Ask HN: Why are dating apps so bad? Why hasn't anyone made a good one?

[1270018080]

Almost all dating apps that have achieved the exponentially growing network effect have been acquired and subsequently enshittified by Match Group. The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money. I think Bumble is the only large scale independent app but they've managed to enshittify themselves too.

So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

Definition of a good dating app: An app with no dark patterns where you can find dates and relationships.

Ideas:

- By internet standards, the market is so mature people aren't motivated to download another app. You're never going to get enough of a positive feedback loop from the network effect.

- No one has made a good app yet.

- A majority of humans aren't compatible with online dating for one reason or another. Maybe they prefer dating in person. Maybe they're unattractive (physically or personality wise), bad at selecting partners, egotistical, selfish, lazy etc. So even if the app itself is good, the users aren't, and maybe the app isn't going to be able to fix the above issues.

[wryoak]

The number one problem with dating apps is that they position themselves for self-selection and most people fail to select appropriate mates when given a whole shopping mall’s worth of candidates. I would never have swiped right on my current partner (7ish years). Or my first spouse, either. Two highly fulfilling relationships in my life that I never expected or tried to manifest initially.

People can generally identify when they have chemistry with someone, but not when they will have chemistry with someone, and most dating apps are run on the idea that you select whom you want to have chemistry with. Not whom you can or will, but want to have. All dating apps will converge to garbage because they focus on choice in love, rather than chance. They don’t throw you into a room with random people and let the real relationships blossom and the false ones fall away, they tell you to pick from a lineup of people whole you have never talked to (and to be honest probably will never talk to), but in real life we talk to random folks, sometimes that unattainable hottie and sometimes the perhaps homely but amiable passerby, and find out the brute force way which ones make us spark. It’s not about the subscription fees or the with dating apps, it’s about the fundamental disconnect between the freedom of election and the inability to act. The promise of consumption without the serendipity necessary to facilitate it.

[netsharc]

Serendipity makes me think of Omegle. Which makes me think of a "Speed-Dating" app: you get connected to a random person like Omegle, but there's a time limit, say 3 minutes, and at the end of it you can decide to either extend the conversation or record a "nice talking to you, but I didn't feel any spark" video (a recording makes rejecting them less confrontational).

Users can give feedback whether the opposite user was rude or offensive, and the service should be quite strict about bans.

I wonder if it'd be a turn-off though, if you spend 30 minutes to talk to ~10 people you don't find attractive. Maybe there should be a Tinder-esque selection process, so when you're online, you'll get offered other profiles which are also online, and if you both swipe right you'll get to a video-chat within seconds.

Ouch, imagine the pain if you're online, swiping right, but never get connected to anyone. Another problem is that the hot people will always be in a conversation and their profiles will only rarely show up (since they won't be instantly available).

[dobladov]

I have not tried it, there's this German app where the choosing of your matches is done by your friends, not yourself, and given that many people meets their partner in real life thought friends it seems like an interesting idea.

- https://blindmate.app/

[fynd_dating]

The idea that chemistry or serendipity should guide your choices is exactly what leads people into relationships that don’t last. Ideally, dating apps should be helping people self-select for compatibility, not chemistry. Not to say that chemistry isn't important, but the chance to facilitate that chemistry should happen within a pool of people you’re actually compatible with.

[spacemadness]

I think The Medium is the Message applies. Breaking down humans into some tables in a database is never going to be great and lends itself to superficiality. It’s transactional at best most of the time and makes a lot of people bitter. The app makers are incentivized to keep you on the platform. None of this is in your favor.

[frizlab]

happn was built on the concept of serendipity. “Find the people you’ve crossed path with” (tagline has now changed though).

[nasalgoat]

I was a founding member of a dating app startup and worked there for 10 years until it filed for bankruptcy. I have some insight.

