I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular.
The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model.
A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in:
1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time)
2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio.
4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example.
5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert)
6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc.
7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy.
None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!
Many of the things you mention seem like they're symptoms of one specific problem with online dating: it's more like a sales numbers game than an intentional focus on one individual. This dynamic is present for both genders.
Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about.
* Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game
* Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game
* Getting ghosted? Numbers game
* That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game
* Burn out? Numbers game
* Situationships? Numbers game
* Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game
Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.
I met my wife via OKCupid juuuust before enshittification hit back in 2018 or so. i can't even imagine what it's like now to using these tools. Glad I'm out of the warzone, for sure.
Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates.
Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.
You don't even have to be attractive. There is some dude in a slum in Manilla right now smoking a hand rolled cigarette between his unkept bearded lips, using his wrinkled face and cataract ridden eyes to squint at a screen to scam the next guy with his keyboard propped up on his oversized tummy. Meanwhile he has an image of a beautiful 20 year old Texas country girl on his profile and maybe even a Russian hooker on call for when he needs to make bait videos. And he probably gets 100x the interest of your 'legitimate' average male user.
> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.
Facebook Dating isn't a standalone product, so people are likely going remain on the app even after they get into a relationship. The service only exists to funnel young people into the Facebook ecosystem. The dynamic is very different from a regular dating app where once you get somewhat serious with someone even having the app still on your phone will be seen as a massive red flag.
And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.
OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.
People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.
> People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail
That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
I too really miss the old OKCupid. I was on it from near its inception (around 2003 I think) until they started requiring phone numbers (2020 I think) and I agree its decline was tragic.
That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.
Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?
OKCupid, back in the day, was stunningly good. Back in 2011 I spent a huge amount of time filling out my profile, and OKC found me 5 matches with >98%.
I married one of them and 2 of them are still close friends.
No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.
OKStupid suffered from the "less space than a Nomad, lame" levels of cluelessness because it tried all this math stuff matching on statistical models of personality, rather than the one criterion actual humans use to select a partner: are they hot?
That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.
I would prefer to date an averagely-physical-attractive person whom I enjoy spending time with than a very physically attractive person whose personality I dislike.
Many women are hot or at least have some attractive features while only few men have a good appearance so we would be extinct by now if it worked this way. At least for selecting men there should be some other criterion.
For much of human history it has worked this way: the king got many wives, nobles got a few, but most men didn't marry at all. They labored and fought and died without getting to pass on their genes. This is also why men are such status seekers and risk takers: our ancestors had to prove their worth for a chance at getting laid. The risks were great, but the payoff was huge and if you failed, it's not like your genes gained any advantage by playing it safe.
I doubt it is true, at least in Russian history a typical peasant had a wife and children. Not being married was considered bad and there were arranged marriages. Also poor men probably had a low chance of "getting laid" as girls were interested only in lifetime long relationship.
I even tried to verify this by looking through old registries available online (where marriages and births were recorded), some of which are digitized and OCR'd by Yandex, but it seems that they do not have a list of unmarried people. Although the birth records typically mention whether a child is "legally born" (within a marriage) or not.
Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person...
What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.
The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.
They changed the algorithm a few months back to be much more like Tinder. Pushing people out of your league physically to the top of the stack, making it less likely that you'll find a match, and they're moving and increasing number of features behind Hinge+.
> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be.
What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific.
It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives.
I think the correct term for this type of thing is a "dark pattern", and they should definitely be illegal.
In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today. Everything is consolidating, and there seems to be zero momentum in the opposite direction. So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
The more obvious solution is taking aggressive trust-busting action and preventing further mergers rather than passing laws to leash the remaining few actors in an already-broken, over-consolidated market.
I'm sure this will draw immediate reactions that in a heavily lobbied (i.e., bribed) environment, it's a pipe dream to hope for antitrust action to occur, but I would point out that the very same environment isn't any more likely to impose meaningful regulation, either.
> So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
> In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today
Did you miss the part where the parent said "I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating"?
It sounds nice to make "dark patterns" illegal, but what that means is that its arbitrary since you can't define it. Discretion is fine, but you have to be fine with [bad politician] appointing his minions to oversee the process.
For something simple like "pick up my garbage in a regular cadence", I wouldn't really care if it's Biden, Trump, Obama, Clinton or any reasonable politician so I'm fine with ceding that authority to the state. But when it comes to something like social media regulation, I don't trust politicians.
Do we really want corporations enforcing unconfirmed reports? If the legal system can't handle the situation, why should we expect a private corporation to?
