Dating apps: which problems do you see with them and how could they be improved?
Dating apps: which problems do you see with them and how could they be improved?
Dating apps are often a miserable experience for the participants, however for some reason they are quite popular and at times can be quite addictive.
A couple others here have the problem figured out and are echoing what I've been saying for years. Swiping is the problem. The addictive gamification of it may be fine for hookups (or just people browsing) but not for finding a potential partner.
Displaying more people, keeping you on the app for longer, is how these apps sell advertising. It's about money, not love (especially given that they're almost all owned by the same company now).
The more details you can include about yourself, the more data the platform has to understand you, the more likely it should be able to set you up with a partner. This results in far fewer people to choose from (less ad space), but potentially a higher likelihood of making a match.
Now, this may suggest the solution is a subscription service with some exclusivity and actual effort put into solving a problem for single adults. However, it's clear that when given the options of a high-quality subscription service or an ad-subsidized inferior option, most people choose the cheaper. And the video streaming services have pointed out that they make more money from ads than they do subscriptions.
I have other opinions about how so many people are choosing to not interact with people IRL and how this is impacting our self-confidence and ability to function as a giving and empathetic partner. But maybe that's off topic.
If dating apps did what they advertised, they would eliminate their customer base.
The objective of the application is to keep you engaged in what they are selling. They want you dating, but not in a long relationship.
They don't have a lot of control on how it happens after you meet, so most of their influence will be in who they present to you and how they gamify interacting.
Solutions are going to come down to real world social skills and overcoming the boundaries of online connections.
Dating apps are very much like games. It's a big social game, and the reward is engagement.
To have a viable dating app it has to continue to have active participants. People need to feel dopamine using the dating app.
That being said the biggest issue is most of the dating apps are closed source. But the issue of opening them, to federation, are abuses spam, seeing people you don't want to see etc.
Is swiping on people, and sending messages the ultimate in dating? Of course not. But it's the current meta that's emerged.
The big problems in the current model, engagement with people who are not photogenic. Being able to present people is more than a photo, with more depth. If the app does a very good job, and somebody finds a partner, they stop using the app, causing the community and ecosystem to die. So apps are currently incentivized to keep people engaged, but not off the market.
Humans are social creatures, Everything is a dating app one huge advantage dating apps have, is that more or less everyone is open to dating. And making connections.
Alovoa is free and opensource. Never used it though
I tend to agree with your points.
The key idea for me is that everything is a dating app. Social media are a great place to get to know someone and become interested in them. However, there is no straightforward way to transition that interest into a connection or a relationship. That's what dating apps provide a way to broadcast your availability along with other parameters like your gender, age, location and interests.
An alternative would be toot on Mastodon or blog about that. That would inform people interested in your online persona that your dms are open for a chat. Of course, that comes with issues on its own...
Spam or unsolicited advances (aka dick pics) are a huge one, especially for women. One way to solve that would be for men do these kind of posts and women to react as they see appropriate. In an ideal society with gender equality, that wouldn't be necessary, but at the moment IMO it's easier to deal with men disguised as russian super models bating for your money, than angry men feeling entitled to your body.
Another issue would be the social repercussions of this information being publicly available. IMO that's easy to deal with since you don't have to tie your online persona to your real Identity. Also, you can have multiple online personas. Hopefully, society gets to a point where expression of sexuality is not taboo, until then there are safe ways to do it.
If you have your photos on your dating profile, you are doxing yourself effectively.
Good points, Great to hear your thoughts on the topic.
Met my wife 13 years ago on OkCupid. I really liked their idea... They used maths and statistics. You complete all these quizzes and it uses some proper math to work out how compatible you are with others.
Eg my wife and I matched something like 98% if I remember.
Here's a video I could find: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m9PiPlRuy6E
While the site still exists I heard it doesn't work this way anymore and is more like tinder now.
But I think combining games and quizzes into an app and then showing you matches based on more than just the physical is something which can easily be incorporated in a fun way into an app.
Been using OkC for almost that long on and off now. The quizzes and questions still exist, but they have been tokenized since OkC now shows you people the same way Tinder does and doesn't have any ability to explore people and profiles the way you used to be able to back in the date. It's so frustrating!
Make OKCupid Great Again
The problem, like with a lot of stuff, ist that they are for profit and optimized in a way to maximize profit over the actual functionality.
And how could that be improved/resolved?
Maybe make it a non-profit like Signal. As soon as the motivation is maximising share holder values, the goal becomes to extract as much value out of the customers. And effective dating apps should not want their customers to return. It’s a conflict of interest.
Somebody really passionate about it has to make one and not sell it or make it publicly tradable? Which would be difficult since the market is rather full (I would guess). Also dating can be just a miserable experience if one lacks self esteem and does not fit into societal expectations of desirability - that's not on dating app problem.
