5 ms·

The Dating App Swipe Is Dying. What Comes Next May Be Worse

• panny 5mo ago
  Dating apps don't have incentive to match you up. When they do, they lose a customer.
  • heggerd 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • throw310822 5mo ago
    Breeze has a really cool formula in which you pay exclusively for each date. And a date is organised automatically for each match, without any possibility to chat beforehand.
    • Yoric 5mo ago
      Unless I'm missing something, this sounds awful.
      • Schiendelman 5mo ago
        When was the last time you went on a date with someone new? I ask because it's likely less awful than the current state.
      • throw310822 5mo ago
        Why does it? I'm curious. I think it solves most of the issues of the traditional apps. (But yes, I didn't mention a fundamental aspect: they propose you only a very limited amount of profiles each day, no endless swiping: if you don't fancy any of your daily ~4, tough luck, you can come back tomorrow).
    • harimau777 5mo ago
      How do you verify that they are who the profile says they are without chatting beforehand?
      • throw310822 5mo ago
        You don't. You go to the date (in a public place, set by the app) and if there's something fishy about them you can report them to the app (there's an explicit feedback request after each date).
        • harimau777 5mo ago
          If you have to pay per match, then aren't you already out the money at that point? Not to mention the risk of just getting murdered.
          • throw310822 5mo ago
            Ooh, you lost $12! And your date did too, and probably the account as well. As for the risk of getting murdered, I think it's unavoidable in any app (and in life in general) but probably worse if you organise the date by yourself.
    • aurareturn 5mo ago
      You still have to match first. So the same swipe left or right but once you match, there is a system that asks when you're free for a date. That's it.
      • throw310822 5mo ago
        Not exactly, you only have a very limited amount of profiles visible every day. About 4, though maybe it depends on the location. So there is no endless swiping. You also cannot match anyone else until you have set up a date with your last match, and if you opt out too many times (again, probably three or four) your account gets blocked. In any case, you only pay for dates you go to (unless you cancel at the last moment). Their incentive is to send you to as many dates as possible.
        • aurareturn 5mo ago
          Coffee Meets Bagels tried that. A few matches at 12PM every day. I think the key problem for dating apps is that 90% of women on it will only match with the top 10% of men. Meanwhile, most men will try to match with anything that has a nose and eyes. I don't think Breeze's concept fixes that since it's still up to the girl to match.
          • M95D 5mo ago
            > I think the key problem for dating apps is that 90% of women on it will only match with the top 10% of men. Probably that's why they did this: > you only have a very limited amount of profiles visible every day
            • aurareturn 5mo ago
              It honestly won’t help. Women can use multiple dating apps. They’re also patient.
              • throw310822 5mo ago
    • d3Xt3r 5mo ago
      Sounds like a cool concept. Too bad they're only in 6 countries. :(
  • jerojero 5mo ago
    Its a little bit of a balance act, they want to match you with someone that's good enough to date a couple times but not enough to date long term. I think the mathematics work better if they match you with "mostly compatible" people rather than "not compatible at all". Success stories are important because that's how you build recognition. Now a days though, match group owns all dating apps so they have a monopoly in dating. Whenever a new app comes to market that's "better" (which will be, in its initial stages) they acquire. Users migrate and then they ruin. Rinse and repeat. They recently acquired sniffies (a gay cruising app) for like 100M. Go figure.
    • panny 5mo ago
      I've looked into match group before, they're the usual suspects (Blackrock, Vanguard) and practice lawfare. If you don't take their buyout (like how bumble refused) then they try to sue you with software patents which I thought were all basically invalidated in Alice v. CLS Bank. But yeah, they're not a nice group of people who want to match you up. They're in it for money. And the way match group operates makes others reluctant to enter the market, unless they are just looking for a big buyout payday.
      • BobaFloutist 5mo ago
        Blackrock and Vanguard are index fund managers, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.
  • bitmasher9 5mo ago
    I actually think a Facebook or Instagram might be in the best position to offer dating with the goal of permanent matching. * Recruit friends to make recommendations mimics classic searching techniques * Can scope out a more complete bio early in the process, for both AI and Human filtering/matching * Their long term incentives will be meet if they post cute couple pictures or generate new long term users
    • aurareturn 5mo ago
      LinkedIn is. But they won't do it.
      • bitmasher9 5mo ago
        Just what we need, Microsoft to suck the joy out of another aspect of our life.
    • deltoidmaximus 5mo ago
      Facebook apparently already has a dating app. I've heard anecdotally it is much better than the match group apps, maybe for older age ranges? I'm married and haven't used dating sites in over 20 years. In theory the 'knows people you know' thing is a good vetting system for finding people to date though.
  • lifis 5mo ago
    That is only the case if people enter exclusive relationships. But if someone has access to a dating app or system that works really well, there is little reason to do that.