Being arrested and convicted of a crime is a much higher bar than what is required to ban somebody.
I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users. This is actively happening, and for some content and jurisdictions it is legally required to happen. If you get a strong signal that someone is a bad actor in your community you should remove them.
I agree, even a handful of reports in a short period could have been orchestrated as a payback.
However surely you could agree that there is a reasonable line somewhere.
If, over the course of several months, multiple people with seemingly no connection to each other report the same problematic person, then is there ANY reason to not issue a ban?
I feel like "just issue a ban" trivializes the complexity of this: banning one account does basically nothing, and they can just create a new account. Multiple people often have the same name, so you can't just ban everyone with that name. It's trivial to take new pictures, etc..
That leaves, what, asking a private company to do facial recognition scans on all new users? Requiring them to present official government ID ala the recent EU laws?
If your safety system is "we'll have to wait till this person rapes several women over the course of many months" then it is meaningless to begin with. And they can then create another profile in seconds on any of the dozens of other apps out there. So no one is safer.
The only reasonable line is - act on the first report (and every single other report), and work closely with the police. But if the victim doesn't want to involve the police then what can you even do?
Best I can do is act on it and eat a massive defamation lawsuit. If you think the $1 Billion Alex Jones was ordered to pay for saying parents lied about dead kids was a lot, imagine how big it would be if someone accused or insinuated a bunch of people of being rapists based on unvetted reports.
I wonder about these kind of crime sprees. It the person wishing to be arrested or something?
A cardiologist life is not usually falling apart. so I wonder why this sort of madness would be a thing. Are they thinking nobody would believe the women?
You make the assumption that people aren't vengeful or liars. They are. Social media elicits the absolute worst human behavior imaginable.
> I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users
This has been tried many times and proven to fail. You end up with echo chambers like lobsters and cesspools of the deranged like BlueSky. Yes, there are decent people on BS but not enough to offset the mass-reporting ban brigades. If you join there and have been deemed an undesirable you will be banned before you can utter a word.
Ah, but "sugarpimpdorsey" says that "echo chambers like lobsters and cesspools of the deranged like BlueSky" ban him.
Is it your contention that lobsters and bluesky are run by the same or allied cliques? Perhaps it is more likely that someone who chooses that username might repeatedly act in ways which confirm to them that everyone else is a jerk?
>When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who accused him of rape.
This is clearly worse than false positives. They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.
> Even after a police report, it took nearly two months for Matthews to be arrested — the only thing that got him off the apps. By then, at least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them. Nearly every one of them had met him on dating apps run by Match Group.
I could understand not banning users or being too conservative in general, but match group bans lots of users without any communication. I know people banned without any reason, and you can see so many reports on reddit. So they could probably just automate banning on even single report.
I feel like "auto-ban on a single report" gets weaponized as soon as people figure it out, and just encourages people to get better at creating alt-accounts to evade the bans?
Law enforcement should be able to submit reports that carry real weight.
I don't know why people would report this behavior to the app and not the police. But the apps should be telling people to file a police report and have the police contact them.
There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
> There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
Rape is underreported because this attitude is so prevalent. Reporting a rape is incredibly difficult and traumatizing and rarely leads to a conviction. It also exposes you to violence and harassment to the person who raped you in the first place.
This is a great example of how large companies are structured so that the organization as a whole is capable of making decisions that would be unthinkable and/or criminal if done by a single individual. As a whole, Match Group:
- Hid credible reports of users being sexually assaulted from the public
- Did not put up any sort of significant barrier for users reported for rape from making new accounts
- Underinvested in safety on their platforms for years, then laid off everyone in their safety org in favor of overseas contractors with little training
- Ignored members of Congress asking about how the company responds to reports of sexual violence
Despite this, I'm sure that everyone in Match Group's leadership who contributed to the organization making these decisions doesn't think they have any sort of responsibility here, and doesn't have any problem sleeping at night.
There are more basic issues with these apps too, which is that they turn dating into a second job. And it is very difficult for men especially, as data has shown that messages / likes mostly center on the most attractive men rather than being well distributed as it is for messages from men to women. So everyone without that attention just ends up swiping right on thousands of profiles and hoping for something to happen. It’s unproductive, depressing, and I would hate to be a single man today with all dating happening online. For that reason alone, we should move on from the online dating experiment.
A tv show in the Netherlands once summed it up nicely: the dating site experience for men is like interviewing for a job, for women it’s like shopping.
