8 ms·

Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)

75 points by ZeljkoS 6y ago

johnnyy 5y ago
interesting article. I'm big fan of online dating. I like online dating and many of my friends met their gf online. Esp I like this free video chat app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videochat.olive https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videochat.... . It's a perfect place to meet new friends and talk with people from different countries.
sarosh 6y ago
See prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501
klyrs 6y ago
(2010)
- paulgb 6y ago
  IIRC, there was some contention about this post when Match.com acquired OkCupid, since people paying for online dating is kind of their business model. If I remember right, it was quietly deleted from their official blog.
graeme 6y ago
Note that this describes a past era. Now, the main apps usually have some way by which if you pay you get higher visibility in the algorithm. E.g. on Tinder if you are premium you get a boost each month and five superlikes a day. The latter show you specifically to the person you superlike (but identify you as having done so), the former boosts your general presence. You can also buy more boosts, and these do up your presence. The headline would still be accurate though if it read “never join a dating app which requires payment”.
- grezql 6y ago
  its the same shit, different wrapping. they all pray on the desperation and profits off it. Bringing people together is only secondary motivation.
- k__ 6y ago
  I paid for OKCupid once for a month or so, because I always had like 25 likes (for multiple years now) I couldn't see and I was curious. I could see my like and in that paid month my likes almost doubled. I didn't act on them, because I wasn't interested in the people who liked me. But I wouldn't see this as a OKC problem. Overall I had the impression, I got my moneys worth.
koboll 6y ago
Having been on several dating apps for about a decade, Bumble has been far and away the best experience. I've met multiple girlfriends on it and there's a high chance I'll eventually marry someone I met off it. It elegantly solves the problem this article identifies in a way every other app and site cannot, because (in hetero pairings) women must initiate the conversation.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > It elegantly solves the problem this article identifies in a way every other app and site cannot. How is it different?
  - isoskeles 6y ago
    Women initiate the conversation. Not sure how it works for anything other than male-female matching though.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      > Women initiate the conversation. They have already indicated that they are interested in the man by swing "yes" on him.
      - isoskeles 6y ago
        I'm not clear on what you're mean. On Bumble, women are specifically supposed to type out the first message in a conversation, which is what makes it unique from other apps where either party may send the first message. If the woman does not send a message within some period, the match disappears. (This is how it was several years ago. I assume it is similar.) Supposedly this makes it better, although I disagree. Many women adapt to that in the same way that men adapted to it in the OP, which is to say, they start sending out generic, shitty messages like, "Hi."
- throway98752343 6y ago
  Bumble is more superficial than Tinder because instead of 2 filtering gates it has 3 and that 3rd gate also removes the opportunity to create attraction through performance or skill. 1. Are you shown to someone you like? Other than paid things like Boost your only lever may be how you swipe. 2. Did they like you back? Good photos and bio actually help here so you have some agency. 3. Are they interested enough to initiate within the time limit? No agency here purely on the basis of sex. "Hi." The deafening silence of gate 3 removes any chance to move a match from indifferent to interested by being funny, skillful or otherwise interesting. And it dumps even more work on the already most overwhelmed party in dating apps: the woman. On hetero Bumble, be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pcbro141 6y ago
I went on Tinder again for the first time in several years and they just keep adding new 'Premium' memberships for men to pay for, it's insane. Tinder Plus, Tinder Gold, Tinder Platinum, Tinder Super Like, Tinder Boost, Tinder Super Boost, Tinder Top Picks. They're making a sh*t ton of money (highest grossing app 2019) off mostly men's desperation (~$1.4 billion in 2019 reportedly), but there's only so much paying for all these boosts and memberships can do when there's just so much more demand for women on there. Tinder is also reportedly as much as 75-85% male. I hope young men aren't letting their lack of matches on the dating apps lower their self esteem/make them depressed and try approaching in real life (post-pandemic). I know for some the feeling of getting close to 0 matches while others get hundreds a day can be crushing to their mental health. But real life is much better, don't let a lack of online success (what's the point, she wouldn't swipe me online so why should I approach her?) stop you from approaching women in real life .
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  It certainly feels like seeking.com is the only honest dating app out there...
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Well... before the internet, if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub, paid $20 to get in, and then $15-$20 per drink so you wouldn't be wandering around without a drink in your hand. A lot of these places had cover charges for men but not for women, so they were making money off mostly men's desperation, too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub I'm sure that I have seen somewhere here before some hard statistics on where partners meet in Western countries – maybe someone still has a link. In spite of the existence of known meat markets, those meat markets are not the source of most of the population’s relationships. Instead, people come together through mundane things like friends of friends, people at work, people in the neighbourhood, classmates, etc.
Jommi 6y ago
Its crazy. The global online dating culture / landscape / norms are currently COMPLETELY dictated by a private company from a single country. That is absolutely insane. What is the implication on mental health and stress if one gets banned from Match group apps for life? Sure IRL is still there, but ABD is here to stay and is the one dictating the norms currently. How do we solve this issue?
