An app that limits technology in online dating

by vega_empire • 7 years ago

40 58 7 years ago

There's nobody in my area using the app. But great and simple idea I thought about building something similar.

ravenstine2• 7 years ago

It's only a matter of time before Match Group buys this, forces the display of full names, changes the UI to favor ego validation instead of serious dating, then lets it slowly rot in the shadow of Tinder.

Needless to say, it's a great idea. Just don't buy into more complicated dating models that ruin everything or let yourselves become another brick in the wall of the online dating monopoly.

skocznymroczny2• 7 years ago

It's unfortunate, exactly what happened to OKCupid. It used to focus on profile text and descriptions. It's gradual, because they don't want to scare all their users, but with each update it's becoming just a swipe left/right Tinder clone with focus on profile picture only.

metalliqaz6• 7 years ago

It doesn't sound like your implication is that OKCupid doesn't know what the market wants. I think we can assume that OKCupid is following the market in doing what you describe. In other words, giving online daters what they want... or at least attracting the kinds of online daters that earn them money.

Perhaps the kinds of online daters that aren't superficial attention-seekers don't end up earning very much money for the companies.

ravenstine2• 7 years ago

If I were to buy OKCupid, I'd do the following:

- Remove any features cloned from Tinder.

- Every major city would have a small office where singles can go to set up their profile and have a set of professional photos taken. Users can add other photos online, but their avatar has to be the one taken at the office. This would also help prevent fake profiles.

- Users will only visible or come up in search results if they are online, or by those they have replied to in PM.

- If a user doesn't go on any dates in 60 days, they are kicked off and have to go to their local office to get their account reinstated. (I'm most iffy on this one)

- Get rid of any existing compatibility profiling. No surveys. No "sex drive higher than average", or "less adventurous". All of that is horseshit.

chongli3• 7 years ago

It's like the dating app equivalent to Network Decay [1]. The problem with dating apps is the same problem with Facebook (or even more accurately, LinkedIn): the business model does not align with the interests of users. For a dating app, users don't want to mess around in endless cycles of conversations that go nowhere. Users want to actually meet someone and have a meaningful relationship. Match Group do not want this. They want users to stay on the app long term and keep going on dates but never settling down.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay

onemoresoop• 7 years ago

That's right. I ran into this article when Match.com bought Okcupid: [link] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/02/match-c...

identity-haver2• 7 years ago

Sadly, this may be true if the answer to "how are they going to make any money with this?" is anything but "make all the guys pay $5 or so a month".

grawprog2• 7 years ago

Ryan checks out the singlespot map and notices a large group of single ladies checked into a place.

Ryan's profile contains fake pictures of him allowing him to check in and see who's in there without exposing himself.

Ryan notices one of the single women that checked in and proceeds to watch her all night as she gets dangerously intoxicated.

Ryan follows her and makes his move.

matt-attack• 7 years ago

Couldn’t Ryan do that to any woman in a bar today without the app?

klank• 7 years ago

I had that first reaction. But, I think there might be something different for Ryan in this case.

Specially, Ryan might view the interaction he had, despite being under false pretense, as a legitimate personal connection to the individual. i.e. the online checkin might be a trigger for stalking behavior that simply being in the same physical presence might not be.

I mean, maybe this isn't a big deal. But I do think it could potentially be different.

PJDK• 7 years ago

Surely Ryan could do this at any bar without the aid of an app?

metalliqaz6• 7 years ago

Ryan doesn't need the first two sentences. He can just go to the current trendy bar or club in town.

grawprog2• 7 years ago

Yeah, but a map identifying a bar that has a large number of single people helps. Especially when it comes with pictures you can use to identify those people and possibly other personal information. Say tracking a specific individual over places they check in over a period of time, stuff like this.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Ryan likes to optimize things and doesn't want to waste time and money at a bar if there's no possible "matches".

projektfu• 7 years ago

Ryan notices one of the single women that checked in and proceeds to watch her all night as she gets dangerously intoxicated.

This part is not enabled or disabled by a dating app. Ryan can do the same thing by hanging around bars and following their patrons around. I do think, though, that the problem is that some men seem to develop unhealthy obsessions with pictures of women they haven't yet met, and that stalkers will definitely spring from this app if it gains traction.

capsulecorp• 7 years ago

I've witnessed the same unhealthy obsessive behavior in Women.

bsamuels• 7 years ago

Maybe only show the pictures once the user is within 200 feet of the location, then they don't have time to develop an unhealthy obsession with the pics

thereisnospork• 7 years ago

I get what they're trying to do, but I how do they get around the sausage-party effect of tinder? It would seem unlikely that women would be comfortable dealing with that sort and volume of attention in person? Maybe if they took the bumble approach where one side is anonymous or semi-anonymous?

alkonaut• 7 years ago

Exactly this. If this becomes popular bar owners will need to have signs saying they dont mind women checking in at their bar - but that men should avoid it if they want any women to show up at all.

identity-haver2• 7 years ago

This might work even if women don't check in, as long as they are on the app. Besides, single guys mobbing an easily accessible bar where there are a lot of single women and scaring them all away within a couple weeks happens all the time already, sans app. This is what bouncers / face-control / cover are for.

pingpongchef• 7 years ago

Alice decides to go talk to Ryan

Never gonna happen. Or more realistically, not going to happen in large enough numbers to consider as a possible scenario.

User23• 7 years ago

The best thing about online dating is that just approaching a woman and talking to her like a normal confident man makes you stand out already. Part of being confident is gracefully, even playfully, accepting when she’s disinterested, which will be often for even high status men so get used to it.