Back when I was dating online dating had just started and I went out on a few dates with women I met online and it all seemed to go OK.
But in the end all the successful relationships I ever had were people I met in real life. Is it really that hard to meet people in real life these days? I mean, in fairness, I was on a campus most of that time, and so mingling is sort of built in. But surely there are other contexts where people mingle?
Society has made many of what were originally the most common places to meet your future spouse now taboo to ask someone out. For example, before dating apps, something like 30-40% of relationships leading to marriage started in the workplace.
It is not marketed at all. It just kind of popped up one day. I've never gone back to tinder, etc since then. It is the best experience to me personally.
Maybe people over still 40 use the social media site in large numbers. I just have a fake profile to access marketplace & dating.
I see what you're saying lol. It is important to specify that the dating profile is different from the social media one, so im not catfishing or anything like that. I am just not sharing personal data with fb on their social media side/profile.
I've been thinking a lot about building an open source dating app as a non-profit offering.
I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.
Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
As I understand it, it's not a technical problem, rather a social one first off: you can build it but it'll be "empty" compared to all other options out there, even if it's technically superior to them. Network effect and all that.
There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.
I think it's an interesting area, but I've got no time or energy to undertake such an endeavor. However, I'd be happy to talk about it and discuss it further if you'd like to. Contact info is on my profile page here.
I've watched speed dating events go from free to $45 in the past couple years. Not sure if that's b/c of inevitable factors in running those events or pure opportunism.
I think something like the matrix protocol would be better. I would be especially interested in not storing unencrypted user messages. Matrix would be a good choice for this.
I think you should do it. The costs for all these services are still priced like the AOL days where bandwidth mattered. I really don’t think the hosting costs could be much. I had a small dating site decades ago and the cost was almost nothing.
> Repeatedly, we found that users, soon after being banned, could create new Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday, and profile photos used on their banned accounts. Users banned from Tinder were also able to sign up for Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish without changing those personal details.
It is really good to see actual investigative journalism still happening out there.
While the story in the article is scary, what's the point of reporting the person to the dating app company? They have no way to check whether there happened a crime or not. Maybe there should be a government-run database which tracks the people reported to police, and the dating apps must warn if the user is in the database or temporarily freeze the account.
Anyway such things should be regulated by laws and run by the government rather than by private companies without any legal responsibility.
Because the purpose of Tinder, Hinge, etc. is to slowly destroy the social fabric of society to a point where people are perfectly malleable. More, more, more instant gratification. Less, less, less integrity.
We live in an age where the commercialization/cheapening of sex is celebrated by society but the natural result of that commercialization/cheapening isn't wanted.
This thread is a very clear demonstration of the libertarian bias of HN. The reflex, knee-jerk response to ANY proposal is "how do you enforce it??" regardless of the issue at hand.
You can ALWAYS claim that a policy proposal is futile, or will backfire, or will jeopardize some other freedom. The question is about the tradeoffs, which requires considering the evidence at hand. So many concerns being raised here are easily refuted by sentences in the article.
Tinder responsibility ends with their app, unless they have claimed that they somehow vet the people for safety. Or they provide chaperone service.
Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
Wow what a weird coincidence that there's a monopoly of dating sites, animosity between the sexes is amplified by bots on social media, only a few users get matches and rapes go unreported, and birth rates keep dropping.
I strongly believe Match Group is single handedly deteriorating relations between genders in regions where they are popular.
The commercial incentive Match Group has to prevent churn means the optimal outcome for them is that you never find a partner. And so if you’re outside that top N percentile of popularity, they’ve optimized their apps to abuse you emotionally and financially. They’re engineering the perfect carrot on a stick.
One such behaviour, for example, is that when you buy Tinder Plus, they will feed you a couple matches, but withhold more than they give you. Once the subscription expires, they feed you rest of the “Likes You” people into the page where they’re obscured, forcing you to resubscribe if you want to see them. And of course you will never encounter those people just by swiping, they’re purposefully held from you.
I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be. It’s the same kind of emotional manipulation that casinos are guilty of.
I've thought about this a lot, but I really don't think the profit incentive changes much. I don't think for example that a free and open-source community-supported dating app would result in a better experience, because a lot of the problems with dating apps are about human psychology and not with the business model.
A FOSS or nationalized dating app would still result in:
1. The feeling of FOMO (99% of swipers stop swiping before they find their REAL soulmate for real this time)
2. Impersonality. One cannot effectively communicate that they are generous, kind, and funny or any other set of attractive but abstract qualities in 4 photos and a short bio.
