Online Dating

I am more than a little discomfited by what the author seems to want here:

- “Reduce competition” by making online dating exclusive to those who can afford $100+/mo

- Obtain potential match’s sexual history prior to conversation to use as a proxy for promiscuity

- See all social media of potential matches

- Ratings hit for people who decide not to meet with you after chatting

- Interface for quantifying the multiple human beings you are talking to as “leads”, CRM style

- Automated reverse image search / face recognition for social media

- Random bonus: ability to filter Instagram messages by male/female??

Leaving aside the basic disrespect for the people on the other end of the chat here, who actually thinks women would participate on a platform where they are being cyberstalked by, and pressured into meeting with, desperate men who are tracking them in a spreadsheet?

Online dating is just manifest of what happens in real life.

The top 20% most attractive men get 80% of the likes. Men of average attractiveness is out of luck on dating apps and they should not use dating apps.

Average men will swipe right on below average women (and above) - because it's easy and free to shoot your shot.

Therefore, even below average women will get seemingly unlimited likes.

These below average women will then pick and choose likes from the top 20%. These women will also wonder why they can't get these top 20% guys to commit to them or ask them out on a date. It's because these men have many options. These above average men will often only want something casual with below average women.

This is why women will say there are no "good" men on dating apps despite having thousands of likes. Eventually, these women will "settle" for someone less than what they hoped. In reality, these women are just settling for men of equal attractiveness to themselves.

>Imagine a CRM-like interface overlayed on Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble

This is "ideal" but in reality, women have no trouble getting likes on dating apps. Therefore, they won't put much effort into a dating app that creates too much friction. If you make your dating app use a CRM-like interface, you'll have a sausage fest. Hell, most women barely fill out their Hinge, Tinder, Bumble profiles. They do the absolute minimum and they still get thousands of likes. My female friend once experimented by putting up a picture of a shoe as her only dating profile. She still received many likes - some of them paid Super Likes.

You cannot "fix it". You either do well or don't on such a platform. It's like being a terrible dancer, and going to a dance party expecting to pick up girls. You won't make a good impression because you don't "vibe" in that environment.

If you try to level the playing field, women have no reason to comply. They will find another dating app, to use.

> Seeking is one of the only sites to do this right. They claim a ratio of 4 women per 1 man, and they get this by charging men $109/month.

Great. Now you pay a $1200/year to be taken for a ride by gold diggers.

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Online dating is a laughably bad proposition, unless you have just the right characteristics to do well on there: being tall and handsome, and having pictures that show off your privileged life, and all that of course in comparison to your peers.

As hard as it is to initiate conversation offline, especially with the norms of today, it's still much easier for me to, compared to getting a match and then somehow managing to convert that into a date.

EDIT: I'd like to add this analogy. Online dating is like job searching by spamming your resume on LinkedIn. I don't even have a LinkedIn...

I've had reasonable success with dating apps, meeting both my girlfriend and my previous one through Bumble. I'm likely part of the so-called "lucky 20%" of men with most matches. While this may sound like I'm bragging (I am), I've also seen the other side of Bumble when my female friends allowed me a peek, and it's eye-opening. The majority of men are simply terrible at marketing themselves.

Most men fundamentally misunderstand women's incentives. They present what they think women will find attractive, but from a male perspective, which often misses the mark entirely. I could elaborate for hours on the issues I see in these profiles. Now, whenever I hear a guy claim "dating apps suck, they're a scam," I don't entirely disagree — dating apps are indeed flawed — but I'm immediately curious to see his actual profile.

There's a significant missed opportunity in these apps: they could teach and guide men to build their best profiles, select and eliminate pictures, and suggest concrete improvements. It might sound extreme, but even basic A/B testing can dramatically increase your number of matches, the majority of men will just create their profile in 2 minutes, never touch it again, and wonder why they don't have dozens of girls throwing themselves at yet another guy taking a selfie in his bathroom.

I don't think dating apps are going to get much better than they are. To me, trying to make a dating app that solves the problems this article and others talk about is a "cursed problem".

I heard an interview from a dating app founder a while ago where she had a quote that I'll try to paraphrase: "We're creating an (app|business) where only dissatisfied customers remain and satisfied customers never return."

