It's impossible to build a good dating experience on an app at scale. Let me explain why.
Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons.
So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult.
So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.
So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.
Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners?
> Enforce a 50:50 ratio
OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking.
> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.
This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why.
> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.
As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.
But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors?
> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).
This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt.
In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.
I love your "RFC" post. I'm a SRE by day who dabbles in code at night (Go). I've long wanted to find a co-founder to moonlight on a project together. I am a remote worker, far away from the Bay Area and it seems really hard to meet others interested in this given where I live. I would love to see more "co-founder dating" here on HN (pardon the pun...)
That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend:
"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."
I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.
In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.
Tinder’s big innovation was the double opt in for messaging. Both parties have to “like” the other profile before they can exchange messages. This helps a lot with the problem of women getting overwhelmed with low quality messages.
I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company, the Match Group.
I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.
I question the enforceability of such a patent - it seems like a mere technicality of phrasing. For example, on Facebook you send someone a friend request which has to be agreed to by them before additional functionality is unlocked. I don't see how applying such a standard interaction mechanism to a dating app in particular is in any way innovative; it seems analogous to the online shopping cart patent that Newegg invalidated back in 2013.
More likely, Tinder intends to use the mere threat of court proceedings to stifle any potential competition.
Edit: Another comment linked to the patent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408610), and it's... really verbose and complicated (as usual). It seems to revolve around having the aforementioned request-response procedure, while simultaneously using the requests and responses to determine other likely matches to present to the participants. I would summarize it as "Netflix ranking applied to dating app user requests", and remain highly skeptical of any supposed innovation. One thing is for certain though: paying a law firm to dissect this thing and argue it in court would cost you a small fortune.
What’s more unbelievable, is the fact that the US Patent Office actually granted them such a patent.
This is a good example of a bad patent.
Now, this will actually encourage shell companies to file all kinds of fake patents, as defensive patents, and thus block anyone from using them.
So for example, the next time another medium, like VR or AR, comes around, then someone enterprising enough will try to think through all the scenarios, and file all kinds of fake patents.
Like for some random example, someone files a patent to recognize your eye blinking, to trigger, a control reaction like clicking a box. Or maybe if you roll your eyes, this will signify that you declined something.
Perhaps someone should create these types of patents just to troll the Patent Office. That way, maybe someone in a position of power, can actually enact change to end this patent nonsense.
Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?
Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.
This gets a little into the 'things you can't say' territory, but online dating just isn't very good for most heterosexual men due to selective pressures (it's probably better when the population is closer to an even split, but even then there are problems). This does change as men get older and there's less competition (online dating is bad for men in their 20s and good in their 30s).
Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data you can look at to see some of the problems.
One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages (making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the response graph itself.
There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around 4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.
For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.
For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills required for success.
For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression. These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).
If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part is less important.
My anecdata was that I found a great many women on Tinder and other sites where I live (Washington, DC). Not fake profiles; I had plenty of dates. I like to think that I'm a good catch, but I don't think I'm exceptionally physically attractive, and am certainly not wealthy. (I was working for a startup and often made no money at all.) I don't believe I was doing anything other men couldn't replicate.
I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)
Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.
well, that is awfully low bandwidth in an internet-connected world. you may only be exposed to 500 potential mates that way. in a market like NYC, merely being on tinder would probably expose you to orders of magnitude more than that! makes sense to leverage tech to parlay your assets (e.g. attractiveness/mating value) to reach a wider audience in order to get highest possible match you can.
I worked on a dating website for a while and while the market was fascinating, the motivations and alignment of the site/team vs the customer are completely broken.
It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - at minimum - compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two.
It's the only business model worse than cigarettes.
Does this mean a business shouldn’t aim to ever solve a customer’s problem?
Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.
From female profiles, and speaking with my friends, it seems that no one is happy with online dating apps.
> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate.
I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.
This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users.
The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education.
At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.
Okay, assuming your information is correct (women are a hot commodity on dating apps and get lots of attention, and conversely men have a hard time getting any attention), if you put out a hetero-only dating app with a 1:1 men:women ratio, why would women choose to use it, when on Tinder they would have men clamoring over them?
