3 ms·

I have an idea for an app that I will never realize so I'll throw it out in the air: Make an app where you make a relatively extensive profile, put up a bounty

I have an idea for an app that I will never realize so I'll throw it out in the air: Make an app where you make a relatively extensive profile, put up a bounty for a match, and then crowdsource the matching. So the app experience would be mainly trying to match other people based on their looks and profile. When a relationship (or whatever goal) is made, people will payout their bounty. Or they can tip and the like for dates, good matches, etc. The biggest killer of dating apps is the disparity between mens extreme thirst and women's extreme reservation. Both need a reality check and I think others doing the matching would provide it. Edit: Also, augmenting this system with AI/LLMs/transformers would make it enormously powerful. It's basically an AI matching framework.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. The optimization is for physical attraction, which is orthogonal to what makes a long term sustainable relationship (emotional health, mutual respect and trust, etc). I don't believe an app will fix this people problem. You can't Uber or Doordash a great partner, but that is the expectation that has been built. Citations: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... | https://archive.is/JSFXx https://archive.is/JSFXx https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 | Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 (Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps (2020))
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men. The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I don't believe you're wrong. There is strong evidence that there are unrealistic expectations in the current iteration of the dating marketplace. I have no advice other than to be secure in your self, prioritize being the best person you can be for your own wellbeing, and make as much opportunity as reasonable to meet other healthy people open to relationships. Good luck out there. Fortune favors the prepared. The right person might not come along, but if they do, be ready to connect. High level, what you describe is the Instagram Reality imprinted on relationship expectations. People are chasing a fairy tale, not reality. https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/ https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444819888720 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444819888720 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chia-Chen-Yang/publication/309419236_Instagram_Use_Loneliness_and_Social_Comparison_Orientation_Interact_and_Browse_on_Social_Media_But_Don't_Compare/links/585324b808ae7d33e01ab5c8/Instagram-Use-Loneliness-and-Social-Comparison-Orientation-Interact-and-Browse-on-Social-Media-But-Dont-Compare.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chia-Chen-Yang/publicat...
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps Exactly. Which means 80% of men will have a real issue finding partners (or already are).
- DoughnutHole 3y ago
  The big problem is that "dating" apps are currently a mix of people looking for companionships and people just looking for sex - and the most popular ones are optimised for the latter, where matching largely comes down to selecting based on attractiveness of a photo. The biggest problem is that attractiveness in real life doesn't match one-to-one with attractiveness in a photo. Interests, charisma, sense of humour etc aren't just "personality" attributes independent of attractiveness - they're components of attractiveness when people encounter each other in the real world. Most people probably don't end up as attractive when you meet them in person as they appeared in their profile picture, because there's not great odds of chemistry when two people match up based on nothing but two photos. That's fine if you're just looking for a hookup, but it results in a frustrating search for a relationship. Honestly I'd wonder if a downgrade to blind matching based on bio would be more effective. People could still dump each other if they meet and don't find each other attractive, but might match up people who are a great match in the real world if not in gamified dating apps.
  - runnerup 3y ago
    You’re greatly underestimating the amount and diversity of signals present in even a single photograph.
    - nathanaldensr 3y ago
      It's too bad the signals are often covered up by heavy filter usage.
      - andrewflnr 3y ago
        No, still underestimating. Also, filter usage is one of the signals.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Dating apps combined with birth control seem to be taking us away from monogamy and towards polygamy. That top 20% of men has no incentive to want to commit to any one woman, so those women are competing in a mostly fruitless quest that may be fun in the short term, but isn't going anywhere. Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means". That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. Modern dating seems insane, I don't see how that's good for either men or women. But what do I know. Edit: If you disagree, say why.
  - samtho 3y ago
