A big problem with dating apps (particularly for women) is that users see so many potential matches that they don’t take anything seriously, imagine they’ve got more choice than they really do, and that if they hold out long enough something better will come along.
I’ve been thinking of how to engineer selection processes in ways that calibrate people better such as show people a block of ten items and let them pick the top three as opposed to rating things on a 1..10 scale or a swipe right/swipe left process.
> A big problem with dating apps (particularly for women) is that users see so many potential matches that they don’t take anything seriously
I said this in another comment, but IMO, the reason people don't take anything seriously isn't because of the number of matches/potential matches. Rather, I think it's the resolution of information that a profile shows. A few pictures and some text is wildly low-resolution compared to even just an audio recording or video. I think requiring people to include one of the two (ideally a video) would be solve this problem once and for all and make dating apps infinitely better.
I think it's been tried too many times before. IMO too much friction to make a video when I already have tons of photos from the last year. It reduces to who can do the best videography which is a less level playing field than photos. I also swipe when I'm in public which isn't possible if there's an audio component
Sort of. Coffee Meets Bagel gives you a batch of three matches per day; you need a mutual like to match with each other. However you can still have multiple matches at a time.
Sounds like it. I’ve used dating apps a lot, and at this point I don’t believe that another dating app is the solution to dating apps. I’ve heard friends and acquaintances toss out their ideas for how to make a better app, but they all seem to ignore one crucial fact: everybody is on all the other apps too, and there isn’t a reserve of more desirable people on some other app. If this app lets me have just one match, that means I’ll just use it for a couple of minutes per day, and then use Tinder once I’ve exhausted its limited utility.
CMB limits you to a few ‘swipes’ per day. To its credit, that keeps it from being an addictive app, but I’ve also had maybe 5 conversations and never a date from it. Tinder on the other hand has allowed me to have all kinds of regrettable experiences.
I'm pretty sure most people want to see some other dating app succeed (besides those owned by Match Co), both men and women. Unfortunately, 5+ years and it hasn't happened yet.
Right. There are numerous ways to improve dating apps, but of course the winners in the current dating app environment don’t have an incentive to embrace the new app, and they’re the core market that any new app needs to succeed. Otherwise the consumers would need to change their preferences, which usually takes a long time to happen.
Well, it depends on their target demographic, I imagine. If you want middle-aged people using the app, absolutely. If you want younger users the reference might go over well.
Here's my ideal dating app (from a 50yo single male divorcee in Silicon Valley): A simple app where each profile has basic info, and exactly one 5 second video, taken only with the app itself, where you introduce yourself. That's it.
First, it clears out the thousands of fake profiles using random pics found online. Voice recognition can easily flag any profiles that don't fit the pattern of "Hi, my name is... ".
Second, it fixes the problem of catfishing, where real people use fake photos, or usually the best photo of themselves ever taken when they were 21 years old, 20 years ago.
Finally, it's not long enough to embarrass yourself. If you've ever seen the video dating recordings from the 80s, you'll know what I'm talking about. Five seconds or so is just enough time to say hello and give a sense of who you are without being cringe.
The rest is just bog standard dating stuff. Ghosting is a real problem, but what are you going to do? I guess you could have some sort of point system...
It reminded me of the "Lowered Expectations" skits of MADTv with awkward VHS dating recordings. Pretty funny. I usually think of the intro melody when my expectations have been lowered for any reason
More thoughts on this, and if you take this idea and make millions, remember your ol' buddy Russ.
Call the app "SixSeconds" (adjusting the record time accordingly). It's the perfect name! It has an alliteration, naturally shortened or nicknamed, and gives a double subtle reference to sex, which works perfectly. I can already see the logo in my head. It's a winner.
This seems advantageous for straight male users, but how would you draw straight female users who benefit from having multiple options on other apps? Asking as a female user of other dating apps.
This is an interesting point because I think the idea behind this particular app is the opposite of what you are seeing as an advantage. With the disclosure that I was out of the dating game before apps existed, and the accompanying lack of first-hand understanding, is it really a benefit to have more options than you can shake a stick at?
Would be interested to hear more of your thoughts, IMO going on dates with multiple people is great for casual dating but not as great for anything more serious. Also benefits in knowing the person you're going on dates with is also pseudo-exclusive
Guessing this would draw on the audience of women who feel overwhelmed. I’m sure that’s a small minority who could just start being more selective in who they match with but - idk.
Honestly - it has no future unless you make this one way. (Only men can match with one woman at a time - maybe limit it to 5 for women or something)
Coffee Meets Bagel did something similar to this when they first launched. You got one potential match a day, and you either liked or passed. I thought it worked well, but there were eventually some problems.
For example, it assumes that you have an even balance of participants in your marketplace. If you have more men than women, you either need to give some men no matches on some days (which decreases engagement), or you need to give women multiple potential matches on some days. There are other ways you can handle this, but they have problems too.
Another potentially bigger issue is monetization. It is hard to monetize one match a day. But you can give people the option to have multiple matches a day if they pay for them, which is what CMB does. But then you should probably give people who were liked by a paid member at least one more match a day, which causes your original premise to break down.
Hinge severely limits the number of people you can like in a given day (unless you pay), and I think this works pretty well.
My wife ended up being my first match on there. The rest of my matches were ... not great. I thought I remembered it being one a week, but maybe it was daily.
