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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 ma

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
    Because Grindr is two guys....
Muuuchem 7y ago
Wouldn't a simple rating system for dates help a ton?
- pwinnski 7y ago
  Any rating system consumed by others is more useful for disinformation than information. aka trolls and spammers will use this feature more than honest people will
- philwelch 7y ago
  If you rate someone positively enough you end up in a relationship with them and stop opening your dating app.
- Kalium 7y ago
  If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a negative signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or is excessively selective. So a good signal is probably someone with few ratings. Which would seem to defeat the point of a rating system, as a five-out-of-five rating is now a bad sign. Anecdotally, this does comport with my experience back when OKCupid would tell you how old someone's account was. It was far easier to make contact and have a conversation with a new account than with one months to years old.
  - ada1981 7y ago
    An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app. Truth is, an app isn’t going to solve for people’s insecure attachment styles and malAdaptive coping strategies. Perhaps an app that matches based on symmetrical childhood traumas would be a hit.
    - JoshTriplett 7y ago
      > An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app. What incentive does anyone have to keep using the service to provide such "feedback" if they find their match, leaving aside the creepiness factor of a service asking for such information? (And please, don't create such an incentive.) If they find their way back into the service, then (ignoring relatively rare cases) something didn't work out.
curiousllama 7y ago
That's... an arranged marriage. You've invented arranged marriages, sans coercion.
- capableweb 7y ago
  Arranged marriages sans coercion is not an arranged marriage anymore, I guess it's a normal marriage? The whole thing with arranged marriages is that the people in the marriage doesn't actually chose who they marry. What solatic is describing sounds nothing like a arranged marriage. You can always say no and move on, no one is forcing you anything.
  - triceratops 7y ago
    You're thinking of "forced marriage", which is a subset of arranged marriages. There are arranged marriages where parents play the role of matchmaker and chaperones, with the kids having veto power. Or the converse, where the kids select partners from a professional matchmaker's rolls and the parents have veto power. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage
    - slowmovintarget 7y ago
      Right. All the arranged marriages I'm aware of were ones where the expected norm was for the children to acquiesce to the arrangement, but didn't force them to accept. They did so either to honor their parent's selection (or that of the matchmaker hired by the parents). I also have colleagues that have declined the arranged matches. Their parents weren't happy, but they did it all the same.
- neogodless 7y ago
  No, I would say an accurate and succinct phrase would be "curated first dates."
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    So arranged first dates?
JohnFen 7y ago
Both when dating and when buying used cars, I prefer to deal directly with the owner/person. There's no need to bring a middleman into either activity.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Clearly there is, as people like to buy certified pre owned used cars and meet people via acquaintances. Perhaps some people don’t have the time or ability to evaluate a used car, or a life partner. Or they feel the broker reduces risk as they might offer some guarantee of the product.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Both when dating and when buying used cars, I require an intermediary to introduce me, as otherwise I am not willing to trust in the owner/person directly. My safety is paramount and requiring a 'middleman' drastically reduces the chances of malicious behavior by the owner/person.
  - wjessup 7y ago
    Could you please explain this line of reasoning? It's not immediately clear why a middleman reduces chances of malicious behavior. Do you think the risk of malicious behavior could be reduced through individual confidence, judgement or leadership in the same way or differently?
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Because the middleman is not just any middleman, it's someone in your network, who is vested in you having a good experience so that you continue to be valuable to them and vice versa. The middleman will do some due diligence before recommending two people to each other.
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      If my friend sets me up with a scam artist, they’re at risk of to losing a friend - and potentially be ostracized by their entire social network for it. So they’re a lot less likely to recommend a scam artist, because they have skin in the game. Same if they set me up on a date with their friend who ends up being abusive.
Jonovono 7y ago
Can't say I am apart of it but doing it the way https://rayatheapp.com/ https://rayatheapp.com/ does make sense. Essentially, referrals from existing members. + looking a how many Instagram followers you have.
- meristem 7y ago
  Using another app such as Instagram as gatekeeper seems to make a value judgement about people not interested in the gatekeeping app’s business proposition.
- OldFatCactus 7y ago
  using instragram followers as a measurement of datability feels incredibly dystopian
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    Unless you used it as an inverse correlation. +15% if you're not on Instagram at all.
- alexgmcm 7y ago
  I wonder if having a public invitation tree like lobste.rs [ https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations ] would help? That way people would be less likely to give referrals to people they didn't know well - as you are vouching for them, and it makes it easier to identify sets of bad actors.
- groby_b 7y ago
  Because the number of instagram followers says so much about emotional maturity and mental stability. Instagram influencer, paragons of healthy behaviors.
cbhl 7y ago
