you were spot on.
Its amazing how they didn't views it as men intentionally avoiding women and point it out as dating apps being inefficient and too profit oriented. Really amazing.
I don't think the problem is that they are profit oriented, but is more of an issue of unaligned incentives. Same as with insurance and LinkedIn type apps.
I thought of a dating app in which I would charge a hefty ($1000 usd) initial fee, and return a percentage daily until I found the right partner for you.
Pre match group buyout OkCupid was peak online dating.
It was marvelous to spend time crafting a profile that was tailored to the kind of people you wanted to meet and to read profiles that were written the same way by others for you.
I found the section with questions that you could answer and provide context for to give me insight into prospective dates and I felt like the percent match was actually accurate.
I'm curious about government run dating sites but I have low expectations. Not because I think that the government couldn't pull off a dating app in theory, I just don't know how they would market it and if it would be a hit and reach a sufficient network effect to work.
I'd be more open to the government forcing dating sites to open up their algorithms and do away with horrific dark patterns.
I've been talking to my friends about this and we've all agreed that online dating is a complete waste of time, we're looking at stuff like speed dating and group activities in real life instead.
Not really. IIRC the asymmetry was similar on OKC but the UI was far different and much better at letting the user search for other users that they were interested in.
The swipe left or swipe right UI is absolute garbage and having to pay to get boost the chances that your profile is even seen is indicative of the primary purpose of these apps.
The problem is that swiping is super stimulus that hijacks our dopamine circuit.
The perfect replacement already exists and it's OkCupid circa 2006. A giant database of genuinely interesting questions and a way to display other users who share similar answers. The method works, but it's not as dopamine rich and thus monetizable as swiping.
Still, I believe there's potential. No one's tried making a dating service backed by the fediverse as far as I know, and an OkVerse would be a fun weekend project.
Since 2000 the percentage of US couples who met online has grown from 10% to >50%. In that time, the divorce rate has shrunk from 4% to 2.5%.
There's a lot of complaining about dating apps. When offline dating was the norm people complained about it endlessly as well. Offline dating also produced an enormous number of unhappy couples. The online dating experience has its own set of frustrations and poor outcomes - many of which don't occur offline - but people continue to choose it over offline alternatives. I've been reading articles like this one for years. They haven't stopped the percentage of couples who met online from increasing.
People tend to aim their complaints about online dating at companies like Match Group. When they complain about offline dating, though, those complaints can only be directed at the culture - there is no corporate entity who is responsible for making approaching strangers at a bar intimidating and potentially humiliating.
> In Tokyo, the city government is even releasing its own dating app, part of a campaign called Tokyo Futari Story ("futari" means couple). The service, which the city has budgeted several million dollars to develop and promote, will require users to verify their income, prove they're unmarried, sit for an interview with the app's staff, and sign a statement saying they're intent on getting married.
The last sentence is the critical one. Matchmakers who vet their clients intent tend to have much higher success rates than those who let anyone participate. A city government can also enact consequences on liars in ways that private companies cannot. We'll see how Tokyo's experiment plays out.
in fairness the marriage rate also shrunk during that time, online dating may have been nice during its inception but like other products has been enshittified into keeping users on the platform aka not setting them up with the best dates, interested to see how tokyos experiment pans out
> In that time, the divorce rate has shrunk from 4% to 2.5%.
Correction: the 4.0 and 2.5 figures are per 1000 people, so 0.4% and 0.25%
Note: it actually dropped a little further to 2.4 in 2022.
To clarify, it's not that 0.24% of marriages end in divorce. The number is derived by dividing all divorces by all people (apparently excluding CA, HI, IN, MI, and NM).
That's also not really the number most people care about, though, which is the percentage of marriages which end in divorce. Sadly, I had no luck finding definitive data on that. Rather, I've seen claims as high as >50% and some as low as 33% for first marriages, with subsequent marriages growing significantly from there, but even when it seems to come from a semi-reputable source like a well-known newspaper, the actual citations are usually more sketchy, so I'd take those figures with a wheelbarrow of salt.
If we are talking birth rate, it might be great to also find answer to a question: Why have children? In the past there were logical reasons to have children like they will help on the farm, more warriors for our tribe, or they can work in factory to increase revenue of a family.
Today ROI on a child is always negative. Members of modern society have no rational reasons to have children and I think most people innately know it but are unable to put their finger on it.