I've often thought that dating apps should better explore the idea of making it mean something when someone expresses an interest, to show that the person taking that step is actually committed to the process of getting to know the person they have selected, and to prevent people wasting their time focusing on just the most superficially attractive people (who are probably inundated with options, or are catfishing anyway).
The way I imagined it was that your patience would be something like a currency, and the longer you are prepared to wait before contacting someone without contacting anyone else, the higher priority your profile should be for the matching algorithm.
I haven't thought through all the implications of this "market for attention", though, and I know that people could just use a different app if they were getting impatient. The other problem would be monetization, as you mention, but users could pay for the ability to send pictures in the app, and to be able to have the waiting days accumulate automatically, i.e. without having to log in each day (and watch an ad).
The problem with dating apps is that it can very often be pretty unclear whether the person is actually worth getting to know or not (cute pictures =/= compatible personality).
Which is why, IMO, the killer feature for dating apps would be one where everyone has to feature a video of themselves on their profile, like TikTok (there's one dating app that does exactly that, called Snack, but it never really took off and the network effect is crucial). You learn infinitely more about a person from a video than any amount of pictures can tell you. To a lesser degree, same with voice, which Hinge just added as an option.
No, the assumption is that video shows a more accurate portrayal of one's personality [than just photos/text], because it's closer in resolution to real life.
In other words, if you agree that meeting someone in real life is the most accurate portrayal of them, then video is a much better proxy for that than just photos and text.
I'm not sure how much of someone's personality you can determine from a pre-recorded, scripted monologue to the camera.
A video can show you how physically attractive some is, slightly better than a photo can (and you could hear if they have a beautiful or annoying voice, unless they're putting on a fake voice) but for personality you need to see how they react in different situations.
Even if you can infer things about their personality from the video, that doesn't tell you anything about their likes and dislikes, which can be useful for text-based filtering. Users could mention their likes and dislikes in their videos, but you'd end up having to watch hours of irrelevant footage just to find one match, which isn't a great UX, and is expensive for the site too.
>I'm not sure how much of someone's personality you can determine from a pre-recorded, scripted monologue to the camera.
You can determine a lot because what they decide to post/record says a LOT about them. Like, waaay more than just choosing whatever random photos of them.
I came here to mention this exact thing. When I was last dating CMB was one at a time. I had some of my best dates on that app and response rates were through the roof.
Granted, I joined eHarmony and married a woman I met there.
Anyways...
The one-match-a-day thing was also a brilliant way for them to deal with the marketplace problem... you don't need to have 1000 males and 1000 females in a city to launch if they can only see one at a time.
Yeah my hesitation with only showing people a single profile everyday is that in my experience I swiped left most of the time. So most days I wasn't swiping right on anyone. That's why I'm hoping to let users swipe freely but just restrict the optionality on the actual matching.
Well no the issue is not monetization. Dating apps should not be profitable. It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app. You cannot possibly expect to do this faithfully if you are making money off your users.
> It is an extreme conflict of interest against successfully matching users and getting them off the app.
That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive.
But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever.
That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
In your scenario, the app would be incentivized to find you poor matches and to keep you on the app for as long as possible to maximize number of daily active users. After all, who in the world would pay for unlimited access to an app if you only needed it temporarily until you found a great match? And who in the world would pay unlimited access for an app that wasn't full of active users?
The only thing it should be incentivized to do it find you a great match. There is no real reason why it needs to be profitable.
It doesn't even have to be one match. I've been using Hinge lately and I found that I get much higher quality matches on there, conversation starts with almost everyone, and I found I can "convert" a conversation into a date much easier on there.
One design decision they made, as opposed to Bumble or Tinder is there's no "swiping", you actually have to go into a profile and like something there. This means more people spend time on your profile, and the folks that actually have liked you back have taken more than just a cursory look at the profile.
I've really enjoyed Hinge in the past, my main recurring issue periodically is the sales pitch of meaningful and implies long term relationships "the app meant to be deleted".
It attracts a lot of people that really think the app will "solve" their dating journey, as if it is a journey compared occasional to skin entertainment. I will concede that the Terms of Service also are against hookups. I've had some great flings and hookups on Hinge. Its been the best dating app for me.
I would like an app that had a Hinge-like UX without the "long term relationship" sales pitch.
(of a similar theoretical caliber, I've tried Bumble, women do not initiate conversations with me. I'll get matched similarly to Hinge, but they just let the match expire and I cannot attempt a conversation there. The entire "women + initiate" in the same sentence is an oxymoron in my lived experience.)
Yeah I'm curious to see what percent of users have been actively on Hinge for more than a year. They should be optimizing to minimize that if it's actually meant to be deleted
While the Hinge model is good in limiting how much liking men can do - it unfortunately doesn’t limit the same problem that dating apps have. Men just wildly outnumber women on them. The general 4:1 ratio is pretty typical (most dating apps don’t even publicize their numbers). So, really you need to limit what men like the most and what women like the least.
I think limiting likes to even less than 7 like Hinge does is the way to go. Maybe 2-3 a day for men and 10+ for women. I think limiting matches is also a better way to go. I’ve seen the screens of many women and 50+ matches is normal. Whereas most men get 0-5 in their entire experience. It’s making it where most women are overwhelmed with options and won’t progress forward with any of them and use most for entertainment.
