mostly on looks is a legitimate audience. Grindr even more so.
- um_ya 7y ago
  Grindr seems to be more successful than Tinder at hooking people up. Most of the problems I've seen from dating apps, revolve around the security a woman feels and an over supply of potentially suitable men.
  - cheez 7y ago

marcell 7y ago

Tinder’s big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have to “like” the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages. I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company, the Match Group. I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.

Jonovono 7y ago
So, every other dating app is owned by the Match Group? (Bumble, Hinge, Hily, etc)
- pageandrew 7y ago
  Hinge doesn't follow the double-opt-in pattern. When you "like" someone, you can immediately send them a message, even if they haven't yet liked you back. I guess that's a big enough differentiator to not violate Tinder's patent. I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.
  - Jonovono 7y ago
    Ah, true, it's been awhile.
    - zachkatz 7y ago
      However, Hinge is owned by Match Group :)
  - parliament32 7y ago
    No, you definitely can't. You can attach a comment to your "like" but then it disappears into the ether, and only reappears in your messages section if they "like" you back.

onetimeusename 7y ago

> on Tinder, men outnumber women by 9 to 1. > Women just aren’t using these apps Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed? Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
> The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. I would say there is a quite a bit of evidence that would corroborate this thesis. The majority of dating is moving online: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... (Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds) But female participants aren't finding what they want: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-gap-hook-up-culture-female-graduates https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 (Mismatches in the Marriage Market) referenced by: https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-men-who-make-as-much-money-as-they-do/ https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-m... (Women are struggling to find men who make as much money as they do) > “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educated-women-find-it-harder-to-meet-partner-1.3108512 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educat... (Better-educated women ‘find it harder’ to meet partner) > While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriving/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv... (The Cost Of Thriving) > While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things) The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.

wefarrell 7y ago

I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences. Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each other. Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem

philwelch 7y ago

> Does not limit sign-ups to keep a balanced M:F ratio. You see this in Vegas all the time: to make sure the ratio isn’t skewed too far female or (more likely) too far male, the hottest club in town is going to have a line. This isn’t just a balancing mechanism, it’s also a revenue model. I’m really surprised that “free for women, men must pay a weekly fee” isn’t more common.

tom_mellior 7y ago
> free for women, men must pay a weekly fee Would this be allowed in the US? In the EU it would probably be forbidden as discrimination.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I believe this would be allowed in the US. At least, I know that there are real-life clubs that charge covers to men, but women get in free...
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Particularly in Vegas, which was the original analogy.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Depends on the state. It's barred in California, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act
  - why_only_15 7y ago
    Interesting that the supreme court ruled on this specifically > The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based prices at bars (ladies' nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40 Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.

yuhao 7y ago

There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot. Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.

twostorytower 7y ago
I loved Grouper. Met a lot of cool people and had a lot of fun. My guess is it was an operational nightmare to scale. There was a lot of manual effort on Grouper's end in selecting the venues, matching the groups, making the reservation, and paying for the first round of drinks (the model was you pay $20 per head to Grouper but it covers your first round).
choward 7y ago
This is the problem with these technology companies: they either provide whatever their app does for free and do who knows what with your data or they make you pay something crazy like $20 and you still don't know what they're doing with your data.

moosey 7y ago

While David Brooks and I don't agree on much, his discussion of "relationism" vs. "individualism" and his "weave" program is the ultimate disruption to the way families and communities are built today. IMO it is the actual disruption for dating and relationships in the US. I'd go further than what Mr. Brooks offers in his assessment of the situation, but like all things ideas exist on a continuum. I would much rather try to build a tribal group than try to find dating partners.

paulie_a 7y ago

This whole "disruption" simply sounds like someone who can't get a date on the current apps. Apps are simply a number game. You get to contact a larger amount of individuals than you could in person. Steps to getting a date: 1 - match with someone 2 - ask a question related to their profile 3 - have non creepy casual conversation. Every answer or statement you give should be followed by a question 4 - ask to Meetup for a drink or coffee in the new 3 days I don't know if that counts as a true date but it's a start. Step 3 is incredibly important

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lowercased 7y ago

Have the 'dating app company' organize small group dates, and broadcast on FB live or similar. Turn it in to a reality show. Well... not FB live - you could only watch if you're a service member (or perhaps paid?)