    I did not downvote, mainly because I don’t think the downvote button means “disagree” but there are some statements you make that probably resulted in a “yikes” for more then a few people. > Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means. That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. This is both reductionist and sexist, drawing a sweeping conclusion that women are both incapable and unaware of the dynamic: they are just as aware as guys are, if not more. Additionally, there is the assumption that all women want to have kids and that settling down quickly after lowering their standards leads to incompatibility. The other part of this that rubbed me the wrong way (which may or may not have been intentional on your part) is that you grouped infidelity and divorce as equally undesirable, implying this to be a moral argument rather than a practical argument of compatibility. But I also acknowledge that I may have simply read too much into it. > Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. This is also a bit reductionist, but there is a good reason why a good chunk of men are ignored. Some of them absolutely suck at providing information to a prospective partner. Those with poor photos and bland bios will be passed over quickly because women likely have a hundred more to choose from. These men will likely be stuck on the platform with few matches and lack the introspection to realize that their profile might be a turn off.
- alex_young 3y ago
  Presumably this means that the top 20 percent of men on dating apps (whatever top means) are dating 4 women simultaneously on average right? Sounds complicated.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I can't speak for others, only anecdotes (and I have no DOIs on this). I have several people in my circle who have had sex with more than 1 person from dating apps in a day, a weekend, etc. This weakly confirms the stats publicly available for my own model on the topic. "Dating" doing a lot of lifting in your comment.
  - flatline 3y ago
    Lots of men are hooking up with some rotation of four women semi-regularly, yes. A lot of those women are doing the same. Not necessarily all at once, but that too. There are plenty of people who date casually like this without labeling it some form of non-monogamy, and without actively trying to get into a committed relationship. When you are very attractive on dating apps - I would say more like the top 5% than the top 20% of men - you have all the choices in the world, your experience is dramatically different than that of other men.
  - rationalist 3y ago
    Or a man goes on a different date for four different nights a week, while a woman goes on one date a week.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Not complicated at all. If you're an attractive and successful man, you can easily see multiple women simultaneously. Even literally at the same time, in the same bed. Managing all those relationships even starts to become a serious pain in the ass at some point. The bitter sociopathic truth is if you're attractive enough you can get away with pretty much anything. It really is a lot like the market. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sex gods get more and more sex while incels get even less than nothing, they are actively hated.
- samtho 3y ago
  A dating app is not a delivery service, it’s lead generation. The divide in behavior along the gender line is explained as actors behaving rationally in a free market. If you have many options available to you (and you don’t see who you are competing against), you will naturally only select the top X%. Conversely, if you have a low number of potential matches, you will cast a wider net because your are just trying to maximize options available to you. In a heterosexual dating scene, there are also safety issues that women face which I am not qualified to comment on, but it should be acknowledged. It is silly to assume that this has no effect on who she chooses to match with. I’m sure there are signals that she recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that influence her decision to swipe right in the first place. The biggest elephant in the room relates to the fact that people who are objectively poor partners will be overrepresented on these platforms. People who are violent, unstable, hair-triggered, poor communicators, serial liars, or anyone who exhibits anti-social tendencies will likely keep coming back to the app after their previous matches inevitably decide they are undesirable. Because they often lack the introspection to identify that they themselves might be the problem (or are just exceptionally shitty and know this but don’t care), they will continue to poison this market and ruin it for everyone. The app provider doesn’t care to solve this because their job is to serve matches (in fact there exists a perverse incentive to not match people well so they keep coming back, but I have no evidence they are acting on this). This brings up ethical questions if we wanted to de-platform toxic people. Who decides this? Do we survey matches that did not work out and ban them if they meet enough poor feedback? How long do we ban them? Do we weight toxicity ratings given as a function of how toxic the rater has been rated themselves? As callous as it is, I partially understand why dating apps do not tackle this. Trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution is always doomed to fail, with mate choice about as social of a problem as it gets. At the end of the day, we need to create systems that augment our social capabilities, not replace them. Any technological solution can and will be gamed in both directions where people will inappropriately be labeled as poor partners and people who get labeled that will circumvent the label regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Unless we identify an objectively verifiable, directly measurable, desirable behavior, we can’t possibly solve this with technology alone. All this is to say that the real solution probably won’t scale, but this means there is likely an opportunity here, as the conventional wisdom states. The problem is the barrier to entry is too high which means more nuanced solutions are likely to be killed before they even get off the ground. I don’t envy those in this business, it really just seems like a losing battle as you grow as a company.