The number one reason dating apps suck is money, or the ability to make money is antithetical to the purpose of getting people together. A dating app is successful when people don't use it anymore, so that user churn is a serious impediment to earning a profit. Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

In that same vein, apps have to work way harder than websites to turn a profit because of app store fees. Our app would have been profitable if we didn't have to give Apple 30% of our fees, so we had to do way sketchier shit to increase profits to compensate.

Second problem is the wildly unbalanced male/female ratios in users. We had one of the better ratios in the market but it was still 70/30 male to female. Straight men and women simply do not have the same motivations around dating and trying to balance those is a hard problem. There are many videos out there about this problem, no need for me to go into detail.

Third is reach. We spent a lot of time trying to find ways to advertise or optimize for store placement and the restrictions placed on us were almost puritanical. For instance, Facebook wouldn't let us advertise because our relationship settings had "married" in the list, so we were forced to remove that option in order to place ads on Facebook. There were other compromises we had to introduce in order to qualify for other stores or advertisers.

Lastly, the Match Group is the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they buy all the good ones (OKCupid, Plenty of Fish) and grind them into maximum profitability like a hedge fund, thus removing any distinctiveness they had in favour of the Match methods.

What it comes down to is the ecosystem is gamed to make good datings apps impossible.

[jfengel]

Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.

I've heard this assertion before, but I don't understand it. Relationships are hard; most relationships fail. There's no need to do any special work to set people up for failure.

If dating app providers had some algorithm that could match people to make lifelong partners, surely somebody would have publicized it by now. Maybe it would be self-defeating as a commercial app, but somebody would do it anyway.

The apps do need ways to keep you coming back, but I don't think they can achieve that by locating and then hiding your perfect match. The best way to keep people coming back is to set them up with the best possible dates, and wait for those to fail entirely of their own accord.

Or at least, that's what I'd expect. If you have more insight as an insider I'd love to hear more.

[josephcsible]

> The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money.

Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. The ideal outcome of a dating app for you, the user, is that you find someone to marry and spend the rest of your life with, and that means you won't need the app anymore. This means that for apps where the user is a source of ongoing revenue (either paying directly, or through ads), there is an perverse incentive for the app to want exactly what you said. An idea I've heard before would be an app where there's a one-time payment to join, and that's the only revenue ever generated by each user. Then their incentives would be aligned with yours.

[IAmBroom]

You're describing old-style matchmakers.

I paid one about $200 circa 1998. She promised matchups every month until I cancelled, more or less. She wanted me to match so I'd quit draining her time & effort. Within 3 months I had a girlfriend, and we both dropped out. We had a grace period where we could re-up if it didn't work. Obviously, if one of us cancelled and the other asked for more matches, that deceipt would have been quickly revealed.

In short, you paid a larger finder's-fee upfront, and the service is motivated to match you ASAP.

[JohnBooty]

    Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. 
    The ideal outcome of a dating app [...] means you won't 
    need the app anymore. 

I used to run a moderately profitable social site with a dating slant.

I get what you're saying. In a way, yeah: your ideal moneymaker is somebody who signs up for a $20/year recurring subscription and forgets about it for the next 30 years.

But that was not how I viewed things. There's always a fresh "supply" of people who are looking for connections.

Think of a college bar. You don't need people to become "lifer" customers. There are always new people coming into town.

In some senses, if you're running a "pure" dating site (ala Tinder, as opposed to something with more of a community/social slant) it's probably not even advantageous to have the same people hanging around the site indefinitely. Most people want to date local people, and they would like to see a constant supply of new local search results/recommendations rather than the same people over and over.

[throwaway314155]

> Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. The ideal outcome of a dating app for you, the user, is that you find someone to marry and spend the rest of your life with, and that means you won't need the app anymore.

You're describing hinge. OP should probably try Hinge.

[throwawayffffas]

> Definition of a good dating app: An app with no dark patterns where you can find dates and relationships.

Yep that's not going to happen. Taking all the dark patterns out is the easy part. But the find dates and relationships part is not a thing you can do on an app. Unless you are like a 9.