- fao_ 6y ago
  Are there not at least 4 or 5 different competing companies in this space? Also you could, you know, go to a bar or meet people at special interest groups. I do believe that before internet dating most people had some kind of a life -- or lack of one -- and found each other through that.
  - p49k 6y ago
    > Are there not at least 4 or 5 different competing companies in this space? No, there are a combined 4 or 5 apps that cover almost 100% of the attention in this space, and all but one are owned by the same company.
    - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
      It's like antitrust is just not even a word anymore.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    Pretty sure one main company owns ~80% of the dating app marketplace, though I could be wrong on the exact percentage.
  - wsc981 6y ago
    I believe Badoo is also pretty huge, but I never used it. Perhaps not owned by the same company that owns Tinder.
    - thesimon 6y ago
standardUser 6y ago
This (2010) article is talking about Match and eHarmony, which I have never used. But if you pay for things like Hinge and Tinder, it really does expedite the searching/matching process and makes getting dates a bit easier (if you are a man seeking women). Finding decent matches can be a tedious and time-consuming process, and only a fraction of those matches ever turn into actual dates. So to me, speeding that up even a little is worth the $20 or whatever.
lacker 6y ago
It's interesting that Match.com acquired OkCupid shortly after this post. OkCupid deleted this post, and there was some minor controversy about whether they were forced to delete it or what. https://web.archive.org/web/20110204185529/http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/okcupid-we-didnt-censor-our-matchcom-bashing-blog-post https://web.archive.org/web/20110204185529/http://www.observ... Of course, this was all before the great rise of mobile apps, subsequently the Tinder model would become the dominant one, where you pay for higher visibility, and you can debate the effectiveness but it's all pretty different from how things worked back then.
colmvp 6y ago
The funny thing some of the observations described in the post is so true despite being 10+ years old. When I first started online dating five years ago, I put in a ton of effort in my replies/messages, except I rarely got any replies. That was pretty sobering. I still put effort in my replies/messages, but I got used to just one or two sentences rather than an actual paragraph. A good female friend of mine complains about how guys in online dating can barely hold a conversation. I have said to her, you have no idea how many messages your average or below-average (in terms of physical attractiveness) male has to send to get a date, let alone a response in the first place.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  The fact is that almost only photos matter, so the same time that you put into thinking of replies is better spent in the gym.
  - scythe 6y ago
    Only photos are trustworthy. You can even hire someone to have conversations with you. You can use a fake photo, too, but your date will leave immediately. The market for lemons isn't any sweeter from the seller's point of view.
  - colmvp 6y ago
    I was very physically fit when I started online dating. The reality is that there are a number of variables you really can't change, at least without surgery which I realize is done in places like South Korea. You can't completely change your face structure, male pattern baldness, ethnicity, or height.
    - CoastalCoder 6y ago
      > male pattern baldness One thing you can control is how you respond to male-pattern baldness. At two extremes: comb-over vs. shave your head. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I imagine women prefer one of those options over the other.
    - 6y ago
lubosm 6y ago
As a former tech staff member at one European dating site, around year 2010 and originated in Germany, the numbers are much worse for paying customers. The numbers presented here are still overly optimistic. The company's owner at that time told me that they know of ONE couple that got married. They were in service for a few years already at the time. Their whole business model was investing about 100 thousand Euros monthly in ads and getting 300 thousand back.
istorical 6y ago
In 2005, people were embarrassed to use online dating because doing so was admitting that you needed it or that you were desperate. In 2010, straight men were embarrassed to pay for premium memberships or features on online dating because doing so was admitting you were desperate. Now in 2021, I am just starting to have female friends that are subscribing to hinge and having that same internal conversation about desperation and struggle with their ego that me and my straight male friends had with ourselves a decade ago in our early 20s when we spent our first $5-10 a month to get unlimited swipes. People are realizing that spending money on trying to find love is worth it in a world where many spend so much on Christmas presents, restaurants, bars, vacations, etc. I am just waiting for governments to realize failing birth rates are such an important factor in the economy that it behooves them to try to actual launch their own free services to try to improve matchmaking. Or to regulate these marketplaces more seriously to encourage these services to optimize more for lasting matches than optimizing for monetization and revenue. I believe Japan is the first to try actually spending government funds specifically on dating apps, both funding dating app startups and building their own, although other countries have been funding different initiatives to encourage people to start families like tax schemes or other monetary rewards. Machine learning has a lot to contribute, but at the same time it can be weaponized against us by private for-profits that want to return money to shareholders. But its theoretically possible to try to find more quality matches with actual reciprocated interest with machine learning, and to find other ways to tweak the rules and systems of online dating to discourage people from matching people they aren't actually interested in dating and responding to those they have matched, to decrease the 'grass is greener / what if the next person on the app I swipe on is better than that person I went out with last friday night' phenomenon, and solve all the other cultural problems created by commoditization of dating prospects, etc. I think Hinge was doing some interesting stuff