Dating Apps/Sites are basically social media sites, they only really work via the network effect, by being so huge that they necessitate significant financial investment.
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long answer:
A dating app is only broadly, mass appeal successful if it can scale to have a wide selection of people, users, ideally, in as many places as possible.
This requires a large amount of servers.
A large amount of servers requires a large amount of money.
A large amount of money requires investors.
Investors require as much profit as possible.
…
A conventional dating site/app, as we think of the big ones today… its a social media platform.
Just with a different, more constrained feature set, a different UI… but roughly similar levels of network infrastructure and overhead.
…
You could actually make a reasonable argument for running a non profit, or … some kind of collectively owned and operated dating service that is restricted to say a city or small region, or maybe a neighborhood in a larger city.
(Indeed, many of the older ones kind of began this way, pitched more like a … a club that you join and pay membership dues for, thats how they were marketed in the late 90s / early 00s… though these of course were largely actually privately owned, but the marketing angle was that of ‘exclusive community’)
The technicals of exactly how to do that, legally and financially, might end up being impractical though… and if the government is directly involved, well… 10, 20 years ago I would say thats a rather serious privacy problem, but at least in the US right now, I am sure Tinder will sell your info to a data broker who sells it to the FBI if they want to investigate you, so… yeah.
The other obvious problem is that the best dating app is the one you use the least… so… some kind of unconventional payment structure would have to be figured out, to counteract this massive and glaring incentive conflict between app and user.
Maybe high upfront fixed costs to the user, but if you don’t find a good match after a year, 75% gets refunded to you?
Not sure. Could be legal nightmare.
…
Other than that, privately owned and operated dating communities can work fairly well without huge server overhead… if they are precisely targeted at a pretty specific kind of people, be it a religion, or a bdsm community, or a specific ethnicity, who knows… those can at least theoretically work at a larger geographic scale, because that kind of scale doesn’t also massively ramp up user count.
But there’s nothing stopping them from being bought out if they get too big.
…
Bonus!
Job application / recruiting sites are also basically dating apps/sites.
Its just person vs job instead of person vs person.
Broadly, guys on dating sites have been flooding women with match requests for years now, women have been overwhelmed by the volume and believe they can be very picky.
Now replace ‘guys’ with ‘job seekers’, ‘match requests’ with ‘applications’ and ‘women’ with ‘companies’.
Both scenarios result in wasteful amounts of energy going into ‘match-making’, which is horrendously inefficient.
Wow, that’s an incredibly insightful answer. I suppose I never considered the scale of it. Most are fairly bare bones, but you are right, there are so many users and repeat users that it would scale very poorly.
You’re also right on the social media part of it. There kindof needs to be secondary engagement thing to attract and support the community.
Always felt that dating apps were a little too ?accesible? That is to say that they are exceedingly easily flooded by no or low effort profiles, abandoned and duplicate profiles. Especially by desperate men who are completely undiscerning and undereducated (consent, sex, sexuality, etc…).
I feel like there should be engagement/social/education tiers that grant more access to more features. Like literally give points if you can pass tests on consent, relationships, kink, whatever. Get social points from good engagement and behavior. These don’t show your profile more or less, but like if the medium has NSFW features, forums, criteria/location filtering it gives access to them based on community trust and such. Maybe offer a paid shortcut, but have that declared on their profile somehow.
Could be nice. But I’d also probably have the swiping style app be accessory to a more traditional forum.
I feel like there should be engagement/social/education tiers that grant more access to more features. Like literally give points if you can pass tests on consent, relationships, kink, whatever. Get social points from good engagement and behavior. These don’t show your profile more or less, but like if the medium has NSFW features, forums, criteria/location filtering it gives access to them based on community trust and such. Maybe offer a paid shortcut, but have that declared on their profile somehow.
I like this line of thinking.
I more or less used to use OkCupid in this way… it has so many questions you can answer that basicsally, if you have your own set of hard red flags… just look through their answers to questions.
…
You could theorerically do a paid shortcut for some things, but not others.
…
With my gamer brain, the first thing that comes to mind is pay to win games:
You can design a game such that… you can reasonably progress through the game, get good items, level up reasonably quickly… without having to spend any more real world money.
Warframe is arguably a good example of this.
You can just play a fleshed out and enjoyable game and progress at a reasonable rate without spending any real world money, everything in the game is obtainable without more money if you’re good at the game… but if you just have cash to burn, you csn just outright buy some high level gear, basically, to say, join up with some friends who’ve been playing for a long time, without playing for 50 or 100 hours to be on their level.
…
But you can also make it just an absolutely hellish slog to progress through the game, such that you finally get tired of grinding and have that ‘fuck it!’ moment, and just pay to progress… and then you at first find those payments are rather cheap actually… but if you keep playing, the actual money costs ramp up faster and faster, alongside your time devoted to the game, so now you’ve got sunk cost and your brain sunk cost fallacy’s you into just still playing and spending.
This is pretty much how WarThunder is designed.
…
But uh yeah, ramble ramble… I like your basic framework here, but again the problem with monetization is thag is has to be reasonable and apparent to everyone, your idea of badges that show everyone this is I think good.