Most people are average, and to find a date and have a relationship they have to be in an environment where whoever is doing the picking does not have infinite options and may be open to lower their standards. Like say in a bar where the options are the people in the bar and their standards might be lower because of beer goggles.

In an app people get to be picky and gravitate towards the most desirable end of the bell curve.

[JohnBooty]

This contradicts reality as I have experienced it.

I think people tend to select people they perceive they'll actually have a chance with. Obviously, not everybody has a good handle on how desirable they are (or aren't) but generally, yeah.

Your logic -- which sounds a bit like incel logic -- also kind of assumes a 1-dimensional scale of 0-10 based on, what? Solely on conventional physical attractiveness? Not everybody buys into that, at least not as a sole criterion.

I know a lot of "not 9s and 10s" who found relationships/hookups online.

I actually used to run a sort of dating site back in the day. Hundreds of examples on there, and I know many more people who've met partners online outside of the one I ran.

What you are describing is certainly true of some places like Tinder that lends themselves to quick impulsive swiping and snap judgements based on looks alone.

[toomuchtodo]

A profitable dating app is orthogonal to what humans need to make meaningful connections.

[liquidise]

If you built an ideal dating service, where 100% of your customers pair with someone they would marry, you could charge huge sums and you'd have an endless stream of customers as people grew into marrying age.

Today's market dynamics are different (no such ideal exists), but all the drivers remain: at some age people care deeply about meeting someone and will pay for a service that gives them s fighting chance. As a former dating app cto, i believe the reasons we don't have services that brag about their match or marriage rates is not capitalist greed standing in the way of love. The problem of matching people via an app is a genuinely difficult problem for a number of fascinating reasons.

[drekipus]

this is the whole thing.

[tibastral2]

Let's pretend you have good dating apps and bad dating apps at the time T. As soon as you find love on a dating app, they "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee, and you leave the app. So I have a theory about dating apps. They give you somebody average, somebody that you could like enough, but not for too long, because YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO THE APP for them to succeed. So only the bad dating apps darwinely are being used more and more by people. They have more and more profiles (who doesn't find love).

It's called retention my friend, and it's the key metric for apps.

[thorncorona]

Or put the other way, only users which do not succeed at finding someone will stay long enough to grow the user base enough for the app to spread.

[JohnBooty]

(FWIW, I used to run a very small/niche, mildly profitable social/dating thing.)

    As soon as you find love on a dating app, they 
    "lose" you as a user, you stop paying your monthly fee

I think this is clearly true for a lot of business models, but I really don't think this is as true for a dating app.

As a business, you are competing against an endless array of other options. How many dating apps are there? A billion? If people don't like the matches you're serving up, they'll try one of the other options... not just hang around your app endlessly, hoping it improves.

[lmm]

> So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

What's the market? How are you going to get people to pay for a good dating app?

Fact is people (specifically women, since they're the audience that matters for dating app success) vote with their feet for dark patterns.

[AStonesThrow]

In a world of touch screen devices and OnlyFans fetishes, descriptions of women who "vote with their feet" carry a whole new set of mental images!

[29athrowaway]

1. Dating apps = a monopoly (Match group)

2. User generated content = moderation hell

3. User to user interactions + emotions = Higher chance of crime

4. It is not for dating, it is for revenue source

5. The gender ratios are asymmetric

6. Men swipe right to everything

7. It is a sea of dead profiles, fake profiles, people looking for attention and not dating, etc.

8. Used also by scammers, sex workers, influencers looking for followers.

[crooked-v]

OkCupid got the closest to handling that gender disparity in reactions by using all those quizzes to point specific subsets of people at each other, but that era died when Match bought them out.

[popularonion]

In the English speaking world, the biggest and most important dating app by far is Instagram.

Match Group should be considered an adult entertainment business, like the old Craigslist personals.

Actually, I just checked the market cap of MTCH, it’s $7.3 billion - about in line with the $8 billion valuation being floated for OnlyFans.