with ML that was giving it a tangible feeling of surfacing better potential matches than other services, but with their acquisition by Match Group and move to put their better matches behind a paywall and encourages spending I assume that's changed (especially since the 'roses' update). What frustrates me is that there seems to be very little way for users to actually provide feedback to these apps learning mechanisms. When the ML is right, it's great. But when the ML is wrong, it's absolutely awful. For example, to report back 'the matches you have been providing were appealing to me because of A, B, and C, but were unappealing to me because of E, F, and G', where the particular feedback factors could be 'physical appearance', 'job', 'political beliefs', 'children or family goals', stop showing me people with terms like 'poly, ethically nonmonogamous', or alternatively start showing me more of those people, etc. I have had friends here who get nothing but handsome but unemployed men showing up in their feeds which for them was a dealbreaker whereas I don't care much at all about my partner's job. And I myself have 'don't want kids' as a boolean flag in my hinge profile but because I once added 'don't want kids' as text in one of my bio prompts, I was getting tons of people who _do_ want kids in my feed. I think the ML algo just saw the text 'kids' in the text part of my bio and ignored the 'don't want kids' boolean part. Myself and my friends have noticed things like if we stopped swiping based on attractiveness and started only looking at job title and for a couple weeks swiped right on people with higher status jobs even if they weren't our type, we got shifted into what seemed like entirely different archetypes and categories of people being sent to us. Like suddenly instead of my female friends getting cute skater boys they were getting wall street traders that had never even been available or visible to them previously. Which raises the question of - is it possible for the dating app ML and our swiping to put us into local maximums (based on our last 1000 swipes) but global minimums?
squeaky-clean 6y ago
I wonder if there would be a business case for a non-subscription paid dating service. A one time payment on sign up for a lifetime membership, or something. The idea being that the service has made its money from you already, and now the goal is to get you to stop logging in. In the happy case it's because you've found a partner, but there's always room for dark patterns I suppose.
peruvian 6y ago
Things are different in 2020. I pay $10/mo for Hinge[1] when I am actively dating. As a man it's a numbers game (like the article says) so the more likes I send, the better. The ~10 likes free Hinge gives me per day are useless. [1] I still have this price in my iTunes subscriptions, but I know brand new accounts have to pay a lot more. That sucks.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Dating sites have a unique business model where a successful user no longer needs your product. So how do you make money from that? Charging monthly fees creates perverse incentives. It will be in their best interest to avoid giving you a good match while trying to make it look like they're trying. A one-time fee will make a user feel ripped off if they never end up landing a date. You could try a model where you pay them once you go on a date (Or some other metric of "success"), but users could easily lie. I met my wife on OKCupid back in 2010, so I haven't had the pleasure/pain of using Tinder, but from what I know of it, it worries me. OKCupid was designed from the ground up to actually show you matches that you might be compatible with on a personality level, while Tinder is rather superficial, making appearance the most important. In other words, you're less likely to find a successful long-term relationship on Tinder. As a side note, it's always seemed rather paradoxical that dating sites have far more men than women on them. I would think that the numbers would be more equal, since the population split among the sexes is pretty close to 50/50.
- anticristi 6y ago
  Here is an alternative business model: Make it easy to get a match, but optimize the match so that a break-up happens after a pre-determined time. This way, the dating app can genuinely claim success and you have returning customers. I can already hear a pitch deck being presented to VCs.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Successful users go off and create more users. The lead time is long, but the supply pipeline is already in place. New users become ready every single year, and they expect to be in the target market for a decade or so before pairing off.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    That's a good point, actually. If a dating site is so good at finding matches for people that there are tons of success stories, it's free advertising. Look at me, just coming out and talking about meeting my wife on OKCupid. I think eHarmony's biggest problem was that they're too expensive. The article estimated that 96.25% of the profiles were dead, meaning less than 4% of their users were paying. I imagine they could have turned that way up by charging $10/month instead of a ridiculous $60/month. Less profit per user, but make up for it in volume.
moonchild 6y ago
Nice piece, although: > It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com. Is likely to be misleading: unsubscribing from match.com won't increase the chance you get married. Far likelier is that the sorts of people who would have had difficulty marrying in the first place are more likely to use dating apps.
underseacables 6y ago
Something that is not talked about enough is all of the personal data that you give dating websites. They ask your opinions on things, answering questions, there is a tremendous amount of that data that could be used quite negatively.
dang 6y ago
The last major thread was less than a year ago so this counts as a dupe (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts are fine after a year or so (usually a little more). Links to past discussions, like the following, are just in case people find them interesting: Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265 comments) Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110199 - Sept 2019 (6 comments) Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 - Sept 2017 (1 comment) Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 - Feb 2011 (80 comments) Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 - Oct 2010 (32 comments) Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 - April 2010 (9 comments)