Obviously dating apps exist and are successful and not everyone who's using a dating app is looking for a long term relationship, but the sentiment remains.

>Online Dating. Is anyone having a good experience with this?

>Third, make the app look like a CRM.

>Now you are on to the qualify leads step. If you aren’t agreeing on a time to meet in the first ten messages, this is a dead lead.

What an incredibly ironic piece. Somehow I don't think any technical solution proposed here is going to improve online dating for people who think like this.

The average dating app experience:

Filter through:

* 50% bots running cryptocurrency scams = 50% remaining

* 50% OnlyFans / Instagram models seeking likes/subs = 25% remaining

* 50% inactive accounts = 12.5% remaining

* 20% looking for sugardaddies / prostitutes = 10% remaining

* 10% Men categorised incorrectly and blank accounts = 9% remaining

* 75% won't respond (busy with other people, etc.) = 3% remaining

* 60% other issues - smoking, already have children, complicated situations, etc. - 1% remaining

So after you spend days to go through about 100 accounts, you finally get to speak to a real person and be one of the 8 guys she's speaking to.

> Charge men money per month. Only men. Every club promoter understands this. You don’t want your club to be a sausage fest, similarly, you don’t want your dating app to be a sausage fest.

Isn't this already just the norm in a lot of apps? When your first point seems to be a thing tat this level that people already ambiently know about I'm going to have a hard time imagining that you have done a lot of research into the space.

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Four points points from reading it:

- Coffee Meets Bagel does one of the best things IMO: only showing a limited number of profiles a day. Forces people into a bit more of a "speed dating" mindset rather than an "endless scrolling" mindset. Good for serious people.

- Pairs, a Japanese app, does have a pretty "CRM" vibe, with a lot of filters and a whole list view. Kinda neat, and again a thing with some serious people

- Somebody on twitter said it best: online dating in its current form is so much worse than mixers because in it the most popular people can talk to way more people. At least at a mixer popular people pair off and then other people talk to other people[0]

- And of course, just like meeting people at parties, online dating is its own vibe. It's not _as_ limiting as mixer/club vibes in some sense if you can find the right app with the right kind of people matching your mindset, but it's easy to forget that a loooooot of people are still meeting outside of that space, despite what online people say.

[0] Can no longer find the original tweet, but it was @Ugarles, included the fun bit about how he met his wife at a party, and much later on in the relationship they realized they had matched online and she had decided against it.

This is what happens when you take an engineer mindset to complex social interactions and try to see if you can engineer your way out of it. For the ML Engineer out there, this is like trying symbolic AI for natural language understanding, it will keep creating weird edge cases that humans will exploit and make the dating app useless.

>Men pay for access.

This is just a bad idea, men are probably fine with it but no woman wants a man that does this when there are men that don’t need to pay for a dating app. Being forced to pay, indicates only 2 options, either 1 you’re a “loser” not desirable by other females or 2 you’re a “player” who just wants to get on with as many girls as possible. This stigma can reduce if there are say >30-40% of single males on the app, but when starting out it can be a deal breaker for the women on the app.

> Compatibility Questions

The problem is the questions that really matter, most people do not want to share (even after entering a relationship, people don’t share this, much less an online form). George gives an example of this himself, in the body count section, most women won’t be comfortable sharing this. Other examples of potential dealbreakers, how much a man earns? How much do you value your job? How much do you value your family? How do you deal with stress? How responsible are you? Etc etc These are not things people share, some are even hard to articulate but all are important in some form to determine compatibility. People also rarely know what questions actually matter in a relationship, the average guy/girl will focus on stuff that does not matter at all in the long term.

>Design app like CRM

Maybe, some of these up changes are good. They don’t seem very consequential as they are mostly UX changes, some of the review ideas seem bad and will be gamed.

Overall, the only good dating system is a social club / society that brings like minded, compatible people together, preferably has a few people with excellent intuition that actively (but secretly) play the role of a match-maker and facilitates natural social interactions among its members. Something churches used to do in the past to reasonable success. Apparently people are trying to do that with running clubs in the bay. But it’s undeniable that these ancient social structures are disappearing without a better replacement and we’re all the less off for it.

