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An interesting challenge with dating sites is that the “bell curves” of attractiveness versus desired attractiveness between men and women aren’t symmetric. Th

An interesting challenge with dating sites is that the “bell curves” of attractiveness versus desired attractiveness between men and women aren’t symmetric. This leads to difficulties running a dating site because women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations. Many women only ever join dating sites as an ego boost, with no intention to actually go on dates. I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you. Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date. Etc… It would be very hard to bootstrap, but once going it would produce many more long term partnerships than “swipe right” style apps.

November_Echo 19d ago
That might sound good in theory, but no one is going to sign up for that. Who will want to pay $50 to not meet up with the creep some algorithm has set them up with? Honestly, it's kinda dangerous.
- maerF0x0 19d ago
  I think they're separate things -- Penalized for not matching with what you say you want to match with. Charged $ for not appearing for a date you had already agreed to.
Spooky23 19d ago
For dudes, you just pay. They boost you and give you a bonus boost when you first start. The tinder strategy is simple. Sign up, make profile, swipe, stop, come back in a week. Then upgrade with in app purchase, hustle to get 2-3 contacts, and churn the subscription. Repeat if needed with a different app and rotate as needed. You’ll get a date with this method and the rest is up to you. Look around, hot girls are with toad looking guys all of the time. You need to manipulate the platform so you are front and center.
SwellJoe 19d ago
"I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you. Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date." No woman alive would agree to this. And, I'm sure there are women who sign up for dating apps for an ego boost and that's why they don't reply, but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach some men take and end up not taking any of their responses seriously. Women often quit dating apps because of bad experiences, they're not going to agree to a date where they don't get to do their own vetting of the person they're meeting.
- jiggawatts 19d ago
  > but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men. Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you. Evidence is that that works out better.
  - SwellJoe 19d ago
    "Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you." A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation. I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.
    - jiggawatts 18d ago
      > if you think it'll work. It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure. They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site. Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase. This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners. The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.
applfanboysbgon 19d ago
A man trying to design a dating system to force women into dates is hilarious. One problem you seem not to have considered: what's in it for the woman? Why would she ever agree to this? To say nothing of how you would be excoriated in the media the first time a woman was assaulted and reported that she had bad vibes but felt pressured into it by your app. And that's if you didn't just create the perfect serial killer pipeline. This is literally the worst PR nightmare of an idea I've heard in my entire life. And, just, you know, bad from an actual human perspective too.
nl 19d ago
> women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations Is this a SF thing? I'm maybe a 7/10 and I've never had trouble getting dates in any city I've lived in or traveled through. I just put some effort into sound interesting, make sure my pics are the best I can find and it's fine. But I've never tried dating in SF and I've heard the gender balance can make it harder?
- twalla 19d ago
  Women get an absolute deluge of interest - when I was dating it wasn't uncommon for me to see women with inboxes with 10k plus messages/likes. There's definitely an aspect of "just pick the hottest 2 or 3 people you're shown and close the app" because you're overwhelmed and over half of the profiles are poorly filled out/sending low effort or vulgar messages. I think most men do poorly because they don't understand the female gaze and they don't take the time to create a profile with half decent photos that communicates who would want to date them and why.
  - firefax 18d ago
    I had a female friend ask me how she could get less lewd messages -- showed me her inbox. Perfectly normal photos, kind of thing you'd have as a stock photo on your lab group's page. Had to tell her sorry but it's just how it is and felt really sad for her. (Sadly, that one is anonymized because it happened more than once.)
- hn993302 19d ago
  It's SF and also age. I've been on both ends. But even when men have the advantage in serious dating, women on hookup apps get more attention because those aren't 1-1 pairings, if you know what I'm saying. On Tinder and some other sites, it's unclear whether it's for hookups or dating. This led to some awkward dates for me back when I was single.
- firefax 18d ago
  I'm ugly and I had a lot of dates. Not a lot went beyond one, but people were perfectly willing to chance a beer if you can actually string together a sentence. Maybe ranking people like that is why you struggle, and not your looks? Sadly I think a lot of men have untreated eating disorders and body dysmorphia.
hn993302 19d ago
Btw Tinder did seem to have a hotness score, at least when I was single in college. Higher score meant being shown higher up on others' stacks. You hurt your score by swiping right on people who don't swipe right back. It was possible to game because it didn't matter as much how many people swiped right on you total. There were ways to tell who liked you ahead of time, even before that became a paid feature. I got myself to the top. All the other guys in those slots were 6'4" gigachad athletes/lumberjacks.

November_Echo 19d ago

That might sound good in theory, but no one is going to sign up for that. Who will want to pay $50 to not meet up with the creep some algorithm has set them up with? Honestly, it's kinda dangerous.

maerF0x0 19d ago
I think they're separate things -- Penalized for not matching with what you say you want to match with. Charged $ for not appearing for a date you had already agreed to.