- sublinear 3y ago
  I don't think dating apps make a difference in the grand scheme of things for two reasons: the "top 20%" of men have always had the first pick, and you can still try to find a date the traditional ways. I put the blame on social media. Getting to know people through a friend was the default and you no longer have to meet in person to do that. Sanitizing social interactions and activists drumming up social fears for their causes has scared everyone off. The only solution is for more people to ignore it all and get out there in person again. That takes time and the pandemic wasn't enough of a nudge.
- 0verkilled 3y ago
  > The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps I've seen this type of statement repeated many times, and respectfully I think it's a very broad and oversimplified reduction of such a complex topic. The source you provided is extremely limited (afaict it's a sample size of 27 in a single app, a very circular definition of attractiveness, obviously not peer reviewed, etc.), but I think even a more reputable source would still have very limited results due to the huge scope of online dating and the highly subjective impressions involved. I do agree that online dating appears to be superficial and not a great tool for finding meaningful relationships, but I've found that a lot of the discourse surrounding it (regular dating too) seems more based on collective insecurities than solid research. Maybe there are differences in dating habits that favor some group over another, but a lot of the things I've seen tend to go to towards the idea of female hypergamy (a pillar of 'redpilled' incel ideology) without a lot to back it up. I'm not saying that this particular study is necessarily wrong, but I'm wary of the biases, unconscious beliefs and assumptions that are usually carried when 'facts' like these are taken at face value.
- foogazi 3y ago
  > The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. Dating apps already have an inverse 80m/20f skew What would it look like if it was evened up 50/50 ? Isn’t that the top 16% of women competing for the top 16% of men ? Eli5
johnwheeler 3y ago
Only men would use it though, right? Women probably wouldn’t need to, and any mate crowdsourcing would be done off-line, bounty-free by friends and people you trust anyway
gjsman-1000 3y ago
I've realized it's actually not just dating. Dating and Hiring overlap a lot conceptually, and both have serious unsolved problems right now. They really are the same problem - match people to other people based on various (but different) qualifications. Solve Hiring, you've solved Dating. Solve Dating, you've solved Hiring.
- thereisnojesus 3y ago
  Ah yes, I love a highly optimized relationship where value is one sided
- htrp 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  nah. maybe in the sense there are interpersonal skills and human judgements, but otherwise these are wildly different, and with different outcomes.
bckr 3y ago
I like this idea. What it lacks is accountability after the match has been made. When you meet someone IRL, you’re generally embedded in some social network. You met through friends, or at a function. Someone was responsible for introducing you, and that person is held responsible to a degree if one of you is a major jerk. Dating apps are the ultimate ephemeralization and atomization of our society. “We met through an app,” while now commonplace, is also an absence of rich social embedding. At best, your friends meet their friends; but when you break up, it’s likely those networks bisect as well.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Perhaps we can use the credit rating agencies to have a dating credit history report along with a financial credit history report. Combine this with the credit/debit card networks purchase histories, and pay history from The Work Number, and I bet we could come up with a dating score number to match people up.
- ekaryotic 3y ago
  It sounds something like the stock market to me. I'm not sure what you mean by accountability, do you mean that someone could do a runner after using the service and not pay out. If you did base it on stocks and shares then that wouldn't happen. I don't personally understand how stocks work, but i recall it was invented by betting on whether ships would return from a dangerous voyage or not, and as a way of spreading the cost and spoils. Surely it's possible to bet on a relationship in the same way, and those who bet the most accurately would benefit the most. then you look at your odds and check the match out.
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TZubiri 3y ago
It's easy to see how this would devolve into prostitution or onlyfans
HPsquared 3y ago
How would you deal with the spam problem?
sublinear 3y ago
Sounds like a way to launder money. Make lots of small bounties everyone ignores and run bots that vote you into a match. Hell you don't even need the bots if nobody else is trying to match you; just need a few votes. Ignore the match and collect a clean bounty. Like others said, crowds paying out and receiving money lacks accountability.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. The optimization is for physical attraction, which is orthogonal to what makes a long term sustainable relationship (emotional health, mutual respect and trust, etc). I don't believe an app will fix this people problem. You can't Uber or Doordash a great partner, but that is the expectation that has been built. Citations: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... | https://archive.is/JSFXx https://archive.is/JSFXx https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 | Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 (Never Pay for Online Dating (2010)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps (2020))