The first question kind of gives away the whole thing. Man signs up to dating app, man isn't successful despite being successful at other stuff. Man blames the app. It's probably not the app.

Specially when the only example for "who is doing it right" is a soft prostitution / openly looking for "sugar daddy" (its the websites own lingo).

There are many dating apps that explicitly cater to women and give them special rights. Bumble is the most popular one. I remember an old one which was set up like a store, where women got to "shop" around to "adopt" a man.

It's supposed to be empowering and also "safer" for women, but as far a I can tell it just feeds more into the unhealthy aspects of online dating that make women entitled and men work hard to be noticed.

They're all pretty shady businesses regardless. I don't think there is really an opportunity for a good mass product in that space.

personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start.

i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out.

a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys.

hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.

I know people with success with online dating and it’s the number one way for people to meet their partners nowadays.

But despite having no trouble with women IRL, I never had much luck online. With hindsight I have realized that I need repeated interaction to detect compatibility and when I was selecting online I was selecting based on compatibility (but being a rubbish judge of it). Plus I suck at texting.

In the end, I married a friend and it’s been fantastic.

Online dating is fundamentally a hard problem because there's both incentive misalignment and reverse network effects.

The goal of most dating app users is to find somebody and stop using the app. The goal of the app makers is to keep the user on the app for as long as possible, to serve them ads / sell their data / charge them for a subscription. These two stand in direct opposition to each other, and companies optimize for the latter as much as they can. This is the incentive misalignment problem.

After a given app exists for a while, the most desirable users[1] will pair off and leave, while the most undesirable and desperate users will stay. The less attractive you are, the longer you'll be on the app. This means that as time goes on, it's harder and harder for the tide of new users to balance out the growing pile of undesirable matches.

This is what I call the "reverse network effect". It's the opposite of normal network effects, which is what happens with normal social networks and messaging apps. A normal messaging app gets more useful as more people join it.

It's worth noting that apps designed for finding hookups and not finding spouses don't suffer from this problem. The more hookups you find, the more likely it is that you'll want to keep paying for the app, and the more desirable you are, the more hookups you will find.

George Hotz, a relatively famous and presumably financially secure, charismatic, and still somewhat youthful man, has just about admitted that he does not have success on dating apps.

I would really like him to do these two experiments: change his height on his profile from 5'4" to 6'1", and then if that alone doesn't do it, additionally emphasize his connections, level of fame, financial security etc. in his profile.

Point being that what women are interested in to start with is actually just as shallow as men.

I think he has some good ideas here actually. But ultimately, this stuff is probably being driven by very primitive instincts.

I also think think that if you look at what has been done with artificial muscles such as at Artimus Robotics or various other robotics and 3d printing companies, the potential for incredibly realistic humanoid robots is on the horizon.

I'm imagining in 2035 or at least 20XX the most popular "dating app" is technically a robotics rental company where the robots rent themselves out. Ultimately there will be plenty of really attractive male and female sexbots manufactured, and most people will be happily screwing 10s whenever they want.

The human race may die out because of this. But we won't lack for companionship with incredibly sexy (artificial) models.

Why hasn’t anyone thought about making dating apps seasonal? The problem with all dating apps, is that after a certain point they become a cesspool of the dissatisfied customers who never paired off.

Does anyone remember when Tinder first came out? It was lit. 12 months later, it was not. The season passed. It became a familiar place, with baggage, where all the cool people left.

Solution: make a seasonal dating app that starts in March, and continues until August/September a.k.a cuffing season. Then, close it down until the next year. Each year, or season, it can have a different theme. You purchase a subscription for the whole season, a half year membership.

It starts all over again next year, with a different theme. This keeps the experience fresh, and viral for new people to join. Solves the reverse network effect problem, by creating a new, temporary network effect. It also harnesses natural human seasonal mating cycles in an intuitive way, while keeping everything fresh. The six month break in development allows for new UI and ‘fresh’ experience, like a Fortnite season.

Imo to make any sort of intentional impact, a good approach would be to replicate OkCupid's mid-2000s.

Not the features, the fact that OkCupid was a subculture... and that it had its own cultural norms and features. Att "poly" pretty normative, for example.

I think tinder-era dating needs a bigger intermediate space between "casual" and "serious," especially for the over 30s users.

