5 ms·

What dating apps are optimizing

106 points by _bypa 8mo ago

diego_moita 8mo ago
Very interesting read. > Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping. So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
- IncreasePosts 8mo ago
  Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.
  - mdavid626 8mo ago
    How is it different?
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
christina97 8mo ago
The article does not actually substantiate the claim in its title. All references are simply to articles that (at best) describe how people respond to dating apps. I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives. It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
caseysoftware 8mo ago
I worked for a dating website a long time ago.. and it's key to understand their business model: - If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around. - If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer. - If you find love and get married, they lose two customers. Which one will they optimize for? My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- t-writescode 8mo ago
  It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections? “I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
- quantummagic 8mo ago
  That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
  - bawolff 8mo ago
    I feel like that kind of word of mouth is not enough to compensate. Like how many customers is word of one sucessful match expected to attract?
    - JambalayaJimbo 8mo ago
      “I met my husband on hinge” is something that gets people to download the app right away. I’ve seen it happen tons of times
    - derektank 8mo ago
      I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.
foxfired 8mo ago
The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app. We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.) "What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
- moomoo11 8mo ago
  Your story helped them sell hope and thus more customers. Hope sells. People want hope. They don’t want advice lol. If the latter was the case we wouldn’t live in a lopsided world. Hope means you don’t need to try. Advice means it’s on you to try.
bawolff 8mo ago
[dead]
kazinator 8mo ago
It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet. To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
- missedthecue 8mo ago
  You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
  - y0eswddl 8mo ago
    Competed away or bought and hamstrung...? And human behavior is absolutely shaped by our environments and systems. We're quite easily manipulatable - whether we want to admit/realize it or not. Social media literally hired human behaviorists to design their apps to make them more addicting. You're quite mistaken if you dont think apps arent engineered to drive human behavior. Dark Patterns are very prominent and well known thing in tech UI. https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns
    - missedthecue 8mo ago
      I mean competed away. There are a lot of dating apps out, probably a lot more than you think. Zero of them were bought out by Match before the market made them huge.
ergocoder 8mo ago
Because it's almost impossible to optimize for love. like how?
- imiric 8mo ago
  They don't need to optimize for "love". They just need to not optimize for dark patterns and extortion. Love happens offline, not on a fucking app.
- Bayko 8mo ago
  That is the companies problem to solve. They are the ones making the product.
  - tasuki 8mo ago
    As explained in the article, that is not the product.
- wellf 8mo ago
  Probably by finding compatible matches.
- koakuma-chan 8mo ago
  What is "love" anyway? I imagine using these dating apps is basically the same as applying for jobs.
rich_sasha 8mo ago
With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour? It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell. But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices. Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
- y0eswddl 8mo ago
  I'm just one person, but it seems to happen quite consistently that the profiles that appeal to me begin to only be offered behind a rose or some other paywall... rarely if ever in the "free" swipe feed.
neuroelectron 8mo ago
That's a nice story, but the real story is the near monopoly in dating apps, and why it always ends up in the same hands and why their motivation is counter to their customers.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
We should go back to arranged marriages.
- rkomorn 8mo ago
  Why have arranged marriages when you can have deranged marriages?
- r33b33 8mo ago
  Agreed
- tbossanova 8mo ago
  Maybe not exclusively but they could definitely have a place
- grunder_advice 8mo ago
  Yeah, I don't think you're going to have much luck with that mentality. Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.
  - mrbadguy 8mo ago
    Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. Your family simply plays matchmaker and it’s up to the prospective couple to decide whether they want to be together.
- ponector 8mo ago
  And next week you have a wedding with old man. Mazal tov!
snozolli 8mo ago
I found the old OKCupid blog posts via Gwern.net: https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcupid.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcup... These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date. FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
- smcin 8mo ago
  Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill) For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
- carabiner 8mo ago
  I loved the oktrends blog and read Christian Rudder's book dataclysm, but these data are over a decade old. A lot has changed (pandemic, atomized culture, manosphere, incels, gym obsession, decline of drinking / going out) I have to wonder how much is still valid. OkCupid was the best dating site ever though.
- renewiltord 8mo ago
  It's interesting that so many people like these blog posts but they'd be really hard to get an IRB to agree to run a study with.
- xigoi 8mo ago
  > Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. Such places will quickly ban you if you start hitting on women.
missedthecue 8mo ago
My experience building dating apps (I built and launched a couple of my own over the years, I have never worked for a major app): 1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams. 2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters. 3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular. With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem. The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.
- tokioyoyo 8mo ago
  Looking from my surroundings, in my circles, women are way more picky than men. Across different races, age groups and etc. According to all of my girl friends, they don’t really need a man, especially of their life is ok right now. They can satisfy their sexual and non-sexual desires much easier without dating. My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance. It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship. I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z
sli 8mo ago
Dating apps would go out of business if they did their job, because success means leaving the platform. They make more money if they hold out a carrot and make it difficult to succeed. This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.
ece 8mo ago
https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa
grunder_advice 8mo ago
I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.
- s1mplicissimus 8mo ago
  But you can become wealthy too, and then pay for a personal trainer, those expensive status signifier items and even plastic surgery if needed. Just need to work harder! /s
  - bradlys 8mo ago
    I actually did this and it still didn’t work. Some of us are born so genetically ugly that even modern cosmetic surgery can’t solve it. No surprise, lots of billionaires are still mediocre looking.
    - s1mplicissimus 8mo ago
      > No surprise, lots of billionaires are still mediocre looking I interpreted that as something billionaires could afford to not care about, like good manners. But tbh. I'm not that well versed with the state of plastic surgery either. Anyway, beauty is subjective and changes over time, there's plenty of more important things to focus on :)
av3csr 8mo ago
I’ve always mused with the concept that these companies could, in theory, start covert eugenics programs
xnx 8mo ago
What every company is maximizing: profit. Work backwards from that.

