
RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps - dvt
https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
======
solatic
It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me
explain why.

Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was
the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would
exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time
the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was
affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by
introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the
cars weren't lemons.

So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of
dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an
emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players";
people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who
stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating
market and makes dealing with the market difficult.

So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look
like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who
can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track
record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the
dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.

So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need
to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to
automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.

~~~
Muuuchem
Wouldn't a simple rating system for dates help a ton?

~~~
Kalium
If you assume honest usage, a high number of ratings becomes a _negative_
signal. That is, it signals someone who doesn't want to stop using the app or
is excessively selective.

So a good signal is probably someone with few ratings. Which would seem to
defeat the point of a rating system, as a five-out-of-five rating is now a bad
sign.

Anecdotally, this does comport with my experience back when OKCupid would tell
you how old someone's account was. It was _far_ easier to make contact and
have a conversation with a new account than with one months to years old.

~~~
ada1981
An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple
up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break up.
Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

Truth is, an app isn’t going to solve for people’s insecure attachment styles
and malAdaptive coping strategies.

Perhaps an app that matches based on symmetrical childhood traumas would be a
hit.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> An app that matches people, gets feedback on dates, and then if they couple
> up, gets regular feedback on how they are in relationship / during a break
> up. Then that score comes with them back into the dating app.

What incentive does anyone have to keep using the service to provide such
"feedback" if they find their match, leaving aside the creepiness factor of a
service asking for such information? (And please, don't _create_ such an
incentive.) If they find their way back into the service, then (ignoring
relatively rare cases) something didn't work out.

~~~
ada1981
Communication within a relationship is a big deal.

So, a service that helped people gain awareness of their patterns and provided
a mechanism for mutual feedback would be useful to someone who is interested
in improving the skills of love and relationship.

There already exist apps that people use for feedback and communication in
romantic relationship.

And, most relationships end (they all do eventually to mortality). How they
end is very telling of the success of the next one.

The problem isn’t really the matching algorithms, it's that people lack the
understanding and modeling of how to have healthy adult relationships, they
carry a lot of unprocessed trauma, and they don't have a context or tools to
work through those old patterns.

It's like making an HR app to match a lot of aspiring kindergartners to AI
jobs or the space program.

------
rmtech
> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market
where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners?

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio

OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to
let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking.

> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.

This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't
see why.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app
> should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10
> people.

As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the
1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start
with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women
sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would
anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors?

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples
> (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to
do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement.
Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt.

In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've
done a good job pointing out problems.

~~~
thebucketbot
> Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group
> dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it
> would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.

As a woman, I would frankly be terrified of going to that. It's risky enough
to meet up with one man from a dating app. I wouldn't risk meeting up with
multiple unknown men.

~~~
rmtech
As a woman, what would you want out of a better dating app?

------
chrissnell
I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go).
I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am
a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet
others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-
founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...)

That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck
with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of
dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a
friend:

"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."

I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to
cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice
furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into
me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I
ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11
years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.

In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach
instead of eHarmony.

~~~
asiachick
Survivorship bias dialed to 11

Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path
and never met their match.

~~~
chrissnell
Yes, I agree and understand. Oh, believe me, I was "looking" for years. For
the sake of brevity, I left out a lot of other important details, like honest
self-assessment, learning listening skills, etc.

But--bottom line--without getting _myself_ on the path to being a better
adult, I was unlikely to have any luck with a dating app. I realized (or
rather, my friend help me realize) that I had to improve my product before
anybody else was going to be interested.

------
marcell
Tinder’s big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have
to “like” the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a
lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages.

I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other
dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company,
the Match Group.

I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new
apps to compete with Tinder and friends.

~~~
Jonovono
So, every other dating app is owned by the Match Group? (Bumble, Hinge, Hily,
etc)

~~~
pageandrew
Hinge doesn't follow the double-opt-in pattern. When you "like" someone, you
can immediately send them a message, even if they haven't yet liked you back.
I guess that's a big enough differentiator to not violate Tinder's patent.

I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has
occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.

~~~
parliament32
No, you definitely can't. You can attach a comment to your "like" but then it
disappears into the ether, and only reappears in your messages section if they
"like" you back.

~~~
dag11
That's not true, we can the comment people leave when they like before we
like/match them back. The thing is that they can only leave a singular
comment/message.

------
onetimeusename
> on Tinder, men outnumber women by 9 to 1.

> Women just aren’t using these apps

Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find
partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?

Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have
worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences
women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to
address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to
meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of
men as cited.

~~~
fossuser
This gets a little into the 'things you can't say' territory, but online
dating just isn't very good for most heterosexual men due to selective
pressures (it's probably better when the population is closer to an even
split, but even then there are problems). This does change as men get older
and there's less competition (online dating is bad for men in their 20s and
good in their 30s).

Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data
you can look at to see some of the problems.

One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages
(making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the
response graph itself.

There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on
attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the
attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around
4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on
dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.

For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness
scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.

For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so
things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of
highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the
side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very
few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills
required for success.

For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're
better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression.
These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance
of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).

If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the
matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites
for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part
is less important.

~~~
JohnFen
I don't know... I'm absolutely nowhere near the top 10% of male
attractiveness, but I've had good luck getting dates on dating sites. From
talking with many women about their experience on such sites, I think that
attractiveness is far less important than behavior -- the vast majority of men
that women hear from, it seems, are very poorly behaved.

~~~
fossuser
Where do you live? I think city is highly variable. It also gets easier as you
get older (for heterosexual men) which could be a factor.

This is the kind of thing where you can’t trust what people say since what
they say and how they act are very different (the dataclysm book is good for
this).

For the matching case if you get zero matches you can’t progress to dates (or
even chat). The selection happens prior to that.

You're probably right though that it's not _only_ attractiveness, there's also
a selective pressure where men are generally okay dating 'down' economically
and women are generally not. While more women become economically successful
(good thing) it further constrains the availability on the dating market. The
only reason I focused on the attractiveness stat first is that on apps like
Hinge/Tinder it's a prereq to even getting to the economic piece.

Diana S. Fleischman (evolutionary psychologist) and Julia Galef discuss some
of this and other things on this podcast which I thought was pretty good:
[http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-216-diana-
fleis...](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-216-diana-fleischman-
on-being-a-transhumanist-evolutionar.html)

~~~
JohnFen
My experience has covered a number of different areas (in the US), and I've
used such sites occasionally for a couple of decades now. I've not noticed a
significant difference between areas or age ranges.

But I'm working with male sample size of one (me), and a female sample size
(women I've talked about this stuff with) of a few dozen, so this isn't
anything like a reliable study. It's just anecdotal.

------
caseysoftware
I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating,
the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely
broken.

It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is
just "pretty good" or - _at minimum_ \- compelling because if you fail on the
site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two.

It's the only business model worse than cigarettes.

I lay out some more detail in a post here:
[https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-
website](https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website)

~~~
lotsofpulp
Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem?

Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a
dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs
people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new
customers through the word of mouth recommendations.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem?

I don't think you can extrapolate the case for a dating site to all
businesses, especially to cases of tangible goods. A car salesman doesn't make
a dime until I buy a car.

Dating sites are an interesting business because a happy customer is one that
is no longer using their product. So how do you monetize that?

If you charge a one-time up-front cost, and a paying customer uses the site
for months and never has success, then you end up with a disgruntled customer.

If you charge a monthly subscription, then you get a perverse incentive to
_not_ please your customer, or only please them enough to keep paying, because
as soon as they enter a relationship, they stop paying.

Only charging after some sort of measurement of success (Like marriage) would
be impossible to enforce.

~~~
saddestcatever
Here's an idea.

Give users an option to put $1,000 in limbo. The condition being, if you
date/marry someone for 2+ years that you met on the app, the app gets to keep
that money.

In return, you get a badge on your profile. It's a certified stamp that your
"money is where your mouth is" and that user either as plenty of disposable
income, or is intent on long term commitment.

^ Both are positive signs for the prospective market.

------
balls187
From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is
happy with online dating apps.

> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and
> where men are hyper-indiscriminate.

I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.

This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal
of it's users.

The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a
snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as
height, job, education.

At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the
experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting
women in real life.

~~~
bryanmgreen
Agree this is one of the most critical points after a lot of thought about
this industry.

I think I’ve pretty much solved it, and am looking for a mobile engineer to
partner with. I’ve got a lot of functionality mapped out.

Shot in the dark to find someone, but if anyone is interested, email is in
profile.

------
fenwick67
Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on
dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time
getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1
men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would
have men clamoring over them?

~~~
zweep
The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to
invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to
dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of
dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who
are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.

If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of
desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to
contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.

~~~
tpetry
Theres a dating app kind of like the idea you are proposing: Once. You get one
(!) suggestion per day and you can decide whether to like or dislike. The
basic idea is quality over quantity. But as such an app is not good at
guessing what you like, you mosten often just press the dislike button.

~~~
keenmaster
The chance that you'd want to date a given randomly selected person, or even
an algo-selected person, is small. The "Once" app sounds like navigating deep
space in hope of one day reaching a habitable planet.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
If you don't expect 30 matches a month to include a reasonable flow of date-
worthy people, I think you've encountered exactly the problem the app is
trying to solve. Your standards have been skewed unreasonably high by the
constant availability of one more match, and some of the people you're not
willing to date would make you perfectly happy if you did.

