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.
This article demonstrates the same failings as the dating apps its author wishes to disrupt.
It does not discuss the safety concerns of dating, either online or offline. It does not discuss the cost of identity verification and other security measures. It does not discuss the revenue model at all.
Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar, assuming you're smart and invite them to meet at a public place first.
AM works [1] because it charges significant amounts of money and works very hard at background checks.
All other sites in-between fail because they want to be the 'Amazon/eBay of dating', wherein they stand up a classifieds site with profiles, refuse to charge enough money to perform background checks, and promptly turn into a lemon market populated by malicious actors who are represented as vetted and safe.
There is no mistaking what you're getting on Craigslist or Tinder for "vetted and safe". You're getting a complete stranger who you haven't seen in person yet. If that's your bag, you're set.
There is no mistaking what you're getting on AshleyMadison, either. It's what they say and they work very hard, and charge quite a lot, to ensure that you'll only meet safe and vetted people.
If you want to play the in-between market, you need to charge a lot of money for accounts and use most of that money to vet people's identity. You can charge less money than a specialist site like AM ("affairs only"), but you can't have any free users, or you'll just become a lemon market like all the rest.
It's unfortunate that AM is so focused on affairs, because their model is the only one that seems to be working as an alternative to the classified-ads approach. Safety and secrecy cost a lot more than Okcupid was ever willing to charge.
This could be something that one could actually disrupt. Problem with Tinder is that its interest is not aligned with users who seek long term commitment. Tinder needs its users to stay in the swiping pool to create revenue. The users (at least some of them) on the contrary wish nothing more than finding the right partner and stop using Tinder.
An anecdote from Bumble app, whenever a user finds a partner and therefore stops using the app, the app notices this and starts to aggressively match the user with new partners. This sudden influx of new potential partners makes commitment hard for some users.
If the incentives would be aligned, the user would pay for finding the long term partner and for abandoning the app, instead of paying for super likes etc.
I always imagined the main benefit of AM was that “married” is an indicator of having passed some basic standards of behaviour - i.e. they are at least fit enough to have been married once.
It seems like a plausible business model too, since presumably cheaters aren’t expecting long-term relationships and will be back for more.
As has been discussed multiple times here on HN, it is highly debatable that apps like Tinder work for more than a minority of men at one end of the age spectrum, and women at the other.
There are possibly therefore other gatekeeping opportunities to consider along with those you suggest and the brilliant parent "lemon market" comment, subject to the scale barrier noted.
The lemon problem, as you highlight, is due to asymmetric information. The mechanisms you mention fix that: mechanics check a car before it is certified, the warranty as well as the value of the brand (reputational damage) shift incentives against cheating on that check. Similarly, in matchmaking, usually the matchmaker knows both parties, warrants that they are ok, and his reputation suffers if they aren’t.
A real innovation would be to solve this problem of asymmetric information in dating in a similarly robust, yet scalable fashion.
Credible testimony is a big problem. People who’ve moved on won’t want to really talk about it much. Meanwhile those who haven’t moved on will replay every bad moment in their head and do their best to make that other person look like a demon, and some just outright lie because they want to take the other person down.
It’s hard to know if that person really was an asshole, or if the person writing the review was the asshole. The only way to know is to accumulate a bunch of separate reviews and maybe try some complicated ML algorithm on the intricacies of the messages/find trends in a person’s reviews (if everyone around them is negative, it’s probably not other people), but...if you start to get to a point where someone has an obvious trend, they’ve probably been through loads of partners, and people looking for dating and not hookups generally don’t want someone who’s churning through new partners constantly.
If you have a solution to this problem, divorce attorneys around the world would pay you for it. It’s way more valuable than a dating app.
Self-disclosure seems like easy low-hanging fruit. I respectfully ended a relationship with a poly individual long before she did anything that I would have considered cheating. It became a question I asked on every first date, and I am now engaged to a mono individual. You might be surprised how many individual would openly admit that they are mono, poly, casual or what-have-you, provided that they are not discriminated for admitting it. I'm incompatible with non-mono sexualities and being open about that spectrum allows me to avoid "cheaters" and them to avoid "clingy."
Apps can then strictly filter according to those preferences (some allow disclosure, all have fuzzy filtering at best).
I don't think the core idea in the post would work, though. Scarcity would only be present in the app, genders that enjoy a natural abundance of choice would probably open the other apps after swiping left on everyone in this one.
this may be a low emotional intelligence take, but I've often thought that dating and hiring are fairly similar problems. you're almost suggesting that people submit dating resumes and cover letters for consideration. on the one hand it seems strange that we don't use even the weakest signals used by hiring managers when we search for potential matches. on the other hand, this would obviously take a lot of the "humanity" (for lack of a better word) out of the process.
for what it's worth, I've never really encountered issues with people outright lying or seriously misrepresenting themselves on dating apps. the people I've met up with were more or less "as advertised". I think the problem is more that a couple pictures and a short bio just aren't a lot to go on for judging compatibility. also in my experience, people tend to have a list of things they definitely don't want in a partner, but don't actually know what they do want. all my successful long-term relationships have been with people I knew for a while before I ever considered dating them. I never considered them an obvious match upon meeting them.