Spooky23 19d ago

For dudes, you just pay. They boost you and give you a bonus boost when you first start. The tinder strategy is simple. Sign up, make profile, swipe, stop, come back in a week. Then upgrade with in app purchase, hustle to get 2-3 contacts, and churn the subscription. Repeat if needed with a different app and rotate as needed. You’ll get a date with this method and the rest is up to you. Look around, hot girls are with toad looking guys all of the time. You need to manipulate the platform so you are front and center.

SwellJoe 19d ago

"I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you. Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date." No woman alive would agree to this. And, I'm sure there are women who sign up for dating apps for an ego boost and that's why they don't reply, but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach some men take and end up not taking any of their responses seriously. Women often quit dating apps because of bad experiences, they're not going to agree to a date where they don't get to do their own vetting of the person they're meeting.

jiggawatts 19d ago
> but most are just overwhelmed by the shotgun approach That’s the whole point of this approach — women don’t get drowned in spam from men. Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you. Evidence is that that works out better.
- SwellJoe 19d ago
  "Instead it’s the equivalent of a trusted friend or relative setting you up with someone they know will suit you." A random dating app is a "trusted friend or relative" now? Sorry, that's not a reasonable expectation. I mean, go for it, if you think it'll work. It's easier than ever to spin up an MVP. But, if I were a betting man, my bet against this working, especially with women, would be very, very, large. Not only do I think it's not viable, I would be genuinely surprised if you got one (1) paid sign up from a woman.
  - jiggawatts 18d ago
    > if you think it'll work. It would, at scale, where there's sufficient data to train some decent embedding models to accurately judge partner compatibility. As a machine learning exercise, this is "easy". Heck, Facebook does it, possibly without even "trying" to implement dating specifically! I regularly get spammed with "suitable single women" as friend suggestions by Meta. I'm not single, but as dating suggestions go, they're actually not half bad! If I was single, I'd reach out to some of the recommendations for sure. They've clearly implemented this exact feature, but they bootstrapped it by having a billion+ people in their system and trillions of interactions between them already. They didn't start out as a dating site. Similarly, I've heard that LinkedIn is now more of a "single professionals dating site" than a career-making / job-seeker site, at least for a decent fraction of its userbase. This is eminently solvable, and people do use these systems to find partners. The nigh-insurmountable challenge is boot-strapping a dating-only site from scratch.

applfanboysbgon 19d ago

A man trying to design a dating system to force women into dates is hilarious. One problem you seem not to have considered: what's in it for the woman? Why would she ever agree to this? To say nothing of how you would be excoriated in the media the first time a woman was assaulted and reported that she had bad vibes but felt pressured into it by your app. And that's if you didn't just create the perfect serial killer pipeline. This is literally the worst PR nightmare of an idea I've heard in my entire life. And, just, you know, bad from an actual human perspective too.

nl 19d ago

> women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations Is this a SF thing? I'm maybe a 7/10 and I've never had trouble getting dates in any city I've lived in or traveled through. I just put some effort into sound interesting, make sure my pics are the best I can find and it's fine. But I've never tried dating in SF and I've heard the gender balance can make it harder?

twalla 19d ago
Women get an absolute deluge of interest - when I was dating it wasn't uncommon for me to see women with inboxes with 10k plus messages/likes. There's definitely an aspect of "just pick the hottest 2 or 3 people you're shown and close the app" because you're overwhelmed and over half of the profiles are poorly filled out/sending low effort or vulgar messages. I think most men do poorly because they don't understand the female gaze and they don't take the time to create a profile with half decent photos that communicates who would want to date them and why.
- firefax 18d ago
  I had a female friend ask me how she could get less lewd messages -- showed me her inbox. Perfectly normal photos, kind of thing you'd have as a stock photo on your lab group's page. Had to tell her sorry but it's just how it is and felt really sad for her. (Sadly, that one is anonymized because it happened more than once.)
hn993302 19d ago
It's SF and also age. I've been on both ends. But even when men have the advantage in serious dating, women on hookup apps get more attention because those aren't 1-1 pairings, if you know what I'm saying. On Tinder and some other sites, it's unclear whether it's for hookups or dating. This led to some awkward dates for me back when I was single.
firefax 18d ago
I'm ugly and I had a lot of dates. Not a lot went beyond one, but people were perfectly willing to chance a beer if you can actually string together a sentence. Maybe ranking people like that is why you struggle, and not your looks? Sadly I think a lot of men have untreated eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

hn993302 19d ago

Btw Tinder did seem to have a hotness score, at least when I was single in college. Higher score meant being shown higher up on others' stacks. You hurt your score by swiping right on people who don't swipe right back. It was possible to game because it didn't matter as much how many people swiped right on you total. There were ways to tell who liked you ahead of time, even before that became a paid feature. I got myself to the top. All the other guys in those slots were 6'4" gigachad athletes/lumberjacks.