4. Similar to impersonality, is the loss of contextual bonding. Especially for women, being in proximity to a potential mate tends to work a lot better than seeing a few 2D photos. It's crazy to think about, but a huge percentage of happy long-lasting couples who met organically would have never swiped on each other, me being one example.
5. Asymmetrical supply and demand (women dying of thirst in the ocean while men die of thirst in the desert)
6. The 'stranger' dynamic makes everything low-stakes and therefore low effort. There is no social consequence for bad behaviour, whereas if you met someone at work, school, church, or were introduced by a mutual friend, there IS a social cost for ghosting, manipulation, superficiality, etc.
7. All of the above results in WAY too many interactions in a romantic or potentially romantic context, and I don't think people were meant to have dozens of situationships for a decade before finally getting success. The constant churn and burn cycle results in burnout. The burnout is exhausting and discouraging and worse, can lead to feelings of antipathy.
None of the above is actually solved by a different ownership or funding model. I'm sure that building an app in such a way that artificially gatekeeping a superior experience behind a subscription creates its own set of winners and losers, but I don't think that is actually in people's top complaints about the dating app experience!
Many of the things you mention seem like they're symptoms of one specific problem with online dating: it's more like a sales numbers game than an intentional focus on one individual. This dynamic is present for both genders.
Due to the "sales numbers game" of online dating, there's an incentive to keep your pipeline full, lest one of your deals falls through and you have to start all over. This seems to create many of the negative phenomena that people complain about.
* Overwhelmed by too many matches or not enough matches? It's due to the numbers game
* Shallowness and hyper pickiness? Numbers game
* Getting ghosted? Numbers game
* That "stranger" dynamic- i.e. not enough time to really get to know someone beforehand? Numbers game
* Burn out? Numbers game
* Situationships? Numbers game
* Dopamine "likes" rollercoaster? Numbers game
Before online dating, everything was slower. You were introduced through a friend or family member. You met someone at work, third place, community, or at a bar. It was one person at a time. Not a pipeline of matches.
We had an open dating app in Plenty of Fish. How did that go before the swipe-system took over?
My wife and I got married just before "app dating" got popular, and she says "we caught the last chopper out of 'nam."
I met my wife via OKCupid juuuust before enshittification hit back in 2018 or so. i can't even imagine what it's like now to using these tools. Glad I'm out of the warzone, for sure.
Dating apps are a Skinner Box by nature. They give randomized reward in the form of likes and matches. If you're attractive, you're the product because you don't need premium service to get more dates.
Give me Yelp for date spots and take a cut of the ad revenue. That way, there's at least an incentive to get people to not ghost each other long enough to actually meet up for a date. Hopefully that will do some level of incentivizing human connection.
You don't even have to be attractive. There is some dude in a slum in Manilla right now smoking a hand rolled cigarette between his unkept bearded lips, using his wrinkled face and cataract ridden eyes to squint at a screen to scam the next guy with his keyboard propped up on his oversized tummy. Meanwhile he has an image of a beautiful 20 year old Texas country girl on his profile and maybe even a Russian hooker on call for when he needs to make bait videos. And he probably gets 100x the interest of your 'legitimate' average male user.
> I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating because they don’t have any commercial incentives (and in fact probably negative incentives) to NOT match you. Thus they can also give you all of the “Premium” features for free.
Don't they still power this via ads? Every set of eyeballs looking for love is slowly trickling nickels into their bank accounts; it seems like they would have the exact same set of incentives as you describe Match Group having.
Facebook Dating isn't a standalone product, so people are likely going remain on the app even after they get into a relationship. The service only exists to funnel young people into the Facebook ecosystem. The dynamic is very different from a regular dating app where once you get somewhat serious with someone even having the app still on your phone will be seen as a massive red flag.
And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.
It's basically the original purpose of Facebook (some might use the term "stalking" over "dating" however).
There will still be advertisers if you move to a more serious relationship stage, just different products.
The main product is Facebook. It’s like suggesting Google Analytics has the same revenue problem as Mixpanel.
And no, I haven’t seen any ads in it.
This sounds plausible
If there is a viable contender, match group will work hard to buy it to drag it down to its level, c.f. Tinder
OkCupid was different, before it got bought by match. The single best thing that could be done for the dating world and fertility rates would be to hire the MIT/Harvard math guys from the original OkC and restart it as a not-for-profit dating app.