For people that want to have a child, and not trying to justify their lack of ability to have one, "ROI" doesn't factor into it. I think you are attributing way to much credibility to your imaginary conception of why people would want to have children.
This response seems to indicate you don't have or want children. There's the emotional and human aspect to having children. Love, family, respect, etc. I'm throwing words around but if these things mean something to you then you'd understand.
I feel western society has lost many of these but you see these concepts upheld in immigrant families in the US.
As a person who has kids, I agree with you to some extent - a decision to have kids is not necessarily rational, you don't take ROI into account that much. However, life with kids, in spite of many negatives, feels much "nicer" overall.
Yeah, I have four kids, and I'll be the first to tell you that it's not a logical, rational decision; it's an emotional, probably hormonal, one. For people like us (the HN crowd, in general) who are drawn to computers, math, logic, etc. and pride ourselves on it, I think that can be tough to understand and accept. It took me a while.
With no intent to disparage women, I think the "baby crazies" are very real. My wife and I got married in our early twenties, enjoyed a few child-free years, but then they hit hard. In her mid-twenties, it became very clear that there was no way my wife would be happy if we didn't have kids, and ROI had nothing to do with it.
Even when there might have been a positive ROI for having kids, I'm pretty sure that nobody looked at it primarily in that way.
It sounds to me that the social concern is the declining birth rate and the article is proposing ways to improve dating to alleviate that problem.
At least in the US, that feels like trickle down economics.
From my POV, the larger detractors to having children are financial “safety” aspects much more than “dating is hard”.
From a 1st person view “I need to save a lot of money because in retirement, I will depend only on the money I saved”.
Or “I am one medical issue away from having my savings wiped”.
Or “daycare / education for my kid is so expensive that it’ll eat a huge chunk into my available cash flow”
I believe if we want more families (and families to have more children) as a society (acting through the government) we need to alleviate those issues.
You don’t need to make having children _free_. But the more affordable you make it, the more people will choose it.
A tech billionaire needs to pay the original okcupid founders (Chris Coyne, Max Krohn etc.) to create a modern okcupid untainted by Match group. It needs to be a nonprofit. It was the best dating site ever, whereas Match has captured the market with its swipe apps as gambling apps.
If the government wants to increase the birthrate, then they should something about childcare expenses, like make them tax deductable, instead of building OkCupid.gov. If we're just going to print funny money every year anyway, then use some of that to maintain the population, and provide a public safety net.
It does seem clear that financial issues are a major contributor. Parents have been getting older before having children, presumably because it's taking longer to have financial stability. I know it was a factor with our kid.
If you want more kids work on affordable housing, decreased costs for healthcare, decreased costs for college, and decreased costs for childcare.
Child-care support is highly likely to be long-term anti-inflationary.
Inflation happens when the money supply grows faster than the productive capacity of a country. And few, if any, things are more important for productive capacity than a young workforce.
Or think about it from the other direction. Suppose the country was "fiscally responsible" and had lots of money to support retirees. But if there is nobody of working age, then those retirees will be spending lots of money on their needs and wants. Without workers to supply those needs and wants the prices will get quickly bid up. Aka inflation.
> If the government wants to increase the birthrate, then they should something about childcare expenses, like make them tax deductable, instead of building OkCupid.gov.
Meaning daycare? IIRC, they are already tax deductible to a point (see: Dependent Care FSA).
But it's interesting and kind of depressing that the solution is always to make it easier and cheaper to shove kids into institutional settings, because the assumption that the gaping maw of capitalism must consume a maximum amount of every adults' time and energy is unquestioned.
Institutionalizing childcare is the best for capitalism, because it captures the parents' time with paid work and creates a product to suck up their money with. Too bad about the kids, though. Capitalism comes first.
> Meaning daycare? IIRC, they are already tax deductible to a point (see: Dependent Care FSA)
At a cap of $5,000, the dependent care FSA does not even cover 2 months of daycare for my daughter, and the tax savings amount to less than two weeks of care.
What do you mean by "institutional settings"? I'm just talking about a daycare where my kid can learn their letters and make friends in the neighborhood. That's kind of an institution I guess, but I wouldn't describe it as an "institutional setting".
