I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model.

A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in:

1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time)

2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio.

4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example.

5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert)

6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc.

7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy.

None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!

My wife and I got married just before "app dating" got popular, and she says "we caught the last chopper out of 'nam."

Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates.

Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.

> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.

Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.

This sounds plausible

If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder

OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.

Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person...

What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.

The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.

Chose your poison:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922

[dead]

[dead]

> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be.

What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific.

It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives.

Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.

Being arrested and convicted of a crime is a much higher bar than what is required to ban somebody.

I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users. This is actively happening, and for some content and jurisdictions it is legally required to happen. If you get a strong signal that someone is a bad actor in your community you should remove them.

>When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who accused him of rape.

This is clearly worse than false positives. They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.

I’m perfectly comfortable with them banning people that have multiple reports of criminal activity.

I could understand not banning users or being too conservative in general, but match group bans lots of users without any communication. I know people banned without any reason, and you can see so many reports on reddit. So they could probably just automate banning on even single report.

> There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.

Rape is underreported because this attitude is so prevalent. Reporting a rape is incredibly difficult and traumatizing and rarely leads to a conviction. It also exposes you to violence and harassment to the person who raped you in the first place.

A tv show in the Netherlands once summed it up nicely: the dating site experience for men is like interviewing for a job, for women it’s like shopping.

Back when I was dating online dating had just started and I went out on a few dates with women I met online and it all seemed to go OK.

But in the end all the successful relationships I ever had were people I met in real life. Is it really that hard to meet people in real life these days? I mean, in fairness, I was on a campus most of that time, and so mingling is sort of built in. But surely there are other contexts where people mingle?

As I understand it, it's not a technical problem, rather a social one first off: you can build it but it'll be "empty" compared to all other options out there, even if it's technically superior to them. Network effect and all that.

There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.

What would make this app safer than the alternatives?

I've watched speed dating events go from free to $45 in the past couple years. Not sure if that's b/c of inevitable factors in running those events or pure opportunism.

Do you think this could be facilitated via ActivityPub or is that not a viable choice?

I think you should do it. The costs for all these services are still priced like the AOL days where bandwidth mattered. I really don’t think the hosting costs could be much. I had a small dating site decades ago and the cost was almost nothing.

Couple things.

- Didn't even know fb dating was a thing.

- people still use fb?

We live in an age where the commercialization/cheapening of sex is celebrated by society but the natural result of that commercialization/cheapening isn't wanted.

You can't have it both ways.

Our anthropology is confused and it shows.

No app countibuted to destruction of social fabric more than Instagram.

the purpose is to make money. What you've described might be a side effect of that.

Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, et. al. sure are showing them up at the game though.

Worked for him for a few years. He’s a good guy and new on the job at Match.

Palantir, the incredible American technology company run by one of the most successful Black Americans? That's great.