A certain fintech startup wanted to build a side buisness dating app that verifies credit score matches. The idea is still up for grabs if anyone can figure out how ot market it.
The numbers are worse than that. Under 20% of people on dating apps are "date bacon", and can get dates, and the other 80% are losers.
Online dating is mostly IAC, which has 130 brands in the business.[1]
Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Meetic, Match Affinity, Meetic Affinity, Affiny, LoveScout24, Parperfeito, Twoo, Lexamore.nl, Amoreux, Neu.de, Partner.de, Secret.de, Gencontros, Divino Amor, e-kontakt, Sprydate, Datingdirect, OurTime, People Media, Pairs... are one company.
Grindr seems to be more successful than Tinder at hooking people up. Most of the problems I've seen from dating apps, revolve around the security a woman feels and an over supply of potentially suitable men.
> 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
"Honesty" isn't a binary attribute and it might not even be that important.
But let's suppose it is, and you had a 100% accurate honesty test. What then?
Reject the bottom 50% of users from the app?
Match people on percentile of honesty?
Make a score that's a balance between looks, wealth, age, charisma, health and honesty?
It might turn out that honesty correlates negatively with other desirable traits. What then?
Both when dating and when buying used cars, I prefer to deal directly with the owner/person. There's no need to bring a middleman into either activity.
Both when dating and when buying used cars, I require an intermediary to introduce me, as otherwise I am not willing to trust in the owner/person directly. My safety is paramount and requiring a 'middleman' drastically reduces the chances of malicious behavior by the owner/person.
Clearly there is, as people like to buy certified pre owned used cars and meet people via acquaintances.
Perhaps some people don’t have the time or ability to evaluate a used car, or a life partner. Or they feel the broker reduces risk as they might offer some guarantee of the product.
I don't think I completely agree with the conclusion though I did chuckle at the analogy.
Still, taking the analogy to its conclusion, there is a market for used cars at reasonable value ( as in, not all used cars are lemons; some are driven to church on Sunday only ).
This is the space Carmax fills fairly well. They do their vetting though. That might be the secret. I have no doubt there is a market for a decent way to date.
Full diclosure: me and my wife met online ( eharmony I think ).
I feel like that was the original point of having to login through Facebook to access Tinder, you could see whether your matches had shared friends. The idea being this was a potential indicator you might be a good match or not
I don't think it is impossible but it is definitely hard to do it "everywhere". A lot of the sites allow for free users to create profiles and this simply attracts scams and bots. You need to make it expensive. You need to make messages cost above X per month. I think you need to start like Uber did at first, it is only people who make $Y+ and maybe it requires a W2. I imagine it like what The Ladders tried (unsuccessfully) to do. You can later slowly move down market but you will need the density of a large city for any matching to work.
Personally, the best part of dating apps/site for me was meeting people outside of my social circles or people 30 minutes away. It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute".
Your other point is valid though, most people just want sex. That isn't a new phenomenon but these apps make new targets easy to find and those targets feel more isolated emotionally than they did in the past.
> It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute".
Sadly this has gotten worse with the post-2010 dating apps / sites. You used to be able to filter by all sorts of things, detailed looks, education, hobbies, smoking,... Now you can only sort by age, distance and by online status (and the last two don't even work properly). It's all looks nowadays, which is kinda annoying since I e.g. would really like to filter by education and smoking. But I guess that would be to superficial and judging...
Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free to message and had paid options.
My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
Originally, OkCupid and PoF were free with paid options.
My experience is anecdotal, but I never had a problem with bots on OkCupid until after the IAC buyout. PoF has always had its share of bots.
I think churches have often fulfilled this role historically; but now that job is served largely by colleges (especially those with a high-cachet brand-name). They're a modern 4-year debutante ball: the dating pool is filtered both by age and socioeconomic status, and most students are packed into tight living quarters, maximizing random social interactions and leading to emergent trust/reputation networks. There's a reason that "we met in college" is such a common answer from married couples.
Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson make sharp critiques against secondary-education institutions, arguing that signaling of grit and conformity is primary, while learning is secondary; but IMO the dating-pool petri-dish aspect of college (often subsidized by parents starting to think about grandchildren) goes under-examined.
Also, the most highly trained academics are woefully unqualified to make matches. Socially attentive individuals in the relevant age cohort fare probably a lot better. A lot of women, in particular, are half decent at guessing, among the people they know, who might make half-decent matches, partly because they actually know their peers.