There could well be an untapped market of women who aren't interested in the atmosphere that comes with the unbalanced gender ratio, even if it means being at a personal disadvantage in the process.
I'm actually on board with the idea of boutique dating apps that limit population and interactions in this way. I would try one that gave discounts and date ideas ("-$5.00 discount at this particular restaurant, oh, and there's 4 tables left for tonight, reserve a table for your date now through our app").
If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place.
For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult.
These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.
Even with a 1:1 ratio, 20% of the men would attract 80% of the women. In any dating pool, online or otherwise, the math is just generally bad for the vast majority of men attempting to attract a partner. See:
The wildly unbalanced gender ratio makes men frustrated, which causes them to invest very little in reaching out to women so that they can reach out to dozens/hundreds/thousands, which makes an experience for women of thousands of dick pics/"hey"/etc, along with earnest high-investment outreach from men who are too ugly/poor/short/whatever to capture their interest.
If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.
The only idea worthy of pursuit IMHO opinion in this post is organizing in person events; this forces people to invest a bit more time in engaging with another human (an evening) vs a few seconds on a photo before a swipe to another human (or short conversations that die out in app). That in person time is the opportunity for organic chemistry, generating interpersonal closeness, to occur between two people.
TLDR The problem is the app. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.
There's a rule, wish I could remember the name of it, that says people will consistently choose convenience over satisfaction even though those choices will tend to make them less happy.
I think this explains a lot of our modern societal dysthymia, but dating apps are particularly illustrative.
I would second that. The only value I've ever gotten out of dating apps was back in the more freewheeling days when OkCupid and the like would promote in-person events. Enforcing a balanced gender ratio plus similar interests (to avoid purely scattershot approaches), and having an official host running each event, would go a long way.
It also gives an obvious way to get users to pay for stuff in a way that directly corresponds to both the amount of work the company is doing and the number of singles the user is meeting: pay $X to get a spot at Y event. That could even include some simple cross-promotional bundling (get a ticket to the zoo / art museum / sportsball game / retro drive-in movie / whatever along with the group event).
I've tried speed dating probably 3 or 4 times. It's one of those horrible things I really shouldn't keep doing, but when there's nothing else out there...
Even in such events, I've only had one time where it wasn't 0 out of 0. With that one person we only went on two days. I dunno if meeting out in meatspace has that much of an impact really.
...Maybe 'hetero singles who want a monogamous partner' is not the best group for a dating app.
Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.
That sounds like a dating service selecting for the market that best benefits the dating service: people most likely to keep using the service rather than stop when they find someone.
Not to be negative, but isn't this the current positioning of OKCupid?
It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?
There was a YC company in W12 called Grouper that basically implemented all of the grab-bag of ideas. It was a 3-on-3 blind date at a pre-determined spot. Each person had to pitch in $20 to participate, which meant $120 revenue for each date. It seemed to be going well - I wonder what happened to them.
> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.
Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last.
> Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out.
This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since.
> Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets.
I think I like this.
> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.
I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups.
> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.
At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology.
> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).
I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this.
---
Here are some ways I think this could be made better:
- People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio.
- The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible.
- If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.
Unfortunately, you can’t isolate your app from the broader environment of dating apps. For instance, take the “No ELO” suggestion. Implementing this feature means you’ll attract a lot of users who don’t like ELO (typically, less attractive users) and won’t gain any users who benefit from the ELO system (attractive users). If you can’t get attractive users, you can’t get any users (Why would I join the app that only has unattractive users?)
Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.
Let's talk brass tacks: what kind of money is this going to make, compared to industry margins?
It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you.
No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc.
How about the first meeting not be any sort of date, and no chatting options ahead of time.
You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction.
If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment.
(Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.)
One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?
Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.
Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.
But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.
Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.
There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.
I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.
I like the filtering idea, although people will probably just end up putting in false entries and you would just be scrolling through people who don't actually fit those categories. It feels gross to objectively exclude people on things they can't control like race and height, but I think that is what people want more control over. And yeah income, occupation, are all actually really important.
