
Inventing a Dating App That Women Will Actually Use - asperry
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/02/dating-app-for-women-that-isnt-awful.html
======
sp332
_“On one hand, women are extremely powerful and we’re leading the workforce
and climbing to jobs that are simply amazing. But, on the same note, we want
to be feminine, we may not necessarily want to be the ones approaching the
guys. How does that work? You still want to be the girl at the bar where the
guy is the one who comes up to you.”_

Well... tough! If you want to be leaders, you have to take responsibility.
It's hard to take initiative, it's scary to risk rejection, but someone has
to. And if you want equality, that means you gotta step up and do your share
of "approaching".

~~~
Mz
As a woman who is willing to initiate, I find it rarely works. It mostly
backfires. Men typically react one of two ways: "Cool! Slut throwing herself
at me!" or "OMFG! Stalker!" It almost always goes disastrously. I have been
working on figuring out how it works to attract a man and let him initiate. I
find it to be rather tricky to navigate.

~~~
marvin
What natrius said. Not meaning to sound mean here, I applaud your initiative.
Really wish more girls had the balls to do the same. And there's probably a
difference regarding how forward women and men are perceived (especially in
the US, I don't get the same impression in Norway). But do you have any idea
how many girls an average guy approaches for every one he actually has a
mutual connection and attraction with?

In online dating, where I _put in some effort_ (sending a serious, thought-out
message and not just boilerplate) I get a reply to about one out of every five
messages I send. The total track record after about a year of effort is one
date per 20 women messaged, or something like that. The picture is better when
you're meeting people at parties where you already have something in common
(one in ten, maybe?) but I'm assuming the bar scene would be somewhere around
1/20 or worse. I'm in my mid twenties.

~~~
Mz
Let me try to put that another way: I get the distinct impression that many
men find it threatening to have the tables turned and struggle to remain in
control of a process where they are used to initiating. I have put a lot of
thought into how it works to signal receptivity selectively because it really
has gone extremely poorly for me to initiate, even though I have a long track
record of being heavily sought after by men. I have trouble reconciling the
two sets of experiences without viewing it as mostly rooted in biased social
expectations about who is allowed to do the asking.

~~~
auggierose
a) Are the men who are "soughing after you" as desirable to you as the ones
you are after when you take the initiative?

b) Are you more nervous when you take the initiative yourself?

~~~
Mz
In most cases, I was pretty sure they were interested before I decided to
bring it up. Me initiating caused back pedaling. So the groups have
substantial overlap. The problem seems to very much be that I am not supposed
to be proactive, etc.

I don't know how to answer that second question. I initiated with my ex
husband. We were married more than two decades. But he very likely qualifies
for a diagnosis of Asperger's and was often clueless when women flirted with
him. More "normal" men seem to be shocked and appalled that I would take an
interest in them and express it. As best I can tell, it has nothing to do with
me being nervous. As best I can tell, it has to do with being perceived as a
dragon lady.

------
whalesalad
The biggest issue with dating applications/services today is that they are
focusing entirely on the wrong thing: matchmaking.

No online service or the algorithms behind it is going to be sufficiently
advanced and AI-ified enough to be able to determine whether or not person A
and person B would be a good match.

There are too many variables. What even is a good match? Hell, MOST of the
time humans get it wrong. How many times have you met someone who fits about
80% of the bill... but you don't find each other funny enough, or attractive
enough, or the sex isn't so good. You can't determine ANY of that via an
online service.

The real magic is going to happen in the real world. You put people together
and see what happens, plain and simple. Dating sites need to stop focusing on
match percentages, political affiliation, BMI, hair color, how many keywords
match in your bio, etc...

I am an economically conservative person. I did not vote for Obama and do not
want him to be our president. On the other hand, I could easily date and get
along with a woman who disagrees with me. (most do actually) I tend to prefer
brunettes, but I don't really care what color your hair is. If I was locked
into some kind of algorithm or search query in a dating app, I might never
meet a blonde girl who shared a lot of my common interests. Maybe you're great
at writing a witty/funny bio but you're incredibly shy / dry in person. Maybe
you look like you're killer in bed, but in actuality you don't even enjoy sex.
None of this will come from a dating service. It all comes from meeting people
and getting to know them through real life events.

I'd continue and explain what I think is a good solution to this problem but
it will be easier for me to just link to the app when it hits the app store in
the next week or two :)

~~~
jessriedel
> But those same women might tell me of a night they just "went crazy" and
> slept with some guy they just met. And you know what, everyone does this.

