Trademark issues aside... why do we do this swipe culture crap?

Old school OkCupud was darkly beautiful because it told you your best match was -- who cares if they're a mafia princess or work down at the cloud factory or simply have other suitors ;-)

What is stopping someone, aside from patents, from making a match based dating site to compete with the current market?

1. Dating apps/sites are a rich-get-richer market. Most people go where everyone else goes, because everyone else is there.

2. The more work you ask your users to do up front, (e.g. answering a bunch of survey questions, taking high quality photos, paying up front) the fewer highly desirable people you'll have, because they can easily find people wherever they go without doing all that work.

3. Swiping is more fun (more addictive) than answering survey questions. OKCupid switched to swiping when A/B testing showed that swiping retained people better than survey questions.

The people who can innovate in this space either don't have the mental and/or capital bandwidth to do so, or don't want to deal with the absolutely massive amount of moderation that it would require.

I met my wife on OkC in 2006, years before the Match acquisition. I have long been furious about what Match did to the site after they bought it in 2011, and have long fantasized about creating something that could return to what it offered. Problem is, I don't think you could do it.

OkCupid in its heyday was a product of the golden age of the web, when social networking was new. It thrived because it predated doom scrolling, so taking quizzes and answering surveys was still a fun way to use the web. Now we're in a post-twitter landscape, where dopamine comes from a flick of a finger.

OkC's forums were one of the first mainstream online spaces for conversations about sexuality and non-monogamy. That role has now been subsumed by subreddits and facebook groups.

When OkC was independent, the majority of moderation involved keeping things pg-13 and enforcing the terms of use. You could crowd-source it all right within the site itself. Today you have AI agent swarms bombarding any site with a userbase, just hoping to get eyeballs. You have age verification laws, payment gateways that will stop processing if they get even a whiff that sex workers might be using your site to advertise, and bigots who will DDOS you if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.

And all that to wade into a battle with a billion dollar juggernaut.

The amazing thing is that people still cite the old stats they published as that remains the only significant body of insight into the dynamics of human behavior in this realm.

I became single in 2013 and cupid was definitely where the cool kids were. But it was a desktop thing. You sat at a computer and engaged. You invested. Tinder and swiping are a phone thing. No real investment.

Funny thing, 12 years later I met my wife on the zombified corpse of cupid. So... go figure.

Okcupid still exists and operate in this manner. So do other platforms. The reason why it does not proliferate like it used to has to do with the short attention span of the population, and in general, the attention economy. You can’t have people answer 1100 questions anymore.

You can, however, put pretty people on the app for them to swipe left or right, and that drives people way more than Doing work to get a match. Unfortunate but true. So the people who opt in to this difficult end are not enough to drive the platform anyways. At least, it could never be anything like when You and I used it ages ago, when everyone was down for the cause (and had the attention span for it too)

Nothing, just The Match Group buying everything as soon as it becomes popular and incentivizing keeping people using the apps over successful long-term matches.

It’s in the same vein as saying, “Why don’t we bring forums back?” Vast majority of people 'enjoy' the quick dopamine hit of swiping, matching, and trading cheesy pickup lines, even if they claim otherwise. They may complain, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to explore alternatives. It doesn’t really matter that the older way may have been saner. Dating apps have been around long enough to become deeply ingrained, which makes it hard for any alternative paradigm to take hold, especially ones that have already faded away.

The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.

It's not just dating platforms that have changed, it's also the users. Online dating used to be a niche you had to actively seek out, which meant that the users were naturally self-selected, had more interesting (for better or worse) personalities, and were (on average) more genuine.

Online dating today is far too mainstream for those qualities to remain. Any new dating platform that gains enough popularity to be useful will be quickly flooded with less-differentiated "normies" that dilute any quality in the platform's demographic, and the "optimizers" who game the platform at the cost of other users' experience.

I actually prefer the swiping apps. As a man I’m expected to make the first move and on apps like OkC it’s easy to waste a lot of time and effort messaging people who are not at all interested in me. The swiping is a signal that there is at least some mutual interest there before I put effort in.

But the main problem with the dating apps is the business model. Their job is to help you find love, but if you find love you delete the app and they don’t make any more money. So they’re incentivized to keep you single forever. I don’t believe Hinge at all when they say they want you to delete their app as quickly as possible.

With the disclaimer that I've never operated in this space, I would imagine that a significant barrier to the creation of new dating sites is that most people who care enough to try to build a good service are spooked by the liability involved (hosting boatloads of personal info, getting entangled legally when things go wrong, keeping creeps at bay, etc). At least from my standpoint as a layman it looks like an absolute minefield compared to a nice boring spreadsheet SaaS or something.

My wife and I met on original okcupid. Not much to say other than the system worked! It’s sad to hear they become tinder-y but I guess it’s hard to compete with the immediacy and dopamine prospects of swiping.

I've worked for a dating startup in the past and the main barrier is marketing costs. You need to be able to bootstrap a network extremely fast or people will join and bounce within minutes and doing that across any sort of region costs a lot of money since you basically need to blanket advertise. Trying to do that across multiple regions requires serious money.

You can build it and they might come but they will leave and never come back if they aren't seeing people to match with.

> What is stopping someone, aside from patents, from making a match based dating site to compete with the current market?

Demand.