[mlinhares]

I haven't been in the dating market for a while but I kinda have the same feels. Trouble here is that instagram is only functional if you have a real friends group that can seed your instagram, otherwise random people will mostly just ignore you, in that sense the dating apps do have something instagram doesn't.

[incomingpain]

I think there's multiple good choices depending on your niche.

>So let's assume there is a deficit in the market for dating apps that are actually good. So why hasn't one been made?

The deficit is in the sidelines.

Imagine you're tinder and also dealing with LGBT. Who get mass reported constantly and banned off the site. So now there's multiple options there who handle that niche.

>A majority of humans aren't compatible with online dating for one reason or another.

I disagree with this. The actual problem is well researched. Women wont date the burger king fry cook. How many dating sites take that into account? Basically none.

How about flipside options that men find important? Basically non-existent on dating sites.

The "deficit in the market" is trivially understood but when the rubber hits the road, why is it no dating sites take care of these?

[sublinear]

Because experiencing the actual relationship is done offline and most people have higher standards? Why bother?

This is like asking why nobody has made a delivery app that ensures you never get missing or damaged items. Those things cannot be controlled online. All those issues occur offline.

[Euphorbium]

okcupid was a perfect app before match bought them and ruined it.

[crooked-v]

That's exactly it. As soon as any dating app has significant traction, Match buys it out and Tinder-ifies it to extract more money from the userbase while coasting on the previous brand value.

[mike_hearn]

It obviously wasn't perfect for the people running it, otherwise they wouldn't have sold it to their competitors.

[orionblastar]

I met my wife in church, my mother introduced us. I was on a dating BBS with a matchmaker program that asked questions and computed compatibility rates. It didn't work out either, and there were too many men and very few women.

[solardev]

That seems to be a huge advantage of religious communities when it comes to passing on lineages. They have a built-in in-group of potential partners from similar backgrounds and values to choose from, and many times they would already be known and vetted by family and friends.

Of course that can also lead to marriages of social convenience rather than romantic love (for better or worse) and, in tragic circumstances, situations like the FLDS church where women and girls are just traded between old men as sex slaves. That's an extreme though.

How have the religious couples you've known turned out? I've known a few, and some are still happily together years later while others have separated. Often they get married just to finally be "allowed" to have sex.

[dobladov]

I wonder how well the dating app launched by the Japanese government is doing.

Having a somewhat high fee to enter, seems like a good way to cut those who are not interested in a real relationship.

> Registration costs 11,000 yen ($77), and membership is valid for two years.

https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/09/fce6ff5d9216-toky...

[OutOfHere]

A good dating app optimized for relationships would disallow a user from having more than five matches at a time, and it would delist the user from search and further matching while they have five matches. Moreover, if the user is non-responsive to solicitations, if only to reject them, the user would again get delisted until their queue had no more than five pending solicitations. Being inactive on the app for seven days, as defined by taking no action in the app, also leads to a delisting.

Secondly, money would be charged per message, perhaps 50 cents per received and sent message, so a dollar in total, instead of a subscription fee. This prevents wasteful messages and wasteful matches too. A user can at a time send only one message to another user until a reply is received. The cost is meant to force them off of the app rather soon.

Thirdly, humans would at repeated intervals have to prove that they're human by uploading a video of them performing a particular blinking or bodily action, also their ID photo, about the same as was done by login.gov for user registration. Elite users would also be required to share annual STI panel test results, with their matches getting restricted to anything that both test positive for, and in exchange their limits will be increased from five to seven.

These days, pictures can be quite fake, so only videos would be accepted, no shorter than 15 seconds in length, and the app will auto-extract pictures from the videos, also matching them to the ID photo and verification video. Any videos older than one year would be deleted.