------
toomuchtodo
The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in
person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with
another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to
another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person
time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal
closeness, to occur between two people.

TLDR _The problem is the app_. People get Uber for dating, which results in
the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because
chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food
delivery services.

~~~
philwelch
True, but hookups _are_ that way, and you get more repeat users by optimizing
for hookups than for romance.

~~~
djsumdog
I had a good friend who said he thought dating apps only work for people who
are attractive. Looking at my own friends in my life who have had successful
relationships from dating apps and those who are frustrated by them, I'd say
my friend was wrong. Dating apps only work for _very_ attractive people, 7 out
of 10 guys and up (6/10 and up for women).

The market graphs in the article are really apt.

~~~
toomuchtodo
"It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are
competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing
for the top 20% of men."

[https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-
ii-g...](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-
unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-
your-2ddf370a6e9a) (Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you
are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative
socio-economic study)

------
meristem
...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group
for a dating app.

Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless
of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found
ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.

~~~
Kalium
Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid?

It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be
experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would
love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?

~~~
meristem
My understanding of OKCupid is that it caters to 'free for all'. The site
choices they made was to increase TAM by stating their addressable market is
'YES' (this is not a dig on the choice).

I have not heard about consensual non-mog/poly/name du jour had a TAM
problem-- can you point me to sources? My sources of 'not a problem' suffer
from geographic and socioeconomic biases.

~~~
Kalium
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-018-1178-7)

4% seems like it could be a difficult market to function in, especially since
that cannot be assumed to be a random sampling from the background population.
I'll assume that anyway, for the sake of simplicity. That limits you to a TAM
of ~12 million Americans, of which you would do well to get 10% as users and
1% as paying customers.

120,000 paying customers isn't a vast customer base. That's an upper bound,
meaning any app is going to come in well below that for a variety of geo-demo-
socio-economic reasons. Or just because getting high market penetration is
difficult.

Again, I would love to know if there's something I've overlooked that changes
this significantly.

~~~
meristem
Well, I trust the Kinsey folks at IU, the origin of the data set. That TAM
could be valid and indeed a problem specially if wanting to set up a very
large user base. I do wonder about the relationship between quality and
quantity in this space.

The study is only 2 years old,(pub data 2018) but the data set is indeed 'old'
(2012). The survey is muti-wave, would be interesting if they ran the data
from 2014-18 through the same statistical tests as this paper.

It is very hard to believe the findings in this abstract based on my
connections with US therapists serving alternative communities, primarily in
the East and West Coast. Maybe the center of the country is very different
(possible and probable). I have no comment on the 4%, although one model
change I'd suggest is that, contrary to monogamous dating, non-monogamous
folks will come back to the app for more partners even when successfully
dating. Here the number of total partners is not the limit, but the allocation
of free time and personal energy.

~~~
Kalium
I've noticed that a lot of alternative lifestyle communities cluster
aggressively, so I also wonder how evenly distributed the demo here is.

As for ongoing usage, that's an excellent point! If you could grab a solid
quarter of the potential userbase willing to pay and keep them paying $10/mo
forever, that puts you at $300,000 MRR ($3,600,000 yearly). That's enough to
cover AWS bills, a small office (think Regus), and probably a handful of
employees in the SF Bay. Or Bay-grade pay for a 100% remote company. Get the
120k number and you're grossing 12 mil / yr. Nothing to sneeze at for sure.

I think it would be a challenge to make much more than a lifestyle business
out of this, though.

------
yuhao
There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of
the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot.
Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for
each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.

~~~
twostorytower
I loved Grouper. Met a lot of cool people and had a lot of fun. My guess is it
was an operational nightmare to scale. There was a lot of manual effort on
Grouper's end in selecting the venues, matching the groups, making the
reservation, and paying for the first round of drinks (the model was you pay
$20 per head to Grouper but it covers your first round).

------
ravenstine
> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.

Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last.

> Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it
> should be having a fun night out.

This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot
of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly
because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but
we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up,
adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine
things have gotten better since.

> Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a
> M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets.

I think I like this.

> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app
> should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10
> people.

I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible
programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer
games but used to organize meetups.

> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.

At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake
psychology.

> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples
> (harassers, catfishes, etc.).

I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this.

\---

Here are some ways I think this could be made better:

\- People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been
active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and
wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio.

\- The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users
cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes,
but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the
studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also
be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated
upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them
nearly impossible.

\- If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure
what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning
isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or
is suspended for a short period of time.

~~~
juped
>The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users
cannot upload their own photos. [...]