75 points by ZeljkoS 6y ago

interesting article. I'm big fan of online dating. I like online dating and many of my friends met their gf online. Esp I like this free video chat app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videochat.olive https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.videochat.... . It's a perfect place to meet new friends and talk with people from different countries.

sarosh 6y ago

See prior discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501

klyrs 6y ago

(2010)

paulgb 6y ago
IIRC, there was some contention about this post when Match.com acquired OkCupid, since people paying for online dating is kind of their business model. If I remember right, it was quietly deleted from their official blog.

graeme 6y ago

Note that this describes a past era. Now, the main apps usually have some way by which if you pay you get higher visibility in the algorithm. E.g. on Tinder if you are premium you get a boost each month and five superlikes a day. The latter show you specifically to the person you superlike (but identify you as having done so), the former boosts your general presence. You can also buy more boosts, and these do up your presence. The headline would still be accurate though if it read “never join a dating app which requires payment”.

grezql 6y ago
its the same shit, different wrapping. they all pray on the desperation and profits off it. Bringing people together is only secondary motivation.
k__ 6y ago
I paid for OKCupid once for a month or so, because I always had like 25 likes (for multiple years now) I couldn't see and I was curious. I could see my like and in that paid month my likes almost doubled. I didn't act on them, because I wasn't interested in the people who liked me. But I wouldn't see this as a OKC problem. Overall I had the impression, I got my moneys worth.