The other fun part of this is that most women on Hinge never even visit the discovery part where you like new people. Instead they just look at the people who have liked them and this takes up all their time. It would explain why most men get 0 likes in their entire Hinge experience. They always have to initiate. (Liking and messaging of course…)
Well, this gave me a chuckle. But I feel like it might foster a "waiting for prince(ss) charming" effect, where you swipe away anyone who you're not absolutely enamored with. There might be an argument that being able to swipe right on anyone (and maintaining multiple conversations with them) leads to "giving more people a chance." An app like this might have the opposite effect and make the entire experience more superficial altogether.
How about a dating app that explicitly uses Optimal Stopping, the solution to the Marriage Problem/Secretary Problem:
> the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don't hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who's better than the best of that first group — that's the one you choose!
> More importantly, will my soulmate also be on that app? Better chance to find them on Tinder.
You could actually employ that strategy on Tinder, no need for a separate app. Allthough looking for a soulmate using optimal stopping does not seem like a good match, anyways.
What exactly qualifies as a rejection (is it a swipe left or a match + date + unmatch)? Thinking match + date + unmatch is the more reasonable application but difficult to enforce
Second I just don't agree that it's the right optimization function, IMO you should max E[quality of partner] rather than max Pr[ending up with best quality partner]
I think an interesting dating app would be the exact same thing as the tinder variants with one key difference:
When you make a profile you get two accounts. One that shows only pictures, and another that only shows interest/text. There should be no way to infer one from the other without a “true match” as described below.
You match with peoples picture version and text versions separately and only when both dual matches complete mutually are you truly matched.
This in effect forces people to make themselves interesting enough without the crux that is photography but also presentable enough so that the natural superficial curiosities can be satisfied.
Assuming no one makes it I’ll probably make it at some point. The way monetization would work is by allowing you to rank people across attributes for both the picture profile and text profile. Paying users can be given information on this.
In addition paying users can be given a “second chance” where if your text profile receives a match but your picture profile doesn’t, you can ping the person anonymously in the future with a new set of pictures and speak with them again, but only after some cooldown period, say a week.
Obviously I’m biased but I think what I described is the solution to the problem that is modern online dating.
Good idea! One problem is that some people will swipe right on everything in one or both categories. Limiting the number/fraction of right swipes might help.
Oh yeah, the devil is definitely in the details. Ideally the matches given should be proportional to the “chances” you give.
If the purpose is to create relationships then I believe people shouldn’t be able to match too many times without giving “chances”.
The app could facilitate this through ice breakers or perhaps embedded small games or showing a TikTok or other short video to facilitate conversation.
The problem is that modern apps make people do all the work, which is fine, but there are some who require a little push or something explicitly to discuss to get started.
I particularly like the push this idea would give users to really take some time with their writing. So many Tinder profiles are either blank or almost-blank. You're left starting or carrying on a conversation with almost nothing to go on.
They did! And they were! You can’t stop prospective daters from being lazy, but the idea is that if that’s all someone posted for their text profile then they can’t rely on their beauty to get interest, and therefore they’ll never be matched.
I've come to think that the only ethical way to fund a dating service is to make it a nonprofit with no free accounts, and mostly community-run. I can't see any other way to remove the temptation to add user-hostile [anti-]features that increase revenue.
I agree 100%. If I were to make this it would actually be free. The paid features would exist mainly to create funding to sustain its own existence without resulting in questionable behavior. Unlike the Match Group, an endowment could be created so that it could technically exist in perpetuity.
I can't speak for the person you asked, but if their hypothetical app were developed by a non-profit company, and the pricing was set at the minimum level to cover the server costs and maintenance staff, would that address your concerns about the intent warping over time?
As long as you have trustees making decisions about staffing levels and remuneration (and they can't hire their friends or give themselves salaries), then there should be no incentive to raise the app's pricing or do anything else that would put off users.
I do have a novel app monetization strategy to suggest, though, which I've not seen anywhere. Imagine that the monthly costs for the servers and staff were published, along with the number of paying customers that month. There could then be a monthly reverse-lottery where N% of free accounts are chosen at random for deletion, with N being proportional to how much financial loss the app made that month (hopefully zero).
The only advantage to having a paid account would be that you are not subject to the lottery, and the only disadvantage to having your account deleted is that you have to reinstall the app and fill in your profile again. Hopefully that would provide enough incentive for people to do the right thing (combined with the fact that people should want to support the services they use, especially if they end up finding their soul mate through it).
Because trustee-run non-profits never get up to inefficient or unethical behavior, right? Also note that "minimum cost of maintenance" is a very flexible concept. How much do we spend on moderation and new features? This is why you want it to be as directly accountable to the users as possible, so they can decide or at least influence those thresholds (there need to be some hard minimum standards for moderation).
It might take a while, but as long as it's possible for existing users to pay more, pressure will build up to convince them to do so. Whether because costs go up, usership goes down, or what. Any organization seeks to survive, and it will need money.
Your lottery is sufficiently weird that I can't say it's exactly what my proposal is designed to prevent, but it's definitely in the space of wacky things no one should have to worry about. Also I don't think you understand the level of investment that can go into a dating profile. Message history, for instance.