  • lesuorac 5mo ago
    There's 3 glaring problems here. 1. There's a steady stream of unmarried individuals so as you match people up there's more people (either just from growing older or divorce) that can use the app. 2. If you don't already own a dating app, then even if you cannibalize the market you can still make a large sum of money. Akin to mining all the gold in a plot of land; sure your company needs to close once its gone but you made money in the interium. 2.5. If you do already own a dating app, if you're known for not working then people will stop using the app and go to a competitor (assuming you didn't buy them all ...)
• armchairhacker 5mo ago
  > Bumble says it will ditch swiping features in favor of AI-powered matchmaking This should be the title
  • ryanchants 5mo ago
    They're recommender systems already, which is AI-powered, so how exactly are they changing?
    • AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • xingped 5mo ago
        I mean, it's scary even to those of us that know what's going on. Some just choose to turn a blind eye to how dumb and destructive the current iterations and implementations of AI still are.
        • AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
          What precisely is dumb and destructive about the vaswani attention paper? I have lived in northern Virginia since 2017, aka “the cloud” We already had years and years of data center development long before the transformer paper came out, capitalism was already destroying basically everything it could with no brakes on it since 1971 Explain to me how the fuck exactly that’s an algorithms fault
  • drcongo 5mo ago
    Indeed, I initially thought this was about a dating app called Swipe.
    • efilife 5mo ago
      There would be no confusion if every word wasn't capitalized
• smitty1e 5mo ago
  When y'all get tired of this faffing about: pursue a suitable community of faith; date an actual person of the opposite gender until Destiny (and other wise eyes) indicate a match; marry, and let two be a large value of one; have or adopt some children; enjoy the fullness of life in all its seasons. The old formula has endured and shan't be supplanted by these fancy gizmos.
  • harimau777 5mo ago
    The problem is that doesn't actually work. I've spent my entire life active in communities of faith and that certainly has never involved, helped with, or facilitated a date let alone a long term relationship.
    • hattmall 5mo ago
      I find that so incredibly hard to believe, in my experience it's like the primary purpose of people in relationships past a certain age is to play matchmaker. It seems inevitable if you are consistently around people and known to be single that they will try to set you up with *someone.
      • harimau777 5mo ago
        I think that a lot of the problem is that most churches are full of people who are over 60 so there are often few eligable single people.
  • b3ing 5mo ago
    Church is one of the worst places to try to date and that’s not the purpose. The only purpose of church is worship, not socialization or politics or pushing an agenda or judgment
    • triceratops 5mo ago
      > Church is one of the worst places to try to date and that’s not the purpose This is surprising to me. I'd think churches would be overjoyed about congregants dating, getting married, and having children (who then go on to attend church). > The only purpose of church is worship, not socialization or politics or pushing an agenda or judgment Is this sarcasm?
• sublinear 5mo ago
  I find it interesting that this niche manages to survive, and that the most common takes are attacks on the gimmicks rather than the quality of the people signing up. The last time any dating apps were "good" was when they weren't apps, but websites. People on these sites back then weren't really trying to optimize for anything. Many were honest and had realistic expectations. It was considered a bit loserish because it's the digital version of the want ads. Of course, everyone likes piña coladas. Dating websites were the less exhausting alternative to going out drinking or finding new social circles. People understood that low risk meant low reward, but hey it was either that or no date at all. In other words, this was always a pretty bad scene. What changed is the marketing angle more poised to take advantage of the naive. Making it shiny because computers isn't really working anymore. It's crazy it ever did.
  • triceratops 5mo ago
    > Dating websites were the less exhausting alternative to going out drinking or finding new social circles The per-event odds of finding love by going out drinking and joining new social circles are low. But the odds of making some great memories and good friends in the process are pretty high*. At least better compared to the alternative of sitting at home and swiping on an app. * There's an entire TV show based on this premise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother
  • ChiperSoft 5mo ago
    I continue to be furious at how Match destroyed OkCupid. OkC of the 2010s was a fantastic and rich community full of interesting people. I met my wife there. I learned about Polyamory from the message boards. Now they've ripped out everything that ever made it good, it's just another Tinderlike
  • BobaFloutist 5mo ago
    There's also an issue in the apps, that is of course going to be an issue in real life too but will be starker in the apps, that if the apps are doing their job, any decent candidate for a relationship will spend very little time in the app. Sure, everyone is different and has different tastes, but I'm not even talking about being super attractive -- even just people that are emotionally functional, moderately skilled communicators, visually and socially unobjectionable, and modestly interesting will also leave the pool relatively quickly. This leads to two options: 1. At any given time, the apps are overwhelmingly populated by people for whom there is at least one very good reason they are currently single. If they're lucky, that reason is changeable, and they find out about it and change it, and leave the app pretty quickly thereafter. 2. The apps intentionally sandbag their "placement rate," repeatedly matching people that are capable of having good relationships with people that aren't, in order to keep a decent pool of the former in the app. Neither of those scenarios makes a dating app a particularly good place to start a relationship. On the other hand, an app designed for people looking for for one-off hookups can easily prosper indefinitely, since good candidates for one-off hookups aren't going to stop using the app the second they have a good hookup.
• hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 5mo ago
  On dating apps, men will always be the customer and women are the product. You cannot fix this asymmetry due to how attraction works and the risks involved between men and women. Ironically Instagram is 'the' dating app as you can vet people better and see if they have any social proof. Real life skips a lot of the BS altogether. I can't ever see anything improving. They will just learn how to manipulate men further into paying, where you suddenly get swarmed with likes then get nothing for a period then get swarmed again so you remain hooked and eventually pay.
• recursivedoubts 5mo ago
  as surely as water will wet us as surely as fire will burn the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return
• nathanaldensr 5mo ago
  This does absolutely nothing to address the underlying social, economic, and ideological reasons why new relationship formation is struggling so much, especially with Gen Z. It's not a technological problem, in other words. I won't go into my personal explanations here as I'll just be downvoted into oblivion (there are other forums for that discussion) but I will say this: without men and women having reasons to be in relationships--especially long-term reasons--then relationships won't happen. It's proving easier to get our needs met outside of relationships.
  • hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 5mo ago
    >I won't go into my personal explanations here as I'll just be downvoted into oblivion Enlighten us.
  • RiverCrochet 5mo ago
    > without men and women having reasons to be in relationships--especially long-term reasons--then relationships won't happen. I'm actually fine with this. I'm not sure I want to be around the same person constantly for longer than a few years and I'm glad modern life allows me to do that. Leaving my family when I became an adult was the best thing I ever did. I'm sure someone out there's thinking or about to say "families are the basis of a stable society" and that's incorrect. The basis of a stable society is having enough money. Without that, families are simply going to be a performative thing to satisfy angry people and/or busybodies.
    • M95D 5mo ago
      I'm really sorry for you. I hope you will have someone to love you someday. No amount of money can bring that kind of happiness.
      • RiverCrochet 5mo ago
        Many people love me, and I love many people. Love exists outside of exclusive sexual relationships and/or ones designed to encourage breeding.
• triceratops 5mo ago
  Dating apps shouldn't exist. Period. No good can come from letting a company become load-bearing in an activity humans were able to do for free since time immemorial - find a partner. (Yes I'm aware some traditional societies had/have professional matchmakers)
  • lesuorac 5mo ago
    So we should ban recreational kickball? Seems foolish to me to ban technology from dating given how much time people invest into it.
    • triceratops 5mo ago
      "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In any case this is a non-sequitur. Recreational kickball isn't a dating app. I don't think it's possible legally to "ban technology" from the dating space. "Dating apps should not exist" was aspirational, not a call for a legal ban.
    • general1465 5mo ago
      We are already banning scammers wherever we can. What is a difference between dating app and a scam? I can't see any.
  • tpm 5mo ago
    Finding a partner was never free, even if no money was involved, at least one of the partners has to invest and demonstrate the resilience and commitment, that involves time and often also money like paying the bar tab for the date in the simplest case. (and yes, I found my wife by paying for a membership in a dating app. We wouldn't meet otherwise even though we lived in the same city)
    • triceratops 5mo ago
      > Finding a partner was never free, even if no money was involved, That's just pedantry, sorry. It's obvious that forming a relationship has non-monetary costs. And the bar tab for the date is the cost of drinks and food. That's the value you receive for the money you spend. Not companionship, or the chance of companionship. Dates can be a simple walk in the park or on the beach - no spending necessary. That may not land with every potential partner. Some of them will want you to spend, or even spend big, on dates. But then that's also a natural filter of its own, if you want it to be.
• bradlys 5mo ago
  I presume they’ll do something more akin to coffee meets bagel where you have X amount of people per day to choose to interact with. There’s not really much AI in all that. That’s been around for a decade+. Hinge is the behemoth and it’s practically how everyone in the UMC and in rich cities meets now after college. It’s unsettling how few serious relationships I meet have been made in some other way (or even a different app) in recent years. Again, college is the big one but if you’re single after college then it seems you’re going to have to meet through Hinge. It’s hard to meet anyone who is serious in any other way. Relationship pairing is overall down across the board though. Looksism is at its all time high and I think will continue to be even more dominant than it already has. I’ve seen the culture shift quite drastically over the last ten years. The idea of dating someone for their personality and completely ignoring their looks is well dead and gone at this point. No one even trying to keep up the facade that most everything in your dating prospects is dictated by your superficial traits.