Part of me wonders whether dating is an education problem. If we could make men* not be lemons, then maybe society as a whole would have better outcomes. But how do you scale up "dating coaches"? (Would you even want to? People will pay easily pay four or five figures for such services right now.) [* Gender is not binary, etc., but painting with broad strokes to make the example more concrete.]
- SereneT 7y ago
  Umm Why specifically men? How about we all learn a bit more about ourselves and about understanding and communicating with others, say in school... That comment makes as much sense as saying; ‘If we could make women not be lemons...’
jjtheblunt 7y ago
i wonder if churches are historically one way of vetting matches
- monocasa 7y ago
  Considering churches heavily encouraged people getting married for life before they were fully cognitively developed, I'd lean towards 'no'.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Humans are never fully cognitively developed.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      And yet, there's distinct differences in around pre 25yo and post 25yo on average, to the point where childhood development psychologists use that as the current baseline. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194
    - jjtheblunt 7y ago
      i thought the same!
- ssully 7y ago
  As someone raised and practiced Catholicism for a large portion of my life, this is hilarious.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Where I grew up, the Catholic Church (the only religion in town) didn’t really play the community-building role the Americans tend to ascribe to their churches, so I too find it baffling myself. However, I can’t help but notice that both my father and my best friend have met their wives on religious pilgrimage to holy site.
  - 7y ago
zelly 7y ago
> 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. The reason young people use dating apps is to avoid this old world formalism. I don't think your idea would get much traction outside of South Asia and the Middle East.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  It's impossible to figure out real world numbers from hype, but my impression is that It's Just Lunch has made a ton of money in the US on exactly this business model. Interestingly, their reputation seems to be again at similar risk because as they've scaled up across the country they've relied more and more on high cost being their gatekeeper over more direct contact with matchmakers. Or at least that's they way it seems from the many emails and calls I see to rejoin with "discounts" jumping an order-of-magnitude every few years from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars, to now thousands. It's rather extraordinary and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence to rejoin even if I was interested.
  - zelly 7y ago
    Young people. For people in their 30s, it's a different ball game. Lots of well-off career people panicking to pair up. I have no doubt there is a lot of money in that. Actually I'm bullish on 30+ arranged marriage apps. It seems like one of those megatrends that's going to hit like a tidal wave.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      It's not arranged marriage by any means, it's just Blind Date As A Service. I signed up in my 20s. They admitted I was young versus their median, but I wasn't alone and had plenty of dates in the few months I was a member. There was a lot of appeal to the idea of not dealing with the usual grind of the average dating app, and getting something a bit more personal/high-touch. (Though even then it seemed apparent that it was less high touch than it seemed for the cost, and the real gatekeeper was the cost.) There should be ways to sell human-moderated dating apps (Blind Dates as a Service) to young people just on how dumb and how much work even the "swipe left/right" systems are. Figuring out how to scale that cheaply definitely seems to be the impossible problem.
blang 7y ago
I think that's what dating ring tried to do. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/ They were featured on a season of the startup podcast https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma They shut their doors in 2018
balls187 7y ago
I think rather than "lemons" dating apps have a very low signal to noise ratio. Which isn't necessarily due to "players", violent men, etc.
floatingatoll 7y ago
This article demonstrates the same failings as the dating apps its author wishes to disrupt. It does not discuss the safety concerns of dating, either online or offline. It does not discuss the cost of identity verification and other security measures. It does not discuss the revenue model at all. Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar, assuming you're smart and invite them to meet at a public place first. AM works [1] because it charges significant amounts of money and works very hard at background checks. All other sites in-between fail because they want to be the 'Amazon/eBay of dating', wherein they stand up a classifieds site with profiles, refuse to charge enough money to perform background checks, and promptly turn into a lemon market populated by malicious actors who are represented as vetted and safe. There is no mistaking what you're getting on Craigslist or Tinder for "vetted and safe". You're getting a complete stranger who you haven't seen in person yet. If that's your bag, you're set. There is no mistaking what you're getting on AshleyMadison, either. It's what they say and they work very hard, and charge quite a lot, to ensure that you'll only meet safe and vetted people. If you want to play the in-between market, you need to charge a lot of money for accounts and use most of that money to vet people's identity. You can charge less money than a specialist site like AM ("affairs only"), but you can't have any free users, or you'll just become a lemon market like all the rest. It's unfortunate that AM is so focused on affairs, because their model is the only one that seems to be working as an alternative to the classified-ads approach. Safety and secrecy cost a lot more than Okcupid was ever willing to charge. [1] Not that AM is any more successful, and in fact might be more fraudulent than the rest! e.g. https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924 https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...