To the extent you do have trustees, I'm not sure it's wise to not pay them a salary. You don't really want to give power to people who will accept a power trip in lieu of money. Unless it's really easy for the community to replace them
I was thinking of that game Pokemon Sun and Moon where the villainess was the president of a non-profit company, not long after I played it I met a woman who had been a non-profit administrator who I thought looked a bit like Lusamine.
I agree. The only problem is that building a dating app user base is extremely difficult and capital intensive. You couldn't be cashflow positive quickly (or maybe ever).
In my large US city, even some of the big-name apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Match) had almost no active users.
I think it would only work if you tacked it onto an existing social network, like Instagram or TikTok, but you'd need the parent company's blessing (which almost certainly wouldn't happen).
I absolutely love the idea, and that's why it's doomed to fail; I seem to have the gift of loving ideas that fail; and to dismiss stupid ideas that eventually make it huge!
You seem to be claiming that most women stereotype you (& poorly at that. What is this "their world" B.S.?) & that being interested depends on your job and/or hobbies.
That's bullshit.
Both my job & hobbies are boring & stereotypical, but I compensate for that by being interesting in the way I communicate (like actually listening to the woman I'm speaking with) & what I choose to discuss (hint: not my job or hobbies. Probably her job and/or hobbies/interests instead).
Why match with both? That still sounds deeply flawed. I would give you a pass if you said "it is a solution for an audience". Dating apps are just themed rooms, each dating app has a different theme as people run down the roulette multiple times hoping the app solves something for them that an app cannot do.
Emotionally unavailable people that think they just need to outsource the size of their dating pool? No app can fix that no matter what theme they do, because the size of the dating pool or their network isn't the only issue.
So, thats just an audience. Trying to match the superficial with the text. Why not just match the text and find out later. Instead of making the rejected person have a new set of pictures, a fun perk could be to show people how many 50%s they matched and rejected, and letting them revisit later or revealing who it was.
The interests stuff on dating apps is pure BS. People want to date attractive people. All the interests stuff is purely for marketing themselves.
My comment might sound blunt but the reality of biology and how our brains are wired cannot be denied.
So in your example people will game their interests till they are matched with a picture they like.
As a thought exercise I wonder if there is a dating service for blind (since birth) people and how they choose their partners. Something tells me even they would go by voice rather than 'interests'.
If you don't mind, may I ask, how you are able to keep up with a world that is increasingly addicted to visual distractions (facebook pictures, tikotok videos, instagram reels etc) and content that is moving from text to video formats.
Also (and sorry for so many questions I never met anyone blind from birth), do you feel more at peace than people with vision (anecdotally)? Because people can barely sit for 15 minutes in meditation and I always wondered what would not being aware of one sense completely felt like (not losing but never having).
I never asked my parents and it's too late to now. I do know they were both students in the same field at the same university so I would presume they met in a classroom setting. It definitely wasn't looks that attracted her, she had no vision whatsoever.
I had the exact same idea a couple of years ago and I still wonder why no one has built it yet (at least not that I'm aware of).
I still think the idea is worth building, but it's also very easy to copy and the existing players could make it an optional mode in their apps or so and immediately have a big userbase.
Would you be interested in collaborating on a proof of concept?
I just saw one of the founders tweet about this. It definitely makes me nervous that one of the two founders (Kyle Kashuv [1]) just tweeted that Sam Brinton shouldn't work at the Office of Nuclear Energy because they taught classes about kink [2][3].
Dating apps house and transmit a lot of sensitive information that might be very related to someone's membership in the kink community... I feel like it would probably be fine because of privacy laws but I think I'll avoid it myself at least.
But if commenting on public information outs you as a kink shaming not at all nice person, why should anyone trust you with sensitive, including potentially kinky, information? What if a cuffed user shares their kinks on the platform, and then goes and runs for office somewhere?
"Several of Kashuv's classmates complained on social media and to the press regarding Kashuv's use of inflammatory and racist comments, including racial slurs against African-Americans.[...] Screenshots of a Google Doc for a class study guide showed Kashuv writing the n-word multiple times, discussing "JEWISH SLAVES," and declaring that he would "fucking make a CSOG [sic] map of Douglas and practice" (in a supposed reference to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive shooter game and Stoneman Douglas High School). Text messages also reportedly showed Kashuv rating a female student "7/10" and stating that she "goes for n***jocks"
I'm generally not super interested when it comes to the personalities of founders rather than products but yeah I think I'd pass on giving this guy my dating information.
Dang, for once I wish I read the comments before I followed the link (and submitted my almost-anonymized) details. I used a burner e-mail address though.
I thought this was some old professor. This dude is 20. he was probably like 15 when the "oh so controversial" events happened. This is literally the equivalent of getting mad at someone for inflammatory things said on xbox live when they were kids.
Was anyone NOT dumb when they were in high school? Smart in the sense of math or physics maybe, but politician levels of picture perfect? Of course not.
Idk. No one I knew was an outspoken racist in school. Especially these days, teenagers seem to be very aware of these issues. Regardless, it’s not the only thing pointed out here. With the original comment it paints a different story than outcry for the sake of outcry.
Is there a dating app where I can defeat inferior suitors in single combat of some kind? I was seriously considering a dance-off app for that, where you have a profile and can issue challenges to groups of other users, who are informed of who they think your competitors are, and then pick winners. It wasn't really fair though because it was a game I would always win. But something like it would be cool.
