[hot_gril]

Basically it'd look like Hinge. Would still be pretty flawed.

Main thing would be changing the matching algo. Tinder seems to want to show "hot singles near you." I kinda reverse-engineered it (at least the 2018 version), and it seems to just score each user based on swipe:match ratio and total number of matches then show you the highest scoring users matching your gender/distance/age filters. It doesn't try to figure out who you'd be compatible with or anything like that. Exploiting a glitch, I managed to game this and get 500X the matches as normal (as M seeking F), which confirmed my suspicions about the algo.

How do you determine compatibility without onerous onboarding quizzes, not sure. Recommender algo ("people with similar liking patterns also liked this person") would be a starting point. But Tinder doesn't seem to have even tried this, while Hinge makes some attempt. There are also a few games they could take out, like telling you ~8 people liked you to bait you into swiping more to find them, but it's not a big deal.

To Tinder's credit, they made dating apps massively popular for the first time ever, and just getting a lot of people onto one app brought value even for serious dating. It was basically the only app in town from 2014-2018. Copycats were spawned, some of which were simply branded more for serious dating, and I met my now-wife on one of them.