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> "people are more magic in real life" I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark.

> "people are more magic in real life" I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments. Instead, i think dating sites' issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most "you". Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5? When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent. The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my "Online Dating Approximation" with your "Online Dating Approximation". The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience. I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat/hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues. None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.

chongli 3y ago
The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore. I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life. Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered. With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    The time constant can be quite long, some people are on these things for months or years. It takes time to equilibrate.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far. Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.
    - userinanother 3y ago
      A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches
      - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
        > A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days? Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!
Jensson 3y ago
> Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner. Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.
klyrs 3y ago
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out. After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.
- nicbou 3y ago
  OkCupid was great in those years. I remember how each person felt like a nuanced individual and not like the elevator pitch of a person. Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.
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  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    I have not used any dating app in the past decade. OKC was last platform, while in graduate school. I LOVED the "percent match" but across multiple profiles (over a few years) I learned how "to game" their system by only answering certain impactful (but not damaging) questions. If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis. My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).
krisoft 3y ago
> Do you believe yours comes in first? There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it. Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them. But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.
- tempodox 3y ago
  ChatGPT, write an attractive dating app profile for me!
causality0 3y ago
There's also the fact people only have a somewhat accurate idea of what they'll actually like in a partner. Maybe you only think you'll like someone who's always direct, or who wants to be submissive in bed, or is financially responsible.
imiric 3y ago
> When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone. The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen. There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  there is a huge DEMAND, but whether you can take that to market and make it viable is a different story. actually kinda shocked China or Korea haven't made this a state thing in order to help boost marriages and childbirths
  - hyeonwho22 3y ago
    The problem in Korea at least isn't with meeting people (well, for 80% of the population), it is young couples feeling they can't meet the finances required to satisfy social norms, and thus deciding to delay the marriage-kids sequence indefinitely. Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.
    - userinanother 3y ago
      Makes sense that most people would time out on child bearing age before they got there. especially now with 8% interest rates
meiraleal 3y ago
> I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments. Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app. > None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.
solatic 3y ago
> The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing. Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.
- darkwater 3y ago
  > So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing. Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact. I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
Huh? You were the CTO of a dating app, you start a line with “more fundamental…” What was the ratio of active women to active men? That seems to be most important. Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.
- liquidise 3y ago
  On our app we were about 60% women to 40% men. Nonbinary made up a small enough % to round to zero. DAU/MAU were roughly the same, though you might see seasonal swings toward one or another.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    I have a hard time with this. For one, a dating site where there is 3 women for every 2 men is such an anomaly in itself, and then when word gets out that "hey, it's a dating site that isn't a total sausage fest" (to be blunt), then I can't see that ratio doing anything but skewing rapidly in the direction of every other dating site.
    - liquidise 3y ago
      For the reason you describe we consciously chose to never talk publicly about gender ratios. Having predominately female users (or even close to 50/50 actives) tends to attract people for the wrong reasons.
      - freilanzer 3y ago
        > tends to attract people for the wrong reasons. Like men wanting to meet women through an app?
        liquidise 3y ago
        By "wrong reasons" i am referring to the intentions of those new users. Say your users are predominantly seeking long-term relationships, and your branding supports that. Then a bunch of men, fueled by gender-ratio marketing, flood your app seeking hookups. You will see short-term a bump in engagement and payments. A/B testing will suggest everything is great. But long-term your product loses value as your users lose faith in your ability to deliver on what they signed up for. The (in this case women) leave and the product becomes another graveyard.
drzaiusx11 3y ago
I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former. The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you. With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images. PS I'm half joking half not.
bruce343434 3y ago
> the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person What kind of things should I imagine here?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I imagine random but surprisingly shared tidbits like your favorite spongebob character being Plankton. Or remembering your most embarassing MySpace post. Or your favorite toy growing up being one of those super balls that you bounced into oblivion one day, never to be seen again (hey, it said "super" after all). Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.
btbuildem 3y ago
Can't help but interpret this take as a little disingenuous. Most dating apps seem to follow the trajectory of "new app launched" -> "new app grows and gets popular" -> "new app bought out by match.com" -> "new app turns to shit" I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.
- richbell 3y ago
  Agreed. GP's comment ignores the reality that dating apps are aggressively monopolized by a single company, and that many of their acquisitions have resulted in demonstrable drops in quality. It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
- ChiperSoft 3y ago
  The problem is that getting to that point requires quite a bit of capital. The hard part isn’t building the app, it’s buying users, largely through advertising, and then filtering the assholes through moderation staffing. Both of that costs a lot of money, up front. To date, nobody has come up with a way to monetize dating apps in a way that doesn’t negate the benefits of the app. Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.

chongli 3y ago

The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore. I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life. Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered. With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
- HPsquared 3y ago
  The time constant can be quite long, some people are on these things for months or years. It takes time to equilibrate.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far. Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches
    - Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
      > A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days? Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!