People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail. Tinder et al are almost definitely worse, but they are also easier. It is always going to be hard for the better-but-harder option to win against the worse-but-easier option. This is exacerbated by the fact that dating apps are perhaps the service that is more reliant on network effects than any other thing. Even if one individual decides that they are willing to do the work for the better-but-harder thing, if not enough other people make the same decision, it will fail.
> People have tried making original OKCupid style apps, and they fail
That's why you need the original founders to make it again. OkCupid was a site made by 140 IQ dudes in Boston for 100+ IQ types. It was not an easy problem. It succeeded because the match % was uncannily accurate. Loss of the site (acquisition and tinderification by Match) was like the sack of Rome.
I too really miss the old OKCupid. I was on it from near its inception (around 2003 I think) until they started requiring phone numbers (2020 I think) and I agree its decline was tragic.
That said, I think the world has changed in ways that would make it difficult to replicate now. For one thing, imagine all the AI bot profiles that would exist. For another, the legal environment has only gotten worse in the sense that entities like Match will try to sue you for infringing on some bogus patent.
Also, let's not forget that the takeover by Match was a deliberate choice: those "140 IQ dudes" chose to sell out their nice product to a big evil company although it was pretty foreseeable they were going to ruin it. Who's to say that wouldn't happen again?
That's why you gotta make it a not-for-profit.
OKCupid, back in the day, was stunningly good. Back in 2011 I spent a huge amount of time filling out my profile, and OKC found me 5 matches with >98%.
I married one of them and 2 of them are still close friends.
Arranged marriages would be a step up from dating apps for most people, I think.
There's something to be said for a traditional matchmaker. It's one of those hard things that might not scale.
manifold.love, which is heavily modeled on the old-school OKCupid, is back from hiatus as of March 2025: https://sinclairchen.substack.com/p/manifold-love-is-back
Sadly not very active or funded, right now.
Didn't all those guys go to Match and make it the company it is today in the mid 2010s?
No, Chris Coyne, Max Krohn, Christian Rudder never joined Match. I don't know where you're getting that from. Match was already a behemoth before buying OkCupid. You can check their linkedin's. Wide range of ventures like Keybase.
OKStupid suffered from the "less space than a Nomad, lame" levels of cluelessness because it tried all this math stuff matching on statistical models of personality, rather than the one criterion actual humans use to select a partner: are they hot?
That's why Tinder won. It's an easy way to filter out the unsexy.
I would prefer to date an averagely-physical-attractive person whom I enjoy spending time with than a very physically attractive person whose personality I dislike.
Many women are hot or at least have some attractive features while only few men have a good appearance so we would be extinct by now if it worked this way. At least for selecting men there should be some other criterion.
For much of human history it has worked this way: the king got many wives, nobles got a few, but most men didn't marry at all. They labored and fought and died without getting to pass on their genes. This is also why men are such status seekers and risk takers: our ancestors had to prove their worth for a chance at getting laid. The risks were great, but the payoff was huge and if you failed, it's not like your genes gained any advantage by playing it safe.
I doubt it is true, at least in Russian history a typical peasant had a wife and children. Not being married was considered bad and there were arranged marriages. Also poor men probably had a low chance of "getting laid" as girls were interested only in lifetime long relationship.
I even tried to verify this by looking through old registries available online (where marriages and births were recorded), some of which are digitized and OCR'd by Yandex, but it seems that they do not have a list of unmarried people. Although the birth records typically mention whether a child is "legally born" (within a marriage) or not.
It's just a mismatch of goals: are you looking for a partner, or a date?
Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person...
What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.
The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.
Hinge IMO is the best of the bunch because it's the only app still run by its original founder, even though it's owned by Match.
They changed the algorithm a few months back to be much more like Tinder. Pushing people out of your league physically to the top of the stack, making it less likely that you'll find a match, and they're moving and increasing number of features behind Hinge+.
Chose your poison:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45311274
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35726102
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44917922
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> What Match Group is doing probably isn’t illegal, but I think it probably should be.
What should be illegal? Withholding matches when you're paid to keep you single but showing you more attractive matches after you unsubscribe? Listen to yourself. Your idea of what they're doing is so highly engineered and specific.
It's so convoluted but it comes down to its a shitty product and people don't want to use shitty products. They may for some time but making a product purposely bad and hostile to your user base doesn't lead to long term growth and people will abandon the product for alternatives.
Not everything "bad" needs to be illegal.
I think the correct term for this type of thing is a "dark pattern", and they should definitely be illegal.
