These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date.
FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
I loved the oktrends blog and read Christian Rudder's book dataclysm, but these data are over a decade old. A lot has changed (pandemic, atomized culture, manosphere, incels, gym obsession, decline of drinking / going out) I have to wonder how much is still valid. OkCupid was the best dating site ever though.
Yes, Christian Rudder's old OKTrends blog was excellent and showed real-world data on how people actually behave, and the frequent mismatch with what they claim/ believe/admit to. (Mind you, the OkCupid founders left over a decade ago and it went hugely downhill)
For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
The app didn't work for me. One that was shared right here on HN. I selected 25 miles radius, same ethnicity. Naturally I was matched with a person 700 miles away, of different ethnicity. So we got married... and deleted the app.
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
People who have difficulty on dating apps want to find a scapegoat, so they scapegoat the app.
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
What about an alternative business model, pay-per-date? There's an application in NL that charges €7.50 to arrange a dinner, disallowing chat until 2 hours before the arranged date for practicalities. They partner with restaurants and you each get a 'free' (you paid for it..) drink; but with the commitment that your date also paid for it and will therefore show up.
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
That doesn't account for the good-will and word-of-mouth generated from any successful matches, which presumably could lead to many more customers than those lost due to marriage.
Pie in the sky idea: users sign up and deposit to an escrow. If after x years, the user has been married to another user on the site for 1 year without being divorced, the matching site receives the funds. Otherwise, the user receives their funds back.
Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.
It’s really disappointing because, a human matchmaker, on the other hand, *does* optimize for “losing 2 customers”. Wouldn’t it be way better for the company’s long-term-health if they charged an appropriate price for making, actually, great connections?
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.
But you can become wealthy too, and then pay for a personal trainer, those expensive status signifier items and even plastic surgery if needed. Just need to work harder! /s
Dating apps would go out of business if they did their job, because success means leaving the platform. They make more money if they hold out a carrot and make it difficult to succeed.
This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.
It goes without saying that they are optimizing for engagement with their platform/app and user growth, just like every last digital huckster on the internet.
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
You have it backwards. The apps aren't training the human preferences, the human preferences are training the apps. There have been a LOT of different dating app ideas, and all have been competed away except for the ones that provide users the biggest perception of optionality.
My experience building dating apps (I built and launched a couple of my own over the years, I have never worked for a major app):
1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams.
2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters.
3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular.
With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem.
The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.
Looking from my surroundings, in my circles, women are way more picky than men. Across different races, age groups and etc. According to all of my girl friends, they don’t really need a man, especially of their life is ok right now. They can satisfy their sexual and non-sexual desires much easier without dating.
My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance.
It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship.
I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z
User behavior is shaped by systems just as much as systems are shaped by humans. There's a reason social media has the hold on us it does even though we all hate it.
You can absolutely design apps in a way that doesn't incentivize the worst human behaviors. Tech socially engineers our behavior all the time - just rarely ever in our favor.
We humans are both easily manipulated and often too egocentric to realize and acknowledge that fact.
> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.
So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
Does anyone think dating apps sell love? I'm pretty sure everyone who actually uses it within the expected bounds uses it as a way to find people to date, which is very different from love.
With my Hanlon Razor hat on, how much is this deliberate vs. natural emergent behaviour?
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
I'm just one person, but it seems to happen quite consistently that the profiles that appeal to me begin to only be offered behind a rose or some other paywall... rarely if ever in the "free" swipe feed.
The article does not actually substantiate the claim in its title. All references are simply to articles that (at best) describe how people respond to dating apps.
I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives.
It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
That's a nice story, but the real story is the near monopoly in dating apps, and why it always ends up in the same hands and why their motivation is counter to their customers.
snozolli|16 days ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcup...
These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date.
FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
xigoi|16 days ago
Such places will quickly ban you if you start hitting on women.
carabiner|16 days ago
renewiltord|16 days ago
smcin|16 days ago
For some reason your post got downvoted and killed.
foxfired|16 days ago
We were interviewed as a success story and our faces are plastered on the Internet now. My friends didn't find the same success, I concluded that they didn't know how to date. (wear the right clothes, etiquettes, conversation, navigate ghosting, etc.)
"What if the app could teach you how to do just that?" That's what I asked in our interview. That part was never published.
moomoo11|16 days ago
People want hope. They don’t want advice lol. If the latter was the case we wouldn’t live in a lopsided world.
Hope means you don’t need to try. Advice means it’s on you to try.
caseysoftware|16 days ago
- If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.
- If you get frustrated and give up, they lose one customer.
- If you find love and get married, they lose two customers.
Which one will they optimize for?
My writeup: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
solatic|16 days ago
The truth is that dating markets are lemon markets. People who are "dateable" tend to find success quickly, and people who are "not dateable" tend to stay on the market. Hence over time, the market will be dominated by "not dateable" people. No dating app on the planet will magically make you a "dateable" person.
To find success on dating apps, you have to work on yourself first, and only afterwards make sure that work shows through both in your profile and in your texting.
Source: was on the apps, undateable for eight years (depression and low self esteem), went to therapy, after making huge changes to my life and getting to a point where I felt like things were going well in everything but being single, a month later I found my girlfriend (now two years together).
roenxi|16 days ago
I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.
It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
crazygringo|16 days ago
That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.
So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.
That's all it is.
Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm just doesn't exist.