koboll 6y ago

Having been on several dating apps for about a decade, Bumble has been far and away the best experience. I've met multiple girlfriends on it and there's a high chance I'll eventually marry someone I met off it. It elegantly solves the problem this article identifies in a way every other app and site cannot, because (in hetero pairings) women must initiate the conversation.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> It elegantly solves the problem this article identifies in a way every other app and site cannot. How is it different?
- isoskeles 6y ago
  Women initiate the conversation. Not sure how it works for anything other than male-female matching though.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    > Women initiate the conversation. They have already indicated that they are interested in the man by swing "yes" on him.
    - isoskeles 6y ago
      I'm not clear on what you're mean. On Bumble, women are specifically supposed to type out the first message in a conversation, which is what makes it unique from other apps where either party may send the first message. If the woman does not send a message within some period, the match disappears. (This is how it was several years ago. I assume it is similar.) Supposedly this makes it better, although I disagree. Many women adapt to that in the same way that men adapted to it in the OP, which is to say, they start sending out generic, shitty messages like, "Hi."
throway98752343 6y ago
Bumble is more superficial than Tinder because instead of 2 filtering gates it has 3 and that 3rd gate also removes the opportunity to create attraction through performance or skill. 1. Are you shown to someone you like? Other than paid things like Boost your only lever may be how you swipe. 2. Did they like you back? Good photos and bio actually help here so you have some agency. 3. Are they interested enough to initiate within the time limit? No agency here purely on the basis of sex. "Hi." The deafening silence of gate 3 removes any chance to move a match from indifferent to interested by being funny, skillful or otherwise interesting. And it dumps even more work on the already most overwhelmed party in dating apps: the woman. On hetero Bumble, be handsome, be attractive, don't be unattractive.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pcbro141 6y ago

I went on Tinder again for the first time in several years and they just keep adding new 'Premium' memberships for men to pay for, it's insane. Tinder Plus, Tinder Gold, Tinder Platinum, Tinder Super Like, Tinder Boost, Tinder Super Boost, Tinder Top Picks. They're making a sh*t ton of money (highest grossing app 2019) off mostly men's desperation (~$1.4 billion in 2019 reportedly), but there's only so much paying for all these boosts and memberships can do when there's just so much more demand for women on there. Tinder is also reportedly as much as 75-85% male. I hope young men aren't letting their lack of matches on the dating apps lower their self esteem/make them depressed and try approaching in real life (post-pandemic). I know for some the feeling of getting close to 0 matches while others get hundreds a day can be crushing to their mental health. But real life is much better, don't let a lack of online success (what's the point, she wouldn't swipe me online so why should I approach her?) stop you from approaching women in real life .

BerislavLopac 6y ago
It certainly feels like seeking.com is the only honest dating app out there...
commandlinefan 6y ago
Well... before the internet, if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub, paid $20 to get in, and then $15-$20 per drink so you wouldn't be wandering around without a drink in your hand. A lot of these places had cover charges for men but not for women, so they were making money off mostly men's desperation, too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > if you wanted to meet somebody you probably went to a nightclub I'm sure that I have seen somewhere here before some hard statistics on where partners meet in Western countries – maybe someone still has a link. In spite of the existence of known meat markets, those meat markets are not the source of most of the population’s relationships. Instead, people come together through mundane things like friends of friends, people at work, people in the neighbourhood, classmates, etc.

Jommi 6y ago

Its crazy. The global online dating culture / landscape / norms are currently COMPLETELY dictated by a private company from a single country. That is absolutely insane. What is the implication on mental health and stress if one gets banned from Match group apps for life? Sure IRL is still there, but ABD is here to stay and is the one dictating the norms currently. How do we solve this issue?

fao_ 6y ago
Are there not at least 4 or 5 different competing companies in this space? Also you could, you know, go to a bar or meet people at special interest groups. I do believe that before internet dating most people had some kind of a life -- or lack of one -- and found each other through that.
- p49k 6y ago
  > Are there not at least 4 or 5 different competing companies in this space? No, there are a combined 4 or 5 apps that cover almost 100% of the attention in this space, and all but one are owned by the same company.
  - JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    It's like antitrust is just not even a word anymore.
- joncrane 6y ago
  Pretty sure one main company owns ~80% of the dating app marketplace, though I could be wrong on the exact percentage.
- wsc981 6y ago
  I believe Badoo is also pretty huge, but I never used it. Perhaps not owned by the same company that owns Tinder.
  - thesimon 6y ago

standardUser 6y ago

This (2010) article is talking about Match and eHarmony, which I have never used. But if you pay for things like Hinge and Tinder, it really does expedite the searching/matching process and makes getting dates a bit easier (if you are a man seeking women). Finding decent matches can be a tedious and time-consuming process, and only a fraction of those matches ever turn into actual dates. So to me, speeding that up even a little is worth the $20 or whatever.