- lostgame 7y ago
  Hahaha, I used to work for the parent company of AM and it is largely bullshit. I’d love to do an AMA about it sometime. But, I mean, who would’ve guessed a company based on the idea of having affairs would have shady as fuck business practices? eye roll
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
Avamander 7y ago
It might be a lemon market for older age categories, but that can't be the case for younger people. They've just entered the market, people born in 2000 are at least 19, if not 20.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Sub-180 munchkins are lemons too.
brianhorakh 7y ago
Lemon Market would be a great name for a dating app. Gatekeeping could be done at scale with a web of trust model.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  How about Lemon Party... oh wait
FabHK 7y ago
The lemon problem, as you highlight, is due to asymmetric information. The mechanisms you mention fix that: mechanics check a car before it is certified, the warranty as well as the value of the brand (reputational damage) shift incentives against cheating on that check. Similarly, in matchmaking, usually the matchmaker knows both parties, warrants that they are ok, and his reputation suffers if they aren’t. A real innovation would be to solve this problem of asymmetric information in dating in a similarly robust, yet scalable fashion. For example: * Credible testimonies from ex-partners * Certification of claimed characteristics (photos, age, weight, income, educational achievement, ...) * ??? * profit I don’t know how to achieve these - I’m pretty sure blockchain is not the solution, but something might be possible in that space.
- fiblye 7y ago
  Credible testimony is a big problem. People who’ve moved on won’t want to really talk about it much. Meanwhile those who haven’t moved on will replay every bad moment in their head and do their best to make that other person look like a demon, and some just outright lie because they want to take the other person down. It’s hard to know if that person really was an asshole, or if the person writing the review was the asshole. The only way to know is to accumulate a bunch of separate reviews and maybe try some complicated ML algorithm on the intricacies of the messages/find trends in a person’s reviews (if everyone around them is negative, it’s probably not other people), but...if you start to get to a point where someone has an obvious trend, they’ve probably been through loads of partners, and people looking for dating and not hookups generally don’t want someone who’s churning through new partners constantly. If you have a solution to this problem, divorce attorneys around the world would pay you for it. It’s way more valuable than a dating app.
  - throw_away 7y ago
    If not even one of your exes would be willing to give a positive testimony, that in itself is a fairly powerful signal.
    - novok 7y ago
snarf21 7y ago
I don't think it is impossible but it is definitely hard to do it "everywhere". A lot of the sites allow for free users to create profiles and this simply attracts scams and bots. You need to make it expensive. You need to make messages cost above X per month. I think you need to start like Uber did at first, it is only people who make $Y+ and maybe it requires a W2. I imagine it like what The Ladders tried (unsuccessfully) to do. You can later slowly move down market but you will need the density of a large city for any matching to work. Personally, the best part of dating apps/site for me was meeting people outside of my social circles or people 30 minutes away. It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute". Your other point is valid though, most people just want sex. That isn't a new phenomenon but these apps make new targets easy to find and those targets feel more isolated emotionally than they did in the past.
- anon73044 7y ago
  Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free with paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
- anon73044 7y ago
  Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free to message and had paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  > It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute". Sadly this has gotten worse with the post-2010 dating apps / sites. You used to be able to filter by all sorts of things, detailed looks, education, hobbies, smoking,... Now you can only sort by age, distance and by online status (and the last two don't even work properly). It's all looks nowadays, which is kinda annoying since I e.g. would really like to filter by education and smoking. But I guess that would be to superficial and judging...
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
I don't think I completely agree with the conclusion though I did chuckle at the analogy. Still, taking the analogy to its conclusion, there is a market for used cars at reasonable value ( as in, not all used cars are lemons; some are driven to church on Sunday only ). This is the space Carmax fills fairly well. They do their vetting though. That might be the secret. I have no doubt there is a market for a decent way to date. Full diclosure: me and my wife met online ( eharmony I think ).
bloodm 7y ago
"who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (" Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market. But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]
jayd16 7y ago
> people with a track record of dealing honestly A track record is also a red flag. In theory, the ideal partner shouldn't need to date for very long.
- histriosum 7y ago
  Can you elaborate on your theory? I dont follow the connection between honest dealer and low number of attempts at dating. I've dated lots of folks who I liked, but did not find "ideal". Or they the opposite with me. They weren't unpleasant dating experiences. My goal, though, wasnt to find the first "good enough" match - I can be happy on my own. My goal was to find the partner I couldn't live without. It seems odd to assume I was/am a dishonest dealer based solely on number of dating cycles.
  - smogcutter 7y ago