That second sentence is very false, even if you replace "everyone" with
"almost everyone". Just 52% of people surveyed by a Durham University study
had had a one-night stand (1,743/3300). Furthermore, this sort of behavior is
often regretted; of the women who had reported a one-night stand, only 54%
said they had positive feeling about the experience.

> Women predominantly reported "regret at being used," with additional
> comments including: "I felt cheap," "horrified afterward," and "I felt
> degraded. Made myself look cheap and easy. Total regret."

Popular summary: [http://www.livescience.com/2678-realities-night-stands-
revea...](http://www.livescience.com/2678-realities-night-stands-
revealed.html)

Paywalled academic article:
[http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-008-9036-2?L...](http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-008-9036-2?LI=true)

(I predict the results will only change moderately if you restrict the sample
pool to whatever particular age range you're interested in.)

I think you're incorrectly generalizing from a very non-representative social
circle. I know you're just writing off the cuff, but you don't do anyone any
favors when you downplay the very real emotional risks people (especially
women) take when behaving promiscuously.

~~~
whalesalad
I understand what you're saying but at a basic and common human level: we all
make choices that we occasionally regret. Sometimes that leads to change,
"I'll never do that again", while other times it just makes you look out for
that particular scenario while continuing in the same behavior. I've had one
night stands I regret purely because of the social stigma against it. Other
times I've had mutually good one night stand experiences with people.

In relationships such as these, one person will be coming from a place of
higher value and another will be coming from a place of lower value. That
isn't to say the woman is always the one coming from a place of lower value.

Thanks for linking to the articles, adding them to my reading list.

------
adambard
As a project last year I wrote a locally-focused dating site with a friend. It
has a similar premise to "Check Him Out", mentioned in the article, but we
didn't use a shopper/product metaphor, opting instead to be straightforward in
emphasizing discreetness for women and ease of use (laziness, effectively) for
men.

You can see it at <http://www.ladieschoicevictoria.com/>

It's been very interesting so far. We've had a strong positive response from
two groups of women: young women who have had bad experiences with more open
dating sites, and older women who, speaking generally, aren't totally
comfortable with online dating and prefer the privacy of having a profile only
visible to people you select. We've got a similar ratio to "Check Him Out",
about 60% women, and about 1600 users overall.

We haven't made any effort to monetize yet, but it seems clear that the
relative success we have had (including being covered in a local paper) is
thanks to both the privacy features and the local aspects.

I don't think we've solved the problem, but I do say that the experiment
suggests to me that some combination of safe and local is the essential
ingredient that the author is looking for.

~~~
pc86
I've always been interested in those first few days/weeks/months for dating
applications. What's it like running a dating site with 30 members?

Obviously locality makes it a lot easier but even then, there had to be a
point where you had 5 users and nobody else. How do you get past that?

~~~
adambard
Building the prototype took two noon-midnight Sundays, and we started
promoting it after the second one.

First, I posted the site on a local subreddit, which got us up to about 20
users. We started telling friends and friends-of-friends, and my partner
ponied up about $800 to run some radio ads. Fun fact: radio stations will whip
up an ad for you as part of their fee. It was pretty fun hearing that on the
radio.

After that first hundred users or so, we started sending press releases out to
anyone we thought might care. This was much easier being local, and easier
still because my wife is a writer with some experience being on the receiving
end of PR press releases, and she wrote it up for us.

We were lucky enough to be featured in the local paper of note, got an
interview on local radio, and a week later we were up to about 1000 users. The
rest we've picked up more or less organically through word-of-mouth and/or
google.

Edit: This was back in October. I wrote this mostly about the technical
details, but it has some experiential stuff too: [http://adambard.com/blog/my-
experiences-deploying-a-small-cl...](http://adambard.com/blog/my-experiences-
deploying-a-small-clojuremongo/)

------
zem
one huge problem (which the article does allude to) is that women simply do
not feel as safe as men when interacting and meeting up with a stranger. it
has little to do with attitudes to casual sex and everything to do with the
relative perceptions of safety.