If women in particular are good at this. And I'm thinking as I say this...wouldn't women be the sex that pursues? I'm not saying men do better at this because they pursue/initiate. This just seems like a false statement unless I misunderstand what you mean.
It’s is indeed very difficult to build a good dating experience. I was working on a project that essentially used your bank account (via OpenBanking) as a gatekeeper.
This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match.
The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive.
Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address.
Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.
Additionally Dating apps like to do as if they represent the world — the girls/guys available out there — but e.g. certain types of persons who you could date might never even sign up.
So if you are e.g. into art, going for into a gallery opening might give you more "potential matches" than swyping tinder for a whole day – plus you got to see art.
Isn't the main problem that women are too picky, and men are not picky enough though? So the apps only work for decent women, and very good looking men.
The biggest lemon problems can be solved by the people by just being careful. I.e. making a video call first, before meeting in real.
That's not an arranged marriage, it's an arranged pool of potential dates.
Same as how if you're on tinder, you're not going to magically swipe to a person not on Tinder.
It just so happens there's someone saying "This person isn't allowed to sign up for Tinder, they're emotionally scarred". Which will probably scar them more.
It's hard to have a reliable rating system for non fungible goods. Unless a person dated a hundred other people, it'd be hard to tell if the rating is accurate. I think it'd work if you want to find people to have sex with one night. I doubt its usefulness to find a partner
I think a rating system would be highly exploitable. Other than that, people seem to think in extremes. Either it's close to 10, or close to 0. Middle-tier doesn't move anyone, even though most are there...for example, how many times do you watch movies with 5.0 rating on IMDb
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.
No. If someone was great, but not for me, do I rate them 0 stars? 5 stars? Am I feeding the algorithm or helping others? If I met someone, instantly fell in love, but they decided it wasn't a good match and didn't want to go on a second (or 5th, or 10th) date... then I can revenge-rate them to sink their future chances of being happy?
Rating systems don't really provide much value elsewhere for various reasons, so I wouldn't expect it to work well for dates, either. Especially not for dates, now that I think of it.
You mean like Amazon's rating system that's gamed and manipulated? :)
Edit: Now that I think about this more, I am not sure how a rating would work. "He's a 5 star! Would totally date him again!" Wait, what? Why would you stop?
It might be a lemon market for older age categories, but that can't be the case for younger people. They've just entered the market, people born in 2000 are at least 19, if not 20.
Can you elaborate on your theory? I dont follow the connection between honest dealer and low number of attempts at dating.
I've dated lots of folks who I liked, but did not find "ideal". Or they the opposite with me. They weren't unpleasant dating experiences. My goal, though, wasnt to find the first "good enough" match - I can be happy on my own. My goal was to find the partner I couldn't live without. It seems odd to assume I was/am a dishonest dealer based solely on number of dating cycles.
> In economics, insurance, and risk management, adverse selection is a market situation where buyers and sellers have different information, so that a participant might participate selectively in trades which benefit them the most, at the expense of the other trader. A textbook example is Akerlof's market for lemons.
> The party without the information is worried about an unfair ("rigged") trade, which occurs when the party who has all the information uses it to their advantage. The fear of rigged trade can prompt the worried party to withdraw from the interaction, diminishing the volume of trade in the market. This can cause a knock-on effect and the unraveling of the market. An additional implication of this potential for market collapse is that it can work as an entry deterrence that leads to high margins without additional entry.
> Buyers sometimes have better information about how much benefit they can extract from a service. For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite and hence, the least profitable customers. The restaurant has no way of knowing whether a given customer has a high or low appetite. The customer is the only one who knows if they have a high or low appetite. In this case the high appetite customers are more likely to use the information they have and to go to the restaurant.
"who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly ("
Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market.
But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]
Can't say I am apart of it but doing it the way https://rayatheapp.com/ does make sense. Essentially, referrals from existing members. + looking a how many Instagram followers you have.
Using another app such as Instagram as gatekeeper seems to make a value judgement about people not interested in the gatekeeping app’s business proposition.
That way people would be less likely to give referrals to people they didn't know well - as you are vouching for them, and it makes it easier to identify sets of bad actors.
Umm
Why specifically men? How about we all learn a bit more about ourselves and about understanding and communicating with others, say in school...
That comment makes as much sense as saying; ‘If we could make women not be lemons...’
> 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.
The reason young people use dating apps is to avoid this old world formalism.
I don't think your idea would get much traction outside of South Asia and the Middle East.
It's impossible to figure out real world numbers from hype, but my impression is that It's Just Lunch has made a ton of money in the US on exactly this business model.
Interestingly, their reputation seems to be again at similar risk because as they've scaled up across the country they've relied more and more on high cost being their gatekeeper over more direct contact with matchmakers. Or at least that's they way it seems from the many emails and calls I see to rejoin with "discounts" jumping an order-of-magnitude every few years from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars, to now thousands. It's rather extraordinary and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence to rejoin even if I was interested.
