Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to Google Docs

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/style/date-me-docs.html

by mistersquid • 3 years ago

55 95 3 years ago

Krastan• 3 years ago

skyfaller• 3 years ago

This sort of long-form writing is what attracted me to OkCupid once upon a time, before it was bought out by Match.com and gradually enshittified. I feel like there is a niche for dating people who like long-form reading and writing still, instead of the swipe left and right on one picture format popularized by Tinder.

Potential problems:

- Launching a dating app from scratch; where do you get your first users if you're ethical and refuse to fake users? (If you're not ethical, people could just use existing unethical dating sites with fake users.)

- Keeping the business from being bought out by Match.com and enshittified, just like its predecessors

- Developing a business model that doesn't incentivize unethical behavior, as OkCupid famously pointed out before it was bought out: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa...

I'm probably posting on the wrong forum, but I don't think VC-backed startups can solve this problem. You need maybe a worker-owned co-op, or an open source non-profit like Mastodon, to have any hope of resisting the pressures of capitalism that ultimately ruin all these sites.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

If you could solve only the first one, you're well on your way to building a company to sell to match.com.

andrewflnr2• 3 years ago

Or user-owned.

JennyWeston• 3 years ago

Dating apps fail due to an inherent asymmetry.

A small percentage of the population will attract a large percentage of the dating pool.

A large percentage of the population will attract a small percentage of the dating pool.

The job of a dating app is to give the appearance of progress and engagement to a very wide segment of the market. It sells hope and false positives.

Better? 1) Learn core social skills. Making people feel good about themselves is fundamentally attractive. 2) Upgrade listening skills. People who make others feel heard and understood are very attractive. 3) Do stuff. Fun stuff. Whatever leads to your personal happiness. Happy engaged people are attractive. 4) Stop using dating apps. Suck it up. Face confusion, rejection, and bad choices. Learn what you need to learn. Improve. Wash - rinse - repeat. People who have earned their confidence and skills are very attractive. 5) Learn to laugh at yourself. 6) Have real friends. Do stuff with them. There is a direct relationship between having good friends and feeling good about life. 6.5) Keep social media to a minimum. It sucks your attention and gives you envy.

sharikous• 3 years ago

I have no doubt that any platform will be enshittified or disappear eventually, but eventually we all will be dead.

The question should be how to launch a dating app in 2023 that won't suck for at least a decade.

mysterydip• 3 years ago

I wonder if there's people out there banking on using LLMs to "seed" startups with realistic-enough fake users to get the network effect bootstrapped to draw in actual users.

dotnet00• 3 years ago

IIRC early reddit did something similar (although obviously not using LLMs) where they aggregated content from other sites automatically and effectively faked activity to draw in real users.

i_am_jl• 3 years ago

Charlie Javice knows a guy.

unsupp0rted3• 3 years ago

This was true of me in my 20s, but with experience I realized:

1. Ain't nobody (i.e. me) got time for that

2. There's no correlation between multiple flowery paragraphs trying to sound witty and quirky about oneself and the chemistry you get after sitting across a table IRL for 30 ~ 90 seconds

All the paragraphs and "FAQs about me" just aren't worth it: for me, or for potential matches of mine

She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, “just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.”

This is the nonsense I'm talking about. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it.

throwaway220322• 3 years ago

This is the fundamental issue with dating apps. Your life partner is not someone that you interact with through a screen.

All of the attempts to fix this are total bollocks. You can sit on a bus and get more of a signal about whether the man/woman sitting across from you is compatible than you can from an app.

LapsangGuzzler• 3 years ago

I think intentional in-person speed dating beats the hell out of dating apps all day. IMO some things will never be improved through appification and dating is one of them.

adrianhon• 3 years ago

NYT fact checkers clearly need their coffee today as the docs they featured are from Notion, not Google Docs

colingoodman• 3 years ago

The photos they featured are Notion, but if you look at the "Date Me Directory" they linked it appears to be mostly Google Docs. The author certainly could have been more specific.

bckr2• 3 years ago

I wonder if their average reader would know what Notion is. I’ve definitely seen romance Docs before.

anonylizard2• 3 years ago

Dating apps don't work because the business model doesn't make sense. All apps rely on repeat business, yet here repeat business depends on failed relationships.