lacker 6y ago

It's interesting that Match.com acquired OkCupid shortly after this post. OkCupid deleted this post, and there was some minor controversy about whether they were forced to delete it or what. https://web.archive.org/web/20110204185529/http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/okcupid-we-didnt-censor-our-matchcom-bashing-blog-post https://web.archive.org/web/20110204185529/http://www.observ... Of course, this was all before the great rise of mobile apps, subsequently the Tinder model would become the dominant one, where you pay for higher visibility, and you can debate the effectiveness but it's all pretty different from how things worked back then.

colmvp 6y ago

The funny thing some of the observations described in the post is so true despite being 10+ years old. When I first started online dating five years ago, I put in a ton of effort in my replies/messages, except I rarely got any replies. That was pretty sobering. I still put effort in my replies/messages, but I got used to just one or two sentences rather than an actual paragraph. A good female friend of mine complains about how guys in online dating can barely hold a conversation. I have said to her, you have no idea how many messages your average or below-average (in terms of physical attractiveness) male has to send to get a date, let alone a response in the first place.

xiphias2 6y ago
The fact is that almost only photos matter, so the same time that you put into thinking of replies is better spent in the gym.
- scythe 6y ago
  Only photos are trustworthy. You can even hire someone to have conversations with you. You can use a fake photo, too, but your date will leave immediately. The market for lemons isn't any sweeter from the seller's point of view.
- colmvp 6y ago
  I was very physically fit when I started online dating. The reality is that there are a number of variables you really can't change, at least without surgery which I realize is done in places like South Korea. You can't completely change your face structure, male pattern baldness, ethnicity, or height.
  - CoastalCoder 6y ago
    > male pattern baldness One thing you can control is how you respond to male-pattern baldness. At two extremes: comb-over vs. shave your head. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I imagine women prefer one of those options over the other.
  - 6y ago

lubosm 6y ago

As a former tech staff member at one European dating site, around year 2010 and originated in Germany, the numbers are much worse for paying customers. The numbers presented here are still overly optimistic. The company's owner at that time told me that they know of ONE couple that got married. They were in service for a few years already at the time. Their whole business model was investing about 100 thousand Euros monthly in ads and getting 300 thousand back.

istorical 6y ago

In 2005, people were embarrassed to use online dating because doing so was admitting that you needed it or that you were desperate. In 2010, straight men were embarrassed to pay for premium memberships or features on online dating because doing so was admitting you were desperate. Now in 2021, I am just starting to have female friends that are subscribing to hinge and having that same internal conversation about desperation and struggle with their ego that me and my straight male friends had with ourselves a decade ago in our early 20s when we spent our first $5-10 a month to get unlimited swipes. People are realizing that spending money on trying to find love is worth it in a world where many spend so much on Christmas presents, restaurants, bars, vacations, etc. I am just waiting for governments to realize failing birth rates are such an important factor in the economy that it behooves them to try to actual launch their own free services to try to improve matchmaking. Or to regulate these marketplaces more seriously to encourage these services to optimize more for lasting matches than optimizing for monetization and revenue. I believe Japan is the first to try actually spending government funds specifically on dating apps, both funding dating app startups and building their own, although other countries have been funding different initiatives to encourage people to start families like tax schemes or other monetary rewards. Machine learning has a lot to contribute, but at the same time it can be weaponized against us by private for-profits that want to return money to shareholders. But its theoretically possible to try to find more quality matches with actual reciprocated interest with machine learning, and to find other ways to tweak the rules and systems of online dating to discourage people from matching people they aren't actually interested in dating and responding to those they have matched, to decrease the 'grass is greener / what if the next person on the app I swipe on is better than that person I went out with last friday night' phenomenon, and solve all the other cultural problems created by commoditization of dating prospects, etc. I think Hinge was doing some interesting stuff with ML that was giving it a tangible feeling of surfacing better potential matches than other services, but with their acquisition by Match Group and move to put their better matches behind a paywall and encourages spending I assume that's changed (especially since the 'roses' update). What frustrates me is that there seems to be very little way for users to actually provide feedback to these apps learning mechanisms. When the ML is right, it's great. But when the ML is wrong, it's absolutely awful. For example, to report back 'the matches you have been providing were appealing to me because of A, B, and C, but were unappealing to me because of E, F, and G', where the particular feedback factors could be 'physical appearance', 'job', 'political beliefs', 'children or family goals', stop showing me people with terms like 'poly, ethically nonmonogamous', or alternatively start showing me more of those people, etc. I have had friends here who get nothing but handsome but unemployed men showing up in their feeds which for them was a dealbreaker whereas I don't care much at all about my partner's job. And I myself have 'don't want kids' as a boolean flag in my hinge profile but because I once added 'don't want kids' as text in one of my bio prompts, I was getting tons of people who _do_ want kids in my feed. I think the ML algo just saw the text 'kids' in the text part of my bio and ignored the 'don't want kids' boolean part. Myself and my friends have noticed things like if we stopped swiping based on attractiveness and started only looking at job title and for a couple weeks swiped right on people with higher status jobs even if they weren't our type, we got shifted into what seemed like entirely different archetypes and categories of people being sent to us. Like suddenly instead of my female friends getting cute skater boys they were getting wall street traders that had never even been available or visible to them previously. Which raises the question of - is it possible for the dating app ML and our swiping to put us into local maximums (based on our last 1000 swipes) but global minimums?

