Inventing a Dating App That Women Will Actually Use

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/02/dating-app-for-women-that-isnt-awful.html

by asperry • 13 years ago

51 88 13 years ago

zem2• 13 years ago

one huge problem (which the article does allude to) is that women simply do not feel as safe as men when interacting and meeting up with a stranger. it has little to do with attitudes to casual sex and everything to do with the relative perceptions of safety.

thirdtruck5• 13 years ago

Agreed. I can't even think of a male-targeting pejorative term that carries anything like the emotional weight of certain words that a disinterested man could wield against a woman when rejecting her advances. That says a lot about the actual differences in power between the sexes.

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

Not quite sure what you mean. I think the GP is talking about people who meet in real life after connecting through an online dating site.

In such a case there are obvious risks that one takes when meeting someone who is a) a stranger b) very likely significantly physically stronger c) already expressed some level of sexual interest.

barry-cotter2• 13 years ago

Creepy = the thought of being associated with this person fills me with disgust.

sp3323• 13 years ago

“On one hand, women are extremely powerful and we’re leading the workforce and climbing to jobs that are simply amazing. But, on the same note, we want to be feminine, we may not necessarily want to be the ones approaching the guys. How does that work? You still want to be the girl at the bar where the guy is the one who comes up to you.”

Well... tough! If you want to be leaders, you have to take responsibility. It's hard to take initiative, it's scary to risk rejection, but someone has to. And if you want equality, that means you gotta step up and do your share of "approaching".

dubfan• 13 years ago

Playing the passive role is actually a form of power. Women get to decide who gets to play the dating game and who sits on the sidelines based on whose advances they accept and reject.

sp3323• 13 years ago

I understand that, and it's part of my point. The passive party has much less at risk than the approacher. It's hypocritical to tell men that women are equals and at the same time demand that they consistently take the riskier role.

Bjuukia9• 13 years ago

You can't give your full attention to a man when you're being courted by 20 men every 5 minutes. It's like sending a resume: there's a ton of applicants and you can't interview them all.

Bjuukia9• 13 years ago

Though I agree with you that women should take initiative a lot more than they do, I disagree with you that it's because they fear rejection that they currently don't. I'm pretty sure nearly every guy would say "yes" to meeting up, even if she's not the hottest or most awesome woman. Since women rarely reply to messages and even more rarely take the first step, I can see men meeting women who DO message them.

About equality: equalty doesn't mean "all things being the same for both genders". Equality needs be based on each gender's needs. Just like you wouldn't require the same from as a child as you do from an adult (because they are different and have other needs and abilities), there are some things that differ between men and women. Equality should respect that. Equality means being respected by who you are, not by being "the same as a man". Equality doesn't mean "being the same as a man", it means being respected for being a woman.

Take this example: breasts are for feeding children; men don't have breasts; so having "equal rights" in that case doesn't make sense. Rights must be based on each gender's needs, just like disability rights must be based on their needs and abilities, not on "being the same as a able person".

Hope this makes sense, having a difficult time explaining it properly.

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

Equal rights usually means equality under law. For example there not being any laws (such as you might find in strongly muslim countries) which apply to women but not to men.

colmvp• 13 years ago

Women have the flexibility of being shy or proactive. Do men? Not really. Men are the ones pressured to be self-confident, extroverted, and to take risks. Thus, it doesn't seem equal because men have far less choice.

bradleyjg2• 13 years ago

That's a neoclassical conception of feminism. The second wave of feminism was all about achieving literal equality - changing society so that women could take on the exact same roles and challenges as men.

I wouldn't say such a conception is inherently problematic, but it certainly raises difficult questions. How can we frame an equality that is based on each gender's needs without importing all the old baggage of gender stereotyping? Who defines each gender's needs -- do we care only about those that are purely biologically, or also those that are deeply embedded in the culture? How do we account for those who don't fit -- either physically or culturally -- into the dominant gender categories? And so on.

Mz14• 13 years ago

As a woman who is willing to initiate, I find it rarely works. It mostly backfires. Men typically react one of two ways: "Cool! Slut throwing herself at me!" or "OMFG! Stalker!" It almost always goes disastrously. I have been working on figuring out how it works to attract a man and let him initiate. I find it to be rather tricky to navigate.

natrius• 13 years ago

It rarely works for many men, too.

marvin3• 13 years ago

What natrius said. Not meaning to sound mean here, I applaud your initiative. Really wish more girls had the balls to do the same. And there's probably a difference regarding how forward women and men are perceived (especially in the US, I don't get the same impression in Norway). But do you have any idea how many girls an average guy approaches for every one he actually has a mutual connection and attraction with?