It is theoretically possible to make 'repeat business' on long-term reputation attracting new customers, similar to how schools and universities can thrive despite only ever serving a customer once. However, how often will someone need to introduce others to a dating app? A multi-year timeline for word-of-mouth is probably too much for a VC funded app.

There exists dating businesses that can profit from long-term relationships, its called Church (Marry at a church = lifetime donor + children likely become members too), hence churches are far more optimized and effective at building long term relationships than apps could possibly be.

Workaccount24• 3 years ago

On the flipside, dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective. It's seems much more desirable for people to have a good experience.

Also many people are not looking to get married at 20. They likely have a decade of messing around before getting off the apps for good.

Invictus0• 3 years ago

dating apps are killing their industry by being so ineffective

I tried to look this up and was surprised to find that Match group doesn't share their MAU numbers. Probably wouldn't be that meaningful since many people use multiple apps. What I did find though is that they have 16M paying users worldwide, which is fairly close to their all time high, and if you estimate that those users are all men, and only 25% of men pay, and there are equal numbers of men and women across all the apps, then you would have a rough estimate of 128M users worldwide, which sounds about right to me.

unsupp0rted3• 3 years ago

For dating apps like Tinder a large subset of the user base doesn't consider short term relationships failed relationships, and can stay on for years and years

CuriouslyC• 3 years ago

Tinder is ok as a hookup app, the problem is that its success there and marketing as a dating app caused it to eat most of the competition, and what competition it didn't eat copied it because of its success despite its format being absolute trash for anything more serious than mr/ms right now.

flatline2• 3 years ago

Where I live, Tinder is mostly millennials looking for long term relationships. I suspect younger people have mostly migrated to social media, I hear a lot about using insta as what is effectively a dating platform, and is certainly a better user experience. The whole dating app experience is pretty awful.

Cymrukicks2• 3 years ago

Yeah but you have to deal with the homophobia and judgement of other members if you want to date around and not immediately settle. The church had a such huge role in western society but squandered it.

anonylizard2• 3 years ago

The primary source of members for all the Abrahamic religions are born into it, not converts. Churches, Mosques, Synagogues will continue to exist, as long as they are effective at boosting birth rates for their members, and manage to retain their children to a degree.

Homosexuals are therefore low-revenue customers, because the expected children count (including adoption) is far lower than heterosexual marriages. Churches that prioritize accommodating modern social mores statistically have shriveled massively.

Whether they have 'squandered' anything by sticking to their 'business model' will only become obvious in decades. They don't operate on quarterly targets or even 5 year plans. Judging by fertility rates, highly religious groups still have higher birth rates than secular groups.

arcbyte• 3 years ago

A couple things.

I understand what you're saying about the judgement of other members, but I think it's misguided. Many, probably most, people fear judgement of their social groups, but conversely it is social groups that also enable the most powerful and free versions of ourselves when we find the right ones. Which ultimately is to say that when the judgement of the group is good, you are empowered to do things you didn't know were possible. So rather than fear judgement, either intentionally pick the group that will judge you well, or more preferably make the changes in yourself that the groups judgement is incentivizing.

Homophobia isn't the right word. The church isn't afraid of homosexuality. It has beliefs that are inconsistent with homosexuality but it isnt fear as the word falsely implies.

benjaminbachman• 3 years ago

Bumble offers a lifetime membership, which I think fixes the perverse incentives.

littlecranky672• 3 years ago

It doesn't, it will still show nagging dialogs to buy "spotlights" and use dark patterns/nudging to get you to spend even more.

Earw0rm• 3 years ago

The business model does make sense, it's just that the actual business model isn't what's presented to users. These are profitable companies.