Maybe one where you can leave snarky comments on the bios of your competitors, telling potential dates why they must be jerks and should date you instead!
Coffee Meets Bagel originally tried this before they changed things.
It's bad for men who already get ~0 matches unless you're in the top few % of men. It's bad for women who get a lot out of the massive selection options (why limit themselves to one? no benefit to them). The issue with dating sites is men are a commodity and women have too many options and that commoditization of men causes problems. Artificially limiting to one doesn't fix this though because the other apps still exist, you can't enforce a true limit when one doesn't exist (and can't exist given how mate selection works in people anyway, women will always be mostly choosing among many options and men have to pursue).
It's a little better based on region, but if you're not in the top few % of men (particularly if you're in a skewed area like the bay area) dating websites are not in your best interest. We're more similar to gorillas than people think.
I don't think this is an issue that can be solved via dating sites. Men will always have to adapt to meet their particular strengths in order to succeed and for that vast majority of us this means eschewing dating apps. Basically learning the human male variant of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX40mBb8bkU
The naive appeal of dating apps for men is obvious, it's really hard to meet single women randomly and showing interest correctly is complicated. The barrier seems lower with apps (but mostly isn't), people deeply desire a mate, but I think the lower barrier of apps is mostly an illusion for the vast majority of men who will get very few matches, even then there's no real replacement for improving social skills through the difficulty of actual practice and attempts (which apps don't help much with given effort to match ratio, effort to actual date ratio is even worse). The actual effort required I'd argue is higher in the end and you end up feeling worse about yourself because your value among other dating site men really is close to zero (a commodity).
I think for women the apps can be useful because you can set a date every week (or even more frequently) and there's a lot of benefit to this in practicing, getting a sense of what you like (or even just feeling good about yourself/desirable with hundreds of matches). Sure many dates are bad, but just getting this kind of at-bat practice is useful. This doesn't contradict the previous paragraph because most of these dates are with the same top few % of men that do well with apps.
Obviously the above applies to heterosexual matching, other types are different.
Personally I'm so glad to be out of the game. To other men still in it, I'd at least say it does get easier as you get older. If you're 22 and miserable, it'll be way easier at 27+ (I suspect largely because young men have low status, women tend not to want to date younger, etc.)
"Dating apps throw way too many options at us. You're supposed to swipe on people, maintain dozens of conversations, continue going on dates until you're exclusive. The lack of commitment undermines true intimacy. Cuffed only lets you match with one person at a time - forcing you to think about whether this match is worth your time."
This conflates exclusivity, commitment and intimacy in a way that doesn't reflect my romantic and dating life, or the lives of a number of my friends. I can only imagine what other assumptions it makes.
It's okay that this isn't for me, there's honestly a lot of room for innovation in the dating app or socialization app space. I've yet to find an app I consider perfect, though there are definitely ones I'm using that are more niche, and better suited for me, than tinder/CMB/OkCupid.
It doesn't reflect yours but it might reflect others'. I personally couldn't carry on more than a single serious conversation with someone without a lot of heartache or frustration. So when I first started talking to the person who is now my wife, the next person who messaged me got a polite decline even though we were not boyfriend and girlfriend at the time.
I met my wife on Bumble, it has a bit of a swipe mechanic, but realistically my (now) wife was the only one (out of all the apps) who actually captured my attention and had interesting conversations with.
The conversation was interesting enough to draw me back from all the other conversations that were going nowhere.
I think the point of this app is to try and slow people down and try to spend a bit of time talking with people to get to know them; you've got a whole day to ask about interests, news, adventures, plans, history, etc. rather than "your pickup line wasn't witty enough, next!" or "lets trade witty remarks to each other for the next week, have sex, and never see each other again"
(although arguably you don't want to match with that sort of person. so maybe the real benefit is that they would be filtered out by this app?)
sorta letting people know that they're more than just a profile picture?
Yes absolutely I'm sure ir does reflect other's experience, most likely the person or people behind it. That is why it's okay that it's not for me.
Though now I'm trying to think of dating apps that just wouldn't work. Cuffed could totally be the name of a dating app for people on house arrest or out on bail.
Where does this lead? What's next? Something with n number of blackmailable pieces you have on the person vs m they have against you (nvm>1 means stick; nvm<1 means go)? Showing how many people would be interested in each of you if you were actually on the market?
This doesn't seem to help relationship-building (and strength training!), which seems to me to be the problem most of my friends (ok, and I) face.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadA big problem with dating apps (particularly for women) is that users see so many potential matches that they don’t take anything seriously, imagine they’ve got more choice than they really do, and that if they hold out long enough something better will come along.
I’ve been thinking of how to engineer selection processes in ways that calibrate people better such as show people a block of ten items and let them pick the top three as opposed to rating things on a 1..10 scale or a swipe right/swipe left process.
I said this in another comment, but IMO, the reason people don't take anything seriously isn't because of the number of matches/potential matches. Rather, I think it's the resolution of information that a profile shows. A few pictures and some text is wildly low-resolution compared to even just an audio recording or video. I think requiring people to include one of the two (ideally a video) would be solve this problem once and for all and make dating apps infinitely better.
CMB limits you to a few ‘swipes’ per day. To its credit, that keeps it from being an addictive app, but I’ve also had maybe 5 conversations and never a date from it. Tinder on the other hand has allowed me to have all kinds of regrettable experiences.
