<story><title>The dating app paradox</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnthrowaway6543</author><text>&amp;gt; Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don&amp;#x27;t bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; and shadow-hide show profiles that aren&amp;#x27;t liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.&lt;p&gt;This won&amp;#x27;t work; if you do this, you&amp;#x27;ll expose that the average online dating user is... well, average.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+&amp;#x2F;10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. Unfortunately, 69% of Americans are overweight and 36% are obese. If profiles users see weren&amp;#x27;t heavily weighted toward highly-rated ones, the perception of online dating would immediately change from &amp;quot;online dating is fine, a bunch of attractive people are using this&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;online dating is only for the ugly and desperate&amp;quot;; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.&lt;p&gt;Dating apps really struggle to keep the most desirable, because those are the ones least likely to need it. Yet they&amp;#x27;re also the most important for a dating app to have. As fewer desirable people use it, the less perceived legitimacy it has, which results in fewer people using it, particularly the desirable ones. I suspect dating apps are experiencing this death spiral now.</text></item><item><author>sweetro17</author><text>Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA&lt;p&gt;High level though, there&amp;#x27;s a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps.&lt;p&gt;At it&amp;#x27;s core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interactions that lead to nothing is much higher and more quantifiable than IRL (you&amp;#x27;ve all seen the r&amp;#x2F;tinder sankey diagrams)&lt;p&gt;Two &amp;quot;solutions&amp;quot; I believe would generally benefit dating&lt;p&gt;1. Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don&amp;#x27;t bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; and shadow-hide show profiles that aren&amp;#x27;t liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.&lt;p&gt;2. Daters set some type of routine that works for them - say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll try to go on ~1 date per month&amp;quot;. Being intentional about this helps minimize the feeling that each date is so fatalistic &amp;#x2F; it&amp;#x27;s the end of the world if the person who seemed awesome when messaging is actually a jerk. It&amp;#x27;d be nice if an app facilitated this type of routine and figured out a feedback mechanism to reward users who were generally pleasant &amp;#x2F; respectful on their dates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sweetro17</author><text>I see your point here - and I do agree, from experience, people sometimes express a desire for a bit of reality distortion in dating (we often heard that they want the experience to feel more like &amp;#x27;fate&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;chance&amp;#x27; than overly engineered).&lt;p&gt;That said, I don&amp;#x27;t fully agree with the idea that there&amp;#x27;s a uniform concept of x&amp;#x2F;10 scale for daters and that they uniformly will balk at those below that uniform rating and therefore the only way forward is boosting those based on their global like %. And some data backs this up.&lt;p&gt;The oft-cited OkCupid Dataclysm book talks about variance (e.g. lots of people like &amp;#x2F; lots of people dislike), explaining variance is meaningfully more important to messaging and engagement than raw like %.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, on the point of weight &amp;#x2F; body type, we found that a little under half of daters (and &amp;gt; 50% of women interested in men) do not report body type to be a significant factor in their decision making. So it is a meaningful factor, but for about 1&amp;#x2F;2 of daters it isn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;The point I&amp;#x27;m trying to drive here is, while there is for sure data and intuition that points to what you&amp;#x27;re describing, there are others that point to other ways that people perceive the quality and likelihood of finding a partner on an app that may work as well, if not better, while not relying on a need to as heavily hack perception.</text></comment>
<story><title>The dating app paradox</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnthrowaway6543</author><text>&amp;gt; Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don&amp;#x27;t bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; and shadow-hide show profiles that aren&amp;#x27;t liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.&lt;p&gt;This won&amp;#x27;t work; if you do this, you&amp;#x27;ll expose that the average online dating user is... well, average.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a bit of kayfabe going on; users want to think the other users of online dating are 8+&amp;#x2F;10, sexy, flirty, fun, and desirable singles. Unfortunately, 69% of Americans are overweight and 36% are obese. If profiles users see weren&amp;#x27;t heavily weighted toward highly-rated ones, the perception of online dating would immediately change from &amp;quot;online dating is fine, a bunch of attractive people are using this&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;online dating is only for the ugly and desperate&amp;quot;; the article points out that this is the way Gen Z perceives online dating already.&lt;p&gt;Dating apps really struggle to keep the most desirable, because those are the ones least likely to need it. Yet they&amp;#x27;re also the most important for a dating app to have. As fewer desirable people use it, the less perceived legitimacy it has, which results in fewer people using it, particularly the desirable ones. I suspect dating apps are experiencing this death spiral now.</text></item><item><author>sweetro17</author><text>Former dating app founder here - lots of thoughts on the space - feel free to AMA&lt;p&gt;High level though, there&amp;#x27;s a lot of human behavior which makes dating frustrating with or without apps.&lt;p&gt;At it&amp;#x27;s core, even in the best case, dating has A LOT of rejection. Dating apps introduce more opportunity for incremental validation (you got liked!) but also incremental rejection (you got ghosted!) and the sheer number of interactions that lead to nothing is much higher and more quantifiable than IRL (you&amp;#x27;ve all seen the r&amp;#x2F;tinder sankey diagrams)&lt;p&gt;Two &amp;quot;solutions&amp;quot; I believe would generally benefit dating&lt;p&gt;1. Apps are more transparent and equitable with how they expose profiles to other users. Don&amp;#x27;t bias toward highly liked people to increase perceived &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot; and shadow-hide show profiles that aren&amp;#x27;t liked often (and then ask them to pay lol). Show people more randomly, to better represent the true cross section of people on the app.&lt;p&gt;2. Daters set some type of routine that works for them - say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll try to go on ~1 date per month&amp;quot;. Being intentional about this helps minimize the feeling that each date is so fatalistic &amp;#x2F; it&amp;#x27;s the end of the world if the person who seemed awesome when messaging is actually a jerk. It&amp;#x27;d be nice if an app facilitated this type of routine and figured out a feedback mechanism to reward users who were generally pleasant &amp;#x2F; respectful on their dates.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>atleastoptimal</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s true. The sad reality about dating is that, for 99% percent of people, the partner that would be ideal for their tastes is &amp;quot;out of their league&amp;quot; so to speak. Humans have dealt with this reality of dating acting somewhat like a marketplace via mores of commitment, dating within social classes, condemnation of promiscuity, etc., but the human nature is still there. 10&amp;#x27;s want 10&amp;#x27;s, but 5&amp;#x27;s don&amp;#x27;t want other 5&amp;#x27;s, they also want 10&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;The strategy most dating apps use has been to keep people in a perpetual cycle of heightened seeming possibility. You see the young, cool, attractive people, and perhaps one out of 100 times you&amp;#x27;ll strike out, and the unlimited options keep you feeling that such an opportunity could happen infinitely. For average hetero dudes, this obsession will drive purchasing premium, paying for swipes and super likes, etc.&lt;p&gt;I know it&amp;#x27;s controversial but I do believe that robotic&amp;#x2F;AI partners is the &amp;quot;ideal world&amp;quot; solution to this. You get someone who fulfills all your physical needs so you don&amp;#x27;t have to play the roulette in real life, or string along someone in your league because you believe you could get someone out of it. I&amp;#x27;m sure in the future we&amp;#x27;ll see them similar to how we see sex toys today.</text></comment>