it's not going to fly. I think the problem of this kind of ideas is that dating is actually a by product of social interactions, not suitable for engineering.
Currently, * unless someone has a better idea * it would be through manually checking any social profiles including git profiles. The aim is not to turn it into a 'club' but just be selective enough that there are alot of like-minded individuals.
A comment on design: I'd recommend removing the large buttons for "How it Works" and "Queue up" on the landing image and instead using some visual indicator to scroll down. Scrolling down vs. clicking buttons (that just automatically scroll you down) seems redundant to me.
The problem is that it can become insincere very quickly.
Like when a group of people decides to have some fun by laughing at other people who are hoping for a date. This could happen even on a "genuine" account, because intentions of people can change. And people don't act the same when alone versus with friends.
I dislike social profiles like the next person and would like a better way of verifying...
I just had an idea whilst thinking about how I was going to respond to this -- perhaps I could do e-mail signup but instead verify the user through the clearbit/fullcontact api. Need to look into that
How is a Facebook or LinkedIn account considered “verification” when spammers routinely use thousands of fake accounts to astroturf fraudulent pages & ads? Surely this means any malicious actor targeting your platform can do the same.
The point of speed dating is to meet a lot of people quickly in the hope that you'll find someone who has chemistry with you. It's about personality, not sex.
Here's my idea for an AI-based speed dating site/app. You fill in the basics (about you and your preferences), plus 5 things that are important to you in life, plus 1-2 things you want to absolutely avoid (ex, smokers), your availability and that's it.
In the background, the AI matches you and sets you up for a quick coffee date at a location that's not far from either person. Twist: every single person actively looking for a relationship in each particular city must be on the site (aside from self-reporting, I haven't figured out how this will be done).
Essentially, you don't peruse the app, you just receive when & where notifications and then go have a 5-minute coffee to see if you have chemistry, which no current app can actually tell you.
That leaves you essentially only dating people who are within ~10 minutes of you at some point. Anything more would be a big time sacrifice- a 5 minute coffee turns into 15 minutes with a 5 minute commute. If that person ghosts (as online daters will know happens ALL THE TIME) or is suddenly unavailable, or 5 minutes late or whatever, you're wasting extra time on someone you've never met and might never met.
As an example, I haven't been actively dating in a bit, but when I last was it was in a big city with lots of public transit, and my radius was ~10 miles. If I started talking to someone I liked it was no problem for us to work out a time to meet, but I was constantly interacting with people who were never within "random meetup" distance of me.
Agree, there will be some issues with what I'm proposing, but I'm mostly looking at it from an in-app time sink perspective. I'd like to remove any frustrations associated with using dating apps. If someone ghosts IRL, then that factors into the AI/ML as time goes on (maybe they can only go on 2 coffee dates per month for the next 3 months as penalty).
People have the right to change their mind about dating some random stranger. No reason to punish them for it. Its a fact of human nature, and we have freedoms. Best not to curtail this.
To get around the ghosting problem you could use GPS to see if the person is actually where they're supposed to be for the speed date. Essentially, people would get a notification when >x people are available in the area and they could go to a coffee shop and flip a toggle which instructs the app to start sending people to speed date them. If they leave the coffee shop or turn off their phone or anything else then the app would toggle off their availability and stop sending dates.
It could be similar to the way Uber manages driver availability in an area. Except instead of sending you fares, it sends dates.
The beauty of a system like this is that you could go to a coffee shop and read or do work on your laptop and toggle on your availability. If people don't show up to date you it doesn't matter because you're not wasting time anyway.
I'm imagining a toggle to alter your visibility too, between showing your general location within a venue, to something more playful (I'm wearing a green shirt, when there are two others in the room with green shirts), or even just 100% visible (here's my picture, I'm sitting exactly here).
Though, I'm now reminded of two r/dataisbeautiful posts [1,2], where - despite both having faulty graphs - the OP shows how s/he got the most dates when the women messaged first. Meaning, this imaginary app we're discussing might have a ton of guys bombarding female users, if it weren't for the AI being involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you. A search of 'dating' in the subreddit shows a lot more results.
Then perhaps the solution is to make guys be the ones to sit in the coffee shop and have the women decide who they want to drop in on.
The really beautiful thing about this is that the woman could see the guy and decide whether she thought it was safe to approach him or not without him even knowing she's there. She could just use the bathroom or buy a coffee and leave or anything else, just like any other customer.
Careful, this is sounding a little eugenic with the "must be on the site". There is no possible way to implement this without some authoritarian regime making it so. I get the impression that this idea if rather coercive.
The app idea isn't related to improving the genetic quality of a human population, but it does solve for the chicken & egg marketplace problem. Having everyone who's 'single and looking' on it could be solved by its mere popularity (ex. Facebook).
Right. My point is that it would be trivial to pivot to eugenics. States like Singapore have been accused of eugenics by running State Dating agencies.
> in the hope that you'll find someone who has chemistry with you
Speaking about chemistry ... I'm hoping for an app that can use pheromones to match people. Or genotyping, or both (I suppose pheromones correlate with DNA somehow). Am I the only one who finds smell most important?
Then 60 sec is probably really not enough to feel that.
Basically, 60 seconds give you just enough time to really see if the guy/girl at the other end of the screen is cute enough for your standards.