I'm a young person (23) and I'd quite like the 'old world formalism'. Then again, I like going on traditional dates and getting to know a person. I don't really know any different.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
1. "Doesn't work for some people" is subject to the same fallacy as "worked for me." Not letting you get away with that one.
2. Working on yourself is very obviously the best way to attract someone else. Statistically speaking we get the most attention from those who perceive our value to be slightly above theirs (people tend to aim for the best around that they don't think are "out of their league"). Increase your own value and you will get more attention from higher value potential partners.
There's a little bit of a catch 22 in that if you work on yourself just to try to be more attractive you probably won't succeed. Things like genuine enthusiasm for a hobby are very attractive and hard to fake, for example. But if you become a person anyone would be lucky date it's not going to be hard to find dates, provided you leave the basement once in a while.
I don't think the parent would be asking for such an app based on the other content, and sometimes that's the most important answer in tech: to know where it isn't needed.
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.
I question the enforceability of such a patent - it seems like a mere technicality of phrasing. For example, on Facebook you send someone a friend request which has to be agreed to by them before additional functionality is unlocked. I don't see how applying such a standard interaction mechanism to a dating app in particular is in any way innovative; it seems analogous to the online shopping cart patent that Newegg invalidated back in 2013.
More likely, Tinder intends to use the mere threat of court proceedings to stifle any potential competition.
Edit: Another comment linked to the patent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408610), and it's... really verbose and complicated (as usual). It seems to revolve around having the aforementioned request-response procedure, while simultaneously using the requests and responses to determine other likely matches to present to the participants. I would summarize it as "Netflix ranking applied to dating app user requests", and remain highly skeptical of any supposed innovation. One thing is for certain though: paying a law firm to dissect this thing and argue it in court would cost you a small fortune.
They (Bumble, but all same company) threatened to ban me because I called them dirty thieves, after I pointed out some dark patterns that they introduced as new features, and they told me they had no plans to revert them. It sucks when there's no stiff competition.
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.
What’s more unbelievable, is the fact that the US Patent Office actually granted them such a patent.
This is a good example of a bad patent.
Now, this will actually encourage shell companies to file all kinds of fake patents, as defensive patents, and thus block anyone from using them.
So for example, the next time another medium, like VR or AR, comes around, then someone enterprising enough will try to think through all the scenarios, and file all kinds of fake patents.
Like for some random example, someone files a patent to recognize your eye blinking, to trigger, a control reaction like clicking a box. Or maybe if you roll your eyes, this will signify that you declined something.
Perhaps someone should create these types of patents just to troll the Patent Office. That way, maybe someone in a position of power, can actually enact change to end this patent nonsense.
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.
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.
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.
So from that data, which I have no reason to doubt, women have the edge, especially more attractive women. Men have a distinct disadvantage which was also apparent from the gender skew.
If women have an edge there, especially more attractive ones, I would expect more would join to gain that advantage. Likewise, men having such unfavorable odds, I would expect they would drop out. But AFAICT, the gender skew has remained pretty static across time and across apps.
So why don't women (especially more attractive ones) join to get the advantage and why do men keep joining if the odds are against them? Do the apps repel (attractive) women? Do they even need the advantage? I would expect attractive women don't have the problem of needing to find dates but maybe not.
Maybe attractiveness is just a relative thing and you need to have such a gender skew for women to filter out who is attractive and who isn't.
> bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC)
Really? Considering the continual emphasis on social issues I hear out of the Bay Area, I thought it would have been far more evenly distributed than other parts of the country.
My anecdata was that I found a great many women on Tinder and other sites where I live (Washington, DC). Not fake profiles; I had plenty of dates. I like to think that I'm a good catch, but I don't think I'm exceptionally physically attractive, and am certainly not wealthy. (I was working for a startup and often made no money at all.) I don't believe I was doing anything other men couldn't replicate.
I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)
Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.
DC is a great place (for heterosexual men) to find dates - I found the ability to get dates via apps to be highly variable depending on the city (maybe M/F ratio, but probably a bunch of factors).
If you want to see this for yourself just change your city in the apps from SF to NYC or DC and swipe. It's pretty obvious and dramatic.
well, that is awfully low bandwidth in an internet-connected world. you may only be exposed to 500 potential mates that way. in a market like NYC, merely being on tinder would probably expose you to orders of magnitude more than that! makes sense to leverage tech to parlay your assets (e.g. attractiveness/mating value) to reach a wider audience in order to get highest possible match you can.
I believe this is the root problem of all dating "apps" or websites, assuming the goal is for two people to find each other and settle down.
Without computers, databases, and the internet, you might only have so many chances to meet someone, and so you are mentally ready to accept someone that may be a few bands "below" you. And you might grow to like them.