First, it clears out the thousands of fake profiles using random pics found online. Voice recognition can easily flag any profiles that don't fit the pattern of "Hi, my name is... ".
Second, it fixes the problem of catfishing, where real people use fake photos, or usually the best photo of themselves ever taken when they were 21 years old, 20 years ago.
Finally, it's not long enough to embarrass yourself. If you've ever seen the video dating recordings from the 80s, you'll know what I'm talking about. Five seconds or so is just enough time to say hello and give a sense of who you are without being cringe.
The rest is just bog standard dating stuff. Ghosting is a real problem, but what are you going to do? I guess you could have some sort of point system...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bomkgXeDkE
Call the app "SixSeconds" (adjusting the record time accordingly). It's the perfect name! It has an alliteration, naturally shortened or nicknamed, and gives a double subtle reference to sex, which works perfectly. I can already see the logo in my head. It's a winner.
Honestly - it has no future unless you make this one way. (Only men can match with one woman at a time - maybe limit it to 5 for women or something)
For example, it assumes that you have an even balance of participants in your marketplace. If you have more men than women, you either need to give some men no matches on some days (which decreases engagement), or you need to give women multiple potential matches on some days. There are other ways you can handle this, but they have problems too.
Another potentially bigger issue is monetization. It is hard to monetize one match a day. But you can give people the option to have multiple matches a day if they pay for them, which is what CMB does. But then you should probably give people who were liked by a paid member at least one more match a day, which causes your original premise to break down.
Hinge severely limits the number of people you can like in a given day (unless you pay), and I think this works pretty well.
Dear Lord that must've been incredibly awkward at the dinner table that night?
I've often thought that dating apps should better explore the idea of making it mean something when someone expresses an interest, to show that the person taking that step is actually committed to the process of getting to know the person they have selected, and to prevent people wasting their time focusing on just the most superficially attractive people (who are probably inundated with options, or are catfishing anyway).
The way I imagined it was that your patience would be something like a currency, and the longer you are prepared to wait before contacting someone without contacting anyone else, the higher priority your profile should be for the matching algorithm.
I haven't thought through all the implications of this "market for attention", though, and I know that people could just use a different app if they were getting impatient. The other problem would be monetization, as you mention, but users could pay for the ability to send pictures in the app, and to be able to have the waiting days accumulate automatically, i.e. without having to log in each day (and watch an ad).
Which is why, IMO, the killer feature for dating apps would be one where everyone has to feature a video of themselves on their profile, like TikTok (there's one dating app that does exactly that, called Snack, but it never really took off and the network effect is crucial). You learn infinitely more about a person from a video than any amount of pictures can tell you. To a lesser degree, same with voice, which Hinge just added as an option.
In other words, if you agree that meeting someone in real life is the most accurate portrayal of them, then video is a much better proxy for that than just photos and text.
A video can show you how physically attractive some is, slightly better than a photo can (and you could hear if they have a beautiful or annoying voice, unless they're putting on a fake voice) but for personality you need to see how they react in different situations.
Even if you can infer things about their personality from the video, that doesn't tell you anything about their likes and dislikes, which can be useful for text-based filtering. Users could mention their likes and dislikes in their videos, but you'd end up having to watch hours of irrelevant footage just to find one match, which isn't a great UX, and is expensive for the site too.
You can determine a lot because what they decide to post/record says a LOT about them. Like, waaay more than just choosing whatever random photos of them.
Granted, I joined eHarmony and married a woman I met there.
Anyways...
The one-match-a-day thing was also a brilliant way for them to deal with the marketplace problem... you don't need to have 1000 males and 1000 females in a city to launch if they can only see one at a time.
That depends on the payment model, doesn't it? If it is set up in such a way that the app makes more money the longer people use it, that introduces a perverse incentive.
But what if, for example, people paid upfront for unlimited access to the service? Then the incentives of the app would be better aligned to the users: find them a good match quickly so that they won't come back in a long time, if ever.
That said, I am deeply grateful that I got married well before dating apps became popular. It would have been such a terrible experience for a nerd like me.
The only thing it should be incentivized to do it find you a great match. There is no real reason why it needs to be profitable.
One design decision they made, as opposed to Bumble or Tinder is there's no "swiping", you actually have to go into a profile and like something there. This means more people spend time on your profile, and the folks that actually have liked you back have taken more than just a cursory look at the profile.
It attracts a lot of people that really think the app will "solve" their dating journey, as if it is a journey compared occasional to skin entertainment. I will concede that the Terms of Service also are against hookups. I've had some great flings and hookups on Hinge. Its been the best dating app for me.
I would like an app that had a Hinge-like UX without the "long term relationship" sales pitch.
(of a similar theoretical caliber, I've tried Bumble, women do not initiate conversations with me. I'll get matched similarly to Hinge, but they just let the match expire and I cannot attempt a conversation there. The entire "women + initiate" in the same sentence is an oxymoron in my lived experience.)
I think limiting likes to even less than 7 like Hinge does is the way to go. Maybe 2-3 a day for men and 10+ for women. I think limiting matches is also a better way to go. I’ve seen the screens of many women and 50+ matches is normal. Whereas most men get 0-5 in their entire experience. It’s making it where most women are overwhelmed with options and won’t progress forward with any of them and use most for entertainment.