    Yeah — considering that statistically, educated people are getting married later than ever (and therefore spend more time dating around), and early marriages are far more likely to end in divorce, experience on the “market” doesn’t seem like a strong signal. “If they’re so great, why are they still single” is an incredibly self-defeating approach.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Both of you are describing the same concept :) > In economics, insurance, and risk management, adverse selection is a market situation where buyers and sellers have different information, so that a participant might participate selectively in trades which benefit them the most, at the expense of the other trader. A textbook example is Akerlof's market for lemons. > The party without the information is worried about an unfair ("rigged") trade, which occurs when the party who has all the information uses it to their advantage. The fear of rigged trade can prompt the worried party to withdraw from the interaction, diminishing the volume of trade in the market. This can cause a knock-on effect and the unraveling of the market. An additional implication of this potential for market collapse is that it can work as an entry deterrence that leads to high margins without additional entry. > Buyers sometimes have better information about how much benefit they can extract from a service. For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite and hence, the least profitable customers. The restaurant has no way of knowing whether a given customer has a high or low appetite. The customer is the only one who knows if they have a high or low appetite. In this case the high appetite customers are more likely to use the information they have and to go to the restaurant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
benburleson 7y ago
Would it be possible to Uber-ize the gatekeeping? Somehow find, train, and trust contract workers to vet candidates somehow. How big would your legal team need to be??
- nradov 7y ago
  No it's impossible to reliably identify the creeps, rapists, and abusers that way.
jcroll 7y ago
I feel like that was the original point of having to login through Facebook to access Tinder, you could see whether your matches had shared friends. The idea being this was a potential indicator you might be a good match or not
rmtech 7y ago
> 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 "Honesty" isn't a binary attribute and it might not even be that important. But let's suppose it is, and you had a 100% accurate honesty test. What then? Reject the bottom 50% of users from the app? Match people on percentile of honesty? Make a score that's a balance between looks, wealth, age, charisma, health and honesty? It might turn out that honesty correlates negatively with other desirable traits. What then?
ByzantineO6 7y ago
Perhaps an association of folks who share fundamental values? Nah, that's crazy talk.
jariel 7y ago
Dating is absolutely not a 'market for lemons'. Also, the most highly trained academics are woefully unqualified to make matches. Socially attentive individuals in the relevant age cohort fare probably a lot better. A lot of women, in particular, are half decent at guessing, among the people they know, who might make half-decent matches, partly because they actually know their peers.
- rc_hadoken 7y ago
  If women in particular are good at this. And I'm thinking as I say this...wouldn't women be the sex that pursues? I'm not saying men do better at this because they pursue/initiate. This just seems like a false statement unless I misunderstand what you mean.
Animats 7y ago
The numbers are worse than that. Under 20% of people on dating apps are "date bacon", and can get dates, and the other 80% are losers. Online dating is mostly IAC, which has 130 brands in the business.[1] Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Meetic, Match Affinity, Meetic Affinity, Affiny, LoveScout24, Parperfeito, Twoo, Lexamore.nl, Amoreux, Neu.de, Partner.de, Secret.de, Gencontros, Divino Amor, e-kontakt, Sprydate, Datingdirect, OurTime, People Media, Pairs... are one company. [1] https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz
atoav 7y ago
Additionally Dating apps like to do as if they represent the world — the girls/guys available out there — but e.g. certain types of persons who you could date might never even sign up. So if you are e.g. into art, going for into a gallery opening might give you more "potential matches" than swyping tinder for a whole day – plus you got to see art.
nr152522 7y ago
It’s is indeed very difficult to build a good dating experience. I was working on a project that essentially used your bank account (via OpenBanking) as a gatekeeper. This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match. The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive. Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address. Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.
- nradov 7y ago
  That should have been an obvious problem. How would want developer seriously think that would be an acceptable user experience?
  - nr152522 7y ago
    Well, it might have been obvious but it was certainly not a useless exercise. Some users were really interested and wanted to experiment with it. Transaction data is read and never stored, just used to processing matches. The flow was relatively simple, link an account during signup. The regulation was hard and expensive.
    - Double_a_92 7y ago
      How do you casually link your bank account to some app? Is it common for banks to have safe readonly APIs or so in your country?
      - nr152522 7y ago
        Yes, take a look at the OBIE [0]. You are required to be registered/regulated as an appropriate 'Third Party Processor' (TPP) class, in this case an AISP. Then you can use an API aggregator service such as SaltEdge, TrueLayer, Teller [1], etc. (I'm not associated with any of these). Or you can try to roll your own. [0] - https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ [1] - https://www.truelayer.com https://www.truelayer.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.teller.io https://www.teller.io
Double_a_92 7y ago
Isn't the main problem that women are too picky, and men are not picky enough though? So the apps only work for decent women, and very good looking men. The biggest lemon problems can be solved by the people by just being careful. I.e. making a video call first, before meeting in real.