Long story short, they know they've got better matches in reserve, and give you those that will keep you using, not those that will actually make you happy.

balls187• 3 years ago

Dating apps don't work for a myriad of reasons: misaligned incentives, irrational users, one-size-fits-few approach.

That said, I've had enough good experiences with dating apps that when I am single again, I would 100% use them to find dates.

Sebb767• 3 years ago

All apps rely on repeat business, yet here repeat business depends on failed relationships.

By that logic, car mechanics don't make sense either - they repair your car, yet they rely on recurring faults to make money. And let's not get started on doctors.

These misaligned incentives exist, of course, but successful matching also serves as advertisement and there are enough people to sustain a business with one-time customers.

Der_Einzige• 3 years ago

Coincidentally, car repair people are trusted maybe a tiny bit more than lawyers. A lot of people in these positions are morally bankrupt and won’t hesitate to rip off grandma to the tune of an order of magnitude

Cymrukicks2• 3 years ago

Modern dating apps are terrible because they have taken all the mechanics used in the gambling industry and use that to fleece users. I hope this generation makes a conscious decision to go backwards in the search for love. Love isn't convenient and its not supposed to be.

Workaccount24• 3 years ago

I have an idea for an app that I will never realize so I'll throw it out in the air:

Make an app where you make a relatively extensive profile, put up a bounty for a match, and then crowdsource the matching.

So the app experience would be mainly trying to match other people based on their looks and profile. When a relationship (or whatever goal) is made, people will payout their bounty. Or they can tip and the like for dates, good matches, etc.

The biggest killer of dating apps is the disparity between mens extreme thirst and women's extreme reservation. Both need a reality check and I think others doing the matching would provide it.

Edit: Also, augmenting this system with AI/LLMs/transformers would make it enormously powerful. It's basically an AI matching framework.

toomuchtodo3• 3 years ago

The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps. The optimization is for physical attraction, which is orthogonal to what makes a long term sustainable relationship (emotional health, mutual respect and trust, etc). I don't believe an app will fix this people problem. You can't Uber or Doordash a great partner, but that is the expectation that has been built.

Citations: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... | https://archive.is/JSFXx

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33585033

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25062789 | Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501 (Never Pay for Online Dating (2010))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583 (RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps (2020))

Workaccount24• 3 years ago

The other side of that study (The infamous OKcupid one, it seems to be the source of all these) is that once women engage with men, their expectations normalize, and they end up with like rated men.

The core issue is just getting women to engage with realistically viable men. This has never been a (huge) issue ever before because until right now, the only way to meet people was face to face encounters. Nature solved for the problem, and online dating broke it.

ekianjo• 3 years ago

The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps

Exactly. Which means 80% of men will have a real issue finding partners (or already are).

slashdev3• 3 years ago

Dating apps combined with birth control seem to be taking us away from monogamy and towards polygamy. That top 20% of men has no incentive to want to commit to any one woman, so those women are competing in a mostly fruitless quest that may be fun in the short term, but isn't going anywhere. Then when they do eventually lower their standards in a desperate attempt to marry once they hit the biological-clock wall, they may have a hard time settling and being happy with their choice, because they've used to dating "above their means". That's a good recipe for infidelity and/or divorce. Meanwhile 80% of men are mostly ignored until eventually some desperate woman is willing to lower their standard and settle for them. Modern dating seems insane, I don't see how that's good for either men or women. But what do I know.

Edit: If you disagree, say why.

DoughnutHole• 3 years ago

The big problem is that "dating" apps are currently a mix of people looking for companionships and people just looking for sex - and the most popular ones are optimised for the latter, where matching largely comes down to selecting based on attractiveness of a photo.

The biggest problem is that attractiveness in real life doesn't match one-to-one with attractiveness in a photo. Interests, charisma, sense of humour etc aren't just "personality" attributes independent of attractiveness - they're components of attractiveness when people encounter each other in the real world.

Most people probably don't end up as attractive when you meet them in person as they appeared in their profile picture, because there's not great odds of chemistry when two people match up based on nothing but two photos. That's fine if you're just looking for a hookup, but it results in a frustrating search for a relationship.