Verified accounts only, mandatory 2FA, have a non targeted ad system that users can opt out of via subscription automatically show users other users who have liked them, put the bio at the top of the profile with the photo gallery at the bottom, only becoming viewable after the user has had enough time to read the profile and bio, same for the ability to swipe on them, use a reporting system that boosts reports from people who file actionable reports, do A LOT of advertising aimed at women because drawing women to the platform is consistently the most difficult part of running a match making site, the gender gap between users of different gender is a significant part of that "avalanche of unwanted dicks" phenomenon women who do brave the sites complain about.
Cut the algorithm out entirely, just line up potential matches with their distance from you, or if you have a questionnaire system like OkC, a matrix of Distance and match score from their answers.
Allow filtering based on love languages in addition to the other categories, also allow filtering based on star sign, but then also allow filtering out anyone filtering based on star sign.
Issue bans for trying to hide or lie about political opinions and relationship goals, IE trying to claim you're a centrist when really you're a socialist who knows that it won't get you dates in deep red Alabama, or claiming you want to be childfree when really you want to saddle someone up to be a SAHP.
Have a separate app for long term dating vs hook-ups, and probation any accounts switching from the hook-ups app to the long term dating app.
Do not permit long distance matching, LDRs can work amazingly, but overwhelmingly the cases where they do work involves a scenario where the partners start geographically close and then have to endure an extended period apart.
Ban users for linking their social media at all on the apps.
Have a date planning feature that just displays well rated attractions in the area like parks, restaurants, and theaters, and then allows users to share picks from that map with matches to suggest where they can go to meet up for the first time.
Verified accounts only
With the prevalence of generative AI, it's becoming more and more difficult to trust an image (and soon videos will follow), so how will people verify themselves? Not many people will want to hand over their government-issued ID to a random company.
Even if that wasn't an issue, how would the service survive? What would be the monetisation strategy (assuming good will)?
The problem with them is that they're designed to be addictive, and connecting people is actively against the economic interests of the app owners, so they don't truly try and connect people.
So how would you go about truly connecting people and still making money?
If someone could figure that out they would be sitting on a billion dollar idea.
Japan has an industry for that with quite different business models. I don't think it produces many loving relationships, but it's at least a good reference for other flawed approaches that haven't worked.
One thing they get a bit better: You pay mostly if they find a matching partner for you and there is a wedding fee (so if it did work for people to decide they get married, that's when you pay). Many, many other problems though
One of the biggest problems is how shallow dating apps are, incentivising you to make split second decisions about others based on a couple of pictures and a small blurb of text that most people just waste on a movie quote they like. And there's really no incentive on most of them to take your time and be thoughtful about trying to match. They prioritize quantity over quality.
Honestly I think something like Bumble's old Speed Dating feature would work really well if you built an entire dating app around it and it had a critical mass of users. When it was a thing, I used it and it led to way more matches (and hotter matches) than I ever got simply by swiping. Because it forces a minimum level of interaction between the people before they decide if they like each other.
There is no possible way to fix an experience that is built on the idea of shopping for people.
Maybe if you were to hide profile pics until a long conversation happened, and if you were able to rate people once you've conversed with them it would push things to be less shallow. But I'm sure there would be ways around it.
I think Breeze is onto something. You only pay for actual date you go on. It has some deal with bars and cafes and you pay 10 euro and the app set up a date and the first drink is included. You are also only ever exposed to a very limited numbers of potential dates. It’s not available in my country, so I haven’t tried it.
Ghosters get their account frozen
Daters are screened and verified
You both pay upfront to show commitment
That's actually quite intriguing. Seems like it's a German startup and only available in Berlin? Maybe it'll catch on and I've never heard of such a concept.
I think it’s Dutch, but has recently expanded to Berlin. The scaling of the concept is probably a bit slow, since they need to partner up with local bars for the concept to work. But better slow and working than fast and predatory like Tinder. Instead of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things (and people)” maybe move slow and heal things are a better approach.
With every single person I've dated using apps, we'd both agree to move the convo out of the app within the day of the match, so I'm not sure how'd that work once it hits mass adoption.
Well it already works and has been since 2019. Personally I prefer to keep communication within the app at least until the first date. But 10 euro for at date and a drink is reasonable for most people. I think it’s a nice service that the app setup the date and streamlines the important part. Tinder streamline the non-crucial part of just browsing people. Tinder is not really solving a dating problem, it’s solving a social validation problem.
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Back in 2020 when Covid started, I wrote a dating app, both for serious and educational purposes, in Flutter.
It was fun, but the process of bringing the app to the play stores (Apple, Google) was a nightmare, bc. they made it extremely difficult to release dating apps, since the stores are flooded with these kind of apps.
And what would be the point of making it FOSS, or federated? Knowing us nerds, the engagement on the development would be higher than that of the app itself 😂
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Shadow ban any accounts that include the words "coffee," "dog," "long time," or "the office" in their bios.
Found my new bio: "Let's get coffee and talk about our dogs and The Office for a long time."