crooked-v 7y ago
Suddenly I'm imagining a 'Peloton for dating' VC pitch deck.
soylentcola 7y ago
Thankfully not on dating apps anymore but this sounds horrifying (to someone like me at least). Between the narcissists and attention seekers of the "reality TV" crowd and the thought of having a potentially stressful and awkward (or, at best, intimate and personal) meeting broadcast on freaking Facebook sounds like something out of Black Mirror.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago

I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start monetizing their male audience more. With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough. You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date. Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.

nexuist 7y ago
Is this not just prostitution with extra steps?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
  At no point you're paying for sex, no?
  - nexuist 7y ago
    High class escorts don't only offer sex. They have "Girlfriend Experience" packages where you can go out on dates, take them to restaurants, spend the day together, etc. For a lot of people this is more attractive than no strings sex. The OP proposal would basically be like this, maybe without the promise of sex but still with the implication that if your date is being paid for, you need to offer something in return.
meristem 7y ago
whatsyourprice.com Also asymmetric market.

jdelsman 7y ago

Why has nobody mentioned Grindr?

saagarjha 7y ago
I don't think it fits with the narrow focus mentioned here.
zelly 7y ago
The gay community has flawlessly foreshadowed the culture of the general populace for hundreds of years. People ignore this for stupid ideological/emotional reasons. If you want to see what the future Tinder looks like, look at Grindr today.
- nerdjon 7y ago
  I really really don't think that's going to work... Women have enough issues being harassed on the dating apps as it is... Grindr conversations are very... forward (and would be seen as harassment by most Woman I have chat with about Grindr) In reality the only reason the Grindr way "works" is because there is no societal power difference between everyone on it vs a hetero focused dating app.
  - zelly 7y ago
    If we were in the 1970s and I described Instagram & Tinder to you, you would be saying the same thing.
    - nerdjon 7y ago
      I mean... maybe. I just don't see societies impressions about gender roles changing anytime soon. Woman are still taught that they have to be hard to get and can't come off as "easy". And Men are largely taught that getting a Woman is a conquest or somehow contributing to them "being a man". Also I do feel the need to point out that on Grindr much of the same things that would be considered harassment on other apps is still there, it is just assumed to be part of the Grindr experience and not seen as harassment (by most at least). (Purposefully not throwing in Trans here since that further complicates what I am trying to say and makes the assumed power differences even more problematic) Also btw, if it isn't clear by now. I am saying this as someone on Grindr and other gay apps.

meristem 7y ago

...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group for a dating app. Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.

Kalium 7y ago
Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid? It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?
- meristem 7y ago
  My understanding of OKCupid is that it caters to 'free for all'. The site choices they made was to increase TAM by stating their addressable market is 'YES' (this is not a dig on the choice). I have not heard about consensual non-mog/poly/name du jour had a TAM problem-- can you point me to sources? My sources of 'not a problem' suffer from geographic and socioeconomic biases.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-... 4% seems like it could be a difficult market to function in, especially since that cannot be assumed to be a random sampling from the background population. I'll assume that anyway, for the sake of simplicity. That limits you to a TAM of ~12 million Americans, of which you would do well to get 10% as users and 1% as paying customers. 120,000 paying customers isn't a vast customer base. That's an upper bound, meaning any app is going to come in well below that for a variety of geo-demo-socio-economic reasons. Or just because getting high market penetration is difficult. Again, I would love to know if there's something I've overlooked that changes this significantly.

generalpass 7y ago

How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options ahead of time. You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction. If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment. (Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.) One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?

rchaud 7y ago

Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to industry margins? It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you. No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc. So why would people pay for this?

golemiprague 7y ago

Two things he downplays but I think should get more attention. As someone who has been there way before dating apps it was pretty obvious to everyone that the 80/20% is pretty accurate. Every group of guys had those guys who would get most of the women, it is just the way it is. Dating app just made it even more extreme, maybe 90/10. The second thing is what he calls 2nd and 3rd tier apps. For all those 80% those apps give some alternative. If you don't get matches in Tinder you can still message people in POF for free and if you got good text skills it works much better than tinder for people who are average looking. So I wouldn't call it second tier but rather the solution to some of his complains. The solution he suggest is what society in more conservative societies always did, vetting by parents and family and a matching system that gave a chance to every male in society to find a woman by matchmaking with end result of one to one. All of that only works when you accept the scarcity of marriage and it is enforced socially by people, legally by the state and sometimes also by religion. I am afraid this is not going to work in our society of today unless we all accept on ourselves more conservative values.

