Ask HN: Why are dating apps so bad? Why hasn't anyone made a good one?
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.
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.
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).
During Covid, friends had their work send them cocktail preparation equipment and have Zoom dates making cocktail with colleagues.
And here I was going to one up this - make it a three minute convo without video. If both people choose to continue, the video starts afterwards.
I think a not-insignificant number of people will find someone who was fun to talk to more attractive then they might at first glance. Might still be some misses, and the number of people who’d sign up is probably low, but I think you’d see more successful matches.
- https://blindmate.app/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're describing hinge. OP should probably try Hinge.
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.
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.
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.
(FWIW, I used to run sort of a dating site too, very small/niche, one person operation)
Why won't the end game be people just stop using Match Group's products?
Alternatively, if you're not already in the dating industry then making a successful match making product is just profit (and then you can pivot to not working ...).
It's called retention my friend, and it's the key metric for apps.
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.
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...
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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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.
I heard about that recently and thought it was interesting, but that can probably only work in high trust cultures with stable governments. In the US, I don't think many people (of any political affiliation) would trust their government to play matchmaker and see all their private messages.
It's a lot easier to make a centralized dating app with a regular server client model than some sort of decentralized peer to peer thing, where the central admins couldn't peek at everyone's matches and private messages and photos.
That Japanese app is also pretty invasive and only supports traditional monogamous marriages leading to childbirth. A western one probably wouldn't and couldn't have the same mentality, unless it wanted to be eHarmony (which, early on, was very strict about who could join).
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.
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.
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.
Essentially its an impossible or non business model.
I feel like the major defence against enshittification is being more offline.
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.
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.
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...
>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?
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.
You partially answered your own question.
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.
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.