But with so much of the cost and friction gone, and a seemingly infinite number of chances to meet someone, especially in bigger cities, that mentality is gone. Why accept someone who might be okay for you when you can aim higher? And if everyone has this mentality, then you can see where the market goes.
I also think there is an issue with wealth/income gap and easy availability of data rendering certain people who aren't seen as able to be economically viable mates to have a value so low as to not be worth dating period.
women control natural selection since birth control, of course they don't need these apps. It is the same for night clubs etc... no entry fee for women, some dating apps do the same, you have to pay if you're a dude, but it is free if you're a female.
An average looking women will never have any issue finding someone to date, an average looking guy on the other hand...
> “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals.
> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says.
> While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things)
The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.
> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
There could well be an untapped market of women who aren't interested in the atmosphere that comes with the unbalanced gender ratio, even if it means being at a personal disadvantage in the process.
Considering that we can't come up with a good reason or show how this alternate app is better/more useful, I'm going to cast some doubt that there is an untapped market of women who want to give up value for some intangible factor.
I'm actually on board with the idea of boutique dating apps that limit population and interactions in this way. I would try one that gave discounts and date ideas ("-$5.00 discount at this particular restaurant, oh, and there's 4 tables left for tonight, reserve a table for your date now through our app").
If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place.
For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult.
These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.
Even with a 1:1 ratio, 20% of the men would attract 80% of the women. In any dating pool, online or otherwise, the math is just generally bad for the vast majority of men attempting to attract a partner. See:
I am skeptical of this much pessimism from the male point of. view. In the op’s post, there is a graph showing women peaking at 60% marriage rate in their 30’s, where as men leave them behind in the 40’s and 50’s. So a good 40% of women aren’t getting their pick of even the bottom 80% of men. i think it’s more like the top 60% of men and women compete for each other and are largely successfully. The bottom 40% of each hold out for as long as they can for the top 60%, and some of them finally succeed (mostly men with accumulated power in middle age).
Also there are pressure release valves. Some people settle for a sexless marriage and simply get sex via prostitution. Men can sometimes find women from poorer countries.
Finally I think what should happen is, make a #singleAndLooking hashtag on twitter and set it on when you are in the market. Let twitter make the hashtag searchable and filterable by city.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
It does not discuss the safety concerns of dating, either online or offline. It does not discuss the cost of identity verification and other security measures. It does not discuss the revenue model at all.
Craigslist and Tinder work because it's no more risky than chatting with a stranger at a bar, assuming you're smart and invite them to meet at a public place first.
AM works [1] because it charges significant amounts of money and works very hard at background checks.
All other sites in-between fail because they want to be the 'Amazon/eBay of dating', wherein they stand up a classifieds site with profiles, refuse to charge enough money to perform background checks, and promptly turn into a lemon market populated by malicious actors who are represented as vetted and safe.
There is no mistaking what you're getting on Craigslist or Tinder for "vetted and safe". You're getting a complete stranger who you haven't seen in person yet. If that's your bag, you're set.
There is no mistaking what you're getting on AshleyMadison, either. It's what they say and they work very hard, and charge quite a lot, to ensure that you'll only meet safe and vetted people.
If you want to play the in-between market, you need to charge a lot of money for accounts and use most of that money to vet people's identity. You can charge less money than a specialist site like AM ("affairs only"), but you can't have any free users, or you'll just become a lemon market like all the rest.
It's unfortunate that AM is so focused on affairs, because their model is the only one that seems to be working as an alternative to the classified-ads approach. Safety and secrecy cost a lot more than Okcupid was ever willing to charge.
[1] Not that AM is any more successful, and in fact might be more fraudulent than the rest! e.g. https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...
But, I mean, who would’ve guessed a company based on the idea of having affairs would have shady as fuck business practices? eye roll
This could be something that one could actually disrupt. Problem with Tinder is that its interest is not aligned with users who seek long term commitment. Tinder needs its users to stay in the swiping pool to create revenue. The users (at least some of them) on the contrary wish nothing more than finding the right partner and stop using Tinder.
An anecdote from Bumble app, whenever a user finds a partner and therefore stops using the app, the app notices this and starts to aggressively match the user with new partners. This sudden influx of new potential partners makes commitment hard for some users.
If the incentives would be aligned, the user would pay for finding the long term partner and for abandoning the app, instead of paying for super likes etc.
It seems like a plausible business model too, since presumably cheaters aren’t expecting long-term relationships and will be back for more.
There are possibly therefore other gatekeeping opportunities to consider along with those you suggest and the brilliant parent "lemon market" comment, subject to the scale barrier noted.
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Meanwhile, Craigslist dropped the dating categories a couple of years ago (in the US, anyway).
A real innovation would be to solve this problem of asymmetric information in dating in a similarly robust, yet scalable fashion.
