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.

▲

MostlyStable 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.

▲

carabiner 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail

That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.

▲

BrenBarn 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I too really miss the old OKCupid. I was on it from near its inception (around 2003 I think) until they started requiring phone numbers (2020 I think) and I agree its decline was tragic.

That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.

Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?

	▲	carabiner 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's why you gotta make it a not-for-profit.

▲

dmd 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OKCupid, back in the day, was stunningly good. Back in 2011 I spent a huge amount of time filling out my profile, and OKC found me 5 matches with >98%.

I married one of them and 2 of them are still close friends.

▲

mothballed 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Arranged marriages would be a step up from dating apps for most people, I think.

	▲	imglorp 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's something to be said for a traditional matchmaker. It's one of those hard things that might not scale.

▲

handoflixue 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

manifold.love, which is heavily modeled on the old-school OKCupid, is back from hiatus as of March 2025: https://sinclairchen.substack.com/p/manifold-love-is-back

Sadly not very active or funded, right now.

▲

magicalist 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Didn't all those guys go to Match and make it the company it is today in the mid 2010s?

	▲	carabiner 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.

▲

bitwize 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OKStupid suffered from the "less space than a Nomad, lame" levels of cluelessness because it tried all this math stuff matching on statistical models of personality, rather than the one criterion actual humans use to select a partner: are they hot?

That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.

▲

AnnikaL 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would prefer to date an averagely-physical-attractive person whom I enjoy spending time with than a very physically attractive person whose personality I dislike.

▲

codedokode 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Many women are hot or at least have some attractive features while only few men have a good appearance so we would be extinct by now if it worked this way. At least for selecting men there should be some other criterion.

▲

bitwize 9 hours ago | parent [-]

For much of human history it has worked this way: the king got many wives, nobles got a few, but most men didn't marry at all. They labored and fought and died without getting to pass on their genes. This is also why men are such status seekers and risk takers: our ancestors had to prove their worth for a chance at getting laid. The risks were great, but the payoff was huge and if you failed, it's not like your genes gained any advantage by playing it safe.

	▲	codedokode 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt it is true, at least in Russian history a typical peasant had a wife and children. Not being married was considered bad and there were arranged marriages. Also poor men probably had a low chance of "getting laid" as girls were interested only in lifetime long relationship. I even tried to verify this by looking through old registries available online (where marriages and births were recorded), some of which are digitized and OCR'd by Yandex, but it seems that they do not have a list of unmarried people. Although the birth records typically mention whether a child is "legally born" (within a marriage) or not.

▲

amanaplanacanal 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's just a mismatch of goals: are you looking for a partner, or a date?