3 ms·

You can't make substantial ethical money with dating apps. It's just not in the nature of the thing. It's perverse incentives all the way... I wish "dating" pl

You can't make substantial ethical money with dating apps. It's just not in the nature of the thing. It's perverse incentives all the way... I wish "dating" platforms would by default just open up to all social connections, like friendships, meetups, ... then you would have a business model for people paying a small fee to stay. Implement some trustworthiness "social score" as incentive to keep an account active. Unified score, segregated profile across "dating domains"? Honestly, old OkC was very nice for meeting new and interesting people, but when they started to gamify everything, I wasn't offered the option to pay for things to stay as they were and left... I would easily pay 1-2€/month for a socializing app to meet new folks in the city. Or we need to come up with some decentralized p2p solution, or something. Maybe some crypto magic on BLE tokens to limit/match peer visibility and profile propagation? Bit rougher - more adventure, more discovery, more danger, more ASCII, more "underground", more cyberpunk. Maybe add zines and art, and expect hookers and drugs. Darknet RF dating, anyone?

pennomi 3y ago
A decentralized solution seems ideal for dating and other social apps, since then the incentives would perfectly align with the user’s needs rather than corporate profits.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  I think so too, but I also suspect the details to be a major buzz kill. Theorywise. Preventing abuse, stalking, spam, ... moderation would be put into the hands of end users. While you can't really prove locality directly, maybe you could prove it indirectly by passive collection and sharing of transient cryptographic tokens of the local network passing by? I think something like that would maybe discourage bad actors as a side effect, too, because people can't sit at home all day harassing strangers, they would have to touch grass/the network periodically. Maybe you could "subscribe" to something like shared blacklists, like a torrent of sorts. I think you could not implement a sophisticated matching algorithm, which couldn't be gamed rather easily, but would rather fall-back to oldschool personals, or a keyword filter matrix for convenience. Or quasi centralized matching services could tap into the network as optional gated communities, similar to Mastodon instances? But really, I dream of riding around the city, collecting MySpace-like profiles of real people or something similar to that "early" internet feel :) I think you can make awesome things, if you kinda just forfeit profit as the guiding principle all together.

pennomi 3y ago

A decentralized solution seems ideal for dating and other social apps, since then the incentives would perfectly align with the user’s needs rather than corporate profits.

jijijijij 3y ago
I think so too, but I also suspect the details to be a major buzz kill. Theorywise. Preventing abuse, stalking, spam, ... moderation would be put into the hands of end users. While you can't really prove locality directly, maybe you could prove it indirectly by passive collection and sharing of transient cryptographic tokens of the local network passing by? I think something like that would maybe discourage bad actors as a side effect, too, because people can't sit at home all day harassing strangers, they would have to touch grass/the network periodically. Maybe you could "subscribe" to something like shared blacklists, like a torrent of sorts. I think you could not implement a sophisticated matching algorithm, which couldn't be gamed rather easily, but would rather fall-back to oldschool personals, or a keyword filter matrix for convenience. Or quasi centralized matching services could tap into the network as optional gated communities, similar to Mastodon instances? But really, I dream of riding around the city, collecting MySpace-like profiles of real people or something similar to that "early" internet feel :) I think you can make awesome things, if you kinda just forfeit profit as the guiding principle all together.