[bradlys]

I don’t want to be a dick but it’s not that dating apps are bad so much that most men are just ugly. The main issue men complain about is not getting matches and almost all these “new dating app” threads come from men. I can’t recall any time I heard a woman suggesting that a new dating app should be made. The main reason is that for most women - the apps work as intended. They get matched and dates and so on. For them, the issue becomes about filtering and being intentional. Which isn’t a problem that’s unique to dating apps - they’ll have this issue in any real life scenario too.

For men, it’s about even getting to a date. I haven’t met many men who complain about dating apps and that get dates. It seems exclusive to men who cannot get matches or dates. These are men that the market doesn’t want. They’re not realizing that it’s not the app - it’s them/society. You might meet someone in another way and eventually find your match but it’s very rare to see men who do exceptionally well in real life but somehow completely bomb on apps. They’re usually correlated.

Apps aren’t the issue. It’s just a society thing. You’re ugly and that’s all there is to it, man. Stop blaming the app and either get surgery or do something else with your life.

[IAmBroom]

False, on several points.

Women frequently complain about the behavior of men on those apps. Bumble was designed by and for women who wanted a different app.

As for only unattractive/undesirable men complaining, that's false, too. I am frequently told I'm attractive. I have many friends of various genders and sexes and initialized preferences; I'm hardly socially awkward. I have problems finding a mate on dating apps lately, but in the distant past they were a successful path to some of my fondly-remembered exes.

[csa]

> I haven’t met many men who complain about dating apps and that get dates. It seems exclusive to men who cannot get matches or dates.

I’m not sure what age group you’re thinking of, but in my age range (40s and 50s), I hear tons of complaints from both sides.

Personally speaking as someone who gets plenty of dates, my complaints are:

- Match doesn’t look like their profile, often by a lot

- Actions don’t support how match presents themselves in their profile

- For potentially “good” matches, I often have to work through a lot of jaded scar tissue that they’ve built up from online dating. People have doubted my name, age, residence, approximate income, goals in dating, etc. Usually these are based on bad experiences they have had in the past.

- A decent number of matches are straight up dysfunctional and/or psychologically unhealthy — think unhealthy boundaries, anger issues, etc. This is often easy to spot in the initial meeting. It’s no wonder they aren’t in a long term relationship.

- Some women, especially single moms, actually want FWB relationships based on their actions, but they haven’t yet admitted that to themselves. It creates awkward tensions that would be resolved if they just accepted that they more-or-less want sporadic on-demand attention and intimacy without much of the emotional and time investment that goes into a full relationship. Fwiw, I have no problem with FWBs, as long as both parties are open and honest about their intentions.

- From both my male and female friends who use dating apps, the apps for folks in their 40s and 50s are largely a market for lemons — the good ones either don’t last on the app very long or don’t stay very long due to bad experiences, and the “regulars” are simply unlikely to get into a long-term relationship.

[deanmoriarty]

I think this is a very reasonable take, I’m not sure where the hate for dating apps comes from.

I am a very average looking man (I’d say look wise I’d be considered a 7/10) and never had a problem using dating apps in the Bay Area, they worked as intended for me, I had experiences with Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid mostly.

Sure you have to work a bit for it, but I dated dozens of women, had very fun times, and ultimately met my wife there.

Most of my friends had a similar experience. The convenience that dating apps brought to my life is remarkable, in my opinion.

[beAbU]

> The intent of these apps is to keep you single and spending money.

You answered your own question.

A "good" dating app will get the user hitched. At that point the user ceases their interest in the app. How will the app maker make money off this person?

Asking for money up front is a no-go. The user has no guarantee that they will be successful in their endeavours.

Asking for money afterwards is tricky and difficult to enforce at scale.

The really good dating services out there aren't apps, they are more like matchmaking or concierge services. You pay someone a shit-ton of money and they give you access to a network of people that did the same thing, and have the same mindset as you. I'm also not sure how successful these services are, other than being good at extracting money from wealthy single desperates.