This is probably the top idea in this whole thread so far.

~~~
ravenstine
Admittedly, the problem is that this limits the app to being regional. Either
the company would need to open offices in major cities, or studios could
contract with the company. I think it's feasible, but would limit the
audience.

The benefits for the user would be incredible, in my opinion. One of the
reasons I quit online dating years ago was because I was already wasting tons
of time on them, but I felt like I was having my face spat in every time I
scrolled/swiped through photos and half of them were annoying instagram
filters, or duckface, or people sticking out their tongues, etc. Of course
there's people who don't look like their photos. Moderating this in-person
eliminates these issues. It's also a revenue model for the dating service, as
I'm sure there could revenue could be shared between studios and the service.

I also like the idea because it would reduce the number of users who aren't
serious. You'll always get people who use online dating because of ego-
stroking or because they think it's "funny", but fewer of those people will
bother if they have to get their photos taken.

~~~
juped
It's only gotten worse since.

------
elil17
Unfortunately, you can’t isolate your app from the broader environment of
dating apps. For instance, take the “No ELO” suggestion. Implementing this
feature means you’ll attract a lot of users who don’t like ELO (typically,
less attractive users) and won’t gain any users who benefit from the ELO
system (attractive users). If you can’t get attractive users, you can’t get
any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?)

Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make
their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.

~~~
gadders
What is ELO?

~~~
nordsieck
> What is ELO?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system)

In this instance, it's presumably a measure of a person's holistic
attractiveness - say the average willingness of prospective partners to accept
another date.

~~~
gadders
Thanks - I've learnt something today.

------
rchaud
Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to
industry margins?

It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the
consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new
gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle
you think the product will give you.

No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc
brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is
going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is
often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro
messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc.

So why would people pay for this?

------
generalpass
How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options
ahead of time.

You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous
introduction.

If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each
receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If
both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away
with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment.

(Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.)

One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no
problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of
online dating? What does that do to the pool?

------
RickS
Here's a random idea I find interesting:

Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a
dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.

Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc),
and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict
nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few
basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.

But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build
their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a
million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are
afraid to eat fruit, whatever.

Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first
message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably
sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole
budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A
portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful
applications. There is no free plan.

There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale
pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too
fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely
costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's
inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be
selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and
waiting until response to filter.

I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to
something like tinder, but it would be neat.

~~~
kart23
I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting
in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't
actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on
things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what
people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually
really important.

------
jariel
These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch.

In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality
and make matches, and they've all failed.

OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found
that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting
outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was
'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about
politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror
movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility.

In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly
determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark
estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but
even then, it's a crapshoot.

In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it.
All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it
makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context.

I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount
to that much.

From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a
self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's
imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX.
But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of
what the value is.

I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a
way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet
people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.

------
wefarrell
I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an
assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a
heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were
to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but
there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences.
Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination
of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each
other.

Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than
this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this
concept.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem)

------
scottlocklin
Imagine thinking the answer to a vast societal problem involves making yet
another app for your ipotato. A vast societal problem more or less directly
attributable to apps on the ipotato.

Put your imbecile phone down, leave the house and talk to people, you
gibbering goons. Pay attention to others, not your nerd dingus: you might
notice things. Better yet, leave your dystopian shit hole American city
hellscape and find people who don't require a nerd dildo for self validation.

~~~
heartbeats
So how do you do this then? My circle of friends obviously consists of people
similar to me, I would have to go two or three hops to find any women.

To visit the Philippines seems a bit drastic.

------
dilippkumar
What if - dating apps are not the answer?

We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that
keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment
that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend
his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems
like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm
(or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular
literature).

Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to
break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com
That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that
platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is
nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet
interesting people.

My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as
a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to,
a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar
demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share
a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place
where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is
socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite
conversation to a group of people.

I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a
library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably
not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human
connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the
first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that
serves a community around it.

If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app
that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only
interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text
messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with
- but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can
pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go
and meet real people in the real world.

------
zelly
The author misunderstands the business model here. It is precisely this market
asymmetry that makes the platform any $$$. Otherwise what incentive do guys
have to spend money on advertising their profiles.

If anything, the evidence presented would suggest that the market is _skewed
in the favor of men_ already. Otherwise women:men would be 1:1.

I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design.
Who wants to join me? (only half joking—seriously reach out)

~~~
RickS
> I propose disrupting the space with even more aggressively Darwinian design.

I'm curious what you'd do to make these apps more darwinian than they already
are.

I'm only going to use Tinder as an example since I think it's the most market-
efficient by far, and I'm going to assume for the sake of argument that the
stereotypes about gendered market forces are true. A few hypothetical ideas,
in order of extremity.

1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for
free)

2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without having
been liked by the recipient)

3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact
initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by the
crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for large-
scale deception).

