If people are oriented towards traditional relationships, then pairing people up younger probably leads to higher overall fertility rate in the population, so I could see governments with existentially declining fertility rates (read: almost all of them) taking an interest in actually providing a successful service here (unlike the commercial dating apps).

Of course, a lack of a match is not the only thing that prevents people from having kids, but I'm curious what the impact of an optimal matching service would be on fertility rates.

edit: I think governments might do well to provide funding for dating apps (whether privately or publicly owned) based on how many matches from the app actually lead to children. Completely flip the classical incentives on their head. Should be easy enough to ask if newborns were a product of a participating app as part of the birth certification process.

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phreeza 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nice idea in principle but (in the case of private) too long a time horizon for typical corporations to care about, sadly.

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ant6n 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Dating Apps don’t need to be corporate. You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.

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zurfer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If there was no fraud and abuse and legal issues and ...

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hypfer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, even with that. 10 people are a lot, actually.

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intended 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

From people who deal with the trust and safety side of things, at a national scale of a few billion people, 10 people is definitely not enough.

What size of population are you considering for this hypothetical nation?

	▲	hypfer 12 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Which problems do you see that would require all of this, given that it is a nation platform where you are authenticated via your government ID? And which nations are scaled to a few billion people? And they all date? Every single one of them? The married couples? The children and the elderly?
	▲	iso1631 6 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Singapore's population is 6 million, about 1.7 million are aged between 16 and 40. That's 1000 times smaller than your "few billion" scale, before you remove those already in partnerships or those who don't want to.

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sigmoid10 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.

	▲	pydry 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good. the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).

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eru 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Amazon (and Tesla) famously had very patient shareholders, and they are both private companies.

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intended 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hell no. Sorry for the reaction, but market optimization under current market principles, will result in the narrowest interpretation of the goal.

As a worse case example, you could succeed by matching people least likely to abort, but most likely to have multiple partners.

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4848488484 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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expedition32 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is a traditional relationship? Fathers selling their daughter off?

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Retric 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People having “large” numbers of children.

The modern trend of most families with 0-2 kids isn’t sustainable. We don’t need to go back to 5+ being the norm but a self stable society needs to be able to offset non parents thus requiring 3+ children families to be quite common.

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hypfer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For that, one prerequisite would be housing that can house such families.

Which, in times of working from home, means 4 bedrooms, 2 offices, 1 living room.

Ideally with walls not built from paper mache, so that they can actually be used for encapsulation of different requirements.

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somenameforme an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Traditionally families often just had one bedroom for children. That's what things like bunkbeds are for.

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kubb 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As someone who ho grew up in a smalll bedroom with multiple siblings until I was 19…

Fuck that.

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hypfer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That might very well be, but now people evidently seem to prefer not doing that, so what is your point?

"Just stop preferring that"? Good luck enforcing that.

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bragh 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It is not about preference, but because of regulation. Nowadays the government demand is that each child needs to have a separate studying and sleeping area. If a sliding wall in a room counts as a separate area is up to the officials' discretion.

On one hand, all of this is understandable, but on the other hand these policies do indeed raise the cost of having children.

	▲	vidarh 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have never heard of a government demanding that. Where does that happen?
	▲	hypfer 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What government does that? That's something new to me.

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KptMarchewa 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

That still works up to like age 7. It really is needed for that age up to ~18, which means you can get with providing that service for ~15 years (multiple children) and then going back to smaller apartments.

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sacado2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not everyone works from home. But if you do, you can live in unexpensive areas of your country, so it's a non-issue.

	▲	hypfer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well I mean the whole discussion was about "why is the fertility rate so low it should not be so low". So that does sound like it is very much an issue. To someone, anyway. I don't really care. I have no horse in this race. __ To cover the expected pedantic reply: Of course technically it's everyone's problem. But just because it technically affects you doesn't mean that you have to emotionally involve yourself in stupid online discussions that don't comprehend systemic views and mistake them for personal whining.

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watwut an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

So, in your opinion it is not possible to have kids unless you have 7(!) rooms?

	▲	hypfer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Possible for sure, but not necessarily pleasant, which is for sure a significant part of the reasons why people decide against having (more) children. If we want them to have 3+ children, we need to reduce these sources of friction of doing so.

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pcthrowaway 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought it was clear from context that I was referring to people who want to have kids with a romantic partner (I suppose for fertility rate purposes it doesn't even necessarily need to be with just one romantic partner, or within a monogamous relationship).

Lots of people don't want kids these days relative to 50 years ago, but even among those who do, they're delaying the process, often to the point where it becomes less ideal due to age. Many people who wanted kids when they were younger end up not having them as a result (and many who want them haven't had them yet).

Having a partner (or partners) to do it with is a significant factor for many, among other factors like concerns about affording food and housing for oneself, let alone for additional dependants.