In online dating, where I put in some effort (sending a serious, thought-out message and not just boilerplate) I get a reply to about one out of every five messages I send. The total track record after about a year of effort is one date per 20 women messaged, or something like that. The picture is better when you're meeting people at parties where you already have something in common (one in ten, maybe?) but I'm assuming the bar scene would be somewhere around 1/20 or worse. I'm in my mid twenties.

thirdtruck5• 13 years ago

I've entered a budding relationship with a pretty neat woman just last week because of her initiative, so I'm glad to report it can happen.

The good news: that approach filters out the men with gender-relations issues sooner rather than later, leaving more time for those few that make it through.

Shorel2• 13 years ago

Yes, it seems men are so easy nowadays, that women have totally forgotten the ancient arts of seduction.

As far as I know, women seem to simply give up at the first obstacle. However, the numbers game is on women's favor, so it still works very well for them.

codex2• 13 years ago

Men have a hunting instinct that must be engaged, and if it's not engaged, the courtship software routine just doens't run. Men need to bat their claws at a string.

marvin3• 13 years ago

Maybe someone should create a dating app where only the women can message the men. Then you would get rid of the deluge of male -> female messages. Wonder how well that would work out in practice.

aristidb• 13 years ago

The article mentions one such app...

ElissaShevinsky4• 13 years ago

Apps like this don't have enough engagement. Women, in general, don't actively search & message men on dating sites. Online dating behavior isn't so different from offline courtship, where men tend to be the pursuers.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

These things have nothing to do with each other. Women approaching guys or being approached, romantically, has nothing to do with their ability to be leaders in the workforce. Zero. And to take the attitude that they need to "step up" in order to earn equality, is totally wrong. Equality is a legal and ethical thing, it doesn't mean you have to do anything.

The fact is, women like to be approached, much more than they like approaching. It's not even very much a cultural thing as far as I can tell, since it's like that in pretty much every country (there are plenty of exceptions, of course, but I'm talking about in general, overall). It's just how people are.

On the other hand, it can be unfortunate. Take OkCupid -- guys will generally message lots of girls. They have to, because the girls aren't sending many messages. There's no kind of inherent problem there, most girls just want to browse their inbox and occasionally write back to a guy that seems all right.

But when girls complain about how OkCupid "doesn't work", I tell them that's also because they're not being proactive. A guy might browse through 200 profiles in an hour; a girl might get messages from 200 guys over the course of a couple of months (it varies a lot). It's going to take her a lot longer to find the "right" guy. So while there's nothing inherently wrong with women wanting to be approached, at the same time they have to realize that if they want to find the right guy, they're going to have a lot more success if they learn to approach, too. But it's their choice. And it's never something for guys to judge.

sp3323• 13 years ago

"These things have nothing to do with each other."

The entire article is about women getting more control over the dating process. Valerie Brennan was the one who made the link to leadership in the workplace, not me.

I wasn't really making a moral point. Just practically speaking, if women want to expand their pool of potential dates, they have to proactively take control of the process of meeting guys.

adambard2• 13 years ago

As a project last year I wrote a locally-focused dating site with a friend. It has a similar premise to "Check Him Out", mentioned in the article, but we didn't use a shopper/product metaphor, opting instead to be straightforward in emphasizing discreetness for women and ease of use (laziness, effectively) for men.

You can see it at http://www.ladieschoicevictoria.com/

It's been very interesting so far. We've had a strong positive response from two groups of women: young women who have had bad experiences with more open dating sites, and older women who, speaking generally, aren't totally comfortable with online dating and prefer the privacy of having a profile only visible to people you select. We've got a similar ratio to "Check Him Out", about 60% women, and about 1600 users overall.

We haven't made any effort to monetize yet, but it seems clear that the relative success we have had (including being covered in a local paper) is thanks to both the privacy features and the local aspects.

I don't think we've solved the problem, but I do say that the experiment suggests to me that some combination of safe and local is the essential ingredient that the author is looking for.

pc86• 13 years ago

I've always been interested in those first few days/weeks/months for dating applications. What's it like running a dating site with 30 members?

