Technology

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won't go somewhere that doesn't already have a lot of users. They don't care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it'll be good and vibrant. Most people can't even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that's got low latency and high quality?

I feel like we ought to expand that traditional quote about the last fish being caught, the last tree being cut and all: When the last emotion is commodified, you will realise that you can't buy happiness.

That’s like saying that famine and starvation is a perk of communism when someone like Mao fucks up. In both systems, what matters is trying to find the most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth. Profit in capitalism is a byproduct of what matters. It’s important for people to remember this so they don’t fall for MLMs, pyramid and Ponzi schemes.

That's because a social app that quickly solves the need of making a connection and then perpetually the need of maintaining it was called ICQ. Or AIM. Or other such. They were focused on the part after that hope.

The reason that's no longer the normal model is simple - weak people are easier to exploit. The "after hope" model doesn't keep people weak.

Even with XMPP - the classic instant messenger model of adding someone to friends, remember it? You send one invite message, and after it the other side won't see anything you want to send until it accepts you into contacts. It might never do that. Or it might add you, see you're sending unsolicited dick pics, remove you.

With dating apps all you need is a search by tags and tags corresponding with truth, and of course ability to choose who can contact you. The former is not hard. The latter is hard when people are interested in putting false tags, but not when the tag social metric, so to say, is commutative. The model where conversations are started by mutual "like" is good, I think. And the anonymized way (like with Pure, have tried using it when decided to become more social, got some insights but no dates, or more specifically one failed date) is good, when those who liked you are shown as anonymous invitations to accept or deny, but also when mutual "like" means accepting that invitation. I think one's visibility and one's point of view are something that should both be customizable with logical conditions. One should be able to set they want to only be seen by people without "no less than 20 inches" wish to not be frustrated when those people ghost them, or that they don't want to see people without photos on their page, or that they only want to see people and be seen by people who like hiking or who like animals, but not both at the same time, or any other set of logical rules, everyone is different. Perhaps a limit on searches is good, though.

And then there is crime. Or mental illnesses. Or bad hygiene. Or conflict. That is, there are situations where outside observers should be able to evaluate who of the two sides is telling the truth about the other side being an abuser or whatever. I suppose some kind of escrow for contacts can be devised. This should be a social thing, a moderator can't be trusted with correspondence and also with judgement. So - escrow by people trusted by both sides, something like that. To have a rating, it should be possible to tell who's really spilling tea and who's doing libel.

And if you were reading attentively, you might have noticed this doesn't just apply to dating, this applies to everything about establishing contact over social media. Because that's absolutely correct, dating doesn't differ in anything from any other social connectivity. In other social events you too want to quickly find and communicate for long with someone. Romance being involved doesn't change much or anything.

The reason these two purposes have been separated by businesses is pretty transparent - trying to apply general social media to dating shows that they don't work, and trying to apply dating social media to normal long-term communication shows that they too don't work. The issue is that what's invisible still exists. That separation is just hiding what doesn't work, but it still doesn't work. A functional social media would function for both dating and daily buddy talk. Like ICQ did.

any kind of dating app is self-detrimental for revenue

It doesn't have to be. In the US, about 4 million people turn 18 every year. Let's say you get all of them signed up and all of them optimally paired off. You still have another 4 million new signups next year. Until the world falls off a demographic cliff, you've got an evergreen customer population.

That being said, the well is VERY poisoned at this point. The match group is a cancer on our society.

You know what would be a valuable dating app to me? I have no idea how this would work in actuality, but an app that helps me date my wife in some way. Suggestions of what to do, packaged date nights, flowers, all that shit — except for all kinds of people not just "traditional romance." River rafting, swinging, sports bars, I mean appeal to all kinds or even people who just want to try things they don't even know is it's for them or not. It would be great for singles, but would still be useful after a relationship is in full bloom. But I think that's something completely different from a dating app.

because if they serve that official goal, they’re essentially nixing their own customer base.

Not if it's a promiscuous sex dating app. Then it's more of a social network, thought, just around polyfuck graph instead of kitty photos graph.

Been trying Hinge and there’s lots of space and opportunity for it. What I’ve discovered/had validated is thay most people are just painfully cookie-cutter. Some are not, and it’s why I still use it.

I also met my partner on OKC. It was a great platform.

Yep, I met my partner through OKC just before they enshittified. I also had used it to meet folks when I travelled for work. I had a note on my profile that I travelled a lot and just wanted to see new cities and eat good food. Surprisingly, I had far more platonic meetups than creepy guys trying to hook up, which I stated I wasn’t looking for in my profile.

I was a very very early adopter of OKC. I remember when it was more of a social media website with quizzes and badges than just dating. I’m still friends with a few people I met there in the early days.

Same, I met a lot of people through old-school OKCupid. It was great.

I feel like it’s hard to craft a bunch of personal responses only to receive no response or a short conversation that dries up quickly afterwards. Talk about exhausting! Might as well start with the bare minimum and engage more if there’s interest back. Otherwise I can’t maintain the energy to keep it up.

At the same time, many users half-ass using them

Honestly the way a lot of the Tinder-style ones (swiping) are designed it almost feels like they're meant to be half-assed? You can't filter by likes, just exclude by dislikes (ex. Don't include people who don't want kids, don't include smokers, etc) because there's no search anymore. They just show you a profile, and you swipe.

When I was using them I very quickly stopped reading bios before they matched back. I just swiped right on everyone, checked daily for new matches, read those profiles and blocked/messaged people based on what was in their profile.

Speaking on filters, though: They don't even work. I had men filtered out, and I ended up getting about 25% of profiles being men. Like, the only gender tag they had was "Man," which lead to a lot of the "Idk why they even showed me to you I have men filtered out" message being sent.

On essentially all of them, they went to a swipe right to like and a swipe left for no.

Except when actually trying to make a match, it's more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren't interested in.

But if you are swiping left, you will match with significantly fewer and potentially none. It becomes demoralizing. And it takes much longer to make a decision if you are looking at everyone including those that don't match with you so you go through fewer people to potentially match with.

Wait until you match with someone to look at their pictures and their profile, and only then, decide whether to stay matched or unmatch.

I had quite a few short relationships from tinder and bumble. But some of those wouldn't have happened if I were more picky at the swiping stage.

I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups

This isn't especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less "serious", but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.

The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though