In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today. Everything is consolidating, and there seems to be zero momentum in the opposite direction. So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
The more obvious solution is taking aggressive trust-busting action and preventing further mergers rather than passing laws to leash the remaining few actors in an already-broken, over-consolidated market.
I'm sure this will draw immediate reactions that in a heavily lobbied (i.e., bribed) environment, it's a pipe dream to hope for antitrust action to occur, but I would point out that the very same environment isn't any more likely to impose meaningful regulation, either.
> So in the face of these market failures, legislation to combat the low hanging fruit like this is probably the only way to make life for consumers bearable without actually fixing the underlying issues.
I tend to think that makes things less bearable in the long term, though, precisely because it doesn't fix the underlying issues. It's like just taking a bunch of ibuprofen and walking on a badly injured leg. It may make it hurt less but it can also make the problem worse. We may need to let the pain get intense enough that people feel no alternative but to overhaul the whole system.
> In a sane market, those dark patterns would be defeated by competition, but there is a distressing lack of sane markets today
Did you miss the part where the parent said "I’ve recently switched to Facebook Dating"?
It sounds nice to make "dark patterns" illegal, but what that means is that its arbitrary since you can't define it. Discretion is fine, but you have to be fine with [bad politician] appointing his minions to oversee the process.
For something simple like "pick up my garbage in a regular cadence", I wouldn't really care if it's Biden, Trump, Obama, Clinton or any reasonable politician so I'm fine with ceding that authority to the state. But when it comes to something like social media regulation, I don't trust politicians.
It doesn't matter if its a shitty product if it has the largest network of users. The alternatives will be ghost towns.
Do we really want corporations enforcing unconfirmed reports? If the legal system can't handle the situation, why should we expect a private corporation to?
Being arrested and convicted of a crime is a much higher bar than what is required to ban somebody.
I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users. This is actively happening, and for some content and jurisdictions it is legally required to happen. If you get a strong signal that someone is a bad actor in your community you should remove them.
What is the "strong signal"? It takes three clicks to report anyone for anything.
I agree, even a handful of reports in a short period could have been orchestrated as a payback.
However surely you could agree that there is a reasonable line somewhere.
If, over the course of several months, multiple people with seemingly no connection to each other report the same problematic person, then is there ANY reason to not issue a ban?
I feel like "just issue a ban" trivializes the complexity of this: banning one account does basically nothing, and they can just create a new account. Multiple people often have the same name, so you can't just ban everyone with that name. It's trivial to take new pictures, etc..
That leaves, what, asking a private company to do facial recognition scans on all new users? Requiring them to present official government ID ala the recent EU laws?
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Honestly I’d prefer a dating app that checks identity and prohibits duplicate accounts
If your safety system is "we'll have to wait till this person rapes several women over the course of many months" then it is meaningless to begin with. And they can then create another profile in seconds on any of the dozens of other apps out there. So no one is safer.
The only reasonable line is - act on the first report (and every single other report), and work closely with the police. But if the victim doesn't want to involve the police then what can you even do?
Best I can do is act on it and eat a massive defamation lawsuit. If you think the $1 Billion Alex Jones was ordered to pay for saying parents lied about dead kids was a lot, imagine how big it would be if someone accused or insinuated a bunch of people of being rapists based on unvetted reports.
They don't need to make the ban public. But not stating publicly that a person did something, they cannot have defamed that person.
I wonder about these kind of crime sprees. It the person wishing to be arrested or something?
A cardiologist life is not usually falling apart. so I wonder why this sort of madness would be a thing. Are they thinking nobody would believe the women?
Multiple reports from multiple users? The linked article starts with this.
You make the assumption that people aren't vengeful or liars. They are. Social media elicits the absolute worst human behavior imaginable.
> I absolutely want private companies to curate their community of users
This has been tried many times and proven to fail. You end up with echo chambers like lobsters and cesspools of the deranged like BlueSky. Yes, there are decent people on BS but not enough to offset the mass-reporting ban brigades. If you join there and have been deemed an undesirable you will be banned before you can utter a word.
If everybody you meet is a jerk, maybe it's not them.
Cliques are a thing, and it's often the case that the clique is the one with the jerks.
Ah, but "sugarpimpdorsey" says that "echo chambers like lobsters and cesspools of the deranged like BlueSky" ban him.
Is it your contention that lobsters and bluesky are run by the same or allied cliques? Perhaps it is more likely that someone who chooses that username might repeatedly act in ways which confirm to them that everyone else is a jerk?
Maybe everybody sucks. All people are garbage people.
"Misanthropes of the world... Keep yourselves apart! Because, fuck you."