The other fun part of this is that most women on Hinge never even visit the discovery part where you like new people. Instead they just look at the people who have liked them and this takes up all their time. It would explain why most men get 0 likes in their entire Hinge experience. They always have to initiate. (Liking and messaging of course…)
I would think that making them pay for more than one match/day would simply make it a de-facto paid app and defeat the whole point of limited matches.
> the best way to proceed is to interview (or date) the first 36.8 percent of the candidates. Don't hire (or marry) any of them, but as soon as you meet a candidate who's better than the best of that first group — that's the one you choose!
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h...
The question becomes how many more dates or relationships will you have in your life? 36.8% of what?
More importantly, will my soulmate also be on that app? Better chance to find them on Tinder.
You could actually employ that strategy on Tinder, no need for a separate app. Allthough looking for a soulmate using optimal stopping does not seem like a good match, anyways.
What exactly qualifies as a rejection (is it a swipe left or a match + date + unmatch)? Thinking match + date + unmatch is the more reasonable application but difficult to enforce
Second I just don't agree that it's the right optimization function, IMO you should max E[quality of partner] rather than max Pr[ending up with best quality partner]
When you make a profile you get two accounts. One that shows only pictures, and another that only shows interest/text. There should be no way to infer one from the other without a “true match” as described below.
You match with peoples picture version and text versions separately and only when both dual matches complete mutually are you truly matched.
This in effect forces people to make themselves interesting enough without the crux that is photography but also presentable enough so that the natural superficial curiosities can be satisfied.
Assuming no one makes it I’ll probably make it at some point. The way monetization would work is by allowing you to rank people across attributes for both the picture profile and text profile. Paying users can be given information on this.
In addition paying users can be given a “second chance” where if your text profile receives a match but your picture profile doesn’t, you can ping the person anonymously in the future with a new set of pictures and speak with them again, but only after some cooldown period, say a week.
Obviously I’m biased but I think what I described is the solution to the problem that is modern online dating.
If the purpose is to create relationships then I believe people shouldn’t be able to match too many times without giving “chances”.
The app could facilitate this through ice breakers or perhaps embedded small games or showing a TikTok or other short video to facilitate conversation.
The problem is that modern apps make people do all the work, which is fine, but there are some who require a little push or something explicitly to discuss to get started.
Were they as generically sarcastic as Tinder's? "Going to the supermarket, want me to get you anything?"
The main difference is expectation, mainly.
“I’m the guy with 3 ducks” and in their profile pic in the background is an image of 3 ducks. Or something like that.
Could be too much effort for most to try workaround though.
Ah I can dream right? Haha
As long as you have trustees making decisions about staffing levels and remuneration (and they can't hire their friends or give themselves salaries), then there should be no incentive to raise the app's pricing or do anything else that would put off users.
I do have a novel app monetization strategy to suggest, though, which I've not seen anywhere. Imagine that the monthly costs for the servers and staff were published, along with the number of paying customers that month. There could then be a monthly reverse-lottery where N% of free accounts are chosen at random for deletion, with N being proportional to how much financial loss the app made that month (hopefully zero).
The only advantage to having a paid account would be that you are not subject to the lottery, and the only disadvantage to having your account deleted is that you have to reinstall the app and fill in your profile again. Hopefully that would provide enough incentive for people to do the right thing (combined with the fact that people should want to support the services they use, especially if they end up finding their soul mate through it).
It might take a while, but as long as it's possible for existing users to pay more, pressure will build up to convince them to do so. Whether because costs go up, usership goes down, or what. Any organization seeks to survive, and it will need money.
Your lottery is sufficiently weird that I can't say it's exactly what my proposal is designed to prevent, but it's definitely in the space of wacky things no one should have to worry about. Also I don't think you understand the level of investment that can go into a dating profile. Message history, for instance.
To the extent you do have trustees, I'm not sure it's wise to not pay them a salary. You don't really want to give power to people who will accept a power trip in lieu of money. Unless it's really easy for the community to replace them
Why stop with dating apps though?
In my large US city, even some of the big-name apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Match) had almost no active users.
I think it would only work if you tacked it onto an existing social network, like Instagram or TikTok, but you'd need the parent company's blessing (which almost certainly wouldn't happen).
But my guess... There's a disconnect between what the woman expect from me and what I do.
Further more I'm either a sports guy or a nerd. Not both, because that doesn't exists in their world yet.
(I have redacted a lot of things, but it's kinda difficult for me, I'm not talking about getting a match.) Hope I don't get downvoted.
You seem to be claiming that most women stereotype you (& poorly at that. What is this "their world" B.S.?) & that being interested depends on your job and/or hobbies.
That's bullshit.
Both my job & hobbies are boring & stereotypical, but I compensate for that by being interesting in the way I communicate (like actually listening to the woman I'm speaking with) & what I choose to discuss (hint: not my job or hobbies. Probably her job and/or hobbies/interests instead).
Emotionally unavailable people that think they just need to outsource the size of their dating pool? No app can fix that no matter what theme they do, because the size of the dating pool or their network isn't the only issue.
So, thats just an audience. Trying to match the superficial with the text. Why not just match the text and find out later. Instead of making the rejected person have a new set of pictures, a fun perk could be to show people how many 50%s they matched and rejected, and letting them revisit later or revealing who it was.