Anything between "mostly just sex" and "dating to marry" is a hard to negotiate zone rn.

One is overpopulated by men. The other is overpopulated by women. The middle ground is untargetable. It comes with no preexisting expectations.

Maybe we need to bring back "going steady."

The problem with online dating is that the whole system is rotten.

The app/site is rotten because they want money, so they are incentivized to make their members as sexually frustrated as possible so that they hand over more dosh.

Because of the first problem, the members are all incentivized to lie. The men lie because they are frustrated that the system isn’t working for them. The women lie by posting unrepresentative photos because they feel the need to compete with everyone else who is doing the same, and the platform is happy with this because they want the most “attractive” members.

When all three groups are dishonest, nothing good can come out of it.

My views:

- some non trivial % of active users are ego tourists.

- ratios matter, and drive obvious behaviours to the detriment of all users

- within a month you've had the same conversation so many times everything blends together and you hate it

- even a great online banter pre meetup means little when IRL it is awkward or slow.

There are flaws beyond that, but I just don't think it is improvable by dehumanising the other parties on the apps more

For me personally, it's about meeting as many people and being the best version of yourself. When you do those things, then you gotta find a person you match well with.

I've met over 10000 people that were a potential romantic interest. I did this (mostly) during the day by giving them a genuine compliment or asking them a question that I was curious about or by stating an observation that happened in our environment. I'd do my best to mix in playfulness as well. Playfulness is key for me as I tend to take life too seriously.

The reason I found my wife was because I was willing to be fine with 9950 rejections, 45 people it didn't work out with, 2 short relationships and 2 long relationships. It fucking hurted, especially initially since I had really unhelpful beliefs about myself (unlovable, etc. but doomed to try to find love anyway).

The statistics aren't fully accurate, but I'm pretty sure they're around that ballpark (that, or the rejection rate is even higher). The way I circumvented burnout was by playfulness and self-amusement. I knew at least that whatever I was saying that I was entertained/amused/inspired by it. That was a much better mindset to have than thinking whatever I said wasn't good enough from the get go. The first 2 years that I did this (from 17 to 19 years old), I only experienced rejections.

Later in life (30+), I also did online dating. Initially, I got 1 match per month for a few months. Then I put on my hacker mindset to see if I could break the game. It took a few months but I eventually got to 150 matches. That was really a question of "if you're not in the 20%, you gotta be smart."

Whenever I tell my story to people, they look at me and are like "I don't want to put this much conscious effort in it." Sometimes it's for moral reasons (love should just "flow" or "just happen", it's imperative for the romantic realm to not be analyzed etc.). Some can't handle the emotional pain (for me it was brutal too). Some just hate the sheer effort.

But based on what I've seen with friends who are like me: if I didn't put in this effort, it is likely I would've gone nowhere since I have friends a lot like me who didn't put in the effort and they seem to act like a control group in that sense. It is what it is. How badly do you want it? I don't know why, I just knew I wanted it badly.

It is what it is.

I would pay $110 per month for a service that could say with 99% accuracy whether some person I vibe with IRL is on dating sites.

Various dating sites have tried to get only guys to pay before, sometimes $50 per month recurring plus expensive microtransactions. But it looks like the site they suggested is for executive types only. I could afford $100 per month for a decent dating site if there was such a thing, but stupid high spending on the dates themselves is asking to be used. I guess a guy spending that kind of money ought to know better but we all know that most of them won't know better.

Speaking of spending money, even buying dinner for a first date can lead to abuse. Men usually have to take the chance because of customs, but some women are eating out several times per week by scamming men for free stuff.

Just reject the entire idea of online dating. It's awful. We've done that experiment, let's not flog a dead horse.

Instead, how can we make offline dating better?

This is such naive take. Only way to increase positive dating experience (for some men outside top 10%) is to include verified tax returns in dating apps.

women who are comfortable with/not grossed by an app like seeking will be terrible I think, comfortable with being a product/ service that men have to pay for, would not want to date men who would have to do something like that without themselves wanting a kind of pay to play relationship

The article has some interesting points but what's the context? Who wrote this & why? It also needs more references for some of the claims made, but it's someone's opinion -- I get it.