>When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who accused him of rape.
This is clearly worse than false positives. They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.
> They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.
Why doesn't law enforcement have this data? Presumably these crimes are being reported to the police?
If the crime wasn't worth reporting to the police, I'm not convinced why a private company would have some obligation to act.
> Even after a police report, it took nearly two months for Matthews to be arrested — the only thing that got him off the apps. By then, at least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them. Nearly every one of them had met him on dating apps run by Match Group.
Yes, I read the article. So what's the problem? The legal process was followed, he got arrested.
If you think the legal process is too slow, presumably the focus should be on fixing that, so that rapists face actual consequences?
> Presumably these crimes are being reported to the police?
Why do you presume that? And even in the best case scenario, it takes years between a report and someone being sent to prison.
> They have a big user database that law enforcement does not.
That they should share with law enforcement when appropriately requested.
I’m perfectly comfortable with them banning people that have multiple reports of criminal activity.
If there are multiple confirmed reports of criminal activity, why isn't that person being arrested?
perhaps the bar for kicking someone off a dating app could be lower than that required for a criminal conviction??
I could understand not banning users or being too conservative in general, but match group bans lots of users without any communication. I know people banned without any reason, and you can see so many reports on reddit. So they could probably just automate banning on even single report.
I feel like "auto-ban on a single report" gets weaponized as soon as people figure it out, and just encourages people to get better at creating alt-accounts to evade the bans?
Law enforcement should be able to submit reports that carry real weight.
I don't know why people would report this behavior to the app and not the police. But the apps should be telling people to file a police report and have the police contact them.
There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
> There are enough brain damaged people out there (and definitely on dating apps) that would file a baseless rape report for being stood up or lied to, so the bar should at least be with letting the police handle it.
Rape is underreported because this attitude is so prevalent. Reporting a rape is incredibly difficult and traumatizing and rarely leads to a conviction. It also exposes you to violence and harassment to the person who raped you in the first place.
Parent comment meant that people would report rape on the app for trivial reasons, not that they would falsely report rape to the police.
This is a great example of how large companies are structured so that the organization as a whole is capable of making decisions that would be unthinkable and/or criminal if done by a single individual. As a whole, Match Group:
- Hid credible reports of users being sexually assaulted from the public
- Did not put up any sort of significant barrier for users reported for rape from making new accounts
- Underinvested in safety on their platforms for years, then laid off everyone in their safety org in favor of overseas contractors with little training
- Ignored members of Congress asking about how the company responds to reports of sexual violence
Despite this, I'm sure that everyone in Match Group's leadership who contributed to the organization making these decisions doesn't think they have any sort of responsibility here, and doesn't have any problem sleeping at night.
There are more basic issues with these apps too, which is that they turn dating into a second job. And it is very difficult for men especially, as data has shown that messages / likes mostly center on the most attractive men rather than being well distributed as it is for messages from men to women. So everyone without that attention just ends up swiping right on thousands of profiles and hoping for something to happen. It’s unproductive, depressing, and I would hate to be a single man today with all dating happening online. For that reason alone, we should move on from the online dating experiment.
A tv show in the Netherlands once summed it up nicely: the dating site experience for men is like interviewing for a job, for women it’s like shopping.
Back when I was dating online dating had just started and I went out on a few dates with women I met online and it all seemed to go OK.
But in the end all the successful relationships I ever had were people I met in real life. Is it really that hard to meet people in real life these days? I mean, in fairness, I was on a campus most of that time, and so mingling is sort of built in. But surely there are other contexts where people mingle?
Society has made many of what were originally the most common places to meet your future spouse now taboo to ask someone out. For example, before dating apps, something like 30-40% of relationships leading to marriage started in the workplace.
> Is it really that hard to meet people in real life these days?
Yes. *especially if you don’t drink*.
The loss of a third space and common community center (Churches, in the US past) has cascading effects.
Facebook Dating is clearly being used as a 'loss-leader' against these apps, and it is fantastic for end users and the overall market.
For those of you who haven't tried it, it offers far more swipes, generous filtering, and no payments required at all for every feature.
I'm surprised more people haven't taken notice of it.
Couple things.
- Didn't even know fb dating was a thing.
- people still use fb?
It is not marketed at all. It just kind of popped up one day. I've never gone back to tinder, etc since then. It is the best experience to me personally.
Maybe people over still 40 use the social media site in large numbers. I just have a fake profile to access marketplace & dating.