Workaccount2 3y ago
The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men. The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I don't believe you're wrong. There is strong evidence that there are unrealistic expectations in the current iteration of the dating marketplace. I have no advice other than to be secure in your self, prioritize being the best person you can be for your own wellbeing, and make as much opportunity as reasonable to meet other healthy people open to relationships. Good luck out there. Fortune favors the prepared. The right person might not come along, but if they do, be ready to connect. High level, what you describe is the Instagram Reality imprinted on relationship expectations. People are chasing a fairy tale, not reality. https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/ https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444819888720 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444819888720 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chia-Chen-Yang/publication/309419236_Instagram_Use_Loneliness_and_Social_Comparison_Orientation_Interact_and_Browse_on_Social_Media_But_Don't_Compare/links/585324b808ae7d33e01ab5c8/Instagram-Use-Loneliness-and-Social-Comparison-Orientation-Interact-and-Browse-on-Social-Media-But-Dont-Compare.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chia-Chen-Yang/publicat...
ekianjo 3y ago
> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps Exactly. Which means 80% of men will have a real issue finding partners (or already are).
DoughnutHole 3y ago
The big problem is that "dating" apps are currently a mix of people looking for companionships and people just looking for sex - and the most popular ones are optimised for the latter, where matching largely comes down to selecting based on attractiveness of a photo. The biggest problem is that attractiveness in real life doesn't match one-to-one with attractiveness in a photo. Interests, charisma, sense of humour etc aren't just "personality" attributes independent of attractiveness - they're components of attractiveness when people encounter each other in the real world. Most people probably don't end up as attractive when you meet them in person as they appeared in their profile picture, because there's not great odds of chemistry when two people match up based on nothing but two photos. That's fine if you're just looking for a hookup, but it results in a frustrating search for a relationship. Honestly I'd wonder if a downgrade to blind matching based on bio would be more effective. People could still dump each other if they meet and don't find each other attractive, but might match up people who are a great match in the real world if not in gamified dating apps.
- runnerup 3y ago
  You’re greatly underestimating the amount and diversity of signals present in even a single photograph.
  - nathanaldensr 3y ago
    It's too bad the signals are often covered up by heavy filter usage.
    - andrewflnr 3y ago
      No, still underestimating. Also, filter usage is one of the signals.
slashdev 3y ago
Dating apps combined with birth control seem to be taking us away from monogamy and towards polygamy. That top 20% of men has no incentive to want to commit to any one woman, so those women are competing in a mostly fruitless quest that may be fun in the short term, but isn't going anywhere. Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means". That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. Modern dating seems insane, I don't see how that's good for either men or women. But what do I know. Edit: If you disagree, say why.
- samtho 3y ago
  I did not downvote, mainly because I don’t think the downvote button means “disagree” but there are some statements you make that probably resulted in a “yikes” for more then a few people. > Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means. That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. This is both reductionist and sexist, drawing a sweeping conclusion that women are both incapable and unaware of the dynamic: they are just as aware as guys are, if not more. Additionally, there is the assumption that all women want to have kids and that settling down quickly after lowering their standards leads to incompatibility. The other part of this that rubbed me the wrong way (which may or may not have been intentional on your part) is that you grouped infidelity and divorce as equally undesirable, implying this to be a moral argument rather than a practical argument of compatibility. But I also acknowledge that I may have simply read too much into it. > Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. This is also a bit reductionist, but there is a good reason why a good chunk of men are ignored. Some of them absolutely suck at providing information to a prospective partner. Those with poor photos and bland bios will be passed over quickly because women likely have a hundred more to choose from. These men will likely be stuck on the platform with few matches and lack the introspection to realize that their profile might be a turn off.
alex_young 3y ago
Presumably this means that the top 20 percent of men on dating apps (whatever top means) are dating 4 women simultaneously on average right? Sounds complicated.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  I can't speak for others, only anecdotes (and I have no DOIs on this). I have several people in my circle who have had sex with more than 1 person from dating apps in a day, a weekend, etc. This weakly confirms the stats publicly available for my own model on the topic. "Dating" doing a lot of lifting in your comment.
- flatline 3y ago
  Lots of men are hooking up with some rotation of four women semi-regularly, yes. A lot of those women are doing the same. Not necessarily all at once, but that too. There are plenty of people who date casually like this without labeling it some form of non-monogamy, and without actively trying to get into a committed relationship. When you are very attractive on dating apps - I would say more like the top 5% than the top 20% of men - you have all the choices in the world, your experience is dramatically different than that of other men.