I think all of these rules would exacerbate the existing dynamic, and I'm
unconvinced that's healthy for either side. As others in the thread have
pointed out, I don't know any single women who are having the time of their
lives on dating apps, despite the 80/20 hypotheses etc. They may have a huge
statistical selection advantage, but in practice that seems to be like hunting
for the single best meal of your life on a 10 mile long, all-you-can-eat
buffet of food you mostly don't care about.

Which is the source of my pet hunch:

All dating apps are effectively identical, having converged on a pitifully
vanilla product that's easy to monetize and scale, and that prioritizes volume
over fit. This is good for companies, but bad for individuals. Large scale
online communities erode the advantages of actual individuality in favor of
performed individuality in a way that ends up feeling dehumanizing for
everyone.

Look at reddit: the popular subreddits have a monoculture that's predictable,
uninteresting, and easily gamed, and so people game it, making it worse, until
it's parroted itself into a tired caricature. Meanwhile, tiny subreddits exist
with smaller tribe dynamics and have much more robust, varied, and interesting
experiences.

IMO the thing we actually need is subreddits for dating, so that people can
self-select into smaller, higher-signal tribes, rather than pretending that
everyone should have to card sort everyone in their metropolitan area.

In a way, this is a different kind of darwinian: encouraging finches to lean
into divergence.

~~~
zelly
> 1) all women get gold features (see who likes you, unlimited swipes, etc for
> free)

> 2) only men are subject to double opt in (eg women can message without
> having been liked by the recipient)

> 3) double-opt-in is based on something ELO-ish. The height of the contact
> initiation barrier is proportional to your attractiveness as determined by
> the crowd (although this creates some extremely perverse incentives for
> large-scale deception).

These are all great suggestions. Yes, they should be implemented. Yes, they
will increase the female:male ratio and bring in more dollars.

The economics of it is to find a balance between selectivity and availability.
You can make the world's most exclusive dating app, but then you have no
users. You can make the world's easiest dating app (extreme example: people
automatically match at random), but then you can't monetize the male users and
female users leave. These constraints create the vanillaness of popular dating
apps you mentioned. They all converge to the same business model.

I don't think it is completely efficient though. One thing to optimize for
would be reducing the chance of a failed date. I would suggest additional next
gen screening mechanisms like potentially a full 3D reconstruction of a
person's body/skeleton, maybe some AR, use your imagination, there's a lot of
ways to go with this with varying levels of dystopianism. For one mild
example, if someone's height in person is a dealbreaker, then the AR ghost
would reveal this in spite of a likely frauded height stat.

> This is good for companies, but bad for individuals

I'm speaking from an business/marketing perspective. Obviously this is not
"good" for the users. The objective is to get more men to press the Pay button
--there is literally no other reason to make a dating app. The "good" thing
for people is to not use dating apps, get married young, and have children.
You have leave your morality at the door, like AAA game dev or high frequency
trading. Nobody _should_ waste their life playing video games or gambling in
financial markets, but if they do, let's oblige them and do business.

------
8f2ab37a-ed6c
I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start
monetizing their male audience more.

With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively
more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to
stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue.
They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO
that's not going far enough.

You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco
where men would gladly pay their way into a date.

Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men
to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest
bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be
obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is
affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to
know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may
or may not be a good thing.

~~~
meristem
whatsyourprice.com Also asymmetric market.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
Paying someone to go on a date with me just seems weird. Either you're keen to
go on a date or you're not, but if I have to pay someone then I'm not even
interested.

------
caublestone
I kind of think that agreeableness is a major factor in seeking intimacy that
isn’t captured well enough in online dating. People are afraid to meet people
that disagree with them and actively ridicule people with differing
values/opinions/lifestyle. Religions, sports teams and other mass clubs
obfuscated a lot of the concern away. But without those people need other
groups and tools to trust a stranger to agree with them over time.

------
jdelsman
Why has nobody mentioned Grindr?

~~~
zelly
The gay community has flawlessly foreshadowed the culture of the general
populace for hundreds of years. People ignore this for stupid
ideological/emotional reasons. If you want to see what the future Tinder looks
like, look at Grindr today.

~~~
nerdjon
I really really don't think that's going to work...

Women have enough issues being harassed on the dating apps as it is...

Grindr conversations are very... forward (and would be seen as harassment by
most Woman I have chat with about Grindr)

In reality the only reason the Grindr way "works" is because there is no
societal power difference between everyone on it vs a hetero focused dating
app.

~~~
_lacroix
It has always amazed me how well Grindr works, and yet every dating app
catering to lesbians is a complete trainwreck. No hetero power dynamics on Her
either but everyone on there seems more than a bit unhinged (as compared to
the crowd on Tinder/Bumble) and the entire user experience is terrible. But on
apps that allow hetero dating there are sooooo many men posing as lesbians by
changing their gender settings or "bicurious" women who aren't actually
looking to date women but changed their settings to show their profile to
women just for fun because they like swiping and there's such a low barrier to
entry. In case anyone reading this works there: I know I'm not the only one
who really wishes Grindr would create a women-only clone of their app!