Tinder's secret sauce was normalising the DTF lifestyle on a massive scale, giving users an app where they can find their next sexual partner for the coming weekend. Much easier (and cheaper) than going to a bar/festival. Here the model is very much use the app on weekdays, match with a partner, have fun, and come back on Monday for more. Much easier to monetise this with subscriptions, super likes, profile boosts etc etc. The only critical feature they are missing (for obvious reasons) is allowing users to rate one another. This naturally does not work so well for the crowd looking for more long term situations.

I think it really boils down to a fundamental mismatch on incentives. As a service, you want recurring revenue. As a user, you want to stop using this service as fast as possible. The two are not compatible with one another.

[9283409232]

What if the app is like Tinder meets Groupon? Match you on date then give you discounts on places to take your date? Business model then shifts from keeping you single to getting you on dates because the money is in consumers spending time out at restaurants and events.

[f_allwein]

Random thoughts:

- are there any measurable factors indicating someone is a good match? Okcupid claimed to match people with others who gave similar answers to their questions, but I had some fates with a high match % and still no chemistry.

- speaking of chemistry, check out https://smell.dating/ . No idea if it works, but at least it’s a novel approach.

- people have different goals, from finding love to sex/ friends/ … (and may not be open about this). Can an app take that into account?

- I heard from several girls that guys sometimes open conversations with direct sexual remarks, which violates the mind set of „natch - have a conversation - get to know each other irl if there’s any chemistry“. How to handle this?

[IAmBroom]

This made an interesting thought occur to me - rating the people you reject.

! = Nice person, but not for me

? = Something odd in the profile

- = Negative interactions during conversations

Percentages would reveal the creeps, so people could filter them out. Or the ratings could be stars, of course; just like on Amazon, a "seller" with an aggregate rating of just one star after 100 reviews is trusted only by those who have yet to learn to check the ratings...

All of this is still antithetical to the business model of subscription services. Creeps who keep trying are profitable.

[solardev]

I feel like the only way this could work and NOT be enshittified is if it were not-for-profit and community-driven, such that the basic matching algorithm was known to all, customizable for each user, and not subject to a profit motive.

I'd prefer such a thing be free and open-source with a community of stewards, kinda like Wikipedia, but without as much nepotism and hierarchy as their admins. It would also have to be end-to-end encrypted so individual users don't give up their privacy to some central server. There would have to be some interesting fancy encryption so that matches can stay private (or at least encrypted) as well.

To help pay for network resources, people could voluntarily contribute, say, $10 after a nice date, and maybe $100 if they stay together for at least a year (or whatever).

Implemented poorly, it would turn into a massive honeypot and privacy nightmare :( But I would love to see something that happen, just for the sake of making happier people and families.

-------

I met many of my exes on OkCupid; it used to be a wonderful service before Match.com bought it and turned it into every other swipe-based dating app. But even after that, I still managed to meet my current partner (of 4+ years) on it... I'm not particularly attractive or disgusting, just average, but got lucky and found my person. Many friends met their SOs online as well. For my generation (millennials) it's pretty common. I'm all for these services, I just wish they weren't so profit-driven.

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bmN-cqSCN4

[deadbabe]

With declining birth rates I wonder if there is room in the market for government backed dating apps, which could potentially make use of data and incentive programs that commercial apps could only dream of.

[lmm]

Already happening in Tokyo.

[fynd_dating]

There is a good app: https://fynd.one. To anyone thinking it’s just another crappy dating app, let me know your thoughts and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.

[apothegm]

A good dating app would be paradoxical. For a dating app to be appealing, it needs a big enough network. But if it’s effective it’s constantly shedding users and shrinking its network.

Even absent economic incentives to monetize users indefinitely with subscriptions, a good dating app almost by definition has awful retention. And that will quickly kill an app that relies on network effects.

[josefritzishere]

The first challenge is meeting the "right person." There are hundreds of dating apps for this, each with varying efficacy. As you read down thread, there are a lot of folks reporting that an app is where they met their Ex. or former spouse. That leads us to the second challenge, for which no app can solve: retention.