- rationalist 3y ago
  Or a man goes on a different date for four different nights a week, while a woman goes on one date a week.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Not complicated at all. If you're an attractive and successful man, you can easily see multiple women simultaneously. Even literally at the same time, in the same bed. Managing all those relationships even starts to become a serious pain in the ass at some point. The bitter sociopathic truth is if you're attractive enough you can get away with pretty much anything. It really is a lot like the market. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sex gods get more and more sex while incels get even less than nothing, they are actively hated.
samtho 3y ago
A dating app is not a delivery service, it’s lead generation. The divide in behavior along the gender line is explained as actors behaving rationally in a free market. If you have many options available to you (and you don’t see who you are competing against), you will naturally only select the top X%. Conversely, if you have a low number of potential matches, you will cast a wider net because your are just trying to maximize options available to you. In a heterosexual dating scene, there are also safety issues that women face which I am not qualified to comment on, but it should be acknowledged. It is silly to assume that this has no effect on who she chooses to match with. I’m sure there are signals that she recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that influence her decision to swipe right in the first place. The biggest elephant in the room relates to the fact that people who are objectively poor partners will be overrepresented on these platforms. People who are violent, unstable, hair-triggered, poor communicators, serial liars, or anyone who exhibits anti-social tendencies will likely keep coming back to the app after their previous matches inevitably decide they are undesirable. Because they often lack the introspection to identify that they themselves might be the problem (or are just exceptionally shitty and know this but don’t care), they will continue to poison this market and ruin it for everyone. The app provider doesn’t care to solve this because their job is to serve matches (in fact there exists a perverse incentive to not match people well so they keep coming back, but I have no evidence they are acting on this). This brings up ethical questions if we wanted to de-platform toxic people. Who decides this? Do we survey matches that did not work out and ban them if they meet enough poor feedback? How long do we ban them? Do we weight toxicity ratings given as a function of how toxic the rater has been rated themselves? As callous as it is, I partially understand why dating apps do not tackle this. Trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution is always doomed to fail, with mate choice about as social of a problem as it gets. At the end of the day, we need to create systems that augment our social capabilities, not replace them. Any technological solution can and will be gamed in both directions where people will inappropriately be labeled as poor partners and people who get labeled that will circumvent the label regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Unless we identify an objectively verifiable, directly measurable, desirable behavior, we can’t possibly solve this with technology alone. All this is to say that the real solution probably won’t scale, but this means there is likely an opportunity here, as the conventional wisdom states. The problem is the barrier to entry is too high which means more nuanced solutions are likely to be killed before they even get off the ground. I don’t envy those in this business, it really just seems like a losing battle as you grow as a company.
sublinear 3y ago
I don't think dating apps make a difference in the grand scheme of things for two reasons: the "top 20%" of men have always had the first pick, and you can still try to find a date the traditional ways. I put the blame on social media. Getting to know people through a friend was the default and you no longer have to meet in person to do that. Sanitizing social interactions and activists drumming up social fears for their causes has scared everyone off. The only solution is for more people to ignore it all and get out there in person again. That takes time and the pandemic wasn't enough of a nudge.
0verkilled 3y ago
> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps I've seen this type of statement repeated many times, and respectfully I think it's a very broad and oversimplified reduction of such a complex topic. The source you provided is extremely limited (afaict it's a sample size of 27 in a single app, a very circular definition of attractiveness, obviously not peer reviewed, etc.), but I think even a more reputable source would still have very limited results due to the huge scope of online dating and the highly subjective impressions involved. I do agree that online dating appears to be superficial and not a great tool for finding meaningful relationships, but I've found that a lot of the discourse surrounding it (regular dating too) seems more based on collective insecurities than solid research. Maybe there are differences in dating habits that favor some group over another, but a lot of the things I've seen tend to go to towards the idea of female hypergamy (a pillar of 'redpilled' incel ideology) without a lot to back it up. I'm not saying that this particular study is necessarily wrong, but I'm wary of the biases, unconscious beliefs and assumptions that are usually carried when 'facts' like these are taken at face value.
foogazi 3y ago
> The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. Dating apps already have an inverse 80m/20f skew What would it look like if it was evened up 50/50 ? Isn’t that the top 16% of women competing for the top 16% of men ? Eli5