Weird, incel vibes from this post. "Body count" is incredibly disrespectful, amongst other things because it seems to only be used with women. Also, browsing the website I found that this person believes an Elon Musk monarchy would be great.

On a different note. I'm average looking, of average to short stature and have a decent job but I'm far from rich (but I'm frugal so I look poorer than I am). I haven't for a while but I used Tinder extensively for about two years. I met over ten women and dated for a while two in that period. Without being obsessed with the app.

What I mean is, while the dating app landscape is generally unfair to men (mostly our own fault, most men will "like" everything without even looking) it's not as bad as some incels online would let you believe. And hey, if apps don't work, try the old school method of going out. It really works.

I've been thinking a lot of this too and my plan is completely different. The main problem is profit. We need to eliminate the for-profit dating apps. In a perfect world there would be a state run dating platform that would focus on equity.

But in lieu of that I figure we should make it selfhosted.

- Publicly ran platform reminiscent of fediverse

- External profile verification so each node admin can host their own, I'm from Europe so the idea here is to use eID.

- Money should only be in the form of donations to the node admin, just like fediverse.

- Node admins can decide whether to invite only or let everyone in, users can decide whether to filter certain nodes, or verified profiles for example.

The goal would be that everyone real has a verified profile and a node admin that keeps bots out with their CoC and sign-up rules.

Optimally this should be done ontop of the existing fediverse, to save on runtime costs and leverage the existing profiles.

But seriously, online dating needs to be completely refactored. I've personally given up on it completely and decided to just talk to people IRL. In spite of having had 2 fairly good relationships started through "the apps".

Honestly I've kinda given up on dating. My ex was doing sugar daddying and had other boyfriends behind my back. The world is too crazy for relationships right now. You have to hope you are lucky and found the one while you were still young.

Anything involving computers is probably going to make the situation worse. Not because of anything intrinsic to computers but because there's been a strong pattern over the past 60 years where people (especially in developed countries) reach for computers when there's some underlying cultural problem.

Not really related to the post in itself but to its author.

Geohot to me is one of the most interesting people alive. I remember finding him annoying when he was younger but maybe that says more about me than about him.

He "matured" really well and even though I don't have many parasocial tendencies each time I hear him on Lex I just know that hanging out with him would be guaranteed life-changing fun.

I really wish him well and I hope the world is kind to him because he sure is a special main character in our simulation.

I'm team Geohot. What a guy!

Until last year I spent 10 years working for a large dating company with millions of members.

There are a few big issues.

1 - Scammers. I’d be surprised if even 1 in 100 female profiles were real. Where maybe 1 in 1000 male profiles were scammers. We had all sorts of ways to detect and ban scammers but it was bad.

2 - Payments are high risk. High chargeback rates, loads of scammer transactions where they’re testing cards, etc. it can be hard even signing up a payment processor.

3 - Less and less people are willing to actually pay for dating services on the web. Especially for that < 30 age range. Tinder / Bumble really dominate that scene.

And if you get into Adult/Casual dating multiply all of the issues x10. And good luck finding a payment processor who isn’t terrible.

"geohotz fixes dating" is a wonderful meme. Let's keep it.

I think it's futile trying to "design" any social media, certainly something like dating. Social media is more discovery than a design.

You discover how it works best.

Obviously, "best" is defined as "nerds get more action, less existential angst."

You need to topple capitalism to have any “innovation” in this space, as match.com monopoly will just gobble up any competitor.

Just give me a website made for the few millenials seeking marriage (almost all of them are too expensive relative to their low population and aimed at seniors). Mandatory visible body count would be a nice feature.

A marginal observation:

- males in nature have a duty on that topic, distribute genetic material;

- female in nature have to select the best genetic material they are able to find.

"The best" is a complicated definition that in practice tend to be hormonal, that's why female normally want in person meeting and find "catalogues" not much useful. The females who find catalogues useful might just look at having temporary fun "from a list" or find someone rich to escalate their social position. That's essentially why on-line dating will not work much anyway until we found a way to understand "genetic profiles matches" witch is so far sci-fi.

The rest is just noise, sometime useful indeed especially if we live in spread areas where potential partners are far from us bu all current "matching techniques" can't simply match the most important natural characteristic, hormones.