~~~
ve55
The same type of technical app may still turn out quite differently if it's
for a vastly different demographic; it may be worth comparing outcomes to some
relevant baseline metrics, such as the female divorce rate being >2x that of
the male divorce rate in homosexual marriages in most countries
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same-
sex_couples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_of_same-sex_couples)

~~~
_lacroix
Very true. Based on personal experience I'm convinced that the female/female
divorce rate is so much higher not because women have worse relationships with
other women but because women have a tendency to rush into "serious"
relationships that ultimately don't last. This would certainly lead to a
different dynamic than you see on Grindr. The lesbian dating style is very
much:

1\. meet girl you like

2\. almost immediately become exclusive

3\. date "seriously" for several months, effectively skipping the early phase
of the relationship where straight couples tend to play mind games or continue
casually dating other people

4\. break up

5\. repeat

My gay male friends tend to casually sleep around a TON until eventually
settling into a very serious long-term relationship, while straight couples
are somewhere in the middle and have a much longer casual dating phase before
making relationships official (at which point the relationship is more likely
to last). When you take men out of the dating equation, the vast majority of
women become serial daters who hop from one semi-serious semi-long-term
relationship to another. It makes sense that a number of those couples would
get married and then quickly get divorced before an equivalent straight or gay
male couple would even get married in the first place.

It's actually quite interesting to observe these dynamics IRL; makes me feel a
bit like a dating anthropologist.

------
rafiki6
The stats I remember reading about dating apps show that conventionally
unattractive men fail miserably at using them and conventionally attractive
men tend to reap tall the spoils. I think this was a study done by okCupid
based on their data. Overall, this is generally true in the real world. The
problem with scaling dating apps actually lies in the fact that the majority
of the population, particularly the male population, will not succeed. They
lose interest and leave the platform eventually. There are many intangibles in
a relationship that you miss when you using dating apps. Maybe you make up for
your lack of a chiseled jaw line by being hilarious or good at something.
Maybe you end up being attracted to someone because you have a really deep
connection due to similar interests.

I actually think dating apps are generally doomed to repeat the same mistakes
because they just don't allow you the important element of organic real life
connections.

------
rmtech
If I was going to try to disrupt dating, I would look at ways to please the
women on the site. The women are the limiting factor, it's important to get
more of them.

I think this will look like harsher and more invasive prescreening of the men.
Make an app that watches a man do 50 pressups. Work out how get the mens'
financial info. Work out some AI-based test of confidence that's really hard
for the man to fake.

The problem with this approach is that unfit, loser-ish men are the profit
centre for these apps, so the app wants to string these guys along just enough
to get money out of them. Still, it might work as a nonprofit or something.

Another angle that might work is trying to provide a credible commitment
mechanism for people who want commitment. Marriage used to fulfill this, but
it has its problems. A sort of "digital marriage" system that punishes people
for going back on their commitments, particularly men stringing women along or
women divorcing men later.

------
devit
The problem is that current dating apps consist of choosing people whose in-
person behavior (as well as resources in some cases) you care about based on
self-selected photos and their ability to write text messages, so it's pretty
obvious it doesn't work very well.

------
Razengan
Most dating services are little more than ad platforms; you advertise yourself
and you can pay to have your ad shown to more users (though their prices are
ridiculous with no indication of effectiveness, and border on scams that
actually _hinder_ matches unless both people are paying, especially Tinder
with its severe nickel-and-diming and predatory dark patterns.)

A true _match-making_ service would automatically match people based on their
criteria, preferences and shared interests.

Of course, if a dating service is truly effective then its users will no
longer need it. :)

------
philwelch
> Does not limit sign-ups to keep a balanced M:F ratio. You see this in Vegas
> all the time: to make sure the ratio isn’t skewed too far female or (more
> likely) too far male, the hottest club in town is going to have a line.

This isn’t just a balancing mechanism, it’s also a revenue model. I’m really
surprised that “free for women, men must pay a weekly fee” isn’t more common.

~~~
tom_mellior
> free for women, men must pay a weekly fee

Would this be allowed in the US? In the EU it would probably be forbidden as
discrimination.

~~~
Kalium
Depends on the state. It's barred in California, for example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act)

~~~
why_only_15
Interesting that the supreme court ruled on this specifically

> The California Supreme Court also decided that the act outlaws sex-based
> prices at bars (ladies' nights): offering women a discount on drinks, but
> not offering the same discount to males. In Koire v Metro Car Wash (1985) 40
> Cal 3d 24, 219 Cal Rptr 133, the court held that such discounts constituted
> sex stereotyping prohibited by this Act.