~~~
thirdtruck
Agreed. I can't even think of a male-targeting pejorative term that carries
anything like the emotional weight of certain words that a disinterested man
could wield against a woman when rejecting her advances. That says a lot about
the _actual_ differences in power between the sexes.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not quite sure what you mean. I think the GP is talking about people who meet
in real life after connecting through an online dating site.

In such a case there are obvious risks that one takes when meeting someone who
is a) a stranger b) very likely significantly physically stronger c) already
expressed some level of sexual interest.

~~~
zem
yes, that was what i was talking about (phaedra starling's "schrodinger's
rapist"[0] is a good if dramatic look at how the landscape is different for
women in a way i will probably never fully realise). though the parent has a
point too - there is an entire catalogue of abusive terms a man can apply to a
woman who has rejected his advances, and the accumulated weight of social
convention has given those utterances the power to hurt.

[0] [http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-
sch...](http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-
schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-
women-without-being-maced/)

------
AmericanOP
Tinder is blowing up right now, and they cornered the coveted attractive 18-29
year old female demographic.

Why are these girls using it? Because other attractive girls are using it.
IMO, they used _the_ growth model for social networks (the same that Facebook
used:

Get sorority girls as users. In the case of Tinder, some top-tier sororities
had rushees use the app and the number & quality of guys who 'liked' you
influenced if you got in. Once sorority girls use it, then other high-status
girls will use it. Then the guys start using it because the girls are there.
Then it's a chain reaction until it circles back to the tech crowd who aren't
a part of that culture, at which point tech journalists try and pinpoint why
the app was successful and get it wrong because the original users are bored &
gone by then.

Rather interesting to me that IAC acquired Tinder.

------
ElissaShevinsky
Author Ann Friedman has a useful insight: "From the Web-based heavy hitters
like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout,
How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men."

The CEOs of every major online dating site are men, with the exclusion of
newcomer Coffee Meets Bagel. OkCupid, for example, has about 30 people, and
fewer than five team members are women. These women have relatively minor
roles in product development.

Women don't like using online dating sites. Female users are harder to sign
up, much less engaged than men, quit sites faster, and are less likely to
convert to paid memberships. It's worth considering whether this has anything
to do with online dating sites being designed primarily by men. Online dating
sites monetize via their male users, which perpetuates designing for the male
experience.

------
vinceguidry
Here's my stab at designing an online dating app.

People input basic information. Age, sex, location. How far you're willing to
travel for a date, how many dates a month you want to go on. That's it. You
pay $20 a month for the service and the software pairs you with someone else
for a date randomly. No suffering through poorly-written and dishonest
profiles and pics. If you don't like the person you're paired with, oh well,
you'll have another date next week.

The idea is we are our own worst enemy when it comes to finding mates and to
let nature take its course as much as possible.

~~~
ebiester
Works fine for men. I don't know more than one woman who would try this. A
woman may not be able to pick the eventual winner, but they have a better
chance of avoiding Mr. Creepy. It might work if people are personally
interviewed beforehand and weeded out, but I still don't think it has much
chance to get traction.

Ask 50 women before you launch. :)

------
MilesTeg
I think it would be very simple to solve the problems indicated in the
article. Just charge some amount of money to send a message on the dating
site. It would cut down on the total number of messages and people(men) will
start self-regulating who they send messages to. If it is free it incentivizes
every 'creep' on the planet to spam every remotely attractive woman.

------
vincefutr23
no mention of tinder?

------
edwardunknown
That's a tough one, you can't make the internet not creepy. Facebook is
actually the best dating site because it disguises it's purpose (and that
_was_ it's original purpose) and even then you'll have better luck standing on
a street corner talking to strangers.

