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- Hacker News
- Nothing, just The Match Group buying everything as soon as it becomes popular and incentivizing keeping people using the apps over successful long-term matches.by al_borland
- That's begging the question!
If The Match Group is a steady supplier of startup exits in this space, that should incentivise more people to start. So we should see more people trying to resurrect old school OKCupid, not fewer.
Though I suspect the answer isn't that people aren't trying, but that these trials don't succeed enough for OP to notice.
by eru - Yeah, I'm surprised no one has spun up a competitor that combines evidence based match questions with the rich profiles okc was famous for -- OKC's only failing was you might find out you have someone you're a big match with who does NOT return that sentiment.
I also think we've lost the ability to do things like man up and ask out the barista knowing full well you're switching coffee shops for at least six months if you read that one wrong... when I was like, 20, I used apps because I didn't feel capable of just... talking to people. The MRA stuff is insane, but there's something to be said for being able to ask for what you want.
by firefax - I think it's a good idea but in this space, that's probably a smell. I met my wife there, been married 15 years now. 97% match, we've basically never had a big argument.by zhivota
- Match owns Okcupid now doesn't it?
With how easy it is to build apps now, is it really unreasonable to bring the old one back in a simple/cheap/sustainable way, that shields it off of being bought by those nightmare data brokers?
by rjzzleep - I've worked for a dating startup in the past and the main barrier is marketing costs. You need to be able to bootstrap a network extremely fast or people will join and bounce within minutes and doing that across any sort of region costs a lot of money since you basically need to blanket advertise. Trying to do that across multiple regions requires serious money.
You can build it and they might come but they will leave and never come back if they aren't seeing people to match with.
by sanswork - I became single in 2013 and cupid was definitely where the cool kids were. But it was a desktop thing. You sat at a computer and engaged. You invested. Tinder and swiping are a phone thing. No real investment.
Funny thing, 12 years later I met my wife on the zombified corpse of cupid. So... go figure.
by KenPainter - > Funny thing, 12 years later I met my wife on the zombified corpse of cupid. So... go figure.
Must have been awkward. Or were you in an open marriage at the time?
by eru - Okcupid still exists and operate in this manner. So do other platforms. The reason why it does not proliferate like it used to has to do with the short attention span of the population, and in general, the attention economy. You can’t have people answer 1100 questions anymore.
You can, however, put pretty people on the app for them to swipe left or right, and that drives people way more than Doing work to get a match. Unfortunate but true. So the people who opt in to this difficult end are not enough to drive the platform anyways. At least, it could never be anything like when You and I used it ages ago, when everyone was down for the cause (and had the attention span for it too)
by danvayn - Anyone serious is willing to fill that stuff out, and I did when I was single. Those sites aren't popular because they don't work very well.by hn993302
- What if the app asks one question per swipe?
Advanced version: and shows a match with the same answer.
by nvch - They dumbed it down for the masses.by elmer2
- From what I can tell, people ARE starting these kinds of projects. They just don't get popular enough for you to notice.by eru
- If we search “dating app” on an App Store, wonder just how long it’ll let us scroll. Past a dozen apps with OP’s idea presumably.by Barbing
- The amazing thing is that people still cite the old stats they published as that remains the only significant body of insight into the dynamics of human behavior in this realm.
- the reality is that those stats were flawed in numerous ways. this is expected, they were never subject to peer review.
for example: ok cupid and tinder, during the times that christian rudder was blogging about them, never reported on the actual ratio of active male to active female users. this made it impossible to do any comparisons over time, it's like reporting only numerators in the absence of denominators.
a second example: when tinder's 2018 interracial dating stats were compared to okcupid's 2011 stats, there was no change, despite real preferences having shown that something like 40 percentage points more people were comfortable with non-same-race dating over that decade. rudder kind of failed the obvious interpretation, that the apps and/or data collection were broken, and instead talked about some conspiracy of the surveys being wrong.
i think there was a lot of other stuff broken with it.
- It's not just dating platforms that have changed, it's also the users. Online dating used to be a niche you had to actively seek out, which meant that the users were naturally self-selected, had more interesting (for better or worse) personalities, and were (on average) more genuine.
Online dating today is far too mainstream for those qualities to remain. Any new dating platform that gains enough popularity to be useful will be quickly flooded with less-differentiated "normies" that dilute any quality in the platform's demographic, and the "optimizers" who game the platform at the cost of other users' experience.
by 10000truths - My wife and I met on original okcupid. Not much to say other than the system worked! It’s sad to hear they become tinder-y but I guess it’s hard to compete with the immediacy and dopamine prospects of swiping.by sickcodebruh
- I actually prefer the swiping apps. As a man I’m expected to make the first move and on apps like OkC it’s easy to waste a lot of time and effort messaging people who are not at all interested in me. The swiping is a signal that there is at least some mutual interest there before I put effort in.
But the main problem with the dating apps is the business model. Their job is to help you find love, but if you find love you delete the app and they don’t make any more money. So they’re incentivized to keep you single forever. I don’t believe Hinge at all when they say they want you to delete their app as quickly as possible.
by dabinat - > The swiping is a signal that there is at least some mutual interest there before I put effort in.
I think you vastly overestimate the "interest" a swipe represents. A significant number of people swipe out of boredom and a lot of swipes are mistakes.
by ElProlactin - 1. Dating apps/sites are a rich-get-richer market. Most people go where everyone else goes, because everyone else is there.
2. The more work you ask your users to do up front, (e.g. answering a bunch of survey questions, taking high quality photos, paying up front) the fewer highly desirable people you'll have, because they can easily find people wherever they go without doing all that work.
3. Swiping is more fun (more addictive) than answering survey questions. OKCupid switched to swiping when A/B testing showed that swiping retained people better than survey questions.
by dfabulich - 1. Dating apps/sites are a rich-get-richer market. Most people go where everyone else goes, because everyone else is there.
I get that this is true for social networks in general, like messaging platforms, there's a first mover and network effect.
However for dating apps specifically, there is not truly a network effect, all you need to find is one person, and for monogamous relationships (which incidentally are more common among heterosexual couples, whereas Tinder and its descendants, coming from grindr heritage, tend against) it's even more true, as in the ideal scenario each user finds one other user, there's not a huge amount of network interaction.
I also think that both in the general and specific course, there's a lot of incentives for niches, subcultures, alternative cultures, often times part of a culture is to avoid the monotonizing mainstream tropes and memes.
by TZubiri