squeaky-clean 6y ago

I wonder if there would be a business case for a non-subscription paid dating service. A one time payment on sign up for a lifetime membership, or something. The idea being that the service has made its money from you already, and now the goal is to get you to stop logging in. In the happy case it's because you've found a partner, but there's always room for dark patterns I suppose.

peruvian 6y ago

Things are different in 2020. I pay $10/mo for Hinge[1] when I am actively dating. As a man it's a numbers game (like the article says) so the more likes I send, the better. The ~10 likes free Hinge gives me per day are useless. [1] I still have this price in my iTunes subscriptions, but I know brand new accounts have to pay a lot more. That sucks.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

Dating sites have a unique business model where a successful user no longer needs your product. So how do you make money from that? Charging monthly fees creates perverse incentives. It will be in their best interest to avoid giving you a good match while trying to make it look like they're trying. A one-time fee will make a user feel ripped off if they never end up landing a date. You could try a model where you pay them once you go on a date (Or some other metric of "success"), but users could easily lie. I met my wife on OKCupid back in 2010, so I haven't had the pleasure/pain of using Tinder, but from what I know of it, it worries me. OKCupid was designed from the ground up to actually show you matches that you might be compatible with on a personality level, while Tinder is rather superficial, making appearance the most important. In other words, you're less likely to find a successful long-term relationship on Tinder. As a side note, it's always seemed rather paradoxical that dating sites have far more men than women on them. I would think that the numbers would be more equal, since the population split among the sexes is pretty close to 50/50.

anticristi 6y ago
Here is an alternative business model: Make it easy to get a match, but optimize the match so that a break-up happens after a pre-determined time. This way, the dating app can genuinely claim success and you have returning customers. I can already hear a pitch deck being presented to VCs.
jfengel 6y ago
Successful users go off and create more users. The lead time is long, but the supply pipeline is already in place. New users become ready every single year, and they expect to be in the target market for a decade or so before pairing off.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  That's a good point, actually. If a dating site is so good at finding matches for people that there are tons of success stories, it's free advertising. Look at me, just coming out and talking about meeting my wife on OKCupid. I think eHarmony's biggest problem was that they're too expensive. The article estimated that 96.25% of the profiles were dead, meaning less than 4% of their users were paying. I imagine they could have turned that way up by charging $10/month instead of a ridiculous $60/month. Less profit per user, but make up for it in volume.

moonchild 6y ago

Nice piece, although: > It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com. Is likely to be misleading: unsubscribing from match.com won't increase the chance you get married. Far likelier is that the sorts of people who would have had difficulty marrying in the first place are more likely to use dating apps.

underseacables 6y ago

Something that is not talked about enough is all of the personal data that you give dating websites. They ask your opinions on things, answering questions, there is a tremendous amount of that data that could be used quite negatively.

dang 6y ago

The last major thread was less than a year ago so this counts as a dupe (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts are fine after a year or so (usually a little more). Links to past discussions, like the following, are just in case people find them interesting: Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 - Nov 2020 (265 comments) Never Pay for Online Dating (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110199 - Sept 2019 (6 comments) Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating [cached] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15260785 - Sept 2017 (1 comment) Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170998 - Feb 2011 (80 comments) Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1842557 - Oct 2010 (32 comments) Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277626 - April 2010 (9 comments)