Invictus0• 7 years ago

This is the tenth time this has been posted in the last month, stop with the spam.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19323084

donretag• 7 years ago

The site should just be banned for spamming https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vega_empire

telesilla3• 7 years ago

Woman chiming in: I'd only consider using this if it were Bumble-like, ie. the women can choose who sees them. Like, men don't even get to swipe until they've been selected first (then of course, men get to choose too). It's a good idea in theory but all the comments here are well too realistic.

rl35• 7 years ago

A system that effectively marginalizes half the population into a dating underclass isn't really a solution. If anything it just creates more problems like resentment further down the line. Not to mention how such a system would even handle people who are genderqueer, for example.

I get the safety aspect of it, and I get fact it's an easy way to cut down on a lot of toxicity, but it's a shortcut that's fundamentally antithetical to equality in the long run.

There's likely a way to maintain the same level of safety for everyone, but I suspect it'd involve a lot more effort on behalf of the platform.

metalliqaz6• 7 years ago

Equality? whaaaa? Being a man, and given the context from the OP, I assume I would be in that marginalized population? But no. I'm not going to get any attention from disinterested females anyway. This is how the human species seems to work. I would volunteer to use a system that preselected my list of possible mates to those who actually want to hear from me. It really saves me a lot of rejection, which is nice.

telesilla3• 7 years ago

I absolutely get what you're saying and I would welcome a better solution. The fact is, right now the friendliest options are the ones that give women more control. I don't spend my professional life thinking about how to improve these algorithms and processes but I welcome new developments from those who do!

chongli3• 7 years ago

Is that how Bumble works? As a guy, if nobody swipes me then I don't see any women at all on the platform?

Doesn't that just lead to a huge surplus of women all competing to date the top 10-20% of guys?

telesilla3• 7 years ago

I've never thought to ask how Bumble works from the men's side: is that true you don't see anyone until they swipe? I assumed that wasn't the case, because I receive messages saying "there are people who are interested to meet you" who I haven't seen yet.

warp_factor3• 7 years ago

Great idea.

It is exactly my complain with dating apps: They shifted most of the dating scene online in a predefined "boring flow". It is unfortunately extremely rare nowadays that people approach each other in real life. I think there is a couple reason why that became the way it is:

- Online dating app wide acceptance made it in such a way that it became the "expected flow" through which dating occurs.

- Trying to approach people offline is now seen as more and more awkward since less and less people do it.

- I also feel like the whole #MeToo and political climate makes it more difficult to approach people of the opposite gender as more people are now worried that it could be wrongly seen as sexual harassment.

willio58• 7 years ago

If you ask someone out in real life and they feel awkward about it, first of all you should realize that asking someone out IS kind of awkward inherently. It’s not a very normal occurrence in life. But if someone is totally weirded out by it then they are obviously not the type of person you want to try dating. It’s like a natural filter for people who can’t handle real life interaction.

warp_factor3• 7 years ago

Yes it should be awkward, but at least in my experience in the past this was expected to happen. And the person on the other side of the awkwardness would mostly be receptive from the tentative approach.

I feel like nowadays, because it is so much easier (but fake) online, most people simply gave up all tentative of approaching//being approached in real life.

I mean meeting people in real life still happens, but it is getting more and more rare//isolated and awkward unfortunately. I guess we live in a society where everything needs to have a well defined flow and be well codified.

mongol• 7 years ago

A grocery store where I live advertised that the blue shopping baskets were for singles, while the red were the ordinary ones. Despite being single, I did not want to pick a blue one. Maybe I should have. They got plenty of press but I don't know if any matches happened.

warp_factor3• 7 years ago

because society still associate being single with a bad trait (I guess the logic being that if you are Single there must be something wrong with you). You therefore don't want to expose publicly that you are single with a blue bag.

torqueTorrent• 7 years ago

That doesn't sound exploitable by stalkers whatsoever! </sarc>

atomical• 7 years ago

I think a dating app that focused on introductions through phone calls would be be effective. Texting is not very engaging.

vitalus• 7 years ago

Seems hard to get enough users to make this worthwhile at any given bar - people have to adjust their "out at a bar" time to include checking into a dating app.

The right growth strategy here seems a lot more localized - targeting specific bars/nightlife districts and seeding from the ground up. Can't get any useful signal from 10,000 users if they're all spread out across North America.

I say that after seeing this app promoted on HN a few times now - probably not a super effective growth channel.

ve55• 7 years ago

While the idea is neat, I have seen this on HN several times already (searching, it looks like probably around 8 submissions of this url by you from two accounts). It will probably take some actual marketing for your app to get the userbase you'd like it to, rather than just constantly posting it to HN.

areyouseriousxx• 7 years ago

Especially since HN skews male and the success of a dating app is dependent on it's ability to onboard female users.

Which is also why this won't be successful. Female users overwhelmingly prefer the current state of dating apps for various reasons that I won't get into here.

rl35• 7 years ago

I hate to be critical, but that explainer video is so 2012. Whenever I see one, it signifies to me that the founders are out of touch with modern stylistic requirements for a successful startup.

That said, Match Group has a veritable monopoly in online dating right now as a direct result of a myriad of unethical behaviors: manipulation and subsequent monetization of people's self-esteem for profit, algorithm design that effectively demands broad appeal which in turn marginalizes certain LGBTQ groups.

The list continues, but for the sake of a healthy society I really hope someone figures out how to crush Tinder and all its clones soon.

jbverschoor• 7 years ago

Orrrrrr. Say hi, and interact!

standardUser• 7 years ago

I love the idea, but in reality I don't want women I'm not interested in approaching me at a bar. For women, it's even worse. The nice thing about 'traditional' dating apps is you each get to screen each other before any interactions.

Simulacra• 7 years ago

https://xkcd.com/642/

An app that limits technology in online dating

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