These academic takes on app-dating are generally out too lunch.
In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed.
OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility.
In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot.
In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context.
I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much.
From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is.
I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.
I think there's an opportunity to build a dating app that treats dating as an assignment problem[0], rather than a browsing experience. Assume we have a heterosexual and monogamous dating pool of 50 men and 50 women. If they were to rank or rate each other some people will be objectively attractive, but there will also be subjective differences based on individual preferences. Using an algorithm it should be possible to come up with the best combination of couples that maximizes each male/female's subjective attractiveness to each other.
Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept.
We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature).
Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people.
My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people.
I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it.
If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.
I'm actually surprised it took so long for companies like Tinder to start monetizing their male audience more.
With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough.
You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date.
Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.
> allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line
Women might not be happy about being "bought" in this way, it might feel too close to prostitution. Also, some men might feel entitled to "get something for their money", leading to situations of emotional pressure up to outright rape. I would not expect the women I know to be interested in a platform that makes them feel like a product that's bought and also putting them at potentially more risk than other platforms. I could very well be wrong.
[+] [-] solatic|6 years ago|reply
Dating markets are lemon markets. The classical example of a lemon market was the used car market - most people who bought "lemons" (unreliable cars) would exploit information asymmetry and sell them on the used market, and over time the reputation of the used car market deteriorated to the point where it was affecting the value of new cars. The car manufacturers solved the problem by introducing gatekeepers - certified used car programs, that certified that the cars weren't lemons.
So who are the "lemons" on dating markets, which bring down the reputation of dating markets for the rest of the players? People who aren't in an emotionally healthy place to make commitments; people who are "players"; people who are violent; etc. It is our experience dealing with the lemons who stay on the dating market that ruins the reputation of the entire dating market and makes dealing with the market difficult.
So the solution is to introduce a gatekeeper. What does a gatekeeper look like? A clinically trained psychologist-cum-matchmaker (pun not intended) who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly (for your personal definition of honest) in the dating market. Don't like your gatekeeper? Pick a different one.
So far as I can tell, healthy dating markets are limited to scale by the need to hire such competent human gatekeepers. If anyone has an idea how to automate the gatekeeping in a humane way - you're sitting on a gold mine.
[+] [-] rmtech|6 years ago|reply
Why? What would the outcome of that be? You want to create a 2-sided market where you troll people by matching them with low quality partners?
> Enforce a 50:50 ratio
OK, so if there are 1000 women and 10,000 men, how do you choose which men to let in? Random? Rank the men and let the top 10% in? Oh you said no ranking.
> Don’t call it a “dating” app. The app should be labeled as a “singles” app.
This doesn't sound like it would make any difference, or if it would I don't see why.
> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.
As far as I know this already exists, but it's probably even worse than the 1-1 matching problem. Random people are nervous around each other to start with, and the group dynamics of 3-5 mutually unknown men competing for women sounds like it would suck. As a male I wouldn't go anywhere near it.
But with this point, can you explain what success would look like? Why would anyone want to have a night out with strangers who are also competitors?
> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).
This doesn't actually sound very disruptive. All the dating apps are trying to do this, and there is an arms race between the bad guys and the enforcement. Unless you have a specific insight I don't see how this would disrupt.
In summary, I don't see any useful solutions, though I do think that you've done a good job pointing out problems.
[+] [-] chrissnell|6 years ago|reply
That said, for your app, I'm kind of a doubter because I never had any luck with dating websites for many of the reasons you mentioned. I went on lots of dates and nothing ever connected but finally got some good advice from a friend:
"Take care of yourself and do what you love and she will find _you_."
I did exactly this: started running every day after work... learned how to cook and started making my own food...spruceded up my apartment with some nice furnishings...and lo and behold, my future wife literally (nearly) ran into me. I was out running one night and she almost hit me at a stop sign when I ran across the road. She turned out to be my neighbor and fast-forward 11 years: we have two kids and 10 years of marriage under our belts.