johnwheeler 3y ago

Only men would use it though, right? Women probably wouldn’t need to, and any mate crowdsourcing would be done off-line, bounty-free by friends and people you trust anyway

gjsman-1000 3y ago

I've realized it's actually not just dating. Dating and Hiring overlap a lot conceptually, and both have serious unsolved problems right now. They really are the same problem - match people to other people based on various (but different) qualifications. Solve Hiring, you've solved Dating. Solve Dating, you've solved Hiring.

thereisnojesus 3y ago
Ah yes, I love a highly optimized relationship where value is one sided
htrp 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
red-iron-pine 3y ago
nah. maybe in the sense there are interpersonal skills and human judgements, but otherwise these are wildly different, and with different outcomes.

bckr 3y ago

I like this idea. What it lacks is accountability after the match has been made. When you meet someone IRL, you’re generally embedded in some social network. You met through friends, or at a function. Someone was responsible for introducing you, and that person is held responsible to a degree if one of you is a major jerk. Dating apps are the ultimate ephemeralization and atomization of our society. “We met through an app,” while now commonplace, is also an absence of rich social embedding. At best, your friends meet their friends; but when you break up, it’s likely those networks bisect as well.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Perhaps we can use the credit rating agencies to have a dating credit history report along with a financial credit history report. Combine this with the credit/debit card networks purchase histories, and pay history from The Work Number, and I bet we could come up with a dating score number to match people up.
ekaryotic 3y ago
It sounds something like the stock market to me. I'm not sure what you mean by accountability, do you mean that someone could do a runner after using the service and not pay out. If you did base it on stocks and shares then that wouldn't happen. I don't personally understand how stocks work, but i recall it was invented by betting on whether ships would return from a dangerous voyage or not, and as a way of spreading the cost and spoils. Surely it's possible to bet on a relationship in the same way, and those who bet the most accurately would benefit the most. then you look at your odds and check the match out.
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TZubiri 3y ago

It's easy to see how this would devolve into prostitution or onlyfans

HPsquared 3y ago

How would you deal with the spam problem?

sublinear 3y ago

Sounds like a way to launder money. Make lots of small bounties everyone ignores and run bots that vote you into a match. Hell you don't even need the bots if nobody else is trying to match you; just need a few votes. Ignore the match and collect a clean bounty. Like others said, crowds paying out and receiving money lacks accountability.