Honestly I'd wonder if a downgrade to blind matching based on bio would be more effective. People could still dump each other if they meet and don't find each other attractive, but might match up people who are a great match in the real world if not in gamified dating apps.

alex_young2• 3 years ago

Presumably this means that the top 20 percent of men on dating apps (whatever top means) are dating 4 women simultaneously on average right? Sounds complicated.

samtho2• 3 years ago

A dating app is not a delivery service, it’s lead generation. The divide in behavior along the gender line is explained as actors behaving rationally in a free market. If you have many options available to you (and you don’t see who you are competing against), you will naturally only select the top X%. Conversely, if you have a low number of potential matches, you will cast a wider net because your are just trying to maximize options available to you.

In a heterosexual dating scene, there are also safety issues that women face which I am not qualified to comment on, but it should be acknowledged. It is silly to assume that this has no effect on who she chooses to match with. I’m sure there are signals that she recognizes, consciously or otherwise, that influence her decision to swipe right in the first place.

The biggest elephant in the room relates to the fact that people who are objectively poor partners will be overrepresented on these platforms. People who are violent, unstable, hair-triggered, poor communicators, serial liars, or anyone who exhibits anti-social tendencies will likely keep coming back to the app after their previous matches inevitably decide they are undesirable. Because they often lack the introspection to identify that they themselves might be the problem (or are just exceptionally shitty and know this but don’t care), they will continue to poison this market and ruin it for everyone. The app provider doesn’t care to solve this because their job is to serve matches (in fact there exists a perverse incentive to not match people well so they keep coming back, but I have no evidence they are acting on this). This brings up ethical questions if we wanted to de-platform toxic people. Who decides this? Do we survey matches that did not work out and ban them if they meet enough poor feedback? How long do we ban them? Do we weight toxicity ratings given as a function of how toxic the rater has been rated themselves? As callous as it is, I partially understand why dating apps do not tackle this.

Trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution is always doomed to fail, with mate choice about as social of a problem as it gets. At the end of the day, we need to create systems that augment our social capabilities, not replace them. Any technological solution can and will be gamed in both directions where people will inappropriately be labeled as poor partners and people who get labeled that will circumvent the label regardless of whether they deserve it or not. Unless we identify an objectively verifiable, directly measurable, desirable behavior, we can’t possibly solve this with technology alone.

All this is to say that the real solution probably won’t scale, but this means there is likely an opportunity here, as the conventional wisdom states. The problem is the barrier to entry is too high which means more nuanced solutions are likely to be killed before they even get off the ground. I don’t envy those in this business, it really just seems like a losing battle as you grow as a company.

sublinear2• 3 years ago

I don't think dating apps make a difference in the grand scheme of things for two reasons: the "top 20%" of men have always had the first pick, and you can still try to find a date the traditional ways.

I put the blame on social media. Getting to know people through a friend was the default and you no longer have to meet in person to do that.

Sanitizing social interactions and activists drumming up social fears for their causes has scared everyone off. The only solution is for more people to ignore it all and get out there in person again. That takes time and the pandemic wasn't enough of a nudge.

0verkilled• 3 years ago

The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps

I've seen this type of statement repeated many times, and respectfully I think it's a very broad and oversimplified reduction of such a complex topic.

The source you provided is extremely limited (afaict it's a sample size of 27 in a single app, a very circular definition of attractiveness, obviously not peer reviewed, etc.), but I think even a more reputable source would still have very limited results due to the huge scope of online dating and the highly subjective impressions involved.

I do agree that online dating appears to be superficial and not a great tool for finding meaningful relationships, but I've found that a lot of the discourse surrounding it (regular dating too) seems more based on collective insecurities than solid research.

Maybe there are differences in dating habits that favor some group over another, but a lot of the things I've seen tend to go to towards the idea of female hypergamy (a pillar of 'redpilled' incel ideology) without a lot to back it up.