"Last fall, Tinder rolled out a $500 monthly subscription, in addition to two cheaper membership tiers. The League charges up to $1,000 a week or $2,500 a month."
For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
>> "Last fall, Tinder rolled out a $500 monthly subscription, in addition to two cheaper membership tiers. The League charges up to $1,000 a week or $2,500 a month."
> For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
For that kind of money, they should probably just pay an escort to date you and make it look like a match. Wasn't Eliot Spitzer was pay that kind of money for his escorts?
Job sites haven't turned job hunting into slot machines, but that's what dating apps are. I spent $0 on job sites on my last job search (500 applications).
I don't have to pay to use job sites. I got many interviews and a few offers without paying. Dating apps have monetized aggressively in the past 3 years where you have to subscribe to get anything out of them.
Free pre-K schooling (like many other developed countries) would have a much much larger impact on the birth date than any of these somewhat gimmicky attempts.
Or reduce the cost of college; you really have to factor that in if you’re deciding whether to have kids these days.
I feel like all these dating crisis articles are specific to straight people because relatively speaking queer people are having an easier time than ever before. Maybe I'm in a bubble
I would say dating apps make it much easier for queer people to find others to date as that was always a relatively limited pool to begin with so location based dating apps would really help make it easier.
However for straight people it was previously not too difficult to find a partner as there was a lot of straight people around you in most places and it was fairly easy to figure out where you stood in the dating market likely only had a handful of candidates to realistically choose from.
Dating apps have instead basically provided an overwhelming amount of choice and there is little in the way of immediate feedback in how you stand in that dating market. Men tend to become less choosy just trying their chances with as many women as possible, which then means women end up with so much incoming attention they start to increase their standards to have any attempt to filter these incoming requests.
You would need to design a system that had some kind of cost for a right swipe for men and maybe it increases in cost for each right swipe basically to force them to become more selective and not spam right swipes and maybe women would need to pay for selection filters or something.
Everyone's missing the point. You can't reverse globalization. The government doesn't want you to have more babies. Baby production was outsourced overseas to import grown adults. Let others worry about childcare expenses.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadI thought of a dating app in which I would charge a hefty ($1000 usd) initial fee, and return a percentage daily until I found the right partner for you.
That way our objectives will be aligned.
It was marvelous to spend time crafting a profile that was tailored to the kind of people you wanted to meet and to read profiles that were written the same way by others for you.
I found the section with questions that you could answer and provide context for to give me insight into prospective dates and I felt like the percent match was actually accurate.
I'm curious about government run dating sites but I have low expectations. Not because I think that the government couldn't pull off a dating app in theory, I just don't know how they would market it and if it would be a hit and reach a sufficient network effect to work.
I'd be more open to the government forcing dating sites to open up their algorithms and do away with horrific dark patterns.
I've been talking to my friends about this and we've all agreed that online dating is a complete waste of time, we're looking at stuff like speed dating and group activities in real life instead.
The swipe left or swipe right UI is absolute garbage and having to pay to get boost the chances that your profile is even seen is indicative of the primary purpose of these apps.
The perfect replacement already exists and it's OkCupid circa 2006. A giant database of genuinely interesting questions and a way to display other users who share similar answers. The method works, but it's not as dopamine rich and thus monetizable as swiping.
Still, I believe there's potential. No one's tried making a dating service backed by the fediverse as far as I know, and an OkVerse would be a fun weekend project.
Since 2000 the percentage of US couples who met online has grown from 10% to >50%. In that time, the divorce rate has shrunk from 4% to 2.5%.
There's a lot of complaining about dating apps. When offline dating was the norm people complained about it endlessly as well. Offline dating also produced an enormous number of unhappy couples. The online dating experience has its own set of frustrations and poor outcomes - many of which don't occur offline - but people continue to choose it over offline alternatives. I've been reading articles like this one for years. They haven't stopped the percentage of couples who met online from increasing.
People tend to aim their complaints about online dating at companies like Match Group. When they complain about offline dating, though, those complaints can only be directed at the culture - there is no corporate entity who is responsible for making approaching strangers at a bar intimidating and potentially humiliating.
> In Tokyo, the city government is even releasing its own dating app, part of a campaign called Tokyo Futari Story ("futari" means couple). The service, which the city has budgeted several million dollars to develop and promote, will require users to verify their income, prove they're unmarried, sit for an interview with the app's staff, and sign a statement saying they're intent on getting married.