Old-school dating was like cocaine and the swiping-oriented apps are crack. It doesn't mean there would be no demand for an old-school OKC clone but it's a niche play and given Match Group's dominance, the capital you'd need to invest to compete would be significant.

Who is this "we" you talk about?

There are hundreds (thousands?) of dating sites. The problem isn't the technology, it's the fact it's a two sided market place, and cold starts are hard for two sided marketplaces.

I much prefer the swiping apps to something that tries to capture the essence of me in a survey.

Match owns Okcupid now doesn't it?

With how easy it is to build apps now, is it really unreasonable to bring the old one back in a simple/cheap/sustainable way, that shields it off of being bought by those nightmare data brokers?

I think it's a good idea but in this space, that's probably a smell. I met my wife there, been married 15 years now. 97% match, we've basically never had a big argument.

From what I can tell, people ARE starting these kinds of projects. They just don't get popular enough for you to notice.

There's an article somewhere (read it many years ago) with the story about the first days of Tinder. The way they got their first users was to send (IIRC) the marketing strategist (a woman) to talk to attractive young women in bars and parties, show them how easy it was to use, and convince them to install the app themselves.

I would say that this points to the real issues: that OkCupid was something one did on their desktop at home while Tinder sold itself as something one does for fun at the bar, and that most people are laser-focused on looks in detriment of everything else. Last time I used Bumble (which was supposed to be "deeper" than Tinder) I'd yell in frustration, scrolling profile after profile without even the tiniest bit of information, eventually reaching the conclusion that people just don't want to read or write profiles.

A new OkCupid would have to position itself as the "eat your vegetables" alternative in a world full of candy. There is a market for that, sure, but it will remain a niche at best.

An interesting challenge with dating sites is that the “bell curves” of attractiveness versus desired attractiveness between men and women aren’t symmetric.

This leads to difficulties running a dating site because women will only say yes to 9/10 or better men, but men will message anyone with a pulse which in turn inflates female expectations.

Many women only ever join dating sites as an ego boost, with no intention to actually go on dates.

I had the idea that the way this could work is a totally automated match making system akin to Uber where you are penalised for not accepting matches made by the system. You don’t have to get married or anything, but if you don’t both turn up at the same GPS time space coordinates it counts against you.

Similarly, the system should require an up front ~$50 fee from both sexes per date. You don’t get it back if you stand up a date.

Etc…

It would be very hard to bootstrap, but once going it would produce many more long term partnerships than “swipe right” style apps.

OkCupid's algo wasn't any good. The swipe thing actually made sense, and idk why it took so long to get there.

How do you deal with bots?

I've been waiting for AI matchmakers. Not just for dating, but for p2p sales, now that ebay has discouraged low-volume sellers and everything has moved behind the facebook wall with facebook marketplace.

One of the problems with OKCupid was that they never got the tests to be very predictive in matchmaking. An AI matchmaker could simultaneously be shopping every member of a site to every other member, devising and administering and evaluating the effectiveness of tests itself, and acting as a go-between before people wanted to make direct contact. The main thing is that it wouldn't be a matter of seeing a "match percentage" (which often led to disappointment because sometimes he just likes blondes and she just likes tall guys) but something more opaque and optimizing, responsive to feedback.

Likewise with facebook, an AI sales matchmaker could be given accounts to your messageboard, discord, mastodon instance, etc., follow "thing wanted" and "thing for sale" threads and conversations, and initiate and mediate contact between likely matches (across different points of contact.) The fantasy about this is that it gets the commissions down to 4% again - I think ebay is pushing 15% at least, for doing less than it ever did. Ebay has also figured out its format fairly rigidly, where an AI matchmaker could be more flexible and interactive - ferrying and even anticipating requests for more info.

AI employment matchmakers have to be around already.

I've been expecting to see some of this stuff pop up, and have been surprised not to have.

Because people were less cynical in the 2010s and there's no way to bring that back.

The Match monopoly buying you out is one problem. A bigger problem is that dating sites have to have a lot of users before anybody wants to use them. (They especially need women users.) This conundrum is a huge barrier to entry in the space. The temptation to pad your user base with fake accounts, scammers, and sex workers is tremendous. If you do that, you boost engagement for a few months and then you die.

Yet another problem is churn. If people find a life partner they drop off the site, and you constantly have to find new users to replace them. This is one way a dating site is fundamentally different from e.g. Facebook. As a result, some of the less-scrupulous sites purposely make it less likely that you will see people who seem like great matches, or they interfere with your ability to message those people, just to keep you using the site longer.

Jump-starting the initial chicken/egg issue in an ethical way is AFAIK an unsolved problem. In the post-OKC era, Bumble is the only one I know of that semi-succeeded because they made it woman-centric from the start.

Finally (yeah, I've thought about this a lot), the modern mobile app-only approach can be a distinct turnoff for people like me. Mobile apps make it difficult to write much text about yourself, which was something OKC encouraged. Apps also present a safety issue: Apps often require location permissions, which means employees of the site can stalk women. (This has happened.) There's no good reason dating apps should require location permission, but most do for the same reason most apps of any kind do: Location gives the site owner personal info they can sell to advertisers. All that having been said, the vast majority of the market probably prefers mobile apps to web sites.

The whole space seems like a cesspool of bootstrapping problems coupled with extreme incentives for unethical behavior. Sorry if I sound pessimistic but you asked what's stopping this from happening. This is my take.