------
AlphaWeaver
I'd like to highlight: this is a problem that's on topic for us at VC3
([https://vc3.club](https://vc3.club)). We're a group of contributors seeking
to produce actionable research in the area of technology for social
connection.

If this sort of thing interests you, we would love to have you join the
discussion!

------
lowercased
Have the 'dating app company' organize small group dates, and broadcast on FB
live or similar. Turn it in to a reality show. Well... not FB live - you could
only watch if you're a service member (or perhaps paid?)

~~~
soylentcola
Thankfully not on dating apps anymore but this sounds horrifying (to someone
like me at least).

Between the narcissists and attention seekers of the "reality TV" crowd and
the thought of having a potentially stressful and awkward (or, at best,
intimate and personal) meeting broadcast on freaking Facebook sounds like
something out of Black Mirror.

------
prawn
From the half-bakery, but what if you could get an indication of how many
messages each user was receiving? And the number of users you could message
was limited each day?

------
blunte
Even if you build the perfect dating app, ultimately it will be sold off to
Match or some other monstrosity, and then it will go (more) downhill.

------
htrp
we had similar experiences in this market for a company now nearly a decade
ago.... the problem is that most of the potential features identified by the
OP exist in the form of community organizations / adult sports leagues /
social clubs

as a start-up, it's nearly impossible to scale the hyper-local focus
(partnering with coffee shops/bars) across multiple regions

------
moosey
While David Brooks and I don't agree on much, his discussion of "relationism"
vs. "individualism" and his "weave" program is the ultimate disruption to the
way families and communities are built today. IMO it is the actual disruption
for dating and relationships in the US.

I'd go further than what Mr. Brooks offers in his assessment of the situation,
but like all things ideas exist on a continuum. I would much rather try to
build a tribal group than try to find dating partners.

------
jl6
I looked through 302 comments on this thread and couldn’t see a single
commenter identifying as a woman. I can’t help but think if we could get women
more involved in the design of dating apps we might have a chance of creating
something that works.

------
Ancalagon
How will a zero tolerance policy for harassers be enforced?

~~~
Ancalagon
legitimately don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. Is this not
a fair question? Help me understand.

------
shakura
Badoo and Bumble are made by the same company, lol

------
jeromebaek
As a LGBTQ person this article is so creepy

~~~
fenwick67
"are the straights okay?"

------
greggman3
It feels like there are a bunch of irreconcilable issues.

I had a discussion about improving dating sites at a local dev meetup. I was
told by the 30 something women in the group the only thing important is the
person's face. Nothing else matters on a dating site.

Of course that's only a few data points (small meetup) but was very
frustrating to hear and if true then all this is pointless. It's certainly not
true for me personally though.

Random thoughts

* video: In the 80s there was video dating. You'd go into the dating service office, look through notebooks of profiles, then ask for the videos of the people you were interested in. Is that just not possible anymore? I get that people were shy of the internet before but in 2020 with Instagram and TikTok are videos not viable?

* AI video interviewer: could you make some interview system where a selection of pre-recorded videos of an interviewer asking questions asks you interview questions so you actually get a reasonable interview out of the user? (vs just having a "record button" and leaving it entirely up to the user)

* Encouraging better profiles: Similar to the AI video interviewer, how can you encourage users to create an interesting profile? I have no idea for the men but for women, making these numbers up but it feels like 30% write nothing. They just put their picture (Tinder, OkCupid, Bumble, CoffeeMeetsBagel). 65% write something so generic as to have no value like "I do yoga, like travel and eating out, dancing, and movies". I have no idea how to fix this. One is use TalkToTransformer.com to make up a random profile and tell them to fix it or else. another might be text-to-speech from the AI video bot (yes I know that's not likely to work). I also know most people or at least some large percent of women don't want to put in the time to fill out a profile. They just want to sign up and look around. Maybe their profile should stay private until they've added enough content. Maybe some deep learning could rate how unique their profile is and they stay private below some threshold or tell them it sucks and they aren't going to get any good matches unless the level it up with lots of suggestions.

* Better Interests: One service (probably patented) lets users create public interest groups. An interest group = name of group and single photo (icon). Example of groups "Raspberry PI Lover", "Fan of George Clooney", "Chocolate is the 5th food Group", "Seeking Soulmate", "Dad jokes are hilarious", "Zelda Love", "Dogs > Cats", ... The plus is a user can just select 5 to 500 of these interests which many find easier than writing a profile. So, on the user's profile a list of these icons show up. Clicking an icon also shows all the other profiles that added that interest. Most dating sites have a boring and useless set of 10 to 50 categories. The user created ones are much better at helping find people with similar interests. I suspect this feature would need serious moderation though so people don't make trolling or rude interests.

* separating services into DTF, LTR, etc...: Right now it feels like on all the major systems everyone is mixed together, both the people that just want something for tonight and the people looking for a soulmate. The mix doesn't work IMO because the DTF men disgust the LTR women and so the LTR women leave. How to fix that I have no idea. One idea is if you're on the LTR site and someone asks DTF you can flag them and get them moved to the DTF site (with enough flags and/or moderation).

* better activities: There was a service "How about we..." were your profile was just suggestions of activities "How about we go to disco bowling together". "How about we try stinky tofu"... etc. How can that be expanded? Partner with AirBnB experiences to sign people up to local event? Partner with entertainment venues for live performances? There's a service called "Dine" which was supposed to be "pick a restaurant, one of 3, from a person's profile, which then automatically sends them a message, so-and-so would like to take to you (name of restaurant), choose a time..." In my experience the site lacked any women even close to my age but it did seem like you could charge a premium and potentially partner with restaurants to try to making actually meeting in person in a safe venue as frictionless as possible.

* group activities? I know match.com had their stir.com initiative. I don't know if it went anywhere. I tried a couple of events. Too few people. Not good matches (odds of matches low). Still many people say they really only have had relationships with people they've known for a while so how do take that feedback into account?

* How to get people to pay and take it serious and still get users. Most of the dating services are free or free for women. This fills the site with non-serious people which is not actually helpful for those that actually want to meet someone. On the other hand any paywall = no users? Although I know that's not always true. The #1 site in Japan is pay only, $120-$180 a year, at least for men.

------
hnewsshadowbans
There is nothing to fix or disrupt. The vast majority of women don't need or
care about dating apps the vast majority of men won't get anything out of
them. Women want the fittest men, men will bang anything that moves. Thats the
root issue and how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the
purview of a better engineered dating program. At most you'll make it slightly
less predatory or more monetarily profitable. A lot of people (men) will still
be left out in the cold.

