[scarmig]

Something about the way dating apps are set up lead to suboptimal outcomes, for both sexes.

As a point of evidence, I mostly used Tinder before meeting my current girlfriend on it, because Hinge and Bumble are unusable for me because they both require listing height, which results in me getting no matches from women on them. But, interestingly, my current girlfriend (and the girlfriend before her!) said that she wouldn't have matched with me if I had listed my height: in real life, however, it's not a concern, and she bemoans the fact that we spent so much time within a half mile of each other without meeting and she wasted so much time with people who weren't as compatible.

Women are inundated with options, so they have to filter them somehow: most women have similar preferences in men, and so once they filter their particular matches to those men who meet those easily filterable preferences, they end up with men that have already been heavily picked over and haven't left the market, either because they don't want a relationship or because they have other characteristics that result in them exiting relationships relatively soon after they start. So it ends up being a market for lemons (if a relationship is what the woman is looking for), leading to lots of mediocre or bad experiences.

[cromd]

Yeah, traditional Boolean search would be an improvement in some ways: “show me men taller than 6, or programmers of any height” (heh), but that’s either too overwhelming for users, or promotes spam or scraping or stalking or something. But maybe more choice isn’t the answer. Or maybe if you gave people the flexibility, they would be more cognizant of all the things they’re missing out on, and of the difficulty of getting it right, and take a less targeted approach with less “overfitting”. But the current system of independent “AND” cutoffs is what people get forced into. And an algorithm is a good alternative, but people don’t trust the algorithms much.

[scarmig]

I'm pretty sure that if you somehow gave people an accurate filter for "loving partner who is looking for a long-term monogamous relationship underpinned by mutual care and affection," it'd instantly become the most popular one. But that's impossible to verify without weeks or months of dating. And there really isn't a good proxy for it, and if there were, it'd be quickly gamed.

I do suspect you could mitigate the market-for-lemons/selection effect by allowing filters on number of likes/matches and duration of time spent on the app: if someone has been on an OLD app for years consistently getting dozens of likes per day, they probably aren't a likely candidate for a long term relationship. But that'd be much less popular, because few people are willing to focus on potential partners not many other people want.