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
  Because Grindr is two guys....

Muuuchem 7y ago

Wouldn't a simple rating system for dates help a ton?

pwinnski 7y ago
Any rating system consumed by others is more useful for disinformation than information. aka trolls and spammers will use this feature more than honest people will
philwelch 7y ago
If you rate someone positively enough you end up in a relationship with them and stop opening your dating app.
Kalium 7y ago
If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a negative signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or is excessively selective. So a good signal is probably someone with few ratings. Which would seem to defeat the point of a rating system, as a five-out-of-five rating is now a bad sign. Anecdotally, this does comport with my experience back when OKCupid would tell you how old someone's account was. It was far easier to make contact and have a conversation with a new account than with one months to years old.
- ada1981 7y ago
  An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app. Truth is, an app isn’t going to solve for people’s insecure attachment styles and malAdaptive coping strategies. Perhaps an app that matches based on symmetrical childhood traumas would be a hit.
  - JoshTriplett 7y ago
    > An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app. What incentive does anyone have to keep using the service to provide such "feedback" if they find their match, leaving aside the creepiness factor of a service asking for such information? (And please, don't create such an incentive.) If they find their way back into the service, then (ignoring relatively rare cases) something didn't work out.

curiousllama 7y ago

That's... an arranged marriage. You've invented arranged marriages, sans coercion.

capableweb 7y ago
Arranged marriages sans coercion is not an arranged marriage anymore, I guess it's a normal marriage? The whole thing with arranged marriages is that the people in the marriage doesn't actually chose who they marry. What solatic is describing sounds nothing like a arranged marriage. You can always say no and move on, no one is forcing you anything.
- triceratops 7y ago
  You're thinking of "forced marriage", which is a subset of arranged marriages. There are arranged marriages where parents play the role of matchmaker and chaperones, with the kids having veto power. Or the converse, where the kids select partners from a professional matchmaker's rolls and the parents have veto power. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    Right. All the arranged marriages I'm aware of were ones where the expected norm was for the children to acquiesce to the arrangement, but didn't force them to accept. They did so either to honor their parent's selection (or that of the matchmaker hired by the parents). I also have colleagues that have declined the arranged matches. Their parents weren't happy, but they did it all the same.
neogodless 7y ago
No, I would say an accurate and succinct phrase would be "curated first dates."
- saagarjha 7y ago
  So arranged first dates?

JohnFen 7y ago

Both when dating and when buying used cars, I prefer to deal directly with the owner/person. There's no need to bring a middleman into either activity.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Clearly there is, as people like to buy certified pre owned used cars and meet people via acquaintances. Perhaps some people don’t have the time or ability to evaluate a used car, or a life partner. Or they feel the broker reduces risk as they might offer some guarantee of the product.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Both when dating and when buying used cars, I require an intermediary to introduce me, as otherwise I am not willing to trust in the owner/person directly. My safety is paramount and requiring a 'middleman' drastically reduces the chances of malicious behavior by the owner/person.
- wjessup 7y ago
  Could you please explain this line of reasoning? It's not immediately clear why a middleman reduces chances of malicious behavior. Do you think the risk of malicious behavior could be reduced through individual confidence, judgement or leadership in the same way or differently?
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Because the middleman is not just any middleman, it's someone in your network, who is vested in you having a good experience so that you continue to be valuable to them and vice versa. The middleman will do some due diligence before recommending two people to each other.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    If my friend sets me up with a scam artist, they’re at risk of to losing a friend - and potentially be ostracized by their entire social network for it. So they’re a lot less likely to recommend a scam artist, because they have skin in the game. Same if they set me up on a date with their friend who ends up being abusive.

Jonovono 7y ago

Can't say I am apart of it but doing it the way https://rayatheapp.com/ https://rayatheapp.com/ does make sense. Essentially, referrals from existing members. + looking a how many Instagram followers you have.

meristem 7y ago
Using another app such as Instagram as gatekeeper seems to make a value judgement about people not interested in the gatekeeping app’s business proposition.
OldFatCactus 7y ago
using instragram followers as a measurement of datability feels incredibly dystopian
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  Unless you used it as an inverse correlation. +15% if you're not on Instagram at all.
alexgmcm 7y ago
I wonder if having a public invitation tree like lobste.rs [ https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations ] would help? That way people would be less likely to give referrals to people they didn't know well - as you are vouching for them, and it makes it easier to identify sets of bad actors.
groby_b 7y ago
Because the number of instagram followers says so much about emotional maturity and mental stability. Instagram influencer, paragons of healthy behaviors.

cbhl 7y ago

Part of me wonders whether dating is an education problem. If we could make men* not be lemons, then maybe society as a whole would have better outcomes. But how do you scale up "dating coaches"? (Would you even want to? People will pay easily pay four or five figures for such services right now.) [* Gender is not binary, etc., but painting with broad strokes to make the example more concrete.]