In retrospect, I should have spent the hundreds of dollars on a life coach instead of eHarmony.
[+] [-] marcell|6 years ago|reply
I was surprised to learn that Tinder has patented this technique. No other dating app can use it, unless that app is owned by Tinder’s parent company, the Match Group.
I think not having access to this technique will make it very hard for new apps to compete with Tinder and friends.
[+] [-] Reelin|6 years ago|reply
More likely, Tinder intends to use the mere threat of court proceedings to stifle any potential competition.
Edit: Another comment linked to the patent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408610), and it's... really verbose and complicated (as usual). It seems to revolve around having the aforementioned request-response procedure, while simultaneously using the requests and responses to determine other likely matches to present to the participants. I would summarize it as "Netflix ranking applied to dating app user requests", and remain highly skeptical of any supposed innovation. One thing is for certain though: paying a law firm to dissect this thing and argue it in court would cost you a small fortune.
[+] [-] dx87|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Invictus0|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9733811
[+] [-] Muuuchem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jonovono|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackrock|6 years ago|reply
This is a good example of a bad patent.
Now, this will actually encourage shell companies to file all kinds of fake patents, as defensive patents, and thus block anyone from using them.
So for example, the next time another medium, like VR or AR, comes around, then someone enterprising enough will try to think through all the scenarios, and file all kinds of fake patents.
Like for some random example, someone files a patent to recognize your eye blinking, to trigger, a control reaction like clicking a box. Or maybe if you roll your eyes, this will signify that you declined something.
Perhaps someone should create these types of patents just to troll the Patent Office. That way, maybe someone in a position of power, can actually enact change to end this patent nonsense.
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] onetimeusename|6 years ago|reply
> Women just aren’t using these apps
Couldn't it be that women just don't need to use a dating app to find partners? Was this a problem they faced before the apps existed?
Meeting people through work, school, friends, parties, etc. seems to have worked fine for women so far. The bottle neck here might be the preferences women have, not being unable to meet men without an app. The app would have to address that to solve their problem rather than purely trying to get people to meet which may again be limited by their preferences if they only like 20% of men as cited.
[+] [-] gonehome|6 years ago|reply
Dataclysm - Christian Rudder's book (cofounder of okcupid) has a ton of data you can look at to see some of the problems.
One is solved by Tinder, Hinge etc. which is women getting too many messages (making things better for heterosexual women) but the other issue is the response graph itself.
There's a graph in that book that shows number of messages received based on attractiveness, for women there is a massive spike at the right end of the attractiveness scale and it gets lower at the lower end, but is still around 4-5 messages a week. This means there are opportunities to at least go on dates if interested and get better at selection/what you like and don't.
For men it's a flat line at zero until the extreme right of the attractiveness scale where it goes up to 1-2 messages.
For men not in the top 10% of attractiveness online dating is not viable so things trend towards a broken state where women select the same group of highly selected men (which tends to lead to less long term interest on the side of the highly selected men). I think large amounts of men ~80% get very few dating opportunities and so are generally bad at the social skills required for success.
For most heterosexual men (those not in the top 10% of attractiveness) you're better off meeting people in real life where you can make a better impression. These issues are compounded in the bay area where there is a large imbalance of men and women (things are less broken in DC and NYC).
If I had a suggestion for a new type of dating site it would be less about the matching part and more about how to help men get better at the prerequisites for success (social skills, dressing better, fitness etc.). The pairing part is less important.
[+] [-] jfengel|6 years ago|reply
I can't vouch for the male-to-female ratio, but I never failed to find somebody interesting on Tinder within a few days. I did hear a lot of horror stories from women about men on such apps, many of whom behaved very badly and others who were quite obviously unsuitable partners (boring, inarticulate, cheating, etc.)
Maybe it's just where I am, or there's something else confounding my observations. But from what I saw, there were a lot of women on Tinder, and if men were failing to connect with them, the problem may not have been the numbers.
[+] [-] maximente|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|6 years ago|reply
It's not in their best interest to give you a great match but someone who is just "pretty good" or - at minimum - compelling because if you fail on the site, they lose one customer.. but if you're successful, they lose two.