Obviously locality makes it a lot easier but even then, there had to be a point where you had 5 users and nobody else. How do you get past that?

adambard2• 13 years ago

Building the prototype took two noon-midnight Sundays, and we started promoting it after the second one.

First, I posted the site on a local subreddit, which got us up to about 20 users. We started telling friends and friends-of-friends, and my partner ponied up about $800 to run some radio ads. Fun fact: radio stations will whip up an ad for you as part of their fee. It was pretty fun hearing that on the radio.

After that first hundred users or so, we started sending press releases out to anyone we thought might care. This was much easier being local, and easier still because my wife is a writer with some experience being on the receiving end of PR press releases, and she wrote it up for us.

We were lucky enough to be featured in the local paper of note, got an interview on local radio, and a week later we were up to about 1000 users. The rest we've picked up more or less organically through word-of-mouth and/or google.

Edit: This was back in October. I wrote this mostly about the technical details, but it has some experiential stuff too: http://adambard.com/blog/my-experiences-deploying-a-small-cl...

ElissaShevinsky4• 13 years ago

This can be solved by pre-registrations. I've done this before for two sites - Member of the Tribe and JSpot (both Jewish dating apps - http://JoinJspot.com ) This lets you wait until you have a certain threshold of users before you launch.

Pre-registrations for online dating are different than with other kind of consumer apps. Daters eventually stop being single. So pre-registrations are most useful if they are for a short period of time - no more than, say, eight weeks. This ensures that your profiles are accurate (single people are actually single and will become active users once you launch.)

AmericanOP• 13 years ago

Tinder is blowing up right now, and they cornered the coveted attractive 18-29 year old female demographic.

Why are these girls using it? Because other attractive girls are using it. IMO, they used the growth model for social networks (the same that Facebook used:

Get sorority girls as users. In the case of Tinder, some top-tier sororities had rushees use the app and the number & quality of guys who 'liked' you influenced if you got in. Once sorority girls use it, then other high-status girls will use it. Then the guys start using it because the girls are there. Then it's a chain reaction until it circles back to the tech crowd who aren't a part of that culture, at which point tech journalists try and pinpoint why the app was successful and get it wrong because the original users are bored & gone by then.

Rather interesting to me that IAC acquired Tinder.

whalesalad2• 13 years ago

The biggest issue with dating applications/services today is that they are focusing entirely on the wrong thing: matchmaking.

No online service or the algorithms behind it is going to be sufficiently advanced and AI-ified enough to be able to determine whether or not person A and person B would be a good match.

There are too many variables. What even is a good match? Hell, MOST of the time humans get it wrong. How many times have you met someone who fits about 80% of the bill... but you don't find each other funny enough, or attractive enough, or the sex isn't so good. You can't determine ANY of that via an online service.

The real magic is going to happen in the real world. You put people together and see what happens, plain and simple. Dating sites need to stop focusing on match percentages, political affiliation, BMI, hair color, how many keywords match in your bio, etc...

I am an economically conservative person. I did not vote for Obama and do not want him to be our president. On the other hand, I could easily date and get along with a woman who disagrees with me. (most do actually) I tend to prefer brunettes, but I don't really care what color your hair is. If I was locked into some kind of algorithm or search query in a dating app, I might never meet a blonde girl who shared a lot of my common interests. Maybe you're great at writing a witty/funny bio but you're incredibly shy / dry in person. Maybe you look like you're killer in bed, but in actuality you don't even enjoy sex. None of this will come from a dating service. It all comes from meeting people and getting to know them through real life events.

I'd continue and explain what I think is a good solution to this problem but it will be easier for me to just link to the app when it hits the app store in the next week or two :)

jiggy20119• 13 years ago

There's also the issue that how well you come off on an online dating site is going to be very skewed by 1) How good you are at written english and 2) How good your pictures are.

JoshMilo• 13 years ago

Agreed. It's always amusing to see those photos where there "trying hard" not to look like they're trying hard to look good.

apa-sl• 13 years ago

Spot on! Computer matching is fundamentally flawed. That's why we are building ElimiDate... Key is to throw people into a pressure-free environment so that they can know each other.

No long-winded profiles,

No browsing through countless fake photos

and no computer "matchin algorithms".

Just fun and chance to be creative :-) If you are interested, take a look and sign up here for beta: http://www.ElimiDateapp.com

jessriedel• 13 years ago

> But those same women might tell me of a night they just "went crazy" and slept with some guy they just met. And you know what, everyone does this.