SereneT 7y ago
Umm Why specifically men? How about we all learn a bit more about ourselves and about understanding and communicating with others, say in school... That comment makes as much sense as saying; ‘If we could make women not be lemons...’

jjtheblunt 7y ago

i wonder if churches are historically one way of vetting matches

monocasa 7y ago
Considering churches heavily encouraged people getting married for life before they were fully cognitively developed, I'd lean towards 'no'.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Humans are never fully cognitively developed.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    And yet, there's distinct differences in around pre 25yo and post 25yo on average, to the point where childhood development psychologists use that as the current baseline. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194
  - jjtheblunt 7y ago
    i thought the same!
ssully 7y ago
As someone raised and practiced Catholicism for a large portion of my life, this is hilarious.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Where I grew up, the Catholic Church (the only religion in town) didn’t really play the community-building role the Americans tend to ascribe to their churches, so I too find it baffling myself. However, I can’t help but notice that both my father and my best friend have met their wives on religious pilgrimage to holy site.
- 7y ago

zelly 7y ago

> 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. The reason young people use dating apps is to avoid this old world formalism. I don't think your idea would get much traction outside of South Asia and the Middle East.

WorldMaker 7y ago
It's impossible to figure out real world numbers from hype, but my impression is that It's Just Lunch has made a ton of money in the US on exactly this business model. Interestingly, their reputation seems to be again at similar risk because as they've scaled up across the country they've relied more and more on high cost being their gatekeeper over more direct contact with matchmakers. Or at least that's they way it seems from the many emails and calls I see to rejoin with "discounts" jumping an order-of-magnitude every few years from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars, to now thousands. It's rather extraordinary and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence to rejoin even if I was interested.
- zelly 7y ago
  Young people. For people in their 30s, it's a different ball game. Lots of well-off career people panicking to pair up. I have no doubt there is a lot of money in that. Actually I'm bullish on 30+ arranged marriage apps. It seems like one of those megatrends that's going to hit like a tidal wave.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    It's not arranged marriage by any means, it's just Blind Date As A Service. I signed up in my 20s. They admitted I was young versus their median, but I wasn't alone and had plenty of dates in the few months I was a member. There was a lot of appeal to the idea of not dealing with the usual grind of the average dating app, and getting something a bit more personal/high-touch. (Though even then it seemed apparent that it was less high touch than it seemed for the cost, and the real gatekeeper was the cost.) There should be ways to sell human-moderated dating apps (Blind Dates as a Service) to young people just on how dumb and how much work even the "swipe left/right" systems are. Figuring out how to scale that cheaply definitely seems to be the impossible problem.

blang 7y ago

I think that's what dating ring tried to do. https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/ They were featured on a season of the startup podcast https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma They shut their doors in 2018

balls187 7y ago

I think rather than "lemons" dating apps have a very low signal to noise ratio. Which isn't necessarily due to "players", violent men, etc.

floatingatoll 7y ago

This article demonstrates the same failings as the dating apps its author wishes to disrupt. It does not discuss the safety concerns of dating, either online or offline. It does not discuss the cost of identity verification and other security measures. It does not discuss the revenue model at all. Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar, assuming you're smart and invite them to meet at a public place first. AM works [1] because it charges significant amounts of money and works very hard at background checks. All other sites in-between fail because they want to be the 'Amazon/eBay of dating', wherein they stand up a classifieds site with profiles, refuse to charge enough money to perform background checks, and promptly turn into a lemon market populated by malicious actors who are represented as vetted and safe. There is no mistaking what you're getting on Craigslist or Tinder for "vetted and safe". You're getting a complete stranger who you haven't seen in person yet. If that's your bag, you're set. There is no mistaking what you're getting on AshleyMadison, either. It's what they say and they work very hard, and charge quite a lot, to ensure that you'll only meet safe and vetted people. If you want to play the in-between market, you need to charge a lot of money for accounts and use most of that money to vet people's identity. You can charge less money than a specialist site like AM ("affairs only"), but you can't have any free users, or you'll just become a lemon market like all the rest. It's unfortunate that AM is so focused on affairs, because their model is the only one that seems to be working as an alternative to the classified-ads approach. Safety and secrecy cost a lot more than Okcupid was ever willing to charge. [1] Not that AM is any more successful, and in fact might be more fraudulent than the rest! e.g. https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924 https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...

lostgame 7y ago
Hahaha, I used to work for the parent company of AM and it is largely bullshit. I’d love to do an AMA about it sometime. But, I mean, who would’ve guessed a company based on the idea of having affairs would have shady as fuck business practices? eye roll
- floatingatoll 7y ago