Jensson 3y ago

> Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner. Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.

klyrs 3y ago

> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out. After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.

nicbou 3y ago
OkCupid was great in those years. I remember how each person felt like a nuanced individual and not like the elevator pitch of a person. Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  I have not used any dating app in the past decade. OKC was last platform, while in graduate school. I LOVED the "percent match" but across multiple profiles (over a few years) I learned how "to game" their system by only answering certain impactful (but not damaging) questions. If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis. My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).

krisoft 3y ago

> Do you believe yours comes in first? There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it. Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them. But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.

tempodox 3y ago
ChatGPT, write an attractive dating app profile for me!

causality0 3y ago

There's also the fact people only have a somewhat accurate idea of what they'll actually like in a partner. Maybe you only think you'll like someone who's always direct, or who wants to be submissive in bed, or is financially responsible.

imiric 3y ago

> When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone. The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen. There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
there is a huge DEMAND, but whether you can take that to market and make it viable is a different story. actually kinda shocked China or Korea haven't made this a state thing in order to help boost marriages and childbirths
- hyeonwho22 3y ago
  The problem in Korea at least isn't with meeting people (well, for 80% of the population), it is young couples feeling they can't meet the finances required to satisfy social norms, and thus deciding to delay the marriage-kids sequence indefinitely. Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    Makes sense that most people would time out on child bearing age before they got there. especially now with 8% interest rates

meiraleal 3y ago

> I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments. Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app. > None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.

solatic 3y ago

> The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing. Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.

darkwater 3y ago
> So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing. Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact. I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

Huh? You were the CTO of a dating app, you start a line with “more fundamental…” What was the ratio of active women to active men? That seems to be most important. Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.

liquidise 3y ago
On our app we were about 60% women to 40% men. Nonbinary made up a small enough % to round to zero. DAU/MAU were roughly the same, though you might see seasonal swings toward one or another.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  I have a hard time with this. For one, a dating site where there is 3 women for every 2 men is such an anomaly in itself, and then when word gets out that "hey, it's a dating site that isn't a total sausage fest" (to be blunt), then I can't see that ratio doing anything but skewing rapidly in the direction of every other dating site.
  - liquidise 3y ago
    For the reason you describe we consciously chose to never talk publicly about gender ratios. Having predominately female users (or even close to 50/50 actives) tends to attract people for the wrong reasons.
    - freilanzer 3y ago
      > tends to attract people for the wrong reasons. Like men wanting to meet women through an app?
      - liquidise 3y ago
        By "wrong reasons" i am referring to the intentions of those new users. Say your users are predominantly seeking long-term relationships, and your branding supports that. Then a bunch of men, fueled by gender-ratio marketing, flood your app seeking hookups. You will see short-term a bump in engagement and payments. A/B testing will suggest everything is great. But long-term your product loses value as your users lose faith in your ability to deliver on what they signed up for. The (in this case women) leave and the product becomes another graveyard.

drzaiusx11 3y ago

I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former. The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you. With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images. PS I'm half joking half not.

bruce343434 3y ago

> the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person What kind of things should I imagine here?

johnnyanmac 3y ago
I imagine random but surprisingly shared tidbits like your favorite spongebob character being Plankton. Or remembering your most embarassing MySpace post. Or your favorite toy growing up being one of those super balls that you bounced into oblivion one day, never to be seen again (hey, it said "super" after all). Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.

btbuildem 3y ago

Can't help but interpret this take as a little disingenuous. Most dating apps seem to follow the trajectory of "new app launched" -> "new app grows and gets popular" -> "new app bought out by match.com" -> "new app turns to shit" I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.

richbell 3y ago
Agreed. GP's comment ignores the reality that dating apps are aggressively monopolized by a single company, and that many of their acquisitions have resulted in demonstrable drops in quality. It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
ChiperSoft 3y ago
The problem is that getting to that point requires quite a bit of capital. The hard part isn’t building the app, it’s buying users, largely through advertising, and then filtering the assholes through moderation staffing. Both of that costs a lot of money, up front. To date, nobody has come up with a way to monetize dating apps in a way that doesn’t negate the benefits of the app. Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.