7 ms·

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 ar

• 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.
    • smelendez 8mo ago
      I feel like dating apps almost exclusively take off via word of mouth. It doesn’t have to be marriage, though, just people finding matches worth meeting. Almost every dating app is scammy, buggy, heavily paywalled, and barely used. If you see an ad for a dating app, it’s usually in that category.
  • raincole 8mo ago
    Very anecdotal, but in my experience people have no attachment to or enthusiasm for dating apps. I've heard (acquainted) couples say the met on dating apps. No one ever said which ones.
    • rkomorn 8mo ago
      My counter anecdote would be that almost every time I mention my spouse and I met on a dating app, people ask me which one. Edit: people ask me which app, not which spouse.
      • hobs 8mo ago
        I think the difference is are they people asking in a relationship or not - asking which app is categorically asking where they can find someone to hook up with.
        • rkomorn 8mo ago
          Or it's curiosity (genuine or polite). Maybe, for some people it tips the scale into trying the app either because they were already thinking about trying some/any app, or switching away from their current one. I don't know if anyone who's asked me has started using the app as a result, but I think it (anecdotally, again) supports an idea that a successful results for one app organically helps its name recognition. Edit: unless you meant the difference was between people asking which app vs which spouse.
          • hobs 8mo ago
            No, you understood me exactly as I meant it - which app. I met a partner of five years on the apps and people often asked how we met but they never asked which app (Tinder) - we actually saw each other on multiple apps but she did not respond on Bumble because it forced her to send the first message, which I thought was interesting feedback.
    • xigoi 8mo ago
      It doesn’t matter which one because they’re all owned by a single company and converging toward each other.
  • dpe82 8mo ago
    That's a very difficult metric to measure whereas "did this user return and continue paying" is easier. The tyranny of metrics in action.
    • samrus 8mo ago
      Man i hate metrics sometimes. Important things that are hard to measure are just left by the wayside
• roenxi 8mo ago
  > If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around. I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly. It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
  • chongli 8mo ago
    That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up. In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
    • Retric 8mo ago
      > If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline That seems to be extremely unlikely, people have finite lifespans and are only in the marriage pool for a small fraction of that. More importantly your website could easily be targeted to an even smaller pool say 25-45 and ignoring deaths and divorce your already ~10% turnover per year if you own 100% of the market. Actual numbers depends on what percentage of the pool starts married, becomes a widow etc but their’s plenty of new people to make up for any couples. Further, happily married couples are great advertising.
• ergocoder 8mo ago
  Number 3. Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.
  • pwdisswordfishy 8mo ago
    Like, lying? You can already do that.
  • knowitnone3 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • hikkerl 8mo ago
    You might found out the hard way that a lot of people say they want that, but very much want to avoid it. The main allure of these apps to young women is all the attention from far more attractive men (relatively). Take that away - show her men who might be her "equal" in terms of marriageability, men who might be willing to commit to her - and your service will soon be dismissed and abandoned for only showing ugly men. You need to sell the fantasy, sell the delusion. Sell hope. The reality hits too hard.
• crazygringo 8mo ago
  This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back. That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site. So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more. That's all it is. Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
  • smelendez 8mo ago
    I’ve wondered about this. Presumably they have some idea of who you will initially match with? Maybe they have enough data to say things like “when someone like user x matches someone like user y, they are relatively likely to both stop using the app within a month?” But that has to be so noisy.
  • Dr_Birdbrain 8mo ago
    I don’t work at a dating company, but I do work in machine learning applications. My best guess is this: they are not optimizing for good vs great matches, and they are probably not even building a model of what that would even mean, not even trying to represent the concept in their algorithms. Most likely they are optimizing for one or more metrics that are easy to measure and hence optimize, and these metrics have the side effect of producing an excitement for the user without actually pairing them up. Example metrics: - time spent on the site - times they “swipe right” or whatever - messages sent - money spent
    • Onavo 8mo ago
      But the end result is effectively the same. If you throw in the constraints of what GP mentioned about customer retention, at the Pareto frontier it boils down to the same optimization, just that instead of manually optimizing the specific variables they become latent variables. There is no difference in the resultant enshittification.
• dang 8mo ago
  There was a thread about that one: Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)
• solatic 8mo ago
  People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app. The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person. To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting. Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
  • anal_reactor 8mo ago
    > you have to work on yourself first I hate this phrase because it's a generic catch-all that says nothing but shuts down any discussion. If I'm friendly, responsible, honest, not poor, do sports, learn new things, keep the house clean, then the fuck more you want. Can we admit that social dynamics have completely changed and the value of "a relationship" dropped through the floor? 200 years ago bad relationship was better than no relationship because have fun trying to farm land on your own, but nowadays it's literally more convenient to live single than to deal with the inconvenience of living with another person. Also, personally, I'm a minority within a minority, and I'm not going to cheat the statistics even if I shower twenty times a day.
    • mpol 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      • anal_reactor 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        • ponector 8mo ago
• Xeago 8mo ago
  What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up. This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!). One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
  • samrus 8mo ago
    This is really interesting. The platform's incentive in engineered more towards finding you a match than to keeping you looking I guess this is still corruptable. The paltform could make more money by getting you matches thay look good but dont work out. But id imagine thatll only be a problem once they scale and ROI becomes a larger priority
  • anal_reactor 8mo ago
    Can you tell me more about it? I live in NL and I'd be curious to try it
  • bradlys 8mo ago
    This exists outside NL now too. However, it’s possibly the most shallow app possible. You know literally nothing about the individual except what they look like. For a country like NL where there’s high homogeneity, probably works out. For the US, this is a disaster. In the US, you’d only get matched if you were a hot guy. It was more brutal than tinder, hinge, etc. Women in the US aren’t gonna spend a single cent on a guy unless he’s mega hot.
    • Suppafly 8mo ago
• bitshiftfaced 8mo ago
  Pie in the sky idea: users sign up and deposit to an escrow. If after x years, the user has been married to another user on the site for 1 year without being divorced, the matching site receives the funds. Otherwise, the user receives their funds back. Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.