106 points by _bypa 8mo ago

Very interesting read. > Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping. So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.

IncreasePosts 8mo ago
Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.
- mdavid626 8mo ago
  How is it different?

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

christina97 8mo ago

The article does not actually substantiate the claim in its title. All references are simply to articles that (at best) describe how people respond to dating apps. I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives. It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.

caseysoftware 8mo ago

I worked for a dating website a long time ago.. and it's key to understand their business model: - If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around. - If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer. - If you find love and get married, they lose two customers. Which one will they optimize for? My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

t-writescode 8mo ago
It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections? “I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
quantummagic 8mo ago
That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
- bawolff 8mo ago
  I feel like that kind of word of mouth is not enough to compensate. Like how many customers is word of one sucessful match expected to attract?
  - JambalayaJimbo 8mo ago
    “I met my husband on hinge” is something that gets people to download the app right away. I’ve seen it happen tons of times
  - derektank 8mo ago
    I mean, one wedding can draw in over a hundred people, and the specific dating app in question gets name dropped not infrequently. The last wedding I went to, Hinge was mentioned in at least one of the speeches.

foxfired 8mo ago

The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app. We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.) "What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.

moomoo11 8mo ago
Your story helped them sell hope and thus more customers. Hope sells. People want hope. They don’t want advice lol. If the latter was the case we wouldn’t live in a lopsided world. Hope means you don’t need to try. Advice means it’s on you to try.

bawolff 8mo ago

[dead]

kazinator 8mo ago

It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet. To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.

missedthecue 8mo ago
You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
- y0eswddl 8mo ago
  Competed away or bought and hamstrung...? And human behavior is absolutely shaped by our environments and systems. We're quite easily manipulatable - whether we want to admit/realize it or not. Social media literally hired human behaviorists to design their apps to make them more addicting. You're quite mistaken if you dont think apps arent engineered to drive human behavior. Dark Patterns are very prominent and well known thing in tech UI. https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+patterns
  - missedthecue 8mo ago
    I mean competed away. There are a lot of dating apps out, probably a lot more than you think. Zero of them were bought out by Match before the market made them huge.