Avamander 7y ago

It might be a lemon market for older age categories, but that can't be the case for younger people. They've just entered the market, people born in 2000 are at least 19, if not 20.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Sub-180 munchkins are lemons too.

brianhorakh 7y ago

Lemon Market would be a great name for a dating app. Gatekeeping could be done at scale with a web of trust model.

egypturnash 7y ago
How about Lemon Party... oh wait

FabHK 7y ago

The lemon problem, as you highlight, is due to asymmetric information. The mechanisms you mention fix that: mechanics check a car before it is certified, the warranty as well as the value of the brand (reputational damage) shift incentives against cheating on that check. Similarly, in matchmaking, usually the matchmaker knows both parties, warrants that they are ok, and his reputation suffers if they aren’t. A real innovation would be to solve this problem of asymmetric information in dating in a similarly robust, yet scalable fashion. For example: * Credible testimonies from ex-partners * Certification of claimed characteristics (photos, age, weight, income, educational achievement, ...) * ??? * profit I don’t know how to achieve these - I’m pretty sure blockchain is not the solution, but something might be possible in that space.

fiblye 7y ago
Credible testimony is a big problem. People who’ve moved on won’t want to really talk about it much. Meanwhile those who haven’t moved on will replay every bad moment in their head and do their best to make that other person look like a demon, and some just outright lie because they want to take the other person down. It’s hard to know if that person really was an asshole, or if the person writing the review was the asshole. The only way to know is to accumulate a bunch of separate reviews and maybe try some complicated ML algorithm on the intricacies of the messages/find trends in a person’s reviews (if everyone around them is negative, it’s probably not other people), but...if you start to get to a point where someone has an obvious trend, they’ve probably been through loads of partners, and people looking for dating and not hookups generally don’t want someone who’s churning through new partners constantly. If you have a solution to this problem, divorce attorneys around the world would pay you for it. It’s way more valuable than a dating app.
- throw_away 7y ago
  If not even one of your exes would be willing to give a positive testimony, that in itself is a fairly powerful signal.
  - novok 7y ago

snarf21 7y ago

I don't think it is impossible but it is definitely hard to do it "everywhere". A lot of the sites allow for free users to create profiles and this simply attracts scams and bots. You need to make it expensive. You need to make messages cost above X per month. I think you need to start like Uber did at first, it is only people who make $Y+ and maybe it requires a W2. I imagine it like what The Ladders tried (unsuccessfully) to do. You can later slowly move down market but you will need the density of a large city for any matching to work. Personally, the best part of dating apps/site for me was meeting people outside of my social circles or people 30 minutes away. It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute". Your other point is valid though, most people just want sex. That isn't a new phenomenon but these apps make new targets easy to find and those targets feel more isolated emotionally than they did in the past.

anon73044 7y ago
Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free with paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
anon73044 7y ago
Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free to message and had paid options. My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
Double_a_92 7y ago
> It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute". Sadly this has gotten worse with the post-2010 dating apps / sites. You used to be able to filter by all sorts of things, detailed looks, education, hobbies, smoking,... Now you can only sort by age, distance and by online status (and the last two don't even work properly). It's all looks nowadays, which is kinda annoying since I e.g. would really like to filter by education and smoking. But I guess that would be to superficial and judging...

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

I don't think I completely agree with the conclusion though I did chuckle at the analogy. Still, taking the analogy to its conclusion, there is a market for used cars at reasonable value ( as in, not all used cars are lemons; some are driven to church on Sunday only ). This is the space Carmax fills fairly well. They do their vetting though. That might be the secret. I have no doubt there is a market for a decent way to date. Full diclosure: me and my wife met online ( eharmony I think ).

bloodm 7y ago

"who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (" Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market. But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]

jayd16 7y ago

> people with a track record of dealing honestly A track record is also a red flag. In theory, the ideal partner shouldn't need to date for very long.

