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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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
- It’s in the same vein as saying, “Why don’t we bring forums back?” Vast majority of people 'enjoy' the quick dopamine hit of swiping, matching, and trading cheesy pickup lines, even if they claim otherwise. They may complain, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to explore alternatives. It doesn’t really matter that the older way may have been saner. Dating apps have been around long enough to become deeply ingrained, which makes it hard for any alternative paradigm to take hold, especially ones that have already faded away.
The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.
by shubhamjain - 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 - 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 - 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 people who can innovate in this space either don't have the mental and/or capital bandwidth to do so, or don't want to deal with the absolutely massive amount of moderation that it would require.
I met my wife on OkC in 2006, years before the Match acquisition. I have long been furious about what Match did to the site after they bought it in 2011, and have long fantasized about creating something that could return to what it offered. Problem is, I don't think you could do it.
OkCupid in its heyday was a product of the golden age of the web, when social networking was new. It thrived because it predated doom scrolling, so taking quizzes and answering surveys was still a fun way to use the web. Now we're in a post-twitter landscape, where dopamine comes from a flick of a finger.
OkC's forums were one of the first mainstream online spaces for conversations about sexuality and non-monogamy. That role has now been subsumed by subreddits and facebook groups.
When OkC was independent, the majority of moderation involved keeping things pg-13 and enforcing the terms of use. You could crowd-source it all right within the site itself. Today you have AI agent swarms bombarding any site with a userbase, just hoping to get eyeballs. You have age verification laws, payment gateways that will stop processing if they get even a whiff that sex workers might be using your site to advertise, and bigots who will DDOS you if you dare to cater to the needs of minorities.
And all that to wade into a battle with a billion dollar juggernaut.
by ChiperSoft - 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