Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vidarh 1652 days ago
> but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.

This is one those things that's important to keep in mind. If we compared like for like a 20-something and a 40-something man, the 20-something many would probably do very well.

But a 40-something man have had 20 extra years to learn how to interact with women, gain experiences, gain education, advance a career, so it's rarely a like for like comparison.

I mean, I personally can't blame the women who rejected me when I was younger. I know exactly what I was like.

Of course some will have physically decayed, but the spread of womens physical preferences for men is pretty wide, and many men still look more attractive to a large proportion of women in their 40's than their 20's.

> This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.

This is also massively exacerbated by dating apps that have no interest in redressing the issue, by allowing womens match queues to build up to the point that most of the women you swipe on will never see your profile, and allowing people to keep swiping on huge number of people in one go.

E.g. my ex wife told me at one point that she'd once signed up for Tinder's premium service out of curiosity and found she had several thousand matches outstanding. It's in Tinders interest to keep showing women who keep getting swiped even as their queues grow large enough that they'll never work their way through those queues.

At the same time this number is massively artificially inflated also because those most struggling to get a match are incentivised to keep trying to match with a huge number of people.

If these apps cared about their users and only showed profiles to other users that didn't have a huge queue of outstanding matches, and also put caps on the number of outstanding/unseen swipes, it wouldn't improve the number of matches much, but it would likely increase the proportion of swipes that leads to matches by drastically reducing the number of swipes.It would also show users who are actually realistically available. Maybe it'd make more people widen their search criteria.

Of course the problem with this is that it runs completely counter to the interests of dating apps, which are best served by encouraging desperation to get people to pay for premium services.

1 comments

I am building a dating app that prioritizes UX over short-term profitability. The roadmap includes this feature, matching users with people who are likely to respond and preventing users from getting too many or too few connections.
Good luck to you with that. I hope you succeed, but I also fear that it's a really tough one because the lifetime value of a dating app user is pretty low to start with (most people are only active for a few months, and many never come back - you can see this in the pricing structures for these apps where the per-month fees for premium services drop off drastically with longer periods, and where some offer lifetime memberships that cost only a few months worth of individual upgrades). On the upside, if you manage the PR well, pushing the angle that it's quality and connections that matters and that your competition are all borderline scams in how they pretend you have a chance with far more people than will ever see your profile might well get you enough attention to keep user acquisition costs low.

Just don't sell out to Match like everyone else seems to be doing...