The last sentence is the critical one. Matchmakers who vet their clients intent tend to have much higher success rates than those who let anyone participate. A city government can also enact consequences on liars in ways that private companies cannot. We'll see how Tokyo's experiment plays out.
Correction: the 4.0 and 2.5 figures are per 1000 people, so 0.4% and 0.25%
Note: it actually dropped a little further to 2.4 in 2022.
To clarify, it's not that 0.24% of marriages end in divorce. The number is derived by dividing all divorces by all people (apparently excluding CA, HI, IN, MI, and NM).
See: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/marriage-divorce.htm
That's also not really the number most people care about, though, which is the percentage of marriages which end in divorce. Sadly, I had no luck finding definitive data on that. Rather, I've seen claims as high as >50% and some as low as 33% for first marriages, with subsequent marriages growing significantly from there, but even when it seems to come from a semi-reputable source like a well-known newspaper, the actual citations are usually more sketchy, so I'd take those figures with a wheelbarrow of salt.
Today ROI on a child is always negative. Members of modern society have no rational reasons to have children and I think most people innately know it but are unable to put their finger on it.
What are you going to do with all that money when you die?
I feel western society has lost many of these but you see these concepts upheld in immigrant families in the US.
With no intent to disparage women, I think the "baby crazies" are very real. My wife and I got married in our early twenties, enjoyed a few child-free years, but then they hit hard. In her mid-twenties, it became very clear that there was no way my wife would be happy if we didn't have kids, and ROI had nothing to do with it.
Even when there might have been a positive ROI for having kids, I'm pretty sure that nobody looked at it primarily in that way.
At least in the US, that feels like trickle down economics.
From my POV, the larger detractors to having children are financial “safety” aspects much more than “dating is hard”. From a 1st person view “I need to save a lot of money because in retirement, I will depend only on the money I saved”. Or “I am one medical issue away from having my savings wiped”. Or “daycare / education for my kid is so expensive that it’ll eat a huge chunk into my available cash flow”
I believe if we want more families (and families to have more children) as a society (acting through the government) we need to alleviate those issues. You don’t need to make having children _free_. But the more affordable you make it, the more people will choose it.
If you want more kids work on affordable housing, decreased costs for healthcare, decreased costs for college, and decreased costs for childcare.
Inflation happens when the money supply grows faster than the productive capacity of a country. And few, if any, things are more important for productive capacity than a young workforce.
Or think about it from the other direction. Suppose the country was "fiscally responsible" and had lots of money to support retirees. But if there is nobody of working age, then those retirees will be spending lots of money on their needs and wants. Without workers to supply those needs and wants the prices will get quickly bid up. Aka inflation.
Meaning daycare? IIRC, they are already tax deductible to a point (see: Dependent Care FSA).
But it's interesting and kind of depressing that the solution is always to make it easier and cheaper to shove kids into institutional settings, because the assumption that the gaping maw of capitalism must consume a maximum amount of every adults' time and energy is unquestioned.
Institutionalizing childcare is the best for capitalism, because it captures the parents' time with paid work and creates a product to suck up their money with. Too bad about the kids, though. Capitalism comes first.
At a cap of $5,000, the dependent care FSA does not even cover 2 months of daycare for my daughter, and the tax savings amount to less than two weeks of care.
For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
> For that kind of money, you should get bottle service. For that kind of money, you can get bottle service.
For that kind of money, they should probably just pay an escort to date you and make it look like a match. Wasn't Eliot Spitzer was pay that kind of money for his escorts?
There's a front-page post about ghost jobs right now:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42010130
(one could argue that that's another kind of slot machine)
However for straight people it was previously not too difficult to find a partner as there was a lot of straight people around you in most places and it was fairly easy to figure out where you stood in the dating market likely only had a handful of candidates to realistically choose from.
Dating apps have instead basically provided an overwhelming amount of choice and there is little in the way of immediate feedback in how you stand in that dating market. Men tend to become less choosy just trying their chances with as many women as possible, which then means women end up with so much incoming attention they start to increase their standards to have any attempt to filter these incoming requests.
You would need to design a system that had some kind of cost for a right swipe for men and maybe it increases in cost for each right swipe basically to force them to become more selective and not spam right swipes and maybe women would need to pay for selection filters or something.