ergocoder 8mo ago

Because it's almost impossible to optimize for love. like how?

imiric 8mo ago
They don't need to optimize for "love". They just need to not optimize for dark patterns and extortion. Love happens offline, not on a fucking app.
Bayko 8mo ago
That is the companies problem to solve. They are the ones making the product.
- tasuki 8mo ago
  As explained in the article, that is not the product.
wellf 8mo ago
Probably by finding compatible matches.
koakuma-chan 8mo ago
What is "love" anyway? I imagine using these dating apps is basically the same as applying for jobs.

rich_sasha 8mo ago

With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour? It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell. But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices. Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.

y0eswddl 8mo ago
I'm just one person, but it seems to happen quite consistently that the profiles that appeal to me begin to only be offered behind a rose or some other paywall... rarely if ever in the "free" swipe feed.

neuroelectron 8mo ago

That's a nice story, but the real story is the near monopoly in dating apps, and why it always ends up in the same hands and why their motivation is counter to their customers.

SoftTalker 8mo ago

We should go back to arranged marriages.

rkomorn 8mo ago
Why have arranged marriages when you can have deranged marriages?
r33b33 8mo ago
Agreed
tbossanova 8mo ago
Maybe not exclusively but they could definitely have a place
grunder_advice 8mo ago
Yeah, I don't think you're going to have much luck with that mentality. Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.
- mrbadguy 8mo ago
  Arranged marriages are not the same as forced marriages. Your family simply plays matchmaker and it’s up to the prospective couple to decide whether they want to be together.
ponector 8mo ago
And next week you have a wedding with old man. Mazal tov!

snozolli 8mo ago

I found the old OKCupid blog posts via Gwern.net: https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcupid.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcup... These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date. FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.

smcin 8mo ago
Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill) For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
carabiner 8mo ago
I loved the oktrends blog and read Christian Rudder's book dataclysm, but these data are over a decade old. A lot has changed (pandemic, atomized culture, manosphere, incels, gym obsession, decline of drinking / going out) I have to wonder how much is still valid. OkCupid was the best dating site ever though.
renewiltord 8mo ago
It's interesting that so many people like these blog posts but they'd be really hard to get an IRB to agree to run a study with.
xigoi 8mo ago
> Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. Such places will quickly ban you if you start hitting on women.

missedthecue 8mo ago

My experience building dating apps (I built and launched a couple of my own over the years, I have never worked for a major app): 1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams. 2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters. 3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular. With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem. The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.

tokioyoyo 8mo ago
Looking from my surroundings, in my circles, women are way more picky than men. Across different races, age groups and etc. According to all of my girl friends, they don’t really need a man, especially of their life is ok right now. They can satisfy their sexual and non-sexual desires much easier without dating. My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance. It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship. I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z

sli 8mo ago

Dating apps would go out of business if they did their job, because success means leaving the platform. They make more money if they hold out a carrot and make it difficult to succeed. This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.

ece 8mo ago

https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa https://github.com/Alovoa/alovoa

grunder_advice 8mo ago

I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.

s1mplicissimus 8mo ago
But you can become wealthy too, and then pay for a personal trainer, those expensive status signifier items and even plastic surgery if needed. Just need to work harder! /s
- bradlys 8mo ago
  I actually did this and it still didn’t work. Some of us are born so genetically ugly that even modern cosmetic surgery can’t solve it. No surprise, lots of billionaires are still mediocre looking.
  - s1mplicissimus 8mo ago
    > No surprise, lots of billionaires are still mediocre looking I interpreted that as something billionaires could afford to not care about, like good manners. But tbh. I'm not that well versed with the state of plastic surgery either. Anyway, beauty is subjective and changes over time, there's plenty of more important things to focus on :)

av3csr 8mo ago

I’ve always mused with the concept that these companies could, in theory, start covert eugenics programs

xnx 8mo ago

What every company is maximizing: profit. Work backwards from that.