I'm not saying that this particular study is necessarily wrong, but I'm wary of the biases, unconscious beliefs and assumptions that are usually carried when 'facts' like these are taken at face value.

foogazi3• 3 years ago

The top 80 percent of women compete for the top 20 percent of men on dating apps.

Dating apps already have an inverse 80m/20f skew

What would it look like if it was evened up 50/50 ?

Isn’t that the top 16% of women competing for the top 16% of men ? Eli5

johnwheeler• 3 years ago

Only men would use it though, right? Women probably wouldn’t need to, and any mate crowdsourcing would be done off-line, bounty-free by friends and people you trust anyway

gjsman-10002• 3 years ago

I've realized it's actually not just dating. Dating and Hiring overlap a lot conceptually, and both have serious unsolved problems right now. They really are the same problem - match people to other people based on various (but different) qualifications. Solve Hiring, you've solved Dating. Solve Dating, you've solved Hiring.

thereisnojesus• 3 years ago

Ah yes, I love a highly optimized relationship where value is one sided

htrp2• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

red-iron-pine2• 3 years ago

nah. maybe in the sense there are interpersonal skills and human judgements, but otherwise these are wildly different, and with different outcomes.

bckr2• 3 years ago

I like this idea. What it lacks is accountability after the match has been made.

When you meet someone IRL, you’re generally embedded in some social network. You met through friends, or at a function. Someone was responsible for introducing you, and that person is held responsible to a degree if one of you is a major jerk.

Dating apps are the ultimate ephemeralization and atomization of our society. “We met through an app,” while now commonplace, is also an absence of rich social embedding. At best, your friends meet their friends; but when you break up, it’s likely those networks bisect as well.

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

Perhaps we can use the credit rating agencies to have a dating credit history report along with a financial credit history report.

Combine this with the credit/debit card networks purchase histories, and pay history from The Work Number, and I bet we could come up with a dating score number to match people up.

ekaryotic• 3 years ago

It sounds something like the stock market to me. I'm not sure what you mean by accountability, do you mean that someone could do a runner after using the service and not pay out.

If you did base it on stocks and shares then that wouldn't happen. I don't personally understand how stocks work, but i recall it was invented by betting on whether ships would return from a dangerous voyage or not, and as a way of spreading the cost and spoils.

Surely it's possible to bet on a relationship in the same way, and those who bet the most accurately would benefit the most. then you look at your odds and check the match out.

TZubiri• 3 years ago

It's easy to see how this would devolve into prostitution or onlyfans

HPsquared• 3 years ago

How would you deal with the spam problem?

sublinear2• 3 years ago

Sounds like a way to launder money. Make lots of small bounties everyone ignores and run bots that vote you into a match. Hell you don't even need the bots if nobody else is trying to match you; just need a few votes. Ignore the match and collect a clean bounty.

Like others said, crowds paying out and receiving money lacks accountability.

sydbarrett74• 3 years ago

Dating apps rely on a variable-interval schedule of rewards (think slot machines). Dating sites don't sell matches. They sell the /hope/ or /anticipation/ of matches. Very rarely, two people do match up and form a successful relationship. It truly is a lottery. Lottos want people to keep buying tickets. If the vast majority of people won substantial prizes, hardly anyone would play anymore. They'd simply take their winnings and ride off into the sunset.

littlecranky672• 3 years ago

After going through a breakup last year, Connie Li, a software engineer, rejoined the dating apps, ready to dip her toe in the water again. But many of the men who reached out to her seemed to just want something casual, so she tried something new.

That is the problem right there. Most dating apps nowadays allow you to set filters for dating preferences (long-term partner, casual, hookups etc.). I asume that the pool of candidates that she faced with that filter turned on and who wanted truly long-term commitments didn't fit her expectations or taste/preferences. Creating google docs profiles won't solve the underlying issue - majority of men mostly looking for casual hookups or outright lying about their intensions (faking long-term interest to get some quick bedroom action).

hbn3• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure they charge to use filters like that anyway. And the subscriptions are absurdly expensive these days.

throwaway220322• 3 years ago

The issue with dating apps is that they optimize on entirely the wrong factors.