It's the only business model worse than cigarettes.
I lay out some more detail in a post here: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|6 years ago|reply
Surely, the value of a successful marriage is many, many multiples what a dating app might charge. And surely, a dating app that successfully pairs people into high value marriages will recoup any losses by earning new customers through the word of mouth recommendations.
[+] [-] balls187|6 years ago|reply
> dating apps have created an environment where women are hyper-selective and where men are hyper-indiscriminate.
I believe this is the key point, and ironic because it's viscous cycle.
This behavior encourages worse behavior that is counter intuitive to the goal of it's users.
The entire premise is flawed from the start, as a dating profile starts with a snap judgement based on pictures, a biography, and key details--such as height, job, education.
At this point, the competition for dates using an app is so high, and the experience is so mediocre, that I am better off spending my effort meeting women in real life.
[+] [-] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsareto|6 years ago|reply
If you want to get creepy, do analyses of where people might want to go based on preferences or chat content and give discounts/suggestions for those categories. Other broad filters could be "find some place with lots of people". The less intrusive version is just giving a map of places nearby that have discounts available. Make it convenient to share map and website pointers within the app, so people aren't tabbing over to Google maps to look up the place.
For joining, I'd probably keep it application only or by referral. Egregious complaints and police reports get you thrown right out. Balancing how much identity verification against a creepy factor would be difficult.
These kinds of things are a lot more palatable the more of them that there are. There can be other flavors of boutique apps, and you just shop around and apply to ones you like. Did you already go through all 500 potential matches on this 1k user app? Just download another one.
[+] [-] philwelch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|6 years ago|reply
https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-t...
[+] [-] toohotatopic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zweep|6 years ago|reply
If there was a system for people in the 25th to 75th percentiles of desirability to have a dating market where the men were only allowed to contact 3 women per month, I think it would be very popular among women.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|6 years ago|reply
TLDR The problem is the app. People get Uber for dating, which results in the dysfunctional marketplace demonstrated by Okcupid, Bumble, etc because chemistry, love, and relationships are not the same as on demand ride or food delivery services.
[+] [-] svachalek|6 years ago|reply
I think this explains a lot of our modern societal dysthymia, but dating apps are particularly illustrative.
[+] [-] crooked-v|6 years ago|reply
It also gives an obvious way to get users to pay for stuff in a way that directly corresponds to both the amount of work the company is doing and the number of singles the user is meeting: pay $X to get a spot at Y event. That could even include some simple cross-promotional bundling (get a ticket to the zoo / art museum / sportsball game / retro drive-in movie / whatever along with the group event).
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
Even in such events, I've only had one time where it wasn't 0 out of 0. With that one person we only went on two days. I dunno if meeting out in meatspace has that much of an impact really.
[+] [-] philwelch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meristem|6 years ago|reply
Based on discussions with therapists, 'consensually non-monogamous, regardless of orientation' seems to be the market to go for specially if the app found ways to emphasize the 'consensually' part and women's safety in general.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kalium|6 years ago|reply
It's my understanding that "consensual non-monogamy" may currently be experiencing some concerns of the addressable market size persuasion. I would love to be wrong. Can you help me with anything I may have overlooked?
[+] [-] yuhao|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 years ago|reply
Not a bad idea from a marketing perspective, but I'd put this last.
> Focus on having a good time. The “conversion” shouldn’t be a match, it should be having a fun night out.
This is where you'll limit your audience. Unfortunately, in my opinion, a lot of people today are timid about going out to meet strangers. This is partly because it's so easy to escape reality into Netflix and Reddit or Discord, but we're becoming more and more of a risk-averse culture. When I was growing up, adults would often overemphasize the dangers of adulthood, and I can't imagine things have gotten better since.
> Enforce a 50:50 ratio. This might bring DAUs down, but without enforcing a M:F ratio, you end up with asymmetric markets.
I think I like this.
> Organize occasional group events. Without becoming a meetup app, the app should push events — concerts, hikes, movie nights — with groups of 6-10 people.
