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

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.