That second sentence is very false, even if you replace "everyone" with "almost everyone". Just 52% of people surveyed by a Durham University study had had a one-night stand (1,743/3300). Furthermore, this sort of behavior is often regretted; of the women who had reported a one-night stand, only 54% said they had positive feeling about the experience.

> Women predominantly reported "regret at being used," with additional comments including: "I felt cheap," "horrified afterward," and "I felt degraded. Made myself look cheap and easy. Total regret."

Paywalled academic article: http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-008-9036-2?L...

(I predict the results will only change moderately if you restrict the sample pool to whatever particular age range you're interested in.)

I think you're incorrectly generalizing from a very non-representative social circle. I know you're just writing off the cuff, but you don't do anyone any favors when you downplay the very real emotional risks people (especially women) take when behaving promiscuously.

whalesalad2• 13 years ago

I understand what you're saying but at a basic and common human level: we all make choices that we occasionally regret. Sometimes that leads to change, "I'll never do that again", while other times it just makes you look out for that particular scenario while continuing in the same behavior. I've had one night stands I regret purely because of the social stigma against it. Other times I've had mutually good one night stand experiences with people.

In relationships such as these, one person will be coming from a place of higher value and another will be coming from a place of lower value. That isn't to say the woman is always the one coming from a place of lower value.

Thanks for linking to the articles, adding them to my reading list.

gnaritas• 13 years ago

> You put people together and see what happens, plain and simple.

IMHO, the whole point of online dating is to be able to avoid having to be put together with someone you know you won't like. We all know what our deal breakers are and all those matchmaking algo's are great at letting us filter out people we aren't going to get along with.

You say you don't care about their politics, so don't filter on that or rate it as important to you; for those who do, they do filter on that and rate it important to them. It's not the algo that determines your match, it's you setting up your preferences and saying what you like and don't like that determine what the aglo says matches.

It honestly sounds to me like you've not actually sufficiently used a dating site well enough to have such a strong opinion given that your complaints seem rather made up. I could be wrong, but that's my impression. I met my current girlfriend on a dating site and all those things are exactly what made it work so well and contributed to finding what is IMHO my perfect match.

rdouble• 13 years ago

Without the matchmaking part, and just meeting people through real life events... isn't that the same as regular dating?

edwardunknown• 13 years ago

That's a tough one, you can't make the internet not creepy. Facebook is actually the best dating site because it disguises it's purpose (and that was it's original purpose) and even then you'll have better luck standing on a street corner talking to strangers.

vinceguidry• 13 years ago

Here's my stab at designing an online dating app.

People input basic information. Age, sex, location. How far you're willing to travel for a date, how many dates a month you want to go on. That's it. You pay $20 a month for the service and the software pairs you with someone else for a date randomly. No suffering through poorly-written and dishonest profiles and pics. If you don't like the person you're paired with, oh well, you'll have another date next week.

The idea is we are our own worst enemy when it comes to finding mates and to let nature take its course as much as possible.

ebiester• 13 years ago

Works fine for men. I don't know more than one woman who would try this. A woman may not be able to pick the eventual winner, but they have a better chance of avoiding Mr. Creepy. It might work if people are personally interviewed beforehand and weeded out, but I still don't think it has much chance to get traction.

Ask 50 women before you launch. :)

MilesTeg• 13 years ago

I think it would be very simple to solve the problems indicated in the article. Just charge some amount of money to send a message on the dating site. It would cut down on the total number of messages and people(men) will start self-regulating who they send messages to. If it is free it incentivizes every 'creep' on the planet to spam every remotely attractive woman.

vincefutr23• 13 years ago

no mention of tinder?

ElissaShevinsky4• 13 years ago

Author Ann Friedman has a useful insight: "From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men."

The CEOs of every major online dating site are men, with the exclusion of newcomer Coffee Meets Bagel. OkCupid, for example, has about 30 people, and fewer than five team members are women. These women have relatively minor roles in product development.

Women don't like using online dating sites. Female users are harder to sign up, much less engaged than men, quit sites faster, and are less likely to convert to paid memberships. It's worth considering whether this has anything to do with online dating sites being designed primarily by men. Online dating sites monetize via their male users, which perpetuates designing for the male experience.

Inventing a Dating App That Women Will Actually Use

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