I like this, too, and I think that something like this might be made possible programmatically. I'm thinking the kind of matchmaking used in multiplayer games but used to organize meetups.
> Avoid ELOs and other ranking algorithms.
At the very least, don't go down the road of MBTI and other forms of fake psychology.
> Have a vetting process with a zero-tolerance policy for bad apples (harassers, catfishes, etc.).
I wonder what the abuse rate would be for something like this.
---
Here are some ways I think this could be made better:
- People can only be discovered if they are online. If they haven't been active in 30 days, their account is kicked out and they have to reapply and wait in line if there's a waitlist to maintain the 50:50 ratio.
- The photos you use must be taken at a designated photography studio. Users cannot upload their own photos. They're free to wear makeup and nice clothes, but no filters or obnoxious facial expressions are allowed.(obviously the studio can airbrush out zits and simple things like that) The studio can also be a place where random singles can meet in person. Accounts are activated upon completing this, and I think that will help prevent bots, making them nearly impossible.
- If you don't initiate any conversations within a period of time(not sure what that should be), this should result in a warning, and if the warning isn't heeded by a certain point, the user is kicked back into the waitlist or is suspended for a short period of time.
[+] [-] elil17|6 years ago|reply
Fixing these dating app issues is impossible because your users always make their decisions knowing that other dating apps exist.
[+] [-] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
It's all well and good to talk about "disrupting" dating, but for the consumer, dating is a personal thing. It isn't like buying clothes or a new gadget, where you're not buying the product so much buying into the lifestyle you think the product will give you.
No dating app is going to solve whatever issues, traumas, predilections etc brought them there in the first place. No amount of in-app engineering is going to change a person's inner mindset regarding dating. That mindset is often the root cause of why dating apps suck; the "hi, how are you?" intro messages, the ghosting, the cookie-cutter profiles, etc.
So why would people pay for this?
[+] [-] generalpass|6 years ago|reply
You sign into an app to indicate you are available for a spontaneous introduction.
If two matched users are within the vicinity of one another, then each receives a notification that someone they have been matched with is nearby. If both agree, the introduction is arranged at some public space. This does away with all the stress of an actual date, plus no actual time commitment.
(Note that I'm not addressing the matching process.)
One point I didn't see or missed in the article is that for men who have no problems getting dates offline, why would they go through the huge PITA of online dating? What does that do to the pool?
[+] [-] RickS|6 years ago|reply
Dating is a filtering problem with highly varied solutions. Therefore, a dating site should be a platform with highly varied filtering solutions.
Create a broad, uniform spec for dating profile content (bio, interests, etc), and a great UX for populating it. And then open it up as a platform. Restrict nothing. Want to filter by height? weight? race? Have at it. Give users a few basic, somewhat customizable frames for searching and filtering the userbase.
But search filters are like microapps / facebook games: developers can build their own search plugins, so one global userbase can serve as content for a million different kinds of dating apps. Hikers, metalheads, people who are afraid to eat fruit, whatever.
Queries cost money (perhaps as low as a fraction of a penny), and the first message from each party costs a bit more (but still trivially cheap, probably sub $1). There's a base monthly cost like $5. If you don't use your whole budget, credits roll over. If you overspend, you get charged pro-rata. A portion of these fees go to developers to incentivize building useful applications. There is no free plan.
There are interesting things to be done with rate-limiting/sliding scale pricing. Perhaps first messages get expensive if you try to send them too fast, so it's trivially cheap to message 2 people per day, but extremely costly to message 50 people per day. Something has to 1) protect women's inboxes from a deluge of low effort garbage and 2) encourage men to be selective upfront rather than indiscriminately shotgunning messages and waiting until response to filter.
I'm not confident that this is a profitable idea, especially compared to something like tinder, but it would be neat.
[+] [-] kart23|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|6 years ago|reply
In particular, there's been a ton of effort to try to figure out personality and make matches, and they've all failed.