Xeago|16 days ago
This removes a lot of the meat-grading and endless swiping; with the platform prompting you why you're not working to scheduling your existing matches. Whilst I have no experience with the absence of any scheduled matches, this gives the platform insight into whether you're a worthy date (remember, each date is profit!).
One date on tinder/hinge/bumble in a 5+ years to a finding my partner in a few months. Paying for the actual date experience was so much less and so much more fun than the footing the subscription on the other platforms - even accounting for the cost of food.
quantummagic|16 days ago
bitshiftfaced|16 days ago
Might also work with using the users' registered home addresses instead of marriage. There are ways to game it and ways to make it less game able, but you get the idea.
dang|16 days ago
Working for a Dating Website (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34368601 - Jan 2023 (196 comments)
t-writescode|16 days ago
“I found my wife on FindLove” is one hell of a marketing campaign for *future* sales. It’s not like people never break up, and it’s not like people don’t continually enter the dating market or move or whatever.
ergocoder|16 days ago
Imagine if you can advertise that 50% of the matches on your app leads to marriage.
grunder_advice|16 days ago
s1mplicissimus|16 days ago
sli|16 days ago
This is also true of those services that "delete" your data from data brokers. Their entire business model relies on them failing to do their job.
av3csr|16 days ago
kazinator|16 days ago
To keep people hooked while making them feel that the app is working, even though they are not getting their end result.
missedthecue|16 days ago
missedthecue|16 days ago
1. Men will sign up for anything. You barely need to market the app. There are at least 30 dating apps in the play store right now with at least 1 million installs and with what I would guess is around 2% or fewer female userbase. Men will sign up in droves to apps with nothing but bots and scams.
2. This means you need to design the apps in a way that attracts and retains women. You don't have a dating app without them. So men are an afterthought. This, among many different examples, is why you have height filters and not weight filters.
3. The most critical point: People say they want connections and relationships from dating apps. What they really want, shown through relentless repeated behaviour, is optionality. The dating apps that provide the most optionality, or at least the most perception of optionality, become the most popular.
With these three principles in mind, every version of a dating app simple ends up being just like the ones we have available to us now. There are lots of unique ideas about how you can implements rules and such to make an app that creates connection and relationships, (like being charged to a card on file per match, or heavily limiting concurrent matches, or only being shown a few profiles per day, or an AI that matches you) but all of those ideas violate the above principles and thus they never take off. There's a very common cope on this side of the net that it's all Match's fault and the greedy corporation is preventing you from finding love. Sure, they could do things better. Sure, they are profit motivated. But you're kidding yourself if you think an open source community maintained dating app would solve any of the major grievances people have with online dating. It's primarily a user behaviour challenge, not a software design problem.
The last thing I would say about the marriage and dating market in general is that almost every academic (economists especially) and app startup founder treats it like a sorting problem, and if only you could devise a sufficiently sophisticated algorithm, you could improve things. The truth is that it's not a sorting problem, it's a clearing problem. And there is simply no way to improve the efficiency of an unclearable barter market.
tokioyoyo|16 days ago
My guy friends though, they’re less picky and more desperate (in a good way). This basically works out for guys constantly “looking”, but the girls not as much so. So you have an imbalance.
It’s much easier from one perspective in the gay world, because we can satisfy our sexual desires much easier. However, it also becomes complex once we seek something that’s more than sexual relationship.
I look at it as a physiological problem that I can’t see an online solution to. It basically needs to be cultural, where women and men meet each other in the middle ground. But good luck with that in 2026z
y0eswddl|15 days ago
You can absolutely design apps in a way that doesn't incentivize the worst human behaviors. Tech socially engineers our behavior all the time - just rarely ever in our favor.
We humans are both easily manipulated and often too egocentric to realize and acknowledge that fact.
diego_moita|16 days ago
> Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren't primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They're designed to keep users swiping.
So they're not very different from porn and Facebook, right? They sell an illusion of the real thing that isn't fullfilling but is addicting.
IncreasePosts|16 days ago
rich_sasha|16 days ago
It if course true that the incentives on the platform are to prevent permanent relationships. But can they really tell "these two would make a very good match so let's keep them apart, this match here is at best adequate, let's do this one instead"? My gut feeling would be that they cannot tell.
But then of course the whole design of the platform prevents deep connection. About 70-80% of the information is encoded in a photo that is not even guaranteed to be realistic. And the point of the platform is to be a rich marketplace where you keep trying. That's the USP before you get into any further design choices.
Platforms like Harmony Online existed for a long time and IIUC they were optimising for long term matches, and for whatever reason they were not as popular as eg Tinder.
y0eswddl|15 days ago
christina97|16 days ago
I would not at all be surprised if some or even most dating apps had a team or org in charge of making the platform “good” for users (using some metrics that really do correlate to what we would think of as a desirable experience); and a somewhat disconnected group of people aiming to increase revenue. This is a pretty standard way of trying to align incentives.
It does not take a genius to figure out that to capture value in the long term requires producing some real value for users.
neuroelectron|16 days ago
ergocoder|16 days ago
koakuma-chan|16 days ago
Bayko|16 days ago
wellf|16 days ago
imiric|16 days ago
ece|16 days ago
unknown|16 days ago
[deleted]
xnx|16 days ago
Work backwards from that.
SoftTalker|16 days ago
rkomorn|16 days ago
grunder_advice|16 days ago
Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.
tbossanova|16 days ago
ponector|16 days ago
r33b33|16 days ago
bawolff|16 days ago
[deleted]