What those guys are saying is: "don't loose a whole date on someone who use a photoshopped profile pic"
I'm not sure how this is the top comment. Obviously written by someone who doesn't use dating apps. I don't know a single person who uses these apps that would describe it like that.
The problem with dating isn't lack of meeting people, it's lack of heuristics. Speed dating just makes it faster to judge, but it doesn't actually do any work for you. One of the big benefits to OkCupid is that the heuristics are relatively good. Improve on that, and you're golden.
one of the problems with good heuristics is that almost all the desire is sent towards the 9's and 10's. Yet obviously most of the site users are 8 or less. So the 9-10s gets swamped, and leave early. The remaining users gets bored because nobody replies.
The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad. It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be where they are.
OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.
Not the dating market, just the online dating market
People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot in the real world.
It's called speed dating, but it's actually much slower per decision than popular places like Tinder and Bumble. I imagine ML can be built to decide who should talk to each other. (push a button, wait in a queue, ML decides who to pair up)
I really like this concept OP. I think your biggest non-technical hurdle is going to be dealing with the classic issue of there simply being significantly less women than men. I'm curious to know how you plan to approach that after you introduce a proper business model.
I'd focus heavily on hotdog detection, lewd language detection, and other ways of terminating calls (and banning users) that break a code of conduct in the calls.
Former speed dating entrepreneur here. In person, at least, women are much more open to the idea of speed dating than men. Much of our marketing revolved around how to appeal to and attract men to our events.
62 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadLike when a group of people decides to have some fun by laughing at other people who are hoping for a date. This could happen even on a "genuine" account, because intentions of people can change. And people don't act the same when alone versus with friends.
I just had an idea whilst thinking about how I was going to respond to this -- perhaps I could do e-mail signup but instead verify the user through the clearbit/fullcontact api. Need to look into that
In the background, the AI matches you and sets you up for a quick coffee date at a location that's not far from either person. Twist: every single person actively looking for a relationship in each particular city must be on the site (aside from self-reporting, I haven't figured out how this will be done).
Essentially, you don't peruse the app, you just receive when & where notifications and then go have a 5-minute coffee to see if you have chemistry, which no current app can actually tell you.
As an example, I haven't been actively dating in a bit, but when I last was it was in a big city with lots of public transit, and my radius was ~10 miles. If I started talking to someone I liked it was no problem for us to work out a time to meet, but I was constantly interacting with people who were never within "random meetup" distance of me.
To get around the ghosting problem you could use GPS to see if the person is actually where they're supposed to be for the speed date. Essentially, people would get a notification when >x people are available in the area and they could go to a coffee shop and flip a toggle which instructs the app to start sending people to speed date them. If they leave the coffee shop or turn off their phone or anything else then the app would toggle off their availability and stop sending dates.
It could be similar to the way Uber manages driver availability in an area. Except instead of sending you fares, it sends dates.
The beauty of a system like this is that you could go to a coffee shop and read or do work on your laptop and toggle on your availability. If people don't show up to date you it doesn't matter because you're not wasting time anyway.
I'm imagining a toggle to alter your visibility too, between showing your general location within a venue, to something more playful (I'm wearing a green shirt, when there are two others in the room with green shirts), or even just 100% visible (here's my picture, I'm sitting exactly here).
Though, I'm now reminded of two r/dataisbeautiful posts [1,2], where - despite both having faulty graphs - the OP shows how s/he got the most dates when the women messaged first. Meaning, this imaginary app we're discussing might have a ton of guys bombarding female users, if it weren't for the AI being involved, as it will be the one matching nearby suitors for you. A search of 'dating' in the subreddit shows a lot more results.
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7oqygb/my_...
2 - https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/7p73ch/my_...
Then perhaps the solution is to make guys be the ones to sit in the coffee shop and have the women decide who they want to drop in on.
The really beautiful thing about this is that the woman could see the guy and decide whether she thought it was safe to approach him or not without him even knowing she's there. She could just use the bathroom or buy a coffee and leave or anything else, just like any other customer.
Meaning no bombardment will be allowed cause the users (neither male nor female) won't be the ones sending first contact.
Speaking about chemistry ... I'm hoping for an app that can use pheromones to match people. Or genotyping, or both (I suppose pheromones correlate with DNA somehow). Am I the only one who finds smell most important?
Basically, 60 seconds give you just enough time to really see if the guy/girl at the other end of the screen is cute enough for your standards. What those guys are saying is: "don't loose a whole date on someone who use a photoshopped profile pic"
Answering why is also important, but it's incorrect to assume online dating isn't a thriving market.
https://www.statista.com/outlook/372/109/online-dating/unite...
The problem here is not that heuristics of finding "your best match" is bad. It is quite easy to figure out who is attractive and matches you. The problem is that most people wants to trade up, and few people (on dating sites) have the desire to end up with someone their own score. Fewer yet wants to date someone less attractive. Hence the dating market ends up being a sort mechanism which works poorly because none of the sorted numbers wants to be where they are.
OkCupid had some great blog articles about the statistics behind this unbalanced matching phenomenon. Read them.
People date up and down all the time, and attraction isn't just limited to good looks. People are attracted to different things in an individual (good looks, ability, wealth, intellect, power or status, etc) -- it's just that those don't always show well on dating profiles. They are much easier to spot in the real world.