One of the most common complaints I read about dating apps is how many bots there are, so yeah, for sure add AI into the mix. That’s definitely what people want. Also, if you have to use AI to start a conversation, what are you gonna do when you meet someone in person? Match has really done the most to ruin online dating over the last several years, though, so this just seems like another step on the same path.
all Tinder cares about is keeping you swiping, with your eyes on the screen.
Yeah they failed at that, at least for me. I deleted my one account over a year ago and can’t see myself ever going back. Apps are borderline useless at this point and I’d rather die alone than slog through one ever again.
They don’t need to retain users for very long, they just need to keep you around as long as possible.
There’s always new single people aging into the dating pool, and thanks to Apple, the ones aging into it now are too tech illiterate, susceptible to lock-in tactics, brand loyal, and resistant to trying alternatives if it’s even marginally less popular or well known. All of which guarantees a steady flow of new singles to milk dry.
The dating app scene is honestly one of the best examples out there of how fucked this unregulated app market is. Any time an app started to grow, started to chip away at the entrenchment of Match, they just bought it. It provided zero benefit to customers to let it happen, in fact it has made it all demonstrably worse.
Also, if you have to use AI to start a conversation, what are you gonna do when you meet someone in person?
Oops! Didn’t work out. Back to the dating pool again.
Also, if you want to upgrade from Gold dating pool to Platinum dating pool, please insert another $20 into the phone.
“If only there was a way to make online dating MORE of a dystopian hellscape”
“You’re not gonna believe this…”
Hunger Games! … it starts with 20 random players and the last two remaining individuals of any sex or orientation are paired off as a happy couple
Just wait til AI makes decisions about your worthiness as an individual. Need a loan? Consult the Demon Box. Need an organ transplant? Demon Box. Eligible for food stamps? The Demon Box has decreed that you must be eliminated
I’ve been thinking for a bit now that the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there’s no incentive to keep people on it forever: you already got their money. You’d actually want people to have good experiences on it so they get their friends to sign up.
The fee would probably have to be somewhat large, both because it would have to cover operating costs for the foreseeable future, and because it would discourage catfishers.
It might still work as like, a yearly subscription, which would mean more sustainable revenue. I wouldn’t do any less than that. And no a la carte options to nickel and dime people with.
You’d also want to come down hard on account sharing and reselling, for obvious reasons.
Problem is, if you go to any venture capitalist with this idea, they’ll probably fund it, but then immediately sell out to Match Group the split-second they make an offer, and then the enshittification would begin.
The only way to prevent that would be to entirely crowdfund it, or have some sort of collective ownership and governance so no single greedy bastard can sell out.
He is describing what professional match makers should be.
But they’re more like life coaches in real life. A total scam.
I thought legit ones existed, but I guess the concept exists but hasn’t been paired with technology and scaled. Tech bros are more concerned about making a cheap buck than providing a good service so they’d rather come up with a shitty addictive service that you have to pay for forever rather than coming up with an efficient service that actually achieves the goal.
That would make business side incentives more aligned with the user side, but I could never see anything with a high barrier of entry accumulating enough users to actually be usable.
Maybe its free at first and as it grows in size and activity the cost goes up? That feels kinda sketchy
Yeah, I thought about maybe making it free for women, but besides being sexist and exclusionary, I think that would just open it up to the scams that plague all other dating apps.
At the end of the day, people don’t realize how much they spend on stupid shit throughout the year. A full year of Netflix or Spotify or a WoW subscription (assuming you’re not taking advantage of long-term commitment discounts) comes out to $150-200, and those add up if you’re going in on multiple services.
The price point I had in mind was like $99/year. Shit, they’re wanting to charge about that much for new AAA games now. I’d have to do more math to figure out if that’d actually be viable, but it’s the number that popped into my head. I think it’d be doable in the $100-200 range, and I actually have a bit of experience with how much it costs to run a platform like this.
Paying for a dating app definitely feels wrong, like you’re hiring an escort or something, but people spend money on their love life all the time: buying clothes, going out to bars and clubs, paying for cover charges and drinks, dumping money on OnlyFans creators in the hope that they’ll pay the slightest bit of attention to you, etc.
I think if the value proposition is clear and obvious, like a dating app where you know everyone there is serious about it because they paid to be there, it would have a decent chance of working out.
There is the question of how to get people on the platform in the first place, because you’re definitely right in that there is a chicken and egg problem. Why pay for a dating app that no one is using?
Firstly, there should be some sort of money-back guarantee if someone literally can’t get any matches, to avoid people thinking they got scammed. Maybe a no-questions-asked policy for the first couple weeks, like with Steam. A good user experience would be paramount for the success of the platform, so even if someone doesn’t have any luck they should ideally still feel like the platform gave them a fair shake.
Additionally, I think it should be open to sign up for free before full launch, to seed the user pool. I have some thoughts on how users can help keep scammers off the platform by verifying each other, and that would be the only thing they can do before launch. This could also be a way for users who can’t or don’t want to pay to earn access to the platform after launch. And to incentivize users to keep helping out, they could get a boost in search results if they helped verify a handful of users every day.
Also, if the project was crowdfunded, that should definitely come with either a year or lifetime membership, so that’s another a source of users who are invested in the success of the platform, and who are going to be excited to use it day-one.
This is a fairly big departure from what you proposed here but your comment made me think about it:
If you had one time / every 5 year payments, you could charge a fairly sizable amount and then use a portion of that money to hire people to vet, interview, and take professional photographs of every user for their profiles (which they could of course combine with their own pictures, though those would be unverified). I’m thinking like $500+, to be clear - but for that you get:
- great pictures taken of you
- more confidence that anyone you see or match with is actually the person they say they are
- ability to have your interview used for determining compatibility, such that anyone you’re introduced to on the app is much more likely to be into you and someone you’re into
There is a dating website for millionaires. I wonder how their revenue stream works but they advertise that they don’t accept men under a certain net worth. I guess a high barrier of entry could work for that market.
You could make it a location based service, and prices increase as the number of users in the area increases. This incentivizes people to sign up when there’s not a lot of active users in your area because it’s cheap/free. Then as more people in an area sign up, new users pay more to reflect the added value of the app.
But if your app was truly so great then the number of users would always be decreasing in a given area.
and then they start offering a drastically more expensive tier for a separate pool of higher ‘quality’ candidates that only want to interact with other higher tier meat.
I would never pay an up-front fee because my past results with dating apps have been atrocious. I would be much more willing to pay for each match I communicate with, because then if they can’t at least find people for me to talk to, I don’t pay them.
That creates an incentive for them to fill the service with bots and fake profiles, so that’s a terrible idea for users.
the only way to make a dating app that actually worked for its users would be one that you pay a single fee for up-front. Then there’s no incentive to keep people on it forever
But without a continuous revenue stream, there’s no good way to grow your revenue forever. Eventually, you’ll peak, as the majority of potential users have purchased the app, and then its downhill unless we get another baby boom.
Could that not be a business model for an entrepreneur? Make the app, advertise it as a limited time only thing. Get the entry fee from everyone and at the end it shuts down. Like those pop up shops. With proper advertisement it could work well since it would go against the counter culture of what regular dating apps are. They would have an incentive to properly match everyone as quick and well as they can since the app isn’t here forever.
