- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Good
why? didnt find anyone? Ive had great success tbh - married, 2 kids not sure if its just luck or incidental or what
Oh no! Where will I find an AI girlfriend?
I’m blessed to have experienced pre-algorithm tinder back in the day.
I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
- people get treated like cash cows. It is almost not possible to successfully date without spending money
- people are burned out. The low quality swiping, matching, just to get ghosted, is hurting the motivation.
- people have other problems nowadays. COVID reshaped us completely. We don’t want to spend 2h a day on a dating app. 2h a week max and then they want to continue in real life.
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
Not sure if you’re open to collaboration on the app: I was thinking of making one with a few novel takes.
Fun fact: I worked with a guy at IBM who wrote some of the original algorithms for Match.com back in the day.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they’re the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I’ve ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn’t really dealt with those. You’ll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
You’ve missed the big one. Those aren’t people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can’t fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Do they have to be scams though? Why or why not?
What is the potential of a dating app that isn’t a scam?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.
I met my now ex and best friend on tinder as it was starting to go to shit. I’m not exactly ready to start dating again but when I do briefly browse on the apps I can’t find anyone who meets my values and I find a lot of people who I can tell are completely fake accounts. As soon as I turned 18 I signed up for all the big dating apps and they weren’t great back then but I was able to make some genuine connections with people. now it feels mostly like a dead internet with majority of users not being real people.
“Monopoly fucks up the entire market, news at 11.”
Hard to argue this isn’t a good thing, given how they’ve driven young people apart on purpose for profit.
Dating apps never really served their purpose. They killed themselves.
All of them being opened by a single money grubbing company, which has enshitified them to an accounting degree has not helped
accounting
squints eyes not sure if typo or not
That and who can afford the apps nowadays? Not me.
I met my wife on a dating app, but it was over 20 years ago now. I suspect that like everything they all have evolved to capture your eyeballs as much as possible. Back when I used them, they were about meeting people, they hadn’t yet gamified them with the swipes and so forth.
So, not surprised, a little sad to hear it even, since I can’t imagine being a young person and trying to meet new people these days. Then again, as an aspiring Luddite these days, I hope people find a way to connect in real life.
People who find people don’t pay. It’s that simple. They are more about sustainable profit than actual match making.
Back when I used them, they were about meeting people,
back then they didn’t suck (as much) because they were still in the ‘acquire users at any cost’ phase.
Are they? All my friends in their 30s have more than one app. Or had it, when they were single.
What has really been dying for quite some time is “third spaces”. That’s what we need to get back really, beyond dating. Just plain socializing and enjoying togetherness.
The more people use them, the less they work. That’s kind of the whole model right?
They are inherently all flawed because they keep you away from the single only reliable way to date: growing your social circle.
Even if you match someone, that’s a single date where you may or may not continue to see each other. Whereas if you spend all that time and effort hanging out with your friends, getting to know people that are in your and their orbits, you are growing your social circle exponentially and exposing yourself to far more dating opportunities while looking like you’re not even trying. And even if it doesn’t work, you are still making being single more fun for yourself by having a rich social life.
Just spend that time reconnecting with old friends, hanging out with people from work or joining some club or class. That’s how to be successful dating. Specifically by not “dating”. To me dating is something that just happens naturally, you don’t need to go looking for it. Just be ready when the opportunity arises. Learn to spot them. Its a social skill like any.
What they mean is that dating apps have been enshitified to the point that most of them no longer function.
Thank God
Even the gay ones?!
Especially the gay ones. Can’t even hold the RNC without them crashing.
can we stop sharing this same demonstrably false shite 🤦♀️ it’s been thoroughly debunked at this point
lol stay mad
Grindr is exclusively ads and bots in most places and has been for a long time. Sniffies is okay but the ads are getting overwhelming so I don’t even bother anymore.
Glad I finally am in a position where I’m not on the apps (knock on wood, etc). I was getting dates but I could always tell it was in spite of their best efforts.
And even the person I’m with now, I feel like the app algorithm thought we’d be like an 80%. On paper it doesn’t seem like it’d be a long term fit- i have a cat, she has a dog. I like a lot of metal, she likes jam bands. Lot of room for the algorithm to predict we’d have a few dates and then it wouldn’t work out.
And as someone else said, most of them are owned by Match group. Even the myths of capitalism require competition for products to be good. Match should be broken up.
Curious to know which app it was. My partner and I have been together for 12 years now thanks to the og OKC.
This was Hinge, which is owned by Match Group (who own okcupid and many others). It’s the least bad, I found, but that is extremely faint praise.
I used to use OKCupid way back. It used to be better. I’m pretty sure you could search. Like you could just type in “Star Trek” or “Dark Souls” and find people who had that on their profile. Nowadays you just take what the algorithm gives you.
We met pre-Match OKC. Glad I don’t have to go through all that again.
Good. Dating apps have never worked for me, and maybe this is because I’m demisexual, but I’m just never able to feel a connection online and I end up swiping left on everyone, and I’m pan so that’s a lot of people.