zelly 7y ago

The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys have to spend money on advertising their profiles. If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is skewed in the favor of men already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1. I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)

RickS 7y ago
> I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design. I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already are. I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market-efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas, in order of extremity. 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for free) 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having been liked by the recipient) 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-scale deception). I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat buffet of food you mostly don't care about. Which is the source of my pet hunch: All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for everyone. Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable, uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting experiences. IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area. In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean into divergence.

jeromebaek 7y ago

As a LGBTQ person this article is so creepy

fenwick67 7y ago
"are the straights okay?"

balls187 7y ago

From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps. > dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate. I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle. This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users. The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education. At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.

bryanmgreen 7y ago
Agree this is one of the most critical points after a lot of thought about this industry. I think I’ve pretty much solved it, and am looking for a mobile engineer to partner with. I’ve got a lot of functionality mapped out. Shot in the dark to find someone, but if anyone is interested, email is in profile.

devit 7y ago

The problem is that current dating apps consist of choosing people whose in-person behavior (as well as resources in some cases) you care about based on self-selected photos and their ability to write text messages, so it's pretty obvious it doesn't work very well.

scottlocklin 7y ago

Imagine thinking the answer to a vast societal problem involves making yet another app for your ipotato. A vast societal problem more or less directly attributable to apps on the ipotato. Put your imbecile phone down, leave the house and talk to people, you gibbering goons. Pay attention to others, not your nerd dingus: you might notice things. Better yet, leave your dystopian shit hole American city hellscape and find people who don't require a nerd dildo for self validation.

draw_down 7y ago
Woof.
heartbeats 7y ago
So how do you do this then? My circle of friends obviously consists of people similar to me, I would have to go two or three hops to find any women. To visit the Philippines seems a bit drastic.

shakura 7y ago

Badoo and Bumble are made by the same company, lol

chrissnell 7y ago

I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...) That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend: "Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_." I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts. In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.

jetpackjoe 7y ago
There have been a few attempts at a life coach kind of app. None of them done well I think.
- adjkant 7y ago
  I don't think the parent would be asking for such an app based on the other content, and sometimes that's the most important answer in tech: to know where it isn't needed.
asiachick 7y ago
Survivorship bias dialed to 11 Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.
- chrissnell 7y ago
  Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc. But--bottom line--without getting myself on the path to being a better adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before anybody else was going to be interested.

hnewsshadowbans 7y ago

Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.

ska 7y ago
They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least, that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells us something about both that signal and the sustainability.
- hnewsshadowbans 7y ago
  If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system vs the one Bumble provides.
  - ska 7y ago
    It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that they move to this one and then find it superior and stay it's a pretty strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.

caseysoftware 7y ago

I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating, the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely broken. It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - at minimum - compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two. It's the only business model worse than cigarettes. I lay out some more detail in a post here: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem? Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.
- pferde 7y ago
  That only matters if the management looks beyond the next quarterly report.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  > Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem? I don't think you can extrapolate the case for a dating site to all businesses, especially to cases of tangible goods. A car salesman doesn't make a dime until I buy a car. Dating sites are an interesting business because a happy customer is one that is no longer using their product. So how do you monetize that? If you charge a one-time up-front cost, and a paying customer uses the site for months and never has success, then you end up with a disgruntled customer. If you charge a monthly subscription, then you get a perverse incentive to not please your customer, or only please them enough to keep paying, because as soon as they enter a relationship, they stop paying. Only charging after some sort of measurement of success (Like marriage) would be impossible to enforce.

hnewsshadowbans 7y ago

There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves. Thats the root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

zabana 7y ago
that is the correct analysis.
kubanczyk 7y ago
> how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a better engineered dating program You've laid out the problem. You say you don't see a solution. It's a non-sequitur to claim that no technical solution exists. > A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold. Looks like we can't have an ideal world, here and now?