[duxup]

Would it be ... profitable?

One of the issues with modern apps is users don't want to pay, so right away you have an issue where you end up tied to advertising dollars and things go down hill from there.

Granted I'm with you, I think the same thing about a lot of apps / classes of apps.

[bravesoul2]

And open source can't save this because you need money for operations such as dealing with spam, fraud, scams and other criminal activity.

[elcdodedocle]

Why are they so bad? They want you to keep using them, so they have to be bad enough.

Why hasn't anybody made a good one? Maybe they have, but they are not around for long. It is not a good business: Little growth potential, no recurring revenue.

[bravesoul2]

The trick is don't use dating apps at all. Do social activities.

I feel like the major defence against enshittification is being more offline.

[ferociouskite56]

The owners censor and discriminate without monopoly regulation. Success depends on many women joining but in my experience they don't enjoy texting. Obviously there's too many scammers.

[IAmBroom]

When a large portion of the men texting them are offensive (and they are), why would they enjoy texting?

[jrozner]

For the most part, everything in your last point is something you can’t solve with an app. Virtually all of that would be problematic meeting someone in any other way and for the most part is all within your control to change. Sure, there are limits to what you can do about conventional attractiveness but there is a lot within your control for most people. Most of those issues you brought up are things that the vast majority of people don’t want in a partner no matter how you meet them. If you like those attributes about yourself you might eventually find someone compatible but if you don’t, most/all of those are things you can address by going to therapy and working on it.

[apopapo]

If we managed to have decentralized social networks based on ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) why can't we have a dating app based on the same protocols?

[Incipient]

The fundamental flaw I see is, a "good" app matches people quickly, so they decline their user base.

Essentially its an impossible or non business model.

[danpalmer]

The business model is famously hard. I wonder if you could make a business model out of an explicit matchmaking service, i.e. you pay when you match, not just to exist on the platform, so that the incentives are more closely aligned. Policing it such that you actually get paid, decisions around what constitutes a sufficient relationship to pay, etc, would all be hard.

Similar to real estate in a way (as far as the model goes, nothing else), in that you can have a house on the market for pretty much as long as you like while the agent attempts to find a "match".

Supposedly this sort of thing exits at the very high end of the market, millionaires aren't on Tinder, they're paying large sums of money to be set up on dates by a human who is actually considering the people involved. Making services for the rich more accessible is often a winning business strategy.

[drewcoo]

Because good dating apps attract Match.

[drivingmenuts]

> to keep you single and spending money.

You partially answered your own question.

[mrayycombi]

Some ideas:

1. Profile quality (and honesty) varies wildly. Peacock and dishonest profiles dominate.

2. There is no Hobsons choice mechanism to force rotation among matches.

3. There are no incentives to respond or follow up.

4. Fake profiles benefit the platform but you have a bootstrap problem if you have no users. Plausible AI fakes will make this worse

5. There is no web of trust- if someone meets someone they could assert trust even at a low level. If I trust anyone in their web this would vet against fake profiles.

I could go on...

[mattl]

Twitter was a good dating app until Twitter was killed off.

[bloqs]

of course they have made them. OG tinder was phenomenally good. i know many people that met their matches and many one night stands beforehand.

the question you should be asking is why do all good things become bad in any given capitalist marketplace? the answer was asserted by Karl Marx a long time ago.

[halpow]

Can anyone explain to me how Tinder changed exactly? I don’t think it did, it's just that people learned how to use it better (rather, women learned to be vastly more selective on it and/or pile up matches without replying to anyone)

[cranberryturkey]

we're building one now. barcrush.app

[freeone3000]

I’m not able to complete sign-up on Safari mobile.

[msgodel]

Dating apps reveal the flaws in the way people reason about sex. Most of the apps are fine, it's the people and the way they're approaching life that's the problem. No one wants to have the conversations needed to fix that though.