My comment might sound blunt but the reality of biology and how our brains are wired cannot be denied.
So in your example people will game their interests till they are matched with a picture they like.
As a thought exercise I wonder if there is a dating service for blind (since birth) people and how they choose their partners. Something tells me even they would go by voice rather than 'interests'.
Also (and sorry for so many questions I never met anyone blind from birth), do you feel more at peace than people with vision (anecdotally)? Because people can barely sit for 15 minutes in meditation and I always wondered what would not being aware of one sense completely felt like (not losing but never having).
I still think the idea is worth building, but it's also very easy to copy and the existing players could make it an optional mode in their apps or so and immediately have a big userbase.
Would you be interested in collaborating on a proof of concept?
Dating apps house and transmit a lot of sensitive information that might be very related to someone's membership in the kink community... I feel like it would probably be fine because of privacy laws but I think I'll avoid it myself at least.
[1] https://twitter.com/neelsalami/status/1494847082083008515 [2] https://twitter.com/KyleKashuv/status/1492041037434392576 [3] https://twitter.com/KyleKashuv/status/1492034875087491073
2022 is wild.
"Several of Kashuv's classmates complained on social media and to the press regarding Kashuv's use of inflammatory and racist comments, including racial slurs against African-Americans.[...] Screenshots of a Google Doc for a class study guide showed Kashuv writing the n-word multiple times, discussing "JEWISH SLAVES," and declaring that he would "fucking make a CSOG [sic] map of Douglas and practice" (in a supposed reference to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive shooter game and Stoneman Douglas High School). Text messages also reportedly showed Kashuv rating a female student "7/10" and stating that she "goes for n***jocks"
I'm generally not super interested when it comes to the personalities of founders rather than products but yeah I think I'd pass on giving this guy my dating information.
Was anyone NOT dumb when they were in high school? Smart in the sense of math or physics maybe, but politician levels of picture perfect? Of course not.
It's bad for men who already get ~0 matches unless you're in the top few % of men. It's bad for women who get a lot out of the massive selection options (why limit themselves to one? no benefit to them). The issue with dating sites is men are a commodity and women have too many options and that commoditization of men causes problems. Artificially limiting to one doesn't fix this though because the other apps still exist, you can't enforce a true limit when one doesn't exist (and can't exist given how mate selection works in people anyway, women will always be mostly choosing among many options and men have to pursue).
It's a little better based on region, but if you're not in the top few % of men (particularly if you're in a skewed area like the bay area) dating websites are not in your best interest. We're more similar to gorillas than people think.
I don't think this is an issue that can be solved via dating sites. Men will always have to adapt to meet their particular strengths in order to succeed and for that vast majority of us this means eschewing dating apps. Basically learning the human male variant of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX40mBb8bkU
The naive appeal of dating apps for men is obvious, it's really hard to meet single women randomly and showing interest correctly is complicated. The barrier seems lower with apps (but mostly isn't), people deeply desire a mate, but I think the lower barrier of apps is mostly an illusion for the vast majority of men who will get very few matches, even then there's no real replacement for improving social skills through the difficulty of actual practice and attempts (which apps don't help much with given effort to match ratio, effort to actual date ratio is even worse). The actual effort required I'd argue is higher in the end and you end up feeling worse about yourself because your value among other dating site men really is close to zero (a commodity).
I think for women the apps can be useful because you can set a date every week (or even more frequently) and there's a lot of benefit to this in practicing, getting a sense of what you like (or even just feeling good about yourself/desirable with hundreds of matches). Sure many dates are bad, but just getting this kind of at-bat practice is useful. This doesn't contradict the previous paragraph because most of these dates are with the same top few % of men that do well with apps.
Obviously the above applies to heterosexual matching, other types are different.
Personally I'm so glad to be out of the game. To other men still in it, I'd at least say it does get easier as you get older. If you're 22 and miserable, it'll be way easier at 27+ (I suspect largely because young men have low status, women tend not to want to date younger, etc.)
This conflates exclusivity, commitment and intimacy in a way that doesn't reflect my romantic and dating life, or the lives of a number of my friends. I can only imagine what other assumptions it makes.
It's okay that this isn't for me, there's honestly a lot of room for innovation in the dating app or socialization app space. I've yet to find an app I consider perfect, though there are definitely ones I'm using that are more niche, and better suited for me, than tinder/CMB/OkCupid.
I met my wife on Bumble, it has a bit of a swipe mechanic, but realistically my (now) wife was the only one (out of all the apps) who actually captured my attention and had interesting conversations with.
The conversation was interesting enough to draw me back from all the other conversations that were going nowhere.
I think the point of this app is to try and slow people down and try to spend a bit of time talking with people to get to know them; you've got a whole day to ask about interests, news, adventures, plans, history, etc. rather than "your pickup line wasn't witty enough, next!" or "lets trade witty remarks to each other for the next week, have sex, and never see each other again"
(although arguably you don't want to match with that sort of person. so maybe the real benefit is that they would be filtered out by this app?)
sorta letting people know that they're more than just a profile picture?
Though now I'm trying to think of dating apps that just wouldn't work. Cuffed could totally be the name of a dating app for people on house arrest or out on bail.
This doesn't seem to help relationship-building (and strength training!), which seems to me to be the problem most of my friends (ok, and I) face.