AlphaWeaver 7y ago

I'd like to highlight: this is a problem that's on topic for us at VC3 (https://vc3.club https://vc3.club). We're a group of contributors seeking to produce actionable research in the area of technology for social connection. If this sort of thing interests you, we would love to have you join the discussion!

jakequade 7y ago

>> Let's Disrupt Already vomiting in my mouth.

Razengan 7y ago

Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that actually hinder matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.) A true match-making service would automatically match people based on their criteria, preferences and shared interests. Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no longer need it. :)

blunte 7y ago

Even if you build the perfect dating app, ultimately it will be sold off to Match or some other monstrosity, and then it will go (more) downhill.

greggman3 7y ago

It feels like there are a bunch of irreconcilable issues. I had a discussion about improving dating sites at a local dev meetup. I was told by the 30 something women in the group the only thing important is the person's face. Nothing else matters on a dating site. Of course that's only a few data points (small meetup) but was very frustrating to hear and if true then all this is pointless. It's certainly not true for me personally though. Random thoughts * video: In the 80s there was video dating. You'd go into the dating service office, look through notebooks of profiles, then ask for the videos of the people you were interested in. Is that just not possible anymore? I get that people were shy of the internet before but in 2020 with Instagram and TikTok are videos not viable? * AI video interviewer: could you make some interview system where a selection of pre-recorded videos of an interviewer asking questions asks you interview questions so you actually get a reasonable interview out of the user? (vs just having a "record button" and leaving it entirely up to the user) * Encouraging better profiles: Similar to the AI video interviewer, how can you encourage users to create an interesting profile? I have no idea for the men but for women, making these numbers up but it feels like 30% write nothing. They just put their picture (Tinder, OkCupid, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel). 65% write something so generic as to have no value like "I do yoga, like travel and eating out, dancing, and movies". I have no idea how to fix this. One is use TalkToTransformer.com to make up a random profile and tell them to fix it or else. another might be text-to-speech from the AI video bot (yes I know that's not likely to work). I also know most people or at least some large percent of women don't want to put in the time to fill out a profile. They just want to sign up and look around. Maybe their profile should stay private until they've added enough content. Maybe some deep learning could rate how unique their profile is and they stay private below some threshold or tell them it sucks and they aren't going to get any good matches unless the level it up with lots of suggestions. * Better Interests: One service (probably patented) lets users create public interest groups. An interest group = name of group and single photo (icon). Example of groups "Raspberry PI Lover", "Fan of George Clooney", "Chocolate is the 5th food Group", "Seeking Soulmate", "Dad jokes are hilarious", "Zelda Love", "Dogs > Cats", ... The plus is a user can just select 5 to 500 of these interests which many find easier than writing a profile. So, on the user's profile a list of these icons show up. Clicking an icon also shows all the other profiles that added that interest. Most dating sites have a boring and useless set of 10 to 50 categories. The user created ones are much better at helping find people with similar interests. I suspect this feature would need serious moderation though so people don't make trolling or rude interests. * separating services into DTF, LTR, etc...: Right now it feels like on all the major systems everyone is mixed together, both the people that just want something for tonight and the people looking for a soulmate. The mix doesn't work IMO because the DTF men disgust the LTR women and so the LTR women leave. How to fix that I have no idea. One idea is if you're on the LTR site and someone asks DTF you can flag them and get them moved to the DTF site (with enough flags and/or moderation). * better activities: There was a service "How about we..." were your profile was just suggestions of activities "How about we go to disco bowling together". "How about we try stinky tofu"... etc. How can that be expanded? Partner with AirBnB experiences to sign people up to local event? Partner with entertainment venues for live performances? There's a service called "Dine" which was supposed to be "pick a restaurant, one of 3, from a person's profile, which then automatically sends them a message, so-and-so would like to take to you (name of restaurant), choose a time..." In my experience the site lacked any women even close to my age but it did seem like you could charge a premium and potentially partner with restaurants to try to making actually meeting in person in a safe venue as frictionless as possible. * group activities? I know match.com had their stir.com initiative. I don't know if it went anywhere. I tried a couple of events. Too few people. Not good matches (odds of matches low). Still many people say they really only have had relationships with people they've known for a while so how do take that feedback into account? * How to get people to pay and take it serious and still get users. Most of the dating services are free or free for women. This fills the site with non-serious people which is not actually helpful for those that actually want to meet someone. On the other hand any paywall = no users? Although I know that's not always true. The #1 site in Japan is pay only, $120-$180 a year, at least for men.