histriosum 7y ago
Can you elaborate on your theory? I dont follow the connection between honest dealer and low number of attempts at dating. I've dated lots of folks who I liked, but did not find "ideal". Or they the opposite with me. They weren't unpleasant dating experiences. My goal, though, wasnt to find the first "good enough" match - I can be happy on my own. My goal was to find the partner I couldn't live without. It seems odd to assume I was/am a dishonest dealer based solely on number of dating cycles.
- smogcutter 7y ago
  Yeah — considering that statistically, educated people are getting married later than ever (and therefore spend more time dating around), and early marriages are far more likely to end in divorce, experience on the “market” doesn’t seem like a strong signal. “If they’re so great, why are they still single” is an incredibly self-defeating approach.
heartbeats 7y ago
Both of you are describing the same concept :) > In economics, insurance, and risk management, adverse selection is a market situation where buyers and sellers have different information, so that a participant might participate selectively in trades which benefit them the most, at the expense of the other trader. A textbook example is Akerlof's market for lemons. > The party without the information is worried about an unfair ("rigged") trade, which occurs when the party who has all the information uses it to their advantage. The fear of rigged trade can prompt the worried party to withdraw from the interaction, diminishing the volume of trade in the market. This can cause a knock-on effect and the unraveling of the market. An additional implication of this potential for market collapse is that it can work as an entry deterrence that leads to high margins without additional entry. > Buyers sometimes have better information about how much benefit they can extract from a service. For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite and hence, the least profitable customers. The restaurant has no way of knowing whether a given customer has a high or low appetite. The customer is the only one who knows if they have a high or low appetite. In this case the high appetite customers are more likely to use the information they have and to go to the restaurant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

benburleson 7y ago

Would it be possible to Uber-ize the gatekeeping? Somehow find, train, and trust contract workers to vet candidates somehow. How big would your legal team need to be??

nradov 7y ago
No it's impossible to reliably identify the creeps, rapists, and abusers that way.

jcroll 7y ago

I feel like that was the original point of having to login through Facebook to access Tinder, you could see whether your matches had shared friends. The idea being this was a potential indicator you might be a good match or not

rmtech 7y ago

> 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 "Honesty" isn't a binary attribute and it might not even be that important. But let's suppose it is, and you had a 100% accurate honesty test. What then? Reject the bottom 50% of users from the app? Match people on percentile of honesty? Make a score that's a balance between looks, wealth, age, charisma, health and honesty? It might turn out that honesty correlates negatively with other desirable traits. What then?

ByzantineO6 7y ago

Perhaps an association of folks who share fundamental values? Nah, that's crazy talk.

jariel 7y ago

Dating is absolutely not a 'market for lemons'. Also, the most highly trained academics are woefully unqualified to make matches. Socially attentive individuals in the relevant age cohort fare probably a lot better. A lot of women, in particular, are half decent at guessing, among the people they know, who might make half-decent matches, partly because they actually know their peers.

rc_hadoken 7y ago
If women in particular are good at this. And I'm thinking as I say this...wouldn't women be the sex that pursues? I'm not saying men do better at this because they pursue/initiate. This just seems like a false statement unless I misunderstand what you mean.

Animats 7y ago

The numbers are worse than that. Under 20% of people on dating apps are "date bacon", and can get dates, and the other 80% are losers. Online dating is mostly IAC, which has 130 brands in the business.[1] Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Meetic, Match Affinity, Meetic Affinity, Affiny, LoveScout24, Parperfeito, Twoo, Lexamore.nl, Amoreux, Neu.de, Partner.de, Secret.de, Gencontros, Divino Amor, e-kontakt, Sprydate, Datingdirect, OurTime, People Media, Pairs... are one company. [1] https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz

atoav 7y ago

Additionally Dating apps like to do as if they represent the world — the girls/guys available out there — but e.g. certain types of persons who you could date might never even sign up. So if you are e.g. into art, going for into a gallery opening might give you more "potential matches" than swyping tinder for a whole day – plus you got to see art.

nr152522 7y ago

It’s is indeed very difficult to build a good dating experience. I was working on a project that essentially used your bank account (via OpenBanking) as a gatekeeper. This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match. The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive. Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address. Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.

nradov 7y ago
That should have been an obvious problem. How would want developer seriously think that would be an acceptable user experience?
- nr152522 7y ago
  Well, it might have been obvious but it was certainly not a useless exercise. Some users were really interested and wanted to experiment with it. Transaction data is read and never stored, just used to processing matches. The flow was relatively simple, link an account during signup. The regulation was hard and expensive.
  - Double_a_92 7y ago
    How do you casually link your bank account to some app? Is it common for banks to have safe readonly APIs or so in your country?
    - nr152522 7y ago
      Yes, take a look at the OBIE [0]. You are required to be registered/regulated as an appropriate 'Third Party Processor' (TPP) class, in this case an AISP. Then you can use an API aggregator service such as SaltEdge, TrueLayer, Teller [1], etc. (I'm not associated with any of these). Or you can try to roll your own. [0] - https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ https://www.openbanking.org.uk/about-us/ [1] - https://www.truelayer.com https://www.truelayer.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.saltedge.com https://www.teller.io https://www.teller.io

Double_a_92 7y ago

Isn't the main problem that women are too picky, and men are not picky enough though? So the apps only work for decent women, and very good looking men. The biggest lemon problems can be solved by the people by just being careful. I.e. making a video call first, before meeting in real.