~~~
kubanczyk
> how to fix it or if it even should be fixed is far beyond the purview of a
> better engineered dating program

You've laid out the problem. You say you don't see a solution. It's a non-
sequitur to claim that no technical solution exists.

> A lot of people (men) will still be left out in the cold.

Looks like we can't have an ideal world, here and now?

------
golemiprague
Two things he downplays but I think should get more attention. As someone who
has been there way before dating apps it was pretty obvious to everyone that
the 80/20% is pretty accurate. Every group of guys had those guys who would
get most of the women, it is just the way it is. Dating app just made it even
more extreme, maybe 90/10.

The second thing is what he calls 2nd and 3rd tier apps. For all those 80%
those apps give some alternative. If you don't get matches in Tinder you can
still message people in POF for free and if you got good text skills it works
much better than tinder for people who are average looking. So I wouldn't call
it second tier but rather the solution to some of his complains.

The solution he suggest is what society in more conservative societies always
did, vetting by parents and family and a matching system that gave a chance to
every male in society to find a woman by matchmaking with end result of one to
one. All of that only works when you accept the scarcity of marriage and it is
enforced socially by people, legally by the state and sometimes also by
religion. I am afraid this is not going to work in our society of today unless
we all accept on ourselves more conservative values.

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hnewsshadowbans
Bumble is not a 'decent' app. Its whole schtick is taking a dump on the group
that keeps it in business (men) and how horrible they are and how women need
to be protected from them. Thats not fair to men or sustainable.

~~~
ska
They are clearly responding to a real market signal (the belief, at least,
that too many men behave poorly on some of these apps) that at least some
women respond very favorably to. I guess if they remain successful that tells
us something about both that signal and the sustainability.

~~~
hnewsshadowbans
If you don't like a person don't swipe on them. If they behave badly, unmatch
them. I fail to see how women are systematically oppressed under this system
vs the one Bumble provides.

~~~
ska
It doesn't really matter what you or I think about it individually - if enough
women are unhappy with the experience (whatever it is) on other sites that
they move to this one _and then find it superior and stay_ it's a pretty
strong market signal. If it fails, that's another signal.

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peter303
Unhappy incels

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nailer
The apps are asymmetric because dating is asymmetric: most women do not want
to date most men.

Likewise subtle prostition is common because it's part of heterosexual dating:
men are expected to provide resources.

You may disagree with the morals of this, but it is very clear this is how
dating works, not a new thing created by the existence of apps.

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paulie_a
This whole "disruption" simply sounds like someone who can't get a date on the
current apps.

Apps are simply a number game. You get to contact a larger amount of
individuals than you could in person.

Steps to getting a date: 1 - match with someone 2 - ask a question related to
their profile 3 - have non creepy casual conversation. Every answer or
statement you give should be followed by a question 4 - ask to Meetup for a
drink or coffee in the new 3 days

I don't know if that counts as a true date but it's a start. Step 3 is
incredibly important