I am just very worried that if this whole app is privately owned… it will inevitably enshittify and subvert itseld to being an evil money draining skinner box as it attracts more investors or gets new owners or goes public or whatever.
I’m just confused as to how there isn’t a dating app that is better.
short answer:
Dating Apps/Sites are basically social media sites, they only really work via the network effect, by being so huge that they necessitate significant financial investment.
…
long answer:
A dating app is only broadly, mass appeal successful if it can scale to have a wide selection of people, users, ideally, in as many places as possible.
This requires a large amount of servers.
A large amount of servers requires a large amount of money.
A large amount of money requires investors.
Investors require as much profit as possible.
…
A conventional dating site/app, as we think of the big ones today… its a social media platform.
Just with a different, more constrained feature set, a different UI… but roughly similar levels of network infrastructure and overhead.
…
You could actually make a reasonable argument for running a non profit, or … some kind of collectively owned and operated dating service that is restricted to say a city or small region, or maybe a neighborhood in a larger city.
(Indeed, many of the older ones kind of began this way, pitched more like a … a club that you join and pay membership dues for, thats how they were marketed in the late 90s / early 00s… though these of course were largely actually privately owned, but the marketing angle was that of ‘exclusive community’)
The technicals of exactly how to do that, legally and financially, might end up being impractical though… and if the government is directly involved, well… 10, 20 years ago I would say thats a rather serious privacy problem, but at least in the US right now, I am sure Tinder will sell your info to a data broker who sells it to the FBI if they want to investigate you, so… yeah.
The other obvious problem is that the best dating app is the one you use the least… so… some kind of unconventional payment structure would have to be figured out, to counteract this massive and glaring incentive conflict between app and user.
Maybe high upfront fixed costs to the user, but if you don’t find a good match after a year, 75% gets refunded to you?
Not sure. Could be legal nightmare.
…
Other than that, privately owned and operated dating communities can work fairly well without huge server overhead… if they are precisely targeted at a pretty specific kind of people, be it a religion, or a bdsm community, or a specific ethnicity, who knows… those can at least theoretically work at a larger geographic scale, because that kind of scale doesn’t also massively ramp up user count.
But there’s nothing stopping them from being bought out if they get too big.
…
Bonus!
Job application / recruiting sites are also basically dating apps/sites.
Its just person vs job instead of person vs person.
Broadly, guys on dating sites have been flooding women with match requests for years now, women have been overwhelmed by the volume and believe they can be very picky.
Now replace ‘guys’ with ‘job seekers’, ‘match requests’ with ‘applications’ and ‘women’ with ‘companies’.
Both scenarios result in wasteful amounts of energy going into ‘match-making’, which is horrendously inefficient.
Wow, that’s an incredibly insightful answer. I suppose I never considered the scale of it. Most are fairly bare bones, but you are right, there are so many users and repeat users that it would scale very poorly.
You’re also right on the social media part of it. There kindof needs to be secondary engagement thing to attract and support the community.
Always felt that dating apps were a little too ?accesible? That is to say that they are exceedingly easily flooded by no or low effort profiles, abandoned and duplicate profiles. Especially by desperate men who are completely undiscerning and undereducated (consent, sex, sexuality, etc…).
I feel like there should be engagement/social/education tiers that grant more access to more features. Like literally give points if you can pass tests on consent, relationships, kink, whatever. Get social points from good engagement and behavior. These don’t show your profile more or less, but like if the medium has NSFW features, forums, criteria/location filtering it gives access to them based on community trust and such. Maybe offer a paid shortcut, but have that declared on their profile somehow.
Could be nice. But I’d also probably have the swiping style app be accessory to a more traditional forum.
I like this line of thinking.
I more or less used to use OkCupid in this way… it has so many questions you can answer that basicsally, if you have your own set of hard red flags… just look through their answers to questions.
…
You could theorerically do a paid shortcut for some things, but not others.
…
With my gamer brain, the first thing that comes to mind is pay to win games:
You can design a game such that… you can reasonably progress through the game, get good items, level up reasonably quickly… without having to spend any more real world money.
Warframe is arguably a good example of this.
You can just play a fleshed out and enjoyable game and progress at a reasonable rate without spending any real world money, everything in the game is obtainable without more money if you’re good at the game… but if you just have cash to burn, you csn just outright buy some high level gear, basically, to say, join up with some friends who’ve been playing for a long time, without playing for 50 or 100 hours to be on their level.
…
But you can also make it just an absolutely hellish slog to progress through the game, such that you finally get tired of grinding and have that ‘fuck it!’ moment, and just pay to progress… and then you at first find those payments are rather cheap actually… but if you keep playing, the actual money costs ramp up faster and faster, alongside your time devoted to the game, so now you’ve got sunk cost and your brain sunk cost fallacy’s you into just still playing and spending.
This is pretty much how WarThunder is designed.
…
But uh yeah, ramble ramble… I like your basic framework here, but again the problem with monetization is thag is has to be reasonable and apparent to everyone, your idea of badges that show everyone this is I think good.
I am just very worried that if this whole app is privately owned… it will inevitably enshittify and subvert itseld to being an evil money draining skinner box as it attracts more investors or gets new owners or goes public or whatever.
…
EDIT:
oh right
Thank you! =D