> I just have a fake profile to access ... dating
That just doesn't sound right, lol.
I see what you're saying lol. It is important to specify that the dating profile is different from the social media one, so im not catfishing or anything like that. I am just not sharing personal data with fb on their social media side/profile.
I've been thinking a lot about building an open source dating app as a non-profit offering.
I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.
Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
As I understand it, it's not a technical problem, rather a social one first off: you can build it but it'll be "empty" compared to all other options out there, even if it's technically superior to them. Network effect and all that.
There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.
Totally. It's a very boring part of this that one would have to contend with.
I kinda feel the same way about Facebook. Groups, events, marketplace are amazing for community building. But it's just so hard to compete with Meta.
I think it's an interesting area, but I've got no time or energy to undertake such an endeavor. However, I'd be happy to talk about it and discuss it further if you'd like to. Contact info is on my profile page here.
I emailed you re the idea.
What would make this app safer than the alternatives?
Safe can mean a lot of things to different people i guess. I would love to incorporate some sort of reputation signal.
Perhaps positive reinforcement after people have met? Or just having social links?
But yeah, i dont have it all figured out yet
I've watched speed dating events go from free to $45 in the past couple years. Not sure if that's b/c of inevitable factors in running those events or pure opportunism.
Do you think this could be facilitated via ActivityPub or is that not a viable choice?
I think something like the matrix protocol would be better. I would be especially interested in not storing unencrypted user messages. Matrix would be a good choice for this.
I think you should do it. The costs for all these services are still priced like the AOL days where bandwidth mattered. I really don’t think the hosting costs could be much. I had a small dating site decades ago and the cost was almost nothing.
> Repeatedly, we found that users, soon after being banned, could create new Tinder accounts with the exact same name, birthday, and profile photos used on their banned accounts. Users banned from Tinder were also able to sign up for Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish without changing those personal details.
It is really good to see actual investigative journalism still happening out there.
While the story in the article is scary, what's the point of reporting the person to the dating app company? They have no way to check whether there happened a crime or not. Maybe there should be a government-run database which tracks the people reported to police, and the dating apps must warn if the user is in the database or temporarily freeze the account.
Anyway such things should be regulated by laws and run by the government rather than by private companies without any legal responsibility.
And sell essentially nothing but false hope. You're not meant to meet someone, even if you pay.
Because the purpose of Tinder, Hinge, etc. is to slowly destroy the social fabric of society to a point where people are perfectly malleable. More, more, more instant gratification. Less, less, less integrity.
We live in an age where the commercialization/cheapening of sex is celebrated by society but the natural result of that commercialization/cheapening isn't wanted.
You can't have it both ways.
Our anthropology is confused and it shows.
No app countibuted to destruction of social fabric more than Instagram.
I apologize for this comment not being constructive the way that HN usually prefers them to be, but...
... they're all part of the same shitpile.
the purpose is to make money. What you've described might be a side effect of that.
Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, et. al. sure are showing them up at the game though.
This thread is a very clear demonstration of the libertarian bias of HN. The reflex, knee-jerk response to ANY proposal is "how do you enforce it??" regardless of the issue at hand.
You can ALWAYS claim that a policy proposal is futile, or will backfire, or will jeopardize some other freedom. The question is about the tradeoffs, which requires considering the evidence at hand. So many concerns being raised here are easily refuted by sentences in the article.
Tinder responsibility ends with their app, unless they have claimed that they somehow vet the people for safety. Or they provide chaperone service.
Putting yourself in a vulnerable position with a person you only have met online without someone trustworthy vouching for them is inherently unwise. Meeting trough friends/collogues has a bit more safety guardrails.
CEO of Match Group Spencer Rascoff was on the board of Palantir.
Worked for him for a few years. He’s a good guy and new on the job at Match.
is he really though?
Yes, and if you want to claim otherwise you should bring some specifics.
Him being on the board of Palantir seems very specific. Empowering the worlds dictators is not compatible with my idea of a good guy.
>you should bring some specifics.
Palantir board member.
CEO of match.
maybe he's nice to his alsatian?
Depends on what you think about Palantir and Thiel.
Palantir, the incredible American technology company run by one of the most successful Black Americans? That's great.
Sam Hyde is running Palantir? Did not know that, wow!
jesus, how does he keep getting away with it?
Article from February
Previously a few comments on the Guardian ver:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035386
Wow what a weird coincidence that there's a monopoly of dating sites, animosity between the sexes is amplified by bots on social media, only a few users get matches and rapes go unreported, and birth rates keep dropping.