For example:
* Credible testimonies from ex-partners
* Certification of claimed characteristics (photos, age, weight, income, educational achievement, ...)
* ???
* profit
I don’t know how to achieve these - I’m pretty sure blockchain is not the solution, but something might be possible in that space.
It’s hard to know if that person really was an asshole, or if the person writing the review was the asshole. The only way to know is to accumulate a bunch of separate reviews and maybe try some complicated ML algorithm on the intricacies of the messages/find trends in a person’s reviews (if everyone around them is negative, it’s probably not other people), but...if you start to get to a point where someone has an obvious trend, they’ve probably been through loads of partners, and people looking for dating and not hookups generally don’t want someone who’s churning through new partners constantly.
If you have a solution to this problem, divorce attorneys around the world would pay you for it. It’s way more valuable than a dating app.
Apps can then strictly filter according to those preferences (some allow disclosure, all have fuzzy filtering at best).
I don't think the core idea in the post would work, though. Scarcity would only be present in the app, genders that enjoy a natural abundance of choice would probably open the other apps after swiping left on everyone in this one.
for what it's worth, I've never really encountered issues with people outright lying or seriously misrepresenting themselves on dating apps. the people I've met up with were more or less "as advertised". I think the problem is more that a couple pictures and a short bio just aren't a lot to go on for judging compatibility. also in my experience, people tend to have a list of things they definitely don't want in a partner, but don't actually know what they do want. all my successful long-term relationships have been with people I knew for a while before I ever considered dating them. I never considered them an obvious match upon meeting them.
That's true to just about every problem, to be honest
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/the-dating-ring-sf/
They were featured on a season of the startup podcast https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/kwhxma
They shut their doors in 2018
Online dating is mostly IAC, which has 130 brands in the business.[1] Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Meetic, Match Affinity, Meetic Affinity, Affiny, LoveScout24, Parperfeito, Twoo, Lexamore.nl, Amoreux, Neu.de, Partner.de, Secret.de, Gencontros, Divino Amor, e-kontakt, Sprydate, Datingdirect, OurTime, People Media, Pairs... are one company.
[1] https://datadating.tacticaltech.org/viz
Tinder demonstrated that people seeking casual sex based mostly on looks is a legitimate audience.
Grindr even more so.
"Honesty" isn't a binary attribute and it might not even be that important.
But let's suppose it is, and you had a 100% accurate honesty test. What then?
Reject the bottom 50% of users from the app?
Match people on percentile of honesty?
Make a score that's a balance between looks, wealth, age, charisma, health and honesty?
It might turn out that honesty correlates negatively with other desirable traits. What then?
Perhaps some people don’t have the time or ability to evaluate a used car, or a life partner. Or they feel the broker reduces risk as they might offer some guarantee of the product.
Still, taking the analogy to its conclusion, there is a market for used cars at reasonable value ( as in, not all used cars are lemons; some are driven to church on Sunday only ).
This is the space Carmax fills fairly well. They do their vetting though. That might be the secret. I have no doubt there is a market for a decent way to date.
Full diclosure: me and my wife met online ( eharmony I think ).
Gatekeeping could be done at scale with a web of trust model.
Personally, the best part of dating apps/site for me was meeting people outside of my social circles or people 30 minutes away. It also let me filter dates based on some kind of criteria besides "cute".
Your other point is valid though, most people just want sex. That isn't a new phenomenon but these apps make new targets easy to find and those targets feel more isolated emotionally than they did in the past.
Sadly this has gotten worse with the post-2010 dating apps / sites. You used to be able to filter by all sorts of things, detailed looks, education, hobbies, smoking,... Now you can only sort by age, distance and by online status (and the last two don't even work properly). It's all looks nowadays, which is kinda annoying since I e.g. would really like to filter by education and smoking. But I guess that would be to superficial and judging...
Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson make sharp critiques against secondary-education institutions, arguing that signaling of grit and conformity is primary, while learning is secondary; but IMO the dating-pool petri-dish aspect of college (often subsidized by parents starting to think about grandchildren) goes under-examined.
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Also, the most highly trained academics are woefully unqualified to make matches. Socially attentive individuals in the relevant age cohort fare probably a lot better. A lot of women, in particular, are half decent at guessing, among the people they know, who might make half-decent matches, partly because they actually know their peers.
This approach enables you to analyse transaction data and filter potential matches based on similarity metrics, E.g. social, health, travel, financial. Once you had a similar score it would present present a set of profiles that you could choose to try and match.
The idea was to filter out the noise and find people with similar social standing, interests, etc and then allow the single to choose whom they find attractive.
Linking a bank account would also provide an extra layer of security in that the user has already provided a form of national identity. I’m not saying this completely guards against fraud, but it’s certainly more difficult than creating a fake email address.