What matters in a relationship is trust, safety, reliability, shared goals and vision, etc. Yes, some level of physical attraction is useful and necessary, sex is important, but it doesn't make sense to optimize 90% on that trait. The only way to figure this stuff out is to meet as soon as possible and "clock" the other person.

Not only that, but the target market of dating apps are overwhelmingly biased towards short-term hedonism anyway.

Tinder are currently running a marketing campaign that is entirely focused on queer dating (not LGB, more like the rainbow gender stuff), which is both a tiny fraction of the market, and also unlikely to be something that will actually result in life-long relationships. It seems bizarre for them to focus so heavily on this group until you realise that, as others have posted, people who aren't ready to settle down are the most profitable group.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

“I’ve literally never in my life gone to a bar to meet a stranger,” he said. “I just can’t even imagine it.”

Most NYT pieces like this have a snarky comment that sums up the writer's opinion about the supposed trend they're observing. I thought this one was pretty good. On the whole, I'd rather they only covered stories they thought were important, but it's also good to have a laugh.

aalimov_• 3 years ago

Imo what dating apps are missing is the ability to meet a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend. If that was offered it could be easier to meet and also get along with the people you do meet because there is already a mutual friend there which might mean similar interests or maybe compatible personalities…

hbn3• 3 years ago

I think even more importantly, having a mutual friend could be a vouch for character.

Facebook could have done something like this if they got into the dating game before all the young people left/stopped making accounts.

arp2422• 3 years ago

Bumble has this, in addition to their dating. My experience as a guy is that it's mostly gay guys looking for dickpics/hookups/whatnot, at least, that was the case in my area at the time a few years back. I did just so happen to randomly meet someone a few weeks ago who said she had pretty good success with it. So YMMV I guess.

hbn3• 3 years ago

Dating apps are so, so bad now. Not that they were great before, but I think people actually took Tinder somewhat seriously as a place to get to know people for the first couple years. Now it's just become an ever-more expensive game that preys on how imbalanced dating is between men and women that I believe is due to these apps and the internet in general (I'm sure there's other issues for gay people but I'm talking about the use case I'm familiar with).

The gender ratio is like 1:10, so even non-conventionally attractive women can get on there and get a few dozen matches in a day (if not 99+ if you're even moderately attractive), and any guy who isn't in the top 1% of looks/money/clout/influence is lucky to get a few matches per day. So the men are making any desperate attempt to stand out from the crowd of other men they're competing with for women's attention, meanwhile every day I see viral tweets of women screenshotting and posting men's "cringe" Tinder openings, telling them to try harder. I don't think a lot of women even realize what dating apps are like from the other side, because I've heard plenty of instances where a girl helps her guy friend make a dating profile thinking she can help him get setup on a date, and are baffled when they can't get him matches or conversations with anyone.

And one thing that's not obvious unless you do your research, is if you're getting swiped right or matched with frequently enough, the Tinder algorithm will just stop showing you to people with no indication you're essentially shadowbanned. Supposedly you can reset the algorithm every few months by deleting your account and recreating it, but apparently if you do this too many times you'll get permanently shadowbanned and won't be able to use Tinder unless you get a new phone number. And considering Match.com owns Tinder and every other major dating website/app, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd use a shared list of the "unlovables."

It really feels like it's cranked to 11 a system where men have to desperately try and stand out amongst a ginormous crowd of other men, and women have to sort through this ginormous crowd of men who may or may not be genuine, not wanting to "settle" because there might be a better one in there somewhere. It's clearly not working anyone, and dating is just so exhausting because of it.

johnea• 3 years ago

So, IRL is just out of the question?

WelcomeShorty• 3 years ago

I never got the whole dating app buzz but have found speed dating to be the absolute best way to meet people who want to meet people.

You meet physically, get to hear, see and smell each other, interact face to face and have an easy exit.

No filters, no yester year pictures, no catchy phrases except for those you've mastered.

Met some very nice people for some very fun times (not just sex).

Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to Google Docs

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