OkCupid has tons of interesting questions that they ask, and they've found that almost zero of the questions are relevant in terms of predicting outcomes. Funny enough I think there were only two questions, one of them was 'do you like watching horror movies' ! Literally of all the questions about politics, marriage, income, alcohol etc. - the question 'do you like horror movies' was a subtle predictor of compatibility.
In general, there's a crude correlation between overall profile ranking mostly determined by attractiveness, i.e. lining people up by their super-ballpark estimation of overall attractiveness would be a very rough good start, but even then, it's a crapshoot.
In reality, dating is by far mostly a game of 'meeting people' and that's it. All of the questions, implications, descriptions, photos - almost none of it makes up for spending a few hours with a person in some interesting context.
I don't believe that any of the analysis offered in the article really amount to that much.
From a business perspective, it's also about creating critical masses. POF, a self-funded business with one of the most original and ridiculous UX's imaginable, was as successful as OkCupid, with some of the most thoughtful UX. But POF did the basics: photo, profile, message the person, which is 99% of what the value is.
I don't think there will be any special sauce in online dating. It's just a way to filter out some very obvious mismatches, but otherwise, really meet people and the reality can hit the road only at that point.
[+] [-] wefarrell|6 years ago|reply
Of course an actual dating app would need to be a bit more complicated than this, but I do think there's the potential to build a something around this concept.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem
[+] [-] dilippkumar|6 years ago|reply
We are irreversibly addicted to various forms of information consumption that keeps us isolated with our attention glued to a screen. Pretend for a moment that you could live in a time pre-television. How would a 20 year old spend his/her time after work? From reading classic english literature - it seems like going out and socializing and interacting with other people was the norm (or, society of that era was often portrayed like this in their popular literature).
Now, we can't go back to that era - However, for the people who choose to break out of this addiction, literally the only option out there is meetup.com That option isn't even a very good one. But a lot of people actively use that platform (myself included) despite several obvious flaws because there is nothing else like it out there. It's the most effective way to meet interesting people.
My hypothesis is that there exists a market for an institution that serves as a meeting ground for socialization. A place where you would dress up to go to, a place where you would go to socialize with like minded people from similar demographics and a place that provides meaningful ways for strangers to share a long dialogue together. A place that isn't home and isn't work. A place where you can grow to know people really well over time. A place where it is socially acceptable to present a friend as "being single" in polite conversation to a group of people.
I don't know what such a place would look like. In my head, I think of a library-coffee shop with a tennis court in the back yard - but that's probably not it. My point is - dating apps try to solve an absence of IRL human connections with the screentime addiction that caused the isolation in the first place. The answer should probably be some brick-and-mortar business that serves a community around it.
If dating apps really were the answer, why not go all the way and build an app that permanently matches up two people as their virtual spouse - you only interact with each other by updating your digital avatar and sending text messages. Think of an anime girl/guy on your phone that you can interact with - but that person maps to a real human somewhere in the world. You can pretend-love each other all you want till you decide you actually want to go and meet real people in the real world.
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|6 years ago|reply
With a 9:1 ratio, it seems like a ripe opportunity to enable progressively more pay-to-play options for men with disposable income (or despair) to try to stand out, by paying their way to the front of the profile advertising queue. They recently introduced the super boost, which is $50, I believe, but IMO that's not going far enough.
You have cities of many frustrated, but wealthy bachelors like San Francisco where men would gladly pay their way into a date.
Ethics and morality aside, there should a platform out there that allows men to bid hundreds, or thousands, on going out with someone, and the highest bidder wins the first spot in line. Of course the woman should not be obligated to take the offer, but it would send the signal that 1. the man is affluent and successful and 2. the suitor is truly committed to getting to know her. This gets somewhat close to the Seeking Arrangement turf, which may or may not be a good thing.
[+] [-] tom_mellior|6 years ago|reply
Women might not be happy about being "bought" in this way, it might feel too close to prostitution. Also, some men might feel entitled to "get something for their money", leading to situations of emotional pressure up to outright rape. I would not expect the women I know to be interested in a platform that makes them feel like a product that's bought and also putting them at potentially more risk than other platforms. I could very well be wrong.
[+] [-] nexuist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meristem|6 years ago|reply