Unfortunately, one of the major problems was convincing users to link their bank accounts, let alone attempting to build what essentially is a marketplace.
So if you are e.g. into art, going for into a gallery opening might give you more "potential matches" than swyping tinder for a whole day – plus you got to see art.
The biggest lemon problems can be solved by the people by just being careful. I.e. making a video call first, before meeting in real.
Same as how if you're on tinder, you're not going to magically swipe to a person not on Tinder.
It just so happens there's someone saying "This person isn't allowed to sign up for Tinder, they're emotionally scarred". Which will probably scar them more.
The whole thing with arranged marriages is that the people in the marriage doesn't actually chose who they marry.
What solatic is describing sounds nothing like a arranged marriage. You can always say no and move on, no one is forcing you anything.
How big would your legal team need to be??
aka trolls and spammers will use this feature more than honest people will
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.
What's the standard when it comes to a date? People's expectations will vary greatly.
Edit: Now that I think about this more, I am not sure how a rating would work. "He's a 5 star! Would totally date him again!" Wait, what? Why would you stop?
A track record is also a red flag. In theory, the ideal partner shouldn't need to date for very long.
I've dated lots of folks who I liked, but did not find "ideal". Or they the opposite with me. They weren't unpleasant dating experiences. My goal, though, wasnt to find the first "good enough" match - I can be happy on my own. My goal was to find the partner I couldn't live without. It seems odd to assume I was/am a dishonest dealer based solely on number of dating cycles.
> In economics, insurance, and risk management, adverse selection is a market situation where buyers and sellers have different information, so that a participant might participate selectively in trades which benefit them the most, at the expense of the other trader. A textbook example is Akerlof's market for lemons.
> The party without the information is worried about an unfair ("rigged") trade, which occurs when the party who has all the information uses it to their advantage. The fear of rigged trade can prompt the worried party to withdraw from the interaction, diminishing the volume of trade in the market. This can cause a knock-on effect and the unraveling of the market. An additional implication of this potential for market collapse is that it can work as an entry deterrence that leads to high margins without additional entry.
> Buyers sometimes have better information about how much benefit they can extract from a service. For example, an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant that sets one price for all customers risks being adversely selected against by high appetite and hence, the least profitable customers. The restaurant has no way of knowing whether a given customer has a high or low appetite. The customer is the only one who knows if they have a high or low appetite. In this case the high appetite customers are more likely to use the information they have and to go to the restaurant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market.
But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]
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Which isn't necessarily due to "players", violent men, etc.
Instagram influencer, paragons of healthy behaviors.
That way people would be less likely to give referrals to people they didn't know well - as you are vouching for them, and it makes it easier to identify sets of bad actors.
If we could make men* not be lemons, then maybe society as a whole would have better outcomes.
But how do you scale up "dating coaches"? (Would you even want to? People will pay easily pay four or five figures for such services right now.)
[* Gender is not binary, etc., but painting with broad strokes to make the example more concrete.]
The reason young people use dating apps is to avoid this old world formalism.
I don't think your idea would get much traction outside of South Asia and the Middle East.
Interestingly, their reputation seems to be again at similar risk because as they've scaled up across the country they've relied more and more on high cost being their gatekeeper over more direct contact with matchmakers. Or at least that's they way it seems from the many emails and calls I see to rejoin with "discounts" jumping an order-of-magnitude every few years from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars, to now thousands. It's rather extraordinary and it doesn't give me a lot of confidence to rejoin even if I was interested.
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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.
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.
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.
Happy you met someone but there are tons of people who followed a similar path and never met their match.
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.
1. "Doesn't work for some people" is subject to the same fallacy as "worked for me." Not letting you get away with that one.
2. Working on yourself is very obviously the best way to attract someone else. Statistically speaking we get the most attention from those who perceive our value to be slightly above theirs (people tend to aim for the best around that they don't think are "out of their league"). Increase your own value and you will get more attention from higher value potential partners.
There's a little bit of a catch 22 in that if you work on yourself just to try to be more attractive you probably won't succeed. Things like genuine enthusiasm for a hobby are very attractive and hard to fake, for example. But if you become a person anyone would be lucky date it's not going to be hard to find dates, provided you leave the basement once in a while.
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.
More likely, Tinder intends to use the mere threat of court proceedings to stifle any potential competition.
Edit: Another comment linked to the patent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408610), and it's... really verbose and complicated (as usual). It seems to revolve around having the aforementioned request-response procedure, while simultaneously using the requests and responses to determine other likely matches to present to the participants. I would summarize it as "Netflix ranking applied to dating app user requests", and remain highly skeptical of any supposed innovation. One thing is for certain though: paying a law firm to dissect this thing and argue it in court would cost you a small fortune.
Then again I only spent enough time on the site to grok “ok this exists” and never going back.