caublestone 7y ago

I kind of think that agreeableness is a major factor in seeking intimacy that isn’t captured well enough in online dating. People are afraid to meet people that disagree with them and actively ridicule people with differing values/opinions/lifestyle. Religions, sports teams and other mass clubs obfuscated a lot of the concern away. But without those people need other groups and tools to trust a stranger to agree with them over time.

jariel 7y ago

These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch. In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed. OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility. In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot. In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context. I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much. From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is. I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.

dilippkumar 7y ago

What if - dating apps are not the answer? We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature). Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people. My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people. I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it. If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.

nailer 7y ago

The apps are asymmetric because dating is asymmetric: most women do not want to date most men. Likewise subtle prostition is common because it's part of heterosexual dating: men are expected to provide resources. You may disagree with the morals of this, but it is very clear this is how dating works, not a new thing created by the existence of apps.

rmtech 7y ago

> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms. Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners? > Enforce a 50:50 ratio OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking. > Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app. This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why. > Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people. As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it. But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors? > Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.). This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt. In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.

thebucketbot 7y ago
> Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it. As a woman, I would frankly be terrified of going to that. It's risky enough to meet up with one man from a dating app. I wouldn't risk meeting up with multiple unknown men.
- rmtech 7y ago
  As a woman, what would you want out of a better dating app?

rmtech 7y ago

If I was going to try to disrupt dating, I would look at ways to please the women on the site. The women are the limiting factor, it's important to get more of them. I think this will look like harsher and more invasive prescreening of the men. Make an app that watches a man do 50 pressups. Work out how get the mens' financial info. Work out some AI-based test of confidence that's really hard for the man to fake. The problem with this approach is that unfit, loser-ish men are the profit centre for these apps, so the app wants to string these guys along just enough to get money out of them. Still, it might work as a nonprofit or something. Another angle that might work is trying to provide a credible commitment mechanism for people who want commitment. Marriage used to fulfill this, but it has its problems. A sort of "digital marriage" system that punishes people for going back on their commitments, particularly men stringing women along or women divorcing men later.

peter303 7y ago

Unhappy incels

jl6 7y ago

I looked through 302 comments on this thread and couldn’t see a single commenter identifying as a woman. I can’t help but think if we could get women more involved in the design of dating apps we might have a chance of creating something that works.

elil17 7y ago

Unfortunately, you can’t isolate your app from the broader environment of dating apps. For instance, take the “No ELO” suggestion. Implementing this feature means you’ll attract a lot of users who don’t like ELO (typically, less attractive users) and won’t gain any users who benefit from the ELO system (attractive users). If you can’t get attractive users, you can’t get any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?) Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.

gadders 7y ago
What is ELO?
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > What is ELO? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system In this instance, it's presumably a measure of a person's holistic attractiveness - say the average willingness of prospective partners to accept another date.
  - gadders 7y ago
    Thanks - I've learnt something today.

RickS 7y ago

Here's a random idea I find interesting: Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions. Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase. But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever. Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan. There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter. I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.

kart23 7y ago
I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.

rafiki6 7y ago

The stats I remember reading about dating apps show that conventionally unattractive men fail miserably at using them and conventionally attractive men tend to reap tall the spoils. I think this was a study done by okCupid based on their data. Overall, this is generally true in the real world. The problem with scaling dating apps actually lies in the fact that the majority of the population, particularly the male population, will not succeed. They lose interest and leave the platform eventually. There are many intangibles in a relationship that you miss when you using dating apps. Maybe you make up for your lack of a chiseled jaw line by being hilarious or good at something. Maybe you end up being attracted to someone because you have a really deep connection due to similar interests. I actually think dating apps are generally doomed to repeat the same mistakes because they just don't allow you the important element of organic real life connections.

htrp 7y ago

we had similar experiences in this market for a company now nearly a decade ago.... the problem is that most of the potential features identified by the OP exist in the form of community organizations / adult sports leagues / social clubs as a start-up, it's nearly impossible to scale the hyper-local focus (partnering with coffee shops/bars) across multiple regions

prawn 7y ago

From the half-bakery, but what if you could get an indication of how many messages each user was receiving? And the number of users you could message was limited each day?