[0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9733811
I wonder if it matters, since apparently they use Facebook's SMS verification system.
I think Bumble might be differentiated in that once the double-opt-in has occurred, only one party (the women) can send a message.
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This is a good example of a bad patent.
Now, this will actually encourage shell companies to file all kinds of fake patents, as defensive patents, and thus block anyone from using them.
So for example, the next time another medium, like VR or AR, comes around, then someone enterprising enough will try to think through all the scenarios, and file all kinds of fake patents.
Like for some random example, someone files a patent to recognize your eye blinking, to trigger, a control reaction like clicking a box. Or maybe if you roll your eyes, this will signify that you declined something.
Perhaps someone should create these types of patents just to troll the Patent Office. That way, maybe someone in a position of power, can actually enact change to end this patent nonsense.
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> 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.
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.
If women have an edge there, especially more attractive ones, I would expect more would join to gain that advantage. Likewise, men having such unfavorable odds, I would expect they would drop out. But AFAICT, the gender skew has remained pretty static across time and across apps.
So why don't women (especially more attractive ones) join to get the advantage and why do men keep joining if the odds are against them? Do the apps repel (attractive) women? Do they even need the advantage? I would expect attractive women don't have the problem of needing to find dates but maybe not.
Maybe attractiveness is just a relative thing and you need to have such a gender skew for women to filter out who is attractive and who isn't.
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Really? Considering the continual emphasis on social issues I hear out of the Bay Area, I thought it would have been far more evenly distributed than other parts of the country.
Or maybe that's just a HN bubble.
I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)
Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.
DC-NoVA area is known for having a surplus of women relative to men.
Basically, every dating mechanism works for men in that area.
This, of course, points out that it's simply the availability ratio that changes the behavior of women.
If you want to see this for yourself just change your city in the apps from SF to NYC or DC and swipe. It's pretty obvious and dramatic.
Without computers, databases, and the internet, you might only have so many chances to meet someone, and so you are mentally ready to accept someone that may be a few bands "below" you. And you might grow to like them.
But with so much of the cost and friction gone, and a seemingly infinite number of chances to meet someone, especially in bigger cities, that mentality is gone. Why accept someone who might be okay for you when you can aim higher? And if everyone has this mentality, then you can see where the market goes.
I also think there is an issue with wealth/income gap and easy availability of data rendering certain people who aren't seen as able to be economically viable mates to have a value so low as to not be worth dating period.
An average looking women will never have any issue finding someone to date, an average looking guy on the other hand...
I would say there is a quite a bit of evidence that would corroborate this thesis.
The majority of dating is moving online:
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... (Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds)
But female participants aren't finding what they want:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603 (Mismatches in the Marriage Market) referenced by:
https://nypost.com/2019/09/25/women-are-struggling-to-find-m... (Women are struggling to find men who make as much money as they do)
> “There are shortages of economically attractive men,” lead study author Daniel T. Lichter tells The Post. Although we like to think marriage is based on love, he says, it “also is fundamentally an economic transaction,” and women want partners whom they can call their equals.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/better-educat... (Better-educated women ‘find it harder’ to meet partner)
> While women in their mid-to-late 30s perceive a dwindling pool of prospective partners, men at this age perceive an “endless supply” of possible partners as it is more usual for an older man to choose a younger partner than it is for an older woman to, the study says.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-cost-of-thriv... (The Cost Of Thriving)
> While Americans see traits like “be caring and compassionate,” “contribute to household chores,” and “be well educated” as of nearly equivalent importance to being a “good husband” or a “good wife,” they are far more likely to describe “be able to support a family financially” as a very important trait for a good husband. This finding holds across education level, race, and gender: 72 percent of men and 71 percent of women say being able to support a family financially is very important for a man to be a good husband, compared to 25 percent of men and 39 percent of women saying the same about being a good wife. (My note: Money shot; what society says and what people are doing are two different things)
The high level TLDR is (based on the data) men are content to date down, women are not, and economically disadvantaged men (which there are more of due to globalization and other macro factors) are exiting the dating marketplace, creating a market imbalance. Toss in data showing men online target ~20-25 years old for a partner, while women prefer to date around their age as they age, and here we are.
Possible? Maybe. Interested? Hardly.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place.
For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult.
These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.
You just arent cool enough to have been invited to one yet.
https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t...
Also there are pressure release valves. Some people settle for a sexless marriage and simply get sex via prostitution. Men can sometimes find women from poorer countries.
Finally I think what should happen is, make a #singleAndLooking hashtag on twitter and set it on when you are in the market. Let twitter make the hashtag searchable and filterable by city.
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.
And those that do, don't want to date someone in that band.
Said more crassly: if I'm a 7/10 on the looks scale, why would I want to date someone who is a 3/10?
Another point--you stated desirability. Other than good photos and well crafted bio, how do you indicate your desirability?